Predator - Incursion

by Tim Lebbon

  “I want to go home,” Lieder said. No one laughed. Everyone agreed.

  “Let’s get outta here,” Cotronis said, and Mains did not object. He remained in the room while the others filed back out, trying to imagine the absent Yautja owner sitting or standing here looking at the same view. What would it think?

  He didn’t want to know.

  Day Sixteen

  “Faulkner, Lieder, covering fire!” Mains bellowed, cursing their luck, cursing the Yautja and their position and his inability to protect these people who depended on him. Especially Lieder. Whatever the two of them had was as close to love as he had ever felt.

  “L-T, this way!” Snowdon said. She had automatically taken point, one arm around Cotronis’s waist as she dragged the ailing Corporal along with her, the other leveling her com-rifle at the shadows as they ran toward the shadows that might be hiding anything.

  Mains followed, grabbing Cotronis from the other side and helping Snowdon. The Corporal was out of it. Her head bobbed, and accessing her life signs on his suit’s master terminal, he saw that her heartbeat was slow, blood pressure low. Her body was shutting down. It had been her screams that had brought this Yautja down upon them.

  Yet they would leave no one behind.

  “First live one we’ve seen in sixteen days,” Snowdon said.

  “Yeah, and it’s really pissed off,” Lieder added, her voice accompanied by the hiss and roar of their weapons. Ammo was running dangerously low, and they had already agreed that they’d use only laser bursts unless a target was a sure and certain hit. Charge packs in all of their weapons were still at decent levels, but nano-munitions and plasma pods were in dwindling supply.

  They were heading across a wide area close to the habitat’s surface, the ceiling low and glimmering with countless crystals forming part of the structure. They’d tried to avoid the exposure of the surface, or the habitat’s cavernous interior, instead finding caves and fissures to hide in and bide their time. Bad luck had brought a Yautja their way.

  Lieder and Snowdon were a hundred yards behind them, covering their retreat until they could find a suitable place for a stand. The Yautja was using blaster and laser, eschewing its more traditional weaponry to get closer to its prey. It also wasn’t cloaking, which Mains found strange.

  Perhaps it was injured. Since finding that group of dead Yautja three days before, they’d realized that there was a whole new factor to their being here.

  They just didn’t know what it was.

  Mains believed it must have been an internal struggle. Perhaps a civil war. Whatever the reasons, it was bad news for them—and likely worse for the places where the departing ships had been heading.

  “Another one!” Faulkner said. “Lieder, sweep left!”

  “I see it.”

  Mains watched the confrontation, trying not to let it distract from where he was.

  “And another,” Lieder said.

  “Okay, pull back to us,” he said. “Three against two is uneven, pull back, reform on me.”

  “L-T?” Snowdon said. There was nowhere close by to make a stand, and she knew that, but there was no way Mains was leaving Lieder and Faulkner to their fate. If they were going down, they were going down together.

  “Johnny…” Cotronis said.

  “There, twenty yards,” he said, nodding toward an uneven mound in the floor. A lot of the structure resembled a sandy rock of some kind, though they knew it was all artificial. Much of the habitat seemed to have been thrown together, rather than built, formed simply for its mass and space rather than to house a large number of inhabitants. It was as if the Yautja had attempted to build a planet, rather than a ship.

  “It’s not big enough,” Snowdon said.

  “It’ll have to do.” Lieder and Faulkner were falling back, alternating in ten-yard sprints before swapping and putting down covering fire. Mains heard the multiple detonations of a micro-dot spray, and a loud squealing filled their ears.

  “Down?” Faulkner said, breathless.

  “Just more pissed off,” Lieder said.

  Mains looked back the way he’d come and saw the two VoidLarks emerge from the shadows, explosions and the blood-red slashes of targeting laser following on behind.

  “Johnny,” Cotronis said. “Johnny, I’m going to…” Her voice faded, then came in again. At first he thought it was his suit’s fault, but then he looked sidelong at his Corporal. She was pale, wan, dying. He could see that in her eyes, and when she spoke again he heard it in her voice, too.

  “Johnny, give me the defender and a few plasma grenades.”

  “You’re too weak to carry it,” Snowdon said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Cotronis said.

  Mains shook his head.

  “Three of them, L-T!” Cotronis shouted, and even that effort caused her to slump between Mains and Snowdon. She was done for. She’d been finished the moment she entered the Ochse’s damaged engine room, and it was only down to time. They’d all known that, but none of them had voiced it. Until now.

  “I’m dying, soon, so I want to die well.”

  “L-T…” Lieder said in his ear, and Mains glanced behind him. Lieder was running toward them through the dark chamber, Faulkner kneeling behind her and unleashing a shattering firestorm of micro-dot charges to cover her retreat. A hundred degrees of his field of view erupted into ten thousand small blasts, and in that glare he saw two of the three advancing Yautja. They protected their faces with their arms, but kept running. They would always keep running, and keep fighting.

  “I don’t want to just fade away hanging between the two of you,” Cotronis said. “Please, Johnny.”

  “Snowdon,” Mains said. She only hesitated for a second before handing the heavy defender to Cotronis. Free of their grasp, the Corporal stood upright, shaking as she took the big gun and held it in both hands.

  Mains handed her his two plasma grenades, and Snowdon gave her two more.

  “Go,” Cotronis said. “All of you. I promise I’ll die in a fucking blaze of glory, but I don’t want any of you seeing.”

  More explosions from behind them, and then Lieder was with them. Panting hard, she moved awkwardly where her suit had hardened to protect a wound and patch a split in its skin. Snowdon knelt and fired behind them, covering Faulkner’s final retreat.

  “One down,” Lieder said. “But the other two are—”

  “Heads up!” Faulkner said. He spun and crouched, and Mains did the same, but then Cotronis stepped into their fields of fire, the defender hissing and cracking in her arms as she unloaded a full shot. The smoking, blazing air behind them blurred, and from somewhere unseen a Yautja roared in pain and rage.

  “Next life, Sarah,” Mains said.

  He and his remaining VoidLarks ran.

  Breathing hard, saying nothing, all keeping one eye on their readouts in case a Yautja appeared from elsewhere, they barely slowed. Then the first plasma grenade thumped behind them, casting their quivering silhouettes ahead toward safety.

  Moments later a much larger blast knocked them from their feet as Cotronis detonated the last three grenades and the defender’s charge magazine.

  Struggling to their feet, they still didn’t speak as they searched for somewhere new to hide.

  * * *

  Lieder almost died.

  The wound she’d received was brutal, and it was only the rush of adrenalin and her suit’s emergency repair that saved her life. After Cotronis’s death the four of them had found somewhere to hide, and Lieder had started to bleed out.

  Mains sat beside her for a while, holding her hand. He couldn’t bear living the rest of his life without her, however short that life looked destined to be, but he was in charge. He had to lead. He would not mourn a strong woman who was not yet dead.

  Administering any sort of medical aid in such an inhospitable atmosphere was extremely difficult. They couldn’t remove her suit, and neither could they access her injury through the suit’s hardened sections. Th
e wound was in her upper right chest, an ugly shrapnel hole that had punctured her lung and shattered two ribs. The suit gave her painkillers and applied pressure, but Mains and the others had to watch helplessly as they waited to see if Lieder would die.

  She was unconscious for days, blood loss weakening her systems. The suit continued to give her low doses of anesthetic. Awake, moving around, agitated, she would only open her wound again. The suit froze her leaked blood, stored it, and gave her a transfusion when she started bleeding some more. It cleaned and conditioned the blood in the process, and it was that more than anything that probably saved her life.

  Mains, Faulkner, and Snowdon took stock and tried to formulate a plan. Already a mysterious place, this habitat was affected by something they could not understand. Even for the sparse population, there wasn’t enough activity. Though the massive explosions they’d felt during their first couple of days there had ended, the slaughtered Yautja they’d found showed that all was not well.

  They had to get a ship and escape, as soon as possible.

  * * *

  At last Lieder was well enough to move again. Though still weak, she had pulled through with her usual good cheer. The suit stopped administering drugs on day twenty-two. She walked on day twenty-four, and spent day twenty-five swapping harsh banter with the others.

  Day Twenty-Six

  “We don’t know what we’ll find up there,” Snowdon said again.

  “If we find more dead Yautja, we move forward,” Mains said. “If there’s a ship docked and we can get to it, we let nothing stop us.”

  “And we stick together,” Faulkner said.

  “Right,” Lieder said. “You can’t do without me.”

  They chose the docking arm they would target, then sent a shoulder drone ahead. After several hours they moved out of the hiding place and made their way back to the habitat’s outer surface. It seemed safe and deserted and it remained so as they moved forward.

  As they emerged onto the surface, space pressed down on Mains once again. This time the intimidating vastness also gave him a sense of freedom, and the idea that anything was possible. He remembered something his brother once said to him.

  If the universe is infinite, or if there are infinite universes, then somewhere there’s a tree that people grow on.

  He took a long breath and sighed deeply.

  “Yeah,” Lieder said. “We’ll be out there again soon.”

  The docking arm they’d chosen loomed ahead of them. It took half an hour of cautious advancing to reach it, then another half an hour to send in two more drones to scout the way. No sign of movement, or life. No sign of death, either. In this dock there were no bodies.

  They entered and started climbing. Several hover platforms stood waiting in their wells, but they didn’t have time to figure out how to use them. Mains was also worried that their operation might attract attention. Silent and cautious was best, so they climbed hundreds of stairs built for Yautja, too deep for their own legs, and soon they were gasping for breath.

  Exhausted, reaching the ship they’d selected, Mains once again sent in his shoulder drone. It was weakening, charge failing, and his suit indicated that it didn’t have the power for a recharge. It didn’t matter. They’d be away from here soon, this place he’d started to think of as a ghost ship. There might still be Yautja here, somewhere—Cotronis’s end proved that—but it felt silent, deserted, and dead.

  They entered the alien ship, and once inside, Lieder went to work. It took only ten minutes for her to pronounce that she could not fly the vessel.

  “Bullshit,” Faulkner said. His voice was edged with fear.

  “I haven’t got a clue,” Lieder said. “You see one single thing here that resembles anything on the Ochse?”

  The four of them walked around the sphere-shaped room, climbing low steps set into the walls.

  “I don’t even know if this is the flight deck or the engine room,” Lieder persisted.

  “Snowdon?” Mains asked, but he already knew the answer, even as she shrugged.

  “Our suit systems?” Faulkner asked.

  “They’re great with systems they know,” Lieder said, “but I’d wager this ship’s heavily personalized toward whoever owns it. Wouldn’t surprise me if it was linked on a genetic level, and if that’s the case, even if I did understand some of what we see here, I wouldn’t be able to operate it.”

  “Shit,” Faulkner breathed.

  “There’s more,” Lieder said. “This far away from the core of the habitat, I’ve been able to analyze its spin and attitude. My combat suit’s computer doesn’t have all the data I need, but I think it’s enough to say with confidence… we’re fucked.”

  “Oh, you think?” Faulkner said.

  “On so many more levels than you think,” Lieder said. “Johnny, we’re on a decaying orbit headed into the nearby sun.”

  “Great,” Mains said. “Well, we wouldn’t want things to be easy, would we? How long?”

  “It’s only an estimate, but I’d guess twenty days until the habitat starts to burn up. Of course, it might be pulled apart by the sun’s gravity before then.”

  “Of course,” Faulkner said. “Anything else? We out of coffee?”

  “Just one more reason to find a way off this shithole,” Mains said. “We go up to another ship. There are three more on this dock.”

  “Much higher up,” Snowdon observed.

  “We need the exercise.” No one smiled. None of them could.

  * * *

  When by the end of the day they’d visited the other three ships, and found them all just as silent and mysterious as the first, Mains thought he might never smile again.

  As they began their descent, following a wide, steep staircase, Snowdon trailed behind, and moments later she called a halt.

  “L-T, take a look at this!” Mains hurried back up and across a gallery area, to where Snowdon was standing in front of an opening in the tower wall. With no atmosphere, there was no glass or other enclosure across the opening, and it was a long way down to the habitat’s surface.

  Snowdon wasn’t looking that way.

  “What the hell?” Mains said.

  “Another ship.”

  From this high up they could see to the far end of the habitat, perhaps two miles away. Since crash landing they had remained around this central portion, fighting as they had to, hiding when they could. The docking tower was the most centrally located structure along the whole of UMF 12. This was the first time they had seen so far, and Mains cursed himself for not exploring the rest of the chamber.

  “It’s not Yautja,” Snowdon said.

  The ship was held stationary, just above the far end. If there were moorings, they were invisible from this distance.

  “You’re sure?” Faulkner asked.

  “Pretty sure. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

  Even looking at it gave Mains a strange feeling. It was like looking at something that shouldn’t be. It seemed grown, rather than built, its smooth lines chaotic, its mass and structure uneven. It was a faint red, almost pink, and that also gave it a biological appearance.

  “Those explosions,” Lieder said. “Maybe they weren’t to do with the Ochse after all.”

  “We’ve been thinking some sort of internal feud,” Mains said. “But this… maybe this is something else.”

  Day Twenty-Eight

  There was something on the habitat that was killing Yautja, and it wasn’t them.

  The two bodies were torn apart, scattered across the wide corridor, blood dried a crispy, deep green. They’d been dead for a long time. Blast holes scarred the walls and ceiling, and other signs of combat indicated that it had been quite a fight. One Yautja head had rolled against a sloping wall, and its jaws hung open to display shattered tusks bared in a last defiant roar.

  “I’m not feeling the love for this place,” Lieder said.

  “Keep it quiet,” Mains said. “Move in pairs, never more than fifty
yards apart. We’re almost there.”

  After seeing the alien ship docked at the far end of the habitat, they’d descended from the tower and prepared to move. Mains’s and Snowdon’s suits were showing signs of running down, and Lieder’s controls had developed various troubling glitches since her injury. Combining assets and cross-charging had solved the worst of their problems, but there was no escaping the fact that they were running out of ammunition. Chemical supplies were also low—vital for the suits to provide oxygen, water, and artificial dietary supplements, but the Excursionists were more concerned about their ability to fight.

  They moved past the dead Yautja. Sending Lieder’s shoulder drone ahead revealed signs of several massive blasts within the habitat, at this end of the open area. Residual radiation suggested that they might have been caused by exploding ships.

  “They suicide if faced with overwhelming odds,” Snowdon suggested.

  “So where are the overwhelming odds?” Mains said. “And why did we see a load of their ships fleeing the habitat?”

  “They don’t run away from a fight,” Snowdon said. “Fighting’s what they live for. That’d be like Faulkner running away from alcohol.”

  “Funny,” Faulkner said.

  “Maybe they were retreating, regrouping,” Lieder said. “Left a small force behind to harry the enemy, destroy their own ships if the time was right.”

  “Maybe,” Snowdon said, sounding doubtful. “But we’ve seen no evidence that they act in concert. Even in a big fight, they’re on their own. They’re just not like us.”

  “That still begs one question,” Mains said. “What enemy were they harrying?”

  “Let’s not hang around to find out, eh?” Faulkner said.

  As they moved forward in pairs, Mains mused on this. It was their job to find out what was going on here. Trapped for four weeks, reduced from eight to four, still they had a duty to perform. They were Excursionists, trained and willing to spend long years of their lives patrolling the furthest extremes of humanity’s reach into the galaxy, looking out for such dangers as this. Running would be a dereliction of duty. Escape and survival was essential, but only for one reason—to deliver a message about what was happening here.