by B. V. Larson
That made her eyes widen. She reached reflexively toward the lump in her pocket.
I knew right where her mind was at that moment. It was very alarming to realize that you were holding an object that would cause the Empire to exterminate your entire species just because it was in your possession.
“Sort of makes drunk-driving seem trivial, doesn’t it?” I asked.
She shook her head wonderingly. “I don’t know what I see in you.”
“Hey,” I said, reaching for her hand. “I need a shower. You want to keep me company?”
Lisa looked at my hand suspiciously for a full second.
“I’m not going to bite,” I told her.
She sighed and followed me to the showers, which were communal in the lower levels of Central. Afterward, we ate dinner—it was dinnertime, I’d learned—and crossed the street to her place.
In her tiny apartment, we made gentle love. It wasn’t wild and urgent the way it had been the first few times—when we had the threat of death hanging over us. I guess we were used to that by now. We’d gone out into space together, faced the enemy and defeated him.
Instead, it was pure victory-sex. Sweet and triumphant.
At length our tappers began beeping. We had thirty minutes left before go-time. Dragging on our clothes and heading back to Central, we ended up trotting for the elevators. We made it back just in time for the briefing.
“Nice of you two lovebirds to show up,” Graves said sternly. “Are you taking point again, McGill?”
“That’s the plan, sir,” I said. “Lisa, fix me up.”
She came to me solemnly. She had the key in her palm, I could tell by the odd way she was holding her hand. She touched it to the dial on my chest and whispered: “Luck.”
“I don’t need luck,” I said. “I need to make the right choices.”
She smiled. “Okay then—don’t do anything stupid.”
I gave her a nod and checked all my seals. Then I raised my weapon to my shoulder and teleported away.
-25-
The dial on my chest was set for the first notch, the first target of importance. When I’d selected that setting before, I’d gone to the world with the green oceans and the green skies.
The trip was a long one. At least this time, I didn’t have a squid cracking my ribs as he burned to death outside my suit.
Those long trips… they were soul-wrenching. I knew I wasn’t myself. I knew I wasn’t in the state of existence that I’d been familiar with all my life. Did that mean I was alive or dead? Is this what being dead felt like?
I didn’t know, but I knew I felt lonely. Logically, the rest of my team was jumping too, all popping into nothingness behind me while I was reconstructed on another world. It was weird to think they were out here in the void with me, impossible to contact or sense.
Before I got used to the whole thing, I arrived. I stumbled and gasped. Taking a few half-steps, I moved up the beach. I didn’t feel like merging my foot up with the next guy again.
Ferguson arrived second. He took a step and tripped, falling flat on his face.
“Get up!” I shouted. “Move out! The next one is coming in seconds.”
He scrambled, throwing sand everywhere. He looked scared, and I didn’t blame him for that. He’d experienced a merge-up, if only with my boot.
I helped lift him to his feet, and we took cover behind some boulders. We were supposed to make sure the entire squad had arrived before we moved inland.
Sargon was next. He was a pro. He stepped up the beach, his weapon ready to fire. He smiled at me.
“Good trip, Sargon?” I asked.
“A little long,” he said, “but there was nothing to it, Adjunct. I almost fell asleep.”
Ferguson snorted and shook his head. Even so, he made an effort to stop breathing hard and tried to act like we did. The trick was to be alert and scanning the environment without looking like you were going to piss your pants. Ferguson pretty much managed it, and I began to have hopes for the hog.
“You ever think of joining a real legion, Ferguson?” I asked him.
“What? You mean like Victrix or something?”
“Exactly. A legion that fights. A legion that goes into space.”
“Well sir…” he said, “it seems to me that I don’t have to now. Hegemony is fighting for Earth every day.”
He had a point, and I nodded.
“Good answer. You’re right. We’re all on the line now. Us out here and everyone back home. You’re all right, Ferguson.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He nodded toward the port-in spot, and I turned to look. Three more of my team had arrived. They stumbled away from the landing zone and took up defensive positions around it.
I clapped my gauntlets together loudly. “Harris, get these people off the beach. Lead A-team. Take up firing positions on that rock formation. From there, you’ll be able to cover the beehive structure and our LZ at the same time.”
He gave me a glance that said he didn’t feel like taking point, but he didn’t say anything. He knew dodging or arguing would only get him a kick in the pants.
“You heard the man, move out!” he shouted at his people.
Ferguson, Sargon and a couple of others hustled up the beach. I waited around as the softies in the group began to arrive. Carlos, Kivi and Lisa rounded out the team.
When we were all accounted for, we moved up to join Harris.
“Anything?” I asked him.
“Zippo sir. This place looks abandoned.”
“Take your team around to the back of the building. The rest of you take cover here.”
Harris gave me another of those “thanks asshole” looks and led his group to the far side of the building. He took the long way around, circling at least a hundred meters toward the shoreline. I didn’t care as long as he got the job done.
Before he made it, the Wur came out. The massive door opened, and what passed for a head section on a Wur creature slid out to greet us. It had orange, snake-like fronds for sensory organs, and these were all alert and squirming independently.
I don’t know who panicked. Right off, I suspected one of the hogs. They were still new to the whole ‘meet-the-new-alien’ thing, after all.
A plasma bolt flashed and struck the alien in the middle of those inquisitive fronds. At least the hog could shoot straight. I had to give him credit for that.
The Wur didn’t drop. Instead, it tucked itself back into the doorway, its head region smoking, and slammed the door shut.
“That’s great,” I said, “who did that? Who fired without orders?”
“I did, sir,” said one of the hogs. It was the bench-guy, the one I’d merged up with days back. He looked ashamed.
“Right…” I said. “Bio? Put this man on my do-not-revive list, will you?”
“Got it, sir,” Carlos said promptly. “He’s as good as permed.”
“Excellent.”
“But… but sir,” sputtered the hog.
“Next time, hold your frigging fire until you’re ordered to fire, unless you’re attacked! Understand?”
“Yes sir! Sorry sir!”
He was white-faced. Behind his back, Carlos flashed me a grin. Kivi thought it was funny, too. Only Lisa seemed disturbed. The Varus people knew I was joking, but she didn’t.
“Okay, now that we’ve managed to turn an easy kill into a barricaded, pre-warned enemy, who’s going to volunteer to open the door for me?”
No one so much as moved, except for Carlos. He was pointing at the scared hog with his thumb.
“We have a volunteer,” I said. “Get going, hog!”
“Me sir? But—”
“You heard the man, get your ass up to the door!” Carlos shouted. “Don’t worry, the Wur always kill people fast—unless they’re in a chewing mood, that is. Then it takes a while.”
“How do you know what that thing is?” the hog asked. “Or what it does?”
Carlos laughed.
The man looked alarmed. I thought he might wet his pants and bolt, but since we were on an alien planet, and he didn’t have the juice in his suit for another port, he had no choice.
He walked up to the door like a little kid visiting his first haunted house on Halloween. Without more than a second’s hesitation, he tried the door. It didn’t budge.
“It’s locked, I think, Adjunct,” he said over his shoulder.
“Well, no shit,” I said. “Get it open!”
He tried to open it more forcefully. The handle was simple. It looked like a lumpy, porous chunk of rock. He grunted and strained, but it didn’t budge. Turning back to us, he threw his hands up in the air, defeated.
In that instant, the door popped open about a half-meter. A long, gray-skinned arm reached out. It had seven, multi-jointed stick-like fingers. I remembered that look well from the time when the Wur had boarded our ship in the L-347 system.
The large hand grabbed the hog and snatched him away. It was all over in a second.
“Sir!” Sargon roared. “Permission to blast that door down!”
“Wait!” Lisa shouted, running to my side. “McGill,” she said. “There’s sure to be valuable intel inside that building.”
“A man’s getting killed in there right now, tech,” I told her.
“Yes, but we can revive him.”
I frowned and tried to listen. I couldn’t hear the hog screaming anymore. Either his radio had been broken or the walls of the building were causing interference.
Internally, I felt a little bad. I hadn’t meant for the hog to have another bad death. Hell, I’d teleported my small intestines into his head just a few days back. He really didn’t deserve this kind of treatment his first day out in the field.
“Sargon,” I shouted, “take down that door for me. But try not to burn out the whole place. Our tech here wants to go gadget-hunting.”
“Roger that,” Sargon said.
Less than a second later, he lit up the door. It began to melt and transformed into black slag. Smoke poured off, and the building above the door caught fire.
Lisa threw up her hands and slapped her helmet in frustration. “You guys are wrecking the whole place!”
“That is what we do best,” I said.
After a six-second burn, the door was a smoking hole. Sargon hadn’t done a surgical job, but at least he didn’t follow-up by lobbing any grenades into the interior. Lisa didn’t seem to realize she was lucky on that score.
“Okay,” I said. “Did you see any other entrances around to the back, Harris?”
“Nothing sir. Just more weird growths. There do appear to be some power outlets.”
“Stay away from those for now,” I ordered sternly. “We’re busting in. Harris, you have the ball.”
“Thanks, sir,” he said sarcastically.
He hustled up to one side of the building, and his team assaulted the door. It felt odd, watching other men do my dirty work. I was used to being at the front of the line when it came time to be tossed into the furnace. Sending other men into the flames seemed wrong somehow.
When I heard hoarse screaming from the interior, I signaled my back-up team.
“Non-combatants, hang back. Combat team, follow me.”
We broke through the door, which was still smoking and orangey-hot. Inside we found the Wur, dead on the floor.
The screaming was coming from the hog we’d sent in first. Miraculously, he was still alive—but his limbs had been ripped right off his body.
Apparently, the Wur hadn’t known quite how to kill an armored human. It had decided to pluck off arms and legs. Harris’ team must have gotten there before the Wur had a chance to remove the man’s last appendage—his head.
Harris already had his pistol out, but I waved him aside. I knelt beside the trooper, who was in shock but still aware. That was due to the miraculous efforts of the modern combat kit he wore beneath the jump suit. He was being pumped full of drugs, and wire tourniquets were being applied to the missing limbs so he didn’t bleed out.
“What’s your name, soldier?” I asked him. His nametag was missing, having been ripped away in the fight.
“Johan, sir… but… I can’t remember my last name.”
“That’s all right. You’ll wake up in the morning, and this will all have been a bad dream.”
“Really?”
I forced a smile. “Really.”
Then, I shot him in the head.
-26-
Some might think I was a right-bastard at that moment. But really, shooting Johan was a mercy. Taking him home and trying to get the bio people to patch him up was hopeless. They’d have recycled old Johan immediately, laughing at me for having bothered to drag him all the way back to Central.
I stood up when it was over and looked around.
“Are we clear?” I asked Harris.
“As far as I can tell,” he said. “I do think there’s something strange about this particular Wur, though.”
“How’s that?”
“He’s got some kind of leash or tether attached to him.”
I examined the ropy, fibrous line that reached to the mid-section of the creature. It did look strange. Calling in Carlos, Kivi and Lisa, we searched the rest of the place.
We didn’t find much else. There was quite a bit of electrical equipment, a bizarre-looking generator, and a few vats of nasty-looking fluid.
“Stay away from the liquids,” Carlos urged. “Highly caustic.”
He offered up a smoking gauntlet as proof.
“Carlos, quit screwing with the tech stuff,” I told him. “Tell me what the deal is with this hose attaching the Wur to the floor.”
He examined the situation closely.
“I don’t know…” he said. “I wish Natasha was here.”
That gave me a pang. I hadn’t had much time to worry about Natasha, but I still wanted her back. I’d half hoped to find some scrap of her body here. If I could prove she was dead, they’d authorize a revive back at Central.
Pushing those thoughts away, I gave my head a shake. “All right, what do we have?”
“This equipment is advanced,” Kivi said. “Biological stuff like we saw back on Death World.”
“Lisa?”
She shook her head. “I can’t understand most of it, but there’s definitely a power-generator involved. It works chemically, like a battery. Organic chemistry for sure.”
“Hmm…” I said. “Why the hell would this place be on the list of stops for every squid with a teleportation suit? That’s what I don’t get.”
“Hey, I think I found it,” Carlos said.
He was on his knees in the center of the room. I stepped quickly to his side.
“What do you have, Specialist?”
“The tether goes here—but it doesn’t stop. It goes into the floor itself. There’s got to be something under this floor. Something the Wur was attached to.”
Less than overwhelmed with his discovery, I grunted.
“So what? Maybe this hose fed the Wur or kept him chained here. This whole trip was a waste of time.”
“I don’t think so,” Lisa said. “There has to be something important about this place. We just have to figure out what it is.”
Now, people might not be surprised to learn that I’ve never been fond of mysteries. I like shooting things. I like chasing women. But puzzles? No thanks, I always pass them by in disgust.
Feeling that sense of disgust now, I headed for the door. I almost made it, too, before Lisa called me back.
“I’ve found something else,” she said. “Have a look at this, James.”
Crowding my way to her, I saw she’d located what looked like a rubber plug. But it was too big to be a plug.
“What’s that?” I asked. “Some kind of drain?”
“Help me pull it out.”
“Okay—helmets back on, everyone.”<
br />
As the atmosphere on this strange water-world was breathable, some of my troops had opened their faceplates. They quickly slammed them shut again.
I gave the plug a mighty heave, and it popped loose. Beneath the plug was a black hole. We shined our lights into the darkness and saw a distant bottom.
“Some kind of cave?” I asked.
“I hate caves,” Carlos said.
Normally, I’d have sent him in on point, but he was our bio now, not a grunt. I scanned the group and my eyes landed on Harris.
“Vet, take two men down and recon this hole.”
He eyed me in resignation.
“Thanks for this opportunity, sir,” he said.
“You’re welcome, smart ass.”
Harris dropped down first, howling a little as he fell. I think the drop was farther than he’d thought. Landing with a splash, he struggled to his feet and aimed his weapon in random directions.
“Get down here, Sargon!” he shouted up. “The water’s fine!”
Sargon jumped in next, then Ferguson. We watched them for a minute or so as they searched around and called the all clear.
“Nothing down here but some kind of big-ass cactus,” Harris said as I jumped down to join the others.
“Big-ass what?”
“See? Over there.”
Sargon and I both advanced, raising our weapons. Looming at the far end of the cavern was indeed what resembled a giant, barrel-cactus.
Sargon and I knew right off that it wasn’t a cactus. It wasn’t a normal desert-dwelling plant. Oh, it had spines all right. They were each a meter long, easy. And it had a gushy center, too. But that center wasn’t full of fleshy vegetable matter, it contained a brain of sorts.
“A Nexus,” I said, staring. “A brain plant.”
Sargon sighted on the dead center of the monster, which was a good ten meters high and five wide. Shaped like a pale green cylinder, I might have wondered how it could survive down here. But I’d already spotted ultraviolet radiation sources. It was being fed and cared for like a hothouse orchid.
“Hold off, Sargon,” I said. “We’ve got this thing trapped. Without minions, they’ve never been dangerous.”