by C H Gideon
Xi performed a quick inspection of the trio, finding none of them in immediate danger of dying from blood loss or asphyxiation, so she reached for the med-kit Blinky had used to bind Lu’s wounds.
She produced a pair of stim syringes, rolled Staubach over onto his back, and injected the high-powered cocktail directly into his heart.
For a few seconds, nothing happened. Then he gasped, sitting bolt upright as his eyes snapped wildly around the room.
“Blinky, focus,” she said, placing a hand on either side of his face and locking eyes with him. “Where are you?”
His eyes darted left and right several times before settling on Xi, and after a few short, panicked breaths, he said, “Shiva’s Wrath?”
“Good enough.” She nodded. “Listen, Lu’s hurt—” She gestured to the burned Wrench-turned-Monkey, then the reporter. “—and so is Samuels. Can you drive the ATV?”
Blinky, true to his nickname, worked his eyelids up and down a dozen times in rapid succession before nodding. “I…I think so. I’m a little wired, though.”
“I know,” she said apologetically, gesturing to the empty syringe. “It’ll wear off in about twenty minutes. You need to rendezvous with Winters and his platoon. They’re due south of here. Where are you going?” she asked when his attention seemed to drift.
“Due south,” he replied, his words coming faster than normal, “gotta chase the winter.”
“Close enough,” she agreed, helping him stand. “Take Lu,” she urged. “I’ll get Samuels.”
Together, they brought the pair of injured to the hatch where they strapped rebreathers onto everyone. She pulled the emergency lever and the hatch swung open, clanging against Elvira’s hull as the flames on the ice-field where the flyer crashed were still burning, though less intensely than before.
With the thankfully-slender Sarah Samuels’ arm around her neck, Xi carefully walked down the ramp to the icy ground and found the ATV’s deployment switch. She was rewarded by the hiss of pneumatic cylinders which released the sparse, six-wheeled vehicle, dropping it to the ice beneath Elvira’s stern.
“Ms. Samuels,” she said, propping the woman up in the vehicle’s right-rear seat and strapping her in, “you need to stay awake, okay?’
Samuels was still groggy, suggesting she might have suffered a severe concussion. Deciding against further attempts to communicate with the reporter, Xi helped Blinky strap Lu into the ATV’s left-rear seat.
“Fire it up, Private,” Xi said, gesturing for him to take the driver’s seat.
“I can’t do that, Captain...” he began to protest.
“You can, and you will,” she snapped. “I have to complete this mission alone. Hook up with Winters to the south. That’s an order,” she said, her voice cracking like a whip on the last words.
Blinky looked like he wanted to argue, but reluctantly nodded and boarded the vehicle. Its capacitors were green, and a test of its motors showed it was ready to roll. “Good luck, Captain,” he said, his hands trembling slightly from the stims.
“Move out,” she clapped him on the shoulder. He pulled his hood over his head, checked that his passengers had no exposed skin, and sped off to the south.
Xi eyed the flaming wreckage of the flyer, seeing only a few pieces larger than a meter in diameter. She then turned her focus to the right side of Elvira, where she and her people had just disembarked, and appraised the damage.
The front and middle legs on that side were almost completely destroyed, with the middle leg’s joint annihilated. It was a miracle the blast hadn’t gone completely through her mech’s armor and vaporized everyone inside.
Bits of the centipede’s carapace were strewn about, embedded in the melted ice, which was the main culprit for Elvira’s aggressive rightward tilt. A meter of ice had melted away beneath the mech, likely from a combination of the explosion and the burning liquid the centipede had covered her with prior to that.
“Damn…” she muttered, bracing herself on the gangway’s rail before hearing a faint noise from behind her. She set her jaw and slowly turned toward the source of the sound, which perhaps unsurprisingly originated from the dying flames of the flyer’s wreckage. “Of course…” She grimaced as the sound of chitin scraping against the ice was accompanied by a flicker of movement beyond the flames.
Knowing that her fight was not yet over, she regained Elvira’s interior and made for the small arms locker. Inside was a collection of weapons, some of which she was rated on and others she was not. She strapped a sidearm to her uniform, clicking it into place just below her hip as she took a tac-vest and visored helmet from the rear of the locker. Strapping the protective gear on, she reached for a handful of micro-grenades, a combat knife and, finally, the locker’s anti-material rifle with collapsible tripod.
“I don’t play to lose,” she declared, snapping a ten-round clip into the rifle and hefting it before her chest as she made her way to the mech’s exterior hatch.
Once she was there, she peered through the portal and saw something that was both completely unfamiliar and still expected.
The thing stood a head shorter than Xi, with a stooped posture and half-insect, half-crustacean-looking physique the basic shape of which resembled nothing so much as a mythological centaur. It had no proper head, but its four legs supported a medium-long body. At the front of the body was a pair of long, double-elbowed “arms” ending in four-pronged pincers. Those arms protruded up from a short “torso” affixed to the front of the thing’s main body, and seemed remarkably thin and wiry considering the thick, blade-like proportions of the lower limbs.
The creature passed through the flames as though they were not there, making a bee-line for her position at a pace equal to a brisk walk.
And while it was possible the thing meant her no harm, she wasn’t about to risk being wrong about that.
Moving down the gangway, she nearly lost her footing on the last step but managed to save both herself and the rifle from a fall to the ice. Gritting her teeth in annoyance, she unfolded the rifle’s tripod and ducked beneath Elvira’s hull, slipping her body back a couple meters before laying her rifle on the ice and sighting in on the thing.
The range-finder showed it was forty meters away. Point-blank range for such a potent weapon. Jacking a round into the chamber, she pressed her finger against the trigger and put the thing in her crosshairs.
“Nighty night,” she whispered, squeezing the trigger and sending a fifty-caliber slug downrange. The gun’s report was deafening—especially since she had chosen to fire it beneath Elvira’s tilting hull, where the sound waves immediately reflected back at her with near-full intensity.
The bullet struck just a few centimeters from where she aimed, and the impact sent the thing skittering across the ice as its chitinous legs failed to find purchase on the frozen surface. But just as quickly as it had been knocked off-target, it resumed its forward progress with machine-like focus.
“Seriously?” she muttered, her ears ringing as she centered the oncoming thing in her crosshairs and squeezed the trigger a second time.
Amazingly, the thing somehow dodged the second bullet and barely broke stride while doing so.
“Oh no, you don’t.” She grimaced as it passed the twenty-five-meter mark. Switching the gun to full-auto, she was counting on its impressive, active recoil-dampening system to keep her from spraying all eight remaining bullets high and wide.
Xi drew a short breath and exhaled as the thing reached the seventeen-meter mark, at which point she unloaded the rifle’s remaining ammo.
The insect-looking thing evaded the first round, but the second and third struck it just above where she had wanted. One of its arms was blown off by the third round, and its rear leg was luckily crippled by the last.
But the creature’s focus was incredible. In spite of its terrible wounds, it tossed some sort of grenade at Xi even as it skittered back from the force of the fifty’s multiple impacts.
Xi log-rolled as fa
st as she could away from the rifle, but the grenade-like device still caught her in a spray of acid that caused her helmet and vest to hiss as smoke poured off them.
She kept rolling toward Elvira’s relatively-raised stern section, feeling angry burns begin to erupt across her left shoulder and back. Her neck soon felt as though a thousand needles were stabbing it, and she knew she needed to get her vest and helmet off.
Before leaving the relative cover of Elvira, she tore her helmet off and tossed it aside. Unstrapping her vest, she screamed in pain as her right hand was burned by a thick clump of flaming material that was actively eating into her protective armor.
Her head was on a swivel as soon as she doffed the ruined armor, and her hand went to the micro-grenades stuck to her belt. The barest flicker of movement beneath Elvira prompted Xi to toss the first of her three grenades near the abandoned rifle, where it exploded with a blinding flash and ear-splitting crack. Shrapnel flew outward as the rifle was destroyed by the explosion, but Xi could not see whether the bug had been caught by the blast.
Acting purely on instinct, she drew her sidearm and looked up to Elvira’s badly-damaged topside just in time to see the creature appear between the dual fifteens. The same place Sergeant Major Trapper and his Pounders had nested during the last push on Durgan’s Folly.
Snarling in primal anger at this thing somehow transposing itself on Trapper’s memory, Xi fired her sidearm a dozen times at the bug-looking beast. The rounds were surprisingly more effective than she expected, with the repeated impacts causing it to lose its footing atop the derelict mech’s hull. The creature’s legs splayed as it struggled to keep something approaching a combat-ready posture, but Xi kept it off-balance with well-timed shots that struck its body near the lower leg joints.
Using a one-handed grip, Xi emptied her thirty-round clip at the thing. As she fired, she drew the second grenade from her belt and tossed it on top of Elvira. Ducking beneath the mech’s raised stern, Xi was protected from the blast while she drew the third and final grenade from her belt.
“All or nothing,” she hissed, discarding her sidearm and drawing the last weapon at her disposal—the combat knife. Whirling out of concealment, she barely managed to avoid the thing as it leaped toward her. Less a matador and more an unpracticed ice skater, Xi’s feet slipped out from under her, and she crashed to the ground a meter from where the centaur-bug did likewise.
Raising her knife, she stabbed down on the creature’s lone-remaining arm as it flailed in her direction. She hesitated, wondering whether she should use the last grenade or not, but suddenly, something happened.
The creature’s body relaxed, but not in anything like a death rattle. Its lower limbs splayed wide while its upper limbs spasmed, twitching left and right in search of something to grapple.
Muted whumps and brilliant flashes pierced the sky above as Terran anti-missile fire scraped inbound ordnance from the air. And beneath that ongoing battle to protect this historically unprecedented first contact situation, Captain Xi Bao did the nearly unthinkable.
She dove knife-first on top of the creature, plunging her weapon deep into its torso. Xi twisted the blade left and right, digging the blade deep and wrenching like she was attacking a lobster with dinnerware. She knew even as she did it that she might have just made the most catastrophic mistake of her life, and that she might have just cost the Terran Republic the chance to form a productive relationship with a new species.
But she had to go with her gut, and her gut told her to show no mercy since that was precisely how the bug-things had behaved.
The six-limbed thing finally spasmed, but as it did so, something remarkable happened: its limbs splayed outward in a symmetrical display that was certainly unnatural given the damage it had sustained.
Xi felt a surge of hope that she had chosen the right path and quickly disarmed the grenade before tossing her knife to the ground. Now disarmed, she did her best to assume a symmetrical posture while remaining upright. Her arms at ninety-degree angles to her sides, and her feet spaced as far apart as her shoulders, she straightened her head as much as she could manage considering the continued vertigo.
The ruined creature held its own posture for a long while before its limbs fell limply to the ice, and Xi fell to her knees as mixed waves of victory and despair washed over her. She had survived the battle, but if this thing had died, then how in God’s name could she complete her mission and establish some kind of dialogue with the things?
She wanted to cry in frustration, but her brain was apparently too rattled to behave in what she thought would be its usual fashion.
Then suddenly, fifty meters from her position, the ice split apart with the sound of a glacier tearing through rock. The cracking of frozen water tearing apart continued as an undamaged version of the hunchbacked alien vehicles emerged from the ice.
She was on her knees and decided now was not the time to adjust her posture. With her heart pounding in her ears, she remained as motionless as she could manage while the vehicle’s crab-like legs brought the lumbering vehicle close to her.
When it was about twenty meters from where she knelt, the giant insect-like thing stopped. For a long moment, nothing seemed to happen. She wondered if she was about to die, on her knees and bathed in plasma fire. Hardly a pleasant end by any measure.
Then the forward-most layers of metallic, chitinous armor folded back into themselves, and a centaur-like creature identical to the one she had just fought emerged.
It approached with its arms splayed outward at near-ninety-degree angles from its body, seeming to approximate her previous posture. She responded by mirroring the pose, and the creature’s blade-shaped, crab-like legs brought it to a stop less than three meters from Xi.
Slowly, with obvious deliberation, the thing reached behind its torso section and produced a small, triangular device approximately ten centimeters long on a side. It was of decidedly non-human design, and if Xi had to guess, she would have said it was Vorr technology.
The triangular device began to glow with a faint, blue light, and a tinny voice crackled to life from within it. “You brave. We brave. Symmetry.”
She felt her heart leap into her throat as a wave of relief washed over her. She had been right! All of this was some sort of inhuman greeting ritual.
She nodded, repeating the phrase. “You brave. We brave. Symmetry.”
“No harm,” the thing’s translator box said, though it lacked inflection, so she had difficulty understanding what it meant.
She cocked her head in confusion. “I don’t understand.”
“No harm. We no harm you,” it clarified as it stepped closer to its fallen comrade.
She nodded unthinkingly. “Yes, tend to your wounded.”
“No harm,” it repeated as it stooped down and, using its one free four-pointed pincer, performed a strange sequence of movements that saw the fallen centaur-thing’s body burst open on the underside.
Xi watched in fascination as the living centaur-thing reached purposefully inside its dead comrade and, with evident care and tenderness, removed something that looked like a cross between a slug and a grub. It was a half-meter long and appeared incredibly delicate.
But the grub-slug thing was still moving, and Xi dimly realized it was the real creature. The centaur-like exoskeleton was some kind of removable armor!
The new insectaur’s armor opened on the underside, where it tucked its suit-less comrade before the armor folded back into itself.
“You brave,” the box reiterated, “we brave. You not food. We not food.”
“Yes.” She nodded eagerly. “You brave. We brave. You not food. We not food. We wish reciprocity…symmetry,” she clarified before gesturing to the translation device, “like you and Vorr.”
“Vorr brave. Vorr food,” the thing unexpectedly said. “Brave food not symmetrical.”
She laughed in spite of herself, concluding that this species was confused by the concept of “brave food.” The
confusion was understandable since most prey animals humanity had encountered were not, in fact, “brave” by any human-recognized definition of the word.
“All brave?” the thing asked, clearly posing a question despite the translator’s emotionless delivery.
“Yes.” She nodded, placing both hands on her chest. “All Terrans are brave.” She tapped her chest. “We Terran. Not Vorr. You?”
“You Terran. Not Vorr. We Zeen,” it replied through the translator before the armored exoskeleton emitted a sound that actually sounded like a particularly lengthy enunciation of the word “Zeen.” While it spoke, the vehicle behind it withdrew back to its originating tunnel where it soon disappeared.
“You Zeen…” She nodded, wary of why its vehicle had withdrawn. “We Terran.”
“Terran hierarchical,” the Zeen said before uttering a variation on the most cliched phrase in the history of science fiction. “Take Zeen to Terran leader.”
17
Battlefield Diplomacy
The live feed from Leapfrog, assigned to the same patrol as Elvira, showed the last seconds of the fight between Xi and the alien soldier as Lee Jenkins watched with bated breath. It wasn’t until the lumbering bug vehicle emerged from the ice and came to a stop nearly on top of her position that Jenkins knew Xi had been right. Her whole theory had just been proven out, and he watched with eager anticipation as a second creature emerged from the larger bug and approached Xi.
The two seemed to converse for several minutes before Styles urgently declared, “New contacts, Colonel.”
Jenkins looked up to see Roy’s tactical viewer show dozens of fresh contacts, none of which seemed interested in hiding themselves. Groups of four to six fresh icons appeared right on top of the remaining Jemmin targets, and in a span of twenty-one seconds, all Jemmin targets were wiped off the face of Shiva’s Wrath.
And the fact that they didn’t react nearly as quickly or intelligently to the ambush as they had done prior to the Poltergeist’s destruction was not lost on either Jenkins or Styles.