Fire Base (Drop Trooper Book 6), page 18
The scorpion-centaur-elephant-spider-rhinoceros beetle didn’t like me being on its back. It didn’t like it at all, and it endeavored to prove that point by thrashing around, a bucking bronco trying to throw off a cowboy. Lucky for this cowboy, I had something more than a rope to hold onto. The fingers of the suit locked in place at my command, and they’d rip right out of their sockets before they let go. And by the way I was being shaken, rattled, and jerked around by the throes of the chimera, that was far from impossible.
I couldn’t see a damned thing, the view in my helmet a kaleidoscope of shifting, blurring colors and shapes, but I knew what the beeping meant the second it started, knew what the helmet’s sensors were warning me about, and I swung to the left, keeping my grip on the horn but letting my legs fly free. Just in time. The spiked tail missed me by millimeters, smashing into the chimera’s own back. The impact shoved its left shoulder down, curving its back and opening up a gap between the chitin plates in the armor on its neck for just a split-second.
I shoved the emitter housing of my Gatling laser into the gap and emptied the weapon, not letting up off the trigger until the readout was flashing red. Smoke was pouring from the gap in the neck armor, white and noxious, and so were gouts of the black goo that passed for blood and bodily fluids in the chimera. And it wasn’t moving.
I hadn’t realized it at first, numbed by the thrashing and shaking, but the chimera had fallen still, just standing, staring straight ahead. Until it began to collapse beneath me. I finally let go of the horn and blasted the jets, carrying me off its back and down to the stone below. I watched it slump to the ground, its head twisted at an impossible angle, the anchoring bone, ligaments, and muscle sublimated to vapor, staring at the thing for long seconds until I was sure it was dead.
When I turned, I blinked in surprise. I had been so caught up in my battle with the chimera, I hadn’t noticed what was happening on the ground in front of it. Vicky was down on a knee, her Gatling laser emitter resting on the ground, gouges dug out of the left shoulder of her armor by the chimera’s talons. Wade was an overturned turtle in the sun, flat on his back, trying to push himself over, and one of the Gauss rifles had been ripped right off his shoulder, though other than that, his suit didn’t seem badly damaged.
The Tahni trooper had not been so lucky. He’d been advancing on the chimera when I’d jumped and he’d apparently been too close to the thing when it had started thrashing and bucking. From the marks on his chest armor, the chimera’s front legs had come straight down into him from above, its full weight crushing the chest plate and the Tahni beneath it.
“Are you okay?” I asked, leaving the question open but actually addressing it to Vicky.
I knelt down beside the Tahni trooper, trying to find the catch for his armor, wanting, for some reason, to see his face. He had, whatever his other failings, been brave and steadfast in the face of what had seemed like certain death.
“I’ll live,” Wade said, though the pained wheeze in his voice made it clear he wasn’t too sure about the judgement.
“You killed it,” Vicky said, sounding dazed. “I didn’t think we could do it.”
I wanted to laugh, but I was still leaning over the dead Tahni and it didn’t feel respectful.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, love.”
“No.” She sounded impatient. “I mean, think about it. From what Zan-Thint said, these things…what did he call them?”
“Skrela,” Wade supplied, finally pushing himself to his feet.
“These Skrela are what killed the Predecessors, or at least chased them out of the galaxy. If this is one of them, how were we able to kill it so easily?”
“Easily?” I repeated, disbelieving. “You call that easy?”
“Four battlesuits with mil-surp weapons,” she insisted. “And we beat one of the things that killed the Predecessors? The Predecessors terraformed planets and made their own wormholes, Cam.”
I frowned. She had a point, but I wasn’t sure what it was.
“So, what do you think…?”
I never finished the question. I didn’t have to. Something was coming out of the entrance to the tunnel. Something huge and black, with an energy cannon on its shoulder, something that looked very much like the creature at our feet. And as it scrabbled forward across the rock, another just like it emerged…and another.
And I suddenly understood exactly what Vicky meant, and exactly what the artifact was.
“That thing didn’t hatch out of the artifact,” Wade put my thought into words. “It’s not an egg. It’s a fucking factory.”
“Hey! Fucking morons!”
I spun at the words, saw Raheem Ogbah waving at us from the other side of the landing zone. I was surprised to see he’d lived through the fight.
“You wanna stare at those motherfuckers until they kill you,” he bellowed at us, “or do you want to get the hell off this island?”
“How?” Vicky demanded. “My jets are out, and even if they weren’t, we couldn’t fly all the way back to Bathala City.”
“Then it’s a damned good thing,” he replied, “that I found a boat! Get off your asses and let’s get out of here!”
I was starting, I decided, to like this guy.
19
“What was this doing here, anyway?” Wade asked.
The three battlesuits standing on the deck of the barge threw the boat out of perspective, making it seem more like a skiff on a pond than a cargo barge on a shallow sea. Which, I guess, made Raheem Ogbah’s diminutive figure at the controls in the rear of the craft look like a pre-teen amongst adults.
“It’s a barge, for freight,” Ogbah said. “The Tahni didn’t bring all that shit with them in one shuttle. Use your fucking imagination, Cunningham.”
And Wade couldn’t say anything, of course, because Ogbah had pulled our nuts out of the grinder. For the moment. I couldn’t stop staring at the island, a good three or four kilometers away and getting farther with every chug of the outdated, ill-repaired jetdrive, still expecting the chimeras to burst out of it, walking on water or flying using jets that came out of their asses or some such thing. But it was just a black shadow against the burgeoning night except for tiny pinpricks of glowing red, which I thought had to be the lava still welling out of the hole Ogbah had blown in the mountain. Speaking of which…
“Mr. Ogbah,” I began, then paused. I was tired of talking to him through the suit speakers. I popped open my chest plate, letting in a wash of warm, humid air and the salty, fishy tang of the ocean, then yanked out my interface cables. Without the helmet optics, Wade and Vicky’s suits were black silhouettes against the grey sky and Ogbah was visible mostly because of his bright, checkered keffiyeh. I spat a lingering taste of blood over the side.
“Before I say anything else, I wanted to thank you for risking your life to save ours. Whatever reason you had for it, I owe you a debt and you can call it due whenever you like.”
I paused, tilting my head toward him.
“That said, why did you risk your life to save ours? And how did you know where we’d be? And how the hell did you get ahold of all that explosives?”
I couldn’t quite see Ogbah’s face in the darkness, but I thought I caught a flash of white teeth.
“Me and Cunningham here,” he said, “we work for the same people, no? My job is to know things, and to keep his dumb ass from getting killed. Though I didn’t think it would be such a labor-intensive assignment, I swear to Allah on a stack of Bibles.”
I blinked at the malapropism, then assumed he meant to do that and shook it off.
“That’s all fascinating,” Vicky said, her voice coming through the air rather than over her speakers. She’d cracked open her suit as well, and had one leg hanging down, the other propped up on the open chest plastron. “But we’re kind of ignoring the elephant in the room.”
“You mean,” I corrected her, “the scorpion-centaur-elephant-spider-rhinoceros beetle.”
“The fuck you just say?” Wade asked.
“I don’t know, but that was what it looked like to me. I started calling it the ‘chimera’ in my head until Vicky reminded me what the Tahni name for it was.”
“The Skrela,” she confirmed. “Those things are the Skrela.”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe they are, or maybe the Skrela are whatever built them and sent out those…pods. Eggs. Microfactories. Whatever those things are. Because those chimeras didn’t strike me as being awfully smart, just damned persistent.”
“One other thing,” Wade said. He hadn’t opened his armor and I thought maybe it was because he was afraid to. “That pod…it wasn’t big enough to have too many of those things inside it, right? How many of those are out there? I mean, to overrun a species as advanced as the Predecessors, it would take more than a handful of those things.”
“They weren’t stacked inside it,” I told him. “Like you said, there wouldn’t have been room. It’s making them.”
“That’s insane,” he blurted.
“I read something once,” Ogbah interjected, voice low and thoughtful. “About self-replicating devices, something called a Von Neumann probe. A sentient species that didn’t have FTL travel but wanted to colonize the galaxy could launch them at nearby star-systems at slower-than-light speeds and when they got to where they were going, they could make more of themselves, make whatever they needed to do the job.”
“These things weren’t sent to colonize,” Wade objected. “They were just shooting at everything.”
“The idea,” Ogbah said, “was that humans could have sent them to colonize the galaxy for us if we’d never discovered the wormholes, never come up with the Transition Drive. But what if another intelligent race somewhere sent them out to get rid of the competition? To make sure what they were doing never happened to them?”
“We’re assuming a lot,” I cut in. “And you all know what happens when you assume. It makes an ASS out of U and ME. But we know what we know and we have to plan accordingly. I think that pod is a factory and the only question is, what does it need for raw materials to make those things? Does it have what it needs back on the island? It made at least a handful of those things from whatever was inside it, but it can’t have unlimited resources crammed into that one pod.”
“The island has metal and plastic,” Vicky said, “from the gear the Tahni left behind. Is that enough?”
“God knows. But if it’s not, if they need more…well, where’s the closest place to get it?”
“Shit,” she hissed. “Bathala City.”
“It’s okay,” Wade insisted. “If we can take this thing back to the island, we can just walk the suits to the spaceport. It’s not like they can stop us. We’ll take back the shuttle and head for orbit. Or, if we can’t get the shuttle back, we’ll call Dunstan and have him pick us up in the cutter. We’ll be gone before those things reach the town.”
I eyed him sidelong, biting back the harsh words ready to burst out. It wasn’t as if he had any reason to care about the people of this planet. Hell, I wasn’t sure why I did. But he seemed to be forgetting something.
“What about Gardeck?” I reminded him. “Or did you just want to leave him here?”
“Shit, Cam,” he said, not sounding in the least apologetic, “I want to get him out if we can, but do you want to still be fucking around in Bathala City when those damned things come knocking on the door?”
“It won’t be as easy as that, anyway,” Ogbah, ever the thinker, pointed out. “You all have to be pretty near Winchester on ammo.”
Something tingled at the back of my neck. “Winchester” was a slang term for being out of ammo…a military slang term. It wasn’t impossible that Ogbah had picked it up from his various contacts, or that he’d been military ages ago and was simply older than he let on…but it felt odd to me.
“He’s right,” Vicky said, either not noticing or not acknowledging the slip. “Our suits can take anything the Kurotong can throw at us, but not everything they can throw at us. Especially with my jets out of commission.”
“And we can’t just barge straight into the docks near the compound either,” Ogbah said. “They have coil-gun turrets there and you can bet your ass that if Luz sold you out to the Tahni, he’s already fed Mama Bindy a line about how you betrayed her, and he’ll have the turrets ready to fill this boat full of holes, and us right along with it the second they see your suits.”
A grin slowly spread across my face, pushed there by a sudden thought.
“I think,” I told him, “I have a way around that. As long as I can get a signal from my ‘link all the way out here.”
I still had the ‘link Weston had dropped off for us. It hadn’t been safe to leave it behind, back when we thought we’d been going out on a legitimate mission—someone might have stumbled across it in our rooms. It was tucked into a pocket of my fatigues and I fished it out, praying it hadn’t been damaged with all the kicking around I’d taken.
The address had been for a text-only message, but I took the chance it would work for a voice call. The ‘link beeped three times before he answered.
“Yeah.” It was Weston and I let out the breath I’d been holding.
“We need to move things up. We hit the target already.” I muted the device and looked to Ogbah. “ETA?” I asked him, confident he’d understand the military acronym.
“At the top speed this hunk of junk can make,” he replied with a shrug, “half an hour.”
“We need you to execute in half an hour.”
I’d been keeping things purposefully vague, exercising comms security, but apparently, Weston was very confident in the encryption on the device he’d left for me. Which, I guess, he would be.
“Did you get your hands on the tech?” And the way he asked the question told me that, despite our understanding, there was no way in hell he was going to let us get off the planet with any Predecessor tech. So, I didn’t feel bad at all about the next part.
“Don’t worry,” I assured him. “Everything we found on that island, we’re bringing back with us.” I smiled, a baring of teeth he couldn’t see. “Half an hour from now.”
He hung up and I could see Vicky’s teeth glowing in the night.
“You, Cameron Alvarez,” she said, “are a bad, bad man.”
“Hold it right there. Kill your engines.”
The voice coming out of the loudspeakers from the wall was sharp and angry, as if our approach to the Kurotong compound at night was an affront to his manhood, or the spirits of his ancestors. I couldn’t make out his face, not even with the optics in the Vigilante’s helmet, not with the glare of the floodlights washing it out. His thermal signature was bright as day, though, right along with the four others at the wall turrets, the power packs for the coil-guns shining stars buried under the wall at their feet. At least the presence of the lights meant they didn’t have night vision. It seemed unlikely, given that you could buy a pair of infrared goggles for the price of a night out at a fancy restaurant back in the Commonwealth, but then again, this wasn’t the Commonwealth. Things that were as cheap as dirt there, people would kill for here.
Ogbah cut power to the jetdrive, which didn’t do too much since it had been set so low, the barge had barely been moving. The circle of the spotlight danced across the front edge of the barge, coming closer to the feet of our battlesuits and I tensed my shoulders and hips, ready to jump if I had to. Vicky couldn’t, so we’d have to take out the guns and protect her from enemy fire if they saw us before…
Gunfire. In the distance, far beyond the three-meter concrete wall guarding the closed gates to the Kurotong harbor, beyond even the lights of the compound, and I wondered if they could hear it with their biological ears or if my suit’s audio pickups were amplifying it for my benefit.
“What the hell is that?” It was the same angry voice that had hailed us a moment ago, and I knew they could, indeed, hear the whoosh-crack of Gyroc fire. “Vinnie! Ken! Anyone at the front gate, what’s going on over there?”
Go, I urged him. You want to. You want to go join the fight, get your shots in. Do it. We’re nothing, just a harmless boat.
“You two! Stay here! Bennie, Lou, you’re with me!”
Damn. Well, at least the one who was on the ball was taking the bait. As long as these two losers didn’t shine that light on us…
The flare of the spotlight into the center of my external camera killed that hope and I hit the jets before the shouted expletive from one of the two remaining guards even reached my ears. The barge sloshed violently in the shallow water of the inlet and I hoped Vicky could keep her balance, but those coil-guns had to go.
The whole of the compound was laid out ahead of me as I soared over the wall, lights flickering and people running, guns in their hands, heading for the threat they knew about, ignoring the much greater one we presented. Gun trucks were rumbling up the dirt road, their suspensions bouncing up and down on the ruts, shouts and curses following them as they nearly ran down pedestrians.
And then I was coming down, nearly on top of the two guards, their faces contorted in fear as they dived away from me. They were on a firing platform and one of them tumbled off the side of it, managing to land on his feet three meters below before collapsing, screaming as he clutched at his ankle. The other was trying to pull a handgun from his belt, as if the Gyroc pistol would do anything against the Vigilante armor, and I tried very hard not to hurt him to badly as I shoved him off the side to join his friend.
“Wade,” I transmitted, “get the gate.”
I didn’t bother to disable the turrets because I didn’t have to—by the time anyone could get to it, it would be far too late. Wade stepped off the top of the wall where he’d been keeping watched and hovered in mid-air, putting a round from his Gauss rifle through the metal chain holding the twin leaves of the gate blocking the inlet. The two halves of the chain fell aside and he rammed a shoulder into the gate, his jet exhaust turning white, the tone of his thrusters going up an octave at the boost of power. The gate swung open and the barge chugged through the gap, grinding its side into the cement piling on the right, letting Vicky jump off the side.
