Message for the Dead

by Jason Anspach

Leenah ran her fingers through his hair. “That might be fun, yeah.”

  The room’s comm chimed, accompanied by a blue overhead flash that pierced the dimness and draped Keel and Leenah in shadowy relief.

  “Leenah?” Garret’s voice sounded timid over the comm.

  “What is it, Garret?”

  Keel rolled his eyes. Why couldn’t he get a moment alone with this girl? “Tell Major Owens that I’m not home.”

  “No… uh, it wasn’t him. I, uh, was curious and listened to the message and…”

  Garret sounded worried.

  “Well is it Lao Pak?” asked Keel. “Because if it is…”

  “It’s from Captain Chhun. Your friend?” said Garret, as though he needed to remind Keel of his relationship with the legionnaire.

  “I know who he is, kid.” Keel rolled his neck. “Look, I feel awful. Tell him I’ll call him back.”

  “No… it’s pre-recorded. He’s in trouble. It sounds bad. Really bad. I think the Cybar have invaded the galaxy.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Keel flung himself up and out of the bed, his entire body screaming in protest. The lights in the room came on full, and Keel squinted against the sudden brightness as he moved for the door. He stopped to look down at himself, mumbling, “I should put on pants.”

  He turned and found Leenah already holding up his trousers in one hand and a loose, open-collar shirt in the other. It was clear from her face that she wasn’t thrilled about going down this road again.

  When he was somewhat more presentable, Keel limped out of his room and into the Six’s main lounge. Exo and Bombassa were having drinks with Skrizz, chatting idly.

  “Didn’t think you’d be up so soon, killer,” Exo said.

  “Chhun’s in trouble,” Keel answered, limping past them to join Garret in the cockpit.

  Exo followed, and soon everyone but Prisma was crowding to hear the recorded message.

  “… so anyway,” Chhun concluded on the recording, “if you’re hearing this in time, we’re in it deep.”

  “Dude,” Exo said. “We gotta help him.”

  Keel nodded. He wasn’t… surprised by this reaction from Exo, but neither had he expected it. “How long ago was that message transmitted?”

  “Twenty minutes,” Garret said. “I called you as soon as we received it.”

  “We can reach the planet in question in three hours,” Ravi stated. “If… such is your decision.”

  “Do it, man,” Exo urged. “Gotta do it.”

  Bombassa nodded.

  There was never any doubt in Keel’s mind. “Send him a text message back. Have him turn on his emergency transponder in three hours so we can find him when we arrive.”

  “Done,” said Garret.

  “Okay, Ravi. Let’s go.”

  ***

  If it weren’t for his bucket telling him the location of Kill Team Outlaw, Chhun would have walked right through the landing zone without seeing a single one of them. Knowing that every gun in the unit would be trained on him, he moved carefully, showing himself from behind the cover of a small copse of woods only after announcing, “Hey, it’s me. Time to get moving. We’re too close to the city.”

  The kill team emerged from hidden positions behind shrubs, rocks, and other natural terrain. Their prisoner from the House of Reason was still with them, shivering against the morning’s cold. It was paradise, but the sun was hiding its face behind the clouds.

  “Yeah, and we gotta get into the wilds quietly.” Bear pointed to Delegate Arushi. “That’s gonna be tough with the screamer underneath the hood, so we gotta think of something.” The big legionnaire motioned for some of his men to take a knee and keep an eye on perimeter security while they talked.

  The landing zone was on top of a bluff overlooking the sea. Strong ocean winds whipped against them, causing the delegate’s gown to fly wildly. The trails leading up from the marina to this spot were well maintained, and hadn’t been all that difficult to climb. It would be a different story if they pushed further into the conserved wilds of the planet.

  “She’s a liability,” said SPC Brown. “I say we dust her and get going.”

  “Yeah,” agreed another of the Dark Ops leejes. “I’m with Brownie. Offing this House of Reason feenk would be doin’ the galaxy a favor.”

  Masters shook his head. He stood next to the prisoner and was trying to shield her from the wind with his own body. He held her in place, gently gripping her arm. “Dude. No way. We can’t just dust her like that. I say we let her go. Let her regroup with her family… while she still can.”

  “Death sentence either way,” said Bear.

  Chhun backed Masters up. “We’re not killing a prisoner. Either we take her with us to our extraction point, or we let her go. Bear, you’re TL. Choice is yours.”

  Bear sniffed like he had a runny nose. “Brownie, let her hands loose. By the time she realizes we’re not going to kill her and pulls away her hood, we’ll be gone like Asha Pawng. Any problems with that?”

  If any of the other leejes disagreed, they kept their mouths shut.

  SPC Brown moved to take the prisoner from Masters. “I got her.”

  The others moved some distance away while Brown unfastened the delegate’s ener-chains. Her hands immediately sprang out in front of her, and she rubbed her wrists vigorously. Her body language, however, betrayed fear. The isolation hood prevented her from knowing that the legionnaires had decided to let her go.

  “All right,” Bear called out. “Let’s get moving.”

  Chhun tensed. His HUD suddenly filled with hostile combatant warnings, as if a log had been delayed and was now spitting out all its data at once. He turned his head and saw among the hedges and rocks several humanoid-sized bots, painted matte black. These were the bots he’d seen accompanying the large war bots that had overrun Task Force Granite; they moved like men and were armed with blaster rifles.

  Chhun threw out his arm and shouted, “Get down!” as he dropped into the dirt.

  Masters and Bear instinctively followed their former team leader’s orders, far faster than the warning should have allowed. It was almost as if they shared some sort of extra-sensory bond. But the rest of the legionnaires were not so attuned to Chhun, and even that split-second difference in reaction time made all the difference. An intense flurry of blaster fire ripped through the rest of squad as well as the prisoner, leaving holes in armor and negligée alike.

  They were dead before hitting the ground.

  Chhun pulled out an ear-popper and hurled it in the direction of the machines. It boomed and flashed, temporarily causing the display inside his bucket to skip and go dark. Standing up, he shouted, “Over the edge!”

  The three surviving legionnaires ran to the edge of the bluff that overlooked the sea. Masters, the speedster, reached the edge first and leapt off without hesitation.

  Chhun heard Bear’s heavy footsteps running behind him. He paused at the brink, turned, and as he waited for the big legionnaire to arrive, he took out one of the bots with a shot to its head. Bear lumbered by, Chhun slapping him on the back, and the big man jumped over the edge.

  Another bot fell to Chhun’s precise blaster fire. These bots weren’t as resilient as the big war bots he’d watched fight at the city center. But they were recovering from the ear-popper, raising their blaster rifles. As Chhun hurled himself off the bluff, blaster fire sizzled past him.

  The physical rush of free-falling crowded Chhun’s senses as he hurtled toward the water. He knew the landing would suck, even with his armor, but it was better than the alternative. He attempted to orient his body to assume a diving position, but he didn’t quite rotate himself properly. He landed at a slight angle, his shoulder and arm hitting the water first, taking the brunt of the impact, followed by his head and neck. His legs flopped hard and awkwardly, like a whale slapping the surface of the water with its tail.

  The velocity of the long fall thrust him down deep.

  T
he impact with the water had wrenched Chhun’s bucket right off. His ears were filled with the sound of violently moving water, and he felt the shocking cold of the ocean against his face. But he had trained for such events. Calmly holding his breath, he forced open his eyes, ignoring the sting of the saltwater as he looked around for his missing helmet.

  Visibility was almost non-existent. He couldn’t see more than two meters in front of him. For a moment, he felt the urge to give in to panic. The landing had knocked him for a loop, and he wasn’t entirely sure which way was up, down, or sideways. But he was keenly aware that he had a limited amount of oxygen with which to either find his bucket or swim for the surface, where the bots would likely be looking for targets.

  Two powerful lights shone through the dark waters. Masters and Bear emerged from the murk, ultrabeams brilliantly shining. Chhun pointed to his head, as though the sight of him without his helmet might not be obvious to his fellow swimmers. But then, in a serendipitous moment, his bucket drifted down, passing in front of an ultrabeam like an actor before a spotlight.

  Chhun reached out to grab the helmet only to jerk his hand back as a sizzling stream of heat jetted down from the surface. The bots were sending down blaster fire from above. For this sort of energy to be maintained this deep into the water, they had to be expending massive power with each charge. These bolts might not kill, but they were likely strong enough to destroy suit integrity. And that would make staying beneath the waves all but impossible.

  Chhun’s second attempt for the helmet was successful. He gripped it as it drifted by his feet, and quickly pulled it over his head. Once more, he fought back against the urge to panic. With the bucket on and full of water, he felt at once claustrophobic and prone to drowning. Nevertheless, he sealed the helmet to the rest of his suit and waited as it booted up.

  The sophisticated technology recognized that Chhun’s head was submerged. Pumps began siphoning out the liquid, and the water level went down as though someone were sucking it away with a straw. Down past his hairline, eyebrows, eyes, nose, and finally, below his mouth, allowing him to take a deep, salt-tinged breath.

  Masters called over the comm. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” coughed Chhun. “I’m good.”

  His audio sensors detected a distant splash somewhere to his left. The impact was deep and intense, and the first thought coming to Chhun’s mind was that a bot had jumped down to bring the fight to them under water. He turned to see what he could, and was met with the concussion of an underwater explosion. It rocked him like a patch of seaweed in the grips of the surf.

  Similar splashes followed. The bots were dropping some sort of grenades or other explosive device in the hopes of blowing the surviving out of the water.

  “Swim down!” said Masters, already kicking his feet in a race to the bottom.

  The others chased after him.

  “So what’s the plan?” asked Bear as they reached a depth that appeared to keep the explosive depth charges safely above them. “Much as I feel like staying under the waves is our best shot at surviving, we can’t stay under here forever.”

  Chhun had already come up with an answer to this question. “We retrace Task Force Granite’s route into the city. At least get close enough to determine whether or not there are any survivors. Before I left, I sent out an SOS to Wraith.”

  Masters grunted. “I guess if anyone is crazy to come and get us in the middle of a fight where even Intrepid had to bug out, it’s Wraith.”

  “That may be true,” said Chhun. “But if he comes, I don’t think it’ll be because he’s crazy. It’ll be because he’s a legionnaire.”

  ***

  The beach where Task Force Granite had landed was empty and desolate. Faint rays of sunlight peeked through distant clouds, but not enough to fight the gloom of gray on the white sands. Hiding in the surf, the legionnaires let the waves wash over their bodies as they tumbled like driftwood, scanning for threats.

  There was no sign of the machines—or anything else.

  “Looks clear.” Chhun slowly stood and began to creep toward the shore. “Still, follow me at a distance. Keep some spacing in case something’s waiting for us on the other side of those dunes.”

  He moved swiftly across the beach, blaster rifle at the high ready, sweeping for targets. But no threat presented itself. The beach was barren.

  But it wasn’t quiet. The sound of distant blaster fire was emanating from the city, where fires burned and thick black pillars of smoke rose.

  “We’re following,” Bear announced.

  Chhun could see the representative dots of his two friends on his HUD, tracing their steps side by side. He moved up a sand dune and stopped at its crest. The grim spectacle of two dead bodies lay before him, riddled with high-energy blaster fire. These had to be the two civilians Task Force Granite had encountered when first traversing the beach. Numerous heavy gouges disrupted the sand here, like massive footprints. They shuffled between the bodies and the beach grass and other vegetation that served as a buffer between sand and city.

  Bear and Masters joined their commander at the top of the dune, crouching low to help conceal their profile.

  “War bots do this?” Bear asked.

  “Yeah,” Chhun said, hopping down the dune next to the corpses. “I’d like to know who’s controlling these things. My guess is Goth Sullus and his Black Fleet.”

  Bear crouched to inspect the bodies, but quickly relented. They were dead, and had no military value. Just a couple of teenagers. “You’d think we would have seen bots like this on Tarrago if they had ’em.”

  Masters walked past the deceased and made for the rainwater runoff. “Maybe they were on back order.”

  Shaking his head, and with a smile on his face that he’d rather not be there, Chhun followed. Even after all this, Masters had his jokes. It seemed like there was never a time to the legionnaire where a joke wasn’t the tactful response. It was endearing. Often wildly inappropriate, but endearing.

  “Looks clear,” said Masters, peering into the storm drain.

  The three legionnaires passed into the drain through the square-cut opening in the metal grate made hours earlier by their brothers in Task Force Granite. Legionnaires for whom they would now risk their lives, just on the off chance that one might still be alive.

  ***

  The storm drains were empty for the first two hundred meters or so, but it was clear that not all was well. The trickling stream of runoff that flowed beneath their feet and splashed around their boots was tinted a rust-red.

  “Blood?” suggested Bear as they moved forward. “Should we run an analysis?”

  “No,” Chhun answered, not slowing his pace. “If it is, we’ll find out.”

  A right turn at an elbow in the underground tunnels that confirmed Bear’s hypothesis. The tunnel was strewn with dead bodies. Some were planetary militia, a few were legionnaires and marines, but most were ordinary citizens. Young and old. Newborn baby boys and aged grandmothers. They were thoroughly and completely dead.

  “Must’ve tried escaping the attacks through here,” Masters said, stepping over the doomed, sparing them the final indecency of their bodies being trampled.

  “Which means there are probably bots down here looking for survivors,” said Chhun.

  His prognostication was met with an electronic beep from down the tunnel. From around a bend, a red wide-beam laser swept across the tunnel, taking everything in.

  There was no way of knowing if this bot was a simple municipal crawler just doing its job, unaware of or unconcerned with the carnage all around it, or if it was some sort of support machine for the invading war bots. Chhun wasn’t taking a chance. Spotting a side tunnel just ahead, he motioned the others forward.

  As they silently crept toward the side tunnel, they were somewhat shielded from the approaching bot by a pile of bodies that lay stacked like a dam, slowing the flow of water to a trickle. They slipped into the detour and pressed themselves against
the walls just as the bot began to climbed the pile of bodies from the opposite side.

  The machine, which was shaped like an egg with five appendages jutting from its widest point, stopped at the peak of the corpses, ceased scanning, and announced in a helpful, sanitized female voice, “Obstacle detected.” It extended a slim, clear antenna, which flashed a bright green for several seconds. It then lowered the antenna and continued on its way down the main passage.

  “Let’s sit back a bit,” cautioned Chhun. “Make sure nothing else is following that little bot.”

  They waited for a few minutes, then heard a distant rumble coming down the tunnel. An automated dozer of some sort, with a half-circle front plate that perfectly fit the bottom of the tunnel, pushed along, moving or grinding bodies until it reached the “clog.” The yellow machine pushed right through, rolling the corpses aside as easily as if they were a buildup of muck and leaves. This machine was no doubt designed to clear such ordinary debris, and the mess it made of the dead bodies—crushing, stripping, and severing—was something Chhun hoped he’d be able to forget.

  It continued down the tunnel, a yellow light flashing behind it, lighting up the darkness.

  “Dude,” said Masters. “That was messed up.”

  “Municipal bots just doing their jobs,” Bear answered.

  “So were the ones who killed ’em,” said Masters. “Doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

  Chhun had been monitoring their position through the underground relative to the city itself. Kill Team Granite had needed to move much farther to reach the POW camp, but all Chhun’s team needed to do was reach the central square where the Legion’s last stand took place. They were almost there. “Let’s get up top before any more machines come.”

  They continued along the main tunnel, finding the progress much swifter now that it had been cleared by the dozer. A shaft of daylight split the darkness, illuminating floating particles of dust kicked up by the machine’s passing.

  Chhun pointed to the light. Below it, metal rungs built into the tunnel wall led upward. “Let’s try and get topside there.”