by Jody Wallace
From his position, Adam could see Sarah’s profile pretty well. She grimaced. “Their population’s been weakened by a breakout of the measles virus, and I don’t know what they can handle. Probably not much.”
“Ship, are you getting this? Daemon activity near the Riverbend settlement,” Horatio said with a quick glance at the intercom speaker. “Can you scan? We need to know if the daemons are a scouting party or defenders for a shade horde.”
Daemons. Those were the red flying monsters. He was about to see his first actually alien-aliens. As the silence and tension grew, Adam found himself straining at his seat belt.
“Can’t we shoot them?” Adam asked the twitchy soldier beside him. “The ship has guns.”
“We can try,” the man responded, “but shuttles aren’t as maneuverable as the daemons. It’s easier to tackle them hand to hand.” He and the other guy exchanged a glance. “Should we wing up, Dr. Sarah?”
“I don’t know yet.” She shaded her eyes, concentrating. “Let’s see what the scan reveals.”
“I am afraid I have bad news,” Ship announced. “I have completed the focal area scan and detected a discrete blotch of shades.” It shared coordinates that meant nothing to Adam.
“That’s the settlement.” Claire cursed bitterly. “This is nowhere near a primary horde. How the hell did this many soul suckers get so far into the buffer zone?”
“Unknown,” Ship said. “I fear this proves that my energy conservation efforts have interfered with global monitoring. I should have detected a horde of this magnitude.”
“Gods.” Sarah paled. Cullin whirled away from her, stalking to a window to glare out. Adam didn’t understand most of what they were saying, but their reactions meant this was bad. Really bad. “If the shades are alive, the humans—”
“Might not be,” Claire finished for her. “We gotta land and rescue anybody we can. Looks like you called it, boys. Wing up.”
Horatio swiped the controls of the shuttle and half rose. “There are too many daemons. I should go with them.”
Claire waved him down. “If something happens to you, none of us can fly this bird. You stay with the shuttle.”
Though Claire wasn’t the soldiers’ commanding officer, they followed her orders. From a cabinet, they attached giant white wings to their backs somehow, grimacing in pain, before flapping them experimentally in the cabin. Adam leaned out of the way. Thin silver armor like Claire’s covered their torsos and upper thighs, and metal bands covered their forearms. The wings folded compactly after the initial test.
He’d seen winged men before. Angeli. Adam focused on the déjà vu too hard, and it slipped away.
Dammit.
“Do not, under any circumstances, get near the shades,” Claire ordered the soldiers. “Your job is the daemons. Watch each other’s backs and activate emergency protocol if things go wrong. The rest of us will handle the retrieval of survivors.”
“Understood.” The men exited through the back of the passenger cabin.
The shuttle slowed, and seconds later the daemons grew to more than dots. Adam could make out bat-like wings. The clunk of a hatch or doorway in the back of the shuttle preceded the appearance of the two soldiers, airborne, their bodies surrounded by a slight glow.
Sarah manipulated some levers on the control panel, scanning the data. “It’s confirmed. This shade blotch has no connection to the primary hordes. Closest one is over eight hundred miles away. They’re just…here.”
“I feel obliged to point out this is not how shades operate,” Ship said. “This is not a situation in my databanks. There is some possibility that shades cannot exist for long independently of a horde.”
“We’ve been dirtside past leviathan point longer than anyone in Shipborn history,” Cullin snapped at the AI. “We have shade deaths all over the buffer zone, and nobody’s spotted any shades running free until now. Clearly shit changes.” He shot a quick glance at Adam as if seeing him with new eyes.
Claire pointed at the screen. “Can daemons, I don’t know, carry shades from place to place?”
Cullin laughed humorlessly. “We can pen a few temporarily, but shades escape airtight containers.”
“What about mysterious silver pods holding shades?” Claire asked. Adam tensed, waiting for the answer.
“Doesn’t matter what that thing you found turns out to be. The fracking shades could escape it,” Cullin assured her.
Sarah frowned at the brusque scientist, but Claire rolled her eyes.
“There is no evidence that the entities use tools or technology,” Ship said.
“Shit changes,” Cullin repeated. “Daemons change—we know that, and we’re getting more proof of that every day. Daemons never used to eat, and suddenly they’re consuming flesh. So if daemons can change, why can’t shades?”
Ship had no response, so Adam asked a question to clarify one of the many things he didn’t understand. “Why can’t the soldiers get near the shades?”
“You guys didn’t tell him anything?” Cullin huffed in disgust.
Claire and Sarah exchanged a glance. “We can’t let the entities know the Shipborn are in this solar system.”
Jesus, he’d only been conscious a day, and he knew about the Shipborn. The monsters had been here a lot longer. “Don’t they have eyes? Sensors?”
Sarah motioned Claire and Cullin to their seats as the shuttle accelerated toward the settlement. Their altitude decreased rapidly, pressure building in Adam’s ears. “These creatures don’t have the same type of intelligence as we do. They don’t realize the Shipborn are in the vicinity until the shades—that’s the black ones—eat somebody from a Ship.”
“Eat?” he asked, horrified.
“Did you expect them to pat us on the head?” Cullin asked.
Adam didn’t mind sarcasm, but he wasn’t going to let the scientist mock him. Granted, the guy seemed like an equal opportunity mocker, but still. “Do you remember what happened to you before yesterday? You do? Then lay off the guy with amnesia while he’s relearning everything you already know.”
Cullin raised his hands in a universal gesture of surrender. “Fine. Shades are shapeless globs of interdimensional matter that eat people. Technically, they absorb sentient life force and leave the body behind, but they’re surface-bound and slow. Daemons scout food sources and drag sentients back to the shades, which tend to cluster and pool. Shades do not tend to show up eight hundred miles from a primary horde without any connecting tributaries.”
“There was a movie.” His memory pinged, fuzzy and strange, like when he’d imagined wrecking his bicycle or having blood work done. “A fog that covered a town and killed people.”
“Not a bad way to think of it.” Claire studied him as if measuring him with a ruler. She seemed calmer than Sarah, Cullin, and the pilot, more equipped to handle the unexpected. In a world where he couldn’t remember his past, her steadiness reassured him.
Even if she didn’t want him in Chanute.
Cullin blustered and bristled while Sarah conversed urgently through her sensor array. The pilot offered a few too many nervous updates of their approach to the settlement. He hadn’t been able to raise any survivors on the comms.
“I understand that the soldiers don’t want to die, but I’m picking up that it’s more dangerous than that,” Adam said.
Claire answered him instead of Cullin, for which he was grateful—less disdain. “If the shades detect the Shipborn by eating one, they create a big ass monster called a leviathan, and it eats Ship, everybody on it, and maybe the planet. The Shipborn aren’t too sure, because they’re always too dead to find out.”
“Holy hell.” Adam glanced out the window. “And you sent Shipborn outside this shuttle?”
“All Shipborn who travel dirtside agree to certain emergency protocol now.” She waved toward the window, where the flying soldiers had gone. “Let’s just say they have the ability to obliterate their own DNA. Do you really need more information?”<
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“No.” That probably meant they were supposed to suicide if it looked like shades were about to get them. Adam’s respect for Shipborn bravery—for setting foot on the planet knowing they might have to commit suicide—increased. “How much danger are we in?”
“The Shipborn can evade a horde in a shuttle as long as no daemons interfere,” Claire said as they zoomed across a landscape, trees and highways passing in a blur. “Right now we’ve got to do a shade assessment at Riverbend. This is a big shuttle, so we’re going to load up the survivors if it looks like things aren’t going well.”
“I’m helping,” Adam decided. “I’m Terran. I don’t need emergency protocol.”
They reached the settlement, where part of a town near a large river with many branches had been converted into a walled-off village. The walls hadn’t stopped the black sea of shades. It lay beneath them, oozing over the fortifications and through the streets. The wrongness of it hit the back of his throat like vomit.
Cullin couldn’t stay silent long, but at least he came at Adam objectively. “Bad idea. He doesn’t have any training. He only learned about this two minutes ago.”
“He does have training,” Claire said grimly. Adam raised his eyebrows, but she didn’t explain. “And I need the help.”
Cullin frowned. “But he doesn’t remember—”
“I don’t care what I remember,” Adam interrupted. “I know right from wrong. I’m going.”
“Sentients do have free will,” Ship said blandly.
Claire nodded sharply and motioned toward a cabinet, expression serious. “You ever fired a gun before?”
“I have no idea.” Adrenaline sizzled through him. His hands fisted. “Can you teach me in five minutes?”
…
The black, oily shades hissed like pressure brakes on the world’s largest Mac truck. Adam pointed the laser pistol, held down the trigger, and melted the waist-high blobs. He swept the shimmering beam back and forth as the shades went up in stench and shrieks.
Claire hadn’t had time to show him much, but the pistols were point and shoot.
“Go, go, go!” Hustling survivors toward the bridge that led to the shuttle, Claire’s urgent shout broke through the whistle of the shades. Adults carried children and helped the elderly. Adam tried not to stare at the occasional bodies strewn on the ground. Grungy banks of snow and slippery footing didn’t make his task any easier.
He drilled more shades over the hood of an SUV. Each sizzle increased their vile odor, a combination of rotten meat and chemicals. Sometimes they sent out tentacles of evil that flowed from the central body. Less frequently, one or two would break off from the herd and go exploring.
Small clumps slid faster. They had the town pretty much infiltrated. It didn’t help that the river bordered the settlement, reducing escape routes.
Killing the blobs, watching them dissipate, wasn’t as satisfying as it should be. Was it because there were so many that his efforts didn’t seem to help? Or was it because he had a primal need to conquer the enemy with his bare hands?
According to Claire, that was something no sentient could risk. A few stupid seconds of trying to throttle a black blob, and he’d be as dead as most of the humans here.
“Mama!” a small voice cried. Adam whirled. A child, tearful and clutching a cat, stood near the entrance of a building. “Where are you, Mama?”
The shades sent a wisp toward the building, questing for the child’s life force. Her view of the oncoming threat was blocked by a truck in the street.
Adam’s heart pulsed with fear.
“Run, kid!”
The kid didn’t hear him. Her pink parka was ripped and stained. She stood on her tiptoes, searching for her mother. “Mama, I found Rainbow Sparkles!”
Thank God he was closer to her than the shades were. He took off as fast as he could, leaping a bicycle, some fallen supplies, a mound of dirty snow. His hurdle took him farther than expected. Ten, fifteen feet. Startled, he fell on a knee when he landed.
What the hell?
No time to worry about that. Maybe it was that training Claire mentioned. He popped upright and resumed course to the child, who squeezed her pet like it was going to save her. The cat yowled and struggled. The shades closed the distance quickly. The child finally noticed them, screamed, and started running down the mucky sidewalk.
Away from Adam.
The thin rope of shades curled behind her fleeing figure, streaming between Adam and his goal. He cursed, sped up, and bounded over the shades like he had the bicycle.
This time he was ready for the distance and the landing. He hit the ground running. The cat broke free from the child and darted away.
“Sparkles, come back!” The child veered after the cat and promptly slipped on some ice.
Adam reached the kid before the shades, grabbing her under his arm like a football. She screamed hysterically. “Get Sparkles, get Sparkles.”
Legs pumping, lungs heaving, he didn’t know how he managed to catch the mangy beast, but he nicked it by the scruff in seconds. He held onto kid and cat as best he could and pounded toward the bridge that led to the shuttle. It was in an open field a quarter mile out of town. With Shipborn aboard, they hadn’t been able to risk landing on the shade-heavy side of the river.
Cullin manned the cockpit, blasting away with the shuttle’s laser cannon at any shades that crept toward their tiny safe zone. Horatio worked the shuttle’s door. He assumed Dr. Sarah was in the clinic, bandaging wounds. Two survivors from town had climbed atop the shuttle as lookouts.
Adam chugged through frozen grass, reaching the shuttle in short order.
“Incoming!” he yelled. The door slid open. Adam tossed the kid and the cat to the pilot and pivoted to return to the settlement.
“Adam, hold up,” Horatio yelled. “There’s a big white tent down by the river filled with people too sick to walk. Claire’s clearing you a path.”
“I’m on it.” Where had he seen Claire? He took off, hoping he remembered soon. The bridge was still clear, thanks to Cullin.
He hurried past a convenience store and a car dealer with no cars. Shot a few shades. Kept going. Was this the right direction? The last he’d seen her—ah, there.
She was atop a tanker truck that was part of the barrier the townsfolk had erected, blasting away at shades with both hands. Her lasers emanated from the silver bands on her wrists instead of guns. The locals had lined one side of the barrier with packed snow, solidifying it.
Claire concentrated her lasers on the left flank of the horde, and it was beginning to part like the Red Sea. She’d ditched her parka at some point, freeing her blaster bands, and her silver torso armor gleamed while her active sensor array lit her head like a halo—like the angeli Adam couldn’t quite remember.
She was magnificent. The sight of her etched itself into Adam’s brain, and he didn’t think amnesia could make him forget it.
He couldn’t gawk. He had work to do. The direction she was clearing must be the way to the tent, where the townsfolk had been trying to stem the highly contagious measles virus by quarantining sick people.
Adam huffed out a breath and charged forward. The foul taste in the air was nauseating, but he seemed to have a strong stomach. He reached Claire in less than a minute and was atop the tanker beside her in two jumps.
He added his laser to hers. The horde burbled with a stomach-churning ripple. When the monsters puddled up, he couldn’t tell them apart. The laser beams sizzled them, almost uselessly, like trying to push back a wave at the beach with a fire hose.
Two and three story buildings hemmed in this part of the settlement, turning it into a death canyon—but clustering the shades for easier picking. Globs peeled off to ooze in the direction of the bridge and the shuttle. Hopefully Cullin could handle those. They hadn’t had many handhelds to distribute, and the survivors they’d armed had disappeared.
Adam had no idea where they’d gone. For all he knew they could be dead.
Without ceasing fire or looking at him, Claire issued her commands. “If you can get to that side street, you can get to the hospital tent. My sensor says it’s partly clear.”
The street in question, speckled with shades, looked like a dubious outlet at best. Still—he’d do it. “Have the shuttle fly to the tent. Meet me there.”
“Can’t move the ship. It’s already too full for optimal maneuverability.” She shook out her arms, lasers ceasing. On either side of the bands, they’d left reddened, angry marks on her dark skin. Damn. His handheld had grown hot, but not that hot. “We need to save the power for when we lift off with so many people on board.”
“Are those blisters?” he asked, stepping closer so she could hear him.
She frowned at her arms. “Fuck. I didn’t realize it had gotten that bad.” She shot more shades anyway, grimacing.
He reached for her. “Should you—”
“Get over it? Yeah. I’ll heal.” She didn’t seem to notice that he’d placed his hand on her shoulder. Her armor was body temp, a flexible mesh. “You ready to run? You don’t have to, but if you’re willing…”
He had the strangest urge to kiss her. Again. Say something about a sweet memory to chase away the bitter. But he stopped himself. “I’m willing.”
“Right.” They made eye contact. His heart flopped. The noises and smells, the cold, everything around them dimmed as he stared into her dark brown eyes and she stared back. “Adam, you’re doing good work here. I never thought… No. That’s all I have to say. I’m glad you decided to help. Keep it up.”
“It’s the least I can do.” He got the feeling it wasn’t all she had to say, but their time was limited. “How many survivors are in the tent?”
She seemed to come back to herself. “Don’t know, don’t care. We can’t leave people to die.” She shrugged off his hand, but he couldn’t tell if it was on purpose or because she’d swiveled to shoot more shades. “Ship’s sending another shuttle, but it may not reach us in time.”
“Where are the two soldiers from our shuttle?”