Fire Base (Drop Trooper Book 6), page 14
“And yet when your people speak of us,” Zan-Thint countered, “your learned ones who write your histories, they say we are the young and foolish race. They say we are headstrong, driven by biological urges we have yet to conquer, that the wars between us were the fault of the Tahni. Perhaps we were too ready to fight when we first met you, but your Commonwealth is hardly without sin.” The Tahni officer sat back in his chair and regarded me with unreadable, shark-black eyes. “The war had ended, and if we were not at peace, we had, at least, not been killing each other for many years. And it would have remained that way had your government been able to control the squatters who illegally settled on worlds the cease-fire had granted to the Imperium.”
“We cleaned them out once,” I said with a shrug, feeling oddly defensive. Who the hell had elected me the defender of the Commonwealth government? “They kept coming. Only way to stop them would have been to kill them.”
“And we did that for you.” Cold, remorseless. Just what I expected. “And rather than being grateful that we’d done your dirty work, your people started the war anew.”
I sighed.
“Your people killed half a million of ours. Did you think we’d just let it go? Forget about it?”
“And if killing a few hundred thousand malcontents who wanted no part of your society was such an unforgivable sin,” Zan-Thint said with the predatory eagerness of a politician seizing on the error of his opponent during a debate, “ worthy of fighting a war for eight, grueling years, slaughtering millions, then how much more unforgivable do you think it would be to one of us for you to have destroyed our entire culture? Our reason for being? How much more vengeance do you think we ought to take?”
I glanced around at the interior of the shuttle, at the soldiers strapped in on either side of us, rifles held muzzle-down but their eyes locked on me with a look that might have been wariness but I thought for sure was hatred. At our Vigilante battlesuits locked into magnetic cargo cradles in the chamber beneath us. They’d brought them along and I couldn’t think why.
“You didn’t bring me here to talk about comparative cultures,” I said, figuring I’d dragged this out as far as it was going to go. “Why didn’t you just kill us?”
“Because I want to know what you’re doing here. And I also want to know where you got those.” He tilted his head downward to the cargo bay, to the suits there. “I am far from being an expert on your laws, but I find it hard to believe that your government allows its private citizens, farmers the last time I encountered you, to purchase heavy military weapons.”
“Not legally,” I admitted. Gears grinded inside my mind as I tried to shift into the bullshitting con man mode I hadn’t used since I was nineteen years old. “But if you have enough money, you can buy almost anything. After what you did to our friends and neighbors on Hausos, there wasn’t much left for us there. So, we pooled our money and bought the suits and weapons on the black market and came after you.” Unable to use my hands, I jutted my chin toward him. “You wanna know why we’re here? We’re here for you. We wanted revenge for what you did to us and our friends.”
And yeah, it sounded lame to me, too. But he was an alien, and I hoped he wasn’t practiced enough in detecting human bullshit to tell the difference. Zan-Thint said nothing for a moment and I thought maybe he’d actually bought it. But when he spoke again, there was something about the tone of his voice, the angle of his head that said he wasn’t quite that stupid.
“I have not quite become an expert on humans in my limited time among you,” he replied, “but I do know warriors. Whatever their species, they share certain qualities, things that go beyond our differences and unite us in one purpose. And you, Cameron Alvarez, are a warrior. As is your mate.” He motioned at Vicky and she sputtered a laugh that was half outrage and half derision.
“His mate?” she repeated. “Did you just call me his fucking mate?”
“I’m sure it was nothing personal,” I told her, grinning despite everything. “Cultural differences and all that. We have to be sensitive.”
“You are,” Zan-Thint interrupted, “unless I misread your tone of voice, joking with each other. Making light while in a hopeless situation. This is also a characteristic of a warrior. Of experienced, mature warriors who are much too wise to do anything so foolish and headstrong as to follow one with my resources out here alone in some juvenile quest for vengeance.”
The Tahni leaned toward me, looming over me by centimeters even seated, outweighing me by a good twenty kilos. He was trying to be intimidating and doing a damned good job of it, but I purposefully kept myself from shrinking away.
“I know you saw it.” His voice was soft, conspiratorial, reminding me of Dave Clines when he was sharing his latest bit of hot gossip with us. “I know you were inside our storage building on Hausos. I examined the security footage later and I recognized you from our meeting at the crash site. You know about the artifact.” He reached out, his fingers oddly misshapen compared to a human hand, as if they had one too many joints, and brushed a long, sharpened nail against the side of my neck. “I want to know who else you told about it.”
I swallowed hard and I could feel the edge of his nail digging into my flesh, drawing a single drop of blood, warm and wet down the side of my neck.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I told him, the words spilling out naturally, as if lying was a skill like riding a bicycle and I just had to get going again for the muscle memory to kick in. “I went to the farm to find out what the smugglers were hiding there. When I found out it was weapons, I called the Corporate Security Force and they came in and cleared out everything you left. I never saw any artifact, just some guns. And I didn’t see anything of the place until after they were done with it.”
Zan-Thint smiled in his Tahni way and straightened in his seat, pulling his face away from mine. I wanted to sigh in relief, but I had a sense it would be premature.
“After you Marines killed the Emperor,” he said, “a religion that had united our people for over a thousand years fell apart overnight. Many of us were left with nothing to believe in. Yet I found something to believe in, Cameron Alvarez. Do you know what that was?”
“Revenge?” I guessed, trying to stay with the theme.
“No. I believe in the Ancients. What you humans so disrespectfully call the Predecessors. To us, they are…” He tilted his head in what I took as a shrug. “…I think you would call them our gods. Though not quite in the way you use the term, but it’s close enough. They are our creators, you see.”
“What do you mean?” I was playing dumb. I had a damned good idea what he meant, but I’d learned it’s better to have the opposition underestimate you. And when you get someone really wound up talking, they usually say more than they intended. “Didn’t you evolve on Tahn-Skyyiah?”
“Of course, we didn’t. We are no accidents, no perverse mutations of happenstance such as you humans. The Ancients created us in their image and likeness. We were carefully and lovingly crafted by them as their children, given the birthright of thousands of living worlds and the wormhole jumpgate system to reach them. All was exactly as it should have been. And then you came along.” I don’t know how it was possible for that broad, ugly face to get any more unpleasant, but somehow it did. “You mutations, mistakes of nature, interlopers in a galaxy not yours to take. You usurped our birthright and claimed it for your own. And for that sin, even more than for killing our God and destroying our way of life, you deserve to be wiped from the universe.”
Okay. I got it now. He wasn’t just some pissed-off sore loser, he was out of his fucking mind. And there was no further point in pretending I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“And the Predecessor artifacts you found will help you to do that?”
Vicky cringed and Wade cursed. Cursed me and cursed in general, getting louder until something solid smacked into flesh and he moaned softly instead.
“What I have found,” Zan-Thint answered, ignoring the cursing and the blow that had silenced it, “is not the work of the Predecessors. They were life-givers, not destroyers. They created the life-bearing worlds your species now profanes with its presence, but they would never have sunk so low as to clean up the mess you’ve made of their work.”
I frowned, now honestly confused, and not just playing dumb.
“What? If the Predecessors didn’t make it, then who the hell did?”
“I have read what you believe, those of you who will even admit the Ancients existed. They are mocked, called cultists, conspiracy theorists for stating the obvious reality. But even they are wrong, for they think the Ancients left this galaxy of their own accord. But in truth, they were forced to abandon their creation by beings from Without.” I could hear the capital letter as if he’d drawn it in the air between us. “Beings so strange and deadly, you could scarcely imagine. All that is left to us is the name the Ancients called them, a word that simply meant ‘enemy.’ They were the Skrela.”
“How the hell do you know any of this shit?” That was Wade and his voice was loud and firm despite the obvious pain in it. He was a brave man, if not terribly bright. “How would the Tahni know anything about the Predecessors if they left the galaxy tens of thousands of years ago?”
If Zan-Thint was offended by the question, he didn’t show it. Or maybe he did, and I just wasn’t good enough at reading Tahni body language to know. Either way, he answered. And I could have sworn he seemed proud to answer it.
“Our priests knew of it. It had been passed down since time immemorial. Never written down or recorded by word or picture, but spoken in secret and memorized from one generation to another and never forgotten. My father was the Emperor’s own court priest and I…was just an overly-inquisitive boy newly emancipated from my mother and the House of the Females.
“I snuck into a ceremony I was never meant to see; heard things I was never meant to hear. My father was passing down the knowledge to my eldest brother, who was meant to succeed him in his station. And I never forgot what I heard that day, that the Forbidden Worlds were once a battleground between the Ancients and the Skrela, that they were forbidden for the same reason the knowledge of the Ancients was kept so secret, because the weapons of the Skrela still remained. And the priests knew what the Ancients knew…what you will all know soon, as well. That the weapons of the Skrela are not a path to power, but merely to destruction.”
The engines of the shuttle were screaming in protest as we descended, echoing up from the ground below. With a teeth-rattling jolt, we landed.
“You’ve come a long way to find me,” Zan-Thint said, pulling free of his straps and motioning to his soldiers to bring us along. “It would be bad manners not to show you exactly what you came to see.”
15
Pinatubo loomed angry over the landing pad, an ancient god hungry for sacrifice, eyeing us as we disembarked the shuttle. It was afternoon but the sun was hidden behind a bank of grey clouds. Black smoke from the caldera mixed with them, turning the cumulonimbus into something roiling and apocalyptic.
“This isn’t all symbolic as shit or anything, is it?” Vicky murmured aside to me, her eyes fixed on the path to keep from stumbling on the sharp-edged rocks that littered it.
The Tahni guard behind her jabbed her shoulder with the muzzle of his rifle for the sin of talking out of turn and she rewarded him with a glare that was probably lost on an alien who didn’t understand human body language, then kept walking.
Into a cave. Under the damned volcano.
The rock walls on either side were as smooth as glass, and I guessed they were bored using a construction laser, probably rented from one of Mama Bindy’s business ventures. The passageway was improbably broad, five or six meters, and about four meters tall and yet somehow it still gave me a sense of claustrophobia I’d never known inside a Vigilante or on board a starship. Maybe it was the knowledge of what was on the other side of that glass-black wall.
The grey light of day shrank into a small circle far behind us and the only illumination came from lines of chemical ghostlights attached to the ceiling by adhesives. The Tahni troops behind us cast long shadows, transforming from familiar humanoid forms into horrific orcs from a dark fantasy tale.
“I know you’re trying to avoid attracting attention,” I said to Zan-Thint, risking the wrath of his soldiers, who didn’t seem to like idle chatter, “but isn’t this going overboard?”
“You might think so,” he said, sounding almost cheerful. “But volcanoes provide more than camouflage and concealment. Would you care to guess what that might be?”
“A wonderful supervillain-lair atmosphere?” Vicky offered, refusing to be intimidated by any of it. “A nice, sulphur bouquet to the air? A sneak preview of the afterlife?”
“Something a bit more practical, I’m afraid. A very nice temperature differential.”
“You’re using it for power production,” I said, finally understanding what he was getting at. I glanced aside but his face was hidden in shadow. “But why? Wouldn’t a fusion reactor be simpler?”
“Simpler, but not cheap or easy to acquire out here. Every reactor available is sold for a premium to someone like your patron Bindy Kamara so they can use the free energy to reward those who accept their authority. Not something most would give up even for the price I was willing to pay.”
He shot me a look I interpreted as quelling.
“And before you or your sharp-tongued mate….” And I knew he emphasized the word on purpose. “…asks, no, we could not have merely offloaded a reactor from one of our ships. We have a use for every one of our vessels, as you’ve seen. We seem to find a use for everything.”
As if on cue—and maybe it was—a grinding, scraping metal racket echoed up the tunnel behind us and the guards pushed us to the right-hand wall to let the vehicle through. It was a curious, uniquely Tahni machine, a sort of flat, low to the ground platform running on spherical wheels, each independently powered. The main platform could be lowered on hydraulics, and the unlikely-looking setup could carry a hell of a lot of weight. Currently, it was carrying all three of our Vigilantes, and as they passed, I felt as if they were staring at us with disappointment.
You should have gone down fighting.
Yeah, I didn’t feel guilty about that. Maybe during the war, I would have, but right now, keeping Vicky and me alive was pretty much my chief priority. In the Marines, if you fell, the next man or woman in line took your place. If the three of us went down, there was nothing else, and I didn’t trust Chief Inspector Dukanovic to do anything for the benefit of anyone but the Corporate Council. And while I didn’t see any particular way out of our current situation, there was absolutely no way out of being dead.
The tunnel opened up into a larger chamber, what might have been a natural cavern, lit up with more than chemical strip lighting. Floodlights cast a baleful glare over row after row of High Guard battlesuits, terra cotta warriors waiting for their emperor to return and call them back to war.
Not the Emperor this time, though. More like the gods.
The last row ruined the image, their maintenance panels pulled open and Tahni soldiers ripping through the guts of the suits, performing the one constant across all races and all militaries throughout history, human, Tahni, Predecessor, or presumably, Skrela if they existed. PMCS—Preventative Maintenance Checks and Service. And these Tahni didn’t seem any happier about it than I had as a private. They did stop to spare us humans what could have been a dirty look, but then someone I assumed was an officer or an NCO barked something at them and they got back to work.
The party didn’t stop at the disgruntled High Guard troops or their glares, just proceeded past them, past a storage room filled with what I recognized from the war as Tahni storage containers, cylindrical stacks from the floor to the ceiling. Ordnance, spare parts, whatever else a makeshift Tahni combined arms battalion would need to get along. But not enough. Not everything.
This, I realized with a flash of the obvious, was not the base, this was a base. Zan-Thint had starships, a network. And I had a hunch he wouldn’t be here in person if it weren’t for the artifact. Because that was what was in the next chamber, the big chamber, the reason for this place’s existence.
Oh, there was a lot more, of course. There was the generator he’d mentioned, whirring just above the subaudible, a magnetohydrodynamic turbine that took up nearly half the chamber, thirty meters across and nearly to the ceiling. They had to have brought it in piece by piece because it wouldn’t have fit through the entrance we’d used. A heat exchange pipe went downward through a hole bored in the floor, and even though it was sealed at the edges, the whiff of sulphur in the air hinted that it penetrated to the magma.
From the generator, insulated cables ran out along the floor back the way we’d come, feeding everything in the base, recharging the superconductive capacitors of batteries, keeping fresh air flowing through the ductwork adhering to the ceilings presumably out to the surface. And more simply ran across the chamber to the machinery gathered around it. I didn’t know what the machinery did, though I assumed the Tahni technicians, scientists, or whatever the hell they were who were clustered around it did, but given time, I could have figured it out.
It, though…I could have spent the next century staring at it, pawing over it, and still not had a clue as to its purpose. The Corporate Council and Colonel Zan-Thint thought it was a weapon, but the only thing I could say about it with any confidence was that it was the most unabashedly alien thing I’d ever seen.
I’d been to Tahni worlds, been to their homeworld, and while there were stark differences between their architecture and ours, I could tell it had been built by and for a species much like humans. Bipedal, bilaterally symmetrical, stereoscopic vision and stereo hearing, and more than that, evolved—or, if Zan-Thint was right, created by the Predecessors—to around the same tolerances of temperature, atmospheric pressure, and oxygen content as us. They were buildings built for people. Not humans exactly, but still people.
