No Plan Survives

by L. D. Robinson

  Mehta turned and took aim, careful to ensure that none of her people were in the line of fire. She picked off two of the aliens, then a jolt of horror grabbed her by the gut as she saw enemy bubbling out of the open airlock. Probably a hundred creatures scrambled toward them, coming in waves.

  She got off two more shots. Davis and his crew fired from their position. But they couldn’t keep this up for long.

  “Is it open?” she said to Trel.

  “Still working.”

  “Davis is wounded!” Ramirez shouted. “He’s still fighting, but I don’t know how much longer we’ll have his help.”

  “Trel, get that air lock open!”

  “Got it,” Trel said, and the circular door swung up.

  Mehta scrambled down into the enemy ship. “Come on,” she said, gesturing to Trel. “I’m going to need you.”

  Trel hesitated for a second, then looked back in the direction of the approaching enemy. He quickly stepped into the airlock and closed off the outside. The tube they entered bent around. She followed it to the other end, then opened it. She stepped into a hallway, noticing how much lighter she was here than on Earth. Several Species X crewmen walking down the hallway stopped, staring, evidently as startled as she. She raised her weapon and her blast connected with the neck of the closest one. Its head fell on the floor. The other skittered around the corner, emitting a chittering noise as Trel stepped onto the deck.

  “The cavalry is on its way,” she said.

  “What?”

  “More Species X are coming. Which way is engineering?”

  He pointed. His hand trembled.

  “Cover me.” She headed in the direction he had pointed, pressing herself forward, the way she’d learned to run in low gravity.

  “You want me to stay here?” His voice squeaked.

  She stopped and looked at him. “No. Follow me, but facing backward, so you can shoot any Species X that comes at me from behind.”

  “Got it.” He sounded relieved. He skipped toward her, far enough to catch up to her. Three ant-creatures appeared around the corner, heading straight toward him. She lifted her pistol and shot, hitting the first one in the thorax. It bounced up onto its abdomen, then crumpled sideways. The other ant clambered over it, and she blasted its head. The third lowered its head and pushed forward. She pulled the trigger but missed.

  “Trel!”

  He spun around, but the ant had reached his feet, and it lunged onto his leg, wrapping its sharp mandibles around his right calf. “Stars and moons!” he shouted. “Get it off! Get it off!”

  She hurried over. More ants were coming, and she felled the nearest one with her blaster, then lifted her boot and stomped the abdomen of the one biting Trel’s leg. Its mandibles snapped open and it reeled backward. Good. She nailed it right between the eyes.

  “Are you okay?” she said to Trel.

  “I… I think so.”

  “Good. Now, don’t lose your mind with fear.”

  “It’s already gone.”

  “Then get it back.” She shot another ant. “I need you, Trel. If you freeze up, we’ll both be dead in a few minutes.”

  “I know.”

  “If you work with me, we can survive. Understand?”

  “How? How is that possible?”

  “No time to explain. Just get me to engineering.”

  He nodded, the movements jerky. His chest still lifted and fell like he was hyperventilating. “Let’s go,” he said, then lifted his blaster and picked off two more ants.

  Mehta turned around, back in the direction of engineering, and found several ants in her path. She blasted them. Trel’s pistol burped out streams of energy.

  “They’re starting to come faster,” she said. “We’ve got to get there quickly, or we’ll be overwhelmed.”

  “Run, then?”

  “Skip.” She took two quick steps forward, then another two.

  “I don’t know if I can do that backward,” Trel said.

  “Do what you can.”

  They rounded a corner, to where the doors to engineering were, and there, they found a huge congregation of ants in front of the door, mandibles clacking. Then, as if someone had given a command, they moved toward Mehta and Trel.

  “I need your help on this!” she said.

  “Too many coming up behind us,” he said. His blaster coughed almost continuously.

  She lifted her blaster and picked off the nearest ants. They fell in piles of broken exoskeleton and splattered body fluids. But their companions didn’t seem to notice. They climbed over their dead counterparts to continue the attack.

  “There must be millions,” Trel said.

  She shot again and again, her blaster hot against her palms.

  “We can’t just stand here shooting,” she said. “I’ve got to get in there!”

  Trel jumped forward, blasting at the ants in front of her, then spinning around and picking off a few from behind, and back to the front. He pushed against the pile of dead ants directly between them and the door.

  She felled a couple of ants moving toward Trel, then spun around and dropped a few more coming up the hallway.

  Trel opened the door and slipped through. The light from his blaster showed through the opening five times as he dispatched the crew inside. “It’s all clear,” he shouted.

  She took down three more ants who blocked her movements, then jumped over the bodies, some still flailing, and bolted through the engineering door.

  Trel closed the door and pressed a button nearby. “It won’t lock.” The door cracked open again, antennae poking through the opening.

  She didn’t have time to worry about that. Trel would cover her back.

  She hurried over to the panel with the bright red frame. It had all the controls she remembered, but no writing to tell her which button did what. Just little rough squares that appeared to have been scratched.

  Scratch and sniff?

  Her space suit wasn’t going to have any kind of device that would translate this stuff. She had to remember.

  Remember.

  She set her blaster on a small ledge at the bottom of the panels. It leaned, then clattered to the floor.

  “They’ve gotten through!” Trel shouted. He backed away from the door as a swarm of insects flowed through the opening, all heading toward her.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The whole area erupted in light as Trel fired his weapon. Globs of fluid splattered on the wall beside her, and bone shards bounced back onto the floor. A dismembered ant leg struck just above the panel with a snap, lingered for a morbid second, twitching, before it rolled and fell.

  She looked back at the panel. Remember, damn it! Okay, the first two sections weren’t what she was looking for. The two sections on the left controlled gravity and inertial compensation. That was on the far right. She found the buttons that indicated the direction of the gravitational offset, then pressed the down button.

  Something clawed at her legs. She looked down. One of the aliens had reached her and had its mandibles grasping onto her calf. Another ant climbed atop the first, mouth parts out ready to dig in. Six or seven more queued up behind them. The pincers stung.

  “Trel!”

  She glanced across the room to see Trel still backing away, still firing his blaster as fast as he could, as a stream of ants flowed through the door. He couldn’t get them all.

  She reached down to grab her blaster from the floor. An ant snatched at her lower arm, mandibles locked tight around her muscle. Another attacked her head, but that was covered in a firm helmet. Still, if she kept banging at it, the ant would break it soon.

  The blaster was just out of reach. She pressed herself forward, gloved fingers wriggling to try to grab it. An ant’s mandibles wrapped around it and picked it up, then backed away from her.

  “Trel! It’s got my blaster!”

  The ant skittered away, then exploded in a mass of shattered bone and oozing innards.

  But the blaste
r was too far away to reach.

  She just needed to get back to her task, which would be more difficult now because ants were gnawing at all parts of her body. One had its mouth parts pincering her waist, and another was crawling over her back, headed to her neck.

  Damn. Her neck. That bite would kill her. With a sudden burst of strength, she shook her body to fling the killer ant off. It ground its mandibles into her upper arm.

  Shit. She had to do something. She reached up to the wall with her unencumbered arm and tried to stand. Too much weight, too many ants grasping her. “Trel!”

  Ping. Ping.

  The mandibles on her arm sprang open and the ant dropped away. Another at her thigh shuddered, its abdomen splattered against the wall.

  It was just enough. She reached the panel again and pushed the button to increase the gravitational counterbalance.

  Her feet rose from the floor. Wrong button.

  She tried the next one. Back to the original settings. She pressed it again and her weight felt normal. Two more taps, and her muscles strained to keep her body, burdened with its ant cargo, in an upright position.

  “They’ve slowed down,” Trel said.

  Not enough.

  She leaned into the panel. Her limbs felt heavy, and her fingers were stiff and difficult to move, probably a result of the pressure the ant had put on her forearm. She notched the gravity up, two more times.

  Her legs wobbled under the extra weight, and she leaned against the wall to support herself, but the aliens still ground into her legs.

  She stabbed at the button.

  The aliens’ mandibles popped open, and they slipped to the floor. Legs moved in frenzied jerks. Heads shook.

  Mehta grasped the edge of the panel, then hit the gravity button again.

  The aliens stopped moving.

  She waited, counting to herself until she had reached twenty. The red in the panel frame began to fade, washing into a dull gray.

  She slid her finger to the first button and gave it a quick jab. She paused, while the colors wavered from dull red to gray and back to a deep burgundy. One more push to lower the gravity. “Any sign they’re coming back to life?” she asked.

  “Nothing yet,” he said. He sat on the floor, bracing himself with his hands, surrounded by lifeless ants.

  She lowered the gravity another notch, checking the aliens to see if they would revive. None moved.

  Finally, she brought the gravity to a level that felt normal.

  She pushed the ant bodies away from her legs and examined her suit. “It’s torn,” she said. “So, since I’m not dead, the air must be breathable.”

  Trel looked at a readout on his space suit. “Confirmed. We still need to keep the suits on to communicate with each other, but we can open the face mask.” He pressed a button on his chest, and the transparent bubble over his head collapsed into the suit.

  “Thanks,” she said, doing the same. She spoke into her suit. “Opash, which airlock will you be coming through? We’ll meet you there.”

  Opash gave her the airlock identification. Then Mehta reached out a hand to help Trel back to his feet. He waved off the hand and climbed to a standing position. “Sorry I got so scared,” he said.

  She squeezed his upper arm. “You got through it, and you did what needed to be done. I call that very brave.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Now I need you to direct me to the airlock. They’re going to need some help.”

  Trel rushed out to the hallway, then plowed his way through the pile of dead ants. She followed, down the corridor, up a ramp to a higher deck. Dead ants peppered the floor, some alone, some in groups. One pair looked like they had been hugging each other.

  Around a corner, the airlock door popped open and Opash came through, followed by Davis, who poked his head out, then sagged.

  “Give me a hand,” Mehta said, grabbing his suit at the shoulders. Trel and Opash joined her, easing him into the hallway, then onto the floor.

  Opash closed the door to the airlock. Air hissed behind the metal door.

  “How are you?” Mehta said to Davis.

  His eyes rolled.

  Mehta looked up at Trel. “He needs medical attention.”

  “I doubt they have much here.”

  The airlock door popped open, and Ramirez and Hiranaka came through.

  “Ramirez, help Trel get him to the medical bay and see if you can figure out what they have that would help.”

  Ramirez nodded, and they picked Davis up by the arms until he was near standing, then each reached around behind his knees, creating a chair for him to sit on. In a moment, they had disappeared around the corner.

  Mehta turned to the others. “We’ve got to get back to Earth as fast as possible. You two get to the bridge and see if you can fly this thing.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Hiranaka said, then stepped over several dead aliens. “How many of these things do you suppose were on this ship?”

  “I don’t know,” Mehta said, her voice a whisper, “but there were a lot. And I killed them all.”

  

  Mehta headed for the medical bay, or at least where she thought it would be. Half way there, the ship shuddered, the floor moved out from under her and a thump echoed off the walls. She reeled. “Bridge, what was that?”

  “The shuttle blew up,” Hiranaka said.

  Strange. She hadn’t heard an explosion. Oh, right, no sounds in space, just the debris hitting the Species X ship.

  Around another corner, Mehta arrived at the medical bay. Davis was lying on a mat on the floor. “No beds?”

  “Not for ants, evidently,” Trel said. He sat beside Davis, wrapping a white cloth around a burned spot on his leg.

  Davis lay still, his eyes closed, the color of his skin turned gray. Ramirez rummaged through drawers.

  “How is he?” Mehta asked, kneeling beside him.

  “The bleeding’s stopped, and right now I just need to control for shock,” Trel said.

  Ramirez slammed a drawer shut. “I can’t find anything useful here.”

  “Stay with him.” Mehta said to Trel.

  Trel nodded as Mehta got back to her feet. She looked at Ramirez. “We have a lot of work to do.”

  He swallowed, a look of distress on his face. “Yes, ma’am.”

  She flipped on her space suit transmitter as she reached the door. “Opash, what’s the status?”

  “Nothing’s labeled,” Opash said. “We’re having to do this from memory.”

  “Are we moving yet?”

  “No.”

  “Have you been able to get into the computer?”

  “I tried, but nothing there makes any sense.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When we look at the screen through our translator lens, it comes out with chemical formulas. No words or numbers.”

  Mehta sighed. “I think those are the words. These are ants, and they communicate with chemicals.”

  “Mierda,” Ramirez said.

  “But how are we supposed to read this?” Opash said. “The translator is just giving us these formulas.”

  She turned to Ramirez. “You got any ideas?”

  He scratched his head, then smiled. “See if you can find any ship diagrams. If we have pictures, with words, maybe we can get the translator to figure it out.”

  “I’m on it,” Opash said.

  “And one other thing,” Mehta said. “Check to see how many formulas there are. If there are seventy-five or less, they’re probably letters, like an alphabet. If there are more than a hundred…”

  “There are thousands,” Hiranaka said.

  “Then they’re words.” Mehta smiled in spite of the situation. “Now, look at your control consoles again. Do you have any scratch and sniff pads?”

  “Oh, for goodness sake,” Hiranaka said. “That’s what these things are?”

  “Let me know when we’re under way.”

  They headed into the hallway,
then stopped at the first pile of dead ant bodies. Their hard, outer shell gave their faces an expressionless look, and the stares of those bulging eyes was relentless. All the mandibles were open to the widest position, like the pose of a Species X scream. It gave her the creeps.

  “The bodies will start decaying soon,” she said. “That’ll leave the entire ship reeking.”

  “We can toss them out the airlocks.”

  “Let’s get them all into the shuttle bay.”

  “Why?” he said. “That will take a lot more work.”

  “First of all,” she said, “do you know how to open the outer door of the airlock from inside the ship?”

  He looked at it and frowned. “Uh…”

  She already knew the answer to that one. The airlocks were built so that the outer door could only be operated by someone inside the lock. That would prevent someone from being accidentally ejected into space before they were ready.

  “But more importantly,” she continued, “we have to find out what their burial procedures are.” Depending on how these aliens regarded death, calloused treatment of the bodies could add yet another reason for them to be angry at Mralans.

  Ramirez frowned. “Really? And are we going to waste our time having a funeral for them?”

  “They’re sentient beings. I killed them without mercy, but I’m not going to dispose of the bodies without respect.” She keyed the mike on her communicator. “Opash, once you get us underway, can you find out how these aliens dispose of their dead?”

  “I can look.”

  “Thanks.”

  He folded his arms.

  “Get to work,” she said, then grabbed two bodies and headed down the hall.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Ramirez lost count of how many trips they had made to the shuttle bay. His legs felt like lead, and his arms ached. Mehta grunted beside him. She dragged only two ants to his three, but he could tell she was tiring. He looked at his watch. They had been at this for 45 minutes, and it didn’t seem like they’d even made a dent.

  “We’re under way,” Opash announced through the space suit radio.

  “Excellent,” Mehta answered. “Netherspace?”

  “That’s the next step.”

  That meant their movement was almost worthless. It would take them years to get home. Why hadn’t Mehta sent one of the men to the bridge? Didn’t she realize?