Live Echoes

by Henry V. O'Neil

  “Yes, ma’am. You can count on me.”

  “It is imperative that we determine if the shapeshifters are here. You’ll be provided with the data gleaned from the scan of the original alien at Glory Main, as well as the scan of the moth-like particles it burst into just before being incinerated. We also have scans of the most recent shapeshifter, provided by the commander of the Ajax while orbiting Roanum. The creature gave us the slip most of the times it walked back into the desert, but on two occasions it burst into the same particles as were observed on Glory Main. It’s possible that those moth-like things are its natural state.”

  “That’s highly intriguing.”

  “If this planet is what we think it is, I would love to vaporize it from a distance.” Reena stepped up to the glowing wall, and touched it with her fingertips. “Unfortunately, that would still leave us with a vast region of space controlled by Sims who believe they’re fighting us for their very survival.

  “To convince them that they won’t be receiving any more convoys of new Sims, and that their creation story was a lie, I’ll need detailed evidence. Hopefully we’ll be able to get microbots inside this planet and gain the footage of what’s going on in there, but we have to be prepared for any eventuality. That includes an all-out ground assault that may even go subterranean.”

  “But it’s not a Hab, Madame Chairwoman.”

  “Correct. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, but we have to be ready to use troops in pressurized suits. If necessary, I’m going to hit that place with every Banshee and special operator we have.”

  Chapter 5

  Looking out the shuttle’s open rear hatch at the brown water just below, Ayliss was no longer enjoying her Banshee fighting suit. Despite having gone through this mission numerous times in the ship’s simulators, she was having trouble believing her armor wasn’t going to pull her down into Stygian depths where she would quickly drown. The suits were designed to handle missions just like this one, and the waterway was under a mile deep, but the sight of the enormous lake filled her with dread.

  She tried to concentrate on Tin, who stood closest to the opening and swayed in an abiding fashion with the lurching shuttle. The square shoulders of her suit faced the waiting ramp, which jutted out and down at a forty-five-degree angle. Ayliss was behind her, one hand grasping the red canvas webbing that hugged the shuttle’s bulkhead. Normally at ease inside the Banshee rig, at the moment she was struggling just to stay on her feet. Her leg muscles were already tiring from the unnecessary strain, but the nearness of their entry into the forbidding liquid made it almost impossible for Ayliss to relax. Seeking a distraction, she turned her head inside her helmet until the rear cameras engaged, showing the looming figure of Dellmore. Like Tin, the seasoned Banshee stood with arms lowered, knees bent, armored hips rocking back and forth.

  Somewhere in the back of the squad was Cusabrina, but Ayliss was no longer paired with the reinstated corporal. Bullhead and Lightfoot had both been assigned to five days of sentinel duty outside the ship’s bridge, and so Plodder was now partnered with Zuteck, and Ayliss, to her dismay, was working with Dellmore.

  “Stop looking at me, rookie,” Dell growled. “I know I’m pretty, but you need to concentrate on your job.”

  The canted armor of Dellmore’s helmet hid her features completely, and the comment would have been funny if it came from anyone else. Shifting her view back to the ramp, Ayliss discovered that focusing on the mission wasn’t a bad idea. In her mind she saw Captain Breverton giving the briefing, and trying to recall specific details helped to distract her. Breverton was short, with red hair cut so close to her scalp that her head appeared to be rusting, and she’d radiated both competence and confidence.

  “Sam’s been getting bolder, now that he knows we’re short-handed out here. On UC-2147 he set up three phony settlements, complete with actual spacedromes, in terrain that left only a few spots for cofferdam deployment.” The Banshees seldom used the cofferdams, which were enormous energy tunnels generated by ships in orbit that cut through a planet’s atmosphere all the way to the ground. “The Sims ambushed the touchdown sites, forcing the deployment of an entire division to fight what was later determined to be two brigades.”

  That detail triggered a memory. Jander and the Orphans had participated in the assault on UC-2147. His platoon had survived the initial chaos, only to be attacked by hundreds of wolf-like creatures late the first night. Jan had almost been killed by one of them, and Ayliss had dreamed of the event during a Step voyage soon afterward. She shuddered at the image of a large dog attacking a very young Jan, biting him in the same leg which the wolf on UC-2147 had almost ripped clean off.

  “So we’re going to make sure Sam is home this time. Our company will be inserted by stealth in multiple locations, moving to jump-off points where our separate teams will wait while cofferdams are generated in the vicinity of the Sim emplacements. The cofferdams will be real, but the vehicles and troop rings descending inside them will be electronically generated decoys.

  “If Sam moves toward the touchdown points in force, we’ll know this is a genuine colony. In that case, you will strike your assigned targets in an effort to blind the enemy and take pressure off the cofferdams.” As part of that effort, Tin’s squad had been ordered to destroy several concealed antennae on top of a winding ridge not far from the lake. “If the enemy doesn’t respond to the cofferdam generation, Force troops will be inserted by shuttle to check the ground around the touchdown sites. Once that ground has been cleared, the main body will come down.

  “Regardless of what happens, you will destroy your assigned targets when ordered to do so. After that, you will support the attack as it develops—which means be ready for anything.” Breverton had grinned in anticipation. “Banshee suits are the perfect combination of optics, communications, and weaponry. We bring speed, armor, and firepower right where it’s needed. I expect you ladies to make the most of that.”

  The memory of the skipper’s enthusiasm had reduced Ayliss’s anxiety a notch when a glowing number appeared in her face shield display. She gasped, even though the countdown had been part of every simulation.

  “Ten seconds,” Tin called. “Relax your bodies, but clench your teeth until you hit. Here we go.”

  The words had clearly been for the rookies, but Ayliss had no time to consider them before Tin was shuffling forward, toward the ramp and the miles of water below. Not believing her own motion, she released her handhold and followed the squad leader. When Tin reached the angled ramp, she jogged down its length and disappeared.

  Heart racing, shrinking backward inside the suit while her legs took her forward, Ayliss started down the incline with shorter and shorter steps.

  “Pick it up, rook!” Dell shouted behind her, but then the shuttle bounced. A giddy flutter rose in Ayliss’s stomach as her right leg came up off the deck and she started overbalancing to the left. Terrified by the notion of falling over with Dellmore watching, she raised the right leg high and slammed it down hard. Overbalancing to the right this time, she gave off a desperate peep and ran off the end of the plates.

  Gravity seized the suit like a chain around her ankles with an anchor at the end. Coming to the position of attention as she fell, legs together and arms tight against her sides, Ayliss shot downward like a brick-shaped arrow. Her eyes saw the bright sky and the endless blanket of brown water and she was falling, accelerating, bracing, and yet the water wasn’t there, where was the water why wasn’t she hitting yet?

  The heavy boots absorbed the jolt of the impact, and momentum sent her driving straight through the murk. The lake water near the surface was a chocolate brown, but mere seconds of racing descent took her down into blackness. Her mind screamed that this was exactly what the simulator had shown, and all the readings said she was upright and almost at the bottom, but the blackness enfolded her and she wasn’t slowing down and she couldn’t see and she was encased in a huge armored box in a giant lake and she was just a
bout to scream when she hit.

  The training modules hadn’t prepared her for the force of the landing, so one instant she was upright and the next she was on all fours. Despite the darkness, she saw a plume of silt blossom all around her and realized that a large boulder was inches from her face. Cold air blew all around her body, the suit’s systems programmed to cool her at that moment so that runnels of perspiration wouldn’t be mistaken for a leak. The frigid air was almost as delightful as the readout saying she had full suit integrity, and Ayliss unclenched her aching jaw. Relief arced through her muscles, and she reached out to pat the stone before standing up.

  “Now that was something.” Legacy’s voice, awe-filled yet calm, came to her ears.

  Standing still, letting her heart settle down, Ayliss watched as the optics adjusted to the depth. Her suit could see through heavy smoke and even certain vegetation, but she’d been warned that the lake’s water would thwart much of that. The featureless void gradually resolved into a light brown, allowing her to see several other rocks and the gently waving tendrils of tall aquatic weeds.

  “I see we all made it,” Tin said. “That’s a good start.”

  The comment set Ayliss’s tongue in motion, calling up the display indicating the positions of the entire squad. They appeared as circles of light forming a ragged line with Tin at one end and Cusabrina at the other. Turning in place, Ayliss saw the azimuth that would take them to shore appear before her eyes. The simple functioning of her suit calmed her even more, and she looked around in amazed freedom. All her fears, all her worrying, and yet everything had turned out just as she’d been promised.

  “Move out.” Tin ordered, and the row of individual submarines started walking across the lake’s trackless bottom.

  The squad was weaving its way through a grove of kelp-like pillars when it regained communication. Just as the water had prevented them from seeing properly, it had also imposed a form of radio silence that would only be alleviated by shallower depths. The aquatic vegetation swayed around them with the eddying current, but their attention quickly went elsewhere. Tight voices pushed through the water to them.

  “—kicked over an anthill!”

  “Fire control, I have enemy troops in the open! Request—”

  “Mark positions! Show us who’s who!”

  Flashes of satellite imagery flickered across Ayliss’s face display, overhead shots of the ridge just beyond the lake. It was covered with a forest so dense as to be almost jungle, but the ground on the other side of the escarpment wasn’t as thick. Settling into scattered trees surrounded by tall grass, it eventually opened up into clearings large enough for the cofferdams. The troop-delivery energy beams had flattened the undergrowth in several spots, but she ignored them because they were supposed to be decoys.

  Heavy smoke rose from the green blanket on top of the ridge, and she caught brief glimpses of explosive light as rockets impacted under the canopy. The feed cut out just as she saw hundreds of moving dots heading for the cofferdam landing zones.

  “Push through this shit, and get into the woods!” Tin hollered. “If one of those rockets lands in the water, we’re gonna get pureed!”

  A hulking shadow appeared several yards to her right, Dellmore swinging her arms and pumping her legs. The grass pillars jerked and twitched and then rose back up to the surface, so Ayliss didn’t reach for them. With her arms swinging tight at her sides, she fought the brown wall that pressed in on all points of her suit.

  Another flash of imagery, this one obscured by heavy smoke clouds that were being pulled across the battlefield by the wind. Missiles detonating all around the cofferdams now, amid a cacophony of frenzied voices.

  “There’s thousands of ’em! Send the reinforcements! Send the reinforcements!”

  “Contact right! Hit ’em! Hit ’em! Hit ’em!”

  “Get down! Rockets inbound!”

  A concussion wave rippled the surface over their heads, oscillating wrinkles stuttering away from them in frightened rows. Ayliss felt something grab her from behind, arresting her desperate motion, and swatted over her shoulder as much as the suit allowed. She came up with several twisted tendrils of vegetation, and tried to shove them away while pistoning her legs. The grasses refused to release her, and she twisted around to see they were hung up where her Fasces was stuck on her back.

  Seizing the shoots with armored hands, she shredded them in fury before drawing the weapon and pushing forward again. She was only a few yards from the shore, but now the lakebed was covered with the rotting logs of long-ago-fallen trees. The decayed torsos collapsed under her weight, and she longed for the surface as if drowning.

  A sheet of flame passed over, yellow and orange, and then she was sinking into the pulpy debris and starting to go over sideways.

  “Fuck this!” she shouted, using the rifle to right herself before squatting down and kicking off as hard as she could.

  The suit’s titanic power blasted her right through the surface and into the air. The bright sunshine blanked out her vision for a long heartbeat as her optics adjusted, and then she could see the towering slopes covered with green, the gray fog that steamed up out of the foliage at different points, and Dellmore’s back as she disappeared into the woods.

  The water had impeded her leap, and so Ayliss landed knee-deep from shore. Something exploded behind her, slapping the suit and sending her lurching forward while a torrent of brown water doused her. Running after Dellmore, she tongued the display to show the rest of the squad.

  They were all there, scattered across five hundred yards at the base of the ridge, and she was pounding up the slope to catch up with Dell when Tin spoke. The squad leader had cut off the communications feed from any ground element that wasn’t Banshee, and so her commands came through as if the squad was on the planet alone.

  “Hold your positions. Pair up and watch each other’s backs. The rockets have already blasted the antennae.” Booming explosions sounded from the top of the ridge, as if in agreement.

  Ayliss located Dellmore on the display, and was at her side moments later. The veteran Banshee knelt behind a wide tree wrapped with vines, facing uphill.

  “Get away from me, Mortas!” The arm of Dell’s suit came up, pointing. “Get over there and face the lake. You don’t have to be up my ass to watch my back.”

  Red-faced inside the helmet, Ayliss obeyed. Slipping between two trees, she knelt and studied the forest she’d just crossed. The wall of green and brown blocked her view of the water only fifty yards away, so she called up an overhead shot in one corner of her face shield. Drone gunships had joined the fight, and their cameras added definition to the composite imagery.

  “Okay, here’s what’s happening.” Captain Breverton spoke calmly. “Somebody on high jumped the gun. Instead of recon coming down in shuttles to check out the ground around the cofferdams, they inserted entire battalions.”

  “Jump the gun?” Ayliss recognized Legacy’s puzzled tone on the squad’s internal band. “Wouldn’t it take hours to do that?”

  “Pipe down,” Cusabrina growled. Then, as if reconsidering, “And yes. They were supposed to wait.”

  Studying the fight on the far side of the towering ridge, Ayliss focused on the knobs of high ground that had been identified as likely sites for Sim heavy weapons. The Force units inserted by shuttle had formed defensive rings on the small hills, but judging from the volume of rocket and gunship fire, they were surrounded by large numbers of assaulting enemy.

  “Our people on the ground are taking a beating, and support fires are limited by proximity to Sam.” Ayliss remembered the veterans talking about the Sims’ favorite way of defeating the humans’ advantage in orbital and aerial firepower. Running straight at a Force unit until they were so close, or actually intermingled, that rockets or gunships were as much a threat to the humans as to the Sims. “Command won’t send troops down the cofferdams until this is decided.”

  “Prepare to move.” Tin grunted, making Ayli
ss wonder what Breverton had said that suggested they were about to displace.

  “I’ll feed you your boundary lines as we go.” Breverton’s words were mixed with heavy breathing, telling Ayliss that the company commander was already in motion. “Up and over the ridge, ladies. Sam’s focused on those small hills. We’re gonna kick him right in the ass.”

  Running up the slope, Ayliss felt a familiar sensation blossom inside her. Dellmore was ten yards ahead, the Fasces clutched across her chest so she could bull through the undergrowth. She’d ordered Ayliss to follow in her footsteps, breaking trail for the newer Banshee in order to cover the ground faster. Despite the thunder from the nearby battlefield, Ayliss quickly settled into a rhythm that allowed her to slide along through the corridor cleared by Dellmore.

  The booms and blasts grew louder as they ascended, calling, promising. The enemy was there, armed, attacking, and the vibrations of the explosions sang through the fibers of her muscles as she moved. She hugged the Fasces, feeling the rush of joy and expectation, and so was almost completely unprepared when they ran into the Sims just short of the blasted summit.

  The rockets had felled many of the trees, and one moment Ayliss was watching Dellmore hop over a shattered trunk and the next she was twisting to identify the flurry of movement from the corner of her eye.

  “Dell! Sims!” she yelled, just as the devastated vegetation came to life. Startled eyes turned in her direction, so many, so human, but they wore the flanged helmets and camouflaged smocks of the Sim infantry. Crouching or kneeling in a tight cluster, their reactions showed they were even more surprised than Ayliss. Diving, turning, raising weapons, they were a blur as she turned the rifle and then she was firing.

  Two of them went flying, struck by the heavy rounds, and then she saw the muzzle flashes as at least a dozen of them shot her. Ayliss shrieked in alarm, feeling the impact as the bullets slammed home, forgetting that she was safely encased in armor until the slugs ricocheted away. The momentary terror was replaced with a flood of joy mixed with anger, so she planted her boots and started shooting again. Several camouflaged smocks were already fleeing through the brush, but more of them were hopping and rolling uphill and down, still shooting at her, and she concentrated on killing them.