by Richard Fox
“Iron Hearts,” Hale said, “keep an eye out on your side of the doorway. We get separated, you head back to the shuttle.”
“And who’s going to fly it?” Elias asked.
“Or open up the bay doors?” Bodel asked.
“We all go home or nobody’s going home, crunchy,” Kallen said.
“Fine. Keep an eye out for anything that moves,” Hale said.
The rest of the Marines had entered the room and taken cover behind the platform. Stacey walked a step behind Malal as he walked around the room, scanning the cylinders.
Almost every inch of the laboratory walls was covered by the cylinders, but there was a blank patch the size of a normal doorway on the opposite side of the platform. Hale jogged around the cylinder. On the blank patch was a frozen shadow of an alien with a segmented body like an ant, its spindly limbs held up over its head like it was trying to defend itself.
“My first experiment,” Malal said. “Complete failure, the essence was lost. Shame really, I rather enjoyed its company.”
“What did you do to it?” Hale felt anger stir in his heart, a flicker of hatred that spread until his hands gripped his rifle so tightly that it trembled in his grasp.
Malal wagged a finger at him.
“We’re not here for a history lesson,” Stacey said. “Where is the codex?”
“Yes, the codex…” Malal turned to the empty platform. “I will need control of my faculties.”
“No. Not the deal.” Stacey touched her forearm computer and the governor’s metal hoops glowed bright enough that Hale could see them in Malal’s chest.
“The interface doesn’t use something so pedestrian as fingers and buttons. Loosen your hold. The Qa’Resh gave you the option,” Malal said.
Stacey bit her lip.
“Hale, if he tries anything, shoot the governor. Something tells me he doesn’t want to be a sludge of subatomic particles,” she said.
“That works for me.” Hale thumbed the safety off his rifle and pointed it at Malal’s chest.
One of the hoops in the governor faded away, and Malal rose off the ground.
“Whoa! What is this?” Yarrow scrambled away from Malal as he floated toward the platform.
“Easy. All part of the plan. Kind of,” Hale said. “Shoot him if he acts out of line.”
“Sure,” Standish muttered, “I’ll know just when the floating star god is about to turn from benevolent companion to face-eating demon. Did that in basic training.”
When Malal’s toe tips touched the pedestal, it came to life with a white glow. Three of the cylinders floated from the walls and formed an orbit around Malal.
“This is what you seek,” Malal said. “Peerless knowledge of omnium manipulation. Discrete dimension communications…and…no.”
“What? What’s wrong?” Stacey asked.
“Corruption.” Malal closed a hand into a fist and one of the cylinders shattered. The light inside the broken cylinder held its form for a moment and then dissipated into nothing. Hale heard the sound of a distant scream.
The two remaining cylinders floated down to hover in front of Stacey.
“The echoes. They tried to access my work and ruined it,” Malal said.
“Do we have what we need?” Stacey removed a small pyramid-shaped object from a belt pouch and tapped one of the corners. It leapt from her fingers and spun like an out-of-control gyroscope.
“The schematics are parsed through several different vessels. We must have the complete record to open it…a security measure that is proving irksome,” Malal said. “This data would have survived until the energy death of the universe. Leave it to lesser beings to ruin perfection.”
The spinning pyramid spun around the two cylinders in a figure-eight motion, rays of light dancing between the objects.
“He serious about all this?” Hale asked Stacey over a private channel. “What if he’s just playing us?”
“The best encryption methods we had before the war involved steganography based on cosmic background radiation with quantum keys,” she said, “which are about as complex to Malal as pig Latin is to us.”
“Which…means?”
“He could be playing us. I have no way of knowing. This recorder the Qa’Resh gave me will take in all the data. They’re the only ones that can put it together,” she said. The pyramid slowed to a stop, then floated to Stacey. She snatched it out of the air and returned it to a pouch.
“Malal,” Hale put his fingertip on the trigger, “you went through an awful lot of trouble to protect all this knowledge. Without redundancy, you’re risking everything on a single point of failure and something tells me you wouldn’t make that mistake. Where are the backups?”
“Perceptive.” Malal stepped down from the pedestal, moving through thin air like he was taking a set of stairs. “This is one of the ancillary laboratories. The forge will have the original documents.”
“How do you know the Jinn didn’t get into there too?” Hale asked.
“Because the vault is still here. If anyone but me had broken into the sanctum, a singularity would have opened up and annihilated everything,” Malal said.
“Hold on. There’s a black hole in the middle of this place just waiting to go off?” Stacey asked.
“Correct. I will guide us,” Malal said. “Bring your abominations into this room. I must reopen the door.”
Hale sent a quick message to the Iron Hearts. The cylinders around the lab clinked against each other like wind chimes as the armors’ heavy footsteps reverberated through the room.
“Malal,” Stacey said, “is there anything else in here we could use in the fight against the Xaros? I don’t want to waste this opportunity.”
“You’ll get what you bargained for, bright one. The rest of the records here all pertain to the grand question.” Malal looked around the room. “The totality of my existence went to the answer, and here we are surrounded by a fraction of that work. Experiments that failed, experiments that brought me one small step closer to a solution. Once I’d solved the equation, I should have destroyed all of this. But…vanity.”
“What was the question?” Elias asked.
“Must we die? Must our consciousness embrace oblivion when reality can no longer support even the concept of thought?” Malal’s face pulled into a sneer. “That was our destiny, is your destiny. The cold abyss at the end of the universe, when all matter and energy decay into nothing. I found a way out. I opened the door to immortality…and my peers left me behind.”
“Your people never had faith in God? Never thought you could achieve eternal life through belief in a higher power?” Elias asked.
“Spare me,” Malal said. “We were that ‘higher power’ for countless civilizations until I found a more noble pursuit for our efforts. Humans are lucky they were nothing better than primates when our gaze passed over Earth. I will not waste any more time. Stand aside.”
****
Malal opened a door into a sparse forest. Trees made up of intertwined vines as thick as Hale’s leg joined the luminescent white trees. Tufts of tall grass formed bushes between the two types of trees, which alternated as the forest stretched into the distance.
The Iron Hearts took the lead out the door, the tops of their helms well short of the treetops.
“This is weird,” Standish said as he and Orozco squared opposite corners around the door. Standish swung around and found the door had disappeared, same as the entrance to the lab. He knelt next to a tree trunk and kept his eyes peeled.
“What part?” Orozco asked. “Us in some crazy hombre’s secret stash or that we’re babysitting the guy, helping him look for…I don’t know, Excalibur or something.” Orozco thumbed the control to his Gustav heavy cannon, spinning the three barrels to life.
“I know, right? How am I going to tell this story to all the impressionable and hero-worshipping ladies when we get home? ‘Then he snapped his fingers and a dimensional gate opened up.’ No one wants a one-nigh
t stand with a nut job. Well…I’m OK with crazy because I never use my real name and leave before they wake up.” Standish shook his head. “But what I’m talking about is this forest. Why are all the trees evenly spaced? Even those bushes are smack between the trees. There should be bugs, critters all over the place.”
“Maybe you’re missing the forest for the trees.” Orozco shrugged his shoulders, then scratched his back against a trunk. “Those tusk-cats weren’t biological. Maybe the trees aren’t either. Nature doesn’t have a lot of obvious patterns to it. A setup like this can’t be an accident.”
“Maybe there’s a planet where trees grow in an orderly fashion,” Standish said. “Gunney Cortaro would love it there.”
“So…there’s a gardener? Someone that wants the forest just like this?” Orozco asked.
“That’s my guess. You think he-she-it knows we’re here?”
Orozco gave the long barrels on his cannon a pat. “I haven’t been subtle.”
“Move out,” Cortaro said from the middle of the formation as Malal closed the door. “We’re half an hour from the next doorway. Stay alert. Stay alive.”
Standish kept watch behind the formation as it moved into the forest. The eerie symmetry and layout of the place didn’t bother him as much as the total stillness of the trees, like he was walking through a photograph and not a living, breathing place.
****
Hale touched a beaded cord hanging from his armor and shifted a black bead to the bottom. Keeping a pace count was a fundamental skill for Strike Marines; learning to keep track of his position without the aid of GPS was a novelty for someone raised in the always-on, always-connected environment of twenty-first century America like him. The American military hadn’t relied on maps, terrain association and compasses for dismounted movement since the end of the Vietnam War. The skills came back to the fore once the Chinese disabled or destroyed the world’s satellites at the beginning of World War III.
Having to trust Malal with the navigation irked Hale. He was the team leader; he was supposed to know where they were and where they were going. With no distant point of reference, the only thing Hale knew for sure was how far they’d gone since they left the lab: nine hundred yards.
Not for the first time, he wished Steuben was there. The Karigole warrior never tried to interfere with Hale’s authority, but he would give a few private words of advice from time to time.
A whistling sound came through the air.
Hale stopped and raised a fist next to his head, signaling a halt. The tree branches remained as still as ever. No breeze caused the whistling, which grew louder.
“Anyone else hear that?” he asked.
“It’s coming from up high,” Elias said. His helm titled up toward the dark sky.
Thumps sounded in the distance ahead of them, each new sound evenly spaced from the last. Hale couldn’t keep count as the rhythm pounded the ground with the steady ferocity of an old belt-fed machine gun.
“Action front,” Hale said, “hold your fire until we know they’re hostile.”
Elias put his palm against one of the glowing trees and shoved it over. Clear glass roots snapped and shattered as it tore free from the forest floor. Bodel and Kallen did the same and then rolled the trees toward Hale with a kick. The three trunks formed a field expedient, if somewhat sloppy, palisade.
“Take cover,” Elias said.
The Marines crouched against the trunks as their internal light slowly faded away.
The sound of marching feet filled the air.
“Care to shed some light on what’s coming at us?” Hale asked Malal.
Malal, standing tall and not taking advantage of the felled trees to shield him, gave a slight shrug.
“Get down. Now.”
“My form is proof against anything the physical universe could—”
“You’re not invisible and standing out in the open will draw fire on those of us who aren’t ‘proof.’”
Malal’s eye twitched, and then he sank down onto his haunches.
“Contact,” Elias said, “dismounted infantry, hundreds.”
Hale glanced over the trunk. Soldiers, made from the same orange and white glass as the tusk-cats, advanced toward them in a wide column, their pace in lockstep. The front rank carried tear-shaped shields and tall pole-arms that crackled with electricity. Bullet-shaped helmets stuck up from behind the shields, all without slits for eyes or breathing. There was no obvious leader, no banners and no sound other than the mass of feet hitting the ground in unison.
“Sir?” Cortaro asked.
The front rank lowered their halberds over their shields, pointed right at the Marines.
“Open fire!” Hale set his rifle to high power and pulled the trigger. His rifle kicked like a mule. The shot hit a Jinn’s shield and blew it, and the soldier, into fragments.
The thunder of the Iron Hearts’ cannons and Orozco’s Gustav drowned out everything else as Hale tried to aim again. The torrent of shots from the bigger guns annihilated the first dozen ranks as Jinn soldiers exploded into dust. Despite the onslaught of fire, the advance continued.
Hale’s rifle buzzed when he pulled the trigger and a battery icon popped onto his visor. He switched his weapon to low power and got off one last shot that blew the head off a soldier. The rest of the body took another step forward then fell to the ground.
“Low-power head shots!” Hale tossed away the dead battery and slapped in a fresh one.
Red spheres of energy the size of golf balls snapped overhead and the smell of burning ozone hit Hale a moment later. The fire from the Iron Hearts came to a sudden halt.
The three soldiers were frozen in place. Willowy bands of electricity leapt from armor to armor.
“Elias? Can you hear me?” Hale asked.
He heard nothing but static in return.
The tree Hale leaned against bucked as a Jinn energy round hit, knocking Hale to the ground. The trunk blew into splinters as another round tore through, spraying Hale with tiny bits of shrapnel.
Malal stood over Hale, bits of tree embedded in his skin, and reached down to Hale.
“Get down!”
“How many times must I—” a Jinn round hit Malal in the back. Malal’s smug face melted like a candle under a blowtorch. His entire body lost coherence and splashed to the ground, the glowing governor in the center of a quivering puddle.
“Malal?” Stacey crawled over and reached for the gooey mass, stopping short of actually touching it.
The roar of Orozco’s Gustav firing at full cyclic tore Hale away from what had become of their guide. Hale grabbed his rifle and turned it back toward the Jinn.
The soldiers’ advance stopped a few trees away, their halberds pointed skyward. They were still as statues. Orozco methodically swept his cannon across the soldiers, destroying several with each shot.
“Cease fire!” Hale shouted. Orozco’s cannon died down a second later.
“Why’d they stop?” Cortaro asked.
“Don’t know, don’t care,” Hale said. “Anyone hurt?” His Marines answered in sequence, no casualties.
The helms of Jinn soldiers toppled over and broke apart on a carpet of broken glass. Shields fell to the ground. Arms detached from bodies and the remaining Jinn disintegrated in seconds.
“Hale…” Elias’ transmission came in riddled with static. The Iron Heart lurched forward, breaking away from a band of energy that clung between him and Kallen like a spiderweb. The web between the other two Iron Hearts vanished with a pop.
“That was miserable,” Bodel said.
“What happened?”
“Our suits went into lockdown, everything off-line,” Elias said. He touched a hand to his helm, as if dizzy. “Feel like I’m going to puke.”
Kallen fell to her hands and knees and the armor rocked back and forth. Bodel and Elias went to her instantly.
“Yarrow,” Hale said to the corpsman, “see what you can do for her. Stacey, is Malal…dead?�
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Stacey ran the small triangle over the Malal-puddle and shook her head as she read off her forearm screen.
“The governor says he’s still…around. Sort of.” She put her hands on her hips.
“Can we take him with us?” Cortaro asked.
“In theory.” Stacey poked the muzzle of her carbine between the governor bands and lifted it up. The goo clung to the bottom of the governor and lifted up with it. “He’s still one big mass. I think we can carry him, somehow.”
“My drill sergeant always said it only takes one battlefield mistake to go home in a bucket,” Standish said, “and we seem to be fresh out of buckets.”
“Standish, empty out your pack and get Malal in there,” Cortaro said.
Standish went pale beneath his visor. “But, Gunney, I already carried that probe in my head back on Nibiru. Who knows what this thing will do to me. What about Yarrow? He’s still the new guy!”
Yarrow brandished his middle finger.
“That’s right, there’s some history between them,” Standish said.
“I’ll get it.” Egan opened the pouch on the small of his back and handed off spare batteries, ammo magazines and tubes of ration paste to Standish. He picked up the governor with his fingertips and lifted it up, Malal clinging to the governor like a soaked towel on a hook.
“OK, here we go.” Egan opened the pouch and tried to guide the lower edge of Malal into the opening. Malal flapped from side to side. Egan let out an un-Marine-like screech and stuffed the governor into the pouch, Malal’s mass draping over the side. Egan scooped it up and tried to stuff it inside.
“Oh God, why is it warm? Why is it warm, Stacey?” Egan got the last of Malal into the pouch and zipped it shut.
Bailey crept over to Standish.
“Did you get that on your armor cameras?” she asked.