B00BFVOGUI EBOK

by John Jackson Miller

  She beheld the monster, rising and plunging. The chemical ice that made up the floor was still frozen — could liquids even exist on Leel? — but the thaw Vremian mentioned had evidently weakened its tensile strength, and the stony serpent was wending and crunching its way through it like a drill through balsa wood. At least it wasn’t paying any attention to her — yet.

  Bridget quickly checked her armor’s team status display. All the members of Surge Team One were alive, she saw, but there had been several non-life-threatening injuries from the battle and the collapse. She suspected the Xylanx warriors had been doing as her team had: using lesser ordnance so as to avoid bringing down the atrium on everyone. But her team had been too near the place where the creature had erupted from the floor. She did an audio roll call, and everyone checked in.

  “Those still armed use your sonics to get clear,” she said. “It’s a little busy up here.”

  Of all the members of her squad, only Arbutus Dinner was free from the icefall. At least she wasn’t alone. He was crouched behind the onetime podium, firing explosive rounds at the beast to no noticeable effect.

  “Dinner, where’s Jamie?” Bridget asked.

  “Outside,” Dinner replied between shots. “He followed the Xylanx dudes.”

  A sign of intelligence on both their parts? she wondered. Maybe. Well, she still had people outside. “Gideon, come in,” she said into her mic.

  Static — but different from what she’d heard earlier, when the Xylanx leader boasted about jamming her second team’s transmissions from Indispensable.

  Jamie and the Xylanx would have to be Gideon’s problem, she realized, as the monstrosity ceased its circular movements. The leading end of the beast rose in the air, towering like a cobra, heading for — what? Bridget trained her armor’s spotlight above. Near the damaged top of the atrium, airborne Leelites swirled in panic, looking like bubbles circling a drain. Through the communications link, she could hear them screaming about the thing — the jorvil, they called it. So they knew what it was, she thought — and it certainly knew about them.

  The upper section of the creature loomed over the erstwhile floor, grasping for the wispy aliens with its handlike head. The floating Leelites seemed an insubstantial meal for such a monster — how did it get so big? — but that didn’t stop the thing from snatching and devouring every unfortunate creature that came near.

  Her armor’s interface alerted her to a nearby armament. Across the wreck of a room she spotted the oversized stock of a rifle, half-buried in the icy dust. She dashed for it, ducking underneath a moving section of the jorvil along the way. The rifle was O’Herlihy’s, she realized on picking it up. All surge team members used signature weapons, useless in the hands of unauthorized personnel; in the chief’s hands, though, it worked fine. She wondered what had happened to Mike even as she started firing explosive rounds at the jorvil’s top section. She didn’t want to bring the entire ice dome down — had it been weakened, too, by the thaw? But there really was no missing a target as big as the jorvil.

  Nothing. She switched ammunition modes. It was the same story with electrical pulses — and with the sonic power that had freed her earlier. Almost too fat to be called a rifle, the Spraecher 300 had five ordnance settings — and not one of them seemed to even distract the jorvil from its prey.

  “Vremian!” she called out into her helmet mic. “What is this thing?”

  She heard the start of an answer from the Leelite, but it resolved into a scream as the jorvil lunged. The Leelite flitted out of the way, causing the monster’s face to slap hard against the interior of the ice dome. The wall shook, and another shower of ice fell.

  Worse, behind her the ceiling of the entrance tunnel gave way, closing off the exit and the last source of exterior light.

  Inside her helmet, Bridget’s visor switched to infrared tracking, allowing her to see Dinner again across the mess. “Party knowglobe connection lost,” the computerized voice in her ear said.

  “Terrific,” she said, rolling her eyes. It was the end of her ability to tap the Leelites’ knowledge base about the creature — not that she’d had a chance to even check. Her team had also been using it to boost their armor transmission signals from within the hall to make them audible to the team outside. Jamming or no jamming, they were truly cut off.

  “What now?” Dinner radioed. He’d momentarily paused his waste of ammunition. “It’s gonna run out of appetizers soon.”

  “Just don’t tell it your name,” she said.

  Anxious, she tried again to reach the second team leader at the ship, to no avail. Where Hiro Welligan was her greenest squad leader, Victor Gideon had twenty years of experience battling strange things from beyond. That was more than anyone on her team had, Bridget included. But Welligan simply had trouble knowing the right thing to do. Getting Gideon to do the sane thing would be a triumph…

  22

  From a distance, Leel resembled a peeled apple: vaguely spherical, white, and featureless. The Black Butte, as the humans had named it on approach, was the solitary deviation: a half-kilometer-high mass of opaque ice, it housed the Leelites’ auction hall. The surrounding area was said to resemble an empty Yukon mall parking lot — except during the once-a-decade superconductor auctions, when it looked like a mostly empty lot.

  Today, however, it was a war zone — and dashing from the only entrance to the butte, Jamie found himself in a no-man’s-land. A hundred meters ahead to his west sat Indispensable, towering and boxy in its current trading configuration. Between the ship and the butte, eight members of Surge Sigma’s second team were in a chevron formation, kneeling and firing their weapons, seemingly at him.

  Ducking back inside the passageway, Jamie quickly realized his teammates outside were shooting at the Xylanx. The black-suited warriors from the auction hall had emerged before he had and now were headed for their own vessel, which sat to the north. More Xylanx soldiers had fanned out in front of the ship, attempting to screen their compatriots’ escape from the butte. Many meters separated them: Jamie thought the parties were using more serious ammunition, here outside the auction hall. It was keeping both groups well apart.

  The Xylanx transport was a curious thing. Built from smaller modules, as all whirlibang-using craft had to be, the ship seemed to have cheese-shaped wedges for its basic building block. That gave the overall vehicle a spiky look, with sharp angles rising from a long horizontal body. Two slender guns rotated atop the vehicle, firing green pulses at regular intervals to cover Kolvax’s party’s escape.

  Behind Jamie, the ice mountain shook. He looked back to see the far end of the passage he’d emerged from collapsing. Afraid, he turned and charged into the snowfield…

  …only to slip immediately and land faceplate first in the open.

  “Trader!” a voice called out over Jamie’s audio system. From the ground, Jamie looked across the dirty snow to see the husky form of Victor Gideon, second team squad leader, charging from the human forces’ flank. “I’ve got him!” Gideon yelled.

  Jamie scrambled to his hands and knees. Cave-in or not, the sight of Gideon charging toward him caused Jamie to think seriously about going back inside to face the monster again. Gideon had scared the hell out of him at every encounter. The man’s HardSHEL armor looked as if he’d worn it through a fall from orbit: dented, banged, and pockmarked beyond belief. Doesn’t Quaestor spend billions outfitting these people? Jamie had thought on meeting him. The guy could use a chamois and some touch-up paint.

  And instead of the Spraecher 300s that Bridget’s crew used, Gideon carried around a cluster of smaller weapons soldered and riveted together — presumably, Jamie imagined, so he could fire them all at the same time. And incongruously with the rest of his high-tech equipment, Gideon also had a shotgun slung over his shoulder. Or at least that was what Jamie thought it was: it looked like the thing Elmer Fudd had carried in the musical that won the Tony Award in 2136. He was surprised Gideon hadn’t gone for a caveman club i
nstead, to match his personality.

  Xylander warriors happily took potshots as Gideon dashed across the open ground. A blast from the alien craft struck to his left, and then to his right. If Gideon paid any attention, he didn’t show it. Between Leel’s three-quarter-gee gravity and his outfit’s sensors and servos, he dodged one snow-scattering blast after another.

  Seeing the live fire chasing Gideon toward his own position made the decision for Jamie. He turned back and lunged toward the shelter of the still-standing exterior opening to the butte. But no sooner did he reach the icy stoop than he fell again.

  “Trader down!” Gideon yelled as he neared the entrance. Throwing his body into a crunching roll, the forty-five-year-old tumbled to a stop. Squatting on top of Jamie’s armored form, Gideon turned and pointed his gun cluster out at the Xylanx. The squad leader screamed a bloody oath and began firing a variety of things.

  Jamie hated Gideon.

  “Let me up, dammit!” the trader yelled, squirming.

  “Nothing doing!” With a face cracked like Mars, Gideon set his teeth in an angry scowl and continued blasting. Return fire peppered the ground ahead of them until the rest of Surge Two’s members shifted position to better protect them.

  Gideon’s silver-flecked brown eyes lit up as the Xylanx fire diminished. “That’s right, that’s right!” He laughed loudly and spoke into his helmet mic: “Gideon here, trader secure!”

  “Is that even your real name?” Jamie asked from the ground. He’d heard a whisper that Gideon’s real name was Eustace Clemmons.

  Gideon grabbed at Jamie’s space suit and hauled him up. “Is that your real ass I just saved?”

  “They weren’t shooting at me,” Jamie said, pulling away. “They were shooting at you. When you came here, then they were shooting at me.”

  “Maybe you’d like to take them on alone!” Gideon elbowed Jamie hard, just beneath the merchant badge. Jamie stumbled a step back.

  “Whatever.”

  As Gideon returned to blazing away at the Xylanx, Jamie dusted himself off, glad that his outfit had absorbed most of the blow. If Gideon was supposed to be one of his bodyguards, Jamie thought, he’d sure missed the class on not hurting his charge. Not to mention a couple of stages of human evolution.

  Since he’d met the guy back on Altair, Jamie had found Gideon alternately terrifying and ludicrous. With close-cropped brown hair and no neck to speak of, the older man looked like a child’s military toy. There was no mistaking why: everyone on the team knew what Gideon’s problem was. Early experiments using nanoids to stimulate the adrenal glands had turned a whole cadre of human guinea pigs into rage machines. The microscopic robots inside Gideon weren’t active any longer, but they’d messed with his sense of self-preservation, blackened his outlook on life, and tensed him tighter than a rubber band around a basketball.

  “Dreadcases” who partook of the therapies were quite pleasant: Jamie’s mother had a faithful bodyguard who played third flute in the National Philharmonic. He didn’t know why Gideon hadn’t gotten treatment, or why Bridget entrusted him with any authority. Perhaps he had once eaten a lion that had threatened her.

  “These guys, these guys,” Gideon said, blasting another armored Xylander at long range to no effect. The whole battle scene seemed bizarre to Jamie: combatants on both sides struck by projectiles would either shrug them off, or at most tumble backward, only to recover. Gideon’s lower faceplate fogged and smeared, and Jamie couldn’t tell from the man’s expression whether he took his targets’ refusal to die as a personal affront, or worthy of admiration.

  “Who are these guys?” Gideon asked, to no one. “They won’t go down!”

  “They’re called Xylanx,” Jamie said.

  “Lots of Xs. I like it. Sounds crunchy.”

  “These are the same people who got me on the depot.”

  “I know that, dishwhip. I was there,” the squad leader said. “They came in here fast — jamming our transmissions before they landed. Set up a screen of fire so their people could reach the butte.” He pointed to the top of the Xylanx ship, where Jamie saw the small cannons blasting away. “When their team left the auction hall, they stopped jamming, but I still can’t raise Yang in there. What’s going on?”

  Jamie quickly described the scene inside the auction hall. Gideon’s eyes narrowed when Jamie got to the part about the jorvil, and the squad leader actually seemed to growl a little.

  “Big monster,” Gideon said, seeming to consider the choice between saving Bridget’s crew and continuing to shoot at enemies who could take what he had to deal out.

  Jamie was doing some considering of his own: he was considering cowering in a corner to wait for a decision when Lissa Trovatelli’s voice piped into his ear. “Q/A here,” the quartermaster said from Indispensable. “Gideon, Unknown One is powering up to go,” she said, referring to the Xylanx craft.

  Gideon groaned audibly. “Yang’s team’s in trouble. Hate to leave this—”

  “We need to grab one of these guys,” Trovatelli said. “I want to know more about them.”

  “It’s mutual,” Jamie piped in. “They stole our knowglobe.”

  “I saw,” Trovatelli said. “I’ve been trying to send a purge code to wipe the memory, but they’ve blocked that somehow.”

  “Stinkin’ thieves!” Gideon said, firing faster.

  Trovatelli spoke more firmly. “We need to stop them, Gideon. At the very least, capture one, so we know—”

  “I’ve been trying!” Gideon snarled and spat angrily, the spittle striking the inside of his faceplate.

  So that’s what the smear is, Jamie thought. Gross.

  “You guys were the ones who didn’t want to arm the ship — you and your low-risk, low-reward mission,” Gideon said. He slowed his rate of fire almost imperceptibly, seemingly having had a thought. “Hey, maybe we could ram their ship with ours. Or at least park on top of ’em—”

  “Hell, no,” Jamie said. The bauxite aboard wasn’t that valuable on its own — except, for whatever reason, to the Leelites — but he was damned if he was going to be stranded here. “Indispensable’s my call, right? I say no!”

  Gideon’s jaw locked. “Puny, pissant trader…”

  Jamie pointed back toward the collapsed tunnel. “Bridget! Monster! Remember?”

  Gideon looked to Jamie as if he was struggling to concentrate.

  “It would be easier if you stopped shooting at things,” Jamie said.

  “Shut up.” But Gideon did stop firing — one of his guns, at least. He spoke in a calmer voice. “Scan Unknown One if you can, Q/A. Trader’s safe and we can’t take on their ship guns. We’re going in after the monster!” He paused. “And — uh, to extract Surge One.”

  Trovatelli transmitted her disapproval. “We may not get this chance—”

  “I’m in charge,” Gideon said, glancing back at the cave-in. “Get me a reading on what’s blocking the entrance. We’re going in.”

  Jamie looked outside. The firing had ceased. “You can go in,” he said, “and have all the monsters you want. I’m going back to the ship before my pulse rate needs a comma.”

  “You’re not going anywhere. You’re safer with me,” Gideon said, turning into the darkness of the cavern.

  “You haven’t seen that thing down there,” Jamie said.

  “It hasn’t seen me.”

  * * *

  I don’t believe it, Kolvax thought as he reached the steps of the X-560. They’re going to let us go.

  Kolvax hadn’t come here to wipe out the human expedition, as enjoyable as that might have been. But it was useful to take the humans’ measure in battle, nonetheless. The trader’s defenders on the surface were good, he had to admit. The forces outside the auction hall had exchanged fire with his team for a long time, with the humans taking only one casualty — and even that was just an injury.

  Kolvax had seen the human’s squad leader — “Gideon,” the transmissions called him — carry the incapacitated sol
dier over his shoulder back to the cargo ship before resuming fighting. Later on he’d seen Gideon run across a field of fire to protect his trader. Foolhardy acts both, but the sort of defiant behavior he liked in a warrior. This Gideon had the heart of a Xylander.

  He quickly dispelled the comparison from his mind. It was distasteful to think about the ways the Xylanx and the humans were similar. And he’d already discovered another likeness he didn’t expect. The humans didn’t have any ammunition that could pierce the Stalker armor of the Xylanx, but neither had the Xylanx brought any ammunition that could pierce the armor of the humans.

  That’ll change, he thought. He’d succeeded in his mission, despite things not going exactly as planned. His ship had fired the first shot at the butte, rocking the auction hall and giving him his advantage of surprise. He hadn’t counted on the appearance of the jorvil, evidently awakened from its hibernation by the blast, but it had taken out the trader’s defenders inside and made stealing the knowglobe simple.

  With the Xylanx transport’s engine rumbling, he watched as his underlings carried the human knowglobe up the steps. Some of the data would be instantly available: that which the team shared with everyone. But most Signatory Systems expeditions used their knowglobes for logistical assistance. There would be other information in the database ready for the taking. Useful facts about humanity — and about these humans in particular.

  He had a lot of studying to do.

  23

  “Keep digging! I’ll cover you!”

  Bridget watched the jorvil warily as Dinner toiled below. The infrared visuals weren’t much help to Bridget in seeing the cold-bodied jorvil, so her armor’s motion-tracking sensors had pitched in to paint the creature into what she saw through her faceplate. Sadly, the darkness wasn’t keeping the jorvil from chasing — and finding — the Leelites. With her connection to the Leelite knowglobe gone, at least she was spared hearing the screams.

  In the pit, Dinner, his helmet spotlight activated, shoveled away massive chunks of ice with his gloved hands. The big Hawaiian was throwing his back into it, she saw. The armature within their uniforms multiplied the wearer’s strength; with Dinner, that hardly seemed necessary.