by Richard Fox
There was a long pause as the image blurred again, lines becoming fuzzy and static hissing through the speakers. The alien looked off camera again as if he was listening to another.
“Did we lose connection?” Hale asked. “Did my transmission go through?”
“Connection’s good,” Edison said.
The alien face refocused. “Do you have the device?”
Hale felt his stomach tighten. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The alien didn’t respond, looking off camera again.
“Do not play games with me…Hale. Amusing. The device was promised with your arrival. I know you have it. You will give it to me.”
Hale threw his arms up. “What do you want?”
“That which brought you here. What brought the first humans here. The gate. The… Crucible.”
Hale felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. “If you know about the Crucible, then you know where my people are. What have you done with them?”
“You will provide the Crucible. Then you may serve at the vanguard of my empire.”
“I’m not giving you anything.”
“Then you must be made to suffer.”
Hale jabbed a finger at the floating head. “And I want my brother... my people back, you son of a bitch. Have no doubt, I will turn every stone in this system upside-down, rip apart every asteroid, and tear apart every planet in this damn galaxy until I find them. And then I’ll come looking for you. Understand?”
“I have cleansed humans of such insolence before. You may be defiant, but you are replaceable.”
“Every man and woman on this mission is as dedicated to our freedom as I am. Don’t think you can—”
The alien looked off camera again, its image blurring. Another figure appeared in frame a second later. Hale felt like he’d been punched in the gut.
Hale stepped up to the table, leaning in as close as he could. “Jared?”
His brother’s eyes widened, craning his head to one side. “Ken? Ken, is that really you?”
“Jared, what’s going on? Where are you? Are you okay?”
Before his brother could answer, Jared was pulled out of view and the alien reappeared. “You will give me this technology. The secrets of the Crucible gates will be mine. Do this now or my patience ends.”
“Listen to me, you metal-faced freak, I don’t know what or who you are, but I’ve been threatened by beings a hell of a lot worse than you. Meaner and uglier than you can even imagine. If you think I’m just going to roll over and—”
The image vanished in a pop of static.
“The transmission has been terminated, Colonel,” Edison reported.
Hale slammed his fist down hard on the table. The conference room remained silent as Hale thumped his hand again…then again.
Chapter 11
The closer the team got to the center of the complex, the busier it became. Sounds of machinery banging on metal and people relaying orders filled the corridors. The tunnels seemed to form a grid through the complex; most contained a main access route with a secondary catwalk above, presumably for the guards to supervise.
Carson’s team kept to the catwalks, using the sounds of construction to cover their advance. They kept pace with two men pushing a cart full of a dark, obsidian ore. They were younger, maybe just out of their teens, gaunt and dirty. They made no effort to speak to each other, seeming only interested in getting their cart of goods to its destination.
They turned a corner and entered a vast chamber. The domed ceiling, 100 meters above the floor, glowed a pale blue. The catwalk split in two directions, encircling the chamber and providing access to a smaller ring in the center of the room, but even that ring was the diameter of a football field.
A large disk-shaped ship with three distinct tiers stacked on top of each other sat in the middle of the room. Gantries and scaffolding surrounded the unfinished craft. Large hull fragments yet to be assembled lay in pieces around the ship. A twelve-foot fence, topped with several strands of razor wire, surrounded the central work area.
A honeycomb of workstations, separated by narrow walkways, took up most of the remaining area. Several stations were grouped in clusters connected by wide roads, where flatbed trucks and forklifts moved back and forth, ferrying equipment and supplies. Colonists packed into the workstations, all focused intently on their particular project, all working under the watchful eye of the Netherguard, who patrolled the catwalks and ground floors in pairs.
“Holy crap,” Nunez said, stopping at the edge of the catwalk. “It’s massive.”
West turned to Carson. “That’s…not what I thought it would look like.”
“Not any human design, that’s for sure,” Carson replied.
“Chief,” Birch said, pointing. “Far side of the ship, next to that transport.”
Carson leaned close to the rail, focusing on the indicated spot. A team of colonists were unloading something from the flatbed. She zoomed in with her HUD. They were moving a collection black tubes that formed a set of concentric circles, held together equidistantly by flat silver housings. The tubes seemed to glisten in the light of the chamber.
A group of six Netherguards stood around the workers. These wore enclosed helmets with horns that arced down to the side of their jaws. Each carried a club covered in brass studs. All paid particularly close attention to the workers’ actions. As they loaded the device onto a floating platform, another figure appeared from underneath the ship.
“What the hell is that?” Popov asked.
This new figure stood a head shorter than the Netherguards, its body slightly thinner but encased in armor bulkier than a Strike Marine’s. Unlike the Netherguards, it didn’t wear a helmet. Its bald head and face were exposed, though several cables ran from housings on its back armor to metal couplings on the back of its skull. Carson zoomed in further…this wasn’t a doughboy; it was a man.
The human workers backed away from the new arrival, all bowing their heads, shoulders hunched like cowering animals. After apparently giving a series of commands to the assembled workers, the figure turned and Carson cursed, zooming in on its face.
“Holy shit,” Birch said under his breath. “That’s Jared Hale.”
“That son of a bitch,” Nunez said, bringing up his carbine.
Carson held out a hand. “Stand down.”
“But, Chief!”
“I said stand down, Sergeant. Moretti, what the hell happened to him?”
“Looks like cyber augmentation,” the medic said. “I’ve seen tech like this used on those with extensive nerve damage, but not to that degree.”
“He’s lost his mind,” Nunez said. “Spent too much time with that Triumvirate whatever and went native.”
“No, there’s more to this,” Carson said. “Wasn’t there something about Jared from the war? Something more than him being an engineer?”
“He was a doughboy platoon leader when the Toth attacked Hawaii,” Birch said. “There’s a story about Ken Hale from a later battle; he broke the siege on a firebase. There was an officer that was surgically altered to look and sound like Jared; happened to a lot of the doughboy leaders. Something about Jared Hale made the doughboys imprint on him, made them more effective in battle.”
“So instead of figuring out what it was, they just made people look like Jared Hale?” Popov asked.
“The next wave of Xaros were on the way to wipe out Earth,” West said. “It wasn’t the time for elegant solutions.”
“So that might not be Jared?” Carson asked.
“Has to be him,” Moretti said. “Altering the doughboy leaders was done to procedurals while they were in the tubes. If this Triumvirate had proccie tech, they wouldn’t need the colonists. They’d just churn out willing servants.”
“But if all these Netherguard are primed to obey that Hale,” Popov said. “What would happen if we kill him?”
“Doughboys would go berserk if their alpha was killed,” Mor
etti said. “Design feature to keep them from going docile and being killed too easily.”
“He dies and it could be a massacre,” Carson said.
Reluctantly, Nunez lowered his carbine.
They watched in silence as Jared Hale and an entourage of Netherguards left the construction chamber, disappearing into a corridor on the far side of the room.
The workers finished loading the device and the platform rose into the underbelly of the spacecraft. The remaining Netherguards escorted the group back through the fence, before closing and locking it, standing guard just outside the perimeter.
“We should go, Chief,” West said. “I don’t know what more we can learn here. We need to get this information back to the Director. He’ll want to know about the ship, not to mention what’s happened to his brother.”
Carson blew out a long, frustrated breath. She didn’t like the idea of leaving all these people behind but knew there was nothing they could do for them now. They couldn’t get even a fraction of the people aboard the Valiant, much less the Rover, and would risk exposing themselves if they tried.
“You’re right,” she said finally. “I don’t like it, but you’re right. There’s little else we can do here.”
“Something’s happening,” Birch said, putting a hand on Carson’s shoulder. “Look.”
It took a moment for Carson to find what Birch was seeing, a flight of three small drones, descending from a platform, twenty meters up. Green and orange lights flashed as the drones flew over the workstations. One by one, the colonists stopped working and began to file out, under the close watch of the Netherguard. They formed orderly lines, exiting through several corridors around the chamber as another group entered.
“Shift change?” Moretti said.
The new workers moved quickly to their stations and the drones docked in a recharge station bolted to a tall pole on the catwalk.
“Those drones,” Carson said, turning to Birch. “Could we hack them?”
Birch looked at Popov. “Those look like Moth-G’s. Inventory control drones. Can you do a remote access?”
“You are such a geek.” Popov swept her hand over her gauntlet. “I’m not picking up anything on known control frequencies…I’m not getting any transmissions at all in here. My guess is they’re on infrared and lasers. We’d need to open them up for a hack.”
“Or get between the lasers and piggyback off their signal,” Birch said. “I send a Gremlin into the formation and we can hack in. Civilian tech is a joke to crack.”
“It’s true.” Popov tapped her gauntlet. “I’ve got source code going back to the first Ibarra bots.”
“We hack in and we can pull vid from this entire complex,” West said. “Would make planning a rescue operation a hell of a lot easier.”
“New plan,” Carson said. “Popov, load up the override codes to the Gremlin. Moretti, you’re with Birch and me. West, Nunez, Popov, hold here. If anything goes wrong, head for Rover and get the hell out of here. Got it?”
Without waiting for acknowledgements, Carson turned and motioned for Birch to move out. They made their way around the catwalk, along the perimeter of the chamber. They dodged two teams of patrolling Netherguards, who were more focused on watching the humans below than anything going on around them.
Birch led them onto a gantry connecting the outer ring with the one in the middle. They moved over a group of the honeycomb workspaces, slowing to look at the colonists working below. Some were operating additive printers, crafting bespoke parts from raw metal dust and polymers. Others were assembling parts, and a select few sat at computer terminals working on some type of code.
A ladder just off the inner ring took them up to another, smaller ring where the drone station sat. Surprisingly, there were no Netherguards protecting the station, and Birch went right to work.
He almost had one of the side panels open, when a loud two-tone chime echoed through the chamber. Carson motioned for Birch to stop as three Netherguards entered from a far corridor, marching across the open space with purpose. They stopped near a cluster of workspaces, standing in a wedge just outside the entrance.
A deep voice boomed and reverberated in the space around them. “Danielle Scartucci!”
The colonists working in the cluster stopped what they were working on, all keeping their eyes on the ground. A woman near the back of the cluster shook her head, taking several steps backward.
“No!” she shouted, her voice of mixture of desperation and anger. “I did it right!”
“Danielle Scartucci,” the voice repeated. “You have been found in non-compliance.”
“No!” the woman screamed, dropping to her knees. “Masters…please!”
“This is your second offense. Apparently, your punishment for your first non-compliance was insufficient.”
The woman walked forward on her knees, hands outstretched. “Don’t! I followed the schematics! I followed them exactly. It’s not my fault every time there’s an adjustment in the project, it affects already assembled parts. If it malfunctioned, it’s not my fault.”
“Are you suggesting the fault lies with the designers?”
The woman paused, looking between the faces of the Netherguards. “No… no, I’m not saying that at all. But I did deliver the correct piece. If I’d been told prior to its construction…”
One of the Netherguards stepped forward, slamming a fist into her gut. The force of the blow lifted her off the ground and dropped her to her knees and elbows. The two other Netherguards slammed their clubs into the ground in unison as the first one stepped toward the woman again.
Moretti brought up his carbine, resting it on the rail in front of him. “To hell with this.”
“No, stop,” Carson said. “Our mission is more important that just one person. If we give away our position now, we can’t help the rest of them and the Director will never know what’s happening out here.”
“We can’t sit back and do nothing.”
“I don’t like this either, but we don’t have a choice.”
The Netherguard bent over, grabbing the woman by her throat and lifting her off the ground. She gasped, hands frantically clawing at the Netherguard’s hands, legs kicking, wildly searching for purchase.
“They’re going to kill her.” Moretti tensed, his finger on his carbine’s trigger.
“You will hold your fire, Moretti. Stand down and do not interfere.”
Moretti held Carson’s gaze for several moments before looking away, cursing.
The woman’s cries faded, her arms losing strength, legs going still.
“Given your skills,” another voice boomed through the chamber, “I will grant clemency. Unit Garnett-12, her left leg.”
The Netherguard holding the woman released his grasp on the woman. It stomped onto her left ankle and took a club from one of the other doughboys. It rammed the tip down onto her calf and the crack of bone echoed through the chamber. She curled into a ball, sobbing as she clutched her broken shin.
“You will be reassigned to another production line at the next shift change,” the new voice announced. It sounded more human than the previous one. Carson had a worrying suspicion she knew who the voice belonged to, and the thought turned her stomach.
The voice continued, “Any further failures will result in termination. The rest will resume their previous duties.”
The Netherguards watched as the woman crawled away. One of her co-workers finally approached her, helping her sit in one of the chairs along the wall.
“Nunez.” West’s voice came through the team’s IR, tone tense and alert. “Don’t move. You’ve got a drone directly above you.”
Carson shifted position, looking down on the other half of her squad. Her three Pathfinders sat crouched on the walkway below, visible only as outlines in Carson’s HUD. A small drone, outlined in red, hovered in the air above their position, rotating, lights blinking, as a dog that’s picked up an odd scent might.
“Hold,”
Carson ordered. In any other situation, she might have simply blown it out of the sky, but here, deep inside an alien prison, surrounded by who knew how many advanced guards, shooting the drone wasn’t exactly prudent.
“I don’t think it sees us,” Popov said.
Carson gritted her teeth. “Just stay still.”
The drone rotated again, then slowly began to orbit their position. Another joined it, holding station above the walkway.
“I don’t like—” West started.
Without warning, the second drone expelled a cloud of yellow mist from a spout on its underside, spraying the three Pathfinders below. The mist clung to the Pathfinder’s armor, negating the effects of their camo-cloaks, revealing them as yellow silhouettes.
West swung his carbine up like a bat, connecting with the drone, sending it spinning through the air. The first drone zipped away, red and yellow strobes flashing. On the ground, a pair of patrolling Netherguards stopped and looked up at the disturbance.
A second later, the alarm stopped.
“Get out of there!” Carson yelled, leveling her carbine at the closest guard. She was about to fire when Birch pulled her muzzle up.
“They’re compromised,” he said, “not us.”
Nunez fired; the shot took the guard in the face, snapping its head back, sending it sprawling back into one of the exterior honeycomb walls.
“Popov, Nunez, on me!” West shouted, already moving, moving back along the catwalk the way they’d come. He stopped short as four Netherguards appeared, cutting off their escape route. West charged, firing from the hip. The rounds hit the flank of one of the doughboys, but the construct ran right for them, oblivious to the injury.
Five more Netherguards appeared behind the exposed Pathfinders, charging with clubs raised.
Carson pulled her weapon away from Birch and lined up a shot, but stopped as Jared’s voice boomed throughout the chamber, his words loud enough to vibrate the platform she stood on.
“DO NOT KILL THEM!”
On the catwalk, Nunez turned to face the flanking attackers, firing just as the voice spoke. The front Netherguard took the barrage point blank to the chest, jerking back, with ichor spraying. The second guard knocked his injured comrade aside without bothering to try and help, sending it twirling over the rail, and reached out for Nunez’s carbine. Nunez shot the doughboy through the hand; the bullet tore through the attacker’s arm, severing it. The guard swung its club around with the other hand and struck Nunez’s weapon, shattering it into fragments. A gout of blood spilled from the mangled arm, then slowed to a trickle as it swung the club around again.