Dark World (Undying Mercenaries Series Book 9), page 12
The next recruit in line was Cooper. He eyed me, and I eyed him.
I couldn’t help myself. I reached out and grabbed him. “You’re next, Cooper!” I told him. “You’re not going to let that girl show you up, are you?”
For just a second, he looked at me, and fear sprouted up in his eyes.
I was a little too happy, and I grinned a little too broadly.
I knew what he had to be asking himself: Was he going to become my first accident of the day? An object lesson for the rest?
Watching these paranoid thoughts go through that little shit’s mind, I pushed him to the line and held him ready for the hole to open again.
“Hands off, sir. I want to do this on my own.”
The door fired open, and I lifted my hands away from him. He stepped out into space—but he took a moment too long.
I winced. Damn!
He’d hesitated. The aerial on top of his helmet, small though it was, had been chopped off by the scissoring doors.
“See that?” I roared at the rest. “Could have been his whole head! Wet your pants if you have to, but you’ve got to move!”
The door popped open again, and the next recruit didn’t reject my guidance. There was a rhythm to it, and you had to jump in the moment the doors clanged open.
The whole point of processing troops this fast was to get us clumped together for the drop. If we landed on the target as closely together as we could, we’d be able to meet up and fight more quickly. In the end, dropping fast was more important than suffering a few splats along the way—at least, that’s how the legion saw things.
My turn came last. I stepped into space, experienced a stomach-lurching drop, and for a split-second I saw open space around me.
I was in the midst of many dropping soldiers. We were being loaded into capsules and fired out of Nostrum’s belly, thirty-two troops at a time.
Out to the sides, in my peripheral vision, I saw flashes of stars. Below the firing mechanism a big gray, brown and acid-green planet spread wide.
In between the planet and our ship was a glinting structure of burnished metal. It looked like no one had ever bothered to paint it.
Then everything vanished again. Two halves of a rounded cylinder slammed over me from either side, loading me up like a bullet into a firing chamber.
The slamming part had been silent, as I was out in open space. It still made me wince—it always did.
Air began to hiss, pressuring the drop-capsule. I could hear again after that as the capsule was spun around, loaded into a breach and aimed at the target.
Right then, I realized we’d forgotten to tell the troops to bend at the knee at this point. Sure, it had been in training vids the day before, but when you were on the spot and scared, you needed that final reminder.
A few of them were bound to land with cracked legs.
Shit.
That was the last thought I had before getting slammed with terrific force. It felt as if twin giants had struck the soles of my boots with sledgehammers.
Fired out of the launch-cannon, I felt myself speed downward like a bullet.
The invasion was on.
-16-
Landing was almost as traumatic as being loaded and dropped. The capsule spun around and fired retro jets. Again, my body was strained by G forces.
Impact foam had filled the cylinder after I’d been fired from Nostrum, so much so that I could barely move. My arms were pinned to my sides, and I hardly had room to cough.
The only instrumentation data amounted to displays inside my helmet. That fed me velocity, range and other info I couldn’t do anything about.
The capsule itself was like a tomb. For some of those who dropped today, it would literally become their coffin.
Almost without warning, the base of the capsule slammed into the satellite. Before I could get out, I felt something give under my feet—and I almost panicked.
Reflexively, I squeezed the handles that blew the capsule’s explosive bolts. The hatch flew away from me and rang against a distant surface.
Ripping away shreds of protective foam, it was like being born again. I staggered away from my capsule.
I was inside the factory. That had to be it. Above, a hole had been punched in the roof. Below me, a deep dent had been made in the deck, and my capsule smoked in the depression.
As I watched, the capsule began to drop deeper, having penetrated the deck under my feet.
I was just about to contact my platoon, when disaster struck. I was yanked forward, off my feet. It took me a second, but then I realized I hadn’t disconnected the emergency hoses that had attached my helmet to the capsule—damn, I wasn’t with it today.
Pulled prone on the deck, I was dragged toward the dark hole in it. I frantically slashed the connective tubes—and I was free.
I stood up again, panting. On my general unit channel, I relayed what I’d experienced. Normally, we landed on hard earth and didn’t have to worry about our capsules falling to lower decks. I wasn’t sure how many troops could hear me, or would understand the message, but I figured I’d try to pass it on.
“Is that you, McGill?” a voice crackled in my ear.
“Harris? Where are you?”
“Damned if I know. We punched through the hull and were driven like hammered nails down to what has to be the third deck. Hell of a thing.”
“Any contact from Winslade? Or Leeson?”
“Nothing—but I’ve got a fix on you now, you’re right above me.”
I got down on my belly and peered through the hole in the deck at my feet. Down there, I saw Harris and a few other troops. They all looked dazed.
Then a hulking figure appeared, bigger than all the rest. It was a heavy trooper. How had they squeezed him out of the drop cannons? I wasn’t sure—until I saw his oversized capsule. Apparently, they’d spent some money on upgrades to Nostrum I hadn’t been aware of.
We soon sorted out our platoons—what was left of them. Harris had twenty survivors, half of them human and half of them Blood Worlders. I, on the other hand, had fared worse. I had nine recruits and Veteran Moller left—that was it.
“Splat!” Harris said, laughing as he counted my troops. “You lost more than half! That’s pathetic.”
“Rough drop for first timers,” I said. “They didn’t all seem to get the part about popping out of their capsules the moment they landed. I figured we’ll pick up more as we go deeper.”
We both gathered up more men over the next ten minutes. That left each platoon short a few, but then we ran into a new problem.
We found Winslade and Leeson, who’d dropped with him. They were both as dead as doornails, as were most of the weaponeers and other specialists.
I reported in to Graves immediately.
“Apparently, sir,” I said, “it wasn’t their drop technique. They punched through the outer hull of the factory, but then they landed in a crucible of molten metals. It was just bad luck, I guess.”
“Shit…” Primus Graves said. “All right, you’ve got operational command of your unit. It’s at half-strength already, I might merge you up later.”
“Got it, sir. Any change to our mission parameters?”
“No. Advance to the crew quarters and secure it.”
“On it, Primus. McGill out.”
When I closed the channel, I looked up to see Harris giving me the evil eye.
“What?” I asked him.
“You planned that, didn’t you? You called in, and he gave you command over me!”
“Grow up, Harris. I’ve got seniority at the officer level anyway.”
“But not in total years of service! Not by a long shot.”
“You can call Graves and lodge a formal complaint—after we take our objective.”
Harris grumbled bitterly, but he followed me with his team of heavies. I knew he wouldn’t call Graves. He wouldn’t have gotten anywhere with that—we both knew it. Graves wasn’t overly concerned with petty squabbles between ranks. He wanted things done and done right now. That’s all he cared about.
The trouble with finding the crew quarters on this factory was it had been built by aliens. As humans were from Imperial territory, we were accustomed to working with markings, computer interfaces and equipment controls that looked a certain way.
This station was sized right, and it looked like humans could work here without a problem—but the aliens that built the place had their own ideas about things like signposts.
Every hatch had a cube above it. That cube was a different color on every side, and some of them lit up more than others. I could tell right away that this was their form of writing. The format impressed me, as it was very compact. All you had to do in order to derive information was study a single three-dimensional object.
“What the hell is that supposed to be?” Harris complained. “Some kind of colored light?”
“No,” I said, and I explained my theory.
Harris was alarmed. “I’m calling Natasha over here. There’s no way we can find our way through this maze following funky backlit cubes!”
Natasha was our smartest tech specialist. She joined us and studied the lit cubes.
“Such an ingenious system,” she marveled. “Think about the data compression! I see at least ten color variations, with six possible sides to display. That gives you ten to the sixth power—a million permutations right there. That’s just if you assume the colors aren’t being used more subtly. Then for added meaning, you’ve got some sides of each cube that are lit more brightly than the others. Emphasis? An accent? We can only—”
“Uh…” I said, interrupting. “Hey, that’s all great, but we need to know what these signs mean. Like, now.”
She looked at both of us, startled.
“I’ve got no idea. Not yet. I’d have to study them. Examine the contents of every locker, chamber or deck with a symbol above it. Then, when it’s all become input into a computer database, I’ll run an inference engine through it and—”
“Okay,” I said, sighing. “For right now, we’ve got no idea. We’re flying blind.”
“We can follow tradition and logic,” Natasha suggested. “The crew quarters should be in a safe region, one that’s centrally located with regards to the life support and workspaces.”
I extended both my arms and pointed in either direction down the passage.
“Which way?”
“Best guess?” she asked.
“Sure, if that’s all you’ve got.”
“Okay… head down stairways. Go that way, spinward around the planet. The radioactive regions are behind us—let’s leave those behind.”
We did as she suggested. What did we have to lose?
The station was huge. All over it, human troops were crawling like ants exploring a train-wreck. We’d damaged the outer hull with our landing pods, but the wounds weren’t fatal.
For the most part, the station seemed to run itself. But it couldn’t entirely be automated. There were too many signs of biotic habitation everywhere.
“Atmospherics?” I asked Natasha.
She shrugged, working her instruments. “We can breathe here. The O2 is a point or two on the low side, and the argon is high—but it’s not dangerous.”
“Good enough,” I said, opening my faceplate.
That was a mistake. The air was acrid. It put a funny taste in my mouth and my nostrils.
It wasn’t the argon, a gas you couldn’t really detect. It was the industrial waste. All these hot machines and boiling vats…
“Smells like Hell itself,” I said. “but I don’t think it’s poisonous. Unit, open masks and turn off respirators for now.”
They all did so, sniffing tentatively. Many coughed and grimaced, but they soon got used to it.
If we could breathe their air, we could save suit power and our oxygen supply. That would make us last longer if we needed it later.
We checked every room, every compartment. True to her word, Natasha catalogued the colored cubes and the contents behind them. Soon, a few patterns began to emerge.
“James,” Natasha said, forgetting to call me Adjunct in her excitement, “I’ve got some data points. Three pinks and any other combo is a small compartment, a storage locker. We can ignore those hatches.
“Good deal,” I said, and relayed the instructions to the rest of the troops. “What else?”
“Black seems to mean danger. Every time that color comes up, there’s an exposed electrical conduction system or a volatile chemical involved.”
“That just figures,” Harris complained, scowling.
Carlos laughed. He was working with Natasha doing biotic measurements looking for trace genetic material. “These aliens are clearly very perceptive. Right, Adjunct Harris?”
“Ortiz,” Harris ordered, “get back up to the front of the line with your fart-sniffing machine.”
Carlos scuttled off, and Natasha followed him.
When we were alone, Harris faced me. “This is hopeless. This complex has at least a thousand kilometers of passageways. We can’t even read their signs, and the place looks deserted.”
“Yes,” I agreed, “you’re right. But think: what if you were working on a huge industrial station and an alien ship showed up? Wouldn’t you sound an alarm, telling your workers to move to a safe location?”
“Maybe… But where?”
I slapped his shoulder plate with my gauntlet. “That’s what we’re supposed to find out!”
I marched off after Carlos and Natasha while Harris followed muttering foul words.
When I reached them, they’d stopped walking and were listening to something intently. It was their tappers.
Frowning, I leaned close. Was that a crying sound? A whimpering?
“Civilians?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” Carlos said. “Natasha is picking it up, but we can’t. The signal is faint.”
“Have you tried to talk to whoever is bawling on the radio?” I asked her.
Natasha waved me to silence. Reluctantly, I obeyed.
Turning up the volume, she let us all hear what she was hearing.
The sounds were disturbing—creepy, even. The sounds of a woman or a child, grieving quietly in the dark. I got a feeling of loneliness and despair.
“There’s no way to talk to them,” Natasha said. “It’s half-duplex. It’s like they’re broadcasting on a faint wavelength with the mic keyed open.”
The sounds went on and on. They sent a chill through me. Such unhappiness couldn’t last forever. Could it be a repeated recording?
Now and then, it faded, but soon it rose up again. It was like the distant song of a forgotten ghost locked in a closet.
“That’s just frigging weird,” Carlos said. “Turn it off.”
“No,” I said. “Triangulate. Give me a fix. We’ll head to the spot.”
Carlos looked at me in alarm. “Hey, big guy, let me give you a little advice.”
Carlos was only a specialist, but we’d been together since we’d joined Varus on the same day. Because of this, I let him get away with things the rest of the rank and file wouldn’t dream of.
“What?” I asked, knowing full well I was going to regret the question.
“Let our ghost-child go. Let it lure in some other sap.”
“You think that’s what it is? A ghost?”
“It’s a trap,” he said firmly. “Something created to demoralize us or to lure us closer.”
“Hmm,” I said, giving his thoughts actual credence. “You could be right, but it’s also the only damned lead we’ve got. We’re going to find it.”
Carlos sighed and shook his head. “I tried. I’ll always tell it that way. No one can convict me.”
-17-
My entire unit had broken up into small search parties, looking for whatever we could scare up. In my own case, I decided to take Carlos and Natasha along to investigate the odd signal Natasha’s computer was picking up. If we did find a person, it only made sense to have my chief medical and chief technical person with me.
While we were searching for the source of the odd crying sounds being broadcast from somewhere in the complex, we found the security center.
All around us, big displays showed what was happening. The cameras were small, we hadn’t even noticed them as we advanced through the passages. But the displays—they were perfect.
“Wow,” Carlos said, marveling. “This is better than a sensor-round ride back home.”
“You can see they’re intelligent,” Natasha said.
“Intelligent?” I asked. “Who do you mean, the aliens who run this thing?”
“Not just that—the cameras. They only pick up unusual activity. Watch.”
I did for a few moments, and I began to understand what she was talking about. The cameras weren’t just motion-sensitive. They didn’t bother to capture moments that were repetitive, such as the movement of large machinery. As a result, we were watching primarily images of our own troops moving around the complex, searching it.
“It’s all about us,” Carlos said.
“What about that signal?” I asked. “Where’s it coming from?”
Natasha worked to isolate and pinpoint the source. Attached to the security center, we found a set of detention cells.
“A prison,” Carlos said. “This just keeps getting better.”
I led them down deeper, into the brig. All the cells were open except for one. That single unit contained shreds of clothing—what looked like human clothing.
We couldn’t get into the cell, but I reached my long arms in through the bars. The rest of my search team stood around, making hissing sounds of distress. It was as if they expected something awful to grab onto me—but it didn’t.
Pulling back the clothes, I found a tapper, of all things.
Now, that’s a bad thing to find, all by itself. Our tappers are symbiotic. They live on us, and they feed on power from our body’s electrical fields. They can’t be ejected by pressing a button—they’re more than surgically implanted.
Dried blood, shreds of desiccated flesh and some stringy things I couldn’t identify dangled from the tapper. I pulled it back with the dress—because that’s what the scrap of clothing seemed to be—and presented it to Natasha and Carlos.
