Parasites

by Jason Halstead

  “Settle in and stay quiet, they’ve spotted some kind of animals and want to find a way around them,” he explained.

  “I should go!” Dr. Bronislav said, stepping forward.

  Jeremy held his hand out, touching the man on the chest. “Doctor, they don’t want us up there and you don’t want to be up there.”

  “What? Why? They’re not going—“

  An inhuman screech was followed by an all too human shout. A distant crackling release of a plasma rifle followed shortly. Another shot followed quickly, then more shouts and a scream.

  Jeremy swore and hoisted his rifle to his shoulder. “Fall back!” He said to them. He stepped forward, hesitating. Another scream, this one clearly a human in pain, made him bite his lip hard enough to draw blood. “All right,” he said, thinking of his daughter. “This is for you, baby.”

  Jeremy rushed forward, charging through the waist-high grasses to the point where he’d met Lance Corporal Kate and then passing it. The environmental suit was nowhere near as advanced as the Marines armor was, but the display on the visor did warn him of the life forms ahead.

  Two Marines, one down and the other kneeling next to the fallen one. Kate was the Marine still functional, but Jeremy could see the blood on her uniform and the side of her face and neck. Two of the animals were on the ground and another was chasing itself around in circles trying to bite at the smoldering hide on its side. Two more remained and one darted forward even as Jeremy fired, and missed, the remaining alien predator.

  Lance Corporal Kate screamed again, though it didn’t sound like pain so much as frustration. Jeremy glanced at her very briefly and saw her struggling with the cat — it had her plasma rifle clamped between its jaws and even had its two forelimbs around it. He re-focused on the other cat and saw that it had turned to glare at him. Jeremy felt his overwhelmed suit hum as it tried to compensate for his elevated heart rate and perspiration, then it went still just as abruptly.

  The suit went dead around him, dropping heavily against him and weighing him down. His rifle dipped with the sudden dead weight, moving it enough to make the cat leap to the side then rush towards him. Jeremy cursed and yanked the rifle up an over, then yanked the trigger in an amateur move that spat in the face of every session on the firing range he’d been forced to endure.

  The grasses and dirt in front of the charging cat burst up, kicking superheated plasma, molten flecks of dirt, and burning motes of grass into its face. It stumbled to a halt and batted with its front paws at its face, then tried rubbing it on the ground. Baffled by the pain and its inability to stop it, the cat turned and fled through the grasses, disappearing before Jeremy could recover his wits and shoot it again.

  “Fiona!” Jeremy gasped, struggling forward against the dead weight of the environmental suit. They were designed to allow for unpowered movement in the event of an emergency, but it felt clumsy and awkward. He overbalanced and fell forward, then scrambled to roll over and climb back to his hands and knees. When he righted himself he found the Marine fire team leader staring at him with her V-bar vibrating combat knife in hand. Not only was it held in a fighting grip but fresh red blood dripped from it.

  “You okay?” She asked between breaths.

  Jeremy nodded, then reached up to twist the seals on his helmet and pop it off. The hiss of escaping atmosphere was a relief rather than a scare, it had already began to grow uncomfortably warm in the overloaded suit. “Yeah, suit died on me.”

  “Potter’s dead,” she continued. “Cats got him. Damn shame, he was a wizard with a plasma rifle.”

  Jeremy didn’t know what to say. Wasn’t being good with a rifle a prerequisite for being a Marine? “How about you, you look bad.”

  “Don’t know if I should say thanks or tell you to fuck off,” Kate said. “Hurts like hell, but I’ll live. Just scratched my face.”

  Jeremy picked himself up and shambled over to her. He studied the scratches and frowned, they were a lot more than scratches. “You need stitches, those are deep. Two scraped bone.”

  Her answering smile had a deformed and gruesome look to it. “Occupational hazard.”

  “So now what?” Jeremy asked, knowing she wouldn’t let them help her until they were out of danger. He glanced back and Dr. Rice and the others staring at them, with Private Palenko standing watch over them.

  “More occupational hazards,” she muttered.

  Jeremy spun to look at her. She was staring past the cluster of line of trees and bushes the cats had been hiding in. He followed her gaze and saw what had her attention, a small herd of giant four legged creatures that made elephants look like children’s toys.

  “What the fuck are those?” He blurted out.

  “Dinosaurs.”

  Chapter 5

  “Mr. Sinclair, I trust next time you’ll remember your purpose here when an opportunity such as that arises!“

  “Piotr, enough!” Dr. Rice had a glare matching her words. Jeremy was glad she seemed to be on his side. “We lost one of our people back there to the smaller species, we don’t know how the large ones would have reacted to our presence.”

  “Bah! They were herbivorous! You saw them, they were no threat!”

  “They were five, six times as tall as we are and probably outweighed us by a factor of one hundred. Whether they wanted to eat us or not, causing them to stampede would have ended our mission.”

  Jeremy found himself nodding. He’d been more in line with Lance Corporal Kate at the time that any native was a potential enemy. Now that he’d had time to think about it, he found himself agreeing more with Dr. Rice and Dr. Bronislav. Jeremy was a technician. Being a scientist had never been what he’d wanted out of life, but he was good at it and it was interesting. What had once been a cover story had become the real him.

  He stretched and looked around. They were resting and eating a hastily put together meal of protein powders and flavored water, all of it from the ship. The scans continued to read positive for the planet being safe for human consumption, but so far they’d only tested the air. All of them, in fact, had their helmets off.

  Jeremy continued to slug around in his unpowered suit – stripping out of it meant being naked. A tech that was slated to be the science post’s systems specialist, Anita Cuseros, had already checked out the power supply and pointed out that he’d overloaded it to the point where the breaker had blown on it and the unit had still managed to fuse itself into a melted mass of scrap.

  He wasn’t the only one, one of the Marines that had landed safely had a suit that had lost power too. Freak occurrence, they’d said. His entire power pack had blown, but at least the suit was designed so that the explosion had been directed away from his body. Now the Marine was struggling to do anything – the military suits were far heavier than the civilian versions.

  The good news was that the other two transports had landed without incident. Technicians, some from the ship and some contracted to stay with the science colony, scrambled to unload and erect the equipment. The first was a defensive perimeter consisting of energized walls matched with ultrasonic generators. The high frequency sound waves had been tested to drive animals away and inflict debilitating nausea on humans and the three other species of primates that survived the industrialization of Earth.

  Some excitement from a section of the wall caused Jeremy to look over. A tech came jogging back, cursing as he ran. “Just blew a coil,” he called out when he saw the questioning look on Jeremy’s face. He hurried over to a large crate and pulled out a fresh one. He tossed the used one to the ground and jogged back past without a word.

  “Jeremy?”

  He ignored his boss. The rifle had been returned to the Marines, lessening his load. He walked over stiffly to the discarded coil and bent down to pick it up. He picked it up and checked it over, looking for obvious signs of damage. A half twist later he found it, a crack that showed scorch marks as the supercharged gas inside had blown free of it. He frowned, studying it a moment longer,
then tossed it back on the trampled grass.

  “Problem?”

  Jeremy jumped, he hadn’t heard Dr. Rice approach. “No, just curious. We seem to be having a lot of problems with our equipment.”

  “Was there something wrong with that too?” Rice asked him.

  He shrugged. “I mean yeah, obviously. It’s blown, but it looks like it had a weak spot on the coil.”

  “That’s a pretty standard part,” She observed.

  Jeremy nodded. “I know, but statistically it happens.”

  She grunted. “Don’t wander off like that. I need an assistant and a replacement is years away. The compound’s not secure yet.”

  He jerked his head around to look at her. “We’re surrounded by Marines and other people! Doctor, there’s no chance of anything happening!”

  She opened her mouth but was interrupted by a distant screech that echoed from the jungle beyond the swamp. After the last traces of the primal scream faded she lowered her voice and said, “I don’t think there’s anywhere that’s safe on this planet, Mr. Sinclair.”

  Chapter 6

  “Hey.”

  Jeremy looked up from the lab supplies he was sorting and storing. Dr. Rice was leaning against a pre-fabricated shelving unit he’d already put together. He wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand and leaned back. “Something wrong, Doctor Rice?”

  “Let’s take a break,” she ran her fingers through her hair to emphasize the need for a break.

  He glanced back at the various supplies he’d been storing. They could wait. He grabbed his nearby bottle of water and took a drink from it then turned back to her. “You talked me into it.”

  Her lips curled into a thin smile that didn’t reach her eyes. Jeremy noticed and felt himself tense up. This was more than just taking a break, she had an agenda. His stomach fluttered as he realized she was probably done waiting for him to explain the inconsistencies in his past. Almost a week since they’d landed. Deciding to take the initiative and, hopefully, control the damage, he asked, “So what’s up?”

  “I’m not good with electronics but everybody’s picked up on what you’d noticed on day one,” she said. “Things tend to break here. A lot. I’ve been through three personal assistants already and most of our gear in here hasn’t even been fired up but the diagnostics when we bring them online show problems.”

  He nodded. It seemed Vitalis, the name that the buoy in space had been transmitting, wasn’t friendly to technology. The buoy had marked it as a salvage claim for someone named Klous Hildebrand, captain of a small transport ship named the Black Hole. The ruins of what they all assumed was the Black Hole were several miles away. It had landed or crashed on a secluded beach. Inland their orbital images had shown a deep jungle but both the jungle and the beach were surrounded completely by mountains.

  “Have the Marines found any survivors?”

  Jeremy narrowed his eyes slightly at the question. “How would I know?” He said defensively. “You’re on the need to know list, not me.”

  “I just wondered if you’d heard anything from that Marine. Kate, wasn’t it? The corporal.”

  “Lance Corporal Kate,” he corrected. He felt a flash of irritation at Dr. Rice’s ignorance. “Fiona is her first name, not Kate.”

  Dr. Rice’s eyes widened for a moment. She recovered quickly. “Mr. Sinclair…Jeremy. This is silly. We’re going to be working together for a long time. Maybe longer if they can’t get the second shuttle fixed. When it’s just us let’s drop the formalities, okay?”

  He nodded. “That’s fine, but Synnamon is quite a mouthful.”

  She smiled. “I’m sure we’ll manage. Tell me about yourself. We need to get to know each other if we’re going to be relying on each other. Obviously our dossiers don’t have a full picture.”

  Jeremy’s shoulders tensed and his stomach cramped. She was good, she’d distracted him then brought it right back around to him. “I think they did a pretty good job.”

  She smirked. “No mention of a Navy past for you. Or is that just another cover story? Are you an agent for some Coalition government agency? Or maybe a private business slipped you in? Is the story about your daughter true, or just something crafted up to win me over based on some psych profile?”

  Jeremy took a step back, shocked by her sudden intensity. He’d been prepared for it but even the best of plans could go up in smoke and he knew it. He’d lived it, in fact. “Doc— Synnamon, no! It’s nothing like that. Jasmine is real. I’m real – this is who I am. I did a lot of stupid shit when I was younger, it’s behind me and I don’t like people thinking poorly of me because of it. That’s all.”

  “Well whatever it was there’s no record of it,” Synnamon went on. “So either you covered your tracks well or it wasn’t as bad as you think it was.”

  He shrugged. The more talking she did the less he had to. The fewer lies he had to tell the easier it would be to get out of it.

  “You promised me an explanation though.”

  Jeremy groaned. He had promised her. He hadn’t killed anybody, and it had been over a decade ago. Military crimes had no statute of limitations though, even if his hadn’t been treasonous. He opened and closed his mouth, then let out a sigh. “I—“

  A banging on the door of the lab interrupted him. It was Private Palenko. “Jer, Doc, there’s a situation in the yard!”

  The private was gone just as quickly. Jeremy looked to his boss and saw her frown. “To be continued,” she said, then walked after the Marine.

  Jeremy followed, stretching his legs to match her brisk pace. They’d traded in the uncomfortable suits for jumpsuits and regular clothing days ago, something he was grateful for. “What’s going on?” He wondered aloud.

  They cleared the outer seal on the lab and were immediately hit by the wet heat of Vitalis. It pressed against them like a wet blanket, nearly making them stop. A primal roar slammed into them, making them take the step back the climate had been unable to provoke.

  “What the hell is that?” Jeremy wondered aloud.

  “ Look!” Synnamon shouted, pointing over the makeshift barrier that now surrounded the science colony.

  Jeremy followed her finger and saw something straight out of an entertainment vid. It was massive, nearly as big as the quadruped monsters they’d encountered on their first day in. This one walked on two legs, but it had arms as well. Heavily muscled arms that dipped below the edge of the barrier. It was still some distance away but it was looking at the settlement as it approached.

  Chapter 7

  Two pulse laser turrets whirred to life. Both rotated to bring their cannons on line with the approaching creature, but the one closer to the east facing gate shuddered and ground to a halt with a metal on metal screech. Smoke rose up from the motor housing, giving probably cause to the failure.

  The third and fourth turrets had no line of site, being on the southern and western walls. Jeremy watched as Marines were running to the barricades and falling into position, their rifles at the ready. Some still held their laser rifles but the heavy gunners in the fire teams had either plasma rifles or, in the case of Sergeant Whiskers, the Marine squad leader, a modified slug thrower.

  Ever since they’d learned how resistant the native creatures were to the focused energy weapons many Marines had been trying to come up with alternatives. Grenades were popular, but finite. Ballistic weapons were the next best thing but they were in limited supply.

  The lone unit opened up, letting loose a powerful hum that raised the hair on Jeremy’s arms as the capacitors charged and released at roughly one second intervals. The creature let loose a roar Jeremy suspected he’d be hearing in his right before he woke up in a cold sweat for the next several weeks. What amazed him was that it kept coming at them.

  Pulse lasers possessed enough focused energy to burn a hole through a quarter inch steel plate with a single pulse. The creature was smoking from where the invisible beams struck it, but still it kept on. A prelim
inary study conducted by Dr. Rice — Synnamon — had shown the hair follicles of the beats they had encountered and some other smaller creatures that had been acquired for study were partially crystalline. The crystallization process was theorized to break up the energy weapons destructive power much like a military grade diffusion shielding, only the organic version seemed to work better.

  “I thought the ultrasonics would keep these things away?” Synnamon cried as it closed to less than fifty yards of the turret.

  “I think it just pissed this one off,” He replied. He backed away as it thundered on, fresh smoke coming as new pulses struck against it. “We need to go!”

  Synnamon hesitated. They stared as the cross between a tyrannosaurus and a few other creatures he couldn’t place smashed one massive front limb into the turret and tore it off the raised dais it was on. The head lunged forward, powerful jaws crushing down on it and squashing the Marine trapped inside before he even knew what had happened. Or so Jeremy hoped, he didn’t want to imagine what it would be like to feel the teeth of a beast like that eating him alive.

  The remains of the turret flew through the air, rolling and hopping along the ground past the gate. The creature swung its head, cold avian eyes sweeping across the compound and the people within it. Jeremy felt Synnamon grab his arm but he couldn’t bring himself to look away from the monster.

  “Godzilla,” Jeremy muttered, remembering the latest in a string of monster vid remakes that had originated on Earth.

  “What?” Synnamon asked.

  “Light it up Marines!” Sergeant Whiskers shouted, then led the charge by aiming down the barrel of the collector’s item he called a weapon. It was a Century Arms magnetic accelerator rifle. Jeremy had no idea what the specs were on it, but he’d heard Fiona talk about it once and she’d sounded like she admired it.