The Battle for Terra Two

by Stephen Ames Berry

  “Did they tell you about the decal you salvaged from that machine?”

  John nodded. “The Empire again—where it shouldn’t exist.”

  The lift stopped with a faint whine. Two brown-uniformed crewmen got on. “I have a theory about the Empire,” said Bill as the decks flashed by. “More whimsy than theory. It never died. It’s out there somewhere, manipulating us, the Kronarins, the Scotar, those killer machines—God only knows what else. All for some esoteric and probably rotten end. It’s cold, malevolent, immortal and hopelessly mad. Evil, if you will.”

  The crewmen glanced at him as they exited. The lift started again.

  “McShane would call that the delusion of an aging paranoid, I think.”

  “And you?”

  John shrugged. “Where the Empire is concerned, I reserve judgment.”

  “Our situation is precarious,” said Detrelna, looking around the briefing room table. John, Sutherland, Lawrona and Kiroda were all appropriately grim. “Despite John’s and his allies’ valiant efforts, the Scotar and their portal are alive and well—witness the dramatic hijacking of our sister ship. Further, the bugs can evade our detectors. One dropped in for a chat, the other—one of Shalan’s, we assume—was on board modifying our weapon programming. Should you all turn into transmutes now, I wouldn’t be completely surprised.”

  No one laughed.

  “They can only have a few detection-avoidance devices,” said Lawrona, “or we’d all be dead.”

  “If those machines come through, we’re dead,” said John. “Where the hell are your reinforcements?”

  “On the way,” said Lawrona. “It takes time. Fleet’s scattered, mopping up Scotar remnants, running recovery operations. And this system’s far from anywhere.”

  “We’ve found what seems to be our end of the Terra Two portal,” said Bill. “It’s the biofabs’ access to this world. The energy traces are unique. Jaquel’s had everyone doing a universal terrestrial grid search for similar readings. Nada.” With practiced ease, he punched up a hot cup of t’ata from the table. “Your turn, Hanar.”

  “A select force will go through that portal to Terra Two,” said Lawrona, “and harry the Scotar—a small force to divert attention long enough for reinforcements to reach us.”

  “So a few of you go and hold the bugs off for a while,” said John, “and your reinforcements arrive. Then what? How are you going to get a ship to Terra Two?”

  “We’re working on that,” said Detrelna.

  “How?” asked John.

  The commodore shook his head. “No. If you’re captured, they’ll steal your mind. The less you know, the better.”

  “And the Scotar infiltration of this ship?” asked John.

  “Our visitor’s gone,” said Lawrona, “and a gunner’s missing. Shield’s up and will remain up. No one on or off the ship, except the assault force.”

  “Research’s working on new detectors,” said Detrelna. He rose. “Mission briefing, here, in”—he tapped something into the complink, read the result—“one hour and seventeen minutes, then back you go to Terra Two with the team.”

  “Did I agree to go?” John asked Bill as the others left the room.

  “Jaquel always takes silence from the affirmative.”

  “I see.” He seemed to reach a decision. “Fine. I’ll go. I have to deliver a present anyway.”

  “Commanding officer!”

  Twenty commandos sprang from their chairs as Lawrona walked down the aisle, striding briskly to the rostrum. The Terrans—John and Sutherland—kept their seats.

  “Sit,” said Lawrona. Like the rest, he wore a black turtleneck sweater, matching pants, and a pair of low-cut black boots. The polished traq wood butt of his M11A protruded from the black leather holster on his right hip. All wore the long-barreled Fleet sidearm, but only Lawrona’s bore the starship-and-sun of Utria, gleaming in silver below the grips.

  “You’ve all read Mr. Harrison’s debriefing,” said the captain. “It’s been three Terran weeks since he returned and since we lost Voltran’s Glory. The situation on Terra Two should be unchanged.

  “Our principal mission is to find and destroy the breeding chambers. Harrison saw no sign of them, but they would logically be in the vicinity of the Scotar nest, the Maximus Project. According to Guan-Sharick, this Shalan-Actal’s using an untested growth accelerant to breed tens of thousands of new Scotar. Of course, any incidental havoc we can wreak, we will. Questions?” His eyes swept the row of determined young faces.

  “Warsuits, sir?” asked Satil. The red-haired, mahogany-hued daughter of Sorgite miners whose startling blue eyes often brought her more than second glances, Mataen Satil was Implacable’s commando officer. The best of a good lot, she’d led the point squad into the Scotar citadel at the Lake of Dreams. Had she been Fleet and Academy, she’d have commanded a starship.

  “No warsuits, Satil,” said Lawrona. “We’re expendable, the warsuits aren’t.”

  The warsuits were another legacy of Empire, silvery bits of formfitting memory foil, impervious to all but multiple blaster hits. The secret of their making long lost, a few hundred had been found toward the end of the Biofab War, forgotten in an ancient warehouse on Kronar. Without the warsuits, the Fleet commando wouldn’t have returned from the Lake of Dreams.

  “All of you know Harrison,” said Lawrona. “He’s our tactical advisor. I’ll be in command, Lieutenant Satil second in command.”

  “Where’s the portal, sir?” asked Corporal Niurn.

  “Bill,” said Lawrona, looking at Sutherland.

  Taking the rostrum, Sutherland called up the overhead screen.

  Nighttime. Colored lights, calliope music, whirling carousel, the rumble of a roller coaster, ponies, shrieking kids, laughing adults. Barkers, games, cotton candy, caramel popcorn, ice cream, funhouse . . .

  Sutherland held the last shot. “You’ve all had lots of groundside time here,” he said. “Know what this is?”

  “It’s an amusement park,” said Niurn.

  “Right,” said Sutherland. “It’s the old Glen Echo Amusement Park, on the Maryland-District of Columbia line. The funhouse you see is the Maximus terminus in our universe.”

  “How do you know?” asked John.

  “The signal traces Detrelna picked up on the grid search. Plus something else. You remember when the bugs had the Leurre Institute?”

  “Sure.”

  “Recall the name of that little bistro, tucked on the end of the main Leurre building?”

  Harrison frowned. “Chez . . . Chez something.”

  “Chez Nichee,” said Bill. “‘Place of the Nest.’ Of course, we only learned later what nests and Scotar were. Well, they got cheeky again.”

  He tapped a control. They were looking at the front of a red-and-blue barn of a building, perhaps fifty feet high, windowless. A dozen broad wooden stairs led up to the smoked-glass double doors of the entrance. A bright red torii gate flared above the doors. The doors were padlocked. A weathered sign read “Closed for Renovations—Watch for Grand Reopening Next Summer.” Two kids, about twelve or so, sat on the top step, eating orange Popsicles. At the bottom and to their left was a white ice cream pushcart, the paunchy, balding vendor doling out ice cream to a short line of kids.

  “Watch.” Sutherland shifted to the tall gilt lettering over the torii gate: XANADU.

  “Colorful, romantic, Gay Ninety-ish,” said John. “Probably some Madam Tussaud rendition of Coleridge inside, complete with demon lover. What makes you think it leads to Terra Two?”

  “Because it says it does,” said the CIA Director. He zoomed in on the smaller lettering below the name:

  Not only the way to Xanadu,

  But also the way to terror too.

  “Weird, but not compelling,” said John. “So they left out a comma. You found this after Implacable picked up the energy trace?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hanar, your show.”

  “It’s a small Scotar nest,�
� said Lawrona, taking the rostrum, “but with the same strange energy output we recorded at the time of John’s dramatic return from Terra Two. Detector readings show the staff to all be biofabs. The two children on the stairs are sentries. The pushcart, vendor and line are probably a heavy weapon’s position. We’ve made five recons in there. Pushcart and children are always there. The faces change, but never the positions. That red structure is the center of the signal.

  “We’re going in and through to Terra Two. Indigenous Terran forces will take out the Scotar as we’re quietly taking that building. We’ll make certain that no Scotar slip through to warn Shalan-Actal. It will be daytime, just before public hours, so there’ll only be combatants there.

  “Terra Two. You’ve all memorized the Maximus complex map. We’ll come into the portal building, seize it, then break out and regroup. If separated, you must make first rendezvous within one Terran hour. Otherwise, we’ll be gone. Any more questions? Very well. Luck to you. To the boats.”

  John watched through the shuttle’s window as Implacable shrank to just another unwinking light among billions. He lost it as the craft breached the atmosphere.

  “What did Lawrona mean by indigenous Terran forces?” he asked Sutherland as the two sat together aft.

  “Marines, mostly. Some armed by the Kronarins and disguised by us, some coming in high and slow to keep the Scotar busy.”

  “Mostly?”

  Sutherland away from the window. “All but one very sick, brave man to distract gate security. A man with ‘Big C’ who insisted on one last stand battling alien hordes.”

  “Bob,” said John softly.

  Sutherland nodded.

  “He hasn’t been feeling well . . .”

  “Two, three months left at the most,” said Sutherland. “Metastasized throughout his body. He had a brief remission, but it’s fading.”

  “I’ve got to see him,” said John. “You know how many times I wanted to drop out of grad school? How many times he bullied and cajoled me into staying, into staying, into working harder?”

  Sutherland shook his head. “His contingent’s leaving from a different point than yours or mine. There’s no time. He asked me to give you this,” he said, handing over a white envelope.

  Opening opening it, John read aloud the message, firmly penned by a strong hand:

  Dear John,

  You know me—no romantic palliatives: no harps, no heaven, no gentle Jesus. Ask my daughter to have them carve my stone with this, from John Donne:

  Churches are best for prayer that have least light:

  To see God only, I go out of sight;

  And to ‘scape stormy days, I choose

  An everlasting night.

  Your friend always,

  Robert J. McShane

  Chapter 11

  Turning into the empty dirt parking lot, the big silver-and-green bus crunched over the acorns, stopping beneath a stand of oak. “Fairfax Charters” read the lettering above the trim. From across the high white-picket fence, a calliope played.

  The silver door swung wide. Out trooped the seniors, some leaning on canes. None were under seventy. Chattering, laughing, they followed the big white-bearded man up to the candy-striped admissions booth.

  “Group reservation,” he said, handing the attendant their yellow federal retirees’ pass. “We’re the Double Dippers.” The attendant, a lean, tanned kid in Levis and an American U. t-shirt, smiled faintly, checking his clipboard. “Mr. McShane?”

  Bob nodded.

  “Welcome to Glen Echo, sir. We open in ten minutes.”

  McShane raised his blackthorn walker, pointing past the kid to where the Ferris wheel turned against a cloudless blue sky. “Your equipment is operating. We’ve paid enough for an extra ten minutes.”

  Even as the kid opened his mouth, the seniors were filing past, scattering into the park.

  Need an underground command post? It’s easy, if you’re a Scotar transmute. Just teleport a clean, modest-sized nuke down to where it can be triggered without punching through to either surface or magma. Use seismic bafflers to avoid unwanted attention. Once the chamber you’ve created stabilizes, send down atmosphere and power generators, command and control systems. Finally, having carefully checked the life support sensors, you may safely flit down your own green self. You’re now a mile underground, sheltered in bedrock, impervious to standard Kronarin detectors and accessible only by telekinesis.

  The command center under Glen Echo was small, just a single station with one transmute. Sug-Atra had had the good fortune to be outstationed on Terra Two when Pocsym blew the Scotar citadel to glory and Tanil’s Revenge wiped the biofab fleet. That had been a year ago. Now he sat bored, watching the surface telltales and monitoring the portal’s status.

  Sug-Atra saw the reality of Glen Echo, not the illusion created by this transmutes on the surface. Elderly humans strolled the midway, playing imaginary games, buying invisible junk food. Seen only by each other, Scotar warriors patrolled in pairs. In a weed-choked lot, where intent humans ruefully lost quarters to nonexistent video games, three transmutes stood with antennae entwined, constantly refreshing the illusion of Glen Echo.

  An alarm chirped. Flicking a tentacle, Sug-Atra brought up a tacscan of the nearby Potomac. Rotary-winged aircraft, thirty of them, were proceeding upriver toward West Virginia. Not unusual. The last week had seen an increase in military air traffic.

  In about a month, Sug-Atra knew, the Terrans and their quaint war machines would be ash.

  He replaced the tacscan with a bootlegged recording of a double-tiered, three-patterned mating dance—warriors and transmutes. It was delightfully perverse and utterly explicit. Sug-Atra was totally engrossed when the alarm sounded again. Angrily, he snapped out a tentacle, bringing back the tacscan. The helicopters were coming in low and fast, a narrow phalanx charging straight at the nest.

  Alert! Alert! Sug-Atra’s thought went to every Scotar in the park. Air assault from the river. Ground defenses stand by to fire. Warriors deploy. Portal sentries alert Terra Two.

  What about the humans in the nest? asked the next senior transmute, one of the three in the vacant lot.

  Harmless, said Sug-Atra. Kill them later. Direct all fire at those helicopters. We are a sacrifice to the glory of the Race. We must hold this nest until our brothers in Terra Two can negate the portal.

  As the two boys turned and bolted up the stairs, McShane raised his cane and fired. The narrow red beam knifed through the two, shattering the door glass and vanishing into Xanadu.

  Tumbling down the stairs, the bodies became those of Scotar warriors. They lay heaped on the ground, viscous green slime oozing from their wounds.

  Glen Echo turned into a small corner of hell.

  The infiltrators, Kronarin crew and Terran infantry, were blasting away at preselected targets, taking out Scotar weapons positions, warriors, and the occasional innocent pushcart.

  Stunned for an instant, the Scotar blasted back, azure beams crisscrossing with the red, turning the midway into a deadly net of energy beams.

  Illusion faded as the transmutes fought for their lives. Shimmering, the bright red Ferris wheel with its gaily colored lights imploded into a ball of primary colors that burst outward, then contracted into a compact gray shape—a shape Sutherland recognized.

  “Fusion cannon!” he cried, staring wide-eyed out the plexiglass cockpit of the third helicopter. Green figures scuttled around the weapon, its great ugly snout now only a few hundred yards away, locking onto the lead chopper.

  “Colonel Griswold,” Sutherland called over the radio, “get ‘em down now! Don’t try for your primary LZ!”

  The bulky troop carriers were still eighty yards up, making for the parking lot, when the cannon shrilled. A thick cobalt-blue fusion beam shot out, turning the lead chopper into a fiery ochre ball that hurled blackened bits of men and machine to earth.

  The explosion was still echoing out over the Potomac when a second beam detonated a
nother chopper.

  Fifty yards above the parking lot, Sutherland saw the cannon lock onto his chopper.

  “Shit,” said the pilot, pulling the aircraft hard right.

  Swooping in and over, the two escorting Apache gunships rocketed the cannon. The salvo went wide, small geysers of flame and dirt bursting around the Scotar position.

  The cannon shrilled again, dissolving the tail rotor of Sutherland’s chopper, then tracked right, firing short blue bursts. The Apaches exploded almost together, two flaming spheres touching as they dissolved into a rain of molten debris.

  The earth rushed toward Sutherland, slamming him against a bulkhead. Blackness.

  What was left of the real Ferris wheel lay between the midway and the cannon—only the motor housing itself, the motor and superstructure long since sold for scrap. Crawling low, McShane reached it just as the gunships were hit. He threw himself flat, hands over his head as flaming metal showered the area. As it ended, he peered cautiously over the rusting metal.

  Most of the Scotar were deployed at the park’s other end. The fusion cannon had only its four warrior crew: one in the gun chair, swiveling with the weapon, the other three maintaining tracking and energy feeds from a gray, all-weather console. Their broad green backs were to McShane. There was no sentry.

  Remarkably stupid, thought McShane.

  It had taken him five hard minutes to break from the firefight. He was tired, so tired. Sleep, his body told him, sleep. You’ll sleep soon enough, he reminded himself.

  Crawling along the midway, he’d wanted to stop a thousand times—stop, hide behind some piece of wreckage and close his eyes.

  The screams had kept him going brought him here. The screams of kids hit by Scotar fire, the commandos he’d sat with at briefing, joked with on the bus from McLean. The screams of the Marines trapped and burning in the choppers’ wreckage—high-pitched, keening, inhuman screams that finally, mercifully, died. Kids, all kids.

  McShane wanted that cannon. And there it was, no more than one hundred feet away.