by Isaac Hooke
He finally had a destination again.
At that point he heard a soft moan behind him.
The woman had awakened.
He turned around and touched her forehead in the starlight. Her fever had broken.
“Where—” she tried, but then coughed horribly.
“Shhh.” Rade covered her mouth with one hand and said, in hushed tones: “You’ll wake the dead with that cough.” He reached inside the protruding collar of his chest piece and extended the life straw coiled there, offering her a sip of recycled water. “Here.”
She took a tentative taste, then spluttered, finally spitting it out. “Tastes like piss.”
“That’s because it is,” Rade said. “Recycled, anyway. Now drink it. I don’t have any meal replacement fluid left. This is all you’re going to get. A human being can survive for three weeks without food. But only three days without water.”
In the dim illumination of the starlight, she eyed the straw uncertainly, and then finally wrapped her cracked lips around it.
She struggled to get the fluid down at first, but soon became accustomed to the flavor, and drank greedily. Rade cut off the feed supply when his reserves were down to a quarter, and he retracted the straw, letting it coil up inside the suit just underneath his chin.
She touched the top of her head hesitantly, exploring the areas of her scalp where the hair was shaven. “What did they do to me?”
“I don’t know,” Rade said, which was the truth.
She glanced down at her body. “My suit?”
“I had to strip it off. You were too heavy.”
“Least you had the decency to leave my cooling undergarments,” she said.
“What’s your name?” Rade asked.
“Corporal Anne Adara.”
“Petty Officer First Class Rade Galaal.” He removed his glove and extended a hand.
She shook it. The grip was firm, though not overly so, not like the over-compensating steel vise some female soldiers felt they had to inflict upon men. Confident in herself and her abilities, then.
“Rade?” Her voice assumed a skeptical tone. “Sounds like a bug spray.”
Rade chuckled softly. “Someone I once knew told me that. You remind me of her.”
“I’m not sure that’s good or bad,” she said.
“Probably bad,” Rade replied.
She looked him up and down in the dim light. “Petty officer first class, you say?”
“That’s right.”
“I outrank you,” she said.
“No,” Rade said slowly. “I outrank you.”
“Don’t think so,” she said.
“You know nothing about navy ranks whatsoever, do you?”
“Why would I? I’m a Marine.” She said it in a slightly amused, self-deprecatory tone that made him believe she knew very well he outranked her.
“I don’t suppose you have a working Implant?” he asked.
“No. Curiously, mine seems to be offline. Yours, too, I’m assuming?”
“That’s right,” Rade said.
“I was captured, I think,” she said. “I remember being dragged away, and then...nothing. You rescued me?”
“I did. They took me, too. I managed to get away. There was another Marine with you. I’m not sure if he was in the same platoon as you. But I couldn’t carry you both, so I left him. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m glad you bothered to take me along at all. A lesser man wouldn’t have done it. I am a stranger from a different platoon, after all.”
“We’re all brothers out here,” Rade said. “And sisters,” he amended quickly.
Her eyes narrowed in the starlight. Or at least he thought they did. “You’re no ordinary soldier, are you?” She reached out, touched his beard with her fingers. “You’re a Snake Eater.” That was navy slang for a special forces operator. He wasn’t surprised the term had migrated over to the Marines, given how often the two services worked together. They had their own slang term for them he was sure, but she was obviously using the navy variant so he would understand.
“Maybe I am.” He wondered how he must look with his head shaved down to the skin on top, with hair still clinging to the sides and back, and a thick beard lining his face. Probably comical.
“I heard the MOTHs were joining us...” Adara continued.
“I can neither confirm nor deny that rumor,” Rade said.
“Yup. You just confirmed it. You’re a MOTH. No one else talks like that. You think you’re a badass, I bet. You know, my company interprets the special in special forces differently than everyone else. As in, special needs.”
“Listen, let’s drop the inter-services competition, at least for a while,” Rade said. “We’re merely two soldiers stranded together deep behind enemy lines, with a common goal: to get the hell out. We have to work together. Artificial divisions along service lines don’t mean anything at this point, especially without Implants. So tell me, are you well enough to walk?”
“I think so.”
“Try it,” Rade said.
She scrambled to her feet and took a few barefoot steps in those undergarments.
“Good,” Rade said. “I was getting sick of carrying you.”
“Would have been nice if you had kept my boots, at least,” she said.
“Extra weight.”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “I prefer it this way. I’m stealthier. Like a cat.”
“Good. Let’s get moving then. We’ve already wasted enough time up here.” He started toward the stairs.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
He paused to point toward the window, at the flashes in the distance. “There’s some fighting to the south. With luck, we should be able to make it there in an hour or two, depending on how congested the streets are. We stick to the shadows.”
“I’m a Marine,” Adara said. “Sticking To The Shadows is my middle name.”
“Your middle name...” Rade said. “Please, don’t make a habit of talking like that. It gets to be annoying.”
“Not Making Habits is my middle name,” she teased.
Rade sighed.
Together they made their way down the stairs. Rade was relieved he didn’t have to carry her. He felt far less vulnerable when he had his blaster in hand and at the ready. Plus, his biceps were grateful.
They proceeded in the direction of the fighting. Rade paused to climb the rubble or a rooftop every so often, to confirm that they were traveling in the correct direction, as the flashes weren’t always visible from the street.
Rade turned on to one particular street and quickly backtracked.
“What—” Adara began.
Rade lifted a finger to her lips and made a hasty retreat. He led her to an adjacent street, and when he reached the building that bordered the roadway, he slowly peered past the edge. Once again he forced her back.
He led her to an apartment overlooking the neighborhood, and he climbed the stairs to the top floor. He found an unlocked door, cleared the foyer and other rooms, then brought Adara to a window.
“Look,” he said.
The streets and rooftops below were packed to the brim with dark forms sleeping under the starlight. Large chests rose and fell, almost in unison. There seemed to be all kinds of enemy creatures down there, judging from the dark silhouettes. Hammerheads. Kraken. Rhinos. Velociraptors. And at least one other family of beast whose vague outline he couldn’t identify.
“Why aren’t the bombers pounding them?” Adara asked.
“I don’t know,” Rade said.
“These creatures are visible on the thermal band,” Adara said. “I detected them earlier on that spectrum.”
Rade frowned. “Like I said, I don’t have an answer for you.”
“Maybe they’re poikilothermic,” Adara said.
“Poik what?”
“Cold-blooded. And at night, they generate little body heat.”
“That’s certainly possible,” Rade sai
d. “Though even cold-blooded creatures are visible on the thermal band at night. Even after their bodies have dissipated most of the heat into the environment, they still don’t blend in completely, especially larger creatures. Their blood continues to flow, after all, and that in itself will generate heat, however minute.”
“But isn’t it possible that certain key parts of their bodies might emit most or all of that heat?” Adara argued. “Take an alligator. At night, thanks to brain activity, you can see the head region under the thermal band and that’s it. What if these creatures are similar, but instead of their heads being visible, only their undersides are? Maybe when they curl up to sleep at night, they shield the exposed areas with their frigid upper portions. Hiding them from the bombers.”
“LIDAR would pick them up, then,” Rade argued.
“Would it?” Adara said. “At the range those bombers operate, rubble would be indiscernible from sleeping bodies.”
Rade smiled in the dark. “What the hell, are you a Marine or are you a scientist?”
“Both. Sorry to prove your stereotypes wrong.” She said that a little too condescendingly for his tastes.
Rade left her at the window. He retreated to the foyer, where he shoved a nightstand up against the door. He grabbed another piece of furniture—a portable closet—intending to increase the barricade, but cringed when the closet loudly scraped the linoleum. He used the strength of his exoskeleton to hoist it completely off the floor before finally setting it into place. Because it was so dark, he didn’t notice how close it was to the nightstand, and the two objects collided with a loud thud.
He held his breath, listening, worried that he had alerted some nearby creature or robot to his presence.
seventeen
Rade waited, continuing to listen. He heard nothing for several seconds, and finally relaxed enough to breathe again.
“Cocooning already?” Adara said from just behind, startling him.
“That’s the plan, yes,” Rade snapped. “We rest here for a few hours, or until the streets are clear.”
He edged past her, barely making out her silhouette against the dim light from outside—because of the tight fitting undergarments, he could almost imagine she was naked. He had a sudden yearning to wrap his arms around her, but he quickly dismissed it and hurried back to the window instead. Once there he sat down against the wall.
She joined him. Someone had launched several flares a few streets away, so that her features were visible, hued green by the gentle glow. Distant flashes occasionally further brightened her face.
“You know,” she said. “We can try sneaking past them.”
Rade regarded her in disbelief. “You really think we can cross that street without waking a single one of them?”
“Why not? The nearby fighting hasn’t awakened them. And if they’re cold-blooded, I bet they can’t fight at night.”
Rade paused. “Actually, that makes some sense. Similar creatures my platoon fought on another world never attacked at night. Hammerheads, we called them.”
“I know exactly which ones you’re talking about,” she said. “Then there are the rhinos.”
“Yep, I’ve met those,” Rade said.
“What about the kraken?”
“Yep,” Rade said. “I’m the one who came up with that name.”
“B Company, 3rd Assault Battalion, came up with it.”
“Whatever.”
“The giraffes?” she asked.
“Haven’t met them.”
Adara shifted slightly and her leg momentarily touched his thigh assembly. He felt the suit fabric press against his skin, and even though there was no direct skin contact, that brush stirred something inside of him.
He quickly slid his leg away.
“So anyway, as I was saying...” Adara told him. “If they’re cold-blooded, it makes sneaking through their ranks all that much easier.”
“Get that idea out of your head,” Rade said. “We’re not sneaking across.”
“Can’t we take the rooftops at least?”
“They’re sleeping on the roofs, too. You saw.” He shook his head. “Look, there must be thousands of them down there. I’m willing to bet they have at least a few sentries among them: if not the creatures, then robots. They work in tandem, you know. All it takes is one robot to sound the alarm. If the beasts won’t attack in the dark, their robot friends certainly will.”
She apparently had nothing more to say, so Rade lay his head against the wall and closed his eyes. It was only taking a momentary rest, he told himself.
One of us is going to have to keep a watch.
Adara broke her silence. “You really think they’re aliens? My sergeant told me they were bioengineered weapons of some kind. Based on human stock.”
“You like to talk, don’t you?” Rade said.
She didn’t answer.
“Okay,” he said, lifting his head. “I’ve heard the same. They’re bioengineered, but not just from human stock; apparently, their genes incorporate base pairs from all kinds of Terran species. But I do think aliens are behind it all. Aliens, using our own genes against us.”
“Why?”
Rade smiled sadly. “You got me there, girl. Who can say what their motives are? They are alien, after all.”
“But isn’t it at least possible the SKs are doing this? And don’t call me girl.”
“Sure it’s possible,” Rade said. “But unlikely. What would the SKs gain by destroying a Franco-Italian colony? And with bioweapons? Why not use conventional weapons?”
“They’re using robots, too...”
“Again,” Rade said. “Why not use conventional weapons? And why capture people?” And why inject nano-machines into their minds, he wanted to add, but decided it was best not to alarm her.
“Maybe it’s all one big diversion,” Adara said. “We send our ships here. Meanwhile the Sino-Koreans attack our weakened fleet back home.”
“It’s possible,” Rade said. “But then again, Big Navy only sent one battle group here. The Brass have to be thinking along the same lines. Which might be a mistake, especially considering it’s not actually the SKs behind all of this.”
“Even if the SKs weren’t involved,” Adara said. “The Brass wouldn’t risk too many vessels. We can’t leave our flanks unguarded like that. Not when the Sino-Koreans could attack without provocation.”
Rade shook his head. “Why does everyone think so poorly of the SKs? Oh wait, it’s because of the indoctrination our militaries feed us. I’ve interrogated them. Fought against them. Fought alongside them. They’re not the big bogeymen that everyone makes them out to be. Think about it for a second. Why would the SKs attack their biggest trading partner? Given all the money we feed to their economy? Why would they risk a long, drawn-out war that could beggar their nation, and weaken them to a follow-up attack by these alien invaders? It’s in their best interests to ally with us against our common enemy.”
“I don’t know,” Adara said. “What you’re saying is reasonable, but a lot of the times, the actions of the SKs don’t make any sense. Their government continues to sponsor privateers, for instance, sending them to harry our merchant and cruise ships, even though we’re technically at peace. And then they deny it, claiming that the evidence from our intelligence services is a fabrication. I tell you, SK thinking sometimes seems just as foreign to me as the thought-processes of a bona fide alien.”
Rade couldn’t disagree there.
“Anyway, I guess I’ll allow us to stay here,” she continued. “For a little while, at least. Because you’re right, it’s safer to wait here until the area clears up.”
“You make it sound like you’re in charge,” Rade said.
“That’s because I am.”
“Ha.” He took a sip from his straw. “Here, have some water.” He extended the straw from the suit, offering it to her.
“Drink your piss again?” she asked.
Rade shrugged. “It’s that or dehydrat
e.”
She drank.
“Who’s in charge now?” he mocked.
“Bastard.”
She drank again and then returned the straw. Rade reattached it inside the collar of his torso assembly.
Quietude, sweet quietude, at last descended.
Until she blurted out: “What happened to her?”
Rade had only just leaned back against the wall. He turned his head lazily. “Her?”
She wiped her glistening lips in the dim light. “You mentioned earlier that I reminded you of someone.”
“Oh. Her.” He hesitated. “Nothing. Only that, we grew apart. It’s not easy holding onto a relationship when the two of you are in the service. Not unless someone wants to quit.”
“I hear you,” the woman said. “Between my first and second deployments, I took some time off. Wanted to explore the world, you know? I ended up meeting a man on a tour craft in Saint Petersburg.”
“Saint Petersburg. As in Russia?”
“Exactly. As fate would have it, he was a fellow Marine on leave. UC. A different company, of course. Anyways, after a few adventures, which included being detained by the Russians and accused of spying, we became a couple. But then my second deployment began, as did his. We tried to keep in touch remotely, even had sex via teledildonics, but it just didn’t work out, you know?”
“I never tried teledildonics,” Rade said. “How did that work out for you?”
“It’s surprisingly realistic,” she said. “Basically, you turn off logging in your Implant, install the device, and then switch your Implant to virtual mode. You can be anywhere you want. A candlelit bedroom. A sunny beach.”
“I know how VR works...” Rade said. “I was more curious about the sensations.”
“They’ve certainly made a lot of advances with the tech. I swear, with that teledildo strapped on, it felt exactly like having him inside me. Without the other sensations, of course, like his arms wrapped around me— I was always afraid of upgrading my Implant to support full sensory stimulation. Guess I was worried about what would happen if some enemy cyberwarfare specialist happened to break our encryption and transmit sensory inputs in the middle of battle. Guess I should have been more worried about capture.”