The Kurlei raised her head, licking Yergin’s blood from her fangs with a long tongue. The fronds in her head were erect and quivering, and Osu could feel the emotion of raw triumph she was broadcasting through them. As he stuck a blade through an enemy’s neck, he could also feel the moment when her confidence changed to confusion. She snapped her bloody jaws at Stryker’s hand, which he snatched away just in time. She used the space she’d won to sniff the air and then stare into the distance. She was staring directly at Zy Pel.
A rifle report rang out from the sniper’s position, quickly muffled by the snow and trees, as Zy Pel put a round through the Kurlei and blew her alien brains out.
At the officer’s death, the enemy appeared stunned, confused.
“Yergin, get him out of here,” Osu shouted, taking advantage of the confusion to put coldly murderous fire into the false legionaries.
Yergin recovered his senses and hauled Stryker up to ride pillion behind him. They sped away, passing Zy Pel and heading back to the hollow they’d scooped out from the top of the glacier.
Osu drove off on a looping curve that put a little distance from the group of phonies who were by now dead, wounded, or too confused to fight. Then he circled back, savaging the area with his bike’s blaster cannons until no one was left alive.
Covered by Zavage and Urdizine who had emerged unscathed from the trees, he retrieved Stryker’s bike and set it to auto follow.
As they raced back to rejoin the others on the glacier, the red sky made a fiery backdrop for an uneven aerial battle. Legion Spikeballs tore into the fleeing enemy aircraft, bullying through the escort fighters and cutting a swathe of destruction through the bombers that had almost escaped to orbit.
Even at this distance, the fireballs blossoming in the upper atmosphere from the dusted bombers cast sharp shadows along the tree line.
Osu prayed that not a single enemy aircraft would escape.
They regrouped in the hollow. Osu saw immediately that it wasn’t Stryker who was the most shaken by the experience; it was Yergin.
With Zavage, Stryker and Urdizine mounted on their bikes and providing overwatch, Osu knelt in front of Yergin under the cover of the camo-sheets. He was shaking – and not from the cold. His eyes were wild, and he was sweating despite the ice, but when Osu took a closer look at the wounds the Kurlei officer had inflicted on his chest, they were bloodied scores, but they were far from the deep gouging wounds Osu had expected. She seemed to have sunk the tips of her fangs beneath Yergin’s skin and moved them from side to side, but no more.
Had she used venom?
“Skragg!” screamed Yergin. “Holy Azhanti, they were vampires, man! Alien vampires. They fucking bit me! I’m gonna turn into one of them.”
“There are no such things as vampires,” Zy Pel told him with calm finality. “But…” He looked away. “I’ve seen things that are much worse.”
Yergin grabbed his shoulders and drew him down till their foreheads were almost touching. “Is that what we’re facing, brother? This nightmare you met in your past? Tell me it ain’t so.”
“Maybe.” Zy Pel shook his head. “Almost certainly not.”
“Suppose it was,” said Osu. “What would you advise then?”
Zy Pel gave him such a look of pain and loss that Osu took a step back. With a visible effort, he calmed himself and reached for a med-kit. “This isn’t what I saw before. But if it were, we would need to watch you, Yergin. Give it an hour to get on our way and then…”
Yergin shook him by the shoulders. “C’mon, Hines. What? Decapitate me? Stake through the heart? Spit it out. C’mon, man!”
Zy Pel started cleaning Yergin’s wound. “There’s no such thing as vampires, okay? I encountered an alien cult once at a place called Azoth-Zol. They bit people to make them more pliable. Some kind of mind-control shit. But their victims were aliens, and you’re Marc Yergin. You may be a borderline case, but technically you classify as human.”
His words calmed Yergin a little but had the opposite effect on Osu. That Kurlei had sniffed out Zy Pel, and his scent had confused the hell out of her. There was much more that Zy Pel wasn’t saying.
While Zy Pel applied an active dressing, Osu tried to calm Yergin further. “Mind control drug administered through false fangs,” he said. “As alien freak cults go, that’s pretty mild. How long after being bitten did the effects surface?”
“An hour,” Zy Pel replied as he stowed his med-kit.
Zy Pel’s words were spoken casually, but Osu took them seriously. Within an hour, he would ensure Yergin would be restrained and under armed supervision. First, they had to get out of there. Fast.
“Are you all in denial?” It was Stryker, who had slid into the hollow.
“Get back to your position,” Osu snapped at him, beyond furious.
But Stryker only glared back. “De Ketele,” he said. “Krynox, Grymz.” He peered at Osu. “Sanderson,” he whispered. “Newts in protective rad gear are assaulting what remains of Camp Faxian. Fires are still burning, and the air is thick with blaster bolts. There are hundreds of damned newts. But there must be survivors too, though not for much longer unless we do something. And here you are talking about vampires. You’re in denial! Let’s go help our friends, already!”
“I don’t like it any more than you,” said Osu, “but the colonel trusted us with a vital mission. And we will carry it out.”
“Is that it?” Stryker roared. “Is that our skragging response? Everyone we know either died or will do soon, and we let those RILs get away with it?”
“I think this is bigger than the RILs,” said Osu, raising his voice to Zavage and Urdizine who were doubtless listening in from their watch positions outside. “Bigger even than Camp Faxian. We won’t forget this, I promise you that. I swear we will send a multitude of newts to meet their precious goddess, but first” – he cast a worried look at Yergin – “we need to move out.”
“I’m still Marc Yergin. What about you, Sarge? Are you still Osu Sybutu or did those nukes mutate you into a vampire hunter? Because I know the real Sybutu would never abandon his comrades.”
“The real Sybutu gets the job done,” Osu told him. “However hard the route I have to take. The same goes for any true legionary. That’s why none of us are going back to Faxian. We’re heading east to complete our mission.”
“Anyway,” hissed Zy Pel as they stowed the camo-sheets in their bikes. “They are not vampires.”
“Maybe not,” Yergin replied, “but whatever the hell they are, they’re still out there. They’re close by and they’re coming for all of you.”
“Stop that crazy talk!” snapped Osu. “We get through this nightmare by acting like professionals. We are not Militia. We are not RILs, rebels, or bandits. We are sappers of the Legion and this is where we prove it, by holding the line.”
“I’m not crazy,” growled Yergin. He accelerated away, hard, heading southeast off the glacier and disappearing into the eerie glare of the red sky and burning legionary base reflecting off the snow.
“I know they’re surrounding us,” Yergin shouted, his receding voice cracking. “I can smell them.”
The air snapped as streaks of fire hit the upper atmosphere, punching shockwaves that transmitted down through the clouds. They were warships coming in hot, bigger craft than the fighters that had been scrapping. All hell must be breaking loose in orbit.
But there was enough to worry about down here in the snow.
“Get him back,” ordered Osu, as he adjusted his goggles to search the skies.
The fiery streaks resolved into mid-sized freighters. Jump-capable, maybe a dozen crew, and with so many modifications in the centuries after they’d rolled off the production fab-plants that their configuration was effectively random. They were the kind of ships you would see dotted around any port. The kind that went unremarked.
Perhaps the Legion was imposing an orbital interdiction and these were traders with something to hide.
Legion Spikeballs screamed after the freighters in pursuit, their fuselages dotted with the force keels that gave them half their name. The other half of the Spikeball designation came from the four beam generators that curved around their bodies to combine in a central nose spike. These lanced energy beams at the freighters whose shields flared briefly before safely dissipating the weapon strikes.
Freighters with shields? Smugglers weren’t shy about making a few after-factory alterations. To emerge unscathed from that kind of firepower, though... even for the Smuggler’s Guild, that meant serious mods. Those ships had military-grade shielding. What were they really? Troop transports?
The Spikeballs broke away to engage with a wing of mismatched and mostly obsolete fighters just emerging from orbit.
Up ahead, Yergin was laughing. It was a demented sound, almost a cry of pain. “Follow me,” he yelled in a voice that sounded little like the friend Osu had known these past four years.
The glacier the bitten man was crossing descended gently to the southeast with sharp drops to the north as it fell away to the forest, and to the south where it butted against the Great Ice Plain.
The light was dying, the bright red skies being swallowed by the gray maw of a storm advancing aggressively from the south, so it took a moment for Osu to resolve the awful sight in front of Yergin.
Blurry white figures were rising out of the snow. They formed a horseshoe several ranks deep, blocking the exit from the glacier.
Osu raced to catch up.
The sappers opened up with bike cannons on the blocking soldiers. Some went down, but not nearly enough. Yergin wasn’t firing; he was head down and speeding for the center of the enemy formation.
The air above the bikers rippled as railgun flechettes cut through, but despite wearing Legion armor and firing PA-71s, the enemy were clearly no legionaries. They fired wildly. Or perhaps they were firing deliberately high. For now.
Osu desperately sought options.
A few hundred meters behind the enemy, the glacier fell away in a sheer drop, with the promise of cover in the forest beyond. Stryker had ridden off a similar drop and survived. Could anyone else?
“They want you alive,” screamed Yergin. “Follow my example. Don’t let them take you.”
Yergin pushed his bike even harder, its engine rising in pitch until it screamed. He kept going. The powerplant shrieked like a banshee – he must have disabled its safeties.
“Yergin!” Osu screamed. “Don’t do it!”
“Gonna take some dirty vamps with me,” he screamed as his bike rammed the enemy, knocking several flying before its nose pitched down, caught in the snow, and began a high-speed tumble, scything through the phony legionaries like a boomerang drone.
“Grab him,” shouted Osu, speeding through the other bikes and heading for Yergin. With so much snow and bodies thrown into the air, and the whine from the bike motor like screeching nails running along the inside of his skull, he couldn’t locate his friend. But he was in there somewhere.
A fireball erupted as the powerplant on Yergin’s bike blew, and Osu was off his bike and flying through the air.
Once again, the bogus legionaries were slow to react. Zy Pel wasn’t.
“Yergin’s bought us an exit,” he shouted as Osu mounted his fallen bike. “Use it!”
They raced through the gap Yergin had blown through the enemy ranks, kicking, stabbing, and shooting the dazed survivors who threatened to block them.
In the flickering light of the burning bike, Osu slowed to scan the snow, hoping against all the odds that Yergin had been thrown clear.
He hadn’t. Osu saw his burning corpse steaming in the snow. His friend was beyond rescuing.
“I’ll keep them safe,” he promised Yergin. “No matter what we’re really facing here.”
Osu saw a flash on his bike armor, inches from his thigh, and felt the tiniest of nudges as a flechette round deflected away.
“Gotta go,” he told Yergin and threw his bike forward.
Rounds zipped past him but within moments he was inside the howling snowstorm rolling in from the plain, and being beaten by balls of ice pummeling him like fists. The others slowed down and allowed their engine heat to radiate so he could find them with the IR overlay on his goggles.
They altered their bikes to limit their emissions in case they were being followed. Doing so robbed them of performance, but with visibility so poor that the legionaries couldn’t see the ground, it made sense.
Instead of riding off the glacier’s edge into the howling gale, Osu ordered his team to turn right, taking them behind the enemy who had halted to lick their wounds. The wind caught snatches of shouted commands to the beaten soldiers to pick up their boots and head north.
Soon, though, the voices fell away and they were left alone in the whiteout with only the dots in their goggles to reassure them that they were still together.
After a few klicks, the storm blew out and they seized the chance to get clear off the glacier. Following Stryker’s instructions, they accelerated off the edge of the ice cliff to make it easy to keep their mounts balanced. Osu misjudged it and had to throw himself clear of the bike. But both of them were undamaged after their fall into the accumulation of fresh snow and headed off for the shelter of the trees as the storm rolled back in.
Here the dense tree canopy protected them from the worst of the howling gales and replaced it with a muffled silence. But as they drove beneath the pines, they had to dodge falling piles of snow that slid off laden boughs.
Osu preferred the violence of the storm out in the open. It was something he could fight. The way the world closed in on them inside the forest felt suffocating. The ghosts of those he’d lost that day seemed to cling to the trees, and he was glad when nighttime soon fell. Darkness was a form of sensory deprivation he was much more familiar with.
They encountered no one.
No birds. No Littoranes. No one friendly, but also no zombie legionary vampires or whatever the hell they’d encountered out there.
If the image of nuclear fire hadn’t seared itself so strongly into his memory, it would be easy in this oppressive silence to start believing they had imagined the disaster they’d escaped. De Ketele, Colonel Malix, the new lieutenant, and Nydella… he was certain they were all dead, along with everyone he’d known who wasn’t with him, wrapped in cloaks and riding bikes through the night. It was a deadly fact waiting for him in the darkness like an underwater mine, but he hadn’t yet felt its emotional impact. Yergin was different. It was Yergin’s death he struggled to process the most, the image of Yergin’s burning corpse he kept seeing lying on the forest floor out the corner of his eye. And the way he had claimed to smell the enemy – the same way their Kurlei officer had sniffed out Zy Pel.
If Osu survived this mission to make a report, he would paint Yergin as a hero who had sacrificed himself to buy his brothers an exit. The horrifying truth was that Yergin’s terror of what he might become was so powerful that Osu was sure he would have blown his bike anyway.
Osu suspected the other survivors in the party were consumed by similar thoughts. Or maybe they were sucked into a different private hell. In any case, they pressed on in silence, willingly numbing themselves with the mindless task of threading the hoverbikes through tree after tree.
“Yergin was right about one thing,” said Zy Pel, breaking the silence on the first rest stop. With Zavage keeping watch, they sat in a circle of their bikes munching on ration bars without enthusiasm. “He was my brother. I miss him already. But if those freaks we encountered were what I found at Azoth-Zol, then... he’s better off dead.”
“I’m not in the mood for anyone talking drent,” shouted Osu in an instant rage. “You said it was mind control. And it only worked on aliens. It’s obvious to everyone here that you’re freaked out by whatever it is we’re facing. You! The unflappable Hines Zy Pel who laughs at any suggestion that he was SpecMish, and then proves he is with the skills and hoarded kit that makes r
egular legionaries like us look like junior cadets.”
“I was trying to calm Yergin. Finding words to cool all your heads. It’s still only a hunch.”
Osu got to his feet and glared at Zy Pel. He was uncomfortably aware of his hands. They needed to hit something. Or someone. “I am in charge here, SOTL. You will share what you know. Next extended stop, you will tell us everything. In the meantime, if these freaks are who you suspect, is there any intel you might care to share with your surviving brothers that improves our odds of staying alive a little longer?”
He shook his head and then looked away. “I’m sorry.”
Sorry? He didn’t look it! Zy Pel took a battered leather pouch from the inside of his cloak and drew out his clay pipe and tin of synth-bac. Ignoring his NCO standing over him, he tamped leaves into his pipe bulb.
If it were anyone else, Osu would have snatched the pipe away and thrown it into the night at such insolence. But there were multiple levels at which he didn’t want to escalate conflict with this man.
He did so anyway, but selected a different angle of attack. One Zy Pel wouldn’t see coming.
“We’ve got more mysteries than we can cope with,” Osu told the group. “We move out in three mikes.” He stared at the man happily puffing away without a care in the world. “Let’s see if we can solve a few before we do. You with the pipe! Are you the Hines Zy Pel who supposedly died on Station 11?”
Zy Pel froze for several seconds, the pipe clamped between his teeth. “That doesn’t matter now.”
“The hell you say!” Stryker erupted with anger. “My best friend got bitten and blew himself up. The main guns at the base turned inward and nearly everyone we know is dead. I’ve seen zombies wearing Legion kit, newts in rad-gear who knew this attack was coming, and bombers that miraculously snuck through the orbital defense system. No one’s told me what’s so important about these damned dig sites, or why the colonel gave us an off-grid mission like we’re some hard-ass secret agents. Maybe he chose us because buttoned-up jack-head legionaries are the most unlikely spies ever, because we always do everything by the book and once we join the Legion family we never interact with outsiders except to shoot them or drink at their bars. The idea of undercover SOTLs is so ludicrous, no one would ever suspect us. The colonel was either an idiot or a genius.”
Chimera Company - Rho-Torkis Box Set Page 7