Max tore into the first drones with fists of fire and death, each arm firing simultaneously. Its massive head turned and took in the nature of the threat; lines of code swept across Ellis’s screens at lightning speed.
The aliens attacked, responding to their primal programming to protect the queen from any threat. Another dozen of the agile creatures burst from all sides and ran at the Max, screaming.
A giant step and the Max was surrounded. The Berserker turned and spouted flame from its fist in a wide arc. The shrill inhuman cries were cut short, the drones cut to ash where they stood.
The other fist pulsed out rounds of explosive armor-piercers, obliterating the aggressors on Max’s left side. Exoflesh shattered and flew. The greenish acid of their blood sent up streams of hissing smoke where it sprayed.
Ellis was there, he could feel the heat and the rush as Max took another step; alien anatomy crunched into fragments under one half-ton trisected foot.
From behind melted-looking columns of dusky secretion, another string of feral soldiers launched their offensive. Trumpeting shrilly, three of the tenacious things scurried at him, jaws snatching at the air.
Max activated the grenade launcher and placed an M5 frag round less than a meter in front of them. The grenade bounced and exploded, scattering huge chunks of alien body outward in a blast of white.
A caterwauling drone came from behind, tail writhing as it leaped onto the Max. The thick rear talons scrabbled for purchase on Max’s shielded armor as the dark monster latched onto his head.
The Max’s sensors gave readings on the creature’s hand as his left hand pivoted backward. A short burst of bullets cut through the alien grin and the body fell away, lifeless.
Ellis checked reads as Max reached maximum fire potential; it would hold there until Pop called the nest clear. The carefully modified heart pounded loaded fluids through the interfaced volunteer, sending him into a state of extreme crisis; the Max responded in a mechanically enhanced frenzy that allowed it to destroy as nothing else could.
Ellis grinned as yet another of the mindless squealing creatures charged the Max. It spun and slashed with its skeletal tail. Before the barbed points even reached Max, the drone that it belonged to was dead.
Ellis scanned Lara’s coordinates and punched the information to Max. The massive warrior started toward Teape’s transmitter, a few hundred meters away and in another offshoot. It moved slowly, the enhanced hydraulics burdened by the massive lower legs. With each step, the fully pivotal arms tracked and responded, clearing blocked passages and spraying bullets at anything in motion.
Again, Ellis felt as though he were inside the Max, the reality of the lab secondary even as he tapped keys and adjusted scanning. A drone clattered up from behind and Max’s rifle cut it through the middle, intestine and acid foaming in spurts from the bisected animal. There were distant keening shrieks from all around as Max moved efficiently forward, delivering death and destruction to the parasitic breed.
Lara spoke smoothly into his ear. “Teape says no one worth saving, forget about override.”
“Copy.”
The override would stretch the boundaries of Teape’s implant signal in case of viable survivors, shielding them from Max’s weapons. Ellis felt a twinge of guilt for enjoying himself; the miners and technicians that had been trapped in the shaft were either dead or dying, and he had forgotten for a moment. This wasn’t a game.
He took a deep breath and blew it out, then concentrated on getting to Teape.
* * *
Hell again. Hell-o again, Teepee.
Teape tried to concentrate on his mouth-breathing; in and out, slow. The mask filtered out the worst of the stink, but it was still powerful.
“Please…”
Teape couldn’t turn his head completely away; still-drying alien secretions had him webbed firmly in place. The ruined face of the pleading man was just visible if he forced his gaze to the right. Each time he spoke, Teape had to look.
One of only two or three Deep 4 techs still alive, the man had repeated the same word every few seconds since Teape had been placed. Once or twice the pleading man had paused longer, and Teape had hoped he was dead.
“Please…”
No such luck; this was hell. It looked the same as always, the variations not worth mentioning; dark and moist, hot, evil smelling. Teape’s left leg was asleep, pinned at an awkward angle, but he was close to standing otherwise; facing the large, pebbled egg that held his own personal parasite. All of it was familiar and horrifying, fodder for the Voice that giggled now. But the most horrible thing…
…is that he wants you to help him, Teepee. Why don’t you say something, ease the poor man’s pain? Tell him that death will be soon, just be patient. Tell him to feel the life inside of him, feel its wormy little convulsions about to tear its way out—
“Please…”
Teape breathed deeply. He heard alien screams and gunfire and held on to the sounds; the Max was coming.
There was a clatter of hissing activity from somewhere in the room, reverberations clouding the source; the workers rushed to protect their queen, their defenses falling impotent in the face of the raging Berserker. Teape had watched the tapes; he knew what was happening.
Once, the sound of Max was enough to make everything better, to fill him with relief and numb gratitude. And although he was relieved, much of the damage had already been done; he had listened to the cries of the damned, surrounded by nightmarish creatures and morbid death. Again. The Voice whispered of the new dreams to come and the things that could still go wrong.
From his position, he could only see the top of the egg in front of him and a few yards of repulsive architecture. That and the pleading man, or at least part of him; the survivor had been placed at a strange angle, his ravaged face turned up. It looked as though one of his eyes was missing, although Teape wasn’t positive. Not that it mattered.
The Voice tried to claw in, but Teape concentrated on listening to Max. He could hear shrieks of alien rage in between explosions and weapons fire, the whoosh of sudden flame drowning out the almost constant hissing. Max was getting closer.
“Please…”
Teape closed his eyes, wishing that he were anywhere else. He could hear one of the others gasping loudly, a woman behind him and to the left. She had moaned once. She and the pleader may have been the only ones, although Teape thought he had heard a whispery laugh when they’d brought him in. It was possible; he’d heard a lot of strange laughter in hell.
A whiff of yeast and Teape opened his eyes. The top of the egg in front of him had opened, the petals just settling. Inside, a membranous sac pulsed gently. A long, multijointed finger extended through the surface, its tiny claw glistening and gooey, and was joined by three others as the alien parasite pulled itself up. Its prehensile tail followed, snakelike.
It’s gonna feel so nice, those muscular little legs wrapped around your skull, that reptilian tail squeezing at your throat. That long, sticky ovipositor sliding against the screen—
Teape tried to breathe, to get in a deep breath before it came. The mask and hood were designed to hold out against the face-hugging carriers of the alien embryos, at least until Max came.
Except for this time, maybe. Maybe this is the time when Teape’s mask slipped, too bad so sad, had to put him down after it impregnated him—
“Please…” whispered the dying man, and Teape hated him for not being dead already.
The alien child coiled its tail beneath it and leapt.
* * *
Lara watched in horror and pity as Teape’s remote was suddenly obscured by the crablike carrier. Its spidery, muscular legs blocked most of the lens; Teape’s pulse shot up, and his helmet cam trembled and shook as much as the alien secretions would allow.
Behind her, Sturges let out a strangled moan. Lara concentrated on her statistics and monitors. It must be awful for him, to see exactly what had become of his coworkers and friends; there was nothing she could say to
make it less horrible. The trapped men and women of his operation had been devastated both mentally and physically, in pain and terror. Those who had died quickly had been the lucky ones.
The Max had almost reached the egg chamber. A pair of drones flew out from behind the jagged entrance and charged. Max’s pulse rifle spurted explosive death, the alien squeals cut short by the tight grouping of the suit’s interfaced aim. The flare’s glow was lower here, the muted green lined with shadows.
A slurred, tense whisper over the headset from Teape. Lara could hear barely restrained panic and desperation in his voice.
“Any way we can hurry this along?”
“Teape, we’re almost in. Max is at the door, you’re clear in two minutes, over.”
Jess followed up immediately from the shaft’s spur. “You hang in there, man, we’re right behind him!”
A small exaggeration, but it sounded better than “When Max finishes and Pop says okay, we’ll work our way to your position.” Lara felt a sudden flush of guilt for her participation on Nemesis. Nobody deserved a job like Teape’s. Particularly Teape.
“Yeah, okay. Okay.” A shaky mumble was the best he could do beneath the fitted mask and the ticklike body still seeking his mouth.
The Max stepped into the hatchery; scattered debris and exoskeleton crunched and ground underfoot.
There was a high, keening hiss that filled the chamber; Lara couldn’t see her, but knew that the queen had called in the remaining drones with that dreadful cry.
“How does—it know where to find him?” Sturges had reclaimed some semblance of composure.
Pop tapped his cutout. “The point man carries a homing beacon that directs Max in to him—and therefore the queen, the heart of the infestation. It’s a surgical implant, controlled by ship computers.”
The Max tracked both arms to the dark corner and opened fire. The spout of flame illuminated the tall chamber and revealed the grotesque queen perched over her gelid egg sac. She screamed, a brutal and loathsome howl that resounded through the smoking gloom.
“Ellis, flare—”
“Copy, over.”
Even as he spoke, the Max launched a twenty-minute incendiary out of a tube behind one massive shoulder; at the same time it blasted the queen’s sac with the grenade launcher, M108 canister rounds that splattered into the translucent membrane and exploded titanium buckshot.
The flare revealed Teape and the decimated survivors, melted into a tower of secretion directly west of the queen. The base was surrounded by leathery shells, all of them open.
Lara could see the parasite carrier latched onto Teape, stained green by the flare. Its murdering ticklike body covered his face, the thick tail looped around Teape’s neck to ensure a tight hold; the creature would actively seek to fulfill its duty until the last possible second, to deposit the drone fetus into its host body through a dripping tube—
Lara swallowed, hard. She was almost relieved as the last few drones struck, leaping in front of the Max.
There were only three and they went at Max savagely, raging blurs of teeth and talon. The Max raised his hand and they went down in a splashy, clattering mass of twitching limbs.
Sturges hitched in his breath. “But your man, Teape—”
Pop nodded. “The beacon also sends out a coded override signal to Max’s scanners. The suit’s fitted to account for fragmentation and ricochet, even adjusts its groupings differently. The Max’s weapons automatically cut off before anything can get to Teape. Point man wears acid-splash as a backup, but it’s never taken any damage—”
Pop stopped and smiled grimly, motioning at Sturges to watch the screen. Lara tried to focus on Max’s reads, but she couldn’t help watching this each time, at least part of it; truly something to see.
The queen had pulled free of her swollen birthing canal in ropy strings of adhesive, prepared to battle and eliminate the invader of her domain; it was the last resort, her minions fallen and children slaughtered. The pure hatred and malice that emanated from the giant mother was awesome, a match to her towering form. A mammoth ebony crest radiated back from her sloping head, her jaws and inner jaws in a frenzy of gnashing fury.
Lara almost smiled; Ellis was probably wetting his pants.
* * *
Ellis stared at the screen, mouth open, eyes wide and unblinking.
God, look at her—
In a flash, the queen of the obliterated hive leaped back and away, a defensive movement that indicated intelligence and incredible power. She wouldn’t repeat the useless offenses of her soldiers, and her size and strange agility added to her formidability. She moved behind the banked secretions that held Teape; the Max would have to go to her.
“Ellis, pump up the infra, over,” said Lara.
Ellis’s fingers played across his keyboard. He sent a blast of liquid flame toward Teape’s feet, the shells shriveling from the intense heat directly in front of them. As they smoked and melted, the frustrated face-hugger released itself from Teape’s face and jumped. The Max took it out with a single burst of his rifle. The carrier practically exploded.
Ellis felt a rush of relief; if it had gotten through the mask, it would have remained, preparing the host for implantation until destroyed—Teape was still okay, at least physically. Ellis was staggered by the depths of the man’s courage… or masochism. Whatever it was that kept him going.
The infras outlined the queen’s sudden movement. Max tracked with the grenade launcher, Teape’s transmitter still obscuring the shot.
She clattered and leaped against the wall behind her, scaled half the height of the alien tower in one fluid bound. Screaming, she flew at the Max from above, talons stretched and grasping.
Ellis watched in amazement as the cutout signal dropped out of range; the Max’s scanners let the weapons loose and three HEAPs smacked her out of the air. The M38 rounds exploded as they penetrated her exoskeleton; she blew to pieces in a deafening burst of flame and acid gore.
From far away, he heard Lara and Pop talking. The Max launched a series of incendiary rounds into one wall of the chamber and tracked the phosphorous smoke with his pulse rifle, analyzing the motion at the same time.
“Looks wiped,” said Lara.
“Agreed. Ellis, flush adrenaline, over.”
Ellis blew out slowly and worked the IV bank sequence that would take Max down by well-rehearsed reflex; he was still reeling from watching the Max inside of an actual hostile infestation—the physical manifestation of an interface program that he had operated. Max was…
…he’s power. A man’s need to destroy, plotted by a computer and encased in steel—
God, the simulation had been nothing like this! Watching him in action against the hive, Ellis had felt exhilarated. He’d felt—
—strong? Like it was you?
The Max shuddered; its arms drooped. Ellis was suddenly tired; he hadn’t been there, had he?
“Restore sedation, over.”
“Injected and rising, over.” His own voice sounded distant to him.
Ellis watched Max’s stance shift, the weight distributing to even out, the weapons powering down as the upper limbs settled into their lock.
“Sedation restored.”
Pop was cool efficiency again, back to his Company show. “Got a clearing to check out, ground leader, and our point man needs a hand. Mop up and let’s get out of here. Looks like you got your mine back, Sturges.”
Almost his last performance, thank God. He’d be gone in three months at the outside. Ellis was fairly certain that he didn’t like Commander Izzard much, and that the feeling was mutual.
Ellis watched the walls of the alien nest begin to burn, suddenly quite relieved about a lot of things; this had been the right choice, to work with Max. Not everyone was cut out to be a soldier, and this way he still got to play a part in the extermination of the parasitic breed.
He could be happy here.
8
Sergeant Death was courageously battling
the Imperial guard with only his Zim gun and a handful of shrapnel grenades, blowing the biomorphs to pieces as he made his way to Sister Spine; his busty sidekick had been knocked cold in the brutal ambush. Although it had never been stated openly, there were strong indications that Death and the Sister had something goin’ on; Jess had thought so when he was a kid and he thought so now.
Pulaski walked into the mess hall fresh from his second workout of the day and another shower. His huge biceps and pecs bulged out of his tank, pumped up from lifting big-time iron. He kind of looked like Sergeant Death with his comic-book body, ripped and veined to the point of parody. Jess glanced back at the wide video screen and swallowed a chunk of watery carrot.
“Put you in black fatigues and a hood, you’d be Sergeant Death, Candyman.”
Pulaski grabbed a tray from a stacked shelf and punched up dinner, scowling at the consistently poor selection.
“Yeah, I heard that before.”
Jess shrugged mentally and forked through his stew for another carrot. Pulaski was still coming down from Deep 4; the cleanup had been uneventful, and the Candyman was usually a little moody after a wiped mission—working out for up to six hours a day and stomping around restlessly. Since they’d left Traon the night before, he’d been pissy.
Jess speared another orange chunk and went back to watching Death scoop up the girl and make for safety. The reconstituted vegetable was as squishy and tasteless as the last. It wasn’t that he liked the carrots; they were just the only thing he recognized in the brown-soaked mass on his plate.
Pulaski sat down beside him and dropped his tray on the table; he smelled like soap and deodorant stick. “How many times we risk our necks for dorks like Sturges? And then Max don’t leave nothin’ worth shooting anyway?”
Jess shook his head. “That’s the job, Candyman. Maybe you should sign up for Max—they could build you an extralarge suit.”
Pulaski snorted and uncapped his water. “Gimme a break. Even I ain’t crazy enough to volunteer for that shit.”
Jess looked up as Sergeant Death left the Sister and took off to fight the Overlord. Coming up was the best fight scene in this episode, with the bad guy’s pet biotiger. He could still remember the first time he’d seen this one; he’d been eleven or twelve, up early on Saturday morning with his eight-year-old brother, Charles—still three years away from the stray bullet that would end his young life and change Martin Jess’s forever. They’d eaten cold cereal on the floor in the tiny den and clapped when Death took out the tiger with his bare hands, waking their mother in their excitement. Sergeant Death had been their favorite…
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