by Richard Fox
Carson fired with one hand, backpedaling as she struggled to remove her helmet. She slapped at the latch just below her chin, but it wouldn’t budge.
Think! Think! You’re a Pathfinder! Her mind raced for a solution, knowing full well that the aliens were almost upon her. Brushing her hand against her left ear, she tried to jimmy the helmet loose and then felt a slight depression of a button. She jammed her finger against it and her broken visor popped off—giving her a look at an alien just as it swiped at her face.
Ducking to one side, she fired blindly then turned and ran for the Mule and bumped into West. He fired from the hip with one arm and pulled her toward their escape. Gauss rounds snapped over her head and hit the aliens. Carson ran in a crouch to the Mule’s open ramp, where the rest of her team laid down a torrent of fire.
Carson ran forward and slowed as she got to the edge of the ramp that hovered two yards over the ground. She grabbed the ramp and turned back to West, who was finally running for safety, dead aliens forming a bloody carpet behind him. The Mule lifted, taking Carson off her feet. She reached out to West and he grabbed her by the wrist. The shuttle shot up and Carson’s grip slipped just a bit. She flexed the pseudo muscles in her forearm and felt the metal of the ramp give ever so slightly.
She looked down. West dangled from her other arm and a mass of aliens clustered around where they’d been seconds ago. A sling-thrown rock whacked against the underside of the ramp.
Birch mag-locked his boots to the ramp and wrapped his meaty hands around Carson’s forearm. He lifted them both up and dropped Carson onto the ramp next to him, then got one arm under West’s shoulder and chucked him into the Mule’s cargo area.
Carson stumbled into the Mule. “Greer, hit it!”
The Mule’s engines roared and it rocketed into the sky. Birch closed the ramp, and servos whined as the ramp shut, sealing the bay off from the raging storm outside.
Looking up, Carson counted her team. All present, and all of them—but Birch—looked scared.
As the Mule leveled out, Carson struggled to slow her breathing. She gave the metal deck a pat, then kissed it through her missing visor before sitting up.
“You all right, Chief?” West asked, extending a hand.
“Yeah,” Carson said, accepting his help to her feet. “Everyone OK?”
The Master Sergeant nodded.
Carson took a deep breath, mentally running through their options. Returning to the Enduring Spirit was the most obvious choice, but going back to Hale without any real information was not her mission. He would want answers, and Carson was determined to bring him some.
Greer’s voice came through the IR. “ETA to Spirit, ninety-seven minutes.”
“Negative,” Carson said without hesitation. “We are not returning to station.”
Greer hesitated, then said, “Say again?”
“Keep us near the colony and stand by.”
“Ohh…kay.”
West leaned close. “What are your orders, Chief?”
“Hale sent us down here for answers. We’re not going back until we have them.” Carson turned to Popov, who was sitting in one of the drop seats, helmet in the seat next to her, sweat matting her red hair to her pale face.
“Popov, the auxiliary data site,” Carson said.
The commo specialist looked up, then glanced around as if she suddenly realized where she was.
“Yes…yes, Chief. Should be able to find it now.” Producing the small cylindrical device from the pouch on her chest, she pulled a tablet from the small gear bag on the small of her back. “Give me a few minutes.”
“Hopefully, we’ve got enough fuel to hit that location and make it back to the Spirit,” Carson said. She pulled off her helmet, then turned it over in her hands, inspecting a dent near the temple that she didn’t remember getting. “Sergeant West, do we have a—”
West handed her a new helmet. She tossed her broken one into the open cargo box and sniffed the insides of her new gear. The factory-fresh smell made her nose wrinkle in disgust.
“I’ll get the team refit,” West said. “You anticipate a less urban location for our next mission?”
“I do. You have active camo cloaks in there?” Carson motioned to the cargo box.
West stared at her for a moment, then blinked slowly.
“Yes, of course you do.” Carson nodded quickly. “Get the team prepped for forests.”
“Roger that, Chief.”
“And, Sergeant, good work down there,” she said.
“Same, ma’am. I’ve had better drops.”
“And I’ve had worse.” Carson slapped him on the shoulder and went to Popov.
Popov ran a data line from her gauntlet to the shunt, then smiled. She looked up from her tablet to Carson. “Got it, ma’am. The encryption protocols are years old. Not hard to crack. Looks like the auxiliary site is in a valley, thirty klicks north of the city. No roads, nothing else out there. Must’ve sent the data by satellite.”
“Send the coordinates to Greer, nice work.”
A second later, the pilot said over the IR, “What’s this?”
“Our next stop,” Carson said.
“What about those…things?”
“We know they’re out there now. Just get us to those coordinates. We’ll worry about any hostiles when we get there.”
The Mule banked under them and as Carson felt the engines flare, she hoped she sounded more confident than she felt. The throbbing in her leg was building again. The temptation to abort the mission and return to Hale was strong, but she wasn’t going to screw up her first chance back in the field.
Near the back of the bay, Moretti sat upright.
“Huh, now that’s funny.” He pulled a small capsule of brown fluid from his gauntlet and held it up to his face, examining it with a frown.
“Those aren’t words I want to hear from my doctor,” Carson said.
“Well, I’ll have to run some more tests to be sure, but this blood sample I took from those savages isn’t actually blood. Nor do they have any DNA to examine.”
Carson looked at the green stains covering her armor. “You don’t say.”
Moretti glanced up and saw what Carson was looking at. “Well, the oxygenated and glucose-bearing particles those things had aren’t the same as red blood cells. And the tissue sample I took is a polymer lattice, not muscle or fat tissue.”
“That sounds familiar…” West said. The entire team looked at the medic.
“So then what did we kill back there?” Carson asked.
“Not to be overly pedantic,” Moretti said, “but you can’t kill what’s not technically alive. Those specimens were one hundred percent artificial constructs.”
“What the hell do you mean ‘artificial constructs’?” Nunez asked. “I never had a robot scream at me and try to rip my arms off.”
“Moretti, this tech you’re describing,” West said, crossing his arms over his chest, “have you seen it before?”
Moretti swiped two fingers across his medi-gauntlet, then flicked them into the air between him and the others where a holo of a large three-dimensional image of one of the monsters standing upright, almost at attention, appeared, followed by several transparent panels, displaying information and data relating to certain parts of the creature.
“They’re not human, altered or otherwise,” Moretti said. “However, they are not a new alien race either. I’m running a second pathology scan to be sure, but I’m fairly certain these creatures are actually Mark III Battle Constructs.”
New holos popped up next to the hostiles they encountered, images of well-built, jowly soldiers in Terran uniforms holding oversized gauss rifles, skin mottled in green, black, and brown.
Memories of the Ember War against the Xaros came to Carson and a chill ran up her spine. Humanity had survived that war through a series of small miracles and technological advances courtesy of alien allies. One of those advances was the rapid production of artificial foot soldier
s, tough enough to take out the Xaros’ drones but little better than cannon fodder. Those foot soldiers had been produced—and died—in the millions.
“Doughboys?” she asked. “No. That’s impossible. Doughboys were programmed to never harm humans. What we met down there sure as hell wasn’t a doughboy.”
“The design has been modified significantly from the original model, but the basic composition is the same,” Moretti said. “They reached the end of their service life soon after the war and were decommissioned. A few kept ticking and I had the chance to examine one during trauma school. Brass wanted us familiar with their physiology, so to speak, in case the production lines were brought out of mothballs. Despite the adjustments to their behavior and appearance, those were doughboys.”
“Why would the colonists make altered doughies?” Birch asked. “Why did they even bring the tech with them?”
Moretti shrugged. “I’m a medic, not an intelligence analyst.”
Carson took a seat, eyeing the claw marks across her helmet. She took a deep breath and leaned back against the bulkhead. Moretti’s revelation posed more questions than answers. Did a colonist try to forge an army to take over the city? Had they unleashed golems that wiped out the entire colony?
“That there are doughboys on Terra Nova begs another question,” Moretti said. “Did the Christophorous also bring the equipment to create procedurally generated human beings?”
“Proccies are outlawed,” Nunez said. “Have been for years.”
“The first wave came over before the ban,” Popov said. “You think they brought the tubes and computers with them?”
“Earth needed every tube it could build before the Xaros attacked again. Why give a valuable asset to a mission going to uninhabited space? Besides, the crèches were huge,” Birch said. “The facility on Hawaii took up most of Maui. There’s no way they could bring that in a single colony ship.”
“Well, this day’s been chock-full of surprises,” Nunez said. “Let’s not rule anything out just yet. Maybe a race of four-armed, ten-foot-tall aliens with tusks is waiting for us at the auxiliary site.”
“What I’m done waiting for is all of you to replace your spent magazines and hot swap your battery packs,” West said. “You think because we’re on Terra Nova, post-mission ops have changed?”
The team got out of their seats and rushed the supply crate. Carson recognized the tone of West’s voice, the sergeant’s way of refocusing the team on the mission instead of their problems, a tactic used since the first days humans carried bronze weapons into battle.
Carson stayed seated, took an earpiece out of her new helmet, and opened a channel to the Enduring Spirit.
This was a recon mission, she thought. We got some information, time to toss this hot potato to the decision makers.
Chapter 5
“Are you sure this data is accurate?” Hale asked, his image flickering in the Mule’s cockpit display.
“Yes, sir,” Carson said. “That’s all the data Moretti’s been able to gather on the…hostiles. Maybe the Spirit’s computers can glean something more.”
Carson could barely make out Hale’s jaw working back and forth as he seemed to contemplate everything she’d just explained. He looked offscreen at something, and a second later, his wife’s face came into frame.
“This is hard to process for two reasons,” Marie Hale said. “First, the Christophorous didn’t have doughboy or proccie facilities on their ship’s manifest. And second, the jump window from Earth—or any Crucible gate in the galaxy for that matter—to Terra Nova has only been opened twice. The Christophorous’ jump and ours. So how did the colonists get hold of the technology?”
Hale shook his head. “We can piece together the past later. We need to find out what happened to the first wave and if Terra Nova is safe for the rest of us.”
Carson nodded to the Mule’s navigation display. “We’ll find out soon. If Popov is right, the backup site should house an entire database of files: colony reports, transit logs. It’s not that large of a facility, according to what I can see on the scopes.”
“If they haven’t destroyed that as well,” Hale said.
Marie gave the director an almost imperceptible nudge with her elbow. Hale remained stoic.
“You’re doing an outstanding job down there, Carson. Good thinking to locate the auxiliary site,” Marie said.
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“Keep us advised of the situation and report back as soon as you’ve secured the facility.”
The transmission cut off before Carson could reply, leaving her and Greer in silence.
Hale still has no confidence in me, Carson thought, trying not to let her disappointment show.
After several long moments, Greer said, “Looks like there’s a good-sized clearing about two klicks away. Don’t see anywhere else to put down.”
“Roger that,” Carson said. “We don’t mind the hike. Just get us on the ground.”
****
Carson wound fabric around her throbbing leg. The digital-pattern material faded in and out before going semi opaque. She stood up and adjusted the tunic and cloak over her armor. Colors rippled over the cloak as she moved too quickly for the adaptive camouflage to adjust.
West tossed her a roll of fabric as wide as her wrist. She caught it and wound it over the barrel of her carbine.
“We have the AC-ready carbines on the Spirit,” the lead sergeant said, “in a cargo pod on deck nineteen, underneath five other layers of cargo pods. I hate going into the field with anything less than the best.”
“You had ten minutes before we went void-born off the ship,” Carson said. “I’ve got no complaints about our gear. You were a Boy Scout, weren’t you?”
West raised a three-fingered salute. “Be prepared. And I was an Eagle Scout.”
“Inspect me.” Carson pulled a hood over her helm and drew a veil down over her visor. Light dimmed as her camo cloak adjusted, then her view returned to normal.
West removed the optic on his carbine and pointed it at her.
“You’re essentially invisible to the naked eye and infrared beyond five meters. No gaps to your coverage.” West looked back to the cargo bay where Nunez, Popov, and Moretti were doing push-ups while Birch supervised.
“Some corrective training,” West said.
“Is it me or has the light occultation improved?” Carson swept her hood back and deactivated the camo cloak.
“This is Karigole technology. Hale went to his contact on their planet a few months ago and got them to improve it. Seems he’s one of the few humans they won’t shoot on sight,” West said.
“Wonder how Earth will deal with them now that Hale’s way out here with us.” Carson looked up as warning lights over the door flashed amber. She felt the Mule sway beneath her feet.
“Go time!” West shouted. “Active stealth drop, we’re here not to be seen or heard. Understand?”
“Yes, Sergeant!” called out the three Pathfinders doing push-ups.
“Recover,” Birch said.
Carson went to the ramp and locked her boots against the floor just before the door lowered and wind howled through the cargo bay. Outside, a thick forest spread through a valley between two mountain lines. Rapids tore down a river, and for a second, Carson wondered if the colonists had ever taken up white-water rafting.
When the Mule set down five minutes later, Carson’s team hit the ground and vanished into the tree line around the clearing. The rain had stopped, but the storm had left the ground soft and damp. A layer of fog drifted above them, partially obscuring the tops of the trees, which appeared similar to Earth’s pines—tall, thin trunks with branches covered in thousands of needles.
Despite a slight breeze, the surrounding forest was eerily quiet. Carson did a slow sweep of the area, her thermal scanners picking up small animals in the brush. She saw the outline of her Pathfinders, their positions sent through their local IR network, on her HUD.
�
��Team, report,” West said.
“Animal trails,” Birch said. “No tracks or trace of anything the size of the hostiles.”
“Couple predatory birds, about the size of eagles to our south,” Nunez said. “Sure hope they’re not hungry. Right, Moretti?”
“I told you to never speak of that again,” the medic said.
“Damnedest thing,” Nunez said. “We’re doing a bacteria collection on a silver-tier world and this pterodactyl analog swoops in—”
“Nunez…” Moretti growled.
“—tries to carry him off but can’t. Then it—” Nunez gasped as Birch wrapped an arm around his neck and cut off his airway.
Carson rolled her eyes. She expected nerves from her team. Letting off steam would keep them sharp later on. “Area’s clear,” she said. “Let him go, Birch.”
“—all over him. Didn’t get that smell off his armor for days,” Nunez said.
“Kind of reminds me of British Columbia,” Popov said.
Carson stepped around the Mule’s nose, looking up at Greer. “Button up and wait for contact. Keep your eyes open.”
“Wait, you want us to just wait out here all by ourselves?”
“That’s right. If you don’t hear from us in two hours, consider us overdue and return to the ship for further instructions.”
“Well, I turn into a pumpkin at midnight, so…”
“Well then, I guess we’d better get moving.”
As the ramp whined closed, Carson considered the slick-top Mule. She wasn’t thrilled about leaving a defenseless aircraft behind, but she couldn’t see any other option. They didn’t have the fuel to circulate in the air while her team explored the facility. Hopefully, the forest would provide the air crew with enough concealment to make up for the lack of defensive weapons.
“OK,” Carson said, stepping up to her waiting team. “Standard scout formation. Nunez, you have point. Birch, how many drones you have left?”
“Just the one.”
“Keep it on standby. If shit hits the fan, we’ll launch it for close-in support. Active camo engaged, move too fast and you’ll blur. Keep your heads on a swivel. If you see any of those things, make sure you get good, well-aimed shots. Pathfinders light the darkness.”