Project Diamond (Jacob Lansing Series Book 1)

by J. W. Bouchard

  The chittering sounds were louder now. I felt dirt tumble onto my helmet.

  A long serrated appendage was thrust through the bars of the grate and folded back on itself.

  Wait for it, I thought.

  The grate open several inches.

  Just a little more.

  “Now!” I yelled and shoved the plastic pack into the opening between the grate and the ground.

  Gloria fingered the button on the baton and it lit up bright blue in the darkness. She touched the end to the grate. Sparks exploded out of the end and the creature above us let out a high-pitched screech, releasing its grip on the grate. The grate dropped onto the pack, which kept it open just enough for me to pull myself through.

  I scrambled to my feet. The roach that had been electrocuted by the grate was already getting to its feet. I snatched my canister of restraint foam from my belt, aimed it, and pressed down on the nozzle. Orange foam sprayed out, coating the roach. I didn’t stop until the foam ran out.

  The roach writhed wildly, but the foam hardened within seconds. It lay trapped on its side, mandibles gnashing.

  “Jake, watch out!”

  I ducked and took a step back just in time to avoid another roach from taking my head off. It lunged toward me. I dodged another blow and kicked out with my leg, connecting with the roach’s thorax. I switched my suitlights onto high. The roach towered above me, getting ready to swing again…

  “Get out of the way!” Gloria shouted as she sprayed orange foam onto the creature. I threw myself out of the way, avoiding the line of fire.

  The restraint foam hardened and the roach fell onto its side near his fallen comrade. Both of them were screeching.

  “They’ll alert the others going on like that,” I said.

  Behind us, Perkins climbed out of the pit.

  Without a word, he got to his feet and approached one of the roaches. He stamped his boot down hard and there was a sickening crunching sound as the roach’s arm broke. Perkins stooped down and grabbed hold of it with both hands. He pulled and twisted, really putting his hips into it. With a grunt, he gave it a final twist and the limb tore free from the roach’s body. He raised the appendage over his head and brought it singing down.

  It severed the roach’s head. Yellow-green goo oozed out of its neck.

  He moved swiftly, doing the same thing to the other one. Alien blood splattered across his helmet, running down his faceplate like thick snot.

  “Help the others,” Perkins said.

  I got down on my stomach and Harper lifted Jin up to me and Gloria and I lifted him out. We hauled Harper up last.

  I was panting. I activated my HUD and bumped up my O2 levels, ignoring the gravelly dryness in my mouth.

  Perkins hacked at the hardened restraint foam encasing the other roach. Once he had it cracked open, he used the bladed arm to saw off the arm from the roach and handed it to me. It was heavy and awkward to hold, but I could manage. I felt better holding something more substantial than a stun baton. At least with the blade I had a chance of surviving.

  “I can’t believe that actually worked,” Jin said. His gaze was fixed on the two alien bodies on the ground.

  “Ugly as sin,” Harper said.

  Gloria touched my shoulder and said, “Good job.”

  “Yeah. Thanks for saving my ass. If you’d been a second later, it’d be my head laying on the ground.”

  “Let’s move,” Perkins said.

  CHAPTER 17

  The tunnel was long and arduous, gradually rising at an angle so that we were walking at an incline. The only saving grace was that the roaches were larger than us, which allowed for plenty of room to move.

  Eventually, we came to a fork in the tunnel. It branched off and we were left with a choice of whether to take the tunnel that veered left or the one that went right.

  “Anyone remember which way they brought us?” I asked.

  “I wasn’t paying attention,” Gloria said.

  Perkins led us down the right tunnel. As we walked, he tried hailing Hayes over the com without success.

  The roaches must have burrowed out hundreds of miles of tunnels underground. How long had the roaches been on 55 Cancri e? Longer than us, that was for sure. Judging by the vast network of tunnels, I would have guessed at least several years.

  The pedometer inside my suit was turned on and the distance was displayed in the lower right hand corner of my HUD. We had already walked two kilometers, give or take, and somewhere up ahead I could hear the muffled groan of heavy machinery.

  We came to another fork and Perkins took us left this time. There was no way of knowing if we were making progress, but as long as the tunnel rose upward it at least meant we were getting closer to the surface.

  “This could go on forever,” Harper said. “It’s a maze. We could die down here before ever finding our way out.”

  I didn’t doubt the accuracy of Harper’s statement.

  My legs were tired. My mouth was dry, my spit like sand. I would have killed for a sip of water, but my water bladder was empty. If push came to shove, I could ask one of the others to lend me theirs, but it would eat up valuable time to snake a tube from their helmet into mine. We had been stuck below ground for less than twenty-four hours, and it had only been a few hours since my last drink. I wasn’t on the verge of dehydration just yet.

  The roach appendage was too heavy to carry by hand for an extended period of time. I had removed the straps from my pack, tied them together and then secured each end to an end of the raptorial forearm, which allowed me to carry it on my back. It was a burden, but the spiked arm was also peace of mind that I could inflict damage in the event we were attacked.

  By now I had come to the determination that the roaches were bred for war. Given the weapons they carried and the plated armor they wore, they had journeyed to the diamond planet with that possibility in mind. I had to hand it to them. In that respect, they had had more foresight than us. Which I guess meant that they had done something like this before. Perhaps they were no strangers to visiting other planets and stealing their resources. How many worlds had they invaded? How many lives had they taken in the pursuit of expansion?

  Perkins seemed impervious to our conditions. He seemed to never tire. Or if he did, he refused to show it. He had thrust his arm into the hollow opening at the end of the appendage, had dug out the snot-like blood and sinewy meat (a process that had caused me to gag more than once), and was wearing the roach appendage as though it was a natural extension of his own arm. If I was convinced of anything, it was that the man was a survivor; his years of training and battlefield experience had taught him to adapt quickly. It was a little frightening, but I took some comfort in it.

  The electric hum of machinery grew louder as we progressed.

  Perkins yelled, “Hold up,” and everyone stopped in their tracks.

  We waited as Perkins moved forward on his own. The tunnel twisted to the right. Perkins disappeared around the corner and was gone for several minutes. He appeared again and motioned for us to follow him. After we passed around the curve, the tunnel ended abruptly and opened up into a large room. The rumble of machinery was loudest here, and in one corner of the vast room was a large generator which appeared to power the overhead lights. The lights were dim, shrouding the room in shadows, which caused me to wonder if the roaches could see in the darkness better than we could.

  “Looks clear,” Perkins whispered over the com and stepped down into the room.

  “Diamond,” I said. “Tons of it.” I shone my lights on the walls and they twinkled back at me like millions of glittering eyes opening and closing rapidly.

  Holes were burrowed into the walls, widening into tunnels.

  “Where are they?” Jin asked.

  “If I had to guess,” Perkins said, “they’re busy dealing with our people.”<
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  “Dealing with our people?”

  “He means they’ve taken everyone hostage,” Harper said. “Or killed them already.”

  I said, “I don’t think so.” The others looked at me, waiting for an explanation. “It’s just a hunch, but why would they kill all of us if they could use us instead? We have a mining operation of our own going on. We don’t know how many of the roaches there are. Let’s assume they think in terms of efficiency the same way we do. They wouldn’t carry any additional weight over what they needed. They’ve got an entire mining operation to themselves. If they tried to take over ours, it might spread their workforce too thin. What would you do?”

  “Use humans – us – for slave labor,” Perkins said. He grabbed a chunk of diamond from one of the carts and hefted it in his hand before allowing it to drop to the ground. “They could accomplish twice the work by doing that. It makes sense. From a historical perspective, it’s exactly what we’ve done back home countless times over.”

  “But instead of bringing us in on slave ships, we basically fell right into their laps.”

  “Twice the payoff.”

  “How do we even know they understand the concept of money, or currency in general?”

  “They’re here aren’t they? It’s useful to them somehow.”

  Perkins said, “If they breathe air and walk upright then they understand the need for currency. There’s no such thing as civilization without commerce. Let’s keep moving.”

  As I climbed into the next room, my HUD registered a drastic spike in temperature.

  “Temp just rose twenty degrees,” I said.

  I shined my light off the walls. I started forward and Harper said, “Wait.”

  “What?”

  “Look.”

  He switched on one of his forearm lights and directed it toward the floor of the room.

  “Are those what I think they are?”

  “I’d bet money on it.”

  The room was crowded with hundreds of eggs. They were semi-transparent, covered in slime.

  “Jesus, how many are there?”

  “Too many.”

  “If only we had a flamethrower,” Harper said.

  Perkins said, “Keep moving.”

  I was tense. I was grateful that we hadn’t run into anymore roaches, but it also disturbed me. Where were they? Perkins was probably right, they were probably dealing with the rest of our crew, but would they waste all their resources on that? Wouldn’t they keep their own operations moving forward?

  “At least we’ve established one thing,” Harper said. “Once we found out they were insect-like, I was afraid they might share a telepathic link. A collective intelligence. Obviously, that isn’t the case, otherwise the two we took down when we escaped the pit would have alerted the others. Still, I think they function a lot like ants on Earth, or like bees. Most of the population acts as drones. Soldiers and workers. We’ve run across the soldiers already. They operate eusocially. Meaning they’re highly organized. They’re cooperative and they have a division of labor. Probably divided by reproductive and non-reproductive. A select group of males can mate with the queen, while the rest are probably sterile. The queen controls everything. Through pheromones she releases through her mandibles.”

  “Mind control by smell?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Did you see this in one of your movies?”

  “I went to Michigan State. Majored in entomology. Who would have guessed, right? Insects are actually pretty interesting. Some of them are more organized than humans. It’s a more altruistic society than anything humans have managed to come up with. The bugs could probably teach us a thing or two.”

  “Right about now, I’d settle for a giant can of Raid,” I said.

  We came to a sudden halt.

  “Pay dirt,” Perkins said.

  The tunnel ended. Perkins’s head was tilted back as he stared up a narrow vertical shaft.

  There wasn’t a ladder, but the dirt was relatively soft.

  “Think it’ll get us topside?”

  Perkins reached for one of the walls, dug his fingers into the dirt, and began to climb.

  My arms were practically useless by the time we made it topside. My hands were covered in dirt, raw from scraping against the rock. When I climbed out of the shaft, Perkins was already crouched down behind a wheel of one of the massive alien trucks. He motioned the rest of us over. Over the com he said, “Kill your lights.”

  We did as instructed and scrambled over to Perkins, taking cover behind the truck. It was as dark now as it had been when we had first made contact with the roaches.

  Perkins had us switch to night vision. The landscape was a washed out expanse of grays and whites. We scanned the surrounding area; we were several yards from the lip of the open pit mine.

  “Looks clear,” Perkins said. “Take a minute to catch your breath.”

  I was grateful for the short reprieve from physical exertion. If someone had offered me a glass of water right then I would have removed my helmet and gladly accepted the consequences in order to drink it. I knew I should be exhausted, but the adrenaline was still pumping through my veins. I kept reliving our escape from the pit, taking down the two roaches, Perkins severing their heads from their bodies. I had come close to having my head taken off, but there wasn’t time to waste dwelling on my near death experience. We weren’t out of the woods yet. Far from it. Escaping the pit and navigating out of the tunnels had only been the first step.

  “What now?” Harper asked.

  Our suits were caked head-to-toe in graphite. It was like being covered in slick black grease. I had to credit the engineers that had designed the suits. They were durable. At any point in the last twelve hours the safety of our suits could have been compromised and any one of us would have been toast. Burnt toast.

  There comes a point when you start to feel invincible. It comes after you’ve been run through the gauntlet of pain and chance, after you should have been dead many times over, but for some reason death has passed up the opportunity to take you in its frigid arms again and again. You start to believe that your continued existence has to do with something more than luck. That perhaps divine intervention has come into play. That some greater force has taken you into an invisible protective shell because it’s saving you for something bigger.

  Either that, or you have one helluva a diligent guardian angel.

  And it is at this point that you begin to take things for granted. It’s the point where you really get married to the idea that maybe you can’t be killed. You become complacent.

  Maybe you would be so bold to throw yourself into the thick of things just to prove the theory. But it’s all a lie. It’s fate playing a trick on you. Thinking like that is the beginning of the end; a first class ticket to your demise.

  As we crouched down behind the alien machinery, waiting for our heart rates to go down, I think Perkins said it best: “You aren’t dead yet, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t going to happen. Keep your eyes open and stay sharp. If any of you start thinking you’re indestructible, let me know and I’ll be happy to prove you wrong.”

  Davidson’s body laid twenty yards away, his helmet several feet from the rest of him. We pretended we didn’t see it. It reinforced our mortality better than any speech Perkins could have given us.

  “We’ll head for the ridge,” Perkins said. “That’ll be our vantage point. From the top, we’ll have a good view of the operation zone. We’ll get the lay of the land.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we figure out how to get off this stinking rock.”

  We started the walk to the ridge. I didn’t like being out in the open. It made us vulnerable. How many roaches were there? Might be a dozen, might be a few thousand. If they were anything like the ants of Earth the way Harper seemed t
o think they were, then we had to assume that we were vastly outnumbered. In a one-on-one fight with a roach, our odds weren’t great, but the five of us against and army didn’t stand a chance in hell.

  I forced myself onward and tried not to think about the climb that lay ahead.

  CHAPTER 18

  At the top of the ridge, we laid down flat on our bellies and crawled to the edge until we had an unobstructed view of the operation zone below.

  Even from a distance, I could hear the din of machinery moving around. I could see trucks lumbering back and forth, depositing debris and then heading back for more.

  The wind had picked up, blowing black dirt against the faceplates of our helmets. Our suit sensors indicated that the humidity had risen. The sky was overcast, more than usual, and it looked as though a storm was on the way.

  Perkins had the binoculars out. He was propped on his elbows, surveying the terrain below.

  “How’s it look?” I asked.

  Perkins was silent for a moment before he said, “They’ve got ground crews working. We’re too far out of range to identify anyone. There’s more down in the pit. At least three dozen roaches down there by my count. Anyone’s guess as to how many they’ve got below ground.”

  “Casualties?”

  “No bodies.”

  “That’s a good sign at least,” Jin said. “Right?”

  “Let me see,” Harper said. Perkins handed him the binoculars. “Looks like you had it right, Jake. They’ve got our people doing their dirty work.”

  “Is the rover still at the base of the ridge where we left it?” Perkins asked.

  “It should be,” Gloria said.

  Jin said, “It was when they captured us anyway.”

  “Even if it is, it’ll make too much noise,” I said.

  “It feels better knowing we’ve got wheels,” Perkins said. “But you’re right, we can’t use it. They’d hear us a mile away.”

  “How do we get to them without them noticing?” Harper asked.

  “Do we want to get to them?” Jin asked, a tremor in his voice. “There are too many of them. We can’t fight our way in.”