by M. G. Herron
She pictured the damaged cube they’d passed off to Major Antonin and the others as they rotated back to the Paladin. Her worst fears crowded her thoughts. “This is all my fault.”
“What?” Yorra’s voice sounded high and tinny in her helmet. “If it weren’t for you, we wouldn’t still be down here looking for him.”
Casey just shook her head. “I should have stopped him from chasing that drone.”
“You tried, Raptor. He ignored you. And then Admiral Miyaru RemOp’d your starfighter when you tried to go after him.”
“There’s more. I didn’t tell you before because the admiral didn’t want me to, but I need you to know so you don’t try to stop me from taking the blame. It’s my fault that parasite got into the hangar—it rode piggyback on my Sabre.” The words kept spilling out. Casey couldn’t stop the flood. “Which means it’s my fault Perry and Colonel Walcott are dead. Not to mention hurting you, and Park. He…” She choked on the words, but forced them out anyway. Her voice cracked. “He may have permanent internal damage, all because of me.”
“Naab is tough and our medics are the best in the Fleet. He’ll make a full recovery, just you wait and see.”
“And now we can’t locate Nevers. It’s all my fault.”
“Respectfully, Captain, shut the hell up. It is not your fault.”
Her anger rose up. “Excuse me? Is that any way to speak to your captain?”
“I’ll speak to her any way I deem necessary, sir, when she’s got her head this far up her own ass.”
Casey blinked. Coming from anyone else, that would have summoned forth a fiery retort. Coming from a close friend like Yorra, the insult somehow shocked her and cleared the fog of blame and self-hatred. She finally stopped rambling.
Casey blinked tears out of her eyes. Yorra was right. As much as Casey looked outside of herself for approval, she also had a tendency to take on the burdens of those she cared about most. Some of this was her fault, certainly. Maybe if she hadn’t berated Nevers so hard before the mission, he would have listened to her when she told him not to pursue the Kryl drone.
But wishing wouldn’t change the past.
After a minute of awkward silence, Casey said, chagrined, “Sorry, Gears.”
“Apology accepted. Now let’s keep searching for Fancypants, huh? I’m looking forward to giving him hell for being shot down by a Kryl drone when he’s safely back on the Paladin.”
Casey frowned, but decided to keep the other secret—about the drone’s ability to phase through solid objects—to herself.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Yorra added. “Someone had to have put that cube up on the ridgeline. Other people passed by there.”
“If there are still other people on Robichar, they’re… I don’t know, underground or something. Some place our scanners can’t reach. The only sign of life we’ve found was the encampment the Kryl took over.”
“What if…?” Yorra paused. “Never mind.”
“What is it?” Casey demanded.
“It was a dumb idea.”
“Tell me.”
“Nothing.”
“Gears, we only have half an hour left to locate Nevers. Spit it out.”
She waited while Yorra cleared her throat. “What if… the Kryl captured him and it was them who put his cube up on the ridgeline?”
Casey felt her blood run cold. She’d be lying if she said the thought hadn’t crossed her mind. She just hadn’t been willing to voice it.
“There’s one thing that doesn’t make sense about that theory. The Kryl have their own weapons. They are weapons. So if it was Kryl who hid that cube on the ridgeline, why did it have blaster and bullet marks on it?”
The protocol to scuttle downed starfighters existed because of the warp drives that were in some high-speed stealth reconnaissance ships, the broadbeam and tightbeam transmitters, and their radioisotope cores. Fleet intelligence certainly didn’t want the Kryl to get their hands on those. But as far as guns, the xenos had never been interested. They ignored any carbines or sidearms they came across.
“I don’t know,“ Yorra said, “maybe that happened before the Kryl took him.”
“Hell, we haven’t got any better ideas. Let’s make one more pass over that encampment, see if we can find any sign of him.”
Assuming the Kryl did have Nevers there, it seemed a grim prospect. The odds they would find him alive were slim. And if they did, they’d only have thirty minutes to plan and execute a rescue mission. It would take five just to get back to the old compound…
As they made their way south, the heat detection software overlaid on the landscape below her finally picked up signs of life that were larger than the small forest creatures they’d been picking up so far. As she studied the forms overlaid on her HUD, she picked out a group of four people—humans, undoubtedly—working their way at a rapid march through the forest, headed toward the Kryl compound.
“Yorra, do you see that?”
“Affirmative. These people could be the ones who left the cube up on that ridgeline.”
“Maybe.” But why the hell are they running towards the Kryl encampment?
Casey’s shields pinged as a projectile ricocheted off her left wing. Her heart hammered in her chest as she swerved away. “Aaaaaand they’re shooting at us.”
“Who, the men or the Kryl?”
“The men!”
“Why would they do that?”
“I don’t know.”
As the compound rushed beneath them—a brief wound in the forest canopy, gaping wide—Casey studied the heat signatures of the four people in the forest, now well behind them, pressing a button to order the software in her starfighter to track them as she continued to focus on flying. The group of four were moving faster now, running and mowing down groundlings as they approached the compound.
“Be careful, they’re armed and trained. Based on the way they’re moving, I don’t think they’re carrying any ground-to-air missiles, but Animus knows those things get easier to hide every time I see a new model.”
She wondered if Admiral Miyaru’s orders would change given this new situation. Procedure dictated that she should provide an immediate status report, now that an enemy had fired upon them. She didn’t want to, for fear that the admiral would tell her to abandon the rescue mission and return to the Paladin.
She hung her head. “Earth damn it all.” She could only hope that Admiral Miyaru was still feeling generous.
She dialed her tightbeam into the Paladin’s signal. To her surprise, Harmony answered immediately.
“Any luck locating the missing pilot, Captain?”
“Maybe, sir.” It seemed wise to prevaricate so the AI didn’t jump to any conclusions. She and Admiral Miyaru were a symbiotic unit and Casey needed this to go smoothly.
“You don’t need to sir me, Captain. Harmony will do.”
“Harmony, I’m afraid I have some bad news. We found more people down here. Four of them. Soldiers. They’re armed and hostile.” The thought riled her up enough that she rattled off the rest of the report with crisp efficiency as, with subconscious ease, Casey pulled the Sabre around and veered back toward the occupied compound. “One of them may even have a high-powered gauss rifle. They shot at my Sabre and then slaughtered a handful of Kryl. The only good bug is a dead bug, so I can’t be mad about that, but I don’t see why they would shoot at us. Are there any other forces on Robichar?”
“Negative, Captain. Yourself, Lieutenant Yorra and Captain Nevers are the only ones left on Robichar, according to my tracking system.”
That meant that whoever those four men were, they weren’t SDF. At least, they weren’t anymore. “Civilians, then?”
If they were here to kill Kryl, who was she to stop them?
Yorra chimed in: “Don’t they know the Kryl are coming?”
“Of course they know, they just mowed down a dozen groundlings.”
“What I mean is, do they know the rest of the hive is coming? Othe
rwise, why haven’t they evacuated?”
“It’s possible they do not, if they lived somewhere remote and did not receive the Imperial missive,” Harmony said. “We’ve already met our quota of civilians for the evacuation based on the Empire’s colonial census data and calculations for mission-acceptable losses.”
It was chilling to hear the AI talk so cold and statistically like that, but Casey supposed even the most advanced emotive functions couldn’t make an AI truly empathetic to human loss of life. Casey frowned. She also couldn’t summon much sympathy. If an armed militia wanted to stay here and fight off the Kryl hive, let them. All she cared about was getting Nevers back to the Paladin in one piece.
“Captain,” Yorra said with a rising inflection. “I think you’ll want to see this.”
Casey’s eyes roved across the ground toward a commotion in the compound. A ragged hole had been torn in the side of a prefab building. A dozen Kryl stumbled out in what her father would have called a rout. They moved in a disorderly, panicked way, climbing over and around each other in a desperate attempt to gain some distance from the building. The creature who had made it the farthest was a massive, bulky sentinel. It clutched its comically small head, which looked like a baseball on top of a giant slug from her bird’s-eye view.
In the shadows cast by the late afternoon sun, a vibrant green light pulsed out of the hole in the prefab.
“What in the hell?”
She turned her scanner on the damaged building in question. It was placed second from the end in a row of identical prefabs. The scanner showed it lit up like a small star, emitting light and low-level radiation to the area around it, so much that she could barely make out the forms inside.
She counted four, maybe five—hard to tell—life forms remaining inside. Every Kryl that stumbled out seemed to be suffering in some way. Once the creatures made it far enough away from the building, they shook their bodies and hissed in anger, but didn’t attempt to retrace their steps. It was like some kind of invisible barrier was holding them back. The radiation? The light? By the Spirit of Old Earth, what was going on inside that building?
As she was circling in the sky watching the chaos below and thinking these thoughts, her mind trying to puzzle out what would be an appropriate course of action in this situation, two more life forms made their way to the exit—Solarans, not Kryl.
She expected them to be suffering as well, but when they emerged, they seemed unaffected by the radiation.
“Is that a kid?”
Unless her eyes had gone bad, it was a mother and a child. They were frightened and obviously in quite a hurry, but otherwise unaffected by what was happening to the Kryl.
Something else darted out of the ragged hole in the side of the building and into the green-tinted shadows. A tiny creature, maybe a Kryl. The woman and child followed it. They moved in the opposite direction from the rest of the Kryl, toward the fence. She noticed that a skimmer bike lay on the other side.
Yorra gasped. “Is that… Hedgebot?”
Casey’s eyes widened as the pilot’s words kickstarted her awareness. Once she said it, Casey, too, recognized Nevers’ bot.
“Harmony!” Casey shouted. “We’ve got a sign of Nevers. His astrobot is on the ground.”
“Do you have visual confirmation of the pilot?” Admiral Miyaru’s voice came on the line suddenly, causing Casey to jump.
“No, sir, not yet.” Casey flicked the safety on her weapons to the Off position. “But I’m not gonna wait around to find out. Nevers doesn’t go anywhere without that bot.”
“What’s your plan, Captain?”
”Increase his odds of survival,” Casey said. She laid her finger into the trigger, aiming at the big, heavily armored Kryl clutching his tiny head just outside the edge of the glowing circle of green twenty meters from the prefab building. She pressed the button down as she yelled, “Get some!”
Twenty-Five
When Elya twisted the handle of the geode, revealing three triangular apertures in the round part of the stone, a wave of bright green light washed out from his position like a shockwave, deafening him.
It took Elya several seconds to realize that it wasn’t the artifact making the noise, but rather horrible, keening cries coming from the throat of every Kryl in the building, and probably some outside. Even the sticky lichen coating the floor seemed to be writhing in agony.
The sentinel dropped the priest, clutched its massive arm against one side of its gumball head, and charged into the nearest wall, sending computer equipment crashing to the floor and squashing half a dozen chrysalises under foot as it scrambled to escape the light’s reach. Its enormous thrashing arms ripped a hole in the prefab building, peeling it back like a metal can and slicing itself on the sharpened edges as it wriggled outside.
The groundlings also went mad, abandoning their hold on Heidi to clutch their forelimbs over their earholes as they screamed. They staggered around like they were drunk or half paralyzed, their back limbs wobbling and unable to support their weight, until they, too, reached the open air.
That left Heidi, Hedrick, Father Pohl, Elya and Hedgebot with the Kryl mutant, who also seemed to be in pain, but wasn’t nearly as incapacitated as the others. The only thing Elya could figure is that since he was partially human, he had a partial immunity to the relic’s effects.
And that was worrisome. Because he seemed to be the most dangerous of all.
“Hedgebot, get the woman and the boy out of here!” Elya shouted.
The boy squinted, clutched his head and moaned in pain. Was the relic’s power affecting him too, now that the parasite had crawled up his nose? Hedrick reared up and sneezed, once, twice. On the third go, snot shot out of his nose onto the floor and in the yellowish-clear liquid, a parasite writhed.
Elya thrust the geode down at it. The parasite squirmed in the puddle of mucus, affected by the power of the emerald light. Elya brought his boot down on the worm and ground it into paste. As the worm died, so too did the xeno exoskeleton that had formed around the boy’s feet. It began to melt, dripping strands of loose mucus to the floor as it liquified.
Elya lifted Hedrick from the platform where he cowered and thrust him into Heidi’s arms. “Go! Take Thom’s skimmer bike. Don’t look back.”
Heidi nodded as she took her dazed son and hurried away.
As she went, the Kryl mutant staggered to his feet, its faceted xeno eye squinting in pain.
“No,” it said, mandibles clacking around its very human tongue. “No, he belongs to us now. Overmind X needs him.”
Elya raised the glowing artifact and thrust it toward the mutant xeno, who raised its arms and fell back, giving Heidi room to slip out of the opening.
“You stupid Imperial pawn,” Father Pohl spat as he, too, limped upright, using both hands to steady himself against the slimy webbed wall. “You’ve just killed my people. As good as murdered us in our sleep.”
“You did that, you traitor,” Elya said. “How could you steal the boy from his mother and bring him here? How could you?”
Elya felt rage rising within him. Now that he had the artifact in his hand, he was in control. The Kryl couldn't harm him. Father Pohl was too weakened by his injuries to do much damage. But now he understood the priest’s previous attitude. No wonder the man hadn’t been afraid of the Kryl. With something as powerful as this Telos relic in his possession, of course he’d deluded himself into believing he could keep his people safe.
“You brought me the boy!” Father Pohl said. “We didn’t have any children with us. But then you brought him to me, and I didn’t have a choice! That was the agreement.”
What could the Overmind possibly want with Hedrick, or any other human child for that matter? The Kryl had murdered countless millions since the conflict between the two races began fifty years ago, during invasions just like this one. They could have taken a child from Yuzosix. They could have taken Elya himself twelve years ago, if they had wanted to.
What
was so different about this time? What had changed?
Elya sneered at Father Pohl. The old priest had gone off the deep end if he thought Elya was to blame for what he did. “The only one responsible for your suffering is yourself. You could have chosen to evacuate along with everyone else.”
“I had a plan to keep my people safe! Until you lot showed up.”
“Any plan that involves sacrificing the life of a young boy to keep yourself safe is no plan at all. You’re as bad as the Kryl if you’re willing to trade the life of an innocent child for your own protection.”
“This is my home! I refuse to be driven off by these god-forsaken xenos. Disgusting, godless creatures. And I found that relic. It’s mine. Give it back!”
The priest lunged at Elya, who sidestepped the fumbling charge and brought his free elbow down on the back of the man’s neck. Father Pohl tried to get up, but his arms trembled and he collapsed. He moaned as his face struck the ground.
Elya turned to the mutant Kryl, who was still twitching with the effort of staying in the same room as the ghostly green ambience emitted by the ancient relic. “And you. What did you try to do to the boy? What was that thing you put up his nose?”
The Kryl just smiled at him and gestured to its own face. “We’ve had some time to perfect the technique.” It glanced toward an empty chrysalis which, Elya realized as he turned his head, was perfectly boy-sized. “I was subject zero. The first patient in her grand experiment. It nearly killed me, you know. The pain of that relic is nothing like what I lived through during the conversion. But I nearly killed her, too, so it was only fair.”
Elya took a step back out of involuntary revulsion. Subject Zero kept staring at him, and though he wanted to turn away, Elya found he couldn’t.
“Grand experiment? What are you talking about?”
“They kept my vital organs alive by putting me in one of those.” Subject Zero nodded toward the chrysalis. “Most of my body perished, but after some adjustments they managed to find the right balance of proteins and chemicals needed to sustain me.”