by Bobby Adair
I dive for the floor, just to change my course, and the Trog zips past above me.
Silva’s rounds follow it.
“I got it,” Brice shouts. “You get that Gray.”
I trust them and max grav to close the gap, grabbing the Gray by his neck as his hand grasps the doorknob.
Spinning around with a one-handed grip on my railgun I bring it to bear on the last Trog, but see him hitting the far wall and falling limply toward the floor.
“That’s it for the Trogs,” I tell them, dropping my gun to dangle on its harness. I spin and go to work placing a C4 charge on the door, look at the Gray in my hand and smile. “You’re going to tell those fuckers in the hall aren’t you?” I laugh, knowing I don’t have to booby trap them. They know they can’t come through without dying. It’s better than a booby trap.
I laugh. It probably doesn’t matter, at least not for a little bit. Any Trogs who were out there have to be flailing in the void right now.
“Grab ‘em up,” says Brice. “Let’s go.”
We have all six Grays.
Now for the hard part. Or easy part. I can only guess which. As far as I know, nothing like this has ever been tried before.
Chapter 50
We’ve consolidated our position.
The Grays are all sitting at the bottom of the empty pool. I’m standing in front of them with Phil at my side. Brice and Silva are behind them, guns unnecessarily ready.
Jill is perched on the edge of the pool with Lenox and Mostyn beside her. Jill’s platoon is securing sublevel seven. They didn’t have to fight for it, all of the Trogs in the hall, the lobby, or in front of the rec room were blown out into space when the station decompressed.
The asteroid is still crawling with Trogs, and they’ll be coming to rescue their masters.
Blair is clucking away on the comm, although I’ve tuned her out, instead instructing Jablonsky to listen in and warn me if the Trogs attack that level.
“Phil,” I ask, looking at the six Grays. “Which one is in charge?”
Phil points to the second one from the end, the one I caught trying to escape through the door.
“Can you communicate with it?”
Phil nods.
“Are you communicating with it now?”
Phil nods again.
“Tell it we want the Trogs to surrender.”
“I did,” Phil tells me. “It’s arguing with me.”
“How so?”
Phil turns to me. “You know. Hairy monkey this, ignorant beast that. Insulting things. It doesn’t recognize us as worthy of having a conversation with.”
“So it won’t tell its Trogs to surrender.”
Phil shakes his head. “It’s confident in the next hour or so, we’ll all be dead. It keeps telling me to leave it alone so it can rest and I can prepare to die with dignity.”
“Uh, huh.” I need to make a decision, and as is not uncommon, I have too many variables and too many choices.
I step over to the Grays and tap the leader on the head with my knuckles. It glares at me and shakes its head to knock my hand away. “This one?” I ask. “This one is the leader?”
“Yes,” Phil answers.
I nod as I think through what I want to do. Maybe it’ll work. Maybe not. What do I have to lose by trying? My humanity? I don’t think so. Grays aren’t humans. Like Trogs, they’re monsters. It should be easy to do what I have in mind.
I reach down, snap the Gray up by his neck, and throw him. He flies three meters and hits the wall of the pool.
Phil grunts like he’s been punched.
Others gasp.
Nobody expected that.
The Gray is on the floor of the pool, rolling over and picking himself up. I pounce on him, kicking him in the head and sending his spindly body spinning again. I have to jump over to where he lands and catch him. He’s moving all jerky and quick, quick for a Gray. He’s afraid. I can feel the emotion flowing out of him as palpable as Gray stink back in my house.
Phil is babbling something, but he doesn’t understand what I need to do. He’s too humane in his heart, that’s why I didn’t consult him before I started.
I grab one of the Gray’s spindly arms, lift him and carry him until I’m standing a pace in front of the other five. I throw him to the ground and smash my boot onto his leg, and increase the downward grav in my suit while I twist and grind. The leg starts to come apart beneath my foot. I feel the pulpy tissue separate and ooze.
Phil’s crying out. He’s horrified. I turn down his comm so I won’t have to listen at full volume.
When I lift my foot, the Gray twig is flattened, mush.
It’s terrified. I can feel it, though at the same time, can’t comprehend it.
“It’s asking you to stop,” Phil shouts, his voice cracking with distress.
I know, or hope he’s not empathizing too much with the little beast, and I know the Gray is forcing Phil to share its suffering. It’s like a broadcast, and I’m only getting part of the signal.
Stomping on the Gray’s undamaged leg, I ask, “Is it begging?”
“What?” Phil’s mortified.
I grind and the thing’s agony creeps through me almost like I’m feeling it myself, so I fight it with my rage. I won’t allow this grotesque little monster to rule my thoughts, and with that, I make my final choice. I stomp its skull.
My head pounds with sudden migraine force.
I stomp again, and it feels like I’m bashing my skull.
I stomp and kick, feeling all of it, going dizzy with pain, until the Gray’s head splits open. I smash it one more time to open it up, and I stagger back from the intensity of searing agony, tearing my brain.
Gasping, I catch my balance, and go back for more.
The Gray’s body is twitching, the orange symbiont is squirming, trying to burrow deeper inside the tick’s split skull. I see its skin bubbling and peeling. It can’t take the harsh vacuum like its Gray host can.
Dropping to a knee, I reach into the open skull, grab the orange mass and pull it out.
Pain fries my every nerve as I rip the last shred of its connection to the Gray body and throw it down on the pool floor. With nothing but blinding torment and aching rage, I go to work again with my boot, grinding the symbiont into goop.
The Gray’s body goes still.
My agony disappears like it was never there.
I can breathe again.
Suddenly, I’m aware of everything around me, the universe isn’t just me and orange torment. Five Grays are still lying on the floor, waving their arms like they’re sick. Silva is down on her back. Phil is on his hands and knees bawling. Lenox, Mostyn, and Jill are off their feet.
They all felt it, at least some of it.
Only Brice is still standing, and I can see from the look on his face he’s experienced his share of what that Gray just did to us. He stood hard through it, ready to back me up.
“Phil.” I walk over to him and help him to his feet.
All of the others are moving, trying to regain their wits. I know they’re alive, I know the suffering was imaginary. They have to be okay.
“Phil.” I put an arm around him and hug him tight, probably the first time we’ve had contact that intimate and sincere since his brother died all those years ago. No, twice now in as many hours. Our relationship is changing. “Phil, I’m sorry about that. It had to be done.” I rap the side of his helmet with my knuckles. “Phil, do you hear me?”
He nods. His blubbering is subsiding. “That was the most horrible thing I’ve ever felt.”
“Yeah.” I’m already making a new rule for dealing with Grays—don’t make them suffer. Kill them quickly, or they’ll fuck you.
With the memory of all that hurt suddenly refreshed, I’m suddenly inspired to find some retribution.
I leap away from Phil, draw my disruptor off my back and as the blade comes alive in blue, I swing it through the heads of two Grays. Their skulls come apart, sendi
ng orange symbiont goo in a spray across the pool.
The pain is sharp and quick, like a jab from a needle poking a thousand times, all at once, all over your skin.
It goes as quickly as it comes.
I draw a deep breath. “Phil, talk to those other Grays. Ask them if they’re ready to surrender.”
“I—”
“Phil,” I remind him. “Lots of lives depend on this. Ask them.”
Phil sniffles up as many tears as he can, and concentrates on the Grays.
“Can they understand you?” I ask.
He nods.
“Are you telling them?”
He nods again.
I walk over among them and start looking for the next one I’ll have to convince. “Which one is in charge now.”
“No!” Phil shouts, “You can’t.”
“I can!” God, I hope I can. “Which one?”
Others on the comm agree with Phil. The assault is on all of us.
“Wait,” he pleads. “Wait.”
I reach down and pick one up by the neck.
“Stop, stop,” Phil tells me. “Stop. They can’t choose that fast.”
I hold the Gray out at shoulder level where I can look into his eyes and he can see my face. I give them some time to vote telepathically or whatever they do.
Phil closes his eyes and stands for a moment, motionless except for his breathing.
I look around at the others. Silva is on her feet, hate in her eyes. She has her weapon up, ready to kill the Grays now that she knows what they can do. Jill is looking down on us with a face I can’t read. Lenox is holding Mostyn in her arms.
I turn back to Phil. “Well?”
“They surrender.”
“And the Trogs?”
“They can’t surrender,” says Phil. “They’re property. They do what they’re told.”
“And what’s that?”
“Whatever you want.”
Victory!
“Tell them all to go to the surface. They need to pile their weapons on the ground in front of the warehouse where they held the prisoners, then they all have to hike down to the bottom of the mine pit and sit in rows. If they do it fast enough, I won’t kill any more of these Grays. Be sure everybody understands that last part.”
Chapter 51
“Congratulations.” Blair sounds like she has a cocklebur stuck in her throat.
Tarlow is bubbling with gratitude. “You saved us.”
“It wasn’t me.” I look around at Phil, Brice, Silva, Jill, Lenox, and Mostyn. Penny and Jablonsky are close by, and so is the rest of Jill’s platoon. “We did it together.” We truly did. I start spinning up a pontification on leadership and teamwork to share, and I’m trying to come up with a clever opening line.
“The Trogs are doing what you told them,” bubbles Tarlow. “The ones on the surface have already laid down their arms and are running toward the mine. All of them are doing exactly what you told them.”
Blair finds her voice. “We own this base again. We’ve fulfilled our mission and we all did this together.”
“Yes, ma’am.” It’s the best response for the moment. “Yes, we did.” And there is plenty of truth in that, too.
“Before you get all full of yourself,” Blair sounds satisfied, like maybe she’s turned the tide of the game I keep hoping we’ve matured past playing, “you need to know that when the dust thinned, we were able to send a distress call.”
Tarlow interrupts without apology, seeming eager to please me. “The connection between the control room and the radio dish array was damaged in the original attack a few months ago. It took me awhile, circumstances and all. I finished fixing it right before your ships arrived.”
Not sure if I’m supposed to say something, I go with the generic. “Good work.”
“Eight assault ships are on their way here,” says Blair. “We would have been fine without you half-destroying the base.”
“No doubt.” I’m bored with this conversation. I drag my boot across the bottom of the pool, trying to rub the orange brain goo out of the tread.
“They’ll be here in a few days,” Blair assures me. “We would have held out that long on level three.”
Why does she feel like this is important? I make a guess. “You did a good job, Blair. I’m proud of you.”
“I don’t need you to patronize me, Major.”
Oops. Wrong guess.
I don’t rise to it, though. In fact, I try not to laugh. With the artificial pain the murdered Grays hotwired into my nervous system rapidly turning into a repressed memory, I want to revel in thrill of victory. It’s time to talk about something productive. “I’m sure we can squeeze a lot more info out of these Grays down here.”
“With torture?” spits Blair.
With fuck you! But I don’t say that. “If we can find the location of a Trog base or two, we’ll have enough assault ships to do some damage. No, more than that. We’ve proven the effectiveness of these weapons. We can win this war. We can clear the Trogs out of the solar system. Are those eight all we have? Is that the whole Free Army fleet?”
“We have more.”
“A lot more?” I push. “Some more? Isn’t it about time we embrace one another in a circle of trust.” I nearly laugh at that, too, because I think it’s funny.
“I’m afraid you’ve pushed yourself right out of that circle, Major.”
I exaggerate a sigh. Blair can’t get past the games. “Look, you can stay here and be Queen of the Potato if you want. I’m going to steal Tarlow from you and maybe some of his buddies from downstairs and have them fix my ship. Then I’m going out with our little fleet to attack the Trogs. With any luck, you’ll never have to see me again. So can we play nice until then? A few days, please?”
“Do you know a Lieutenant Holt?”
That stops me cold. When I recover, I say, “He was the platoon commander on my assault ship. We decided not to kill him. We put him off on Juji Station before we came here.”
Blair laughs. Maybe cackle is a better word. And better than that, maybe chortle like a witch watching her favorite newt drown in a boiling cauldron.
I decide I really, really despise her, but I need to know what has her so tickled. “What?”
“The MSS is broadcasting a news vid where—”
“Propaganda vid,” I correct.
“—Lieutenant Holt presents evidence that you’re a Trog mole and you’re responsible for the Arizona Massacre.”
“The Arizona Massacre?” It has a name? That angers me. I can’t believe it. “They’re pinning that fiasco on me?”
“They claim you’ve been in league with the Trogs for years. You’re the reason we’re losing this war.”
“Everybody knows the MSS is full of shit.” Dismissiveness. I tell myself, that’s the best play here. No point in getting wrapped up in MSS lies, even if they are personal.
“Nobody in the fleet will trust you,” says Blair. “It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. Nobody will believe those stories either. They’ll assume all of your heroic exploits are lies.”
“All bullshit. Total crap.” This all goes back to that argument she and I had in front of the warehouse after I freed her. This is a power play. I know she’s behind it, somehow. “We’re all out here because we know what the MSS is. These soldiers will fight beside me. I’m not worried.”
Blair isn’t done. “What about Holt?”
“What about him?”
“He’s SDF, maybe MSS. You were supposed to kill him, and you didn’t. Even if everyone out here decides the MSS story is made up of lies, then what are they to think of Holt? Are you an SDF sympathizer? Are you going to betray us to them? Are these heroics your ruse to put all of our necks in a noose?”
“Fuck you.” I close the connection. I’m steamed. I stomp around inside the pool, thinking about killing something else, maybe a Gray, maybe a Trog. I stop myself. It’s Blair who deserves my anger.
God, I despise that woman.<
br />
Everyone around me is asking questions. None of them were on the comm with Blair and me. They don’t know what’s transpired.
I push through the effort to calm myself, and decide I’m not going to listen to Blair’s shit. I’m going to do what I do.
I open a comm to my soldiers. “We’ve won. The asteroid is ours. The Trogs have surrendered. They’re all marching toward the mine. Let’s secure these prisoners. The Free Army fleet is coming. It’s time to prepare the Rusty Turd for the battle with the Trogs’ armada.”
THE BATTLE CONTINUES…
Preorder Freedom’s Fray, Book 3, available Summer 2017
Please report any corrections to http://www.bobbyadair.com/typos
But wait…there’s a little more to the story.
Please, allow me to introduce myself. I’m Beverly Blair, but you know me as Colonel Blair, perhaps derogatorily as ‘Queen of the Potato.’
I just want to say, I greatly resent that one, and want to express in no uncertain terms that Dylan Kane is an immature dunce. He’s got a third-grade boy’s cruel heart and I can assure you, he’ll lead this whole endeavor to ruin.
So please, pay attention when I tell you, don’t encourage him by reading this terrible compilation of half-truths and self-indulgent absurdities. I’m a good person and he makes me look like a total bitch. In truth, I think he has mommy issues. In fact, I’m certain of it. I could tell you some things. I know one he didn’t tell you—among other things, he’s afraid of flying monkeys.
I know!
Flying monkeys. Can you believe it?
Who the hell’s afraid of flying monkeys? And that’s just the first on a long list. He’s a total sissy.
The point I’m trying to get to is this. We don’t want Dylan Kane to torture us with any more of this sophomoric swill, am I right? So let’s all agree, whatever we do, we won’t follow this link and buy the next book in the series:
CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE FREEDOM’S FRAY
We won’t follow this link for a free prequel and email list signup:
CLICK HERE FOR A FREE PREQUEL, FREEDOM’S SIEGE!
We absolutely won’t leave a review. I mean, really, do I even have to tell you this?