One Dark Future

by Michael Anderle

  Captain Osei grunted. “If they wanted to be monsters, why bother with this alien shit? Why not just use genetic engineering themselves?”

  “We don’t know that—" Jia began.

  The rest of the mutants leapt into the air in different directions, all emitting a sound that was unmistakable despite the odd hollowness: laughter. They snagged the vines with one set of their arms and quickly climbed hand over hand, like monkeys straight from the bowels of hell, their unsettling laughter continuing.

  The team fired, clipping some of the enemies, but not downing them. Unlike before, the mutants now appeared more focused on evasion than pointlessly charging the soldiers.

  The legless enemy rolled onto his stomach and charged forward, crawling with surprising speed using his four angled arms. He jumped from the side to side, bullets barely missing him, but keeping him from advancing.

  The break in tight formation forced the separation of the squads’ fields of fire. The soldiers, Erik, and Jia all fired at whatever monster was closest to them, but now that they were on the ceiling, they could take advantage of the protruding stalactites for cover. That might have been their intent all along.

  Erik’s burst bounced off one of the stalactites, leaving a small dent and seeping orange fluid for a brief second before the wound sealed itself. The exposed wounds on the mutants were half-closed.

  “Oh, great.” Erik gritted his teeth. “They regenerate.”

  This wasn’t going to be as easy as he’d hoped. Even the damned crawler’s severed leg was closing over.

  “Then let’s nail the most vulnerable part,” Jia suggested as she put her words into actions.

  Wearing a satisfied look, she aimed carefully and fired three times into the head of the approaching crawler.

  He jerked and twitched before jumping backward. Despite the gaping wound in his head, he continued to circle the team on the ground, drawing fire and letting out an unsettling cross between a cackle and a death rattle.

  “Now I’m annoyed,” Jia muttered, taking another shot.

  Captain Osei nailed a mutant mid-jump on the ceiling. The enemy fell to the ground with a loud thump, leaving it an easy target for nearby soldiers.

  They concentrated their attacks near the head, blasting out huge chunks of the skull and neck, but it scrambled back to its feet and bounded away despite the damage.

  The crawler took two bursts that made it stumble. The team’s bullets ripped through it, but some of the earlier wounds were already beginning to close, including dark green and black patches growing slowly to cover the head and major leg wounds.

  “Why won’t they die?” snarled Captain Osei. “We’re blowing off limbs and taking out their brains. How do you kill something that keeps living even after you blow its brains out?”

  His hand jerked toward a grenade on his belt. To Erik’s relief, the captain stopped before he could call out an objection. They were flanked in three dimensions by the regenerating mutants. Tossing grenades around at this point would end in team casualties.

  Between the Ascended Brotherhood and the yaoguai, Erik had gotten used to bizarre enemies. The important thing was to maintain discipline and attention to tactical detail.

  The latter flooded Erik’s thoughts as he ejected a magazine and reloaded. He’d been so focused on the laying down shots, he’d almost missed the obvious. Winning a battle wasn’t just about hurting the enemy. It was also about understanding the enemy’s tactics.

  Erik narrowly missed a climber with a quick burst. “They’re not trying to close on us. They could be trying to run down our ammo and work our nerves. If that’s the case, it means they don’t think they can beat us.

  Unfortunately, given the looks on some of the soldiers’ faces, the plan was working.

  “Keep it up!” Captain Osei bellowed. “We didn’t come all this way just to get taken down by rejects from the UTC’s Ugliest Assholes contest!”

  Jia focused on the crawler, her brow set in grim determination. Wounds adorned the crawler’s chest, arms, and head, but he remained spry. If anything, he seemed to be moving faster now that he was using his two sets of arms.

  Erik’s theory was challenged when the crawler charged a soldier, but the enemy skittered back after taking two rounds in the shoulder.

  Everything that lived had a weak spot. There were no perfect lifeforms, and even if there were, they wouldn’t be made over the course of hours from random humans who’d stopped by an ancient ship that had to be running on minimal power.

  “Emma, let us know if you see anybody else,” Erik ordered, worried the enemy might be stalling to send in more dangerous reinforcements.

  Jia tracked the crawler with her rifle. He was taking more of a pounding than many of them but remained fast enough to avoid many of the attacks.

  If Erik couldn’t rely on anatomy, he would rely on deductive reasoning. He jerked his head around, looking at the wounds on the enemies. They covered most of their body, but he’d noticed none of them had been hit in one location.

  Erik aimed at one of the overhead mutants and took a shot. His rifle cracked, and the burst ripped the monster. He screeched and fell, flailing as he landed with a loud thud. Unlike before, he didn’t return to his feet. With another weaker screech, he twitched and thrashed. There was no laughter.

  “Lower abdomen,” Erik shouted. “That’s their weak spot.”

  Everyone stopped their indiscriminate fire and aimed their next shots. Not everyone could land a direct hit against fast-moving targets, but having three squads, Jia, and Erik in the room made it inevitable. The other mutants fell in rapid succession, the crawler lasting longer than others, if only because of the difficulty of hitting his abdomen given his orientation.

  With calm precision, the soldiers approached the twitching mutants.

  They aimed as squads into their abdomens and blew them apart with concentrated fire. The speech might have sounded human, but the death screeches were anything but.

  The wounded enemies thrashed and twitched, their slow regeneration no longer in evidence before they stopped moving and slumped.

  Erik let out a breath. “That’s what you cocky bastards get for underestimating us.”

  Jia let out a sigh of relief. The soldiers exchanged looks, some taking the opportunity to load fresh magazines in case of another ambush.

  Erik shouldered his rifle, walked over to one of the corpses, and pushed it over with his boot. He knelt to inspect the abdomen. Heavy rifle fire had mutilated most of it, but small, leathery black tendrils remained spread throughout the exposed internal organs, all running to a small dark deflated mass bleeding orange, at least what remained of it.

  “There’s something in here,” he called back. “I have no idea what.”

  Jia headed over to inspect the body. She tilted her head, her expression calm and analytical as if she looked into strange human mutants’ perforated bodies every day.

  “It’s almost like a parasite,” she murmured. She gestured at the next closest body. “Check the abdomens and see if you can find something like that in the others.”

  Erik moved over to the nearest remains and stared at it. “Yeah. Not much left, but definitely something in here.”

  Soldiers looked into the other bodies and nodded at Jia. Corporal Milton edged toward the corpse but didn’t dare crouch next to it.

  “Is this what’s going to happen to us?” he asked. “We’re going to end up with some alien thing in our intestines?”

  The other soldiers exchanged worried looks. One man crossed himself.

  “We don’t know that,” Captain Osei insisted.

  Jia stood. “Actually, we do.”

  Erik didn’t frown at her. Jia could be blunt, but if she was about to say something, it would be based on the best knowledge available to her.

  The captain glared at her. “Are you trying to panic my men?”

  “No, Captain. If anything, the opposite.” Jia motioned to the tendrils. “The team on the sh
ip wasn’t mutated, and Emma’s verified a lack of contamination. We haven’t autopsied the bodies, but I’m presuming if they’d started mutating, Emma would have let us know.”

  “If I was feeling generous,” Emma offered. “But, yes, I have total drone coverage of the bodies aboard the captured ship. They are just lying there dead, with no strange mutations or evidence of any physiological changes.”

  Jia gestured at the bodies. “The parasites aren’t that small, and not a single one of these people still had a helmet on. If I had to guess, I’d say they probably pulled it off because of the signal and then the parasite entered.” She opened her mouth and pointed down her throat. “Maybe through here.”

  Several soldiers grimaced. One woman gagged.

  Jia knocked on the side of her helmet with her knuckles. “We’ve got a defense against the signal, and now we know as long as we shoot the parasites, we can finish these mutants off quickly. We’ve got total tactical control of the situation.”

  The tension slowly bled off the captain’s face. “Okay, I see what you’re saying. You think this is all part of the security system? The ship turns invaders against themselves?”

  “It could be.” Jia shrugged. “It could be that the parasites had nothing to do with the Navigators’ plans. Maybe they went to a restaurant that undercooked their meat. Everything I’m saying is heavily based in guesswork about a race that died out before we even had fire.”

  “Undercooked meat?” Captain Osei smirked. “So they ended up in a comet floating to Earth with mutating parasites and death signals?”

  “Stranger things have happened.” Jia shrugged.

  “I think if that was true,” Osei looked at a few of the bodies, “it’d be the strangest thing that ever happened.”

  Erik smiled at Jia, remembering something from the fight. “Hey, that one guy was hopping for a while.”

  Jia shrugged in confusion. “We blew his leg off. Hopping was inevitable.”

  “These things aren’t quite zombies, but they are sort of zombies, and he was hopping.” Erik shook his hand back and forth. “Just saying, that almost counts as jiangshi.”

  Captain Osei looked at the two of them. “What are you two talking about?”

  “Ignore him,” Jia ground out. “He’s being obnoxious about stupid stuff from Earth.” She pointed at Erik. “They weren’t dressed appropriately to be jiangshi. What’s next? Only do training scenarios that involve fuzzy kittens?”

  “That would lead to us getting attacked by packs of fire-breathing kittens.” Erik grinned. “Don’t worry, I was joking.” Erik looked at the captain. “Mostly. But before I throw Emma into a black hole like I promised, she can translate that language for us. Or is it totally alien?”

  “I’m working on the translation, Erik,” Emma replied. “I’m finding patterns that suggest it might be human, but I need time. Whatever form of communication it is doesn’t match any of the languages I know, and my language base includes one spoken only by twenty people on a small Pacific island.”

  “They spoke to us for a reason. They must have thought we’d have some chance of understanding.”

  Captain Osei’s brow wrinkled in thought. “Will it help if we know what they were saying? They probably were just bragging about how they were going to kill us.”

  “If they can talk, they’re not mindless,” Jia replied. “And they were talking for a reason. We might be able to get out of here without any more fights, and we also might be able to figure out what’s going on.”

  Erik shook his head. “Osei’s right. It doesn’t change the plan. If we didn’t think we needed to blow this thing halfway across the galaxy before, we do now. Since Emma and Gamma Squad are watching our backs, we need to sweep through the ship and lay down explosives as quickly as possible, then we’re leaving and vaporizing this ship and every parasite and weird-ass murder-field generator on board.”

  Captain Osei nodded with a satisfied look.

  Erik turned to Jia. “Agreed?”

  Jia offered him a firm nod. “Some things are better lost to history.”

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Now less interested in exploration and more in dropping explosive charges, the team cleared the next quarter of the ship far faster than they had the first quarter.

  Fighting parasitic creatures that inhabited human corpses, Jia thought, encouraged them all at a primal level.

  There was little chatter as they proceeded from room to room with zero opposition.

  They weren’t there to take in the sights of the bizarre ship. If all went well, they’d make sure no one ever could.

  Jia was feeling confident they could set everything they needed to annihilate the Navigator ship in less time than it had taken for their initial inspection. The remaining crew from the conspiracy ship remained unaccounted for, but everyone expected they’d run into them sooner or later.

  Horror was a funny thing, and training did a lot to blunt its effects. In the coming weeks, perhaps they would have time to reflect on what had been done to the people aboard the captured ship and those who had boarded the alien vessel.

  But for now, they were nothing more than an enemy who needed to be put down.

  Jia couldn’t work up much concern. What little belief she had in the potential restraint of the conspiracy had gone away on Venus when they ran into the hybrid agent.

  The conspiracy members weren’t brave men and women plumbing the depths of forbidden knowledge to save humanity. They were disgusting, morally bankrupt monsters who had greedily pushed too fast and too far.

  Now their outer forms reflected their inner truths.

  Sophia Vand wasn’t enough. The conspiracy had to be stopped. It needed to be burned down, root and branch.

  You bastards made the mistake of not finishing off Erik at Molino, Jia thought. Now you have both of us to worry about.

  Erik, Jia, and the soldiers passed into a new wide and long chamber. Pulsating columns ran from the floor to the ceiling, the light glowing brighter in them than the walls and the ceiling.

  Smaller mounds similar to ones they’d seen in other rooms surrounded the columns.

  “It’s fortunate you have me with you,” Emma announced, more than a hint of satisfaction flavoring her tone. “Because you would be hard-pressed to gain the same benefits in the same period of time from even a dedicated specialist, but I bring true creativity with massive analytical speed.”

  “Care to explain why you’re being so smug?” Erik asked. “Smugger than usual? Or is it Fleshbags Should Appreciate Their AI Masters Day?”

  “I can translate the language, more or less,” Emma replied. “Once I realized its fundamental nature, it became a trivial exercise.”

  Captain Osei’s brow lifted in surprise. “You translated an alien language that quickly?”

  Emma laughed. “While I do appreciate you being appreciative of my capabilities, it’s important that I be honest so you can better understand both my potential and my limits. My achievement is impressive, but no, I didn’t translate an alien language, which was why I could do this so quickly.”

  “I don’t understand. If you didn’t translate it, how can you understand it?”

  “Because I translated a human language,” Emma replied. “That is to say, those unfortunately parasitized gentlemen were speaking a language from Earth. A dead one, mind you, but a human language that evolved from and was used by human beings. Well, technically still is being used by human beings, as long as you count those who have been transformed by alien technology.”

  “The Navigators speak some obscure language?” Erik asked, sounding annoyed. “Is this just about screwing with us? If they were threatening us, it’d make more sense to use a language we could understand.”

  “I can’t be sure that sort of thought process had anything to do with it.” Emma chuckled. “I can’t be a hundred percent certain because of my lack of access to OmniNet resources, but I’m more than confident that the language they are speakin
g is a form of proto-Afro-Asiatic.”

  “Huh?” Captain Osei cocked his head. “I haven’t heard of that language.”

  “Of course you haven’t.” Emma’s voice indicated she was waving a hand dismissively. “Because you are not a linguistic scholar, and it’s not something most people would concern themselves because no human being has spoken any form of the language on Earth for an estimated twenty thousand years.”

  Corporal Milton looked from the column he was inspecting toward the captain, his eyes wide. “Did she just say twenty thousand years? As in, before we had cities?”

  “Yes, that would be an accurate statement.”

  Jia blinked, letting it settle over her. She didn’t understand the implications, and it’d never occurred to her that the odd speech might be something like that. Something percolated in the back of her mind, like two puzzle pieces desperate to fit together.

  Erik frowned. “I hate to sound like a recording on replay all the time, but I don’t get it. Why would they use a language from that long ago? Why not use something more modern? What’s the game here?”

  Jia’s breath caught as the pieces finally connected. “Because that was the only reference they had.” Her eyes widened. “You’re right, Erik. There’s no reason to try to communicate with us in a language we don’t understand, and it’s not like those crew members would know a very dead language. Those parasites must not have access to the memories of the host, but if whatever’s controlling them visited Earth in the distant past, they might have access to ancient language samples.”

  “You’re telling me the Navigators aren’t dead, and they’ve visited Earth in the recent past, relatively speaking?” Captain Osei asked, sounding dubious. “And they’re controlling people through those things we shot in their stomachs?”

  “Why not?” Jia shrugged. “The Leems visited Earth, so why not the Navigators? I’m not saying the ancient astronaut theories are true, but it’s not insane that the Navigators popped by.”

  “But they’re all dead,” he countered. “And they have been for a while.”