But before the ship above has run its last leg, something steps from between the edifices of Kota Asli and shows itself in the unforgiving and shifting light.
Gunnar raises his ACR, but I quickly slap it down when I recognise Ardiyanti.
She comes into view, but there’s no pride in her frame now. She seems defeated, her shoulders drooping and her face slack.
I immediately make to call out to her, tell her to run to me, and I have my weapon up and ready to discharge on any fucker who would think to open fire on her.
But I am stilled, and I feel a tightening in me that I refuse to give name to.
Ardiyanti’s arms hang loose, and she appears to drag her feet. But then I see that her feet barely touch the ground, this earth that was her home and playground and is now torn and destroyed. Her toes leave the ground like she’s levitating then gently float down again to graze the soil, resuming their ascension once more.
Behind her, revealed by the flame in the sky, is the thing that holds Ardiyanti aloft.
Did it know? Did it know that this is the one thing I couldn’t witness right now in all of this war?
The creature has a limb driven into the back of the girl. I presume her head. I don’t care to know. All I know is that the girl is dead, and this fucking thing dares to hold her up, little Ardiyanti who was tough and would save her city herself, it holds her up and parades her at me like a fucking puppet.
I’m starting out across no-man’s land, my ACR charged and ready, my finger on the grenade-launcher. I’ll finish the thing from the inside out if I have to.
Gunnar grabs my vest. “Don’t be stupid, Callan,” he says.
I can’t read his expression because I have eyes only for that fucking Jelly, that abomination making its way so casually from those dormant buildings across the wasteland.
“What do we do?” Roisin’s screaming, and there’s a wild panic in everyone’s eyes.
Corporal Meyer says something about a tactical retrograde, and Westerling is screaming back at him about not retreating. One of the Captain’s men fires on the creature, which is pointless at this range, but despite that fact I race back and rifle-butt him in the face, dropping the cunt to the ground.
Westerling’s platoon turn on me with their weapons cocked, but my squad have got my six. Suddenly we’re in a stand-off.
I growl like an animal at the fucker on the ground before joining Gunnar back out on the perimeter of no-man’s land.
Over yonder the Jelly is still holding Ardiyanti up. Like a shield.
I’m looking at the thing now, really getting a good look at it. They’re scrap beings, I’d heard, and sure enough it has armoured itself with salvaged parts from vehicles and ruined buildings. It looks like some patchwork toy, a shapeless luminescent blob with mismatched car parts stuck to its amorphous body. And its body sort of glows from within, the light rippling along its limbs. I don’t know if limbs is actually the right word... they’re a bit like tentacles, in a way, and they’re undulating across the ground like a snake’s body.
The Stellum Corps ship hits the Earth, somewhere over in North-West Central Jakarta. We see the explosion first, several massive fireballs that fill the sky and billow towards the scorched clouds above. Then the ground beneath us shakes.
Roisin’s ranting now, gone hysterical.
“Great, just fucking great,” he says. “There were probably Jellies on that ship, and now there’ll be fuck knows how many of them down here. We don’t even know how this one got here, or if it’s alone!”
Gunnar’s head explodes next to me, a splash of crimson wetting the side of my grape, getting in my ear, leaving chunks of bone and gristle on my shoulder, and on my arm. I shake it off, stumbling away from him, and see the dirt around me erupt in little bursts. Gunnar’s body slams into the ground.
Meyer yells out: “BOLO!”
But it’s too late. Behind me, the platoon has knuckled down under fire.
“Contact, two twenny, three hundred metres!” bellows one of Westerling’s guys before his face is torn apart by hostile fire.
It’s coming from behind somewhere to our left. Guys are dropping like flies. I can see hostiles sprinting across a space between ruined walls. Who knows which insurgency they are, if any? Could be pissed off civvies, for all I know. The EIO still has some juice in it, and I take out the light above to give everyone some cover. In the melee, someone fucks up and I hear them scream “DROPSHOT!” There’s soldiers trying to run in all directions, and then a bright flash freeze-frames them in silhouette.
The explosion knocks me on my ass, into a puddle of Gunner’s blood. My ears are ringing. I’m on my back, and I crane my neck towards the alien over at Kuta Asli, and see it’s still making its way toward us, but slowly over this treacherous terrain, bringing Ardiyanti’s corpse with it.
I roll over and spit out a gob full of dust, and push up onto my feet. I check my weapon, and satisfied, I start charging across the pummelled ground toward the Jelly. I’m fairly fucking roaring my rage at it, trying to burn the bastard down with the intensity of my eyes, willing it to die. I know I don’t stand a chance against it, but it’s irrelevant at this time.
The Jelly seems bolstered by my efforts. It raises poor Ardiyanti higher. I hate the sacrilege of it. I hate this creature.
My boots are heavy on the ground, and over the sound of my running I can hear the slaughter behind me growing fainter, not only because I’m putting distance between myself and that carnage, but because clearly the platoon haven’t stood a chance against whomever attacked us.
This is all messed up.
Then there’s the sound of a cannon going off, way behind me, and immediately I recognise that sound: the railgun. Either it has misfired in the commotion, or someone – either Walling or one of the dissidents – has set it off.
The elecro-pulse sweeps past but I’m caught in its margin and thrown forward across the ground, tumbling over myself and scraping to a halt, skinning my chin along the cracked earth. Half my clothes have been scorched off. My arm hangs by my side, lying at an odd angle. I can see that it is barely attached to me anymore. I can’t feel it. I don’t know what to think, seeing it there in the dirt, immobile and lifeless.
The alien has copped the full force of the blast, and lets out a screech that pierces into my head. I’m struggling to focus on the creature, to see the effect the railgun has on it, but what I’m able to see isn’t comforting one bit. Sure, the blast has struck it and appears to have done some damage, and all that armour plate is knocked away from it and fallen to the ground, but that’s about it. Exposed now, the creature is even more abominable, and its tentacles thrash wildly about.
I can see Ardiyanti’s corpse lying in the dirt.
But the Jelly doesn’t drop. It manages to recover from whatever damage the pulse has wrought. The light the Jelly emanates is still strong, but there’s a blackened burn area smack in the middle of the fucker, and the thing heaves as if with some effort to breathe or some such.
Struggling to my feet I note that my boot has been shorn away from one foot. My severed arm dangles down the length of my body, bumping against my thigh. I try to ignore it. I start off at a trot again, determined to take advantage of whatever damage the railgun has done to my enemy. I’ve ever heard of a weak spot for Jellies, but I need something for when I’ve reduced the distance between us.
Then there’s a roar. A child’s roar, all rage and unbridled fury. I glance across and parallel to the Jelly stands Cumi, his face raw and red as he screams at the alien, with his fists clenched at his sides. What the hell is he doing? Why isn’t he armed?
The Jelly turns to face the child, its tentacles looping and coiling frantically with the endeavour. It will destroy him.
I change course and I’m running for Cumi now, and the alien is doing the same thing. We’re both closing on the kid, but the little punk makes a charge at his poor friend’s killer, his little feet pounding the earth as he screams and raise
s his tiny fists.
I get to the boy first, scooping him up with my good arm. Running now for cover, for the shell of the edifice ahead, the destroyed shopping mall my squad targeted earlier. I feel the whiplash of a tentacle behind me, but keep running.
The kid is struggling in my grasp, and it’s all I can do to hold on to him. I realise that with Cumi under my good arm and the other hanging from its socket that I don’t have my ACR. Fuck it! It must be laying back in no-man’s land, where the railgun tore my arm off.
I get past a broken doorway, and it’s so dark in here I can’t see anything and slam into a wall with my shoulder. Lancing pain from the collision rips like lightning through my good arm, forcing me to drop Cumi. I reach back, barely able to see him in the gloom, and grab him by the shoulder just as the Jelly worms its way into view. It knows we’re still in here. It’s making a path straight for us. They probably have night-vision knowing my current luck.
We slide along the wall, feeling for another entrance, a back door or just any door that will take us beyond this room.
The Jelly is at the entrance. I can hear it clambering across the bricks that litter the threshold. The light of its body has begun to illuminate the room.
My hand slips off the wall and into space, some kind of opening. Immediately I make for it, not caring what is beyond and whether there is a floor or a massive gaping hole. We’re in luck: solid concrete beneath our feet. The doorway behind us glows ethereally. Shuffling along this new wall we find another doorjamb.
I can’t find the access pad.
Now Cumi is helping. By the feeble light of the Jelly in the next room I can see his little hands are sliding over the panel of the door, searching for something.
“Here,” he whispers, wrapping his tiny fingers with mine and guiding my hand to the access pad.
The room fills with the glow of the Jelly. I can’t look at it.
Cumi has gone tense beside me with fear.
The front of my pants is dark with piss. There’s oil leaking over my ankle and onto the floor.
I get my fingernails under the edge of the panel and lift it away, finding a small rubber button and depressing it, relieved to hear a release in the door’s mechanisms. I’ve disabled its lock function, but without any electricity we still need to jimmy this door open the old fashioned way. The illumination in the room is telling me we’re in a bag of dicks, however. The Jelly is at my back. I feel the intense heat of it.
Cumi scoots down on his haunches, his face a feral snarl, his fingers like claws. He’s going to go out fighting.
I spin around and press my back against the door. I’m trying to use my weight to slide the bloody thing across, but I’m face to face with the Jelly. It leans in towards me. Inside its gelatinous bulk converge what look like dozens of large black spermatozoa. They assemble at a point closest to me and take stock of me, seeming to see and measure me.
I’ve never seen an alien up close before.
Only as holo-simulcrums in the academy during theory classes. There was the reconstructed skeleton of an alien. Not one of these Jellies, but some other hostile species. It simply looked like a weird human skull to me, albeit black as obsidian. But the Jelly really lives up to its moniker: it looks like a kind of giant jellyfish. The massive kind that choke the seas these days. This alien version is a silica life-form, so by rights shouldn’t even be able to survive down here in Earth’s atmosphere. But laced over its entire phosphorous body is thick webbing, like oiled rubber, and I can smell something like methane being farted from pustules all over it. An awful heat emanates from the creature. The Academy said that these parasites have adapted to draw heat from the core of planets that they try to infest. It’s crucial to their survival. This suffocating Indonesian warmth must be a boon to them.
The alien shifts slightly, and those black sperm eyes now dart down through the glowing blob and find Cumi. The boy growls with fear and pushes back against the door further. His skin drips with sweat, his clothes soaked with it.
“No,” I yell. “Look at me!” I punch the Jelly with my good hand, but it ignores me. It doesn’t acknowledge me anymore. It sees only Cumi.
Through the damage done to my left arm I can see that the actuator cables are twisted at the socket, bleeding hydraulic fluid all the way down to my hand. It’s dripping on the floor, mixing with the oil pissing from my crotch. That arm is fubar.
I have one good arm left, no weapon, and no idea of escape or defence.
From the darkness to my side an arm reaches out towards the Jelly, towards where those weird eyes are all gathered and staring at Cumi. The arm straightens and the hand forms a pistol with the index finger straight and the thumb cocked. The finger presses against the Jelly.
“Bang,” says Jones, emerging from the gloom.
The Jelly spins towards him, a whirlwind of heat and screeching, and its tentacles flail around, catching me and throwing me against the wall to my far left. I can’t see Cumi, he’s somewhere in the dust-storm the creature is kicking up, but I can see Jones, that mad bastard, and he’s beating at the Jelly with his fists. It has him up against the wall in a rage, and it’s gutting him as easily as punching into a bag of mud. It pulls the skin of his belly wide and lets his entrails fall in a steaming heap onto the floor, the blue glow of the creature illuminating the whole thing.
Against the light of the beast I see Cumi’s silhouette darting to the doorway for escape, but the alien is quick, spermatozoon eyes everywhere at once. It catches the boy in an outstretched tentacle and drags him back across the floor, drawing blood from poor little Cumi’s fingers as he tries to claw free.
I’m up on my feet again, but now my ankle is twisted, the plastic shell of my fibula split open and the servo within spitting sparks. My foot swings inwards, pigeon-toed, and hobbles my progress. In my mind’s eye I can see Gunnar sneering at me with contempt. Even as a human he was always more fearless than I was, more adept. I’m programmed for empathy and support, not bull-headed machismo. This is foreign territory for me.
I limp across to the Jelly, just as it gets another tentacle around Cumi’s head. I fear what it is about to do. I drive myself right at it and ram my arm into its side, the magnificent heat of it peeling away the silica of my arm and exposing the rigid plastic boning beneath. But I’m made from condensate polyimide, durable for battle conditions, and it holds up against the core temperatures of the alien.
The Jelly is in a rage. It lashes out at me, stripping reams of silica tissue away from my head, trying to prise my skull apart, get at my software. It’s beginning to separate me; I can hear the casing starting to split at the base of my skull.
All I can do is drive my fist into the oily azotosome membrane protecting the creature and tug hard at it, stretch it as far from the gelatinous body as I can, hoping to break this protective insulation open. But I’ve over-estimated either my strength, or the likeness of this extra-terrestrial silica to that which sleeves my endoskeleton. The membrane refuses to break. Hell, even the railgun only scorched and dented the beast. It’s a futile effort on my part. The Jelly starts to pull apart my skull.
Cumi is at my leg, and I’m trying to kick him away. I scream at him to run. Instead, He reaches into the ruins of my pants, into the side-pocket and produces little Ardiyanti’s gift to me, the bone arrow she herself had hand-crafted. A crude and useless weapon.
The boy braces himself then springs up, the bone clutched in both hands, his knuckles white, driving it towards that stretch of azotosome membrane I’m pulling at.
The bone tip pierces the oily silica, does what the force of a railgun couldn’t do. What my robotic body is failing to do. The bone drives through the tissue and suddenly the membrane yanks from my grasp, recoils across the phosphorous bulk of the Jelly, shrivelling and snapping into a coiled ball of oily flesh, like an empty scrotum. It falls to the floor, and the Jelly pulls away from us, liquid methane spewing from fissures in its body as it flails around blindly. Painfully, I hop
e.
I reach down and shield Cumi from the violence of the alien’s abandon. He’s struggling to breathe from the noxious methane in the air as he clutches at the ruin of my arm, his tiny fingers curling around my exposed carbon-fibretendons andpolyimide boning.
The Jelly falls to the floor and rolls over on itself several times as if to put out a fire. I feel its heat lessening, the room growing cooler as the alien’s violence diminishes. It is dying. Our oxygen is poison to it.
Finally it stills. The tentacles flop onto the floor and grow stiff, hard and cracked. The glow from within the creature dissipates, and the room becomes darker.
Cumi pushes against my leg, encouraging me to leave the room.
So we carefully cross the floor, and as we pass the Jelly, I chance a jab at one of its limbs with my mangled foot. The silica crumbles. There is no light left within the beast now, and it is opaque and slimed with a thick, oily residue.
Outside, it is eerily quiet.
My platoon has been decimated. Whatever cell ambushed us is long gone. I can see the remains of our camp scattered across the dust, in the distance. See the bodies there, utterly still. Over to our right beyond Kuta Asli there are the dying sounds of a battle, somewhere from where the horizon burns bright orange against the night. That’s one hot LZ, over there. The Jelly’s that were undoubtedly on Stellum Corps’ falling ship will have killed whoever was camped there, be it PANPAC-NATO forces or sympathisers to the West-Papuan separatists’. Either way, there won’t be much left of them soon.
Cumi is over at Ardiyanti’s body, and he has removed his threadbare shirt and is wiping the dust away from her face. He sheds no tears for her. His face is hard, his brow furrowed. I realise I’ve never seen him without that creased brow.
Together, we bury poor little Ardiyanti, but we say no prayer. Neither of us knows one. It’s not really done anymore in the world. The mound of soil looks heartbreaking, if I had a heart to break.
So small.
“We should try and find the others,” I say quietly. “Give them a burial, too.”
The Cemetery Children Page 3