Colony Lost Page 15

  “I bet that fucker is hiding on one of those ships,” Steve said. “Diddling some female flight sergeant and sucking on a pouch of champagne as he plans for what he’s gonna do when he gets to Ares.”

  “Yeah, probably.”

  Dustin returned his full attention to the tiny triangle of Beagle as it moved further away, shrinking in size until all he could see were the two bright blue pips of light from its engines.

  My wife and kid are on that ship, he thought. I’m going to miss the birth of my child. I have never felt so lonely. I will never feel lonelier than this.

  He was wrong.

  Waren slipped out of the FEM barracks and jogged around the corner of the row of shit houses. The stink invaded his nose and made him rethink hiding behind the toilets but he knew that was the exact reason it was a good idea. He plugged his nose and powered through the stench. He sat on a rock where no one could see him.

  Waren looked over his shoulder–paranoid–before opening up the hardened case of the thin military data pad. He tapped the power button and struggled to type in the access code after the screen flashed to life. He tried to enter the password again, and failed again. He took a deep breath, and tried to steady his shaky hands.

  “Get a grip,” he whispered to his long fingers. “Useless fucking pieces of shit.”

  He waited, stealing a glance at the roaring ships as they churned through the sky, leaving coronas of heat and blue light in their wake. The familiar rumble of their engines calmed him, and he quickly typed in the password before his fingers shook again.

  The tiny machine took a minute to boot up. He opened the secure encryption software with a few taps, and logged into the program. A few seconds later he had the device in control of Beagle’s microwave transmitter. His late night modifications under the console in the cockpit had worked. He double-checked that the communications gear was outside of the Selvan atmosphere and that the transmitter was aimed at the right area of Ghara’s orbit for the guerilla receivers to hear his hijacked pulse transmission. Everything lined up.

  He lifted the screen to his face, and spoke quietly into the microphone.

  “Tin Soldier to Toy Box. Last transmission before blackout. Fleet sabotage is incomplete. Insufficient vessels affected. Ground sabotage in process, break. One fatality has been required. I am not implicated. Indigenous wildlife blamed. Cover is still protected, break.”

  Waren stopped as he heard one of the wooden doors open on the shitter a few meters away. He waited a minute before getting up and walking away casually.

  He lifted the data pad again.

  “Will lay low and continue ground sabotage at slower pace, over. Good luck and good fortune to the cause. End of transmission.”

  He hit send.

  Waren cleaned the history on the device. Then, with a sudden lunge, he smashed the device against the rock, cracking the screen and breaking the keyboard. The alloy metal exterior laughed at the blow, but the damage was done to the softer interior. He trotted around to the front of the row of outhouses and pulled open one of the squeaking doors. He tossed the broken communications data pad in the open hole and listened as it fell with a wet plop into the basin of shit, piss, and hostile chemicals.

  “Sergeant Dillon!” a voice called out.

  Waren spun and put on a grin. Lying came easier and easier every day on Selva.

  “Corporal Lewicki,” Waren said back as he let the toilet door slam behind him. “Skipping the show of the first great Selvan exodus?”

  The darker-skinned and shorter corporal chuckled and held up a beaten magazine from an armpit. “Just trying to find a minute of privacy.”

  Waren saw the flashes of pink and brown flesh on the cover image.

  “You and me both. You take care. Watch out for chafing. Self-care is paramount during deployments.”

  “You bet,” Lewicki said, and pulled open a stall door of his own.

  With relief, Waren spied the surroundings for other suspicious eyes.

  As unseen, invisible storms whipped and lashed above, an unseen storm of life brewed below.

  Roused by the invisible fields of energy above creatures moved in deep burrows beneath the flat stones of Dampier Peninsula. These were not the crude, stony-shelled beasts. More graceful in form and intellect, these creatures moved with a smoother and more deliberate intent, and intelligent curiosity. These creatures thought, though their thoughts were profoundly alien. Where once there had been silence, there now would be glorious noise. On four legs and with four arms they lifted their chitinous bodies from their slumber. Wide heads encased in hardened shell sprouted a half dozen eyes as hard lids opened for the first time in months.

  Amongst their sleepy numbers, tinier creatures–each covered in wounds brought on by a lifetime of caustic injuries inflicted by their generous masters–ran underneath their legs, clicking their pedipalps together feverishly, dancing in ornate patterns, relaying weeks of information in seconds to their rousing overlords.

  One of the larger creatures spat suddenly, hitting the dog-sized beetle with a blue gelatinous substance that sent it against the stone-and-earth wall of the burrow with a thud. The small creature hissed in pain as the invasive saliva bored through its shell, finding blood, muscles and nerves, and then stealing the processes they managed. The sounds of pain faded and were replaced with excited clicks of pleasure. On a genetic level, the blue spit rewrote the creature, twisting its form and shape until its body lengthened, and its forearms bent and changed. After several agonizing minutes the beetle stood on four legs instead of six, and held aloft two new vestigial arms that had burst through fresh cracks in its exoskeleton. The arms flailed, newborn and alien.

  It had become more like its masters.

  Five of the small, unchanged creatures brought a strange thing into the underground chamber. Fleshy and soft, dead as the rocks they slept on, the insects carried the human atop their flat-shelled backs until they reached the center of their leaders. The diminutive servants shrugged the alien corpse off their backs to the dirt and scurried to the side so their gift could appease.

  Three of the skulking, large beasts with four arms and four legs approached the bizarre corpse. With a powerful, claw-tipped arm they lifted the loose-fleshed leg of the dead specimen, then the tight-skinned arm of the creature. The dead limbs dropped down over and over as the hungry and curious creatures tested it again and again. They sought the joints, and felt for the muscle. One of the monsters bent over and rocketed its foremost limb at the chest of the dead creature, shattering the crunchy interior easily with a dozen loud snaps. They stepped back, unimpressed by the dead thing’s lack of durability. They clicked and buzzed, gossiping and laughing in their eldritch way.

  The largest of the spitters motioned its smaller cousins aside and hovered above the dead gift made to the council of masters. It inflated its reproductive organs by shifting fluids around in its body. When it knew it had enough saliva ready, it spat on the dead flesh, and stepped back.

  The blue liquid bored into the flesh, eating the flimsy fabric first and then some of the pink skin, followed by the bones underneath. No smoke rose and no charred flesh appeared, though the body melted away as if it had been doused in acid. No blood ran and no life came to it, but the dead thing changed anyway. The tattered, reformed bag of skin holding fluid, bone, muscle and flesh shifted with a spasm and a jerk, reforming itself, changing color and consistency. The soft skin on the man’s head hardened into a brown and black shell, flecked with the blue of the fluid that started the metamorphosis. Five fingers fused into three, and the nails hardened and blackened into spikes. His teeth lengthened and sharpened, forming into hollow fangs that couldn’t fit in the mouth they grew from.

  The fleshy gift took their seed as nothing ever had, and that made the spitters very excited. So excited they danced in the darkness with unthinking, animalistic glee. Their servants, that took months and months to shift into one of their kind, danced about again in an orgy of information,
and the story they told made their masters so very happy, if creatures like them could feel happiness.

  They told the story of more malleable things nearby, things that were alive.

  Fathers and mothers would have new children soon.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Rasima plains, planet of Selva

  21 September 163 GA

  “Hey, Dustin, you cool?” Waren asked from thirty meters to his rear. The man’s voice sounded tinny inside Dustin’s helmet.

  “Yeah I’m good to go. Hot and itchy is all.”

  “Quit bitching,” Hauptman said.

  With Lt. Lionel Haputman in the lead, the trio of marines as they patrolled the edge of the southern jungle. The thick growth ended near to where the peninsula joined the mainland.

  The elite marines were the only humans allowed near the forest home of the stone-skinned creatures, and even then they patrolled in their original three-person fire teams, one team at a time. The risk of losing all six expeditionary marines at once had been deemed too high.

  “I ain’t bitching. Waren asked if I was okay. I was answering his question,” Dustin said in his own defense. He adjusted the rifle in his hands and fought off the urge to scratch at the armor covering the small of his back. A stream of sweat ran down his skin and into the crack of his ass, setting off a wildfire of nerve endings that almost made him break control.

  “He asked if you were cool, not if you were okay. And I am telling the both of you to zip it and pay fucking attention. All this electronic interference from the upper atmo has fucked our drones and our long-range communications so we need human eyes working all the time. We have twenty more minutes here before we rotate out and infantry’s C-squad takes over watch from the hill and those big fucking monsters are still inside the trees,” Hauptman scolded.

  “Yes, sir,” Dustin replied.

  He sighed inside his helmet and looked at the temperature readout projected on the inside of his helmet’s visor. The date above the forty degree Celsius readout told him today was the twenty-first of September. Twenty-five days had passed since the fleet departed Selva. If all had gone well, the ships would be arriving back in Gharian space about now.

  “Contact right.” Hauptman raised his rifle then took a quick knee in the tall grass under the fading light of the setting sun. He aimed south into the jungle.

  Waren and Dustin dropped to their knees and aimed into the forest, searching out their commander’s aiming location. Hauptman’s fire marker in their holographic field of view registered as a golden plus symbol. Dustin found it, then Waren did as well. Using his weapon’s more advanced rifle optics, Dustin zoomed into the darkness below the trees and fungal towers. Using eye movement and a blink he toggled his weapon’s viewfinder to thermal.

  He saw one of the lumbering fake-stone insects trudging in their direction. Brighter in color than the foliage,, it waddled back and forth. It disappeared briefly behind the trees and other rocks.

  “I got one bug moving our way slow,” Dustin reported. He took a steadying breath and lined up his fire with the creature’s face and the bundle of eyes he knew to be weak spots.

  “Fall back,” Hauptman switched channels and hailed the crew of the Bingham tank a kilometer away. “Punisher One this is Vigilant One. We have a rock bug in the tree line. Falling back to your position. Vigilant Two has it marked, please acquire his target and confirm.”

  The commander of the Bingham tank replied. “Roger that Vigilant actual. We have acquired the tango. Fall back. We have you covered.”

  “Let’s go,” Hauptman said. “Australian peel on me.”

  Lionel sat still with his weapon trained on the moving bug. Now the creature’s goal was apparent; it intended on leaving the forest. It moved in their direction with deliberate intent , its cone-shaped head aimed at them, and all its eyes focused on moving forward. The lieutenant kept still with his weapon on target until Waren took a knee twenty meters to his rear.

  “Go,” Waren said, and Hauptman went. He ran past Waren, then past Dustin, and took a knee again. Dustin called Waren clear, and Waren ran behind Hauptman. They leapfrogged like this for two hundred meters, one man always ready to fire as two ran. Hauptman cleared them safely from the bug and they jogged the rest of the way up the slope of the plains to the armored edifice of the Bingham tank. The top hatch opened and the tank commander popped out. Streaks of grime ran down his face from under his light helmet and more facial hair than he should’ve had sprouted from his chin and cheeks.

  “Should we light it up?” Punisher One’s command sergeant asked Hauptman.

  “If it gets halfway across the field with no signs of stopping or turning back, take it out,” Hauptman said. “How many does this make, this week?”

  “One a couple days ago, then two yesterday. This is number one today,” the sergeant answered.

  “And one shot does them in?” Dustin asked.

  “Nothing but a yellow puddle after one of our main gun rounds hit it. Or hit near it for that matter.” The commander laughed.

  “When have you guys clocked some sleep?” Dustin asked.

  The tank jockey giggled. “We’ve been sleeping in here. There’s only one trained crew for Punisher. Tomorrow we’re working on bringing one of the Armadillo crews up to speed on how to operate the main gun so we can get some shut-eye.”

  “A tired tank crew sounds dangerous to me,” Dustin said. The sergeant nodded with distant eyes.

  “Out of curiosity how many rounds made the trip here?” Hauptman asked, changing the subject.

  “Four load outs,” the sergeant said.

  “Forty rounds a load, right?” Waren said.

  “Forty-four. This relic had an upgrade to its magazine before our granddaddies were born,” the sergeant spit on the ground and patted the top hull of the monster he commanded. “An honest-to-God machine of war.”

  The men laughed.

  “So about 176 rounds when we landed?” Waren asked, sounding unimpressed.

  “On the nose, sir.”

  Dustin looked back into the field. The sky above the grasses and the approaching animal looked like a war among the spectrum of colors. To the right and the west the colors of day took their stance. To the left and the east the colors of night came charging. In the middle of the battlefield in the sky greens and yellows swarmed amidst one another like an exchange of celestial gunfire. Auroras had taken over the night sky since the magnetic fields closed. The darkness was never full on Selva now. Some of the men had taken to holding up paper plates to the night sky with a circle cut out. The trick turned the aurora into a facsimile of Ghara.

  Beneath it all the fat insect closed, wobbling its way into the dead zone that filled the halfway mark of the field.

  “Sir,” Dustin warned.

  “Light it up,” Hauptman said.

  “Cover your ears and open your mouths. Overpressure is a motherfucker. Kill it!”

  The air around the tank shimmered as the magnets inside the tank’s firing mechanism spun up with gigajoules of power, warping the molecules of the world around it. The gun discharged when the energy built to its crescendo.

  The actual firing of the gun gave off no more noise than the click of a button but the shell it fired annihilated the speed of sound and erupted the atmosphere. Even with the noise compensation system inside their armor, Dustin’s ears snapped in pain. His mind and eyes couldn’t perceive the moment of the shell’s transit or its trajectory; the round existed in the tank, then it existed in the walking bug. The moment of impact came with a tremendous explosion that obliterated the creature and tossed grass, earth and yellow ichor thirty meters into the air.

  The marines cheered and clapped. The overwhelming display of power dumped adrenaline into their blood and boiled up courage and aggression.

  “One hundred and seventy-two,” Waren said.

  “What?” the sergeant in the tank asked.

  “You’ve fired four rounds. That’s what you have left
here on Selva,” Waren replied, looking at his lieutenant. “And another bug is leaving the forest,” he looked back and pointed into the distance. Another waddling beast came their way.

  “Sergeant, you keep your magazine full at all times,” Hauptman said. “Get a runner with a wagon if you need to but if you dip below forty rounds on hand for your main gun at any time and I find out about it I’ll have your ass strung up for dereliction of duty. And get some damn sleep. Get your men some sleep, too.”

  “You got it, sir. Can you tell Lieutenant Broderick you said that? Chain of command, and all,” the sergeant said.

  Hauptman nodded. “I’ll take care of you. You use Punisher here to take good care of us. Nothing gets past halfway. Start screaming if anything does.”

  “Roger that,” he replied.

  The marines left the tank and headed back toward the center of Stahl. Heading their way was the twelve man C-squad from the infantry platoon. They looked young, brash, and ready to fight an enemy that didn’t know it was an enemy. The C-squad marines calmed their demeanor and gave the FEM men a wide berth out of respect. After passing the elite unit, the infantry boys returned to their bravado.

  “Shower up and take a few hours to rest. When the sun goes down and it cools off we are digging emplacements near that tank. Firing positions,” Hauptman said.

  “Why?” Waren asked. “We don’t need cover against them. They’re fucking bugs.”

  “Because we’re smart marines, and a good firing position is where smart marines shoot from. Besides, we don’t know all of what those things can do. You know what their behavior reminds me of? What these bugs are doing right now? Probing. Probing our defenses and capabilities. One, then two. Here and there to see how we respond. Maybe these things are like ants, losing a few to find the best way to take over a neighboring nest. Assume nothing about your enemy.”