by C. G. Hatton
Martinez was yelling.
He yelled at her to stay back, ruthlessly shutting out the pain and heat in his leg that was screaming poison, and slotting in the new magazine. He switched target to the grey cloak, eliciting a sneer in that leathery face.
It raised the hand wielding the axe and two of the Bhenykhn moved forward, one to LC, one towards him.
It was on him in a split second, grabbing the rifle even as he was firing it, twisting it out of his grasp and clubbing him round the head. It loomed over him, rain glistening off its smooth brown chitin-like skin. It smelled like dank, decaying leafmold and this close up, the pressure of that constant buzzing hum was almost unbearable, beating against his mind.
A massive hand grabbed him round the back of the neck and forced him down, fingernails like knives puncturing the armour to rake into his skin.
His knees hit the ground, splashing in rainwater that was pooling and running in small streams.
He could hear Martinez shouting to the others to stand down, wait, screw what NG had said.
He raised his eyes to look at the alien in the grey cloak and caught a shadow of movement out of the corner of his eye. Something where there should not have been any living thing. A dark shape jumped onto the Bhenykhn’s back and a knife flashed again and again, stabbing into its neck in a frenzied attack.
The Bhenykhn squad leader tumbled, hitting the ground face down.
NG reeled. It was dead, the pop of void that hit more powerful than anything he’d felt before.
The others froze as if recalculating.
NG twisted free, sprawling on the ground and rolling to his feet. He pulled the knife out of his leg and didn’t hesitate, darting in to stab the Bhenykhn in the neck. The blade plunged in with no resistance and no defence from its energy shield.
He stepped back as it fell, turning to see LC doing the same. The fourth alien was raising its rifle, slowly, as if caught in slow motion indecision. A shadow flitted next to it and it fell. Hilyer stepped forward into the light, pushing the Bhenykhn away from himself. The kid was butt naked, covered with mud, bleeding from a gash across his chest and grinning insanely. He had a knife in his hand, more blood dripping down his arm, dripping off the end of the curved blade. And most disturbing, NG couldn’t sense a thing from him, no emotion, no thoughts, no pain, no life signs at all. Nothing.
Hil was laughing like a maniac. He kicked the gun away from the body at his feet. “We’re the fucking Thieves’ Guild,” he yelled down at the alien, shouting over the thunder, voice close to cracking. “You don’t mess with us.”
Damn right.
Chapter 37
She was quiet, staring into the flames, thinking about times past and friends lost, that defiance and determination so familiar even though it had been so far away and so long ago.
She was thinking that they had had their peace, a mere interlude, always aware this was on its way, but now it was here and that peace was gone. Again.
He didn’t disturb her thoughts, didn’t chide her out of it the way he would have done with Nikolai.
It had been hard at the end. Few escaped. She was thinking how few. Thinking how this galaxy that teemed with these small, short-lived creatures was going to fare.
“They have us,” the Man said quietly. “We had no one. And these events have unfolded the way they have because we are here.”
He filled the goblets and held one out to her. “It will not be the same.”
•
Martinez ran up, directing the others to collect weapons, Duncan heading over to LC.
NG felt his legs start to go as the adrenaline dissipated. He sank to one knee, trembling, Martinez at his side.
“Poison,” he mumbled. “Just give me a minute.” His leg was throbbing, the back of his neck burning tendrils into his spine. He could feel it rushing into his bloodstream, a systemic toxin that was paralysing.
Martinez shouted across to the others, “Poison. Don’t touch the blades.” She took hold of NG’s hand, thinking that if he could hear, he was welcome to take whatever he needed.
“It’s not just the knives,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck.
She passed on the warning, squeezed his hand tight and yelled at Hil, “Hey, Hilyer. Nice butt.”
Hil laughed again. NG looked up. It was second nature to rely on that automatic sixth sense to know exactly where everyone was around him so it was unnerving as hell to look across and see the kid standing there.
Sebastian stirred. ‘No wonder the Bhenykhn had no idea he was there amongst them. It appears they do have a weakness.’
‘Except they’re not blind. He was lucky.’
Hil was also running on pure adrenaline. Someone had given him a field dressing and he was hugging it against the wound on his chest, soaking it through with fresh blood in seconds. The kid was close to crashing. God knows how he’d made it this far.
“So that’s how we do it?” Martinez said.
“It won’t be so easy for anyone else to get that close,” NG said. His chest was heaving, leg almost numb. “Let’s get back inside. I need to reload.”
Fiorrentino was lording over it at the head of the table as they walked back in to the ops room. NG killed it immediately without a word, grabbing the map and bottle, calling the Wintran medic to follow and limping into the small office.
He ditched the rifle, stripped off the helmet and neck guard, and sank into the chair behind the desk.
“We don’t have long,” he said. He propped his leg up on a second chair and fumbled to untie the straps on the body armour round his thigh. The knife wound was ugly but he could hardly feel it. He opened the whisky and drank straight from the bottle as he worked to neutralise the residual effects of the poison and stop the bleeding, wrapping a field bandage tightly around the jagged wound.
‘Nasty stuff.’
‘What, the poison or the whisky?’
Sebastian laughed. ‘You amuse me, Nikolai, have I ever told you that before? There have been several distinctly peculiar times when I’ve found your infectious exuberance bizarrely entertaining. I refer to the poison. It should have incapacitated you in seconds. They don’t like that it didn’t.’
‘Good.’
He tied off the binding with a rough knot and looked over at LC. Hal Duncan was helping the kid do the same. LC was pale and shivering, but laughing at Hilyer who had crashed out on the low sofa, still wielding the Bhenykhn knife and still grinning, flirting with the medic who was trying to patch him up and joking about waking up naked in a crashed medevac pod. It was like being in the mess in Acquisitions, sky-high egos and screw-it-all bravado. Without even needing to read them, it was obvious Hil was overcompensating for having almost died and LC wasn’t so much freaked out that he couldn’t feel his leg but that he’d killed someone, albeit a freaking monster that was trying to kill them.
Duncan looked up and caught NG’s eye, thinking, ‘I take it this is the infamous Zach Hilyer?’
‘The one and only. Don’t let Fiorrentino or anyone from Zang anywhere near the pair of them.’
Duncan gave a slight nod and said out loud, “What now?”
NG took another swig from the bottle. “We need to draw their attention so Hones has a chance when he reaches the Tangiers.” He offered across the whisky and switched to direct thought. ‘It seems that the aliens can’t detect anything from Hilyer. Can you?’
Duncan shook his head as he leaned over to take the bottle. NG could sense a change of heart in the big ex-marine, that deeply unsettled suspicion of the guild making way for a tentative element of trust after having seen them in action, seen first hand the way they’d run to help Luka. Duncan handed the whisky straight to LC and looked back at NG. ‘You don’t have this virus.’ Not a question.
‘Nope.’
Martinez had grabbed an armful of ammo boxes on the way in and was reloading. She pushed a box to Duncan who started to thumb rounds into the magazines, nudging LC to do the same.
‘You’re different,’ the big man thought. ‘Is that why you can hear them and we can’t?’
NG took a box and started refilling his own. ‘I have no idea,’ he thought back. ‘We didn’t have much of a chance to carry out any research on the virus before…’ He tailed away, no idea what to think or say… before he almost killed LC, before he got Sorensen killed, before he got Devon killed or before he messed with the Assassins so badly it almost got him killed?
That got a glance from LC.
Duncan didn’t care about anything but the immediate threat. ‘Can they hear us?’
‘We don’t think so.’ That ‘we’ sounded barking mad. NG looked up. ‘I don’t think so. They don’t seem to be reacting to our thoughts. I don’t think they can read our minds or overhear what we think. But they’re driven by energy. They sense human life signs through our energy signatures. I don’t know. We use a shit load of energy to do this. Maybe that’s what got their attention.’
‘And,’ Sebastian interjected, ‘the fact that you pre-empted every move they made. Hardly subtle, Nikolai.’
Duncan narrowed his eyes. ‘So we might as well be sitting here with a flashing neon sign over our heads?’
NG didn’t reply, feeling wide open, exposed. He just kept pushing in those rounds, one bullet at a time, very aware how few boxes they had left and how fast he’d burned through these mags out there.
Duncan stopped what he was doing and stared. ‘But that’s what you want, isn’t it?’
‘We need to stop them reporting back.’
‘And you think the Tangiers has the weapons to do it?’
NG shrugged. ‘Hones thinks they do. I think it’s our best shot.’
The big ex-marine slotted the last full magazine into his rifle. ‘Did you know the Bennies were here?’
‘You’ being the guild.
‘We knew they were coming. We didn’t know they were here already.’
‘Excuse me for asking, but what the hell does a guild of thieves have to do with a fucking alien invasion?’
‘We don’t just steal stuff.’
Duncan glanced at Martinez. ‘I can see that.’
Sebastian stirred suddenly, sending a shiver down NG’s back.
Duncan picked up on it. “Time to go?”
NG nodded. They needed to get mobile. He rubbed his leg. Pins and needles were prickling in the muscles as the feeling came back slowly but he reckoned he could walk on it. LC was another matter but if they were going to have any chance of surviving this, they needed to move.
‘You heal faster than us,’ Duncan thought. Again, not a question.
‘It’s different.’
‘How?’
LC was listening in. This was the rest of the conversation they should have had on board the Alsatia, before Sebastian…
‘For me to heal, it takes conscious effort. The virus you have is active. It heals for you. You don’t need to do anything. I have to concentrate – that’s why it works faster but it costs. This is what we need to figure out – what could you do if you tried?’
Duncan had to suppress a chuckle. ‘We don’t exactly have time to play, do we?’ He stood. “Do you need anything?”
NG looked up and sent privately, direct thought again, ‘I need to thank you for getting LC out of the shit on Poule.’
‘He’s a good kid. He has a death wish but I’m starting to see that’s a prerequisite to work with you guys.’
NG bit back a smile. He reached for the map. “I need to show you what the plan is.”
Hones and his team made it through the tunnels and were heading across the valley towards the Tangiers. NG crouched on the rooftop in the shelter of a thick pipeline, rifle cradled in his arms, finger on the trigger.
It had stopped raining but the damp cold was still permeating like thick fog. The Bhenykhn were regrouping. He listened in, watching from his vantage point as they circled around, half his concentration on Hones and the minute by minute monologue the colonel was running through his mind, ‘…if you can still bloody hear this.’
He could, just, through the steady stream of intel that Sebastian was throwing at him. It was a nervy game they were playing, attracting the Bhenykhn’s attention then running, occasionally stopping to shoot the shit out of a single alien, chipping away at their numbers. Sometimes skipping out by the skin of their teeth. Sometimes not. Hones had assigned five of his best marines to stay with them; they were down to two.
‘Okay, we’re good to go,’ came in from Duncan.
NG stood, still half crouched, motioning to Martinez and running to the edge of the roof. He dropped flat into a firing position. He could see LC, pressed up close against the door of the building opposite, no need to bust open the lock, he could see from here it had been hacked open with an axe. Duncan was standing on the other side watching the kid’s back. Hilyer was around somewhere. They were keeping together, blazing a trail, fast and mobile, causing enough trouble that the Bennies were struggling to put a coherent plan into action to capture them.
He just wanted to find out what had happened to Elliott.
‘We’ve got the street,’ he sent.
LC went in, Duncan close behind.
They had maybe five minutes before they’d have to bug out.
It didn’t take that long.
NG walked in. The smell was almost overpowering, a stench of decay and rotting flesh, blood and pheromones hanging heavy in the air.
There were at least four bodies that he could make out, flesh and body parts strewn around the small control room. One head was pinned to the wall by an axe, dripping fluids. Another was strung up by a weighted chain, still swinging from the rafters.
LC looked sick. He pushed past, muttering, “He’s not here,” and heading for the door.
‘The child is quite the empath. Dangerous talent to have when he has no control over it. It looks like Elliott has been busy. I want to meet him, Nikolai. He’s avoiding you, have you noticed?’
He had.
He wandered over to the main console and picked through LC’s assortment of oddities, all disassembled, lying scattered from what looked to have been neat lines before the fight. There were four more energy shield pods there, all smashed, oozing bodily fluids.
Martinez was cursing as she gathered weapons, kicking aside dismembered body parts.
Hilyer walked up beside him before he even knew the kid was there with them. “Hey NG, look at this.”
Martinez looked across. “What the hell is that?”
NG squinted at it, a chill settling in his stomach.
Hil grinned, obvious that he recognised it.
“What is it?” Martinez said again, taking it off Hilyer and holding it up to the light.
The craftwork was unmistakable.
‘Oh my…’
Hil leaned back against the console. “Do you remember that tab LC screwed up a few years ago?”
Everyone knew the tab LC had screwed up. It had taken them four extraction teams and a Thundercloud to get him out. He’d spent two months in Medical recovering from it.
She nodded, turning the elaborate badge over in her hand, rubbing the blood off the twisted metal.
“He was fucked,” Hil said, “but he’d nailed the tab. He had it in his pocket.” He looked up. “It was one of these, wasn’t it? Where is he?”
“Outside,” NG said vaguely and demanded of Sebastian, ‘Did you know?’
‘Know what? That the amulet Anderton retrieved from Rodan was Bhenykhn? Or that the Man knowingly sent one of your precious field operatives after an artefact he knew was scavenged from his arch enemies? Or that the fiendish Angmar Rodan was in possession of such an item? What do you think…?’
NG looked around at the carnage, an uneasy queasiness stirring deep inside.
‘Don’t you want to know what it is?’
He didn’t.
‘It’s a kill token. A badge of honour. One thousand confirmed kills in unarmed combat. They keep tal
lies.’
Christ.
“How the hell,” Duncan said, turning round from examining the head on the wall, “did one skinny tech guy do this?”
The head had an ear missing.
NG shook his head vaguely. He nudged a few of the screens that weren’t smashed but the whole console was dead. “I have no idea. We need to find him. Come on. We’re low on ammo. Grab whatever weapons you can.”
They made it back out onto the rooftops and ran, putting distance between themselves and the control room. The wind was picking up again.
“How fucking long does night last in this place?” Martinez muttered as they hunkered down again, the others spread out around them in a defensive formation.
NG huddled against a wall. He was cold and he’d lost track of Hones. They had about seven more hours of darkness but he had no idea if he said that out loud or not. He closed his eyes for a second and tried to concentrate on the Tangiers. There was a lot of Bhenykhn activity there, much more than there had been. They were scouring the place, picking it clean.
He was vaguely aware of Martinez taking his rifle and pushing a flask into his hand. He took a sip of something that burnt his throat. He coughed and muttered a thanks out loud, directing at Sebastian, ‘C’mon, help me here. Where’s Hones?’
‘In trouble.’
He followed Sebastian’s train of thought and managed to pick out the colonel, more from the pain and the vicious swearing than anything the man was thinking consciously.
‘They don’t have time to lock in the targeting coordinates,’ Sebastian murmured. ‘The Bhenykhn know what you’re doing. They’re sending gunships, here and to the Tangiers. Those warheads aren’t going to make it out of their tubes and Hones knows it. Can you feel that?’
It was chilling, a double hit of last-stand determination from the JU colonel and a flush of impending victory and bloodlust from the Bhenykhn. Hones and his men were overrun, more of the alien ground troops storming the warship.
‘Get into cover,’ Sebastian thought coldly. ‘Now, Nikolai, get into cover.’