“You didn’t recognize me yesterday, Bear,” Chase Rachel whispered. She stroked his fine, thinning hair and touched his cheek.
“I’m sorry lover. So sorry. I’m here now.”
“Hard day, yesterday,” Rachel said.
Lev gripped her hand harder, and she squeezed back.
“We don’t have much time; do we Bear?” Rachel asked, almost like a child.
Lev sighed and smiled like a saint. He shook his head. So brave, Chase thought.
“I guess not, Rachel. I have to go soon. I can feel it. It’s not fair to you. I’m hanging on baby, but ... So sorry ...”
“It’s OK love. You just need to rest. You are my Warrior, Bear.” Rachel kissed his forehead. “You will always be my strength.”
Chase left them quietly for the kitchen and coffee. From the kitchen, he could hear the soft flow of their voices moving back and forth, but couldn’t make out the words. They laughed a few times. Chase found the sound comforting as he busied himself. After a while, their conversation faded. Lev fell asleep.
Rachel moved into the kitchen like a sleepwalker and drifted down to a chair at the kitchen table. Her face was pale and drawn, showing nothing of the steely-eyed and seasoned officer. Chase recovered from his emotions and realized it was his turn to ramp up a little of the traditional sort of strength. He understood things with Rachel and Lev would only get worse. It was time to be there for them however he could.
It took him a long time to realize the balance between true feeling and the fact that sometimes you do have to put things on the shelf. The horrors of war taught him that he could endure just about anything. He almost laughed by the coffee pot when he thought how confronting the fact of humanity’s place in the universe somehow taught him emotional balance.
Shit, life was weird, Chase thought. Comparing and contrasting non-humanity with humanity gave him a unique perspective on the human condition. Life was nothing if not strange. He also found it intriguing beyond measure. He placed two hot mugs of coffee on the table and sat without words.
Rachel had taken off her uniform jacket, and her tie hung loosely around her collar. They sipped their bitter drink and absorbed the scene through the kitchen window as the sun sank over the tiny little neighborhood on a quiet street on a sprawling military base in Maryland. The colors turned from red, then orange and faded past deep blue-black and into darkness.
Chase broke the silence.
“Time is coming for many things.”
Rachel leaned forward over her coffee mug and stared into the steam like an Oracle at Delphi. The old Marine observed her for a while. Rachel sat thinking.
“I don’t know if it can be done,” Rachel said, and then turned the same faraway gaze through the kitchen window into a backyard full of still shadows.
“Rachel, it must be done.”
“If Earth falls, it’s over. Not just for your people and mine, but for life in this galaxy.”
“Not right away.”
“Not right away. No. Not in our lifetimes. The problem is, the time is now. It’s the precipice. If we don’t do something now, we teeter over and fall.
The decisions we make now will determine whether life in the galaxy will go on as intended. These next few months and years will determine the course of next epoch.”
“That can’t be true, especially on such a timescale. We’ve been to war before, Rachel. You and I. You more than most. One battle doesn’t decide a war.”
“Chase. That does not matter. Sometimes battles simply do decide. This is different—vast. At certain points, smaller decisions do mean more on this scale, not less. This is one of those points.”
“Rachel. You know what needs to happen for the balance to tip our way.”
She took a sharp breath and sighed with her mouth closed and jaw clenched.
“Unscheduled incursion is in four days. We need to speak with Ray first,” she said, stalling.
“He’ll probably tell you the same thing. Maybe he’s coming to tell us it’s time.”
Rachel turned to her friend with an expression Chase had never seen. She had always been the fixture of strength and guiding force of the Group. Rachel built the Units. She was once the person with all the answers. She was the leader, no matter what rank she held. Now, in this kitchen, she just appeared scared, tired and alone. Chase sat with her, confident that true Warriors would always find a way. He felt slightly guilty at his happiness to be her strength now. He resolved to get her through everything, with Lev, war. Whether the Galaxy fell or not, she was family, and he would be present. Going down together was better than going down alone.
“The exiles,” Rachel said. She slowly turned her head away from Chase to stare through the kitchen window again.
Rachel couldn’t see the sky through the shadowy leaves of a cherry tree. She could not see the stars. Her sisters were out there, and Rachel could not see them. She needed them, and they had no idea who she was.
Chapter 3: The Third Arm, Warsphere Alpha, Mutiny
Nina’s head turned like a turret. Madness prevailed. She stood there fixing the situation in her mind, seeking patterns. There were few, but patterns existed. She just had to understand them. Nina decided to go through the communications inventory her Comm Sergeant compiled. They needed a plan. Something more than “form a line and face attrition.” The spore would come for them. They couldn’t destroy it. They didn’t have the numbers, and the army they did have was scattered. They had to survive just long enough to leave.
Nina found the inventory organized into specialties. The sergeant was in contact with groups of engineers, comm soldiers, and light, medium and heavy infantry. Some other groups were made up of light and medium troops that spontaneously formed to work on supply, reconnaissance, and medical functions. There it was. She opened a channel back to Abal.
"Here are my thoughts. I'm sending you a list. I say we forget about rebuilding platoons and build back our force by specialty,” Nina said. “The trend is forming this way by itself, and it's working. Let the ranks decide hierarchy as we form the lines.
Right now we are still too scattered. Too much time needed to rebuild the original command. All we need is defense until extraction."
There was a pause as Abal considered the proposal.
"That is viable. I will pass it along as a general order. We have too many heavy troops forming back here. We need more on the flanks and rear."
“That means our situation isn’t clear to everyone. It needs to be. Abal, we have to leave this planet.”
Silence on the channel. Nina let it hang until she grew impatient. The channel was still open.
“Abal,” she repeated with urgency.
“Yes,” came the reply. The voice was flat and far away.
“Abal, this is not right. It can’t be like this. Find a way. Get us out. There is no mission here. Only survival. Those are the orders I’m giving here at my command. What will your orders be?”
Another long pause, then Abal said, “To survive, Nina. I will find a way.”
"Good. Contact again in thirty minutes," Nina said.
Nina stood for a moment as the crowd thickened. She stood still for a time as soldiers ran, lumbered and stumbled. Lost soldiers were finding the front, but if they came under attack now, many would die. They were too close to the spore. The attack could come at any instant. Nina snatched at the robe of the first Lieutenant she saw.
"Do you have orders?" she asked.
"No captain," the flustered Lieutenant said with obvious desperation. She was an engineer.
"Now you do. We're improvising ranks. Gather privates and corporals. I don't care which platoon they come from, just make sure they are engineers. When you get about twenty-five, your job is to organize supply chains. Build stations as quickly as you can back to command. Do you understand?"
"Yes, captain. Where should we put these supplies," Nina flushed. The veins in her neck jumped under her skin.
"Lieutenant!" she
barked. The Lieutenant jumped as if startled from sleep. "In a safe place! Use your judgment!"
"Yes, Captain!"
“And Lieutenant,” Nina added, “your direct order is to survive. You will not die for this battle here today. We hold back the spore until extraction. You and I and the rest are leaving here. Spread that order. Do you understand?”
The Lieutenant’s eyes hardened, and she ran off with renewed purpose. Nina gave similar instructions to soldiers of different specialties as she saw them. Nina told everyone she came across to survive. That was their mission. They were leaving. There were no objections. Word traveled fast that Orbital was silent. The frustration became another struggling soldier on the channels. For the first time in her life, she felt anger not toward the enemy, but at Command. She was not alone in her sentiment. Nina could sense resentment in thoughts everywhere.
Time became a blur of signals and orders and improvised strategy meetings. Nina mined every gram of her command training. Before long, the area around her grew orderly.
Nina’s Comm Sergeant informed her of an incoming signal.
"Has it been a half-hour already?" Nina asked.
"Yes," Abal said. Her response was always crisp.
"I'm organizing specialty groups of twenty-five to fifty. Supplies are shaping up. I'm thick with comm and engineers here. I think I can spread them out and have them build," Nina replied.
"I'm taking a similar approach. I have a large section of heavy infantry, about three hundred. They're building ranks now. Tiers of force are forming in lines back to base. Looks well organized. Hold as long as you can. I have an idea for getting us out,” Abal said.
"Make it work," Nina replied.
"Contact as needed," Abal replied, then ended the transmission.
Nina found a disturbing problem as she surveyed the piles of salvaged supplies. Soldiers were hoarding power crystals. Only a few damaged or drained units showed up in the random caches. This will not do, she thought. Nina snatched another Lieutenant from the crowd.
"Tell everyone you can, and tell them many times over that they are not to keep extra power crystals. We will need them in reserve. Hand them over to the supply lines."
Soldiers everywhere took the initiative and organized themselves into sections. Each section was a line consisting of a column of heavy infantry in the center with two wings of light to medium troops. Their plan was to hold and expand the line as the spore attacked. Three semicircles behind them formed with a similar disposition. They assembled a rapid defense.
When the spore attacked, they planned for the light troops to make forays into the mix and drive the spore into the heavy soldiers. Nina called her original scout group to assembly. It took a few minutes for them to encircle her. She opened an exclusive channel to them all.
“We don’t have much time. This is now the front-line command squad. You keep this channel open and stick with me. We will be everywhere on the line. Comm, your job is crucial.
"Share everything with unit commanders on the front. Continue funneling everything to me. Stay focused." Grim faces surrounded Nina. She took a breath and continued.
"Things are getting stable here. I need to ask you to do a recon with me. Only a few of you are Rangers, so I'll understand if some of you don't want to go."
Nina paused. Nobody moved.
"We need to have a look into that canyon. We are dark there. For all we know, the mirror spores are already on the way. We have to be sure. Follow my lead. Stay alert. Use your heads."
They moved out, their formation taking the form of an arrow with Nina at its tip.
The ground near the canyon was rough with erosion. As they approached, the land angled down to the canyon edge. They leaped over rivulets of sulfuric acid that sweat from the rocks and bubbled up from the ground. The acid pooled the closer they got to the canyon. Ponds of it stood in some of the lower craters.
By the time Nina reached the canyon edge and stepped over the riprap and peered down into the abyss, the acid flow formed hundreds of little falls that splashed down the canyon walls. The canyon bed far below was a river of acid.
There was no other life on this planet, nor was there for light years in the surrounding region of space. The Silicoids here would be pure and perfectly adapted to this place. They would also be more dangerous.
The Silicoids survived by mimicking the traits of other life forms, destroying those other life forms in the process. They survived not by self-awareness and understanding, but through some loophole in evolution that let them take just what they needed from established life to propagate.
Silicoids destroyed all other traces of life besides their own, along with the planets they infested. They were mindless and relentless. The Silicoids were pure survival without the balancing qualities of reason and self-awareness. In this case, the spore would adapt to the nature of the planet itself, relying on whatever chemical memory of the innocent life its ancestors consumed.
Nina caught a glimpse of motion in the corner of her left eye. A few meters away, the surface of an acid pond rippled. In the next instant, a thin column of acid shot up and a creature emerged. Its grayish, translucent tentacles stood straight up, wound together in a helical column attached at the base to an egg-shaped blob of mottled black and gray.
The column separated into individual arms from the top, and the spore corkscrewed up into the atmosphere ten meters. It spun rapidly and expanded its tentacles like a hideous whirling bloom. As it hurtled back down, the limbs bent in half and became like the legs of a spider. The spore landed on the sharp tips of its arms making small craters at the points of impact. It instantly stopped spinning. It had no eyes, but they sensed that it took them all in at once as the irregular armored facets of its crystalline body vibrated. The body expanded and contracted slightly as if breathing.
Warriors immediately drew their staves and surrounded the spore. Nina found her two staff sections in each hand without realizing how they appeared there.
"Hold!" She screamed in her mind. "Steady!" Nina urged. Their circle was very close to the canyon edge. The group maneuvered away from the canyon, drawing the Silicoid.
Several tentacles loomed above the body, sensing the surrounding gasses, wanting prey, preparing to strike.
"Now!" Nina thought, sending an enormous burst of energy into her divided staff. The sections glowed bright violet, then dark blue.
Half the warriors sprang forward while the others fell in behind to provide cover. They attacked in sharp waves. Nina was distantly aware of their Comm Sergeant broadcasting a signal that their troop made enemy contact.
Nina lunged for the body, but a tentacle arced overhead, tip down and aimed straight for her head. It tried to impale her. Too fast, Nina thought. It's moving too fast.
Nina halted the lunge with her left foot, which skidded behind her against the ground cluttered with gravel. At the same time, her right foot slid forward, and the tentacle tip drove itself into the ground beside it where her body would have been. She almost lost a foot. Nina's arms spread wide as she slid, and her chest slammed into the tentacle.
The creature was somehow harder than rock. It was impossibly hard and cold in spite of the heat of this atmosphere that was just below the boiling point of sulfuric acid. The tentacle rose up again, and it slid up between her legs and close beside her body. Nina wrapped her arms and legs around the arm as it ripped a chunk of stone from the ground. She hugged it tight, and her staff sections slammed into her right ribs and left shoulder.
The tentacle arced back up, and Nina rose with it. She was upside down. Everything slowed. The troop appeared slightly smaller as she rose. A warrior stared up at Nina, shocked by the sight. A tentacle swung around and cut her neatly in half. Her torso pinwheeled away from an explosion of light as her energy sheath shattered. Her blood was instantly compressed by the merciless atmosphere and became a deep red streak of color suspended in the gas, slowly turning brown. The naked corpse was smashed to a formless nothing by
the weight of that horrible place.
Nina was more than six meters above the ground. The tentacle stopped high above the creature and prepared to swing back down. Nina hugged it tighter, canceling the momentum. She let go just before the limb came back toward the ground in its attempt to smash her.
Pressed by gravity and atmospheric mass, Nina plummeted. She turned in mid-air. Feet down, she brought her left-hand low with the staff section extending down at the Silicoid like a spike. Her other hand rose high with the tip of the other staff section pointing at the sky. She turned her body away from the staff until she was almost parallel with the ground.
Just as the lower half of the staff contacted the body, Nina hammered the top half down to meet it. There was a burst of violet light as she pushed energy through the staff while taking full advantage of the energy of her fall. The staff sank past the spore's thick skin.
Bits of the body shattered and slammed into her chest and belly. Nina turned her head, and her cheek and temple crashed into the body beside the point of staff impact. Her torso slowed dramatically, bending her spine the wrong way at a painful, wrenching angle before her legs caught up again and swung down under the spore. Nina managed to bring her head and arms forward before the inevitable counter-reaction. Her upper back hit the ground hard enough to strain her energy sheath.
Nina managed to hang on to her fully assembled staff with one hand, but the impact had her disoriented. She tried to push herself upright and away from the spore with one hand as she feebly held her staff at it with the other. She was conscious of the spore spraying the acid it used for something like blood. Hers was not the only damage it received.
The legs and feet of warriors appeared around her, and then hands gripped her robe and pulled Nina back just as the spore's body slammed into the ground where her legs had been. Nina didn't have time to see the several soldiers who set her on her feet again.
The creature was reeling and crazed under the warrior's punishment. Two of its appendages were missing. Nina shook off the impact and charged again. Another arm swung at her from the left, noticeably slower this time. Nina brought both hands low on the staff like a sword and swung it hard to meet the attack. The reticulated arm shattered with a spray of acid, and a long section of it dropped to the ground. It spasmed as it died.
The Genetic Imperative Page 5