Dust World Page 7

  “I don’t understand, sir,” I said. “I thought we would be up against some kind of human colonists with delusions of setting up their own mercenary trade.”

  “We were wrong about that,” Graves said. “Take a look.”

  He tapped at his arm then applied it to a nearby wall of the ship. The wall lit up immediately becoming a huge screen. It was a nice trick, but I’d rarely seen anyone do it. Only officers had tappers with high enough administrative permissions. Even the tech specialists weren’t allowed to turn the ship into a video playground.

  “Watch closely,” Graves said. “You’ll see a glimpse of the enemy. We downloaded this file from the bridge cameras before they knocked out the surveillance system.”

  We watched an empty corridor. For several seconds, nothing happened then shadows loomed—odd shadows.

  “What the hell is that?” demanded Carlos.

  For once, no one told him to shut up. We were all thinking the exact same thing.

  A figure flickered past the vid pickup. It wasn’t human—I was sure of that. It moved oddly, loping with an undulating motion. Due to the angle we didn’t see all of it, only a portion of the body. There were thick snake-like appendages and interlocking plates shaped in diamond patterns.

  “Something with scales,” Natasha said, stepping closer. She lifted her hand to the wall screen as if drawn to it. “Very alien.”

  “Looks like a bundle of snakes tied together,” Carlos said. “Whatever it is, it’s frigging huge!”

  “Not as big as a Jugger back on Steel World,” Kivi said.

  Carlos shook his head and chuckled. “Aliens. Freaky aliens. That’s just great. Good thing they’re morons. They must have no idea how the Empire operates. The Galactics will come here and fry the lot them. They’ve made our job easy. All we have to do is survive long enough to report this incident to the authorities. Take a last look at Zeta Herculis, people. The Galactics will erase it utterly when they hear about this. Soon, the enemy will be extinct. Hell, they might even put out the star itself. I hear they do that sometimes.”

  “You might be right,” Graves said. “But it doesn’t matter because the Battlefleet could take years to get here. By that time, we’ll be dead—or they will.”

  We stared at the monster on the screen as Graves replayed it over and over in a loop. It moved so strangely. I’ve seen my share of aliens on Steel World and in exo-nature vids back home. But these things were weird. There was no earthly equivalent. Just watching it made my skin crawl.

  Everyone seemed to react the way I did except for Graves, Carlos and Natasha. Graves didn’t seem to care. He was all business. Carlos was delighted with the idea the aliens had screwed up by attacking our ship. Natasha—she seemed fascinated.

  Graves followed the vid with a little speech about how we were going to first encircle the command deck then close with the aliens when we had them boxed in. He sounded confident of victory.

  I wasn’t comforted. I couldn’t stop thinking that we were facing unknown alien invaders who’d been smart enough to board a starship in warp and disable it.

  We broke down into squads and advanced. Corvus was a big ship—huge in comparison to Earthly vessels. It wasn’t like exploring a ship at sea; it was more like exploring a labyrinthine skyscraper. Fortunately, the Skrull were nothing if not efficient and logical. They’d laid out the vessel in geometric patterns. The command deck was surrounded by corridors that converged like spokes on a wagon wheel. Eight ways in—no more and no less.

  All we had to do, according to Graves, was cover all eight of those escape routes. If we sealed the enemy inside, they couldn’t come at us without facing a barrage of fire down a long passageway.

  Our unit was assigned lucky passageway number seven. We marched up and encircled the entrance. The hatch was big, about ten meters in diameter. All the passages to the bridge looked that way. When we were in position, Graves moved to the panel and used his tapper to override the security. I was glad he was here. Corvus wouldn’t have listened to any of the rest of us.

  Before he opened it, he paused, receiving a message. I listened in as I was still connected to command chat. I made sure I didn’t transmit anything. I figured Graves would revoke my permissions and kick me offline when he remembered he’d put me into the loop.

  “Graves?” asked a female voice. “What’s the situation on seven?”

  I knew the voice. It was Primus Turov, our beloved cohort commander.

  “We’re about to open it up, sir,” he said.

  “Hold on that. We have a problem.”

  I looked at Graves. He was frowning now, but that was nothing unusual.

  “May I ask the nature of the trouble?” he asked.

  “The central torus has stopped rotating. There’s no gravity in the aft of the ship, and we’re having difficulty moving up to join you at your position. You beat the rest of us to seven.”

  “Standing by,” he said.

  Now that Turov’s voice was no longer buzzing in his helmet, Graves looked around, gazing up and down the passageways. He signaled Adjunct Leeson, who was my direct superior and who’d brought the rest of my platoon to the party over the last few minutes. Veteran Harris and Weaponeer Sargon were with him, I was glad to see. Altogether, there were now better than a hundred troops jammed into the intersection. Gravity was light here, and we were holding onto the walls ten feet or more up. Like lazy monkeys, we relaxed and gripped rungs that were placed strategically all over the ship.

  “Leeson, take your squads and spread out!” Graves shouted suddenly. “Move your people down toward the next junctions.”

  Leeson looked confused, but he didn’t argue. He didn’t even ask for clarification. Anyone who was in Centurion Graves’ unit knew better. He waved to me, and I began to follow him.

  “Hold on,” Graves said. “Leave me with two weaponeers, McGill and Sargon.”

  A minute later, Graves had dispatched platoons in either direction down the curving passageway. They were only about a hundred meters away, but we couldn’t see them.

  Carlos came close to me and clicked his helmet up against mine. To non-spacers, this would have seemed like an odd action, but it was quite common when troops were suited-up. By pressing our helmets against one another, we could talk without the muffling effects of being englobed in armor. That way, neither party had to shout or use our radios. It worked especially well in vacuum where there was nothing to carry the sound otherwise.

  “Graves is dispersing us,” Carlos said. “That means trouble.”

  “Don’t wet your suit,” I said. “He’s just being cautious before we open this door and confront the enemy. We’re too bunched up here in the passageway.”

  I didn’t tell him about what I’d overheard from Primus Turov. A delay in moving troops up to our position could mean nothing—or it could mean a lot. It sounded to me as if the aliens had realized we were coming and they were doing what they could to impede the counterattack. This might not be as easy a fight as we’d hoped.

  When Graves had his troops set up the way he wanted, he contacted Turov again.

  “Permission to open the doors, sir,” he said.

  There was silence. Nothing at all came over the line from command chat.

  “Primus Turov? This is Centurion Graves. Respond please.”

  More silence.

  I watched Graves. I stared at him through his closed visor. His face was flat, but I thought I saw his cheek twitch in irritation.

  Why wasn’t anyone responding? I thought of a dozen possible reasons. Communications failure was first on the list. Could the invaders have disabled the ship’s repeaters, separating us from each other?

  Graves tried once more, then looked up. “All right,” he said loudly on local chat. “Listen up, we’re opening these doors. Look alive, brace yourselves for a pressure change and ready your weapons.”

  We snapped lines to the walls and activated the magnets in our boots. Then we lifted our weapons and
aimed them at the massive, concave hatch.

  Graves applied his tapper, and the hatch swung open.

  -7-

  Up until that moment, I’d yet to fire my newly-assigned heavy weapon in a combat situation. I’d handled a belcher back on Steel World a few times, but I’d been an untrained recruit at that time, using it in a makeshift manner. Now I knew much more about the cannon that rested on my shoulder, and I had an appropriate respect for the weapon.

  Plasma cannons were—weird. They didn’t fire a pellet or an explosive. My trainers had told me to think of them as flamethrowers that launched a very brief, powerful gush of flame.

  They were designed to release a lot of heat and energy in a directed cone in front of the Weaponeer who wielded the system. They could be dialed for long or short range, creating a tight beam or a broad area of effect. The range of the weapon lessened if you broadened the beam, but it could hit multiple targets that way and it was much easier to hit something.

  Deciding how to adjust your cannon was the business of the weaponeer in question. Accordingly, I made a choice. Just as the doors began to open, I reached up and cranked the stiff collar at the muzzle to open the aperture two notches wider. At this setting, it would fire a cone about thirty degrees wide.

  Sargon, who was on one knee beside me, tossed me a disapproving glance as I did this. I knew it wasn’t standard procedure. The enemy was supposed to be at the far end of a long straight passageway that led to the bridge, and a narrow beam would provide the best reach in that case.

  I felt myself flush slightly as I caught Sargon’s glance. I was a rookie with my first cannon, and we both knew it. I also knew that he wouldn’t have questioned a more experienced man. I wondered if I was making a mistake as he’d kept his beam very tight. There were good reasons for this. There were a lot of troops behind me in a cramped space. I wouldn’t be able to fire my weapon without hitting friendlies if things got hairy.

  Maybe I would have second-guessed myself after catching Sargon’s frown, but I was out of time. Committed, I shouldered my weapon as the hatch yawned open like a giant’s eyelid in front of us.

  What happened next was a shock. A number of bizarre-looking hulks stood on the far side of the door. They’d clearly been waiting to greet us. Oddly, we hadn’t heard a sound from them before now. Normally, we’d have seen them with the local cameras—but they’d wisely knocked out our surveillance systems. I wondered if they’d been listening to our lengthy preparations, counting us fools all the while.

  The first thing I registered about them was their size. They were each larger than a man, perhaps three meters tall, and much more bulky. They looked like squids to me, with a dozen tentacles sprouting from the top of their bodies like incredibly thick strands of hair. These tentacles were thicker than a man’s leg and they radiated from a central knot of flesh where I imagined their organs were. There were no eyes that I could see, nor faces of any kind. But in the center of that ball of muscle that connected those snake-like limbs together I did see something—a beak. That was the only way I could describe it. A mouth built of hard shell or cartilage. The tentacles themselves weren’t soft and wet, either. They were covered in layered, metallic scales, each of which was the size of deck of cards.

  There was definitely a quiet, predatory stance to these aliens. They weren’t stupid; you could tell that instantly by the way they held themselves and the liquid grace with which they lunged forward.

  There was no hesitation in them. We were surprised, but they weren’t. They were hunting us, I realized. They’d turned off our security cameras, moved to this hatchway and then waited for their prey to open the door. Probably, they’d arranged things so our unit was alone up against them. Now that we’d finally opened the hatch, they were all business.

  They rushed us. It was as simple as that. They had to weigh a ton each, but as heavily-built as they were, they still moved with a flowing grace. They ran forward on their numerous tentacles, manipulating them with perfect rippling synchronization.

  Sargon fired first. I have to give him that. He took out the lead monster with a gout of energy that sliced right through it at point-blank range.

  I fired a moment later, as they loomed right up into my faceplate. All I could see was a mass of tentacles with a silvery glint to them, shimmering and rattling as they rolled forward into the range of my suit lights.

  When my weapon went off, the reflection from their scales blinded me momentarily. Two aliens reeled back, smoldering. The rest came on relentlessly. A wave of flesh plowed over me, knocking me onto my armored back.

  When I could see again, I was being trampled. Sargon was down, too. One disadvantage of our weaponry lay in the slow firing rate of our cannons. You couldn’t spam blasts at the enemy. The cannons had to cool down and recycle after every shot.

  My mind tried to take in everything my senses fed me. A dozen thoughts ran through me. First on the list being that I was about to die. Second, I calculated that since we were out of communication with central, it could turn into a perma-death.

  I tried to force myself to focus. I couldn’t get up as more enemies were flowing over me, their massive limbs thundering with crushing force upon my breastplate. If I’d been in light armor, I’d have been dead already.

  Then, one of them fell. A group of soldiers were all around it firing. Thick dark liquid resembling dirty motor oil oozed from the smoking holes in its scales. The two I’d shot were smoking, too. They weren’t dead, but they were sagging and flopping. I felt a surge of relief to see I hadn’t wasted my single discharge.

  My unit was in confusion, struggling with the aliens in our midst. I saw two soldiers fly as an alien lifted them up and smashed them together. The monster seemed to know our faceplates were weak points, and it applied terrific force there crashing both troopers’ heads into one another. The two helmets cracked. Blood exploded an instant later, falling like rain mixed with tinkling bits of starred plastic. The two troops had been rammed together with such terrific force their skulls had been cracked open.

  Graves was somewhere in the midst of this nightmare, shouting a string of words over and over. I finally caught what the command was, as did others.

  “Use force-blades!”

  Every heavy trooper was equipped with a laser carbine, our standard long-range armament. But when things got close and ugly we had a backup weapon: beams of force that extended like knives from the arms of our suits.

  While inside a spaceship, using force-blades wasn’t always the best idea. They could slice through the metal hull of a ship as easily as they could an enemy. But Graves had given the order, so I engaged my blades and angled them upward into the press of bodies above me.

  Only one of my two blades operated properly. The other flashed an orange fault light at me, and I cursed every tech in the unit. I used the other to cut off a tentacle. It took more work than it should have, with me sawing the flailing limb while it hosed out thick oily liquid mixed with blinding showers of sparks into my faceplate.

  All around me, glowing blades of energy slashed and burned. The enemy didn’t fall like cut grass, however. Their limbs were thicker than a man’s leg and the metallic outer layer of scales seemed to resist our weapons, slowing us down. It took about two full seconds of sawing to remove a tentacle from an alien body while it thrashed about, smashing whatever got in its way. I was impressed as I knew human flesh could never have withstood a force-blade for that long.

  In the end, we won the fight. Graves urged us to take a prisoner, but it was impossible. They never gave any hint that they were interested in surrender or retreat. They attacked with every shred of vigor in their massive, strange bodies until we brought them down and diced them.

  I watched the last one go down with a soldier’s foot in its beak-like mouth. The man was howling in fury and pain. He sawed at the central knot of flesh, but the beak wouldn’t let go. It crunched down, sparking and rasping on his metal boot, chewing on it. Finally, we climbed on the
shivering mass and stabbed our blades deep into it over and over until it stopped struggling.

  The trooper’s boot was mangled, and he said his foot had been crushed. A bio administered a sedative, then looked at Graves who had managed to stand up.

  Graves examined the trooper’s crushed foot, then nodded.

  “Shit,” said the man. He closed his eyes.

  Carlos and I watched, gritting our teeth, as the bio used her tapper to activate the suit’s survival systems. She pushed a button, confirmed it twice, and we all heard a snap and a crunch. The suit had amputated the man’s foot. A sizzling sound followed and the wound was cauterized.

  “Ugly,” Carlos said. “Better than getting permed, though.”

  I told him to shut up, and for once, he did.

  We counted our wounded and our dead. We’d lost eighteen troops and killed seven aliens. I didn’t like the odds. We had no idea how many of them might be aboard.

  “We have to have reinforcements, Vet,” I told Harris.

  He looked at me with wide eyes. His breath panted slightly in the transmitted reply.

  “No shit? Is that what you really think? I was going to kill them all personally.”

  Graves walked up to me and picked up my cannon. “Your weapon isn’t in your hands, Specialist,” he said sternly.

  He looked my cannon over carefully. I noticed that he paid no attention to the wounded around him. He was more interested in the status of my tube than he was in my health.

  “This is one of only two working heavy weapons,” he said, handing the tube over to me. “I want to keep it operating. It’s worth more than any of us.”

  “How do you figure that, sir?” I asked.

  Veteran Harris put his hands on his hips and glowered at me, but the Centurion took the question well enough.