Aggressor Six

by Wil McCarthy

  Marshe looked around at her people. Shenna lay on the floor, her chin on her paws, sad eyes looking up at the proceedings. Josev Ranes looked angry but avoided meeting her gaze. Yeng and Hanlin, the Workers, were looking at her, their expressions neutral.

  “Okay, people,” she said, trying to recover her earlier momentum. “We're talking about strategy. What's next? What's the human fleet at Lalande doing?”

  “Dying, your Queenship.” said Josev. His eyes, she saw, were on the tactical schematic holie on the panel beside him. It presented a thick rope of red trails projecting into the star system, surrounded by a haze of thin green lines. Even as she watched, two of the green lines flashed white and vanished. Josev clicked his tongue. “They're just dropping like pebbles. I think we ignore them. When they come close, we shoot them, but other than that I don't think they have any effect on our strategy at all.”

  Marshe found she had nothing to say to that. Neither did anyone else, it seemed. The room was very silent for a while.

  ~~~

  Ken felt the hot water bouncing off his skin like solid particles, unable to clean, unable to purge him of the misery that clung to his flesh like rotted greasepaint. “I really can't do this,” he whispered again.

  God, maybe he should just slash his wrists and be done with it. Live like a Waister? Think and spit like a Waister? The thought was more horrible than any other he could recall.

  They're people, the voice of Josev Ranes reminded him. Not like us, but still people. He remembered the calm resolve of the Drones, the helpless wailing of the orphaned Dog. Still people. Still people. Would it really be so difficult? He recoiled as if struck, for that was the idea he'd been running from. That, he realized, was the most horrible thought his brain could ever hold.

  It wouldn't be difficult. No, it wouldn't be difficult at all.

  Chapter Four

  Ken's gumboots held him fast to the surface of the Waister scoutship as he turned this way and that, trying to get a good look at his men. Theoretically, the roll-joints at the neck and waist of his suit had enough play in them to make this possible, but in practice he found he could swivel no more than twenty degrees. The men, also glued to the scoutship's hull, stood about Ken in an expectant, inward-facing circle. Like roundtable knights looking to their king.

  The hull shook faintly as the Spider dug and drilled its way in with diamond-fullerene claws. Dig, Ken thought, distractedly. Come on, COME ON! He'd been here twenty minutes already, and the thing seemed to be soaking its way in, millimeter by excruciating millimeter.

  Around him, the men's stares were oppressive, suffocating. What did they want from him? Zero gravity urged his body to relax, to slouch inward and curl up like a fetus, but he fought against it, keeping his knees locked, his back as straight and stiff as a plank of wood. Let them see rage and defiance in his stance, let them guess and wonder if the icy stalagtites of fear dripped and sweated in his guts as in their own.

  The men had arrived like an explosion happening in reverse, coming in from different directions with different speeds, but all converging on the Spider's homing beacon within minutes of each other. The landing force had been a thin shell, enclosing billions of cubic kilometers of space. Attrition had eroded the walls as they contracted, the shell thinning and shrinking, thinning and shrinking until it became a web of tiny human jewels enclosing the ship. Then the web had swirled, danced, broken up into dozens of delicate whirlpools that spiraled in against the hull. Disintegration beams had done what they could, but groups of men now dotted the ship like pockets of deadly infection.

  Deadly, that was, if the skin could be penetrated. “Come on, Spider!” He barked, out loud. That was a violation of protocol, since technically the sound was conducted from his suit down through the gumboots and into the interior of the Waister ship. But the gnawing of the Spider against the hull would be far louder, the scream of rock-cutting machinery as heard from inside the rock. If they could hear him over that, let them. “Dig, you fucker! Come on, dig, DIG!”

  Ken's scooter had parked itself alongside the earlier arrivals, and still others were swooping down, landing themselves in two neat rows. Alive, he'd thought. Huh. The fact of his survival seemed unreal, an improbable twist in a dizzy falling-dream of darkness and smothering terror. Something new was happening. His death would take a different form now, his final agonies a new and unfamiliar texture.

  He had waited, looking around for his commanding officer, eyeing each trooper's insignium. Where were the officers? He waited some more, but the men had stopped coming. No officers? No sergeants? No other corporals? But that meant... Oh. Dear God, that meant Ken was in charge. The thought was obscenely almost-funny, like the lopsided grin of a smashed and bleeding skull.

  Bastard, he'd whispered to the God that had forsaken him. In Charge. What did it mean to be In Charge of a platoon of scooter-parked marines on the surface of a Waister scoutship? It meant... Oh, no. He'd unfastened his rape hose from the scooter's tanks, letting it reel and snake its way back into his chest. Then, choking back shapeless fear, he'd flipped himself over and off the scooter, slapping his gumboots firmly onto the alien hull. They held.

  He'd taken a few steps, feeling the rubbery adhesive tense and then give suddenly as he lifted his feet, feeling it flow and compress and adhere as he pushed down again. The boots worked. They actually worked. With hand signals, he'd ordered the men off their scooters. Slowly, grudgingly, they had complied, and stumped around angrily to encircle Ken and the Spider.

  Ken shook his head, brought himself back to the present. His time sense was getting screwy. He glanced at the Spider, eyeing its malignant bulk, the gloss-black sheen that wrapped the stars in twisted reflection around its legs and airlock-body. Its twirling, glittering blades still hummed against the dark, rusty brown of the Waister hull.

  “Come on!” Ken shouted again. Or was this the first time? A deja vu feeling swirled briefly through his mind and vanished. The Spider stared coldly back at him with its dark bubble-eyes. “Break through!” He ordered it.

  And it did. Seconds after he'd spoken, the body of the Spider lurched downward a few centimeters, as if hungry ant-lions were pulling it down through the hole it had dug. Two legs pulled free from the hull, twitched, then slammed down again, digging for new purchase. The oblong body pulled back slightly, righting itself. The ring of green lights began to flash on its back. Not eyes, a voice whispered. Just lights.

  KchchchchK! Went the speakers inside Ken's helmet. Then, in an inhuman, exaggeratedly synthetic voice: “THIS IS SPIDER THREE-TWENTY. THE HULL IS PENETRATED. RADIO SILENCE IS LIFTED. THIS IS SPIDER THREE-TWENTY. THE HULL IS PENETRATED. RADIO SILENCE IS LIFTED. YOUR MISSION ASSIGNMENT IS PRINTED ON MY BACK. YOUR MISSION ASSIGNMENT IS PRINTED ON MY BACK. VICTORY IS INEVITABLE. YOU ARE INVINCIBLE. KICK THEIR FUCKING HEADS IN.”

  “What the fuck?” A voice called out.

  “...damn squanky piece of junk,” said another.

  A third voice tried to join in, but a growling wave of distortion reduced its wisdom to garbles.

  “Okay!” Ken shouted over the static, surprised to hear himself speaking at all. “Cut the chatter and switch to channel two!”

  He reached his hand up and tapped the second hooded switch on the front of his helmet-chin, and the distortion vanished, replaced by the chatter of soft, distant voices and the sibilant hiss of interplanetary space.

  “Corporal?” Somebody said.

  “Yeah,” Ken replied, his voice quick and tight.

  “Corporal, what happens now? I mean...” The voice was that of a young man. Younger than Ken, by the sound of it, and fighting desperately to keep from crying.

  “Oh,” a second voice said with disgust, “Will you cut it?”

  “...ain't gonna last ten minutes if he don't get his...”

  “...pusher with no gear where it counts...”

  “...ALL going to die so what's the big...”

  “CLEAR THE FUCKING CHANNEL!” Ken screamed, too
loudly.

  The chatter died but for a lone voice, which finished up, “...with an air hose up his ass.”

  By chance, Ken happened to see movement inside the visor of one of the men in his view. The final speaker. Gritting his teeth in hysterical anger, Ken raised his right arm and pointed its wiregun at the man. “YOU!” He said. “What's your name!”

  There was a pause, filled only with the soft static.

  “NAME!” He shrieked, waving the wiregun slightly for emphasis. This is the wrong thing to do, a voice was telling him. Wrong thing to do wrong thing wrong thing—

  “Mirez, sir!” The man shouted back, his voice sounding strangled.

  “Mirez,” Ken echoed. He paused, listening to the hiss of the planets for a few moments. Something seemed to crystallize in his heart. “Mirez. I told you to clear the channel. You've just bought yourself a ticket inside.”

  “Huh?” Mirez asked, with obvious fright.

  “Get in the Spider, Boyo,” Ken said cruelly. “You're first man through.”

  “Corporal, I didn't mean it. I'm sorry, I was just so scared I—”

  “Private, get in the Spider before I blow your chest open. These orders are not negotiable.”

  Mirez made a deep squeaking noise, but he pulled a boot free of the hull and slapped it down half a meter in front of him, repeated the task with the other foot. Like a tortured puppet, he lurched and staggered toward the Spider, climbing up onto its back when he got there. He turned at the waist, looking back in Ken's direction, but he turned away quickly; Ken was still pointing the wiregun at him. Without further ceremony, he leaned over, grabbed a pair of handles, and pulled himself face-first onto the Spider's oblong back.

  Mirez vanished. Not in a flash, or a puff of vapor, or a cloud of sticky-freezing blood. He simply disappeared like a playing card from the fingers of a magician. Eaten by the Spider. Ken knew that the handles had withdrawn, and the outer door had split, each half swinging inward, then rolling straight out, then swinging inward again, scooping the marine into the airlock-body and closing behind him. Then the inner doors had done the same thing, and Mirez had been expelled to the interior of the Waister ship. All in a blinding cobra-strike instant.

  “Mirez, report,” Ken said. The voice was alien, even to him. The words had sprung, unbidden, to his lips.

  A burst of choppy, whining static stabbed back at him. Nothing recognizable as a human voice.

  “Mirez! Report!”

  This time, no sound came back at all.

  “Shit,” Ken said. He looked around at his men. “Everyone form a line behind me. I'm going in.”

  Going in? Going in? Fear raced through his blood, tingled his hair and the roots of his teeth. The sphincter of his anus felt suddenly as if it were shrinking back into his colon. His mouth went dry. But his legs scissored, carrying him forward almost of their own accord, and his hands formed fists that were simultaneously wiregun triggers and armored, bludgeoning hammers.

  He was going in.

  Climbing onto the Spider's back was awkward, the kind of flailing weightless task that Ken had never been properly trained to perform, but he managed it adequately. His hands found the handles that Mirez had gripped. His feet pulled free of the Spider's slick shell. The sign, the orders stenciled on the Spider's back: FORWARD. That was all. Ken pulled himself downward, gently...

  There was a lurching sensation, a flicker of darkness followed by pale, purple-gray light, and suddenly he was pivoting on his toes, dizzily falling face-first onto a flat, wet-looking surface. He and the surface met solidly, the shock slapping through him like the blow of a heavy sandbag. He felt himself bounced and jostled inside his crash webbing.

  What the...

  Gravity. He'd stepped into gravity and fallen on his face.

  “Mirez,” he groaned, without lifting his faceplate from the floor. “Report.”

  “Check it out, Corporal! It's gravity! Gravity on every wall!”

  Ken pressed his arms flat against the floor and pushed. He was heavy, but he managed to raise himself enough to tuck a knee under his center of mass. Like a piece of construction machinery, he levered himself upward. And gasped.

  The chamber was diamond shaped, a house-sized octahedron, its glistening, triangular walls the color of dead lilacs, lit by a diffuse and apparently sourceless glow. Mirez stood on one of the walls a few meters away, his upright body canted fully ninety degrees from the direction Ken felt as “down.” Behind and beyond the man, some gray things that might have been boxes were clinging to the walls like sea anemones. They were hexagonal tubes a little over a meter high, their tops flat and seamless.

  No sign of enemy troops.

  “Oh,” Ken said softly.

  “About one point five gee's, Corporal. Trouble getting up?”

  Ken swept his gaze back and forth, looking at Mirez, at the boxes on the walls above and around him. Waiting for something to fall, grunting in bafflement when nothing did. Mutely, he got his other foot under him, found balance, and stood.

  “Artificial gravity,” he said.

  “Corporal.” Mirez was leaning back, looking “up” at Ken. “I could have splattered you all over this chamber. You son of a bitch.” The man's breathing was heavy with fear and exertion.

  Ken felt disgust rising in his throat, locking his jaws, drawing his mouth into a rictus. “Private,” he said, “We are here to fight the Waisters. Wolf, Sirius! Remember those places? Remember Albuquerque and Iapetus and Nysa? Do you think I'm scared of you?”

  “You should be,” said Mirez.

  “Oh. Oh! That's great! Like wiring me is going to make a difference! We're dead, Boyo, haven't you figured that out? We secure the ship. That's all. Getting out alive is not part of the job description.”

  “Oh man,” said Mirez. “You're really prize. I'm supposed to take orders from a corporal with a death wish?”

  “Get back in the Spider,” Ken told the man. “Get outside and tell the men to start coming in. Warn them about the gravity.”

  Mirez glared insolently. “Or what?”

  Ken glared back, considering his answer. Act, an internal voice advised him. He acted.

  Gravity twisted at him as he leaped from his wall onto Mirez', but he resisted vertigo, nausea, collapse. Busy right now, he thought, call me later. But the sound that came from his lips was a martial “KiYAA!” His hands found the young private's shoulders, pushed against them while his right leg, fighting the stiff joints of the hardsuit, swept horizontally. Mirez was a spacer, like most of the marines. Had to be. Had to be. But Ken knew what it was to fight, struggling gravity-pinned against the dirt while bully ham-fists pummeled and battered.

  Mirez fell quickly in the high gravity, and Ken rode him down, hand-to-shoulder, knee-to-stomach. The impact jostled him, blurring vision, jamming fingers and thighs against their rings of ceramic restraint. Mirez made a sound, a throaty grunt that terminated abruptly.

  No time for this! A voice nagged. Ken ignored it.

  Slowly, deliberately, he moved his hand to the center of Mirez' chest, grabbing the handle of the rape hose, pulling until half a meter of it was exposed. He paused then, looking down into the man's terrified eyes. Then, he drew Excalibur from the sheath on his leg, and made as if to draw the blade across the smooth, serpentine body of the hose. He paused again.

  “You...” he panted, suddenly tired. “You want to try the air? Yes or no?”

  “ohgod,” Mirez gagged. “No. No. I'm sorry. Please, I—”

  “Pathetic,” Ken said, in a voice he did not recognize. He let go of the hose, watched it snake back into Mirez' suit. He resheathed the utility knife, shuffled his feet, and drew himself upright again, resisting the meaningless urge to brush himself off as he stepped clear of the man's body.

  “Get up,” he said, when he saw that Mirez was still looking up at him with wide, frightened-child eyes. “Get back in the Spider, do what I said. Now!”

  A flicker of movement caught his eye, somethin
g above him and off to one side, something up on one of the crazy ceiling-walls of the chamber. He felt a stab of emotion, neither fear nor anger but fight, a blank, pearly wave of reptilian non-thought. He dropped into a crouch, dimly aware of wrenching, high-gravity pain. In the same fluid motion he raised his arm and balled his fist, sighting along the wiregun tube.

  Nothing... Nothing...

  His tracking gaze stopped. Door. Door! A hexagonal opening had appeared in one of the “upper” walls, and behind it... Light and shadows. Smooth, slick lavender surfaces. And movement. “Mirez!” He shouted. “Get the men in here! Right now!”

  He'd been about to say more, but his voice seized, froze in his throat. Turning and twisting in the grip of byzantine gravitation, a... a creature swung through the opening and out onto the floor. Ken's mind twisted with it, trying to make sense of the flailing, clambering form.

  A purple scorpion, its twin tails ending in twitching masses of wormlike fingers. A bruised and naked human, balancing inverted on flat forearms, palms and elbows down, head up, legs curled back over the body. No, no. The letter “C”, supported by four wide feet, with a face at the bottom and a pair of hideous arms dangling from the top. Its skin was ribbed and rippled and bumpy, its face buglike, fishlike, perversely human.

  “Oh,” Ken said, and his tone was one of protest rather than shock. “Oh right.”

  The brown, bulging eyes pulsed and swiveled, and then they stopped and Ken knew that the creature, the Waister, had seen him. When it moved one of its hands, he saw that it was holding something, a thin wand that shone like dull brass. The creature glanced at the wand, hefted it as if it weighed several kilograms. Then the eyes swiveled to look back down at Ken, and the wand followed, turning slowly in the creature's hand.

  A weapon? Was it a weapon? Keeping his fist balled, Ken bent his wrist in the way that triggered the wiregun.

  There was almost no recoil.