by Joshua James
“So, who is in charge here?” asked the scientist.
Jiang looked at Lucky again.
“Guy outside without a head,” said Lucky.
The scientist didn’t skip a beat. “Well, who’s next in command?” She tilted her head toward Lucky.
He closed his eyes. “You wouldn’t be talking to me if you didn’t know it was me, lady,” he said.
Her colleague snorted. He had yet to look up from the data cube he was engaged with. His artificial hand was glowing, and his eyes were glazed over.
“Big and stupid,” he said in a voice meant to carry. “What a surprise, Vlad.”
Lucky recognized the voice as the idiot who had shouted down from the upper window.
“Thanks for all your help out there,” said Lucky.
The scientist didn’t look up, but he did shrug.
“I didn’t realize you couldn’t come and go like the other Marines,” he said. “I don’t know how your stupid toys work.”
“Orton, please,” said the old scientist.
“Vlad?” asked Jiang.
“Ah, yes, introductions are in order. My name is Vladlena Alyona. I’m the lead XT investigator on our expedition. But my team members just call me Vlad.” She looked around, unsure for the first time. “My team is gone, of course. As are your comrades.”
She paused again to clear her throat. “This is Davidson Orton, our lead data harvester.”
Orton shook his angry red face but again refused to look up from his cube. He looked like a teenager, but Lucky knew he was older. Just a baby face. The kind of little punk who never grew up and needed a good ass-kicking.
Lucky’s sister would have probably described Lucky that way, too, once upon a time.
“Charmed,” said Lucky. “Where are your blood eyes?”
Vlad frowned at the insult. “Our clones didn’t make it.”
“So just the bloods bought it, eh?” he said, noting her again flinch at the word. “What a coincidence.”
Scientists always got sensitive when you implied that they treated their clones badly. Even though they did.
Lucky named off the other Marines then turned back to Vlad.
“XT? Xenotechnologic? Since when does the Empire send relic hunters on secret missions?”
Orton finally looked up from his cube, shock on his face.
“Are you for real?” he asked. “Vlad is one of the smartest people in the universe. She has more brains in her little pinky than you have in your entire body.”
“Hey, he doesn’t even know me,” said Rocky.
“Orton, please,” said Vlad.
Orton kept staring at Lucky in what was supposed to be a menacing glare.
Lucky stifled a smile. He was always looking for a good fight, but hitting this kid would be like hitting a puppy.
Malby looked ready to explode.
“Now that we’re all friends, what the hell is going on?”
Lucky nodded. “How about it, Vlad?”
She sighed. “I’m afraid I’ve gotten us all killed.”
18
Anomaly
Orton had just settled back to his data cube, but now he jumped up out of his seat, waving his glowing data-harvesting hand.
“No way,” he said. “You cannot put this on yourself, Vlad. There’s no way we could have known any of this was going on here.”
“What is going on here?” Jiang asked.
The question hung in the air.
“We have known for some time that the Union was in possession of alien technology.”
Lucky found himself leaning forward.
“What, like a relic?” asked Malby, incredulously. “All of this is from a relic?”
Vlad regarded him icily. “Obviously not. Relics are cold, dead artifacts of bygone civilizations. We find them all the time. What you see out there,”—she waved to the blast doors—“isn’t coming from some trinkets on the black market.”
It was true that humanity had been finding relics of past alien civilizations for as long as they had been exploring the stars. But those had all died out billions of years ago, more or less at the same time. A fact that really baffled all the smart people.
It didn’t mean jack to Lucky.
What they hadn’t found, despite all the expectations that they would, were any actual, living aliens.
This also meant nothing to Lucky. Few things did.
“Hold on,” Lucky said, raising his hand. “So you think they found real, living, breathing aliens?”
“No …” she hesitated. “Well, we didn’t think so. Now we aren’t so sure.”
She looked at Orton, who had gone back to his data cube. He nodded absently. “I don’t see anything here that appears to be xenorganic. We are strictly dealing with xenotechnologic evidence.”
“Alien tech, but no actual aliens,” stated Jiang, who was again absently rubbing the chain around her neck.
“Exactly,” said Vlad.
“So, you’re telling me that the Union found some working alien technology and that is what did this?” Malby said, incredulity in his voice.
“In so many words, yes.”
“Bullshit.”
“Can you shut up and let the lady talk?” said Cheeky.
“Make me,” retorted Malby, turning on Cheeky.
“C’mon now,” said Dawson, always the peacemaker.
Orton shook his head.
Lucky thought for a moment it was at the behavior of the Marines, but the squat little scientist was staring at his data cube.
“It just doesn’t make sense,” he said to Vlad. “There is no way this signal is related to the original anomaly. It must be the second one.”
Vlad stepped behind Orton, and her eyelids fluttered as she accessed the data as well. Her rapid eye movements were distinctive. He remembered them from the vid.
“I don’t think we got the full picture, yet,” said Jiang.
Orton let out an exasperated sigh. “For the love of—”
“Orton!” warned Vlad.
“I’ll just tell them, or they’ll just keep acting like they’re entitled to know, even if they can’t understand,” he said, staring down Malby who looked like he might knock the guy’s teeth out.
Lucky couldn’t help but notice none of the other Marines were standing between Orton and Malby this time.
“The Union has had alien tech for some time. We have known that. But we couldn’t get any details because all our spies went dark. Complete communication silence. We used to know everything the Union was doing before their own commanders did, but now we were in the dark. We couldn’t recruit new spies, and we couldn’t send in our own. They just went dark immediately as well.”
“This was all in our briefing. Isn’t that the reason we’re here?” asked Lucky.
Orton shook his head. “That’s barely the half of it.”
“Good to know the silencing of entire worlds is just the half of it,” Dawson said.
Orton shrugged as if to agree, but Vlad stepped in before he could make things worse.
“We don’t know what happened, but we don’t think it’s what it looks like,” said Vlad.
“Well, it looks like they’re all dead,” said Jiang. “And I thought that was as bad as it could get for them until I saw this little creep show up out there.”
“We think they are fine. There has been a military coup, of sorts,” Vlad said.
She again hesitated, looking at Orton. For someone who had seemed so sure of herself a few minutes ago, now she was stuttering along.
“A military coup?” Jiang repeated.
Vlad nodded slowly, aware of the delicacy of explaining this fact to a well-armed member of her own military.
Orton showed no such tact.
“Regardless of the apes in charge,” Orton said, waving dismissively, “What we are really concerned about is that whatever experiment they were running has gone wrong.”
“Not necessarily wrong,” interjected Vlad
. “Perhaps it just expanded faster than intended.”
Orton nodded deferentially. “Yes, that could be it,” he said. “We didn’t have any clues, and then we saw the sudden flare of activity around the anomaly here. We have known about it for some time, but there was nothing that made it special—”
“What anomaly?” Jiang cut him off.
“Don’t you Marines talk to each other?” He waved his arms. “Didn’t the first group of you explain what we found?”
Lucky wasn’t interested in explaining the concept of need-to-know to this prick. And frankly, Lucky wouldn’t have cared if he had known. “Explain it,” he said.
Orton shrugged. “We found a spaceship.”
19
Signals
Lucky waited for more. Orton wasn’t offering.
“And—” he prodded.
Orton shrugged again. “There is nothing special about it. Typical relic.”
He waved his hand at the data cube, and for the first time the three-dimensional view shifted from a number set into an image.
At first glance, it just looked like a piece of rock protruding from the dirt. A second longer, and Lucky realized he had already seen it. They all had. It was the steep rocky hill jutting out of the crater just beyond the stackshack.
Up close, everything changed. It wasn’t a hill. It wasn’t a natural formation at all. From ground level, the shape of a rock-hewn spacecraft was unmistakable. And enormous. And—
There was something vaguely familiar about it. Alarm bells started going off in his head, and suddenly he felt a wave of nausea wash over him. The edges of his vision were suddenly tinged with red.
Orton was droning on about how it was the kind of find a lesser research team could spend a lifetime poring over, but his team knew better. There was nothing special about it.
“Uh oh,” said Rocky.
“Did you just hit me with a cocktail?” Lucky replied.
“We need to talk.”
“Kinda in the middle of something here, Rocky.”
“This can’t wait.”
“Well?”
“I’m having trouble controlling Him.”
This was not what Lucky expected. He sat up straight.
Rocky didn’t talk about The Hate often. She was as scared of Him as Lucky was, but she was the only thing standing between Him and complete control of Lucky.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean ever since we got here, He has gotten stronger. He wants out. I can feel it, and I don’t know how long I can keep Him in.”
“How has it gotten strong?”
“I’m not saying I have all the answers, Lucky. I don’t even understand how He is here.”
“Well I don’t even know what He is.”
“The point is, if it gets out down here, I don’t know if I can put it back in the bottle.”
The Hate had saved his life more times than he could count. But it was pure evil. When it took over, Lucky couldn’t control himself. He wanted to kill and maim. He was uncontrollable. He didn’t differentiate between friend and foe. He wanted everything to die.
Something inside of him was a cold-blooded murderer. A demon.
Each time Lucky asked for its help, he vowed it was the last.
But he couldn’t stop making deals with the devil.
“The nightmares are getting worse, too,” he said.
Were they? Yes, he thought. He hadn’t realized it until he said it, but it was true.
“The drift dream about the experiments? I thought you always had those.”
“There was something different about this one. It was more … real. Vivid. I don’t know how to explain it. I was there.”
Rocky seemed to be turning this over.
Like The Hate, the experiments weren’t something either of them liked to talk about.
Before the experiments, he had been just a rookie with a typical AI.
After the experiments, he and Rocky became … intertwined. He was able to coordinate with Rocky in ways he didn’t hear other Marines discuss.
They were probably both in denial.
“Think for yourself, buddy,” she said. “And besides, we know they’re connected.”
“We are all connected,” he said.
Rocky didn’t disagree.
The Hate. The experiments. It was a puzzle he had never been able to put together.
He also couldn’t make any of it go away. No matter how many times he burned his memories, they always came back.
He knew they always would.
Lucky was startled out of his dark thoughts by the sound of laughter.
“Hell, Malby,” Jiang said, shaking her head.
“Why is that funny? It’s a spaceship. It might still work.”
Orton took a turn at rolling his eyes.
“It’s eight billion years old and encrusted in rock and ore. What do you think?” he asked. He didn’t wait for a response. “Obviously not. It’s a relic.”
Malby pointed at the blast doors with his pulse rifle. He still hadn’t put it down.
“Then what do the Union weirdos want with it?”
Orton squirmed uncomfortably.
“That’s what we were trying to figure out,” said Vlad.
“They aren’t related,” barked Orton. He looked at Vlad hesitantly. “They aren’t related,” he repeated more softly.
Vlad said nothing.
Malby blew his top. “They aren’t related?” he screamed. “They sure as hell look related to me! Or did you not see all the rovers on the damn planet congregating here for a giant party?”
“That is what I’m trying to tell you. The signal that’s controlling them is coming from the other anomaly.”
Lucky jumped back into the conversation. “Hold it. There’s a signal? And another anomaly?”
“Yes,” said Vlad. “We tracked it as soon as we landed here. We didn’t realize what it was doing at first. They didn’t attack until the main team had gone to the original anomaly site. There is some Trojan horse at work in the rudimentary Union wetware.”
The Union might have hated tech, but they still wanted to control their population like any good power did. So they had basic nanobots implanted in all their citizens. They provided simple functionality—basic biobots for disease and injury, docility and loyalty impulses, the usual. But their stuff still sucked.
“So, they are getting hijacked and going nuts and pulling their eyes out?” asked Malby.
“Yes, but it isn’t nuts,” said Vlad. “Vision takes up an inordinate amount of mental functioning. The Trojan needs that to receive and interpret the signals. It compensates with other senses. Like I said, these aren’t people anymore. They are programmed puppets.”
“And the other anomaly?”
“That is more speculative,” Vlad said, looking over at Orton. “Whatever it is, we have triangulated the position of where the signals are originating. It is a point in space.”
“What’s there?”
She shrugged. “We don’t know. We don’t exactly have resources in orbit at the moment.”
She waited a beat. “But we’d sure like to find out.”
No one spoke for a moment.
Jiang was still fixated on the eyeless freaks outside. “So, this is what all the citizens of the Union look like? This is why we lost contact with their home system?” She was shaking her head.
But Vlad cut her off. “We know for a fact that isn’t the case. We’ve lost our spies, but those we have smuggled in have been able to provide us with some information. We have reports of these puppets in the population, but this is strictly a military operation.”
Lucky assumed the spies were actually unmarked clones. That was against every treaty in the universe, but trivial issues like that wouldn’t put off the Empire.
“No military would go along with doing this to their civilian population,” said Cheeky.
“Said the planetary submission specialist,” replied Orton.
Cheeky glared, but Lucky just leaned back and caught Jiang’s eye.
She raised an eyebrow.
“The mil-tech was the first to be trojaned,” explained Vlad. “And it was easier since they have networked AI capabilities. Once they were in the military network, gaining control of the military leadership was … simple.” She shrugged in apology. “And soldiers do what they are told to do.”
Lucky flipped her a middle finger but didn’t get into it. “Okay, so some are following orders. And some are mindless puppets like them,” Lucky said, nodding at the blast door. “Who is pulling all the strings?”
“That is precisely what we came down here in the first place to try and figure out,” she said.
Lucky flipped the sighting bar on his unholstered punch pistol up and down while he thought about it.
He looked over at Jiang. He could tell she was thinking the same thing.
“Nah,” said Lucky, hand coming to rest on the small firearm. “I don’t buy it.”
20
Time's Up
“What is that supposed to mean?” said Orton, looking around incredulously.
Vlad didn’t say anything, but her eye darted to the punch pistol in his lap.
“I think you’re trying really hard to make me think you care about who is behind this. But I don’t think you care at all, or maybe you do, but the Empire sure as hell doesn’t.”
“Please enlighten us,” said Orton, sarcastically throwing his arms up in the air.
Lucky holstered the punch pistol. Orton really was oblivious to the implied threat, like a puppy that had never been kicked. It was almost endearing.
Orton crossed his arms and tilted his head.
Jiang beat Lucky to the punch. “Take it from someone who has been playing for this team for a while. We didn’t come out here because the Empire gives two shits about the Union’s civilian populations.”
Lucky was annoyed, but nodded.
“Exactly,” he said. “The Empire cares about two things. New weapons and old wars. I think the Empire knew the Union was trying to weaponize some alien tech. But they figured the Union couldn’t find their ass without help—a fair assumption—and didn’t take it seriously. But now, it’s looking like the tech-averse dirt lovers might have actually made a breakthrough. And that has the Empire brass simultaneously shaking in their boots and totally hard for some new alien weapons.”