by David Ryker
Around the walls, processing machines and hab structures had been built up like rows of seats in an amphitheater. The bottom was flat. Once upon a time, it had been covered with regularly-spaced storage containers along dirt roads for survee access.
“It’s just like Anderson told you,” Simms said, turning back to me as we peered over the crest of the ridge. “There’s nothing left here. Only death.”
Anderson and Leka had decided to stay with the wounded and those of the survivors who didn’t want to come back here. I could see why. There was a flatness to Simms’s expression, like there was to Tomlins’s, but none of the good cheer that came with Tomlins’s brand of sociopathy.
Behind us, I heard foliage shift. Salter and I turned - and an instant after us, so did the other two in our party. We waited. Off in the distance, I could hear a tiny and rhythmic tap-tap, tap-tap in the leaves.
“A bird,” Salter whispered, waving our attention back to the Textiles plant. I wasn’t so sure about that, but I turned back around.
“They hit this place hard,” Tomlins said. “Harder than the breaker facility.”
“Maybe,” I said. “You hit something at the breaker facility, nine times out of ten you hit metal. Metal stops burning after a while.”
“These fires are going to be burning for weeks,” Simms said. “You see that area up there, on the north end?”
“Yeah.” I looked all the way across the crater, to where a bunch of hab structures was barely visible through thick bluish-green smoke.
“That’s what we called the lifer block. It’s where they house you when you’re not expected to live out your sentence.” Simms frowned. “It used to hide the piping complex to the liquid waste sink.”
Used to. The whole thing was burning now. I couldn’t tell if fire or xeno plasma blasts had caused the structural damage that laid the building’s skeleton bare for the smoke and flames to drift through.
“There’s no way they’re gonna get fire mitigation in on this,” Okafor said. “Look.” He pointed to the west, where smoke was still rising from the breaker facility. “That’s burning, too.”
“They’re going to have to evacuate the planet,” Simms said.
“They might have to,” Salter said, “but they won’t. Not until it’s too late.”
“You’re probably right.” Simms shook his head. “We’re not worth the resources.”
“Not to the Coalition,” Salter said. I knew the expression on his face to be a smile. I wasn’t sure about the other humans around us.
“You got someone else in mind?” Okafor said.
“I’m in for twenty on a smuggling charge,” I said, jerking my thumb toward Salter. “You wanna know who put my best friend here in with me?”
“Kind of, actually,” Okafor said.
“A bunch of bad fucking dudes is who,” I said. “Don’t listen to this guy.”
Salter rolled his eyes. “I’m an employee of the Savys Belt Brotherhood,” he said. “You may know my employers as…”
“As the Belters?” Okafor narrowed his eyes.
“So you’re familiar with…”
“Ssh.” Simms pointed north - and up. “Get under cover.”
I crawled sideways along the rock I was on until I was crouching in the shade of a big vine with dying yellow leaves. As I moved, I scanned the sky where Simms had pointed until I could see it: a disruption in the atmosphere, not so much a shimmer as a spot where my eyes didn’t want to focus.
“That’s gotta be one of their ships.” Tomlins had moved to join me, faster than a shadow and just as silent. “Look. It’s having issues staying cloaked with the smoke.”
As it descended toward the bottom of the crater, I could make out the shape of the spot in the air. It was a pyramid, flat-topped and rotating slowly. I could see the smoke moving around it.
“I don’t think it’s cloaked,” I said. “That’s...that’s not how a cloaking device works.”
“Yeah,” Tomlins said. “I just can’t figure out how else to describe it.”
A regular cloaking device usually projected some kind of image or other visual disruption. Whatever this thing was doing was sure a visual disruption, but not one I’d ever encountered. This was no projection. It was the opposite. It was nothing. The craft kept doing it until it landed, in one of the clear spots where storage containers had been blasted out of the way.
“Aww, fuck,” I said. “What we’ve been going through is just the first wave.”
“Softening us up for a ground invasion.” Tomlins nodded grimly.
A few yards to my northeast, Simms whistled and beckoned for me to come closer.
I belly-crawled over to meet him, careful to keep my profile low. As the craft got closer to the ground, I could feel a hum just like the one I’d felt when we’d first encountered a larger grouping of these xenos.
“The PDS is over there,” Simms whispered, pointing to the eastern edge of the facility. “They had it pretty heavily guarded. Most of us working this plant would do anything to create a distraction.”
“Do you think they still have guards on it?” Tomlins said.
“I don’t know if there’s anything left to guard,” Simms said.
I had to agree with him. I could barely see anything through the toxic haze of smoke and dust that was drifting through the remains of the textiles facility.
“How will we know if it’s sending a signal?” Tomlins said. “All we have to find out is whether or not it’s broadcasting, and then we can get the hell out of here.”
“We’ll have to either get to the PDS or get a comm unit off a guard,” Simms said. “I’ll give you a wild guess as to which one’s gonna be easier.”
“Shit, the way they hit this facility...hold on.” My attention was suddenly drawn to the ship in the middle of the crater. Not just my visual attention: my whole body wanted me to see this.
The ship was breaking apart, but not in the way that my mind told me to expect. There was no anthill scurry, no sudden disintegration of the vessel into a bunch of individuals. Instead, there was an audible lurch and shudder as the ship separated into four tower-like beings. Each one had a blocky, almost rectangular body that supported a similar head to those of the smaller creatures we’d seen earlier.
They moved more slowly than the smaller xenos, but still with the same eerie wrongness to their motion. Limbs seemed to appear and disappear at random from the lower half of the tower-like creatures.
“This ain’t good,” Simms said. For the first time since I’d met him, actual worry crossed his face. “Those are...those are different.”
“No they’re not,” I said. I looked for Salter. He was to the west of us, grimacing as he took in the sights below him. “Hey!” I said.
Although my voice was quiet, Salter heard instantly. He whipped his head to glare at me. “What?” he said.
“We’re going down there,” I said. “We need to do it…”
There was a plasma burst, and one of the vehicles on the west end of the pit burst into flames. I could see Coalition troops swarming like insects from cover, firing plasma bursts in vain at one of the tower creatures that was moving through the maze of storage containers.
I caught a weird, brassy tinge of anticipation. Something told me to look at the two towers that remained behind. They were moving in tandem. I got the sense they were trying to get lined up just right. Just right for what?
My question answered itself as a deep red wall of light erected itself between the two enormous creatures. Like a plasma burst, it disintegrated most of the metal and plastic in its path.
“Aww, fuck,” Tomlins said. “They’re clearing more landing space.”
Behind us, again: a shift in the foliage, the sensation in my spine that something else wasn’t right. Like we were being watched - but not by the xenos. I glanced at Salter, and saw that he, too, was checking his six-o-clock like someone had just called his name.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” S
alter was up and already heading back toward the group.
“After coming this far?” I said.
“No questions.” Salter’s voice was a hiss. “Come with me.”
It wasn’t a bodily compulsion. It was a mental one as strong as the desire to eat, sleep, or pee outside my pants. I had to follow him. It was the rules. No matter how much it made my independent brain want to vomit.
“Goddammit,” I said. “We have to find some -”
“No,” Salter said. He smiled as he stared me down, willing me to follow him. “We’re getting out of here. And while we’re at it…” His smile widened as he thumbed the charge lever on his plasma rifle. “I don’t like our new friends, I’ve decided.”
Before Simms or Okafor could react, he’d raised the rifle to his shoulder. I screamed at my body to do something, to protect the people who were risking their asses to come with me. And I couldn’t make it listen.
“I knew it!” And I knew that voice. That was Leka! But…
What was going on? Why had she left the wounded behind? Where did she get that grenade?
Salter turned with a sneer. “Oh, so it’s you who’s been following us,” he said. “How nice of…”
As he turned, he lowered his weapon slightly. He shouldn’t have done that. Leka had already activated the explosive charge, and it detonated about three feet away from hitting him.
I felt the pain in my own body as Salter screamed and went flying backward, very much on fire.
“Traitor!” he yelled. “You slimy…”
He didn’t have a chance to finish the sentence before he lost his balance and pitched over the edge of the ridgeline. I doubled over in agony as my nervous system tried to process what he was going through - and then collapsed.
“Collins!” Leka was beside me in a second. “Collins, are you...okay, you’re breathing.”
“I’m breathing,” I said as Leka rolled me over onto my back. “I can’t say Salter’s doing the same.”
“Yeah, well, that’s more clean oxygen for us,” Leka said. “He wasn’t putting his share to any good use.”
I held still while she made sure I had a heartbeat and listened to my lungs. “Huh,” she said. “Well, looks like he left you undamaged.”
“I guess,” I said. It was dawning on me that he hadn’t deactivated my word. Nobody told me what happens when someone says your word and then gets killed. Usually, the Belters made sure that didn’t fucking happen.
“Guys, we gotta get out of here.” Simms was pointing down the ridgeline.
“Oh, shit,” Tomlins said. “Why the fuck did you use a grenade?”
I scrambled to my knees, and my heart sank. We had been noticed. We had been noticed by all four of the tower creatures. And they were heading toward us.
“Run!” I said, picking up my weapon and booking it into the trees.
We ran silently for most of a mile. Tomlins, Leka, Okafor, and Simms all followed behind me. Unblooded as they were, it was hard for them to keep up. I let loose the occasional plasma burst with my rifle to clear vegetation and let them know where I was. It wasn’t like saving the charge was going to do me any fucking good against these xenos.
Still, Simms was yelling, “Stop shooting!” after me.
“Run faster!” I yelled back.
I was heading down the hill toward the PDS, moving on an eastward tack as much as the landscape would let me. That was one of the nice things about being a blooded Belter - it was relatively easy to orient yourself to north and south on pretty much any planet you found yourself on. Something to do with electromagnetism.
That thought made me stop in my tracks, holding my plasma rifle half-ready like an idiot. Something to do with electromagnetism. Like the electromagnetism that powered a plasma rifle. Like the electromagnetism these things were using to stop our plasma bursts.
“Nice of you to let us catch up.” Tomlins was wheezing as she approached me from behind. I could hear Leka coughing up a lung about twenty yards away.
“We need solid-slug weapons,” I said. “If we’re facing off against these things, we need solid-slug weapons.”
“Huh?” Tomlins said.
“Something about their tech,” I said. “It interferes with my biotech. It interferes with our plasma bursts. Shit, do you remember what happened when we hit them with plasma?”
“I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention,” Tomlins said. “I remember you got a hit in on one. It’s got some stopping power to it.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but what good is stopping power if nine times out of ten they can throw the force of the plasma burst back at us?”
“Good point.”
Leka joined us, almost doubled over as she struggled for breath. “Fuck you guys,” she said. “You know I can’t run that fast.”
“You wouldn’t let me carry you,” Tomlins said, put out.
“Sorry,” I said. “Hey. What do you have left in terms of solid-slug or explosive weapons?”
“I’m running low on ammunition for this weapon,” Leka said, hefting her rifle. “Uhh, I have a pistol. And four more plastic explosives in my bra.”
“Speaking of which, can you not use those again unless you really have to?” Tomlins said.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t want to see that little shit get his ass popped by a hand grenade,” Leka said with one of her rare toothy grins. “The towers were going to notice us anyway.” Her face soured as she looked me in the eye. “Hopefully Salter being out of the way will keep that from happening again.”
“Are you saying Salter drew those things toward us?” Tomlins said.
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” I said. “The electromagnetism in our biotech. It’s...it’s causing interference, or picking up a signal, or something from the xenos.”
“So you’re going to keep running toward them,” Tomlins said. “Great idea.”
“No, they’re not homing in on me, necessarily,” I said.
“As far as you know,” Leka said. “What do you even know about the biotech in you?”
“Biotech?” Simms said. He and Okafor were bringing up the rear, even more winded than Leka, even if they weren’t coughing as grotesquely.
“It’s a long story.” I narrowed my eyes. “Let’s just say that Salter wasn’t fucking around about the Belters, okay? I don’t want to get into it too much.”
“I think you’d better get into it,” Okafor said, drawing himself up and crossing his arms across his narrow chest. “Belters are bad news.”
“Yeah,” I said. “They are. Which is why it’s a good thing Leka here took the real Belter out and left you with me.”
“Salter was here to supervise Collins,” Tomlins said, stepping in between me and the newcomers. “Keep him on a leash. Make sure he didn’t do anything too inconvenient to the Belters.”
That seemed to be comforting to Simms. A mirthless smile spread across his face like spilled oil. “And are you, uh, frequently inconvenient to the Belters?” he said.
“Look, I just wanna see my daughters again,” I said. “The Belters aren’t going to help me. The Coalition isn’t going to help me. All I can do is...is what I’m doing, and right now sticking with you guys is the best chance I have. Okay?”
Simms nodded. “Either you’re a fuckin’ good liar, Collins, or I think I like you,” he said. “Guess we’re about to find out which one it is.”
13
I remember how happy I was to see Celeste standing in that doorway.
“Hey, sweetie,” I said softly, smiling at her and at Nadine cowering behind her. “It’s okay. There’s just a little mix-up with the law going on right now.”
“You don’t have to talk to him.” The judicial officer accompanying them was a short, squat woman with curly brown hair that formed a trapezoid around the base of her neck.
“Dad?” Celeste said. “Dad, what’s going on?”
I had spent the last two weeks fast-talking and pleading civil rights and fi
guring out how to dance a circle around the Coalition goons interrogating me. I had, up until this point, had plenty to say.
“Daddy, just come home!” Nadine said. “I don’t like it!”
But right then I was speechless. Words were not powerful enough to carry the weight of the grief in my chest. I had to say something. The girls’ fear was written deep on their little faces. I knew instantly what their mom had told them about me. What she’d warned them that I would tell them.
“Well, sweetie,” I said, fighting the heat of tears in my throat, “I, uh, I can’t come home right now.”
“Why not?” Nadine said. “Mommy says you’re too mad at her to come home!”
I was, actually, too pissed off at fucking Linata to be in the same room with her. I had told my lawyer that much. Maybe that was a mistake. But I smiled at Celeste and laughed. “No, sweetie,” I said. “Don’t be silly. I just didn’t have my paperwork in order for a cargo I was carrying. It’s like, you know, a grown-up version of not doing your homework.”
“That’s one way to put it, I guess,” said the judicial officer.
“Mommy says you’re a bad guy now,” Nadine said.
“Mom’s just upset,” Celeste said. She squeezed her sister’s hand. Always remembering that she was the big strong one - just like I’d told her. “Dad, are you gonna get out on bail?”
“They’re thinking about that,” I said. How did an eight-year-old know what bail was? “But I made some, uh, pretty bad mistakes on my paperwork.”
“Your daddy’s a flight risk,” the judicial officer said. “And he shot three of the nice policemen who were…”
“Allegedly,” I said. “Girls, they’re trying to pin a lot of bad stuff on me, and if they get their way…”
“Which we will,” the judicial officer said. “Come on, Collins. You know Boetcher is only letting you do your little family visit because he has the footage from the arrest.”