by Neil Clarke
Mirotic is tapped in, with his optic implant glowing the same red as the surveillance unit. “Nothing hot and moving but us. Bog gets denser to the east and south. Lots of those sponge trees, lots of subterranean fungi. No radio communications. Could be more anti-air mines sitting masked, though.”
His English is airtight, but still carries a Serbian lilt. Before they clamped him, he was upper-level enforcement in a Neo-European crime block on Kettleburn. He once personally executed three men and two women in an abandoned granary and had their corpses put through a thresher. Only Elliot has access to that back-record. To everyone else, Mirotic is a jovial giant with a bristly black beard and high-grade neural plugs.
Prentiss, Jan, trundles past, having received Snell’s nudge for a hand with the fuel cells. He wipes wet dirt off on his tree-trunk thighs. Both he and his sister are nearly tall as Mirotic, and both are broader.
“Soil’s no good for graves,” Prentiss rumbles over his shoulder. “He’s going to get churned up again. Watch.”
“How many drones came out intact?” Elliot asks Mirotic, trying to sound sharp, trying not to imagine Beasley’s body heaved back to the surface.
“Two,” Mirotic says. “I can fix a third, maybe.”
“Send one up,” Elliot says, scratching his arm. “Get a proper map going.”
Mirotic hesitates. “If I send up a drone, we might trigger another smartmine.”
Elliot hadn’t thought of that. He hasn’t thought of a lot of things, but rescinding the order would make him look off, make him look shook, maybe even remind Mirotic of the night he saw him with the syringe.
“That’s why you keep it low,” Elliot says. “Scrape the tree line, no higher. And keep it brief.”
Mirotic takes a battered drone from its casing and unfolds it in his lap, sitting cross-legged on the damp earth. As it rises into the air, whirring and buzzing, his eyes turn bright sensory blue.
“It’s strange there’s no animal life,” Mirotic says. “Nothing motile on the sensor but insects. Could be a disease came through. Bioweapon, even. Seen it in the woods around New Warsaw, dead and empty just like this.” He rests his thick hands on his knees. “We could have everyone jack up their immunity boosters.”
Elliot takes the hint and sends a widecast order to dial up immunity and use filtration, at least for the time being. Then he goes to where Tolliver and Santos are vacuum-sealing Beasley’s body bag, the filmy material wrapping him tight like a shroud. Tolliver looks up at his approach, flicking dark lashes. He has smooth brown skin and sly smiles and a plastic-capped flay a skin artist did for him on leave that shows off the muscle and tendon of his arm in a graceful gash. Elliot has felt it under his fingertips, cool and hard. He knows Tolliver is fucking at least one other squadmate, but he doesn’t think it’s Santos.
“Me and Tolliver will finish up,” Elliot says. “Go spot for Mirotic. He’s tapped in. Then get the tents up.”
“Sir.” Santos’s the only one on the squad who says sir, who salutes, and she does both with enough irony to slice through power armor. Santos was a foot soldier for one of the Brazilian families up on the lunar colony. She looks like a bulldog, squinty eyes and pouched cheeks. Her clamp didn’t go in right and there’s double the scarring up her head.
When Santos leaves, still sneering, Elliot drops to a crouch. “Did they know each other?” he asks, grabbing the foot end of the body bag. Tolliver takes the other and they carefully stand up.
“Talked Portuguese together sometimes,” he says. “Beasley knew a bit. Said the moony accent’s a real bitch to follow, though.”
Elliot tells himself that this is why he needs Tolliver on his side, because Tolliver sees the webs, sees all the skinny bonds of social molecule that run through the squad.
“Fucked up seeing him halfway gone like that,” Tolliver says, with a put-on hardness to his voice. “At least the clamp is good for something, right?”
Elliot grunts in response as they carry Beasley away from the downed Heron, away from the surveillance unit and the carbon-fiber tents now blooming around it.
“When I said we could give him paineaters, that vein in your forehead, it went big,” Tolliver says, almost conversationally. “You were in the back when they hit us. You were in the medcab again.”
“I’m coming down,” Elliot says, even as his itching arm gives another twinge. “And I’m staying off it. Staying sharp.”
Tolliver says nothing, and then they’re at the hole where the other Prentiss, Noam, is waiting with a spade slung over her shoulder. They lower the body bag in slowly, gently. Elliot reaches down for a fistful of damp earth and crumbles it over Beasley’s shrouded face. Tolliver does the same. Prentiss starts shoveling.
“We got the extraction request through before we lost altitude,” Elliot says. “Won’t be down here long.”
Tolliver gives him a sidelong look. “Some of us will be,” he says, then turns and leaves.
Elliot stays to watch until the body bag has disappeared completely under thick wet dirt.
Dusk drops fast on Pentecost, dyeing the sky and swamp a cold eerie blue for a half-hour before plunging them into pitch dark. Most of the squad already have peeled eyes—the night vision surgery is a common one for criminals—and Elliot orders all lights dimmed to minimum to conserve the generator.
Elliot has a tent to himself. He lies back stiff on his cot in the dark and reviews mission parameters in his optic implant, scrolling up and down over words he’s read a thousand times. They were heading north to reinforce Osuna, cutting slantwise across marshy no-man’s land the rebels usually stay away from. They were not expecting hostiles on the way, and now they’re grounded at least a thousand klicks from the nearest outpost.
Elliot tries to calculate how long the paineaters and emergency morphine he salvaged from the shattered medcab will last him. Then he accesses his personal files in his implant and watches the one clip he hasn’t deleted yet, the one he watches before he sleeps.
“She’s awake . . . Just looking around . . . ”
His wife’s voice draws three syllables out of awake, drags on around, high and sweet and tinged weary. His daughter’s soft and veiny head turns. Her bright black eyes search, and Elliot can pretend they see him.
Something scrapes against the side of the tent. He blinks the clip away, hauls upright and reaches for his weapon before he recognizes the imprint of a body pressed up flush to the fabric. Elliot swipes a door with his hand and Tolliver slides through, already halfway undressed.
“Told the Smell I’m out back for a long shit,” Tolliver says, working his stiff cock with one hand, reaching for Elliot’s waistband with the other. “Let’s be quick.”
“Wasn’t sure you’d be coming,” Elliot says, helping yank the fatigues off. “Because of Beasley.”
“Don’t fucking talk about Beasley,” Tolliver says.
Elliot doesn’t, and Tolliver’s body all over his is second best to a morphine hit for helping him not think about that or anything else. But when he comes it’s a throb and a trickle and then everything turns lukewarm dead again. Afterward, Tolliver sits on the edge of the cot and peels his spray-on condom off in strips.
“Jan went walkabout in the swamp a bit,” he says, because this has been the usual trade since they deployed last month. “Think he’s testing the range limit for the clamp. Wants to skate, maybe. Him and his sister.”
“In the middle of a mined bog?” Elliot asks, pulling his fatigues back on.
“They’re both settlement-bred,” Tolliver says. “Colonist genemix, you know, they think they’re invincible. Probably think they can tough it out and get south to the spaceport.”
“He told you that he wants to desert?”
Tolliver takes a drink from Elliot’s water bottle and runs his tongue along his teeth. “He told me he did some exploring,” he says. “Wanted to jaw about some odd bones he found. I filled in the rest.”
“What did he find?” Elliot asks.
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br /> “Animal bones,” Tolliver says. “Really white, really clean.”
“Mirotic thinks a plague might have come through,” Elliot says, instead of saying a bioweapon. “There’d be bones.”
“Plagues don’t usually put them in neat little heaps,” Tolliver says. “He said they were all piled up. A little mound of skeletons.”
Tolliver swipes a door and disappears, leaving Elliot sweat-soaked and sick-feeling. He only hesitates a moment before he gropes under the bedroll for his syringe. Before he can start prepping his favorite vein, the cyclops starts to wail.
Everyone is out of their tents and armed in a few minutes, clustered around the cyclops. Half of them are rubbing their eyes as the peel sets in and turns their irises reflective. Elliot switches to night vision in his implant, lighting the shadows radiation green. The air sits damp and heavy on his shoulders, and with no breeze nothing moves in the flora. The stubby sponge trees and wide-blade ferns are dead still.
“Where’s your brother?” Elliot asks Noam, counting heads.
“Taking a shit out back,” she says. “He’ll have heard it, though.”
Mirotic is tapped in now, his implant blinking red. “Just one bogey,” he says. “Thirty meters out. Looks like some kind of animal.”
“You set it to wail for every fucking swamp rat that wanders through?” Snell says. His face is still streaked with soap.
“It’s a lot bigger than a rat,” Mirotic says. “Don’t know what it is. It hasn’t got vitals. It isn’t warm.”
“Mechanical?” Elliot asks, thinking of the spider-legged hunter-killers they used to drag rebels out of their caves around Catalao. Tech has a way of trickling over in these long engagements, whether stolen or sold off on the side.
“It’s not moving like any of the crawlers I’ve seen,” Mirotic says. “Circling now, toward the back of us. Fast. Jan’s still squatting back there.”
Some of the squad swivel instinctively. Elliot pulls up Jan’s channel. “Prentiss, there’s a bogey heading towards you,” he says. “Might be mechanical. Get eyes on it.”
Jan’s reply crackles. “Hard to miss,” he says. “It’s fucking glowing.”
“And what is it?” Elliot says. “You armed?”
Jan’s reply does not come by channel, but his howl punctures the still night air. Elliot is knocked back as Noam barrows past him, unslinging her gnasher and snapping the safety off. Snell’s fast behind, and then the others, and then Elliot finds himself rearguard. He’s still fumbling for his weapon when he rounds the back of the downed Heron.
His eyes slip-slide over the scene, trying to make sense of the nightmarish mass of bioluminescence and spiky bone that’s enveloped Jan almost entirely. His night vision picks out a trailing arm, a hip, a boot exposed. The creature is writhing tight around Jan’s body, spars of bone rasping against each other, and the glowing flesh of it is moving, slithering. The screams from inside are muffled.
Snell fires first, making Elliot’s dampers swell like wet cotton in his ear canals. The spray of bullets riddle the length of the creature, and a fine spray of red blood—Jan’s blood—flicks into the air.
“Don’t fucking shoot!” Noam smacks Snell’s weapon down and lunges forward, reaching for her brother’s convulsing arm. Before he can grab hold, the creature retreats toward the tree line with Jan still ensnared, unnervingly fast.
It claws itself forward on a shifting pseudopod of bone spines, moving like a scuttling blanket. Someone else fires a shot, narrowly missing Noam running after it. The creature slithers into the trees, for an instant Noam is silhouetted against the eerie glow of it, then both of them disappear in the dark.
“Shit,” Tolliver says. “I mean, shit.”
Elliot thinks that’s as good a summary as any. He can still see Noam’s vitals, and Jan’s too, both of them spiked hard with adrenaline but alive. They’ll be out of range in less than a minute.
“I hit it,” Snell says. “Raked it right along its, I don’t know, its abdomen. Didn’t do nothing.”
“You hit Jan. That blood spray, that was Jan.”
“Jan’s inside it.”
“We’re going after them, right?”
Elliot looks around at the squad’s distorted faces. Tolliver’s eyes gleam like a cat’s in the dark. There is no protocol for men being dragged away by monsters in the night. He opens his jaw; shuts it again. Mirotic shifts in his peripheral, taking a half-step forward, shoulders thrust back, and Elliot knows he is a nanosecond from taking the squad over, and maybe that would be better for everyone.
“Mirotic,” he says. “You stay. Get a drone up and guide us bird’s eye. Everyone else, on me.”
Plunging through the dark swamp, Elliot expects every mud-sucked step to trigger another smartmine. Sweat pools in the hollow of his collarbone. The whine of the drone overhead shivers in his clenched teeth, and the squad is silent except for heavy breathing, muted curses as they follow its glowing path in their implants. The Prentii’s signal comes and goes like a static ghost.
The warped green-and-black blur of his night vision, the drone’s shimmering trail of digital breadcrumbs, the memory of the monster and Jan’s disembodied thrashing arm—none of it seems quite real. A nightmare, or more likely an overdose.
“Rebels stay out of these swamps,” Snell says aloud, dredging something from his post-clamp war briefing. “All the colonists do.” His voice is thin and tight.
Nobody replies. The drone’s pathway hooks left, into the deepest thicket of sponge trees, and they follow it. Pungent-smelling leaves slap against Elliot’s head and shoulders. It reminds him almost of the transplanted eucalyptus trees where he grew up on Earth.
“Can’t get any closer with the drone,” comes Mirotic’s crackly voice in his ear. “Trees are too high, too dense. They’re right ahead of you. Close now.”
The twins’ signal flares in Elliot’s skull, but their channels are shut and their vitals are erratic. Elliot’s feels his heart starting to thrum too fast. Eyes blink and heads twitch as the rest of the squad picks up the signal. Tolliver’s face is drawn, his mouth half-open. Santos is unreadable. Snell looks ready to shit himself. Hands tighten on stocks. Fingers drift to triggers.
The sponge trees thin out, and Elliot sees the same bioluminescence that swallowed Jan whole. The shape of it is indistinct, too bright for his night vision, so he flicks it off. When he closes and reopens his eyes, he sees what’s become of the twins.
They are tangled together in a grotesque parody of affection, limbs wrapping each other, and it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins because they are coated in a writhing skin of ghostly blue light. Long shafts of dull gray bone, humors or femurs from an animal Elliot knows was not killed by any plague, skewer them in place like a tacked specimen.
Reminding himself it might be a hallucination, Elliot steps slowly forward.
“Prentiss?”
A sluggish ripple goes through the twins’ tangled bodies. Elliot follows the motion and finds a neck. A head not covered over. Noam’s eyes are wide open and terrified. Elliot watches her face convulse trying to speak, but when her bruised mouth opens, glowing blue tendrils spill out of her throat. It’s inside her. Elliot recoils. In his own throat, he feels bile rising and burning.
“Shit, they’re conscious,” Tolliver breathes. “What is that stuff? What the fuck is . . . ?” He reaches for Noam’s cheek with one hand, but before he makes contact the other head, Jan’s, buried somewhere near his sister’s thigh, begins to wail. It’s a raw animal noise Elliot has only ever heard men make when they are torn apart, when their limbs have been blown off, when shock and pain have flensed them down to the reptile brain and all it knows to do is scream.
He claws Tolliver’s hand back.
“Don’t touch them,” he says. “We have to run a scan, or . . . ” He looks at the bones pinning them in place, at the writhing cloak that looks almost like algae, now, like glowing blue algae. He has no idea what to
do.
“Look at the feet,” Santos says thickly. “Fuck.”
Elliot looks. Noam’s feet are not feet any more. The skin and muscle has been stripped away, leaving bits of bone, crumbling with no tendon to hold them together.
“Kill them,” Santos says. “It’s eating them alive.” She pulls her sidearm and aims it at Jan’s screaming mouth. Her hand tremors.
Elliot doesn’t tell her no. It would be mercy, now, to kill them. Same how it was mercy for Beasley.
A vein bulges up Santos’s neck. “Can’t,” she grunts. “The implant.”
Elliot aims his own weapon at Jan and as his finger finds the trigger he finds himself paralyzed, blinking red warnings scrolling over his eyes. Convict squads have insurance against friendly fire same as any other. Maybe in a combat situation the parameters would loosen a little, but this, an execution, is out-of-bounds.
“Send the nudge, Noam.” Tolliver squats down by her wide-eyed face. “You in there? You gotta send the nudge. So we can trigger you. Come on, Noam.”
The yellow message doesn’t appear. Maybe Noam is too angry, too colonist, thinking she is invincible, thinking somehow she’ll get out of this scrape how she got out of all the other ones. More likely her mind is too far gone to access the implant. Jan starts to scream again.
“I’ll fucking do it manual, then,” Tolliver says, with his voice shaking. He looks at Snell. “Give me your knife. Unless you want to do it.”
Snell wordlessly unclips his combat knife and slings it over, handle-first. It’s a long wicked thing, not regulation or even close. Elliot thinks he should offer to do it. He’s in command, after all. He knows where the jugular is and where to slit it without dousing himself in blood. But he only watches.
And the instant Tolliver touches Noam’s head, all hell breaks loose. The monsters come from everywhere at once, scuttling masses of bone and bioluminescence. From the ground, Elliot realizes dimly even as he backpedals, keys his night vision, opens fire. The rest of the squad is doing the same; splinters fly where bullets hit bone but the skin of things, the blue algae, just splits and reforms.