The moon’s horizon was a cloud of thick chlorine and nanite-infused sand. It was so dense, I couldn’t see my way in front of me. Worse, my sensors were still FUBAR’d by the chlorine.
As I rushed into the thickest pockets of it, where the scream had originated, it occurred to me that I could be rushing headlong into the enemy.
See, the bugs’ physiology was pretty different from ours. While their atmosphere didn’t normally contain toxic levels of chlorine, it didn’t harm them the way it would us.
The disgusting things were completely naked, save for their exoskeletons. Their body temperatures more than enough to stave off the cold on the planets and moons they typically occupied. What was more, their antennae allowed them to ‘see’ in ways we as humans couldn’t.
When their vision failed, they moved via a primitive form of sonar, meaning that while I was completely lost in this wall of dust and debris, the bugs would ‘see’ me coming.
They’d also see what I had just done to their comrade, and if there was one thing I knew about the bugs other than the fact that they were extremely dangerous, it was that they were vindictive bastards.
Worse, their hive mind would let all those in close proximity feel their comrade die. I’d be even more of a mark than I already was, and I was hoping I could use that to my advantage. The grassfeds were helpless here. I knew that as well as I knew my own name. I needed to pull all the attention to me if they were going to have a chance of surviving this. Of course, if I wanted to survive it myself, I was going to need some assistance myself.
“Outward diagnostic scans reveal three Acburian entities and two human entities. While I am unable to directly communicate with the humans, initial size and weight scans suggest they are your teammates,” Annabelle reported.
“Are they dead or dying?” I asked, weaving back and forth through the fog. It wouldn’t be much in the way of cover, but hopefully, it’d keep the bugs from getting me with a lucky shot if they decided to try to blast me.
“One of the human entities has a racing pulse rate. The other’s pulse seems to be dwindling by the second, as does his core body temperature. That suggests—”
“He’s losing blood,” I answered, cutting her off. “Do I have enough energy to switch to thermal vision?”
“Yes, Lieutenant Ryder, but not for long. Chlorine levels are at their highest in your current positioning. I’ve been forced to ratchet up internal shielding just to prevent catastrophic suit damage.”
And there it was. The reason Annabelle didn’t need to ask my permission to divert the majority of my energy, energy I had risked my life to procure, to self-help measures.
On the surface, it might have sounded like it was meant to keep me safe, and ostensibly it was. The truth was though, the only thing the people in charge cared about these days more than gathering bug energy was preserving the scraps of Ellebruim covering our bodies.
That was why there was no discussion between Annabelle and me about self-preservation techniques. The chlorine in the air would eat through the suit if not for the shielding. It would then eat through my body, but that was of almost no consequence to the Alliance. The suit was what mattered.
I was here, stuck on an alien planet, a prisoner to the whims of a technology that was supposed to work for me. Still, at the same time, I had to admit that while the Orbital Constitution technically let me ignore those issues, everyone I’d ever seen do it had died both quickly and violently.
“Fine,” I muttered. “Hold it as long as you can. I need to be able to see where I’m going.”
“Affirmative, Lieutenant Ryder.”
In a flash of red, my eyes took on entirely new prisms. I could see through the sandstorm now, right into the heat signatures of the bugs and of Conroy and Billy. Unfortunately, with the breakdown of communications, the only information the nameplates could give me was generic. Squadmate 1 and Squadmate 2 was all it told me.
My people were blind, of course. The sort of tech necessary for thermal vision was expensive and taxing on a suit. That was why Annabelle couldn’t hold it for long given our current hindrances. It also meant that there was no way people like Conroy and Billy could afford it.
Billy, or at least I assumed it was Billy, based on shape and size, had a standard machete. It was a simple but effective weapon. Though, he’d have had to been swinging in the general direction of something for it to matter, and he wasn’t.
Conroy was on the ground. His heat signature was much weaker, almost blue instead of the standard red. It shouldn’t have mattered to me. A soldier was a soldier. Still, I felt a rush of relief realizing it was him, and not Billy, who was essentially done for. I hadn’t let Bill Langham’s son die yet and, God help me, I wasn’t going to.
The bugs saw me rushing toward them. I figured what I had just done to their comrade was enough to earn me their full ire. I had underestimated them though. They watched me dive into enemy territory and must have realized it was because of my urge to save these two. In turn, they ignored me, running back to their easier victims.
Two of them descended on Conroy and, in an instant, I watched his blue heat signature get torn into a trio of scraps tossed to the earth below. His shriek was as stomach churning as any I had heard in all my years doing this but almost as sickening was the cute, video-gamey way his nameplate shattered into a million electronic pieces. Why the Alliance had done that, I’d never know, but I wanted to punch the guy who designed it repeatedly.
Part of me knew there was a study somewhere that said the animations helped desensitize us to the death of other soldiers, but I'd always found it tasteless, especially since I couldn't turn it off.
I gritted my teeth and rushed toward Billy. Saving one was better than none, and to have any chance at that, I needed to move quickly.
“Switch on strobe lighting,” I said.
“There’s not energy for both strobe and—”
“Then shut the damn heat vision off,” I yelled. “Just switch on strobe now!”
Suddenly, I couldn’t see anything anymore. The sand was blocking my vision again, though my suit was emitting a pulsating white light.
If the stories are right, the people of Earth found out about the bugs’ weakness to strobe lighting by accident. They burst into a club in Germany one night while all the littlest Wiener schnitzels were dancing around and grinding on each other under a twirling disco ball and flashing lights.
They all stopped in their tracks when all the bugs stood frozen like grotesque statues.
It would have been nice if this effect was permanent. I mean, if a flashing strobe light would keep the bugs frozen indefinitely, we would wrap ourselves in them. We’d put them on Christmas trees and install them in the headlights of our cars. Unfortunately, testing showed the effect could only be stretched for ninety seconds, and once it had been done to a bug, it could never be done again. Their mind adapted beyond their instincts pretty damned fast.
Still, it was better than nothing, and I could only hope the bugs I was facing today had never been strobed before.
I choked up on the handle of my war hammer, trying to remember where the bugs had been.
“Would you like me to showcase the last recorded visual from thermal vision, Lieutenant Ryder?” Annabelle asked, her voice like the song of an angel.
That was exactly what I needed.
“Sure thing, sweetness.”
I squinted as a still picture of the bug’s last known places appeared on my HUD. If the strobe lights had worked, they would be frozen in roughly the same place. After that, it was all whack a mole.
I ran full speed toward the first image, counting down the seconds in my head. I was at thirty when I swung the hammer. The satisfying feel of resistance and crack of exoskeleton under the weapon made my heart sing. I laid into that one a few more times, making sure I’d reduced it to a gooey puddle that wouldn’t be getting up. The bugs had a nasty way of shaking off death blows, and being that I was fighting blind, I c
ouldn’t afford to risk it.
One down.
I spun on my heels, counting up to fifty-seven seconds as I brought the hammer down where the second bug was supposed to be. Again, I felt the creature give way under me and the spray of its internal fluids all over me.
I kicked it down before slamming my warhammer onto its head with an overhanded blow that sprayed its insides across the ground. Turning, I rushed to the third. He was far enough away that I was at eighty-five seconds when I swung the hammer, flinching in anticipation of a result. The only sensation that came was my warhammer burying its head in the ground.
“Damn it,” I said. He must have been exposed to the strobe already.
All of that happened with an “Affirmative,” from Annabelle.
When my vision went back to red, I saw the thing over Billy. His heat signature had gone down too. It was purple and, in seconds, it would be a cold and unforgiving blue. His body temperature was falling fast. He wouldn’t last that long though, not with the bug standing over him like that.
“Initiate targeting mechanism,” I said quickly.
“On the creature?” Annabelle asked.
“Like you have to ask.” A fresh targeting overlay appeared over the bug readying to do to Billy what the others had just done to Conroy.
I let go of the war hammer, letting it slip from my hands until I had a grip on the strap. Spinning it hard in my hands like the propeller of one of those old-fashioned non-orbital helicopters, I let go.
The targeting systems of the suit helped guide my trained hand, causing the weapon smash dead-on into my target. Lightning exploded from the weapon’s head as it punched a hole straight through the armored carapace. The bug stopped mid-motion to look down at the warhammer embedded in its chest right before my weapon sent bursts of electricity rippling through the tender insides of the bug’s body.
I watched Billy flinch away instinctively as the smoking, charred bug toppled onto his prone body as I ran toward him. Meanwhile, Annabelle happily reported that I’d gotten three more kills for the damned leaderboards in addition to 3,000 coins as well as a ‘Multikill Bonus!” of 1,000 coins. It’d all be worth shit to me, though, if Billy died.
“Take the energy from that one,” I shouted through my mask as I still wasn’t able to communicate via the comms systems thanks to all the interference. “I’ll get us to the others if I can. In the meantime, tell your suit to give you two staples to bind your wounds and enough pain meds to make sure you can still walk.”
Thank God the Alliance didn’t charge for medical supplies. It was one thing they loaded up our suits with, even the grassfeds. After all, they couldn’t get their suits back if you couldn’t make it back yourself.
I swallowed hard, hoping that’d be enough to save him until we got off this rock. At the very least it’d buy us enough time to get out of the center of this damned cloud.
“We’re not out of the woods yet so you’d better be ready to fight like your goddamned life depends on it.”
7
“We need to move,” I said, looking down at Billy’s heat signature. I had already sucked the energy from two of my conquests and was ready to haul iron and get to our destination. I must have been more efficient than my grassfed companion because the son of my onetime best friend was still struggling to pull the energy from the third and final bug carcass.
I would have taken it myself. Hell, I’d have done more with it than Billy could have done with ten times the amount. We both knew it, but I was sure much of his energy had been depleted by his suit’s defensive shields, especially with the added drain of the nanite and chlorine cloud. Either that or he’d likely burned it in a spray-and-pray attack with whatever weapons he might have had in his suit.
At least that’s what happens nine times out of ten when grassfeds are faced with something they hadn’t seen coming. It was like these kids needed a map laying out every possible twist of fate right in front of them. Then again, that was what the VR training was for, so it probably wouldn’t have mattered much, anyway.
“Palm flat on the carcass,” I barked, looking at him fumble around with the thing.
“I’m trying,” he answered. His voice was hoarse and still panicked. He couldn’t see in front of him so he probably had no idea if there were more bugs on the way. He should have known that if there were more, I’d already have been dragging him behind me like a little girl’s doll. But, like I said, common sense and grassfeds aren’t exactly known to coexist much.
“Clear your damn mind, Langham,” I said, thinking about leaning down and smacking some sense into the boy’s skull. “It’s reflexive. The damn suit wants you to do it. You don’t even have to think about it. If—”
“PFC Langham’s elevated heart rate is stopping his suit from activating the energy retrieving system,” Annabelle said in my head. “That, combined with the nature of his injuries could prove too much for his body in this state.”
I cursed under my breath. The suit grounded itself onto our bodies and, to pull energy from the bugs, it had to interact with our bodies. If Billy couldn’t calm himself down enough to think straight, I was going to have to take it myself after all.
“Just stand the hell up.” I leaned down and pressed my gloved palm to the bug carcass.
As the energy flowed into my suit, I sighed.
I had hoped I could convince Billy to use the energy he’d have gotten from this bug on thermal vision, but it looked like I was going to have to drag his ass through this cloud, anyway.
“Opie,” Billy asked, choking on what had to be his own spit, given the fact that his mask filtered out the chlorine and nanite infected dust.
“Conroy’s gone,” I answered matter-of-factly. “Shredded. We need to move.”
“Oh God,” Billy said, and in his voice, I heard so much of his father. It would have shaken me in any other situation, a sound that pulled my mind back to one of the worst days of my life. If I didn’t want today to be another one of those though, I was going to have to keep my will strong, and so was Billy.
“No,” I said firmly, grabbing him and jerking him upright. “We don’t react like that, Billy, especially not in the field. We’re soldiers, dammit. We face this kind of stuff all the time. Conroy knew the risks, just like you do.” I pulled him forward. “We keep moving.”
“You don’t even pray?” he asked as I dragged him along the alien terrain.
“Say whatever you want to say to whoever you want to say it to,” I answered without breaking stride. “Just walk and talk at the same time.”
Maybe the elapsed time had done much to wash Billy’s father of whatever faults he had, but the memories I had of the man weren’t of someone like this, someone who would fall apart at the first setback.
I shook my head, a tinge of guilt pricking inside of me. What kind of bastard was I, anyway? This kid was scared. It was his first mission, his first time on any of the bug worlds, let alone an unexplored one that we obviously knew nothing about. Our information was wrong, probably lies fed to us by the Acburian Empire.
They needed a win, you see. They had strongholds, and they were growing substantially, but it was taking time. Undoubtedly, it was taking much longer than they thought it should.
The Alliance had come across an Acburian transmission a year or so back. Translators said it was the bug queen reaming out one of her sergeants (though they had a different, almost unpronounceable word for it). She was pissed off about the lack of forward momentum, and she wanted results.
While anyone with a working brain would have probably taken this as a threat, the Alliance spun it in a different direction. It was a victory. They played it all over the news programs and even put excerpts of it (translated into the languages of the Earth people who were going to be hearing it, of course) on billboards and bus stop benches.
It was proof that we were winning, that Earth grown David really might beat the space-dwelling Goliath.
If you ask me, it was a crock of s
hit.
First of all, I had my doubts about the translation. While I wouldn’t know the Acburian word for ‘taco’ without Annabelle to translate it, something about the wordage made me think that maybe the Alliance-funded translators were laying it on a little thick when it came to the concern and downright fear the Queen of the Cockroaches seemed to have for us.
Secondly, even if they were telling the truth, even if her bug-eyed majesty really was shitting her nonexistent bug pants over the thought that we might win this thing, the last thing you’d ever want to do is let people know about it.
I mean, I get it. They’d wanted to boost Earth morale, but Earth was our talent pool. Earth was where our Marines came from and telling future Marines that we were winning a war we still hadn’t seen the top of was as stupid as it was immoral.
You don’t tell kids that they’re going to the pool and then toss them into the Mississippi. It leads to trouble, and a lot of dead bodies to fish out.
Take Langham, for example.
It was that reason, along with so many others, I had to be hard on Bill’s kid. Even if Bill hadn’t exactly been the macho man my memories might suggest, his son was going to have to be if he was going to do better than his old man. People who fell apart, sooner or later, got ripped apart. That was how it worked. I wasn’t going to let that happen to Billy.
“Where are we going?” Billy asked. “I can’t see anything.”
“Best to keep your eyes closed then,” I said. “Save them for when you need them, and I’m getting us out of this damn cloud.” I, of course, didn’t add the ‘if I can’ that was ringing around in my head like a tin can.
“Annabelle, initiate spiral scanning. Tell me how much further I need to go in any direction to get the hell out of this thing.”
Doomed Space Marine: A Space Adventure (Bug Wars Book 1) Page 5