by Neil Clarke
“It’s a weapon, and they dumped us here to test it.” Snell’s voice ratchets high. “That fucking smartmine was probably one of ours. We’re expendable, right? So they dumped us here to see if it works.”
Elliot waits for someone to tell Snell to settle the fuck down, but instead Santos and Tolliver and Mirotic are all looking at him, waiting for his response. Tolliver plucks at the bandage around his hand, anxious.
“The colonists stay out of these swamps,” Elliot says. “You said that yourself.” He has a flash of the twins’ twisted bodies, the scuttling monsters. “I figure now we know why.”
“When do we get extracted?” Santos asks flatly. “Sir.”
Elliot knows they are low priority. Maybe five days, maybe six. Maybe more. “They know we’re rationed for a week,” he says.
“A fucking week?” Snell grinds his metal teeth. “Man, we can’t be out here a week with that thing. I’m not ending up like the twins, man. I say we carry what we can, and we get out of here.”
“To where?” Mirotic asks. “The fungus extends under the ground in all directions.”
“If you knew about this, why didn’t you tell us?” Snell demands.
Mirotic’s nostrils flare. “Because fungus is not usually predatory.”
Elliot tries to focus on the back-and-forth, tries to think of what they should do now that they know the swamp is inhabited by monsters. He realizes he is scratching at his arm.
Santos looks over. “What the fuck?”
But she isn’t looking at Elliot. Tolliver, who has been silent, ash-faced, is clutching at his bandaged thumb. He looks down at it now and his eyes widen. A faint blue glow is leaking from underneath the cling wrap.
“Oh, shit, oh, shit, I feel it.” Tolliver is twisting on the cot, sweat snaking down his face. “I can feel it. Moving.”
The bandages are off his hand now and his cut thumb is speckled with the glowing fungus. The autosurgeon unfolds over his chest like a metal spider while Mirotic searches for the right removal program, his eyes scrolling code. Elliot feels a panic in his throat that he never feels during combat. It reminds him of the panic he felt last time he spoke to his daughter.
He crouches down and holds Tolliver’s free hand where Snell and Santos can’t see. It’s slippery from the sweat.
“Got it,” Mirotic says thickly. “Biological contaminant.”
The autosurgeon comes to life, reaching with skeletal pincers to hold Tolliver’s left arm in place. Carmine laserlight plays over his skin, scanning, then the numbing needle dips in with machine precision to prick the base of his thumb.
Tolliver’s free hand clenches tight around Elliot’s.
“Hate these things,” he groans, locking eyes for a moment. “Rather let the Smell use that big old fucking knife than have a bot digging around—” “Shouldn’t have dropped it, then,” Snell says.
Tolliver swivels, his mouth pulls tight in a grimace. “Fuck you, Snell.”
The autosurgeon deploys a scalpel. Metal slides and scrapes and the sound shivers in Elliot’s teeth. Mirotic is looking over at him, and when he speaks he realizes why.
“The spores are moving. Autosurgeon wants to take the whole thumb.”
A wince ripples through the tent; Santos clutches his own thumb tight between two knuckles. Tolliver’s eyes go wide. He tries to yank his arm away, but the autosurgeon holds tight.
“No!” he barks. “No, don’t let it! Turn the fucking thing off!”
“It could spread through his body if we aren’t fast,” Mirotic says. “How you said it did to Prentiss and Prentiss.”
Elliot swallows. He isn’t a medic. What they drilled into his head, from basic onwards, was to trust the autosurgeon. And he doesn’t want Tolliver to end up like the twins.
“Do it,” he mutters.
“Turn it off!” Tolliver wails. “Listen! Listen to me, you fucks!”
His free hand thrashes but Elliot holds it tight, not caring anymore if Santos and Snell can see it, as the scalpel descends.
“The program’s running,” Mirotic says. “Too late to stop it.”
The blade makes no sound as it slices through the skin, the tendon, the bone. The autosurgeon catches the squirt of bright red blood and whisks it away. Tolliver howls. His spine arches. His hand clamps to Elliot’s hard enough to bruise.
Elliot sits underneath the cyclops, listening to it whir. He said they would sleep in shifts, that he would watch first, as if his vitreous eyes might catch something the sensors miss. Partly because he had to say something. Give some kind of order. Mostly because he needed a hit.
Now, with the morphine swimming warm through his veins, he feels light. He feels calm. His heartbeat is so slow it is almost an asymptote.
“He screamed so much because there was no anesthetic in the autosurgeon.”
Elliot turns to see Mirotic, holding a black plastic cube in his hand. He understands the words, but his guilt breaks apart against the high and then dissipates. Tolliver will be fine. Everything will be fine. He tries to shrink the chemical smile on his face, so Mirotic won’t see it.
“Everybody knows why,” Mirotic says. “Where’s the rest of it?” He doesn’t wait for a reply. He snatches the rattling sock out of Elliot’s lap and yanks him to his feet. Mirotic is tall. But he’s slow, too, the way everything is slow on the morphine, and Elliot still has his old tricks.
A hook, a vicious twist, then Mirotic is on the ground with the needle of the syringe poised a centimeter from his eyeball.
“I need that,” Elliot says.
“You’re pathetic,” Mirotic grunts. “Holding his hand and wasting his morphine.”
“Why do you care?” Elliot asks, suspicious now, wondering if maybe it’s Mirotic who Tolliver visits in the night when he doesn’t come to him.
Mirotic slaps the syringe away and drives a knee up into Elliot’s chest. The air slams out of him, but he feels only impact, no pain. He staggers away, bent double. If his lungs were working he would maybe laugh.
“I care because you used to know what the fuck you were doing,” Mirotic says. “Back before they stuck you with a con squad.” He taps the high-grade neural plug at his temple. “You read our records. But I’ve seen yours, too. These personnel firewalls aren’t shit. And if we’re going to get out of this, it won’t be with you doped to the eyes.”
“Give Private Tolliver the paineaters,” Elliot rasps, straightening up. “Leave the morphine. That’s an order.”
Mirotic shakes his head. “It stays with me, now. You’ll get it when we get extracted.” He tosses the black plastic cube; Elliot nearly fumbles it. “Worry about this, instead,” Mirotic says. “Worry about a fungus that eats our flesh and uses the bones like scaffolding.”
Elliot turns the cube over. Through the transparent face, he sees sticky strands of the glowing blue fungus moving, wrapping around Tolliver’s scoured-white knucklebone.
In the morning, Snell is gone.
“Never woke me for my watch,” Santos says, picking gound out of the corner of her eye. “I checked the tent. His kit’s not there.”
“And now he’s out of range,” Mirotic says. “Could get the drones up to look for him. Keep them low again so we don’t trigger any more mines.”
The inside of Elliot’s mouth feels like steel wool. They are standing in the sunshine, which makes his head ache, too. A cool breeze is rippling through the blue-and-purple flora. The sponge trees are swaying. It’s peaceful, near to beautiful. In daylight it’s hard to believe what happened only hours ago in the dark. But the twins’ tent is empty, and Tolliver is drugged to sleep with bloody gauze around the stump of his thumb.
“Why would we look for him?” Elliot says.
Santos gledges sideways at Mirotic, but neither of them speak.
“He deserted,” Elliot says. “If he doesn’t pose a threat to us, we let him walk. He’ll either step on a mine or get eaten alive.” He feels slightly sick imagining it, but he keeps his voice c
old and calm. “Mirotic, rig up a saw to one of the drones, start clearing the vegetation on our flank. Make sure we have clean line of fire. No use watching them on the cyclops if we can’t hit them til they’re right up on us. Santos, get the comm system out of the Heron. We’re going to make a radio tower.”
When Santos departs with her sloppy salute, there’s less contempt in it than usual. Mirotic stays and stares at him for a second, suspicious. Elliot meets his gaze, pretending he doesn’t care, pretending he didn’t already ransack Mirotic’s cot looking for the morphine while he was on watch.
“Good,” Mirotic says, then goes to get the drone.
Elliot turns back toward the tents. He lets himself into the one Tolliver and Snell were sharing, and realizes Tolliver is no longer asleep. He’s sitting up on the sweat-stained cot, staring down at his lap, at his hand.
“How are you feeling?” Elliot asks, because he doesn’t know what else to say.
“You took my thumb.” Tolliver’s voice trembles. “I needed that thumb. That’s my good hand.”
“It was moving deeper,” Elliot says. “That’s why we had to amputate. You probably don’t remember.” He hopes Tolliver doesn’t remember, especially not the pain.
“Still got a trigger finger, so I guess it doesn’t matter to you, right?” Tolliver says. “Still got a mouth, still got an ass. All the parts you like.”
Elliot feels heat creeping under his cheeks. “You can get a prosthetic when they pick us up,” he says, clipped.
“At this rate?” Tolliver gives a bitter laugh. “There’s gonna be nobody left to pick up tomorrow, fuck a week. That’s if you really did get the extraction request through, and you’re not just lying through your fucking teeth. I know junkies. I know all you do is lie.”
Elliot wants to slip his hands around Tolliver’s throat and throttle him. He wants to slip under the sheet and hold Tolliver to him and tell him they’re going to make it. He does neither.
“I needed that thumb because I was going to be a welder,” Tolliver snaps as Elliot goes to leave. “When all this shit was over and I’d gotten my clamp out, I was going to be a welder like my grandfather was.”
But war is never really over, and there’s a sort of clamp that doesn’t come out. Elliot doesn’t even remember what he used to think he was going to be. He turns over his shoulder.
“Your head’s not right,” he says calmly. “It’s the drugs. Try to sleep more.”
“Oh, fuck you,” Tolliver says, somewhere between laughing and crying. “Fuck you, Elliot.”
Elliot steps out, and the tent closes behind him like a wound scabbing shut.
By the time night falls, they’ve cleared a perimeter, cutting away the vegetation in ragged circumference around the Heron, the tents, the cyclops. Tolliver came out to help mid-afternoon, jaw clenched tight and eyes fixed forward. Nobody mentioned his hand or even looked at it.
The few incendiary grenades they have in armory are distributed. Mirotic is trying to rig up a flamethrower using a soldering torch and fuel drained from the tank. Santos and Tolliver are perched on the roof of the Heron, hooking the makeshift antennae into the comm system through a tangle of wires.
Mostly busy work, Elliot knows. They can’t be sure the incendiary grenade did anything but distract the fungus, and it moves fast enough that having open ground might only be to its advantage. They don’t know anything about this enemy.
But if he keeps up appearances, maybe he can get the last of the morphine back from Mirotic without resorting to violence. Act sharp, act competent, and then when the withdrawal kicks in he won’t have to exaggerate much to make Mirotic realize how much he needs it to function.
“Nothing,” Santos says.
Elliot looks up to the roof of the Heron. Tolliver is still trying to rotate the antennae for a better signal, but all that comes through the comm system and into their linked implants is shrieking static. He dials it down in his head. They are too far from the outpost.
Then a familiar signal comes faint and blurry. A blinking yellow nudge slides into the corner of his optic.
“Snell,” Tolliver says. “Shit.”
Elliot feels a shiver go under his skin. The sky is turning dark above them. The cyclops picked up no movement during the day, but like Mirotic said, plenty of predators hunt only at night. There can only be one reason Snell would send the nudge. Elliot can picture him stumbling through the bog, maybe dragging a turned ankle, with the blue glow creeping closer and closer behind him in the dark. Or maybe the fungus already has him, is already flensing him down to his skeleton.
Tolliver’s upvote appears, then Santos’s. It will only take four votes now to trigger the nanobomb. Mirotic looks over at him, and Elliot doesn’t think Mirotic is the merciful type. He executed three people and put their bodies through a thresher. But then Mirotic’s upvote appears in the queue.
“Quick,” Tolliver says, not looking at him. “Before we lose the signal.”
Elliot is not sure if he’s making the strong move or the weak move, but he adds his vote and completes the consensus because he still remembers Jan’s screams. Everyone is silent for a moment. Santos crosses herself with the same precision she salutes.
“Leave the antennae,” Elliot says. “The extraction request went through. They’ll come when they come. Until then, we dig in and stay alert.”
Santos hops down off the roof of the Heron. Tolliver follows after, gingerly for his bandaged hand. Elliot looks at what’s left of the squad—fifty percent casualties in less than two days, and nowhere near the frontlines. Santos is steady; Elliot hasn’t seen her shook once yet. Mirotic is steady. But Tolliver hasn’t told a joke or barely spoken the whole day and his eyes look scared.
Elliot’s still looking at Tolliver when the cyclops wails a proximity alert. He tamps down his own fear, motions for Mirotic to tap in.
“Seven bogeys,” Mirotic says. “Different sizes. Biggest one is over two meters high. They’re heading right at us, not so fast this time.”
Elliot flicks to night vision and watches the trees. “Aim for the bones,” he says, remembering the previous night. “They need them to hold together. Santos, get a firebomb ready.”
Santos loads an incendiary grenade into the launcher underslung off her rifle. Tolliver has his weapon tucked up against his side, like he’s bracing for auto, and Elliot remembers it’s because he has no thumb. Across the carpet of chopped-down ferns and branches, he sees something emerging from the trees. It’s not moving how the other ones moved.
Elliot squints and the zoom kicks in. The shambling monster is moving on three legs and its body is a spiky mess of charred bone held together by the ropy fungus. Through the glow he can make out part of a blackened skull on one side. The twins’ bones, stripped and reassembled like scaffold. His stomach lurches.
Santos curses in Portuguese. “Permission to fire?” she asks through her teeth.
The other bogeys are converging now, low and scuttling like the one that took Noam. A pack, Elliot thinks. He can feel his pulse in his throat. This isn’t combat how he knows combat. Not an enemy how he knows enemies. He wonders if the flames even did any damage the night before. Bullets certainly hadn’t.
“Wait until they’re closer,” he says. “No wasted splash.”
Santos sights. Her finger drifts toward the trigger. She waits.
But the monsters don’t come any closer.
“It’s fucking with us,” Tolliver says. “Sitting out there waiting.” He has a calorie bar in his hand but it’s still wrapped. He’s been turning it over and over in his fingers.
Santos bites a chunk off her own ration. “You think it thinks?” she asks thickly. She glances to Mirotic, who shrugs, then to Elliot, who distractedly does the same. Elliot is more concerned by the deepening itch in the crook of his arm. He needs morphine soon.
“Has to,” Tolliver says. “It came for Jan first. Jan was the one who went out and found the bones in the first place. Then it use
d Noam to lure us out.”
The four of them are sitting under the cyclops, with a crate dragged out to hold food and dice for a game nobody is keeping track of, just rolling and passing on autopilot. Every so often Elliot has someone walk a tight circle around the Heron to check their back, in case more of the monsters try to flank them. In case the cyclops malfunctions and doesn’t see them coming. Busy work.
But there are still only seven, and they still haven’t advanced from the edge of the trees. Sometimes the fungus shifts and the bones find new positions, but they all stay in place, waiting, maybe watching, if the fungus has some way of seeing them. Mirotic suggested heat sensitivity. Mirotic, who must have the morphine hidden somewhere on his body.
Santos is the first to finish her food. She stands up, brushing crumbs off her knees. “I’ll go,” she says, hefting her weapon. Elliot nods. He can’t help but notice Tolliver’s eyes follow Santos around the corner of the Heron, wide and worried. Maybe it is Santos he goes to see.
“Big snakes only have to eat once in a month,” Tolliver says, turning his eyes back to his bandaged hand, studying the spot of red blooming through. “Spend the rest of it digesting.”
Mirotic snorts. “This fungus is not part of a balanced ecosystem. It killed off all the other animal life. Obliterated it.”
“Wish we had a fucking chinegun,” Tolliver mutters.
Then the cyclops keens, and everyone is on their feet in an instant. Elliot sights towards the tree line first, but the monsters haven’t moved. Mirotic’s optics blink red.
“Right behind us,” he says, and whatever he says next is drowned in gunfire. Santos’s signal flares hot in Elliot’s head, combat active. Elliot rounds the corner of the Heron and sees Santos scrambling backward as a ghoulish mass of bone and blue bears down on her. He can’t understand how the monster covered the perimeter so quickly, how the cyclops didn’t spot it earlier. Then he recognizes the tatters of Beasley’s polythane body bag threaded through the fungus.
Elliot shoots for bone, but the way the monster writhes as it moves makes it all but impossible. The burst sinks harmlessly into its glowing blue flesh. Tolliver is firing beside him, howling something, but through the dampers he can’t hear it. The monster turns toward them, distracted. Elliot calculates; too close for a grenade. He fires again and this time sees Beasley’s shinbone shatter apart.