“What is it?”
He shook his head. “I think it’s a bomb set on the APC. 1st Squad got loose. He was afraid they’d get to the APC and come back.”
“What about Mitch?”
“I don’t know.”
“Call him! Find out!”
“Billie—”
“Goddammit, Wilks!”
“Let me see if I can stop this timer. They’ll need a way off the planet. Go guard the door! There are still a couple of the androids running around loose!”
She stared at him.
“Go, do it! If they get us, we all die!”
Billie moved. She pushed the selector to full auto, looked out into the corridor, didn’t see anybody. She stood at the doorway, watching.
“Wilks?”
“I don’t have enough time! There’s got to be a failsafe, a break-off command but I don’t know the code. I’m trying to bust the APC controls open to shut the power down, maybe the destruct is run off of its systems. It’s all I can do.”
“How long?”
He shrugged. “Could be a minute, could be an hour. I can’t tell. The system won’t access it from here.”
Billie turned back to watch the corridor. If Mitch was alive, she’d go down and find him. If not, then it didn’t much matter.
“Damn!” Wilks said. “Damn, damn, damn!”
22
Fortunately for the squad they’d been issued IR viewers. The pirates had known the marines would be going into a dark hive, so they let them keep their red eyes.
So they could move in the dark.
The air pods might be buzzing around up there somewhere, but for now, the marines were better equipped and effectively invisible.
They approached the APC in the moonless night, guided by the landing craft’s heat leaks. Ramirez had the point; he was several hundred meters ahead of the rest of them. Bueller had told Ramirez to pull up short, scout the area, and then report back. It was likely that there were guards on the lander and Bueller had to figure a way to take them out without damaging the craft.
Bueller was looking away from the lander when all of a moment the night turned to blinding day.
“Shit!” he said. He flipped the IR flat screen up and turned, using his own vision.
The fireball from the APC was still spreading, dimmed somewhat and growing darker as it expanded outward and upward. They were far enough away so that the shock wave was fairly mild; it was like a hot wind, a sudden breeze off a desert at midday. Bueller dropped flat, but realized even as he did so that his reflexes were too slow. If it had been dangerous they’d already be past tense.
After a second pieces of wreckage began to patter down, some of it hit nearby, a solid chunk! as a heavy object dug into the rocky soil. A bit of flaming debris arced past, still climbing, and other burning shards fell like a holiday fireworks display, a hot rain that pocked the dirt and went dark or bounced and stayed lit even after coming to rest.
“Oh, man!" Chin said.
Bueller spoke into the com. “Ramirez? Respond.”
The opchan was quiet.
“Adios, Ramirez,” Mbutu said.
Bueller stared at the smoking ruin ahead of them. Ramirez must have gotten caught in the explosion. Damn!
He was sorry to lose Ramirez, but another cold fact lay in his belly like a bar of dry ice: with the APC destroyed, they were all fucked. End of mission. End of squad.
Damn.
* * * * *
Billie said to Wilks, “Can you contact the marines?”
The com board was alive with incoming calls, but all of them from the pirate androids, who were stranded on-planet when the APC blew. Wilks waved his hand over the cutoff control and the board fell silent. He touched another control.
“Fox Platoon, this is Sergeant Wilks. Anybody copy?”
For what seemed a long time to Billie there was no response. Oh, gods, Mitch!
“This is Bueller, 1st Squad.”
“Mitch!”
Wilks waved her to silence. “Bueller, what’s your situation?”
“I’ve got Blake, Smith, Chin, and Mbutu. We lost Ramirez when the APC went nova. How are things there?”
“Billie got the drop on the head bad guy. He’s no longer with us. There are probably some of his troops still loose on the ship but we’re armed and in the control center. I think we can clean them out okay.”
“Interesting that his androids aren’t First-Lawed,” Bueller said.
“Yeah, ain’t it, though. Listen up. I’ll light the other APC and come down after your squad. This mission is going to be an abort, Bueller. The bad guys already have one of the bugs back home. Once the government hears that, they’ll grab it. We don’t need a specimen anymore.”
“Copy that, Sergeant Wilks. We’ll find a safe place for the APC to land—”
Suddenly a voice cut in over that of Bueller’s, bleeding across a wide spectrum of the radio band.
“Help, somebody help! This is Walters, Second Officer. The androids put us down next to one of those fucking anthills and the things are coming out right toward us! Help us!”
Wilks said, “Dammit!” He fiddled with the com controls. “Walters, this is Wilks! Where are you? Give me a transponder beacon!”
“Jesus and Buddha! They’re all over us! No! Leave me alone! Aaahh!”
“The beacon, Walters, trigger the beacon!”
Billie stared at Wilks.
“There it is!” he said. “He managed to kick it on.”
Billie shook her head. “The things will take them into the hive. They’ll web them up in the egg room.”
Wilks nodded. “Yeah. Even with the beacon, we can’t get to them before they get implanted. They’re dead men.” He blew out a short sigh. “I’m gonna nuke the planet from breakaway orbit,” he said. “At least it’ll be quick. We’ve got enough hardware. While Stephens was bitching about the plasma rifles, I was moving bomb components past him disguised as spare parts. I can put a ring of fire down there that’ll trigger a thousand volcanoes. Between them and the nukes, they’ll scour the place like a sandblaster. Sterilize the whole fucking planet.”
“Sergeant Wilks,” came Mitch’s voice. “We heard the distress signal. It’s only a dozen klicks from here. We’re on the way.”
“Negative on that, mister. The mission is an abort, repeat, it is an abort. You find a spot for the APC and wait for it to collect you. That’s an order.”
“Sergeant, you know we can’t leave those men in there.”
Wilks’s jaw muscles danced as he ground his teeth together.
“We’ll call for the APC when we get them out,” Mitch said.
Billie didn’t understand what was going on. “Mitch! This is Billie! You can’t save the crew; they are as good as dead! Wait for the APC!”
“I—I can’t explain it, Billie, but we can’t just let them die.”
“Dammit, Mitch! What is this, some kind of marine honor thing? They’re gone! They might be breathing for a while longer but they’re dead if they get implanted! We couldn’t do anything for them even if you could get them out! It isn’t worth the risk!”
“I’m sorry, Billie. I love you.”
“Mitch!”
“Save your breath,” Wilks said. “You can’t stop them.”
“Why?”
But Wilks had nothing to say.
“Anything from the other squads?” Chin asked.
“No,” Bueller answered. “I expect if any of them made it and still have corns working we’ll see them at the hive.”
Smith shook his head. “Damn, I don’t like this.”
“Tell me about it,” Bueller said.
They moved off through the night.
* * * * *
There were four of Massey’s First-Law-less androids on the ship. Wilks and Billie found and killed them all.
“I don’t understand,” Billie said. “I didn’t think androids could hurt people.”
“Close,” he said. “They modified Asi
mov’s First Law of Robotics for androids. They can’t kill a human or even stand by and allow a human to be killed without trying to help. Otherwise there couldn’t be android surgeons; they wouldn’t be able to hurt somebody a little to save them from a bigger hurt or death. Apparently nobody told this group. Massey’s backing must be very high up in the scheme of things to have pulled that one off.”
Wilks programmed the remaining military lander, as well as the one from Massey’s ship. The company ship would hang in standby orbit in case it was needed; he could pilot it by remote from the planet. Massey had dropped the little pods with their crews in what was called snowball wrap—it burned off going down—but the pods couldn’t reach escape velocity to make it back out of the gravity well.
“I’m going down with you,” Billie said.
“Not a good idea. I’d rather have you on the ship.”
“I don’t much care what you want. I’m going.”
Wilks looked at her, shook his head. He’d tried to warn her, tried to keep her from getting involved with Bueller. It hadn’t worked. Now she was having to pay the price. The cost was steep. He hurt for her, but maybe it was the best way. Bueller and the others were probably history, no better off than those of their crew the monsters had dragged into their mound for baby food. None of the other squads had answered his calls. The mission was a fuckup from the first. Damn. “All right. You can go.” What else could he say?
The squad had a stroke of good luck. Just before dawn they happened on one of the air pods. The little vehicle must have run low on fuel and put down next to a stream to try to recharge the converters. It would take a long time for the stream’s water to power up the flywheel batteries—the thing wasn’t much bigger than a ditch and the current was slow-moving—but it was not as if the passengers had a lot of choice. Running dry of power at a hundred meters in the air would guarantee a landing nobody would walk away from.
Using her red eye, Blake spiked the two androids from two hundred meters out, one shot each.
“So, do I get a medal or something?”
“Sure, Blake. When we get back to Earth, I’ll put you in for the Marksmanship Badge.”
“Aw, I already got that one, Bueller. I was hoping for a Platinum Star, at least.”
“What the hell, that, too,” Bueller said.
They grinned at each other, but the expressions were tight, whistling-past-the-graveyard humor. Their chances of getting out of this alive were as slim as those of a spitball in a supernova.
But they were better off now. The pod held two more plasma rifles and chargers, a 10mm carbine, and two softslug pistols. Everybody was armed, a plasma weapon for everybody except Bueller, who took the carbine and a belt of grenades.
“How’s the pod’s charge?” Bueller asked.
“Almost dead,” Smith answered. “It’ll take sixteen hours at the stream’s flow rate to give it enough to lift. Even then, two passengers would be reaching.”
Bueller shrugged. “Let it keep charging. Maybe it’ll be useful when we get back.”
“ ‘When’?” Smith said. “My, ain’t you the optimist.”
“Let’s move out.”
Dawn lit the eastern skies with the first reddish glimmers of day.
" “Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning,” " Smith said.
“We’re marines,” Bueller said. “Let the Navy worry about that shit.”
They marched toward the alien mound.
As the APC fell from the Benedict’s belly into space, Billie held her breath. Outside the ship’s faux gravity field, she and Wilks were suddenly weightless, and that cold, pit-of-the-stomach flutter made her want to throw up. She swallowed the bile that threatened to spew and took deep breaths through her nose. Mitch was down there and still alive. If they could get to the hive before he went inside, she could maybe stop him. If they were too late for that, then she would grab a gun and go in after him.
“How long?” she asked.
“If we’re lucky, maybe an hour.”
“And if we aren’t lucky?”
“We’ve got to skip through the atmosphere at a bad angle to make the rendezvous,” he said. “If we do it wrong we could fry inside this can.”
“What happens to the planet if we die?”
“If I don’t put in a call to the ship in six hours, the computer drops the atomics and heads for home. Anybody left down there had better get their affairs in order real quick.”
Billie looked at Wilks.
“You know what those things can do where there’s only a few of them,” he said. “I’m not taking any chances on leaving a whole planet full of them lying around for some other poor sucker to stumble on.”
She nodded. He was right. If they died, it was best to take the entire world with them. It was the only way to be sure.
“There’s the entrance,” Mbutu said. “What’s the drill?”
“I’ll take the point,” Bueller said. “Move in after me in a two-and-two, Mbutu, you and Chin in front, Blake, you and Smith covering our asses. We have the signal from the transponder, we go straight to it, recover the crew, come straight out.”
“Easy as falling down a grav-shaft,” Smith said.
“You got a warped sense of humor,” Blake said. “Somebody must have jiggled the tech’s arm when he was installing your brain matrix.”
“Fuck you,” Smith said.
“If we get back to the ship, I’m all yours, lover.”
“That’s great, Blake,” Mbutu said, “give him a reason to die quicker.”
“Let’s move in, marines. People need our help in there.”
They were two hundred meters into the mound when the first wave of aliens came at them. A dozen of the things, moving impossibly fast, fangs bared, claws extended.
“Aim low!” Bueller ordered. “Take out their legs!”
He snapped off three three-round bursts, waving the carbine in a short arc to his left, leaving the center and right of the corridor clear.
Green beams flashed past him and burned limbs from bodies. Several of the things fell and skidded on the ridged floor and others tangled with them.
Bueller pulled the softslug pistol from his belt. The exterior armor would stop the handgun’s rounds, but when the things opened their mouths to extend those toothed rods, he fired his sidearm into the openings. The softslugs tore through the tissue inside the heads very nicely, and the projectiles stayed inside the harder skulls, doing enough damage to be fatal. Raided around like a mad bumblebee in a jar.
It was over in five seconds, and the twelve attacking aliens lay burned or shattered, smoke rising where the blood touched the hive. Not that something that acidic could really be called blood.
“Don’t step in the liquid,” Bueller ordered.
“Stuff’s not eating into the floor much,” Blake said.
“Makes sense that it wouldn’t,” Chin said.
“Wouldn’t do to have holes burned in the building every time some drone cut its finger.”
“We’re still five hundred meters away from our quarry,” Bueller said. “Let’s move.”
The APC bounced, the ride bone-jarring despite the seat restraints. The atmosphere was cloudy, and visibility was nil. Wilks hoped the computer controls knew what they were doing. The hull temperature was hot enough to melt silver and climbing. The belly, nose, and underwing tiles on the APC were designed to take a lot more friction than they were getting, but if the lander slewed too much one way or the other, the heat could be a problem. If the skin burned through, it could cause fatal damage to the occupants in a matter of a couple of seconds. At least it would be fast. “A-a-ar-are w-w-we g-g-gonna m-make it?” Wilks looked at Billie. His own voice chattered with the vibrations when he answered. “M-m-maybe.”
Another wave of monsters clattered toward the squad, hissing as they moved. Bueller’s carbine rumbled, a giant tearing heavy canvas, and the armor-piercing rounds punched through the bodies where they hit straight on, ricochete
d off when they struck at an angle, making sparks like flint on steel.
Chin was right behind Bueller and his plasma rifle flared, the pulses making the walls glow with a sickly verdant gleam.
One of the things tumbled, legs seared off at the knees. It skidded into Bueller, knocked him to the side against the wall.
Bueller slammed into the surface, his head protected by the helmet but his shoulder hit hard. The force of the impact twisted him so as he fell away he saw what happened to Chin as if watching it on a holoviewer in slow motion.
—The legless alien spun, scrabbled with its taloned hands, and slid in at Chin under his line of fire. Chin tried to lower his aim, but too late. The alien opened massive jaws and bit, latching on to Chin’s thigh—
—Chin screamed. He slammed the butt of the plasma rifle uselessly at the thing’s armored skull—
—Blake yelled, “Don’t move!” and slid over a step to shoot the alien that had Chin in its teeth—
—The alien’s legs were gone, but it still had its tail. It speared Chin’s belly, jammed the pointed tail through him so it emerged between two ribs on his back. The ribs broke through the skin, showing splintered bones—
—Blake fired, hit the alien behind the hinge of its jaws. The thing convulsed and the teeth sheared through Chin’s leg completely. For a second he stood there on one leg, the monster’s tail helping him stay up. Then he fell—
—Smith moved in to tug at Chin, the thing’s tail still through him, and another alien flew past Bueller, blocking for an instant his view. He managed to raise his weapon, even though it had all happened so fast he was still falling after his impact with the wall—
—Bueller fired. One of the slugs spanged off the alien, knocked its head sideways so it looked straight at Bueller. The other two rounds missed the alien. One of them found Chin and blew the top of his head off—
—Smith was close to the alien. As it twisted back to find him, Smith fired. He was too close. The focuser on the end of the plasma rifle nearly touched the thing. The beam pierced the alien’s armor, but it also partially splashed. The plasma sprayed and hit Smith in the face. It cooked the flesh, boiled his eyes into steam. He fell back as the alien collapsed on him, its acid blood spewing onto Smith, eating through his armor and body, stinking smoke rising in a hot blast—
[Aliens 01] - Earth Hive Page 15