by Peter Telep
Shane appeared to agree with his plan. She didn't nod, but she didn't leer at him either.
"No matter what we do. I say we call for an immediate EVAC," Bartley suggested.
"And do what, screw up the whole mission?" Hawkes asked incredulously. "Pags would've wanted us to stick together and complete the mission like Marines. He wanted to fly more than any of us. He'll never get that chance. And neither will we if we don't finish this on our own. No EVAC. Let's go hunting." Hawkes stood.
Damphousse, Carter, Stone, Wang, and Low joined him.
Bartley bit her lower lip and shook her head.
Nathan thrust a hand toward Wang, who helped him up. "Carter, Stone, take west side. Stone, assume a position behind that"—Nathan pointed—"see it? See it over there? That long, fat boulder."
"I'm already there," Stone replied curtly, then he and Carter jogged off.
"Damphousse and Wang, east side. Back on the path. Now swing really east and we might be able to drive the sucker back toward its ship."
"Where we'll show it a little good, old-fashioned Marine Corps payback," Wang said before leaving.
Nathan looked to Hawkes. "We're gonna be the eagles, and this summit's our nest."
Hawkes struck up a thumb. "What side you want?"
"East," Nathan said.
With a terse nod, Hawkes pivoted and started for his position.
Nathan shifted his attention to Low, whose brow rose in anticipation of orders.
"I need Low," Shane said, trying to get up on her own but failing miserably. "I have a job for her." She faced the Marine. "I want you to see if you can convert the SIR into a thermal imager."
Low nodded, already understanding. "I think we can. There's an uplink code to break, but I don't think it'll be too difficult."
Nathan smiled. "We get an image on that thing—"
"Don't get too excited. It might have an imager of its own and is—at this moment—tracking us," Shane said. "Now, where do you want me?"
"Here. Stick with Low. At least until you feel better."
"I'm fine. A little groggy, maybe."
"You were violet, now you're somewhere on the light green side," he said.
Before heading for his position, Nathan took one last look at Pags's corpse. The wind rippled across Pags's flight suit. The red mass where his chest had been was covered with a fine layer of dust.
At his self-appointed post, Nathan dug out his Night Vision Sight and clipped it onto his rifle. He squinted at the small screen, trying to pull a glimpse of the alien from the red-tinted terrain. He was already anxious, and in his mind's eye Pags's murder was looped into an endless rerun of carnage. His visor and suit were still smudged with Pags's blood.
You're not dealing with feeble humans. You're dealing with Marines. We're weapons, focused and full of purpose.
The wind got stronger, the dust turning points of clarity into opaque blurs. He cursed under his breath as he scanned the valley through his NVS.
Then, in the shadows near covering boulders... movement.
He should alert the others so that they could drive the alien—as planned—into a position where it would be somewhat cornered, either near its ship or against the cliff side. But his desire for revenge had coalesced into a rabid beast that had to be fed.
They might've killed Kylen! They killed Pags!
He jogged around the hill, booting up sand and sliding over rocks as he descended into the valley.
Low's voice came through his link. "West is solo."
"Dammit! What the hell's he doing?" Shane asked. "Nathan? What's up? Nathan? Report!"
Ignoring her, visualizing himself as a nuclear-tipped rocket on a heat-seeking course for the alien, Nathan raised his rifle and sprinted to a boulder. He ducked behind the stone, polished it with his shoulders as he paused a moment to catch his breath. He rolled a dial on his suit's main control panel, dimming the readouts.
"Stone? Carter?"
"Yeah, we've been listening. Moving east to intercept."
"And I'm with you," Shane said.
"Wang and I are closing in, too," Damphousse added.
Nathan didn't exactly resent their help, but he didn't think he needed it either. As far as Shane was concerned, he should've figured that there would be no holding her down.
He crept to the edge of the boulder, stole a glance into the clearing that led to the next jagged rock, saw no sign of movement, then tore off.
At precisely the moment he reached the center of the clearing, the silhouette of the alien burst from the deeper gloom roughly a dozen meters ahead. The thing, like him, was dodging for rock cover.
Synapses fired, but Nathan's shock had slowed his reaction. He squeezed the trigger of his M-590. The gun spat a trio of bolts at the alien.
But the creature's speed was astounding. It sheered, rolled, and vanished behind a rock in a single, insectlike maneuver, the bolts blasting apart rock faces in the background of its ghost.
The mistake Nathan made was to linger in the clearing to see if he'd shot the thing. Problem was, his assailant exploited the delay to release a round, a round accompanied by the now-familiar and gut-wrenching noise that had come a nanosecond before Pags had been blown away.
ZZZZ-POP-POP!
Despite the skin of his camouflage suit, despite the pressurization, despite the fact that Nathan was already in the air, having launched himself toward the hemispherical shadow of the boulder, he still caught the light of the alien's round on his periphery—a light brighter than burning magnesium—and he felt its heat—something akin to a supernova—as it grazed his shoulder.
He hit the dirt, knees and elbows first, his rifle jarred from his grip. He scrambled forward, came back up with the weapon, then kept on his haunches, trying to decide how long he'd wait before risking a look.
"You spot that fire?"
"Oh, yeah."
"Now hold until you got a clean shot."
"Stone? Circle—"
Nathan switched off his link. No need to be distracted by their skipchatter. If memory served, the thing was about three rocks up, on the left.
If you swing wide and come from behind it. . .
Abandoning the idea of looking before leaping, Nathan rabbit-ran from boulder to boulder. He didn't stop to check each clearing or catch his breath. Though riding the edge of recklessness, he'd stitch a pattern to his position without, he prayed, the alien knowing until a heartbeat before he shot it into salsa.
One rock, two, three, and arrowing toward the fourth—
ZZZZ-POP-POP!
A large chunk of the boulder in front of him erupted with blue webs of energy, then was shaved off to fall into rubble. He swung around to sprint back—
And the alien broke free from a swirling smoke cloud and charged him.
Before he could level his weapon, the abomination dug its claws into his chest, lifted him a half-meter off the surface, then threw him. Nathan floated like a free-thrown basketball on his way toward an unforgiving stone backboard. When he hit the boulder, the air blasted from his lungs and his neck snapped back so hard that he thought it broke.
As he slid down the rock to land unsteadily on his feet, the creature came at him again, vapors and a low trilling escaping through its grillwork. It was then that he noticed it was unarmed. Had it run out of ammo? No time to speculate, for the alien, leaning forward, arms outstretched, fin on its chest looking like a stinger that would finish Nathan, shambled within two meters, arguably point-blank range for someone armed with an M-590.
Nathan fired.
And there was the creature on the ground, slithering away from him, unhurt. It had evaded his shot! The only thing damaged were the peaks of a pair of rocks, both now flat and haloed with dust.
He stood rapt as the thing sprang to its feet and scurried like a roach from the light to gyrate into a crevice between boulders.
Mustering his remaining strength, Nathan staggered forward, then climbed onto the boulders above the crevice, h
oping to catch the thing as it emerged from the other side. He found good purchase on a ledge and dragged himself up, the clearing coming into view.
His mouth fell open.
With its back to him, the alien knelt in the clearing. Its trembling arms were raised above its head. Nathan tracked the creature's gaze to Shane, Stone, Wang, Damphousse, and Carter as the group slowly surrounded the thing. He switched on his link, and immediately had to adjust the sensitivity to cut off the panting of the Marines, who were obviously as scared as their prisoner.
Shane looked up at him. "I think it's trying to surrender," she said, her voice cracking.
One shot would finish it. All he had to do was lift his rifle, barely aim and squeeze the trigger. The military biotechs could dissect the corpse at their leisure; they didn't need a live one running around.
He pushed himself a little higher onto the boulder, then lifted his rifle, bringing it to bear on Pags's murderer.
Shane turned her gun on him. "Don't you dare."
fifteen
Shane had tried to talk to Nathan during the hike back to the ISSCV, but he had remained sullen. She guessed she would eventually get him to open up, and so she had let him have his reticence.
They hadn't had to tie the alien; it had come at gunpoint peacefully, as humans also are wont to do. Low had recorded the position of the downed alien ship and had sent the data to the Marine Corps Command Post just south of Olympus Mons. Shane wished she could have seen the looks on the comtech's faces. News of then discovery would become a global event....
Now, with the sun rising over Gledhill crater in the distance, burning off a thin morning fog, Shane stood near a porthole in the troop cylinder, rubbing eyes that yearned for sleep.
"It probably thinks we're gonna kill it," she heard Wang say from somewhere behind her.
She crossed from the window to the doorway of the supply room. Inside, the alien sat in the middle of the room, tied with cargo cord to a storage crate. The others, save for Nathan, were gathered at the threshold, grimacing and covering their mouths and noses as they studied the hideous but fascinating pilot.
The alien's head was bowed submissively, as it had been all the night. Though she had tried, Shane could not detect a single facial feature that she could compare to a human face. Just those lines that were either part of a mask or some type of gills. While some parts of its skin were smooth, perhaps synthetic, other parts, particularly its hands, were covered with gray scales edged with black or green.
"We're gonna kill it?" Stone asked, clamping his nostrils. "I think not. It's gonna kill us with that smell."
"Or at least it's gonna make me puke," Damphousse said, her eyes tearing as she waved the air in front of her face.
"Smells sulfuric," Low observed.
Damphousse took another look at the prisoner. "Must be a scout. Going toward Earth it had to crank the chicken switch over Mars."
"Probably sent a distress call," Wang added.
Shane gazed soberly at Damphousse, then at Wang. "That means there'll be more coming."
Carter edged a bit toward the enemy creature, crouching for a closer look at the thing's head. "There's got to be some way to figure it out."
"Maybe it's in the mission briefing," Stone said sarcastically, then sniffled and strode away from the doorway to return to his bunk.
Hawkes stepped gingerly past Carter and got so close to the alien that Shane felt the sympathetic racing of her heart. The being seemed to tense, scales standing out, head lifting a little. Hawkes held up his palms, trying to indicate that he wasn't going to hurt it.
"Don't get any closer," Shane told him. "It could carry some disease."
He tossed her a cocky grin. "I never had a mother, but you sound like one." Then he focused back on the alien. "It's wearin' an armored flight suit, I think."
"I would hope we're not at intergalactic war with a naked enemy," Wang said.
"What if it is naked," Carter proposed. "With that kind of skin, I bet the thing would be impossible to kill in an unarmed hand-to-hand."
Stone sat up in his bunk. "Why don't we let it loose and you two can go outside."
Carter brought himself to full height. "I'm up for it."
"Cut the crap," Damphousse said. "Hey, Coop. Watch it there."
Hawkes's nose was a mere thumb's length above the back of the alien's head. Indeed, he was breathing down the thing's neck.
"All right, that's enough," Shane complained. "You're taunting it."
"No... I think I... see something," he said, distracted.
The alien awkwardly shook its head no.
Damphousse gasped. "It knows some of our nonverbal gestures."
"They've been studying us," Shane concluded. "And we know nothing of them."
Hawkes was reaching down toward a straight metallic line on the alien's right bicep. Shane couldn't bear any more of the tank's interrogation. "Get away from it, Hawkes."
But her words meant nothing to him. He lifted a small metal card from what now revealed itself as a slot in the alien's body. The card had raised points and gleamed in the cabin's artificial light.
A noise on the order of a shriek burst through the alien's grillwork:
EEEEEEYAAAAAA!
Hawkes had obviously pissed it off. Carter began to withdraw a pistol from his holster as everyone else took at least a step back.
Shane glowered at Carter. "Put that away."
The Marine smirked and complied.
Hawkes studied both sides of the card, then held it up.
Immediately, a thought hit Shane. "Maybe it operates the vehicle, like a key."
Damphousse took the card from Hawkes and ran her finger over its surface. "There's some sort of encoded information here."
Hawkes snatched the card back from Damphousse, then stepped around the prisoner and dropped to one knee before it. He shoved the card into the enemy's face, and, in a commanding tone, asked, "What is this?"
The creature did not move, its head hanging. Though it surely couldn't say it, Shane imagined the thing rattling off its name, rank, and serial number in answer to Hawkes's query.
Shaking the card, Hawkes raised his voice. "Explain."
EEEEEEYAAAAAA!
And this time even Hawkes was startled. He fell onto his rump and retreated crab-like from the thing. Then he pulled his sidearm and pushed himself back up onto a knee. He took aim at the alien's head.
Shane swallowed. "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait..."
Strangely, the alien seemed to look to the weapon, then, with a tip of its head, indicated toward Nathan, who had just joined the group in the doorway.
All eyes turned to Nathan, whose gaze was narrowed on the alien. He looked to be gathering spit in his mouth.
"Him?" Hawkes asked the creature while pointing at Nathan.
Shane's heart nearly hit the floor as the alien nodded.
Hawkes waved the card. "What does this have to do with him?"
Once again, the alien gestured toward Nathan with its head. Hawkes moved to Nathan, and an expression of understanding came over Hawkes's face. Nathan's flight suit was zippered down to his navel, and his photo tags had become untucked.
Hawkes grabbed the tags and turned back to the alien. He shook the card. "This"—he lifted the photo tags—"is this?"
It took a second, but finally the creature nodded, a sad nod, Shane thought. Then, curious about the card, she took it from Hawkes.
Wang leaned over her shoulder. "It's like a picture of its family or somethin'."
The mood in the cabin grew dour. The home world of the aliens was probably light-years away, yet they, like humans, took along reminders of home, of family, of a life they probably fought for. Shane felt an ironic sense of pity as she pictured the prisoner as a father or mother with little ones praying for its safe return.
Yet when her gaze met Nathan, who had collapsed back onto his bunk, he stared back at her with a countenance of ice.
"Maybe we ought to give i
t something to eat or drink," Low suggested.
Moving its head right, the alien focused its attention on a section of shelving that contained a lone canteen. It nodded over and over, pleading in its own odd way and pulling at its bonds.
"It wants water," Wang said, awestruck.
"Right," Damphousse tossed in. "Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. Makes sense that water's one thing we have in common."
Shane glanced down at the card, then, not trying to hide the melancholy in her voice, amended, "But not the only thing. Give it some water."
Out of the corner of her eye, she caught Nathan springing to his feet. Her head wasn't turned fully in his direction when he stuck his face in hers like a D.I. bent on making a point. "What the hell is wrong with you? We're low on rations already. We're all cut to thirty percent O2 flow and you're gonna waste water on this thing?" He shook his head, a crazed lilt in his voice. "No! No way!"
Then he abruptly shifted away from her, elbowed his way into the supply room and spat on the alien. He glimpsed back at everyone, his mouth curled downward, his eyes pained. "This thing killed Pags!" Then he shot a malevolent look at the alien. "God knows who else it's killed."
The card fell from Shane's grasp. She eyed the floor, ashamed. But part of her still knew that showing mercy to the alien was right. It was a first step. The aliens might have murdered, but perhaps they were ordered to do so. Perhaps they were the slaves of an unreasonable dictator. She could speculate for a millennium, but humanity would never learn the truth if it failed to communicate.
Teeth gritted, face flush, Nathan slapped on his helmet before stomping into the air lock.
After listening to her own breath trip over itself several times, Shane picked up the alien card and went to her bunk. She fetched her helmet and hustled off after Nathan.
Outside, the sun was five degrees off the horizon, the distant crater summits crowned in a scarlet haze. Were it not for her mood, Shane would have taken time out to enjoy the Martian sunrise, perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Nathan stood twenty or thirty meters from the vehicle, a lone violet silhouette staling into the sun. At his feet lay Pags. They had zipped the Marine's body into one of the black body bags Wang had found in the supply room when they had first checked the gear. Wang had chided the Corps, saying that they didn't have much faith in the recruits—and the presence of the body bags was proof of that. Nathan had argued that every Marine should pack a body bag in consideration of the others, but no one had taken him up on his idea. Actually, if they had had the bags during the dust storm, they could've used them as makeshift shelters.