Incursion: Shock Marines

by Gustavo Bondoni

  “Look, as long they aren’t shooting me to pieces, I’m fine with this being a civilian place. That will make it easier to blow up.” Tristan covered the final few steps to the far wall. “There’s some kind of sliding panel here, probably a door.”

  “All right,” Cora said. “Hold there. I’m trying to coordinate with the platoons from the other two dropships. One of them crash landed. No casualties, but they’re gonna be awhile. The other crew is on its way to help.”

  “Any news regarding the crew whose lander broke up?”

  “They’re not in Tacnet range, and we’re not allowed to use anything the enemy might pick up from orbit.”

  Tristan swallowed. On the ground, he would take whatever the blobs threw at him. Hell, when his blood was up, he welcomed the challenge. But getting taken out while helpless in the dropship was every marine’s worst nightmare.

  “All right, Tristan, everyone who’s gonna be here is here. Scouts say the walls look clean. Do you see any way to open the door?”

  “No. Blank wall all around it. I’m giving it a push. Nothing.”

  “Try sliding it.”

  “Okay.” He pushed to the left, but the panel didn’t budge. On pushing to the right, his suit sensors picked up a tiny movement. “Looks like that might work, but I’m gonna have to force it. If they don’t already know we’re here, they will when I’m done with the door.”

  “Do it.”

  The material gave way with a loud groan, the first sound Tristan had heard in the methane atmosphere. He pressed against the wall, hoping that any murderous barrage of projectiles or energy would fly right by him.

  Nothing happened, so he stuck his head into the hole, pulling it back out quickly. “Dark as hell in there. Gonna take another look with the suit light.”

  Actinic white beams cut through the room, nearly blinding after the dull red glow of the facility’s native illumination. Tristan pointed them into the darkness beyond the gap he’d made and found another wall about six feet away. Then he pointed the beams downward.

  “Looks like we found an elevator shaft,” he informed his team. “Goes straight down farther than I can see with this light. I count three levels that can be accessed, but there are probably more further below.”

  “All right, give me a second. We’ve got this place secured, so we’ll leave a couple of sentries to welcome the stragglers from the other shuttles when they get here. The rest of us will go in.”

  Tristan knew he was going to get into trouble, but toggled his radio. “What? Why? If we drop a charge or two down this shaft, we’ll destroy the installation completely without risking any of our lives.”

  “Orders are orders, soldier. If you like, you can stay up top doing sentry duty. If we get massacred down there, you can drop a charge.”

  “Absolutely not, ma’am. I want to go down there.”

  “Thought so. Now use your head. The general needs to know what we’re up against. No way to tell him if we just blow everything up. And besides, I don’t know about you, but this just doesn’t feel like a blob installation to me. They must have stolen it from someone.”

  She was right. Tristan had fought rearguard actions in the evacuations of two systems. He’d been tasked to hold positions in the face of nearly overwhelming blob attacks. Though he’d never been inside a blob installation—the settlements they were abandoning were invariably human—this certainly didn’t feel like their tech. And the light seemed a bit weak for their preference.

  “You’re right. I apologize.”

  “Save your apology. No use to me now. But how would you feel about going down that hole first?”

  He looked down into the shaft and chuckled. “I don’t feel at all good about it to be honest, but I guess someone has to. Do we go to the bottom and work our way up? Or downward from the top?”

  “Just go as far as the first stop. We should probably try to figure out how to use this elevator at some point.”

  “Not while I’m inside, please.”

  He hooked a line to the suit of one of the scouts who’d made it as far as his position and jumped into the shaft. His exoskeleton had braking rockets, so he considered it best—as he had when crossing the hall—to move as quickly as possible. He overshot the landing by ten feet, hovering below the level of the door as he checked for defenses. Nothing there.

  He’d assumed that the door mechanism would be visible from inside the shaft, but the sliding panel looked exactly the same as the one above. He decided against trying to get a grip on it while hovering on suit jets.

  “I’m going to have to blow the door.”

  “All right.”

  He fired an expanding shrapnel round into the thin metal. In the enclosed shaft, the noise reverberated loudly enough that his suit’s audio receptors damped it automatically. The shot punched a round hole about the size of his hand into the material, and then it was just a case of using the suit’s servo-assisted claws to pull the door away.

  Tristan stepped into a hallway built for some creature shorter than humans: if he’d stood there without his suit, it would have been a close fit. The suit had to bend nearly double to advance. He stopped at the first bend in the hallway and looked around the corner to see another stretch of hall that ended in a door. A cross-corridor bisected it about halfway through.

  “All clear. Send in the cavalry.”

  Suit after suit entered the corridor from the shaft, Cora and the sergeant from the other dropship leading the way. “Cover us,” the lieutenant said. She advanced with one of the scouts, moving cautiously. Their beams created long shadows in the darkened hall.

  They reached the spot where the other corridor crossed the first and looked carefully around to each side. “Short halls that end at open doors. We’ll have to split up to check all three rooms. I’ll start with the one in front.”

  Cora strode across the intersection and the place suddenly came alive. Gunfire from the cross-corridor, accompanied by a bright light, slammed into her suit and threw her down the hall and out of Tristan’s sight. Projectiles also glanced off of the scout’s suit before he dove out of the line of fire.

  “Lieutenant!” Tristan said.

  There was no answer. He ran into the hall, selecting his weapons as he went, and ignoring the sergeant’s shouted order that he stop. Tristan dove across the intersection, fast enough that the shots that came in his direction missed by wide margins and fired randomly in the direction of the attack.

  Once across, he played back what his cameras had recorded and cursed. “It’s just a ceiling-mounted swivel gun. And I’d guess it’s probably automated and activated by a motion detector. It shot at me, but it’s not shooting at the lieutenant.”

  He selected a frag grenade, set the timer for a second after release, and lobbed it into the cross-corridor, up near the ceiling. He knew that he wouldn’t have to hit anything; the fragments should be enough to take a weapon out.

  Tristan dove across the hall again. There was no fire this time. He crawled back, staying low, and inspected the weapon. It was a wrecked mess. “OK, the intersection is clear now.”

  The sergeant approached, held a hand into the intersection, and then walked up to the gun. He motioned for Tristan to join him.

  “Hold your light steady on this for a minute,” the man said.

  He poked and prodded at the gun before pulling it out of its mooring, bringing a mass of wiring with it. “I think your lieutenant is right. This isn’t blob tech.”

  “Not ours, either.”

  “No. Definitely not. But whose, then?”

  “Brillan?”

  “We’d better hope not. We can hold our own against the blobs, but the Brillans have kicked our ass every single time we came anywhere near them. If they took this system from the blobs while we were in transit, then we’re in deep shit. And so is the blob fleet when it gets here.”

  “Might be Uploader.”

  Tristan saw the sergeant shudder beneath the exoskeleton.

/>   “We’ll figure it out later. Might be some poor suckers the blobs conquered and ate. Whoever owns this, we need to disable this installation now and worry about it later. You should check on the lieutenant. She got hit hard.”

  Tristan hadn’t worried about it, mainly because the Tac computer wasn’t reporting her as dead. Those suits could take quite a beating. But if she was all right, she should have been up and about already. He went to where she lay.

  His pulse quickened. Cora’s suit was bent into an unnatural shape and he could see light areas where the automated repair systems had patched the skin to keep it pressurized. It didn’t look survivable.

  He hooked into her diagnostics and saw that the suit had injected her with coma-inducing drugs in an effort to keep her alive long enough for help to arrive. She was in bad shape.

  “We need a Medevac here,” Tristan said.

  “Hate to remind you, we haven’t got a Medevac shuttle up and running. Maybe one of the dropships can pull her out, but you’re going to need to get her back upstairs. We need to move forward.”

  Tristan was torn. On one hand, he desperately wanted to feel that he was actually doing something to fight the enemy. On the other… there were only three surviving members of his original ten-man unit. He was damned if he was going to let that number fall by one.

  And Cora didn’t have a hell of a lot of time.

  “All right. I’ll try to get her out of here.”

  “Good luck.”

  “You, too. Watch those intersections.”

  Tristan forgot about them. Shock marines could take care of themselves.

  He turned his attention to Cora. The diagnostics said that she was stable, but all kinds of red lights which he wasn’t trained to evaluate were blinking at him. “Hang on, Lieutenant.”

  It was nearly impossible to be gentle while wearing an exoskeleton, but he did his best to avoid bumping her unnecessarily as he dragged the inert suit down the hall towards the elevator. Now came the tough part.

  Tristan hooked a diamond monofilament line to her suit and let it play out behind him as he powered his way up the shaft. Once he reached ground level, he began to pull the line back in. He winced as Cora’s suit overbalanced slightly and banged into the far wall.

  He managed to get her up without further mishap, and put her suit on his shoulder, aided by the taller roof of the hangar area. He approached one of the sentries and spoke to him. “Any news on how we’re getting out?”

  “Pickup in thirty minutes.”

  “Are any of the dropships still in the area?”

  “The one that crash-landed is just getting off the ground.”

  Tristan called the ship. “Are you in good enough shape to do a Medevac?”

  “How many?”

  “Just one.”

  “Hang on.”

  Less than a minute later, the wounded dropship, wobbling noticeably, flew into view. “Hook her up, but I really wouldn’t want to carry anyone else. Not sure how well this thing is going to hold together.”

  “That’s fine, just get her back upstairs as quickly as you can.”

  The ship left, leaving Tristan to look out over the dark landscape and the stars, hard and bright through the thin atmosphere. The stark emptiness gave him the answer he’d been searching for earlier: warm, hospitable places were few and far between. When you had one secured, logic dictated that you had to defend it against anyone who might covet it. Even if they weren’t showing any signs of aggression.

  Without warning, a dark shadow flew out of the open door of the building and disappeared into the sky. Thermal imaging showed it as a slightly warmer spot against the cosmos, moving at spectacular speed.

  Thirty seconds later, exoskeletons began to pour out of the door. “Move it, guys. You don’t want to be within four hundred meters of this place when those charges go off.”

  Tristan followed the sergeant as they ducked behind the ridge they’d originally used as cover for the landing and then ran a few hundred meters further for good measure. The suits could cover ground extremely well.

  “What was that thing?” Tristan asked.

  “I have no idea. It was sealed inside some kind of containment field on the lowest floor. We broke some equipment to see what the hell would happen when the field went down and this thing flew out and began shooting at everything in sight. Only got one of the troops, but there wasn’t much left of him after it was done. Took out a bunch of computers and crap and even a column. Looked to me like it was firing at random.”

  “Well, what did it look like?”

  “Black and wingy and very, very pissed. I was happy as hell when it took off. That’s when I ordered the men to place charges. There were a bunch of those containment fields in that bunker. And by a bunch, I mean a few dozen. I definitely didn’t want to have to fight my way out of there against an army of those things. I thought it would be a better idea to blow them to bits.”

  As if to punctuate this statement, the charges went, shaking the ground.

  “How many charges did you use, Sergeant?”

  “Every one I had, soldier. Every fucking one.”

  Chapter 5

  Irene’s heart beat loudly in her chest as she came up behind Houssein. He was perusing the results of the radio carbon dating analysis and scratching his head. Even if she hadn’t known exactly what was troubling him, it was comically obvious that he was very puzzled by what he was reading.

  She took a final look around the lab. Tall tables cut it into four square work areas and computerized monitoring equipment was stored neatly along the walls on wheeled trolleys. Only one piece of equipment was in use, the dating machine, and that one had been pushed off to one side as Houssein read its report. The most important thing was that there was no one there except for the two of them.

  Good.

  The knife in her hand was nothing special. She’d asked the factory for a batch of cutting blades suitable for the infirmary robots on every ship in the fleet. They’d shipped out earlier that day. The technology was thousands of years old—even the material itself was just medical-grade stainless steel—but sometimes a simple tool was still the best thing for the job.

  She did it exactly the way they’d taught her. Approaching from behind, Irene put her hand over his mouth and pulled his head back. Houssein’s hands went straight up to try to pull her away, and she reached around him and drove the blade between his ribs into his heart. He collapsed without a sound.

  Again, Irene looked around the lab. Still no one around. Of course, considering how many of the Lapland’s crew had failed to survive the trip, there was little reason for anyone to walk into the space that Dr. Houssein’s had selected for his use, but her nerves were screaming that she was being watched, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

  Reassured on that point, she quickly hid the man’s body in a storage locker and mopped up the surprisingly small amount of blood. She’d need to dispose of the corpse soon enough, but there was no rush. No one would open a cupboard in here until his absence was noted, and that could take several days. Houssein had not been the most gregarious of men in the best of circumstances, and his reaction to the fleet’s situation had been to lock himself in the nearest lab and work without speaking to anyone other than the people he absolutely needed to interact with.

  Fortunately for Irene, she’d been one of those people. As one of the few surviving computer and nanotech specialists, she had access to what all the workstations were doing, and was on call to give the researchers support when needed. She thought it would be a nuisance that they’d be asking her, a top researcher, for what amounted to menial tech support. But with the passage of time and admin access to everything that went on in the ship, she realized it was a godsend. She’d known exactly what Houssein was up to and when the man needed to be eliminated. Taking action was just the natural continuation of what she was there to do.

  She hadn’t imagined that her hands would shake as much as they were now
that the deed was done. Granted, she’d never killed anyone—in fact, the very reason she was there was to stop violence in all its forms—but she hadn’t thought that it would affect her so much.

  Irene took a few deep breaths to steady herself. Logically, she knew that what she’d done was necessary. The life of one man paled into insignificance when compared to the judgment of history upon mankind. And that was what she was there to attempt to salvage—although, in all honesty, it was probably too late for that.

  Her attempts to get herself together were undermined by the memory of Houssein’s hand which gripped hers, and then losing strength as the blood poured out of his heart. He’d been warm when she took his neck but, by the time she hid his body, he’d felt cool to her touch. Or perhaps it had just been her imagination.

  Irene picked up the printouts, still lying where the researcher had dropped them. The data was exactly what she’d seen when she was using her admin access to eavesdrop on what Houssein was doing: radio carbon analysis of several supposedly new parts which had inexplicably failed from all over the fleet. The synthetic lubricating oil was a perfect organic compound on which to run radio-carbon testing.

  A weight left her shoulders. No matter how badly she felt about having killed the man, it was justified. She hadn’t made a mistake, hadn’t misread his research and murdered him for no reason. The scientist definitely suspected something was amiss with the mission—something that Irene herself had been warned was a remote possibility—and these results would have led him down a path that eventually would have indicated action from the fleet’s leadership.

  She’d managed to get to him before he could share his suspicions. The bigger question now, and the thing that Irene knew she would have to watch out for, was whether Houssein had discussed his thinking with anyone else. She thought it was unlikely. The guy simply hadn’t liked to have any human contact. But it wasn’t impossible.

  In a ship as laden with scientists as the Lapland was, any passing comment could be extrapolated into a working theory within days.