Dust World Page 8

  “I know you didn’t see much of that fight as you were resting on your back throughout most of it, but at range, these two tubes are the only effective weapons we have. Sargon took one down, you incapacitated two more. The other four aliens got in close and did a lot of damage. I’d rather take them out at range, wouldn’t you?”

  I nodded, conceding his point. I checked my tube and ran a diagnostic set of tests on it with my tapper.

  “She’s a little banged up, but she’ll fire,” I said.

  Graves nodded and waved for everyone’s attention. He had all the non-coms gather around the mess on the floor. He focused on the first alien we’d killed, the one Sargon had put a big hole into. He turned to Natasha, who was the only tech in the group.

  “Tell me what we’re facing here. Is this thing’s outer skin organic or not?”

  Natasha limped to us and dug into the alien flesh which shivered slightly at her touch. She didn’t seem squeamish in the slightest. I recalled her interest in biological oddities. Once again, she seemed fascinated by what she saw.

  “No,” she said. “I’d say this is a polymer covering—something like a thick hose that forms a sheath over their natural limbs. See the layering here? The suit is tight, but I’m sure it’s a suit.”

  I watched, impressed. She dug around inside the alien’s smoking carcass like a pro.

  “That’s what I thought,” Graves said. “What about these external scales?”

  “A protective layer,” Natasha said. “Light armor, I’d say. Maybe these aliens are wearing their equivalent of spacesuits. The material doesn’t look smart, however. I’m not seeing any attempt by the fabric to reknit itself together. Nothing like an auto-healing system, either. It is a basic, protective spacesuit.”

  Graves stood up and put his hands on his hips. “No armament. No Galactic tech to speak of. I take this as a good sign. They’re not all that advanced.”

  “Excuse me, sir,” I said. “They did manage to penetrate a warp bubble and attack a ship inside.”

  Graves shook his head at me. “Negative. They jumped our ship as we left warp.”

  I must have looked confused because he chuckled.

  “They’re tricky, but they’re not techno-wizards. We came out of warp when the Skrull sensed an uncharted field of debris directly in our path. Remember that a warp ship is still vulnerable to mines and the like. We shifted out of warp to change course—that’s when they struck.”

  “No mines, sir?”

  “No. Just an ambush.”

  I nodded. “A decoy. They faked us out like bandits on a highway.”

  “Exactly,” Graves said. “Smart, strong and tricky, but not overly-advanced.”

  I was willing to accept his verdict, but Carlos wasn’t.

  “Sir?” Carlos said. “How’d they get out here? How’d they figure out exactly where and when this ship would show up?”

  “We’re not the first. We’re on a known shipping lane. Galactic ships have come through the system before. The Galactics have been watching this system—but I think it was for different reasons than we’d previously assumed. In any case, these aliens must have known we’d arrive here and were lying in wait for us.”

  His thoughts asked as many new questions as they answered, but I decided to keep quiet about that for now. Were the aliens waylaying any ship that came into their system? That seemed ballsy. They’d been given the Empire’s ultimatum. Join and submit, or die. Perhaps they didn’t take it seriously.

  “But, sir?” I asked. “What about the colonists who are supposed to be out here? Where did these aliens come from? How do they fit in?”

  “What I want to hear from you is fewer questions and more answers. Let’s focus on retaking the ship. We’ll figure out the big picture later—if there is a later.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  What came next I should have suspected, but somehow, I was surprised.

  “We’re advancing up this passage to the bridge,” Veteran Harris said. “Sargon, McGill, you’re leading the way.”

  A minute later, I found myself moving down the tube-like passageway toward the dark, far end. I had my cannon on my shoulder, and I was sweating inside my suit. Every step, I expected massive aliens to spring out of the walls at me.

  We reached the next bulkhead without further incident. I felt relieved, but this was far from over.

  As troops clanked forward on my flanks and worked the next hatch, I directed my tube at the door. The scene was too familiar. I had to wonder if we were walking into another ambush. If the aliens didn’t have ranged weapons, they’d be smart to keep attacking us when we were all bunched up at a hatchway.

  Veteran Harris came closer to me as troops worked on the next hatch. They were having trouble of some kind.

  “They’ll have it open in a second,” he said. “You still have that weapon dialed for a broad spray?”

  “Haven’t changed it, Vet.”

  He nodded. “I think that was a good call. Not to say Sargon’s choice was wrong, but if they’re hiding on the far side of this hatch, you’ll be able to spray them in the face again.”

  Sargon knelt beside me and stared at the closed hatch with fixed concentration.

  “Vet’s right,” he said. “I was worried, but you played that last encounter like a pro. I guess you’re a heavy weaponeer now for real.”

  “Just doing my job,” I said. Inside my helmet I smiled, enjoying the praise. I knew I’d have to make the most of it. In Legion Varus, a kind word was a rare thing.

  We watched for about a minute—but the hatchway didn’t open. Graves stomped forward, irritated.

  “What’s the holdup?”

  “Stuck, sir,” Carlos said. “The techs are working on it, but the hinges are jammed or something.”

  “So? Force it open.”

  Natasha joined the conversation. She stood near Sargon and I, who were still watching the hatch for any sign of an enemy ambush. Anyone caught between our heavy tubes and that hatchway would be in a bad spot if the situation turned hot.

  “Can’t do that, Centurion,” Natasha said. “This is Skrull tech, and we don’t have the codes to override it or blow the hinges. If the hatch doesn’t work, we’ll have to go around.”

  “We could burn through the door,” he said.

  She shook her head. “Bad idea. These bulkheads protect the bridge. If they won’t open, it’s probably for a good reason.”

  Graves stared at her. “Are you suggesting there’s active fire on the far side?”

  “That, or hard vacuum.”

  Graves thought about it. “I don’t care,” he said. “We’re breaking in.”

  “We should know what we’re up against first, sir,” Natasha protested.

  “Then figure it out. Sargon, burn me a hole in that door, will you? Do all the damage to the bottom half.”

  “Stand clear!” Sargon shouted.

  People scuttled out of the way—all except Natasha.

  “I have a better idea,” she said.

  “Let’s hear it,” Graves said.

  “Let me send in a buzzer.”

  A buzzer was a tiny snooping drone. Techs kept them in their bag of tricks on their backs.

  Graves waved for Sargon to stand down.

  “How will you get one past the hatch?” he asked Natasha.

  Natasha produced a buzzer about the size of her thumb, which resembled a cockroach. It was a yellow metallic color, similar to tin.

  She moved to the hatch control panel she’d been messing with and opened it. “There are conduits that lead to the far side. I’ll set this one on a scouting mission and let him go—with your permission, sir.”

  “Do it.”

  The buzzer crawled from Natasha’s hand and entered the panel. It soon vanished. She activated her tapper. I wanted to watch but stayed in position, aiming my weapon at the hatch.

  “I’ll pipe the signal to everyone’s tapper,” she said.

  A moment later, a flickering
, fish-eyed vid began to play on my arm. I put it low on the interior screens in my helmet so I could watch and keep my eyes on the hatch while it played.

  The buzzer crept its way through a dark, crowded environment. Everything it saw was very small, but screws looked like pillars from its point of view.

  Finally, it found its way out on the far side. The passage looked dark and empty. I saw its four tiny wings extend. They flapped and buzzed—but it couldn’t take off.

  Natasha looked back at us. “Vacuum,” she said. “There’s no air. It can’t fly.”

  “That’s it then. You sealed the first hatch behind us, didn’t you?”

  Natasha nodded.

  “Brace yourselves, everyone,” he said. Then he looked at me and Sargon. “Blow the hatch.”

  -8-

  We burned through the hatch in less than a minute. When it finally breached, a screeching roar began. The air around us was sucked out of the punched-through hole we’d burned into the center of the lower steel leaf.

  It took a while for the air to all be sucked away, and Sargon and I kept blasting. We’d set our weapons to lower yield with pulsing emissions. That wasn’t optimal for combat, where you wanted to hit your target with a killing bolt of plasma, but for a stationary target like a hatchway it worked well. The beams lasted for several seconds each, then we had to recycle the units and let them cool down before firing again.

  We kept working while the air around us leaked away. Everyone had their helmets on and the hatch behind us had been sealed, but there was still quite a bit of air that needed to escape from the long passageway.

  As I worked to burn the hole larger, I wondered what we’d find on the far side. I could tell that there wasn’t going to be any air pressure. This leak wasn’t the mild hiss you got when two chambers were equalizing pressure. This was the all-out rush of gas that occurs when there’s nothing but space—hard vacuum—on the far side of a breach.

  Whatever we found, I was now certain we weren’t going to encounter any living Skrull crewmen. They couldn’t have survived this attack on the bridge.

  When we had a glowing, orange-black opening the size of a manhole, we stopped firing. Two troops were ordered to wriggle into the dark chamber first.

  We waited a minute or so, watching them as they struggled and grunted to get through. Then they walked around on magnetic boots in the cold chamber beyond. They transmitted back what they saw on their suit vid just as the buzzer had done.

  One of the two was Kivi, and she did the talking as they reported on what they saw.

  “Null gravity,” she said. “No atmosphere. It’s deserted in here, sir.”

  “Do a quick sweep,” Graves said, “then open the hatch from the inside.”

  I glanced at him, wondering why he didn’t just have them open the hatch right away and get it over with. The pressure had equalized, so there wouldn’t be any explosive equalization. With the hatch open, we could support our two scouts if something went drastically wrong…

  After another moment’s thought, I finally got it.

  “Right,” I muttered to myself inside my helmet. Centurion Graves didn’t want the hatch yawning open if there was going to be trouble. The heavies on the wrong side of the door would just have to deal with it alone, and we would be left with more options as to how to respond.

  Possibly for the first time, I was glad I was now a specialist with a valuable tube and the skill to use it. The more expendable types were inside that dark chamber now, exploring.

  We watched tensely. Kivi sounded nervous, but she was game. She’d toughened up since our first mission into alien space.

  “Checking the corridors. Main power seems to be cut, Centurion. This module is running on auxiliary batteries as far as I can tell.”

  Graves didn’t speak. He watched the vids intently. Most of the rest of us did the same. I noticed that Sargon wasn’t watching the streaming transmissions. Instead, he’d repositioned himself to one side of the hole we’d burned through the hatch. His weapon was shouldered and ready. I realized he was watching that hole like a cat hunting for a mouse. I joined him, thinking he was doing the right thing.

  Graves flicked his eyes over the two of us. He didn’t say anything, but he nodded in approval. That was a nice for a change.

  Kivi made a sweep of the immediate area beyond the hatch, then opened the big doors. We tensed. After having been rushed by about ten tons of armored squids, we were nervous.

  I took a look around as we advanced. We were in the Skrull living quarters—at least that’s what I figured they were. Dead Skrull littered the place. Unfortunately, as we were in null-grav they were floating, not resting peacefully on the deck.

  Skrull are a weird-looking species. They aren’t very big, maybe a meter long from stem-to-stern, with wrinkled-up faces that are vaguely humanoid and hard shells over their central bodies. Several thin limbs come out of this shell. The limbs looked disturbingly like the arms of dead children as they drifted in frozen rifts of their own blood. They’d been killed then frozen by the hard vacuum.

  “What do they call those freaky monkeys from Madagascar?” Carlos asked me.

  I thought about it. “Lemurs?”

  “Yeah. That’s what these guys look like. Big yellow eyes.”

  “I was thinking of turtles with long skinny arms and humanoid faces.”

  “Sure, that fits too.”

  We hadn’t seen the Skrull all that often even though we’d technically spent over a year in space with them. It struck me how you could live with another species and not really know them because each group stayed with their own kind. Now, they looked more like kin to me. Basically a peaceful, effective people, they’d been slaughtered wholesale like animals.

  “This kind of pisses me off,” I said as we waded forward, heading down narrow passages toward the central shaft that led to the control rooms.

  As I spoke, I had to reach out and push away gauzy frozen mists of blood. The mists looked like crackling spider webs, breaking at the slightest touch.

  “Why?” Carlos asked.

  “I don’t know. They weren’t hurting anyone. They have red blood the same as us, too. I didn’t know that.”

  Carlos laughed. “You’re such a hater, McGill. Why not love those snake-armed killing machines? True, they aren’t nice—but then, neither are we. Remember, the Galactics invaded their system and started giving them orders. You have to admit these giant armored squid-dudes have balls. They’re fighting harder than we did.”

  I nodded thoughtfully. I didn’t usually expect Carlos to have anything deep to add to a conversation, but this time he had pulled it off.

  “You got a point,” I admitted.

  “That’s enough chatter up there,” Veteran Harris said, pushing his way past a few troops to get close to us. “Ortiz, stop distracting the specialist. We need his gun and his eye alert if you want to keep breathing.”

  “Would it help if I just offed myself right here, Vet?” Carlos asked.

  “That would really, really make me happy,” Harris told him, and I believed him. “But no, we need your sorry ass, too. Just shut the hell up.”

  Since the Skrull were smaller than humans and we were in heavy armor, the going was tough. I had to wonder about the enemy. They were comparatively huge. How had they managed to maneuver through these tunnels?

  “Contact!” shouted a voice from the front line.

  I was pretty sure it was Kivi. I pushed forward, but Sargon contacted me privately.

  “Let the regulars engage first,” he said. “You don’t rush in when you have the only weapon that works.”

  I held back, but it wasn’t easy. It went against my basic nature. I wanted to help Kivi—but at the same time I knew Sargon was right. He didn’t always hold himself back, but this mission was too critical. We just didn’t know what we were up against. Hell, if I died right now, I didn’t know if I’d ever be revived. The rest of the legion where the revival machines were was still out
of contact.

  Sliding to the side and parking myself in an alcove, I let a few heavies drag themselves past me. They looked like they were climbing a ladder underwater. In null-G pretty much everyone moves like they’re swimming, dragging themselves from one handhold to the next and kicking off from any handy surface. You couldn’t just walk or crawl, as there was no gravity to hold you down to the deck and give you the grip you needed for such forms of locomotion.

  Carlos was one of the troopers who rushed ahead of me obeying Graves and Harris. He thumbed his nose at me—or at least it was a close approximation. His faceplate got in the way of the full gesture.

  My breathing accelerated as I rejoined the flow and moved forward. I was the fourth man as we emerged into a larger, more open area.

  Kivi had called out “contact”, meaning she’d found the enemy. But when I came out of the gopher hole that terminated the passageway, I didn’t see any armored squids.

  “Where are they?” I asked.

  “Two o’clock,” she said. “Look.”

  Kivi was hugging the aft wall. I saw she was staring and pointing her weapon toward an opening. It took me a moment to realize what I was looking at. There was a large rip in the hull of the ship. It was right there on the top dome of the observational deck of the bridge. The rip was about five meters long and maybe two wide, and it impressed me in more ways than one.

  “I don’t see any squids,” I radioed, aiming my weapon at the rip. Flanges of dark metal drifted and I could see starlight beyond the rip illuminating the outer hull.

  “I did,” she said, breathing hard over the microphone in her helmet. “It was just a shadow, a fast movement. Something jumped over that breach up there.”

  Sargon and I put our backs against the deck and aimed up at the breach. If something did rush us, we’d have time for one good shot—that was it.

  “Report, Sargon,” Veteran Harris said. “Are we moving into the chamber or not?”

  “Your call, Vet,” he said. “There’s been a sighting. There could be a million of them crawling on the hull or only one.”

  Harris cursed and kicked the decision back up the chain to the officers who were in the rear. They moved the rest of the troops up, apparently not liking their position any better than I had when I was in that hole. A few more of our troops came up onto the bridge.