by David Ryker
Anderson gasped. “Do you think they see us down…”
The Coalition ship wasted no time in letting loose a barrage with its solid slug cannon. Those were big rounds. I knew from experience: they could put a substantial hole in even the most sophisticated xeno-sourced armor from a close enough range.
This barrage was one of those. It actually rocked the xeno craft in the sky, and I contemplated for a second what would happen if the craft broke up over us and fell to the ground.
But only for a second. Another wave of nausea made me double over, supporting my weight on my hands as a blue-tinged sphere expanded like a soap bubble around the alien craft. I realized I was clutching on to a vine. My knees were wet.
I looked up, and I wished I hadn’t. The xeno craft’s energy bubble concentrated into three beams, each of which launched out at the Coalition quads in unison. On impact, the hulls of the quads disintegrated. I could hear someone shriek as pieces of burning metal fell into the jungle. I could feel the heat on my face, even as my blood ran cold at the thought of what the crew was experiencing.
Instinctively, I drew back for shelter under the cover of a thick-trunked tree. The xeno craft didn’t take any time to stick around and gloat over its victory. It made a quick turn-around, as if doing a visual sweep of the area, and then it meandered off through the air at a casual pace.
As the craft flew away from us, I stepped out of the cover of the tree. It didn’t cloak itself again. Why not?
“Uh-oh,” Leka said. She was holding her plasma rifle tight, her fingers fidgeting on the barrel, although she had to know by now it wasn’t going to do her any good about the threat we were actually facing. “I think it might be headed in the same direction we are.”
“Well, maybe if it is, we’ll have an easier time looting the place,” Anderson said. “Only way to find out is to go on and get there.”
It turned out that panic was the missing ingredient in making us faster through the jungle. We were leaping over bushes; I was grabbing Leka and Anderson and practically throwing them ahead of me over thick spots in the vines. Tomlins was scrambling through the brush like some kind of feral animal. Turns out having one big guy and three tiny women isn’t always a tactical disadvantage, at least not in this kind of terrain.
The sense that I was about to puke was lessening as I ran, but I still didn’t feel right. It was almost like the last stages of a hangover, when you’re almost back to normal but still regretting certain parts of last night.
And it went a little deeper than just not feeling right. As my nausea faded, I realized that my sense of direction was fuzzy – a feeling I hadn’t experienced since before I was blooded. Maybe that burst of energy had done something to my enhanced sense of direction. Maybe something to do with an electromagnetic burst?
Whatever it was, I had to navigate by the sun and by the slope of the ridge we were scrambling along. I could manage, or at least I thought I was managing. Losing my ability to orient myself along the planet’s magnetic field was a strange and slightly frightening feeling, like someone gouging out an eye.
But we were getting closer. I could still remember the way the land had looked from the hilltop, and I could figure out from the shape of this hill that we were almost to our destination.
“Hey,” Leka said, stopping and standing up straight to point to our right. “Look! I remember that half-dead clump of bushes from earlier.”
I stopped, too. She was right. This was exactly the area where our route out from the ceramics dump converged with the route we were taking in. And I had almost missed it. Would have missed it, had it not been for Leka’s sharp eyes.
“Well, let’s go,” Tomlins said. “At least to the edge of the forest, right?”
“I’ll do that,” Anderson said. “But I don’t know about going all the way up to the top. If that xeno craft’s hanging around, we’re going to be dead meat.”
“Agreed,” I said. “But we at least have to know what we’re dealing with.”
“Like I said,” Anderson said. “I’ll go to the forest’s edge with you.”
Personally, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go any farther than that either. We all four spread out as we picked our way uphill, away from the marshy area and toward the barren and rocky side of the mountain. Carefully, silently, we crept toward the line of thinning trees that separated jungle from the slab-sided slope below the ceramics dump.
The edge of the jungle, as most natural borders were, was indefinite. We stopped when we reached the last few clumps of vegetation good for taking shelter behind. I searched the skies above us, and as my senses keyed in on puffs of smoke blowing through the atmosphere, I realized my nanotech was recovering from whatever had happened to it.
That was a relief. As was the utter lack of human or xeno presence above us.
“Well?” I said quietly, looking over at Anderson. “Doesn’t look like there’s anything stopping us from getting up there.”
“No, there’s not,” Anderson said.
“I say we go.” Tomlins didn’t wait for a response before she started creeping up the slope, darting from rock to rock the same way we’d done in our initial approach. About a hundred yards up, she turned and beckoned for us to follow.
I sighed and started creeping up the hillside behind her. Every step was followed up with a scan of the skies, double checking to make sure there was no xeno craft hovering above us.
No xenos. No Coalition craft either, which wasn’t exactly comforting. Nonetheless, we kept on making our way up to the top of the hill. Tomlins was first to summit. Leka and I came up just behind her. Anderson came up last, huffing and puffing and glowering at the rest of us who’d just made her come all the way up here to possibly get killed.
There, lying prone just over the crest of the ridge, we could see most of the ceramics dump. We could also see the xeno craft - or at least, the xenos that had made up the craft. I wondered at how they did it, became machines. I glanced at the motley crew stretched out on the ground beside me, and stifled a chuckle at the thought of Anderson, Tomlins, Leka and me somehow turning ourselves into a spacecraft. It had been a very long time since I had been…personal with a woman. But even so, none of these badass ladies struck me as the type to welcome my offer to merge with them.
I shook away the thought, and refocused on the xenos beneath us. These ones didn’t look like towers, or pyramids, or like the unnerving little animals we’d seen in the jungle.
They were tripedal, and they had a rotating array of sensor plates that looked somewhat head-like. They were surrounding a group of humans in jumpsuits - and it was then that I saw a group of the creatures we had been hunting in the jungle. They appeared to be keeping the humans in a bunch.
One of the smaller ones approached a larger xeno, and the larger alien stepped forward toward the group.
I wanted desperately to look away as the larger xeno picked up a human with one unnatural limb.
“Fucking hell,” Anderson. “I knew somebody was going to get eaten today.”
16
From where we were, the nauseating part wasn’t the sight of the xenos feeding on their prisoners, dropping them vertically into the opening amidst their sensor arrays. The nauseating part was the shrieking, and the chaos unfolding inside the group of humans who were still awaiting their consumption. It was panic, sheer panic, desperate movement with no hope of escape.
“We gotta do something,” Leka said.
“Like what?” Anderson and Tomlins almost spoke in unison. Suddenly, I was really glad we’d sent Curtis back to camp with Tomlins’ kill.
“We are doing something,” I said before an argument could start and draw the xenos’ attention to us. “We’re getting the hell out of here, and we’re telling all our friends that...that…”
“Uhh, what are they doing?” Tomlins said.
One of the tripedal creatures was shuddering like an engine about to blow. It stepped back from the rest of the devourers. It was faint
er this time (and thank God for that), but I felt that same wave of cellular disgust that I’d felt during the fight between the xeno craft and the Coalition quad.
“Aww, fuck,” Anderson said. “Run. They’re disassembling!”
I didn’t take much convincing with that one. So far, the smaller versions of the xenos had gotten closer to killing us than the big ones. We didn’t speak as we scrambled back down the slope, but we made no other attempt at concealing ourselves. We could only hope that the xenos were too distracted by their current meal to come and track down a smaller, faster one that tasted like textiles residue.
Progress was fast, not elegant. If one of us fell, we rolled down the hill a ways until we came up to keep running down toward the treeline. And the treeline didn’t slow us. It wasn’t until the vines beneath our feet became rope-thick and dense as matted hair that we resumed a kind of walk-like pace.
“I hope you know the way back, nano-nuts,” Leka said as she came wheezing up on my tail.
“Less talking,” I said. “More following.”
“I can do both,” Leka said, although the pace of her breathing told me that “both” was pushing her limits.
“Nobody wants you to do both,” I said.
“You, specifically, don’t want me doing both.” Leka had to pause for a bit to gasp for air while we navigated the increasingly swampy ground. “I saw the way you reacted when those fucking things started using their weapons.”
“Good for you,” I said.
“Mother...fucker…” Leka had to scramble and leap across logs to catch up with my strides. “You better...not be acting…like some...kind...of beacon.”
“If I was, I think we’d know about it already,” I said.
“You really...don’t...know how that shit...works?” Leka stopped, hands on her knees, and started coughing. Some of what she spat out was dark.
“It wasn’t a big part of my training, okay?” I said.
Leka took a few seconds to pant and stare at the ground before turning to me. “What did they train you to do?” she said.
I chewed on the inside of my cheek for a second before answering. “Everything,” I said.
I remember that the Timmons brothers used to beat the shit out of me every day, just for fun. They wouldn’t take my money, or my mom’s vapo-packs, because if they did that then Marcie or even my mom might get involved.
The way it was, they got to knock me halfway senseless every time I stepped foot out of the house. They kicked my ass at the food store. They kicked my ass at the vapo-mart. They kicked my ass behind my mom’s work.
I was a slow learner, I guess. And I was on the smaller side.
“Hey, dicknose!” I didn’t recognize that voice. I wondered, for half a second, if it was because of how hard my head had been shoved into the hab wall.
“Yeah, I’m talking to you. Both of you.” It was a man’s voice, and it belonged to a thick-built guy in a very nice suit. “Put the kid down.”
I was shocked by how quickly they obeyed. I was about six, seven years old. I had shit to do and I didn’t know anything about the people who hung out down the street.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” the guy said. I couldn’t believe how clean his suit was. He looked like someone on the news. “Hey, kid. You okay?”
“Sorry, sir,” Ricky said.
“Get out of my sight, you little shit,” the guy in the suit said as he knelt down next to me. “Hey, little guy. You okay?”
I was a slow learner, and I was a little dizzy from the ass-kicking I’d just endured. I remember thinking to myself, This guy looks famous. I wanted to be famous. Being famous meant you got nice clothes and a nice house and no chores ever.
“Yeah, I’m okay,” I said.
“Is your mom around here somewhere?” he said.
I shook my head, even though I was less than a hundred yards from my house. I was little, and I wasn’t the brightest kid, but I knew enough to be embarrassed of my mom. If this guy saw my house and got a load of her, I figured, I’d never get to talk to a famous person again.
“Well, tell you what.” The guy took a credit stick from his pocket and pressed it into my palm. The display on the side said it had fifty left on it - enough money in my world to make me king for a day.
“Wow…”
“Take that and keep it safe,” he said. “Don’t spend it, don’t touch it, don’t do anything with it for a week. Okay?” He was leaning down with his hands on his knees. “I’ll be back planetside in a week, and if you can show me this credit stick with the full fifty on it, I’ll let you have it.”
“I can have it?” I said.
“Yep,” the famous guy said. “All you have to do is not spend it until I get back. And tell you what else.” He got a little closer, and his voice got quieter. “I’ll give you a little job, what do you say? A little job that pays even more than fifty credits.”
“Really?” I said, my voice a shocked whisper. A job from a famous guy! That was one step away from being famous myself! “Okay,” I said. “I can do it.”
“And did you?” Leka asked. The story had kept the group pleasantly distracted from their situation for the better part of two miles. The farther we got away from the ceramics dump, the sharper my senses were getting.
“Did I spend it?” I said.
“No,” Leka said. “I mean, did you get the job?”
“Obviously,” I said. “That guy really did turn out to be famous, too.”
“Let me guess,” Leka said. “Lucky Pavel.”
That made me stop in my tracks and look her up and down. “Yeah,” I said. “That was Lucky Pavel. How…”
“Like you said,” Leka said. “The guy is kind of famous. One of the things he’s famous for is his little urchin networks.”
“Huh,” I said. “I guess.” I resumed stomping through the vegetation. “Anyway, that’s how I got into doing transport shit. I was never really, you know. Important.”
“They don’t send the important ones to worlds like this,” Tomlins offered.
“But he was important enough they didn’t kill him outright,” Leka said. “That’s pretty important in the Belters. Am I wrong?”
“Important and useful are two different things,” I said. “They were banking on getting me back as soon as I’m done with my sentence.”
“Ah,” Leka said. “Hence the thing with your kids.”
“You don’t know a fucking thing about my kids,” I snapped back. I gave Leka a look that made her shrink back from me and fall behind a couple paces.
There were no more questions after that. That was good. We could move faster if we talked less.
We had a lot more daylight when we returned than we had yesterday. I never saw any smoke rising from the survivors’ location, but somehow the bird had been cooked. It had also been all but eaten by the time we got back into camp.
“I saved you guys some,” Garcia said. “From one of the legs.” He handed me a hunk of greasy dark meat.
“How’d you cook this?” Anderson asked. “Plasma gun?”
“You got it,” Garcia said. “Simms showed us how to use the heat sink to make a smokeless cooker if you’re in a pinch.”
“And maybe part of one of those hoverspeeders,” Simms said as he came walking up. “You’re back early.”
“Yeah,” I said, stepping back reflexively from his presence. “The ceramics dump has been completely taken by the xenos, and...and it’ll be better to talk about what happened to the surviving humans after I’m done eating.”
Simms gave me a flat, understanding kind of smile. “Ah,” he said.
“Yeah.” I nodded as I turned around. The survivors had set up a few groups of blanket hammocks amidst the trees here. I took my portion of jungle bird and went to go sit on one that was relatively far away from everyone else. My head was spinning, and I just needed a moment to collect myself. To think.
I needed to come up with the next step in my plan. I needed to c
ome up with it soon. And whatever it turned out to be, the next step in my plan needed to involve some more food than we had, or else we’d be shit out of luck whatever happened.
We needed to do something about the wounded, too. On my way to find a hammock, I noted that the group of casualties had gotten smaller. How many of them were too far gone to move on any farther? How many of them would slow us down to the point where we were easy pickings for the goddamn xenos?
Not that we were anything but easy pickings to start with. They were worse than immune to plasma bolts. They had this way of disassembling and reassembling, to the point where they could form themselves into organic spacecraft. What the fuck were we supposed to do against an enemy like this? What did we even call them?
They weren’t like anything I’d seen before. None of my new companions seemed to be any more familiar with them than I was. It would sure be fucking nice to at least know where they’d come from. Sometimes, knowing where something came from was one step closer to knowing what it wanted.
I could see Anderson relaying what we’d seen to Simms and the rest of her group. She didn’t look like she had any more of a clue than I did. As she spoke, her listeners’ faces paled. A couple of them began to cling to each other, and I assumed she was getting to the part where the xenos were herding humans up and eating them.
We weren’t getting out of here alive, were we? This was worse than if they’d just shoved me out an airlock. They had given me hope, the faint hope I was going to see Celeste and Nadine again, and then the motherfuckers had left me to get eaten by xenos on a poison-riddled prison world.
That thought engulfed me for a second, sent me spinning. It was like the realization that I really was getting arrested and I really was going to wind up serving some kind of prison term if I was very lucky. For a little bit, it was the only thing occupying my brain. We were all going to die out here, and we were going to die horribly, and there wasn’t a lot else to think about.