First Contact (2008)

Introduction

2012-12-21T06:56:00.000-08:00

This is a darker take on the "First Contact" novel.

In this universe there was first the devastating Doomsday War, a sort of World War III that left America and many other parts of the world in ruins. Then came about a century of rebuilding from the ashes until this global union called the Terran Associated Governments (TAG) was formed. They were effective enough as a government, but not a utopia by any means. Unfortunately, some people in TAG decided they wanted to run the whole show and thus a civil war destroyed TAG and created global chaos.

In this world, everything runs on a barter economy, cupcakes are luxury goods on Mars, and mercenaries outnumber the civilian population. Who would blame anyone for wanting to get out of that? Fortunately, a young Chinese scientist named Ling whose gift from her dying father was the location for a planet similar enough to Earth to start a new colony. Even more fortunately, her boss is the wealthiest man on Earth and his operatives have located a ship that can serve as a new Ark to save humanity. All he needs are some mercenaries to take possession of the ship, a brilliant engineer to get the ship working, and a crew to fly it.

Enter a group of Mexican mercenaries, none of whom is over the age of 25, who've spent the last few years fighting phony wars for a trade union of mercenaries. Then there's Jacoby Lester, a young genius who travels the crumbling highways in an armored tractor-trailer to sell weapons systems to communities. Finally, there's Captain Alicia Stowe of the Martian Aeronautical Command--an impressive title for a navy that consists of a handful of armed freighters that might fall apart if they ever hit full speed--who comes from good military stock but has spent the last five years sitting behind a desk, eating ill-gotten cupcakes.

This motley crew has to come together to steal a ship and fly it light-years across space, where even more danger awaits them. (If you read the original "First Contact" or the first remake "Rebirth: The Oracle" then you'll know what will happen.)

Please enjoy First Contact (2008)...

Epilogue

2008-04-09T05:45:00.002-07:00

Epilogue

Ever since waking up on the ground of the ancient city, Alicia felt as if she were walking in a dream. She supposed a lot of this feeling had to do with every time she looked in a mirror—or any polished surface—she saw an unfamiliar face. It was a beautiful face despite its paleness, a vast improvement over the pudgy mug she had worn, but it was not her face. This face belonged to someone young and dynamic, someone who still believed great things could be accomplished, not someone who had lost everything and everyone of value.

Worse yet, everyone looked at her differently now. Lieutenants Wheeler and Kline gazed at her with awe, responding to every command with a crisp, “Yes, sir!” Major Rosaro spoke to her warmly, going so far as to take her aside for a personal briefing where they swapped stories like old comrades. Sylvia Barker acted perkier than usual, inviting Alicia to confide in her about anything as if they had known each other for years.

Even Jacoby Lester treated her differently, but in a far less positive. After their lovemaking session they had climbed back into the truck to find the ship in its hangar, just where the Sentinel had said they would find it. Along the way, Alicia tried to make conversation only to find Lester completely uninterested in anything more than the occasional grunt. That was fine with her, because she needed the quiet to figure out why she had slept with him in the first place. When she had woke up and found him kneeling down next to her, kissing him just seemed right. One thing led to another in a haze of orgasmic joy she hadn’t felt since, well, ever.

The best theory she could come up with to explain what had happened was that she had been so happy to be alive that she would have fucked anyone at that point, even one of the crabs. That it was someone young and handsome—and human—like Lester only sweetened the deal. But when she woke up, even in her current semi-dazed state she knew it had been the wrong thing to do. Not because of age or position or anything like that. They simply didn’t know each other well enough and what she did know about him was not appealing.

He must have sensed the difficulty as well, because once they reached the ship, he went to find the engine room and stayed there. At first she thought perhaps he found the alien technology so fascinating he had forgotten about anything else, but when she went down there the tension nearly suffocated her. She couldn’t get out of the engine room and back to the bridge fast enough.

Three days later and she had talked to him for a grand total of a minute. Once Wheeler and Kline came aboard, Alicia delegated all the communications with Lester to them, not that he talked much more to them. In her private chat with Major Rosaro later, Alicia discovered part of the reason for Lester’s sullenness. The major described finding a pallet filled with strange machines crashed on a mountainside with a message from Dr. Chen aboard. In looking around the mountaintop, Rosaro’s men found evidence that Chen had survived and then been abducted. Given Lester’s relationship with Dr. Chen, Alicia could understand why he acted so cold towards her.

In time maybe he would get over the guilt he felt, but thinking of the hurt she felt over her parents dying twenty yeas ago, she didn’t think this likely anytime soon. At least for the meantime they both had plenty of work to do. They had to get this ship flying and back to Earth to stop the Brachyurans, as she had promised the Sentinel.

With fewer than thirty of them—most of those being colonists and Rosaro’s soldiers—flying the ship would be a challenge. The Sentinel or whoever had designed this ship had taken a lot of the work out of it by automating most of the controls. The labels on the controls had even spontaneously translated themselves into English for the benefit of the new users. Still, those controls needed someone to watch over them and with only three to man the bridge this meant very little sack time.

Not that Alicia found she needed a lot of sleep anymore. She had slept for about six of the last thirty-six hours and didn’t feel any of the usual heaviness accompanying fatigue. This vibrant young body didn’t much sleep, nor did it need much food either, which was good considering they had only the rations from Lester’s truck, the transports, and what the colonists had on them. Machines in the ship’s galley could produce a gray paste no one had been brave enough to try yet. Rosaro and some of her men had taken one of the transports to forage and collect water for the trip.

From the reports Lester sent back and from her own reading, Alicia knew the ship used something called a Trans-Dimensional Jump drive to create a wormhole through which it could travel unthinkable distances in the blink of an eye, or so the materials claimed. Alicia didn’t trust it any more than sticking herself in a cryogenic pod for ten years, but she tried to remind herself the Sentinel wouldn’t have given her a ship to fight the Brachyurans if it would blow up en route.

Once they got to Earth, she would fulfill her part of the bargain by destroying the Brachyuran invaders. The Sentinel had told her she needed to wipe out every single Brachyuran in the galaxy, but she wanted only to think one step at a time. Her sleepwalking brain couldn’t handle anything more long-term.

Wheeler’s voice coming from a speaker shook Alicia from her troubling thoughts. “Captain, we’re coming in with food and water!”

Alicia slapped at the buttons on her console to find the right one. “Acknowledged,” she said at last. “Welcome back.”

“Thank you, sir!”

Alicia wondered how long Wheeler and Kline could go on worshipping her. Probably until she got them all killed trying to fight the Brachyuran ship. When she got to Hell they would probably still be there as a punishment. “What did I get myself into?” she wondered aloud to the empty bridge.

Another day went by to stow the supplies Rosaro had brought back and to make one final check of all the systems. When they were all reasonably sure they could get the ship off the ground, Alicia gathered everyone outside for the christening ceremony. It had not been her idea to force everyone out into the desert at the warmest part of the day to have them listen to another of her terrible speeches. Sylvia Barker had been the one to suggest the ship couldn’t lift off until they’d given it a proper christening. “It’s bad luck for a ship not to have a name,” she said.

Alicia didn’t bother pointing out the Persephone had been given a christening ceremony and bad luck still followed it around. In the end the ceremony would help boost the morale of the survivors to give them a little feeling of normalcy. And she supposed having something to call the ship other than “the ship” would be good for clarity’s sake.

The problem came when they assembled at the front of the silver, teardrop-shaped vessel. In the four days since finding it, no one had discussed what they should call it. “It’s your ship, Captain,” Sylvia Barker said. “You pick the name.”

“I’m open to suggestions,” Alicia said. She hadn’t so much as named a goldfish growing up, let alone a starship.

The crowd rumbled for a minute. Finally a voice called out, “How about the Avenger?” To her surprise, this suggestion had come from Jacoby Lester. Then again, maybe it wasn’t that surprising. The Brachyurans had killed the woman he loved and destroyed his precious truck. Avenging this was exactly what he wanted.

“Sounds fine to me,” Alicia said. “Anyone want to second it?”

“I like it,” Major Rosaro said. The others in the small group nodded or murmured their approval of Lester’s name.

“All right then.” Alicia took a crystal glass found in the galley that someone had filled with water. “I hereby christen this ship the Avenger. May she avenge those whom we have loved and lost.”

The glass shattered against the ship’s silver hull, the pieces tinkling to the ground. Then there was silence. Alicia used this moment of silence to pray not for those who had died, but those who were still alive, those whose lives were in her pale, wrinkleless hands now. “Everyone get on board. We’ll leave within the hour,” she announced to the crowd.

The bridge for the newly-christened Avenger was nothing like the antiquated mess of the Persephone. Not only were the computers far more advanced, but the heavy automation allowed everything to fit in a single compartment. Wheeler took the helm at the rear of the bridge, not more than three steps from the lift doors. Kline descended the half-dozen steps to the lower half of the compartment to take the sensors and communications stations. Behind them came Alicia to mount the raised dais in the center of the bridge.

Unlike the Orson Scott Card or the Persephone, the Avenger’s throne-like chair had more than enough padding to make up for the natural padding she had lost. The consoles around the chair could give her instant access to any system on the ship from the bridge to the engine room and even the galley. Whenever she sat in the chair, an unsettling feeling of doubt fluttered through her stomach. What the hell am I doing here? she asked herself again.

“You are doing what you must do,” the Sentinel whispered into her ear, speaking for the first time since saving her life. “And I will be there to make sure you succeed.”

She felt another flutter in her stomach, this one of dread. He was here somewhere, in some form she could not see. He would make sure he got his money’s worth for bringing her back to life and giving her this ship. What have I done?

“Captain?” Kline’s voice asked, cutting into her thoughts.

“What is it?”

“All systems are ready, sir.”

Alicia took one last look around at the bridge of her ship. No, not her ship. His ship. The birdman’s ship. She was nothing more than his puppet in all this. But what other choice did she have?

Clearing her throat, she tried to speak in her best imitation of her mother’s voice. “Then let’s go. Take her up.”

The Avenger rose into the Lancaster sky so smoothly Alicia could hardly feel it move. The ship emerged through the atmosphere with similar ease until she was back into space, where she had lived most of her life. Very soon she would return to where her parents had lived and died—back to Earth.

She hoped she wasn’t too late.

[End]

Chapter 33

2008-04-09T05:45:00.001-07:00

Chapter 33

Like in everything else, Brevlar’s transport ship had to wait until all those of the shock troopers returned to the hangar before it could come in for a landing. Brevlar spent the time contemplating the gruesome trophies had had taken from the wreckage and rehearsing what he would say to Commander Bolli about the mission. No doubt the commander, in the throes of the sickness, would appreciate Brevlar returning minus his hatchlings and with no bio-energy to show for it. If the trophies and accompanying lies didn’t assuage the commander, Brevlar would find himself on the end of a pike as Bolli’s trophy.

Another solution occurred to him as the transport ship finally made its way into the hangar. The transport ship had been programmed to return with or without anyone aboard, so it would be easy enough to stowaway on the collection vessel until it returned to Brachyura. The problem then would be what to do after he landed and someone from Command told Callida he had died. Better to risk Bolli’s wrath than to put his mate through that kind of torment.

In the hangar he watched rows of shock troopers marching down the ramps of their transport ships, none of them carrying storage containers of bio-energy. Using his skills as a hunter—and the fact that shock troopers never paid any attention to recon troopers unless they needed someone to flush out a nest of the enemy—to sidle up to one column of shock troopers. From their rumblings, he knew his chances with Bolli had just nose-dived.

According to the shock troopers, a major attack to eliminate the last substantial pocket of the enemy had been aborted by the mission’s tactical computers. The enemy had used some kind of unknown weapon to bring down a dozen transport ships before the computers brought the ships home. Unfortunately for Brevlar, Bolli had not been on one of those transport ships. That meant the mission commander would already be ready to tear someone to shreds and a recon trooper returning from a failed mission would make a convenient target for venting stress.

His survival instincts told him to scurry into a corner of the hangar and hide until Bolli vented his frustration on some other sucker. With someone so gripped by the sickness, that process could take weeks. Brevlar might as well enact his plan to fake his own death. A pity he didn’t have an aide to send in as a sacrifice, but given the casualty ratings, Command never thought a recon trooper commander needed an aide.

The clang of metal slamming against metal echoed throughout the hangar, causing Brevlar’s heart to sink further. Commander Bolli grabbed another supply crate, hurling it over the heads of his shock troopers to shatter against the wall. For a moment Brevlar froze as the commander’s unmasked eyes looked towards him, but the mission commander was staring at a technician nearby. “You will program the computer to return us to the surface immediately or you will join this one!” To Brevlar’s horror, Bolli scooped the corpse of a technician from the transport ship and threw it at the feet of the other technician.

Even the other shock troopers looked mortified, scuttling away from the hangar to their barracks. Brevlar placed himself between two of the fleeing shock troopers to screen his escape. He reached the doorway when he heard Bolli’s voice roar, “You, recon trooper, what have you to report?”

Had there been any other recon troopers around Brevlar might have made good the escape and later claimed a misunderstanding. Instead, he turned around to face his irate commander. He held up the trophies as a peace offering before he said, “I bring you this as tokens of the enemy’s destruction.”

Bolli didn’t seem to notice the goodwill offerings. “Report,” he said.

“We succeeded in our mission to follow the enemy. Once they came to a stop, we launched our attack and defeated them.”

“I see none of your pathetic unit with you. Where are they?”

“I am saddened to report all were killed when one of the enemy cunningly detonated a hidden explosive device to destroy their vehicle. I have brought you the treacherous creature’s head.” Brevlar let the bag fall away to reveal the enemy creature’s head. On the ride up, more of the flesh on the skull had peeled away to reveal more of the white bone underneath.

“I care not for their heads. What of bio-energy?”

“We were in the process of securing the bio-energy when the explosion came. Had I not been thrown clear of the blast, I would have died with the rest of my unit.”

“That would have been preferable than for you to return with these meager offerings. Where did their vehicle stop? What did you find?”

For the first time in the discussion Brevlar could offer the truth, albeit with a glaring omission. “They came to a stop in the middle of the dunes. When they did not move again after some time, we proceeded with the attack.”

“Incompetent fool!” Bolli swiped at Brevlar with a claw, but luckily for Brevlar, not with the sharpened edge. Instead, he used the blunt side to bat the recon trooper away. The trophies flew from Brevlar’s claws, the metal tube landing somewhere with a clatter while the head landed next to Brevlar with a soft thud. “I should have you executed for your failure and drained to replace some of the bio-energy squandered.”

“I apologize, sir,” Brevlar said, searching for something to appease the commander with. “I submit myself to your judgment and I volunteer myself to your service for your next mission.”

This was an empty promise, as Brevlar doubted Command would give such an unstable hothead another mission. Still, he could see the honorable warrior’s plea having its intended effect. As Brevlar had expected, a naïve young commander like Bolli still cared about such foolish things as honor.

“Very well, vermin. I will spare you this time, but if you fail me again, I will put you on a pike next to that,” Bolli said, gesturing to the technician’s corpse.

“I understand, sir. I will not fail again.”

As Brevlar turned to go, Bolli said, “Take your trophies to my office. They will serve as a reminder of the promise you made this day.”

“Of course, sir,” Brevlar said, gathering the trophies. Scurrying through the corridors, he couldn’t keep his eyes from looking into the face of the enemy. He came within a mandible’s width of ending up like that twice today. But he had survived and soon he would be home with his wife again. That would make all the danger worth it.

The puny recon trooper had left the trophies on Bolli’s desk, the head staring at him with its one eye as he walked into the room. After the door shut, Bolli took the head in one claw, studying it like a work of art. Such a grotesque race, he thought. They were as feeble as the recon troopers with their brittle bones tucked inside, surrounded by a layer of flesh and fur. Bolli had to resist the temptation to smash open the head just to prove the point to himself.

They should not have beaten him! Though he had slaughtered the vast majority of them in the cave, the one small group remained to mock him. They had sent him scurrying away like a scolded hatchling thanks to foolish technicians and their computers. The next time he would rip open the hatch if need be to get down on the ground and take the precious bio-energy in those weak bags of meat.

He set the head to one side of the desk, facing the door to greet anyone who walked in, and then picked up the length of tube. It was not so different from the dart throwers used by shock troopers, only the projectiles it shot could damage the tough armor of a transport ship. Thinking back to the battle in the cave and the ineffectiveness of the projectile launchers used by the creatures there, he wondered why they had not used something like this in there. But then if they had, Bolli would not be sitting at his desk; he would be a rotting heap left to adorn someone else’s desk.

He hurled the tube away against the wall. Such thoughts would do him no good right now. A warrior focused on the present and planned for the future; he did not muse about the past until he could no longer fight. Yes, the old had time for reminiscing, not him. He needed to think about how he could defeat those creatures that remained and find a more plentiful source of bio-energy.

A light tap sounded against his office door. “I do not want to be disturbed,” Bolli shouted through the door at his foolish aide. Perhaps he should take the aide’s bio-energy to make up for not killing the foolish recon trooper.

“I’m sorry, sir, but Scientist Bytellen—”

“That’s Master Scientist Bytellen,” came an arrogant voice as the door opened. The burgundy-colored scientist, not much bigger and certainly far less strong than a recon trooper, strutted into the office.

“What do you want, Master Scientist?” Bolli asked, making no attempt to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

The scientist waited for the door to close before he spoke, a mandible twitching as he noticed the creature’s head staring back at him. “I have come to offer the key to salvation for all our people—especially you. My work has succeeded at last and with it a new dawn for—”

“Get to the point,” Bolli hissed. “I have no time for your self-glorifying rantings.”

“Very well then, Commander Bolli. I hear you and your fearless warriors were defeated by a handful of the enemy. And I hear that even if you return to destroy them, you still will not have the bio-energy you need.”

“How did you hear these things?”

“That’s not important. What is important is that I have the solution to your problem. I can take you to a planet rich with life, enough to fill all seventeen collection vessels and give you a chance for revenge. You see, I have learned the location of their home world.”

“Their home world? You’re saying they are not native to this planet?”

“Indeed. This group is a reconnaissance group sent to claim this world for future expansion. Their true home world lies a short distance away.”

“And how did you come by this information? From one of your experiments?”

“No, from the messages they sent before their ship was destroyed. I won’t bore you with the details of how I deciphered the message, not that you would understand in any event.”

Bolli gestured to the head at the corner of the desk. “Choose your words carefully, Master Scientist.”

“Come now, there’s no need for us to be enemies. Our goals are the same. You want bio-energy for your personal needs and I want more samples to further my research. Going to their home world will satisfy both of us.”

“Perhaps. What about those pitiful creatures left on the surface?”

“Leave them. They are unimportant. There’s no sense wasting good bio-energy to crush them for your foolish pride.” The scientist’s mandibles clicked together as he motioned to the trophy. “What better way to take revenge than to leave them stranded on this miserable world and destroy all their brethren?”

Bolli considered this. As much as he wanted to finish off those creatures on the surface, if the scientist spoke the truth, then a much larger prize had presented itself. A prize with enough bio-energy to save his mother and sisters from the ration camps. Staying here to expend energy and lives on the relative handful of creatures would only delay their stay in the camps. He couldn’t allow his pride to get in the way of that.

More importantly, to ensure his cut of the bio-energy, he had to remain as mission commander. He couldn’t risk going back to Brachyura and letting Command assign someone else to the task. He would have to make the authorized jump before those back home became suspicious and sent a relief party. There was no time to lose.

“Can you program the computers to take us to this planet?” he asked.

“It’s already done. We can be there as soon as we reach the jump point.”

“Then we will set out at once,” Bolli announced. He came around from behind his desk to glower down at the scientist. “In the meantime, you will mention this to no one. If you dare to betray me—”

“I understand, Commander. I have no intention of betraying you. As I said, our goals are the same.”

“For now. When we arrive at the planet you can have your specimens—after I have the bio-energy I need.”

The scientist paused to consider this offer for a moment until he realized he had no choice in the matter. “That is acceptable. There will be more than enough of the creatures there to satisfy us both.” The scientist backed away towards the door, the strut gone from his steps. “I will notify you when all is ready.”

Bolli waited until the scientist left and the doors closed to collapse onto his cushion with relief. He didn’t care one iota about the scientist’s foolish experiments or his grandiose claims of saving the Brachyuran people. He only cared about getting the bio-energy he needed and now the scientist’s madness had dropped the way right onto his shell. Soon, very soon, he would have enough bio-energy to rescue his family from the bureaucrats back home. That would make it worth putting up with the scientist’s nonsense about a ‘cure.’

As if Brachyurans had some kind of disease. We are the superior ones, Bolli thought, glancing again at the head on his desk. They are little more than animals. The weaklings should be glad their deaths would go for a nobler purpose than they could ever hope to achieve scrambling around on their two, flesh-coated legs. They are the real disease, he thought. And I will be the cure.

While he went to deal with the mission commander, Bytellen left his daughter locked in the laboratory. The hatchling had begun to stir after the infusion of oxygen-rich air into her lungs. She made more of her gibberish hisses sounds, her strange white-and-brown eyes seeking him out. When she did see him, the hissing intensified, becoming similar to the noises she had made while hacking apart Blutax’s thug.

“There is no need to be afraid, my daughter,” Bytellen said. “You are perfectly safe here. I won’t let anyone harm you.”

The hatchling blinked with confusion and then began hissing again. Bytellen thought back to before his experiment and the words he had played for his specimen in her own language. Perhaps her mind still hadn’t adjusted to the present reality of its body; perhaps she still thought in the guttural tongue of her former people.

He found the recorder he had used, keying it back to the beginning. Bytellen did not understand the language, nor could he have spoken it in any case, but he recognized the tone of the message as one of comfort and conciliation. Even if his hatchling did not understand the words either, the soothing down might calm her.

“Greetings. We mean you no harm. We are explorers from a distant world. We wish to live with you in peace. We wish to share our science and technology with you,” the voice in the recorder said.

Bytellen didn’t understand these words, but they had the desired effect on his daughter. Her hissing subsided, turning to a more thoughtful wheezing. He let the message repeat several times while he thought of how to keep the hatchling entertained while he went out. Of course he could inject her with a sedative, but his sedatives were all designed for full-blooded Brachyurans, not such a unique creature like daughter. The would be no way to tell what kind of damage such a sedative might have on her delicate internal organs.

As he studied her, he considered what his mother had done for and his siblings when they were hatchlings. Mother had left them in the care of the servants most of the time and those servants, with their own tasks to perform, would lock Bytellen and his siblings in the nursery with an image viewer. Already a student of science, Bytellen used to watch the image viewer with intense fascination, trying to determine how it worked.

The collection vessel didn’t contain much in the way of viewer programs and most of those were dedicated to military training. Someone with his daughter’s violent temper certainly didn’t need training to become more dangerous. Scrolling through the list in the archive, Bytellen found a section of programs designed for hatchlings. One of Bytellen’s relatives had installed the programs for an eventual colonization mission during one of the bio-energy surpluses. Locked away in a little-used archive, no technician ever bothered to delete it.

When he returned to Brachyura, Bytellen would have to stop by this relative’s grave to thank him for such foresight. In the meantime, Bytellen called up the ideal program for his daughter: one on basic language skills. Like most programs designed for hatchlings, this one featured lots of bright colors and movement to keep the young eyes focused on the screen. His daughter proved to be no exception. Once the program began, her strange eyes stared at the screen with a fascination mirror Bytellen’s at that age. He couldn’t help feeling again a surge of pride at her perfection.

“I will return shortly, my daughter,” he said quietly as he slipped out the door. He made sure to activate the door’s locking mechanism in case the program did not keep his daughter entertained the entire time and she tried to go exploring again.

As he returned to the laboratory, he knew something had gone wrong when he found the door unlocked. Inside, he found his daughter backed into a corner, hissing as she had before he left only this time at Blutax. The leader of Forty-One snapped his claws dangerously towards the hatchling, making a hissing sound of his own.

“What is going on here?” Bytellen shouted.

“This thing of yours killed Baz,” Blutax growled. “Now I’m going to make her pay for it.”

“You will do no such thing,” Bytellen said. “She is my property and if you so much as scratch her shell, I will make sure you are thrown into a labor camp for the rest of your miserable life.”

Blutax spun around, rearing up so that he towered over Bytellen. “You won’t be able to do anything if you’re dead too,” Blutax said.

“You would be stupid enough to try it on a ship full of shock troopers.” Bytellen looked beneath Blutax’s underbelly to see his daughter still backed into the corner, though she had stopped hissing for the moment. “Leave now and when we return to Brachyura my family will compensate you for Baz’s life.”

Blutax considered the offer a moment until Bytellen wondered if perhaps the mercenary would try to kill them both after all. Finally Blutax lowered himself to meet Bytellen’s eyes. “Very well, your highness. I will accept your offer, so long as you keep this thing—” he paused to gesture at the hatchling with a claw, bringing on another round of angry hissing, “away from us.”

“Agreed.” Bytellen waited until Blutax reached the door to say, “We will be leaving the system soon for another collection mission. I will require your help to gather more specimens. We can work out the price later.”

“Careful, my lord, or you might overextend yourself,” Blutax said with genuine menace on his way out.

“You’re safe now, my daughter,” Bytellen said.

To his surprise and great joy, the hatchling rushed forward, rubbing her mandibles against his. “Father,” she said in distorted but understandable Brachyuran.

Her first real word! And she had called him Father. If Blutax had returned to kill him, Bytellen would have died the happiest Brachyuran in the universe. “My beautiful daughter,” he said, stroking her shell. “Such a wonderful little girl you are.”

As he continued to stroke her shell, he realized his daughter needed a name. In Brachyuran society a female hatchling did not get a name until she mated, mating being the equivalent to combat for males. Until then, their mother referred to them by the order of their birth such as “First born” or “Second born.” He thought this too impersonal and ordinary for an extraordinary creature like his daughter.

“What should we name you?” he said, not expecting an answer. There was no way her young mind could process the concept of a name—

“Chenling,” she said.

“What was that?”

“Chenling,” she said again, tapping herself with a claw.

Not only had she spoken, but she could understand a fairly complex question as well. Bytellen tapped his shell with a claw to make certain this weren’t a dream. Not even in his wildest dreams had he thought such a thing possible, at least not so quickly. A hatchling required weeks to begin speaking and twice as long to understand complex queries. Yet his daughter had done this in hours.

“You truly are wonderful, my darling Chenling,” he said, patting her shell.

“Father,” she said again.

“That’s right, I’m your father. And soon you’re going to have lots of siblings to play with,” he said as he felt the collection vessel begin to move from orbit towards the jump point.

Chapter 32

2008-04-09T05:44:00.000-07:00

Chapter 32

The headlights of The Monster showed nothing more than a tube of black rock all around. The truck continued to descend through the rock until Jacoby thought they must be nearing the planet’s core. Or maybe this lack of perception was due to the nasty bump on the head he’d taken during the battle. His ears continued to ring and blood seeped through the fingers pressed to his temple. If he got the chance, he would redecorate the interior with more cushioned seats.

Whether he got that chance or not depended all on this mysterious “birdman” Captain Stowe had mentioned. From the sound of it, this birdman didn’t plan on letting her go alive; Jacoby assumed he would share the same fate. Cradling the shotgun, he took comfort knowing he wouldn’t go without a fight. But then again, if this birdman could access The Monster’s computers from a hundred kilometers away and part the sand to bring them down here, a mere shotgun wouldn’t frighten him. Or her. Or it. Whatever the hell it was.

He glanced over at Stowe in the driver’s seat; her expression had not changed since they began this descent. The look of intense concentration on her face told Jacoby she needed every possible ounce of self-control to keep from curling up on the floor in the fetal position and bawling like a little girl for her mommy. Ever since she had mentioned her dreams on the Persephone, Jacoby had thought she must be crazy, even with someone breaking into the navigation computer. Getting the ship blown out from under her could have given her a case of post-traumatic stress. For all he knew, she might have programmed the navigation computer herself while he wasn’t looking.

Now that they were riding this nightmare elevator, he knew either she was sane or they were both crazy. Remembering the rest of what Stowe had said, Jacoby didn’t like the direction this trip was taking. Though he supposed getting killed by a mysterious alien was just as good as by the crab things.

“We’re slowing down,” Stowe whispered, her words slurred from her teeth clamping together so tightly.

“At least now we’ll get to the bottom of this,” Jacoby said. If Stowe recognized the pun, she gave no sign. Jesus, she’s really got it bad, he thought. He tightened his grip on the shotgun with one hand, the other reaching into the center console. “You’d better take this,” he said, holding up a small yet dangerous-looking pistol.

Stowe reached out stiffly, as if moving her limbs after a long sleep. She tucked the gun between the folds of her gut. “Thanks,” she whispered.

The elevator came to a stop with a metallic clang. Jacoby still didn’t see anything other than rock around them, but The Monster began to move. He reached over to cut off the truck’s engine, stopping his hand in midair when the nose of The Monster plowed through the rock as if it were no more than a curtain. “Some kind of camouflage netting,” he said. Stowe said nothing.

On the other side, The Monster’s headlights showed another platform and beyond this, a city larger than any on Earth. A city made entirely of salmon-colored crystals shaped into elaborate swirls, petals, and discs rising thousands of meters. Jacoby thought of a story Abe had told him as a boy about an emerald city. Even at the time Jacoby had known such a thing to be impossible and yet here it was, kilometers beneath an alien planet.

“My God,” Jacoby said for lack of any better way to phrase his awe. The sheer manpower required to fashion just one building would have rivaled the Great Pyramids in Egypt or Stonehenge in England.

And yet as The Monster descended on another platform, Jacoby didn’t see any signs of life. No one walking around or driving, not even any signs of activity inside the massive crystal buildings. He opened a window to listen for the typical Earth sounds of traffic both human and vehicle—nothing. Nor did he detect the usual odor of eggs left under a radiator for a century associated with large cities.

At the bottom of this elevator ride, The Monster began moving forward along a wide avenue of what appeared to be orange moss. Had the aliens who created this city used the moss for pavement or had it grown here on its own? From the way the moss grew in a straight line and stopped uniformly near the base of the crystal buildings, Jacoby assumed it was unnatural.

Stranger yet, the buildings didn’t seem to have any windows or doors. He supposed that could be an illusion like The Monster appearing to drive through solid rock. After all, whatever lived here must need a way to get in and out. Then again, with the complete lack of life around him, exiting and entering the buildings might not be a primary concern.

This thought put him once more in mind of the Great Pyramids in Egypt. Those had been built as final resting places for the pharaohs. Perhaps this empty city with its doorless, windowless buildings served a similar purpose. He shivered from the creepy feeling anyone gets in violating a tomb.

“It sure is quiet,” he said, listening over the hum of The Monster’s engine for any sign of life.

“Yes,” Stowe said. Her hand went to the gun at her waist. “We’re almost there.”

“How do you know that?”

“He told me.”

“Great. Then he can tell us how to get the hell out of here,” Jacoby said, trying to keep his voice light. They were both nervous enough as it was.

The Monster came to a stop in front of what appeared to be an oak tree over a thousand meters tall. At the end of the branches, Jacoby saw his first sign of life in red lights winking at random. He supposed those could easily have been left on by whoever had designed this city for centuries or even millennia. “So this is it,” he said. “Nice place. A little impractical though.”

“He’s saying we should get out and walk over there,” Stowe said, gesturing to the tree-shaped building.

“Right,” Jacoby said, cocking the shotgun for reassurance. “Let’s go meet this birdman of yours.”

He stepped out of the cab, onto the orange moss surface. Unlike Earth moss, this crunched beneath his feet, sounding like the proverbial walking on eggshells. Examining some of the moss crushed by his boot, it made sense. A long time ago this moss probably would have the same texture as that on Earth, but decades or centuries or millennia of neglect had allowed it to fossilize.

For the first time since landing on Lancaster he thought about Ling. If she had come with him instead of stubbornly looking for her own way down she might be here now to help him make sense of all this. He could certainly use her much greater knowledge of biology and archaeology right about now. And being able to reach out and feel the warm, smooth skin on her hand might have calmed some of his jitters.

With so little noise around them, Jacoby didn’t have any trouble hearing the subtle click on The Monster’s roof. He turned in time to see one of the crab aliens fling itself from the roof—straight at Captain Stowe. She spun around just as the crab brought a claw down, jabbing it into her chest.

In that moment Jacoby’s entire body froze. He watched Stowe’s face wince with pain, followed by something else—a calmness as if she had finally solved a difficult puzzle. Her face contorted into a grim smile as she pitched backwards onto the fossilized moss. “My only asking price is that you give your life,” she whispered.

For its part the alien didn’t sit idly by to watch Captain Stowe’s death throes. It pulled its claw from her chest and then lunged at Jacoby. He fired a shot that went at least a meter wide before the crab landed at his feet. The crab swiped with one claw and the other, tearing a gash in Jacoby’s sides but missing anything important. Jacoby swung the butt of the shotgun around to smack the crab in the mandibles. Before Jacoby could get the barrel around to finish it off, the crab scuttled away into the empty streets.

A sigh coming from Stowe sent Jacoby running over to her side. She still wore the same contented look on her face even as her head lolled away from him. He felt for a pulse but found nothing. The captain was dead.

Jacoby pulled the pistol from her belt and then opened the magazine to make sure it was loaded. Then he ran off to make sure that fucking crab paid for what he’d done.

Everything Alicia had heard about death said one would see a tunnel of white light welcoming him or her into whatever passed for the afterlife. As a child, she imagined she would emerge from that tunnel to find all her friends, relatives, and pets waiting for her along with a big cake and lots of gifts like a birthday party. After her parents died over Earth, she took the more cynical view that when a person died, he or she simply faded to black and then became word food.

That a spider web of red light should form before her eyes had never occurred to her. Yet while she knew her body lay on the ground with a gaping chest wound, she found herself in a void otherwise empty but for this spider web of red light. Not even her arms, legs, or torso existed in this place, only a vague notion of herself as a human being with those body parts.

“You’ve finally come, Alicia Rose Stowe,” a familiar voice hissed.

“It’s you,” she said, her voice seeming to echo as if she were standing at the bottom of a very deep well. “Who are you?”

“My name does not translate into your insignificant language. For now you may simply call me the Sentinel.”

“Sentinel of what?”

“Of the city, of my people, of everything. For you see, I am the last one left. The others have all gone on ahead.”

“To where?”

“Your feeble mind couldn’t possibly comprehend the mechanics. Suffice it to say they are gone and I am all that’s left to finish this business,” the Sentinel said, his voice booming all around her. If she still had hands she would have used them to cover her ears, if she still had those either. “Now that you’re here we can finally get underway.”

“I’m tired of these riddles. Why don’t you show yourself and tell me what the hell you want,” Alicia said. She supposed this might not be the best negotiating tactic given what little leverage she had as a corpse, but she had already endured enough of the Sentinel’s abuse.

“Very well then.” From the spider web of red light came a red cloud with the vague shape of a human and the head of a bird. “I have a very simple proposition for you: I will save your life and those of your otherwise worthless people and in exchange you will destroy the Brachyurans.”

“Brachyurans? You mean those crabs who attacked us?”

“The very same. Given your race’s limited knowledge of the universe, you are of course unaware of the threat the Brachyurans pose. They are a plague, a cancer eating away at the fabric of everything that needs eradicated.”

“You seem to be all-powerful. What do you need me for?”

“The sad irony is that in my unlimited state of existence I am in fact limited when dealing with you three-dimensional beings. I have the superior intelligence and weapons necessary to destroy these vermin, but not the ability to operate those weapons. For this I require undeveloped beings like yourself.”

“I’m glad you think so highly of us,” she said, the sarcasm losing its effectiveness in the echoing void. “So what you want is for me to go back and use these weapons of yours to wipe out these Brachyurans for you?”

“Yes. Every last one of them must be eliminated to completely wipe their scourge from the universe. You will make sure of it.”

Were it possible, Alicia would have gulped at this. “You want me to wipe out an entire species? I can’t agree to that. It’s genocide.”

“What do you think they will do to your people once they reach Earth? They have already wiped out two hundred eighty-seven species in less than five hundred of your years.” The Sentinel’s blurred, birdlike face suddenly became sharp, a pair of red eyes glowering at Alicia as he let the horrific math sink in. “The Brachyurans do not believe in survivors. They will hunt and destroy every last one of your people from the oldest man to the youngest child. And they will not stop with merely humans. They will take what they can from every creature on Earth, down to the worms in the ground. When they leave, your precious world will be nothing more than a barren husk.”

“You’re lying. No species could be that cruel.”

“Really? Lying am I? Perhaps you’d like to visit some of your comrades.”

Before Alicia, the void disappeared, replaced by the interior of a cave. In the dim light from a handful of dying flashlights, Alicia saw human bodies lying everywhere. She recognized the soldiers of Major Rosaro’s unit mingled in with the colonists. Every one of the bodies had the same wrinkled, grayish appearance as if they had been mummified. The cave rotated slowly to illustrate the hundreds of bodies scattered about the cave. “This is just an illusion,” she said at last, glad at this moment she didn’t have a stomach or mouth for throwing up. “It’s not real.”

“I assure you it’s very real. Consider the attack on your ship: they did not attempt to communicate with you even though you made no aggressive moves.”

“That could have been a misunderstanding. If we could talk to them and explain our case—”

“Diplomacy? You give them too much credit. You seem to be under the impression the Brachyurans are sentient beings with even your limited cerebral capabilities.” The cave disappeared, the Sentinel’s face reappearing to laugh at Alicia. “These creatures have no more sentience than a virus. They destroy everything they come into contact with to sustain themselves.”

Alicia thought about her planet’s history in the last two centuries: world wars, nuclear devastation, and finally anarchy with the fall of TAG. “The same could be said of us,” she said. “That’s no reason to make them extinct. If we try to reason with them—”

“Enough of this. You seem to be laboring under the other false impression that I require your approval for this transaction.” The Sentinel’s face recomposed itself, losing the beak and twisting into a gross parody of Alicia’s face. “You can serve willingly under my guidance or you can become my slave. The choice is up to you, but either way you will be mine.”

Alicia considered this for a moment that in this void could have lasted a second or an eon. The Brachyurans had attacked her ship and killed Dr. Chen and Ensign Tyler if not everyone else on Lancaster by now. And if they found Earth, which in its weakened state couldn’t possibly mount much of a credible defense, the death toll would be catastrophic. She thought of her friends back on Mars and Earth like Walter and Frankie; they would die along with everyone else. Yet the alternative was to be a willing party to genocide.

She thought of her parents, trying to imagine what her mother or father would do in this situation. They would do their duty to Earth as they had done all their lives, until their deaths fighting for TAG. Yes, she would do her duty for Earth, to save it from these Brachyurans and live with the consequences.

“I’ll do it,” she said at last.

“I knew you would see things my way. Off you go now.” The Sentinel receded back into the spider web of red, the web growing larger and larger until it filled the void. Gradually the web folded itself, forming the outline of a human form. Alicia was aware of her legs and arms again, the web pressing tight against her, pushing her down a shaft of red light.

All at once her eyes opened and she gasped for breath. She was alive!

In his previous occupation as an arms dealer, Jacoby had sometimes found it necessary to escape from unhappy clients—or more often clients who thought they should get advanced weapons systems for nothing. Never had he been the one trying to catch an escapee. So far he didn’t like it any better.

For one thing he found being the hunter a lot slower than being the hunted. When running for his life, he didn’t have to pause to look for tracks, nor did he have to stop at every intersection to look for a trap. And in a city twice the size of the ruins of New York City, he could be at this for years and still not find the damned crab who had killed Captain Stowe.

No longer how long it took, he promised himself he would find her killer. He had never thought much of Stowe as a ship’s captain and he certainly didn’t think much of her sexually, but she had been good to him. When the other women in charge wanted to throw him from an airlock, she held them at bay to give him due process. Not to mention her quick thinking in the battle on the surface had saved his life. For all that, the least he could do was track down her murderer. If only he could find where the bastard had gone.

Whoever had built the city had designed the roads not in the logical grid pattern like most human cities, but more as a chaotic system of moss rivers. Some of the pathways meandered along in great loops while other darted ahead in a straight line. Roads met each other at bizarre angles like tributaries feeding into a greater river. The overall effect, while beautiful and artistic, made it hell for Jacoby to find his way around. He only hoped the crab had the same difficulty.

Pausing at one of the intersections, he searched in the fossilized moss for tracks. In theory a six-legged creature should have left more tracks, but Jacoby saw only a single indentation here and there. Somehow the little fucker must be covering them up, Jacoby thought. Not well enough, though. Jacoby followed after the pair of indentations, keeping his shotgun ready in case of an ambush.

If he knew the city better or could get up on one of those high buildings, he could set up an ambush of his own. He still couldn’t find any evidence of doors or windows on any of the buildings. Near as he could tell, the crystalline skyscrapers were completely smooth all the way up. Unless there was an entryway on the roof, he didn’t see any way in. At least that meant the crab probably couldn’t get in either.

As he continued trotting through the dead city, he noted the utter lack of anything besides the buildings and roads. No light poles, billboards, or sewage ducts; not even a candy wrapper left on the ground. The thought occurred to him that perhaps this wasn’t really a city after all. Perhaps it really was a tomb with each of the sealed-off buildings serving as a mausoleum to some dead king. And thanks to that crab, one more body had been added to the crypts.

The trail of indentations stopped at a bend in one of the pathways. Jacoby knelt down to examine the area for any sign of where his quarry had gone. He couldn’t find any manholes or vents where the crab could have gone. Maybe the crab had finally realized his mistake and started covering his tracks better.

He looked up from the road at the same moment the crab scurried from the shadow of a hexagonal building. Jacoby raised the shotgun and fired a blast that scattered fossilized moss but hit nothing else. The crab used one of its claws to bat the weapon from Jacoby’s hand, lunging at him with the other claw. Jacoby stepped aside from the attack, kicking at the crab’s legs only to find tripping a six-legged creature took more than one swift kick.

But a six-legged creature also didn’t have the agility of a two-legged one, making it hard for the crab to turn around and line itself up for another charge. Jacoby reached to his side for the pistol he had taken off Stowe and aimed for the crab’s mask. His first shot would have hit the mark if the crab hadn’t put its claw up, unleashing a high-pitched wheeze at the hole made by the shot.

Enraged now, the crab made another bull-rush at Jacoby. He deftly stepped aside, or rather thought he had. What he found was that the crab didn’t need all six of its legs to walk at the same time. Instead, it raised and leveled one of the front legs to send Jacoby sprawling to the ground with a mouthful of fossilized moss. By the time Jacoby rolled around to face his attacker, he found the crab in mid-pounce.

Jacoby didn’t have time to think; he emptied the pistol’s magazine at the crab as it arced towards him. The crab let out a terrifying hiss Jacoby thought to be an alien war cry as it prepared to sink its claws into him as it had Stowe. But it didn’t. Instead, the crab landed on top of him and began clawing at its own face, the hissing sound growing in pitch and volume. Coupled with the hissing sound, Jacoby smelled something like car exhaust. Even before the crab toppled over beside him, Jacoby realized one of his wild shots had struck the crab’s mask, which provided him with air.

The crab’s legs and claws continued to twitch for a full minute, after which it became perfectly still. Jacoby stared at it for another minute, waiting for the creature to reanimate and try to finish what it had started. When this didn’t happen, he got unsteadily to his feet. The shotgun lay at the edge of the road; he retrieved it and for good measure stuck the barrel between the crab’s slimy mandibles. The instant Jacoby pulled the trigger, the crab exploded like a piñata.

Covered in a full buffet of crabmeat, Jacoby set out for where he had left The Monster’s cab and the body of Captain Stowe. On the long walk back, he tried to clean himself up as best he could and pondered what to do next. He was alone in this sprawling city with enemy crabs above him and only a day or two of supplies in The Monster’s cab. The only question remaining was whether the aliens, starvation, or boredom would get him first. Maybe it would have been better to let the crab kill him.

No, he was a survivor. He had survived his parents dying and then all those years on Earth with Abe. He had traveled ten light years in a freezer and then bailed out of the ship in a cargo pallet. Somehow he would survive this too.

He noticed something odd as he neared where Stowe had died. The way her body laid didn’t look the way he remembered it. As he got closer, he noticed cloth from her jumpsuit lying slack on the ground as if she had melted. Her stomach especially looked flatter than he remembered instead of bulging like she was six months pregnant. And was that hair fanned out around her head?

As he reached her side, he discovered someone had switched the captain’s body with another woman. A woman about eight years younger and eighty pounds lighter than the Alicia Stowe he had known. Her skin looked even paler than before—like that of a corpse, which he supposed was accurate—and her hair not only had grown to shoulder-length but had changed from ordinary brown to auburn. And perhaps most glaringly, this woman didn’t have a large hole in her well-toned chest.

He knelt down beside the woman, wondering if he had already gone crazy during the walk back. Stowe had been the only other person with him in The Monster and they were thousands of kilometers from New Jamestown. Unless this city extended underground that far and somehow this beautiful woman had wandered along and replaced Stowe’s corpse with her own still body—no, that didn’t make any sense at all. But what other explanation could there be?

The woman’s eyes snapped open and a gasp mirroring Jacoby’s escaped from her lips. She continued to pant for a few moments while Jacoby stared down at her in shock. Those green eyes looking back at him were the same as those belonging to Captain Stowe. What the hell was going on here?

“I’m back,” the woman said in the captain’s voice.

To his utter amazement, she wrapped her arms around his neck, pulling herself up to lean against him. Her cheek felt icy, like that of someone who until a minute ago had been dead. Against that cold skin he felt the warm saltiness of tears. “I’m back,” she said again with obvious relief.

“Captain? What’s going—” He didn’t get a chance to finish the sentence as her lips pressed against his, smothering the rest of his question. At first he was too stunned to return the kiss, but within a second his well-honed reflexes took over. He found his hands moving as if on their own to unzip the front of the woman’s jumpsuit. She in turn practically ripped off his pants.

From there nature took its course, Jacoby remembered very little about the experience except the look of puzzlement on the woman’s face throughout. She had the look of someone awoken from a dream, trying to decide if what she saw was real or make-believe. Sensing this, Jacoby whispered, “It’s real. You’re back now.” It was by far the strangest thing he had ever said while coming, but it was what he thought she needed to hear at this moment.

“Don’t let me go,” she said, her voice taking on the plaintive whine of a child. “Please, don’t let me go.”

“I won’t. I’ll be right here,” he said, collapsing next to her on the ground. The fossilized moss didn’t make for a comfortable bed, but he didn’t dare ask the woman to move, not in her condition.

He didn’t know when he fell asleep, but when he woke up, he found the woman who perhaps was Captain Stowe looking down at him with that same puzzled expression. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“We need to go,” she said softly. “There’s not much time to spare.”

As Jacoby looked around for his parents, he thought of that night with Ling in Kruppsberg, the night that had gotten him into all this. That one tryst had gotten him almost killed on several occasions, the latest being at clawpoint by an oversized crab. He wondered what this tryst would get him into.

The last of the alien ships rose up into air, out of range of the armored suit’s rockets or machine-guns. Teresa tried to work some moisture back into her mouth after shouting commands to the suit and her men throughout the battle. When she mustered enough spittle, she said, “That’s enough. Good job.”

For the moment, they had won. Six humans in strange human-shaped tanks against a fleet of alien ships and somehow Teresa and her men had come out on top with nothing more than a sore throat. In all her years of soldiering, she couldn’t remember witnessing such a miracle. A pang of sadness prodded her at the thought of what Sherman might have done in that final battle for Santa Rosa if he had a half-dozen of these machines. He might still be alive and she might still be with him there, instead of freezing on top of an alien mountain with her throat dry and ears ringing.

“What do we do now?” Renteria asked, her voice equally hoarse.

“Get back to the transports. Be careful,” Teresa said. Throughout the battle, she and the others had taken care to move as little as possible in the unfamiliar machines. The armored suits tended to exaggerate the wearer’s movement so that one step might send her tumbling down the mountain. As it was, she shuffled her way over to Lieutenant Wheeler’s transport and then collapsed through the hatch. After dragging herself into a fairly dignified position, she called out to the cockpit, “Let’s go.”

While the armored suits had won the day, Teresa didn’t want to linger in this spot for long. The aliens were bound to come back and the next time they would know what to expect and come prepared. Or at least they would think they knew what to expect; not even Teresa knew the full capabilities of these armored suits yet. For all she knew, they might have a few nasty surprises built in like a canister of nerve gas or nuclear bomb. If she could rendezvous with Sylvia and the other colonists, maybe they could find out more about what made these things tick.

Getting out of the armored suit on a transport being buffeted by icy winds turned out to be more difficult than the battle itself. Teresa first had to unhook what seemed like dozens of cords and diodes attached to her body. Then she had to free her left hand to find the escape release. After she crawled out, feeling as if she had gone through being born again, she flopped onto the cold deck in only her underwear.

The others went through the same thing, shivering next to her in the transport’s compartment. “Next time we bring blankets,” Cabrera said through chattering teeth.

Next time. Teresa didn’t want to think about what might happen next time they fought the aliens. More than likely, the cold would be the last thing she would have to worry about. “They’ll have clothes for us below,” she said, trying not to let her negative attitude affect the rest of them. Let them savor the victory; they had earned it.

The other transport lurked beneath a thin screen of branches and snow hastily erected by the colonists. As for the colonists themselves, they had taken shelter in a fissure along the wall that widened to a shelf of rock. Not the best defensive position by any means, but the best they could find at the time. Teresa would have to rectify this situation as soon as possible, before the aliens came back.

She didn’t get more than two steps out of the transport before something heavy jumped on top of her, knocking her back into the snow. Looking up, Teresa saw the beaming face of Sylvia Barker. Sylvia didn’t give her the chance to say anything, immediately raining kisses on Teresa’s cheeks.

“You did it! You came back!” Sylvia shouted between kisses. “I thought for sure you would—”

“I’m all right, or at least I will be when you let me up so I can get some clothes,” Teresa said with mock-irritation. Sylvia offered a hand to help her up and then pressed her warm little body against Teresa.

“Your nipples are so hard,” Sylvia teased.

“Later,” Teresa snapped.

The other colonists and soldiers were all looking away from the reunion, pretending they didn’t see anything, which meant they had of course watched it all. Well, let them watch and think whatever they wanted. They would probably all die in a few hours anyway. She and Sylvia might as well be happy in that time.

A fresh jumpsuit and blanket waited for her in the camp and while Sylvia continued to clutch Teresa’s hand, her face took on a grim set. Despite her childish enthusiasm, she clearly knew what they were up against as well. By now everyone probably knew. They had won a battle, but there was a long way to go.

“What do we do now?” one of the colonists asked the question on everyone’s mind. The colonists looked around at each other for answers while Teresa’s men stared at the snow with no expression.

“We’ve got to find somewhere to hide,” Teresa said. “Somewhere safe.”

“Maybe those things of yours can swim,” someone said.

“Knock it off, guys,” Sylvia said. “We don’t have a lot of time before they’ll come looking for us again. So let’s not waste any more time.”

“We could try that forest on the northwestern continent,” Renteria said. “Cut down some of those trees for fortifications.”

“But what happens when they get through those?” someone asked.

They considered every section of the planet from the polar caps to the deserts. In the end, nothing seemed like a long-term solution. Sooner or later the aliens would catch up with them and finish them off. All the joy at their victory was soon forgotten as the grim reality set in.

Lieutenant Wheeler came running into the encampment with tears frozen to her cheeks. “It’s over!” she shouted. “They’re leaving!”

“What are you talking about?” Teresa asked.

“I got a message from the captain,” Wheeler said. “She’s alive! She said the aliens are pulling out of orbit.”

“How could she know that?” Sylvia asked.

“Maybe it’s a trick,” Renteria said. “Maybe they want to lure us out.”

“It’s her. I spoke with her myself,” Wheeler said. “She sent coordinates for us to meet her. Somewhere in the desert on the northeast continent.”

“You’re sure about this?” Teresa asked Wheeler.

“I’m positive. She knew things no one else could know. I’m willing to stake my life on it.”

“And all of ours,” a colonist muttered.

“We could take one transport to check it out,” Sylvia suggested.

“Wheeler and I will go,” Teresa said. “Everyone else stay here and wait until we send word back.”

Sylvia finally let go of Teresa’s hand, but followed her out to the transport with Wheeler. “I’m going with you,” Sylvia said.

“They need you here.”

“What difference does it make if I die here or I die there? At least this way I can be with you when it happens.” Sylvia’s face had lost all of its earlier joy and elation, instead turning to a mask of pain and sadness with tears pouring down her cheeks.

“Fine,” Teresa said. “But it’s only because I’m such a lousy co-pilot.”

After leaving instructions with Renteria, Teresa boarded the transport, Sylvia already on board. The transport lifted off for what would probably be the last time to spring whatever trap the aliens had set. If it wasn’t a trap, if the aliens had really left orbit after that bloody nose Teresa and the others had given them, what then? She didn’t want to try thinking that far ahead.

Instead, she rode in the rear compartment with Sylvia, the two of them clinging together for these final hours. They said nothing during this time, just basked in the simple joy of each other. That was enough for Teresa at this moment, to feel Sylvia’s body against hers, comforting her, reassuring her.

Long ago Teresa had spent nights like this with Sherman, feeling nothing but the two of them in the world. It was some cruel irony that as she found another person who could make her feel this way she would die. Make it last, she told herself over and over again throughout the trip. Everything would be finished soon.

The transport bucked them against their harnesses, shaking them from their loving embrace. “We’re there, Major. You’re not going to believe it,” Wheeler said.

Teresa undid her straps, casting a worried glance at Sylvia. They hurried into the cockpit as one, throwing open the door to see what was—as Wheeler said—an unbelievable sight. “Oh my God,” Sylvia breathed.

A portion of the desert two kilometers square had been cleared away to reveal a pair of silver doors. As they watched from the transport, the doors parted, revealing first only darkness and then another glimpse of silver. That glimpse of silver became a long, arching curve, like the shape of the tears running openly down the faces of both Wheeler and Sylvia.

From out of the desert emerged a ship.

Chapter 31

2008-04-09T05:43:00.000-07:00

Chapter 31

In all his life Bytellen had never spawned any hatchlings of his own. Now he had created a hatchling of his own, a daughter who would bring a new era of hope and prosperity for all Brachyurans. A daughter created from his own bio-energy signature who before his eyes had transformed from a bipedal sack of hair and flesh into nearly a perfect copy of himself—at least on the outside. From all his scans, she had retained most of her internal structures. This created one major problem in that her lungs still needed the oxygen-rich air of her original kind. Because of this, Bytellen still wore a breathing mask in the laboratory. A pity his daughter could not yet see his true face.

For her part, she remained motionless on the table, her newly-grown legs twitching at random intervals. He had loosened the restraints on the table to accommodate the bulk of her new shell, making sure to tie restraints around her claws. From past experience, Bytellen knew his creations did not always appreciate his modifications. Most of those who survived the process tried to kill him before running amok and being put down. But none of those had ever turned out this perfectly.

Bytellen ran a claw over his daughter’s smooth shell, the dark blue spots mottling it identical to his own. Never in all his life had he seen another Brachyuran who looked so beautiful and so…perfect. He could not think of another way to phrase it. After all the failed attempts he had at last created the perfect form to allow his people to survive. No longer would they have to search the stars for new supplies of bio-energy. Once he administered the cure to everyone there would be no need for collection vessels, recon troopers, shock troopers, and especially ration camps. Best of all, the entire population of Brachyura would have him to thank. He would become the new Master Scientist.

Only one hurdle remained: reverse engineering the process so that he could administer the treatment to his people. This would require more specimens. He knew from checking with the tactical computer that Commander Bolli had wiped out nearly all the creatures on the planet and would soon complete the job. If he wanted to repeat the success of this experiment, he would need to find more of these creatures.

While his daughter continued to sleep, her mandibles clacking softly every once in a while, Bytellen opened the message sent by his daughter. He skipped the audio recordings, focusing on the visual package. This showed a male and a female of these disgusting bags of flesh and then went into images of other life forms, none of them found on the planet below. He saw cities far larger and older than the single town on the surface. Lastly, to confirm his suspicions, he saw a blue-white planet with different continental shapes than the one the collection vessel orbited.

So, this was not the native home for these creatures. They were strangers here just like the Brachyurans, though from the base set up on the surface they must have planned to stay for some time. If he could find where they had come from, he might find a much larger and more diverse collection of specimens to use. A shame the tactical computer had destroyed the ship these creatures had used; he might have been able to get the location from the ship’s computers. He would have to find another way.

Looking at his daughter, he considered a simple solution: he could ask her where she came from. That would be easy enough if not for the problem that she didn’t know how to speak Brachyuran and he couldn’t speak her language. Given enough time he could perhaps create a translation program, but he didn’t have time. Once that fool Bolli finished his work, he would return to Brachyura with his prize, unless Bytellen presented him with an even greater one.

Finding the home planet for these creatures turned out to not be much of a challenge. As her first act of love for her new father, his daughter had thought to provide the key in her message. Among a group of simplistic mathematical equations, she had included an image of the galactic disk. By solving a group of equations—a process that took Bytellen all of three minutes—he discovered the coordinates. By solving a group of equations of his own design—a process that took him another fifteen minutes—Bytellen translated the coordinates into Brachyuran format.

He tapped a claw against a section of the galaxy not far from here, no more than ten light years at most. Clearly these creatures did not have a Trans-Dimensional Jump drive of their own yet. They must rely on sublight travel to get around. How primitive. But then they didn’t have a Master Scientist to show them the way.

Bytellen finished sending the coordinates to the navigation computer at the same time his daughter gave a low hiss. He turned around to see her head moving experimentally. Like any proud father, he watched with expectant joy as she moved her claws for the first time, holding them up to her face to see them for the first time. A normal Brachyuran hatchling would not shriek at the sight of them, nor would she have begun thrashing around on the table. Bytellen tried to soothe her with an old Brachyuran nursery rhyme his mother had sung to him, but his daughter paid it no heed. Instead, she continued to roll around on the table until the restraints came loose.

The restraints on her claws turned out to be a prescient move on Bytellen’s part as his daughter swiped at his face the moment she rolled over on the table. She hissed something at him, but her mind still spoke in its native language, so the sounds came out as gibberish. He didn’t need to hear the words to know she was angry with him.

Restraining her claws from opening didn’t stop her from using them as a club to batter at his face. Bytellen threw his own claws in front of his face to protect himself from his daughter’s wrath. Like any hatchling throwing a tantrum, she would expend her energy and become docile. Or at least he hoped so.

First, though, she scuttled toward the door, her movements awkward on her new legs. She beat at the door with her claws before hitting the release button on the side. Even as she escaped into the corridor, Bytellen felt a surge of pride that his little girl was so intelligent. One day perhaps she might become a Master Scientist as well.

When he got out into the corridor, his pride turned to horror and then revulsion. He found his little girl locked in combat with one of Blutax’s thugs. The shock trooper had the advantage at first, until Bytellen’s daughter broke the restraints on her claws. With a fury more savage even than Blutax himself, Bytellen’s little girl tore the shock trooper apart. She ripped each leg from its socket and then proceeded to slice the head away from the body. Worse than that, she opened the soft underbelly of the shock trooper’s shell to plunge her head inside.

She was eating him! Bytellen had never seen anything like it among Brachyurans. Her mandibles shoved the flesh of the shock trooper into her mouth, where teeth ground the matter into a pulp that slid down her digestive track. To record the event for posterity, Bytellen darted back into the laboratory for a scanner. He returned in time to record his little girl hollowing out the shock trooper’s shell. Then the exertion of the attack coupled with the lack of breathable air caused her collapse. Her mandibles continued to click softly as he dragged her back into the laboratory.

The encounter had worked better than any experiment Bytellen could have thought up. Without a doubt he knew he had succeeded. At last he would free his people from their dependence on bio-energy. Now he just needed to clean up the mess in the corridor before Blutax found out and killed Bytellen’s wonderful little girl.

The transport ship lifted off from the charred remains of the planet’s only settlement. Burning the village to the ground had given Bolli little pleasure, considering his quarry had fled into the mountains. These mountains were higher than those where the other creatures had hidden and far colder as well. Bolli didn’t relish having to traipse around in the snow to hunt down the last enemy survivors. But he had no choice. He needed the bio-energy too badly to leave any of the creatures alive.

Data from the navigation computer flowed into the transport ship, providing the coordinates of the enemy positions in the mountains. Most likely there would be more booby traps and Bolli didn’t have any recon troopers left to sacrifice, which meant he would have to risk himself and his shock troopers disarming traps. The only alternative was to send up to the ship for more of the feeble recon troopers and in the process look weak in front of his troops. No, he was the mission commander and he would handle this situation without help.

For the first time he went up to the cockpit of a transport ship to look through the tiny windscreen. The windscreen wasn’t really needed considering the computer in the cockpit did all the flying, but after a group of transport ships flew blindly into an ocean mistakenly identified as a desert, the designers thought it would be helpful to give those on board a window so they could at least bail out in the event of a malfunction. The technician sitting next to the computer backed farther into his corner as Bolli squeezed into the cockpit.

“How long will it take to get us up there?” Bolli asked.

“About thirty minutes, sir.”

This was thirty minutes too long for Bolli’s taste, but he had no choice in the matter. A fully-loaded transport ship could only go so fast. At least stewing in his anger for thirty minutes would keep him sharp when they hit the ground. He would have to be sharp to wade through whatever pathetic traps the creatures threw at him this time. No matter traps they set or where they hid, he would find them and eliminate them. He would take all the bio-energy possible and then try to find another source. Surely there had to be another planet somewhere to get more of the precious bio-energy.

While he continued to ponder this situation, the transport ship’s cockpit turned colder until Bolli’s legs rattled. Out the windscreen he saw the purple-gray rock of a mountain peak shrouded in white snow. On his first mission as a shock trooper Bolli had fought in a similar climate, only that planet had been made entirely of ice. A quarter of the regiment—including all of the puny recon troopers—died from the cold. Others, mostly the more veteran troopers, lost appendages that snapped off on the frozen ground. He didn’t wish for a repeat performance. He would have to get in and out as quickly as possible with the bio-energy.

So engrossed in these thoughts, Bolli did not see the trail of smoke coming from the mountaintop. Nor did he see the five more that followed it. He didn’t see anything until two explosions rocked the transport ship to his right. Three more explosions bloomed across the ship’s hull followed by a much larger blast as the ship turned into a fireball. Bolli could do nothing but watch as the remains of the transport ship scattered across the ground below.

“Where did that come from?” he shouted to the technician.

“I’m not sure, sir. The sensors didn’t pick up anything.”

The destruction of one transport ship brought Bolli’s full attention to the front windscreen. Staring out the window, he searched for any sign of the enemy. Then he saw it: a puff of flame coming from the mountaintop, followed by five more. Projectiles screamed towards Bolli before arcing over the transport ship. He didn’t see where the projectiles hit, but he felt the ship tremble from turbulence as another ship went down.

“They are there,” Bolli said, gesturing at the mountaintop. “We must move faster to intercept them.”

“We’re going top speed already, sir,” the technician whimpered.

“Then begin evasive maneuvers before more are destroyed.”

The technician punched at the buttons on the computer and then wheezed. “The tactical computer does not have adequate threat data for evasive maneuvers.”

“Provide it the data then.”

“I can’t.”

Bolli pointed a claw at the quivering technician. “I am the commander of this mission. Do as I command!”

“I would sir, if it were possible, but the system—”

“Curse you and your system!” Bolli shouted. He slammed a claw into a bulkhead of emphasis. The tirade did nothing to make the transport ship go faster or to prevent more of the enemy projectiles from taking out another pair of his ships. Bolli shook as much as the technician only with rage instead of fear. By the time he reached the mountaintop, Bolli wouldn’t have any troops left to command. Meanwhile, his life was in the claws of this pathetic technician who in the Brachyuran hierarchy was lower-rated than even a recon trooper.

From the mountaintop came a series of flashes like lightning. A moment later, Bolli felt the transport ship stagger from a series of blows as if someone were pounding it with a large hammer. “What as that?” Bolli asked.

“I’m not sure,” the technician said. The transport rattled again, this time the deck beneath Bolli’s feet bucking so that he would have flipped over if not so tightly crammed into the cockpit.

“They are firing at us. Do something!”

“I can’t!” the technician screeched, covering his face with his claws.

The third round of blows riddled the left side of the transport ship, flipping it over. The transport ship continued to bank until it had turned its nose ninety degrees to the mountaintop. Bolli watched streaks of light pass beneath the transport ship as it began clawing for altitude.

“What is happening? Take us down!” Bolli commanded.

“I’m sorry, sir, but the tactical computer has ordered a withdrawal.”

“The computer is not in charge here, I am! Take us down.” To emphasize the consequences of disobeying this order he pressed the tip of one claw to the technician’s face. The technician worked feverishly on the computer, but the ship did not respond.

“It’s no use. The system has locked out the override—” the technician let out a strangled wheeze as Bolli’s claw slashed the mandibles off the technician’s face. Another and then another swipe reduced the technician to an unmoving heap on the deck.

Bolli looked up from the carnage to get one final look at the mountaintop. On it he saw a peculiar sight: six machines with the bipedal appearance of the enemy creatures. He watched a series of flashes erupt from the arm of one machine and then head a series of sharp blows to the transport ship’s hull. Clearly the enemy had used those machines to destroy a good portion of his force and to drive him from the battle.

They could enjoy their victory for now. He would soon be back to finish what he had started. Nothing would stop him the next time.

The enemy vehicle descended on the metal platform into the ground. Once the top of the vehicle disappeared, another metal platform slid into place over the hole, followed by a wave of sand. After another thirty seconds, no one would ever know where the vehicle had gone.

No one except Brevlar. He watched from atop a dune, the pain of falling from the side of the vehicle at high speed still burning through him. Taking stock of his vital systems, he determined the middle leg on his right side and the front leg on his left side no longer worked. Long red streaks ran along his belly from sliding across the rough sand, which would make sitting difficult for days to come. Most astonishing of all, his breathing mask had somehow stayed on and remained functional.

He had survived, unlike the hatchlings. Once again good luck and a strong survival instinct had saved him, telling him to leap from the vehicle before the enemy fired; even one second later and he would have lost more than a couple legs and some plating on his belly.

Having survived the attack, he now faced the dilemma of what to do about his mission. By all rights he should look for a way down to follow the enemy vehicle. Commander Bolli had dispatched his unit to follow the enemy to find what secrets they were hiding and the mysterious disappearance of the vehicle certainly qualified as a secret. Yet his survival instincts reminded him that with no support and dragging two legs, he wasn’t likely to get much done should he run into the creatures again.

At this point a foolhardy hothead like Commander Bolli would smash his claws into the sand and dream of revenge for losing his unit to theoretically inferior opponents. Brevlar did not seriously entertain such a notion. He had not become the oldest living recon trooper by nursing petty grudges. A pair of these creatures were hardly worth his life.

Looking around at the sea of sand, he spotted the remains of the enemy vehicle’s rear component. With its front vanished beneath the ground, there would be no evidence that the creatures survived. Their vehicle had exploded, killing all inside, including three of Brevlar’s comrades. As the only survivor, Brevlar was doing his duty by returning to the collection vessel to report the loss. He could haul a piece or two of wreckage back to the transport ship in case Bolli questioned the story. Yes, he couldn’t possibly come up with a more airtight alibi.

Finding a good piece of wreckage would be the hard part. He didn’t want anything too large and heavy, nor did he want something too small to identify. What a commander like Bolli would really appreciate was a trophy, something to hang on the wall of his office to impress underlings. The more disgusting and primitive the trophy the better.

Brevlar tossed aside the blackened claw of a hatchling, beneath which he found the ideal trophy. It was the corpse of one of the creatures. Like the hatchling on top of it, the explosion had torn the enemy creature into several parts. But among the pieces, he found the head intact, albeit with half the flesh and hair burned away. Such a gruesome state would impress Bolli all the more. With a delicate snip of a claw, Brevlar freed the head from the remains of the torso.

One of the creature’s eyes had remained, the eye staring at him. He tried not to think about what the creature would say if it could still speak. A few more snips of his claws tore off a large chunk of fabric from the corpse, which allowed him to cover up the ghastly trophy. He hoped after the collection vessel returned to Brachyura he didn’t have to serve with Commander Bolli again. He didn’t want to be reminded of how close he had come to ending up like this creature and the hapless hatchlings.

On the off chance Bolli did not appreciate the creature’s head, Brevlar scoured through the wreckage for something else. A glint of silver tubing jutting from the sand caught his eye. Brushing away sand from the tube, he realized this was one of the weapons that had killed the two troublemakers in the first encounter. If he didn’t like a piece of the enemy, Bolli would certainly appreciate a piece of their weaponry.

After stashing the trophies in the sand at the top of a dune, Brevlar set to work on his next gruesome task. Wading back into the mess of the vehicle’s rear section, Brevlar searched for pieces of his comrades to bury as best he could in the shifting sands. As a minor reparation for taking its head, Brevlar also gathered up pieces of the enemy creature to lay in the sand.

The work to sort the biological matter from the pieces of debris took over an hour, but in the end Brevlar felt satisfied he had found all he could. Counting up all the limbs, he accounted for all three hatchlings who had boarded the vehicle’s rear section. He backtracked through the sand to find the remains of four other hatchlings. With the three already dead before the battle, he counted only ten plus himself. One body was missing. He searched futilely for another half hour without turning up the corpse. Wherever it had gone it was as good as buried anyway.

With his claws he dug out a pit in the sand, shielding it as much as possible with his body to keep more sand from filling in the pit before he could get the remains into it. This was certainly not a proper grave by any stretch, but he supposed it was about the best any recon trooper could hope for on an alien world.

He considered whether or not to say any final words to his fallen comrades. In the end he couldn’t think of anything to say. There had been so many over the years, their faces blurring together to become unrecognizable. The only faces which remained burned in his mind were those of Callida and his daughters. One more mission and then he could stay with them forever. No more risking his life on alien planets to scout for bio-energy snapped up by brutish shock troopers and hoarded by greedy commanders while innocents starved in ration camps. No more worrying about whether the transport ship would crash or his breathing mask would malfunction. No more worrying that death waited just around the corner to put its claws in him.

“No more,” Brevlar whispered. Then he grabbed his trophies for Bolli and headed back to the transport ship waiting to take him up to complete the mission. “No more,” he said again, liking the sound of those words.

Chapter 30

2008-04-09T05:42:00.004-07:00

Chapter 30

Ling awoke to find herself in an alien version of Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. Around her she saw banks of machines that were no doubt an alien version of computers along with jars of a strange clear fluid glowing with a rainbow sheen. Craning her neck upwards, she saw a shelf lined with more jars, these filled with body parts not belonging to either humans or the crab-like aliens. Specimen jars, she thought with a grimace. If it were possible, she would have laughed at the irony that after all her years as a scientist she would end up on a dissection table with parts of her body living on for years to come in a jar on a shelf.

She tried to move her limbs, but found herself strapped down to some kind of table. Of course. No scientist worth his or her salt would try to dissect a living organism without making sure it was properly secured first, not even an alien would be so foolish. I guess we have something in common, she thought. She turned her head to the side and then closed her eyes so she couldn’t see the awful jars again.

There existed a small chance—a very small one—that her alien captor might not want to dissect her at all. Maybe he had found her wounded and was trying to heal her. If she could find a way to communicate, she might be able to indicate her peaceful intentions and get out of this mess. If this being truly was a scientist then surely he or she could respond to reason.

“Greetings. We mean you no harm,” her voice said, only Ling had not moved her lips. The words repeated again, this time in Chinese, then in Spanish, and then in French. She opened her eyes to see the smaller burgundy-colored alien standing beside the table with a silver device in his claw. He’s using the first contact message I sent to communicate, she thought, admiring the alien for his cleverness.

“What are you going to do to me?” she asked.

The alien said nothing. With the mask still over his face, she couldn’t have any idea about his reaction to her words. Did he understand or was he simply parroting the message back to her?

The alien finally made a series of clicks and hisses, speaking to her in its language. When she said nothing, he touched the silver device in his hand again. Ling’s voice said in English, “We are explorers from a distant world. We wish to live with you in peace.” The message began to repeat through other languages.

“Yes, peace, that’s what I want too,” she said. “Let me off this table and we can talk.” She wished the alien hadn’t strapped her down so she might have the chance to gesture at him; he might understand that better.

If the alien did understand, he gave no sign. Instead, he set the silver device on the shelf and then tapped a button on a computer console. A screen came to life, displaying a double helix Ling recognized as a strand of human DNA. The screen next to this came on, displaying another double helix, this one a different composition—a strand of alien DNA.

Before she could get the chance to examine the alien DNA closely, the two strands smashed together on a central screen. In place of the two strands was one different from either of its separate components. The alien tapped a button on the silver device again. Ling’s voice said, “We wish to share our science and technology with you.”

A silver tube appeared in the alien’s hand. Ling watched as a long needle extended from the tube. A syringe. Coupled with her own words, she now understood the point of the alien’s visual aid.

This alien truly was a Dr. Frankenstein. Only instead of sewing body parts together, he worked on a molecular scale. With the syringe he planned to take a sample of her human DNA and combine it with a sample of alien DNA to create some kind of hybrid. But for what purpose? As a casual experiment or for something more sinister?

The alien clicked and hissed something in his own language, probably reassuring her that the enormous needle he planned to jab into her wouldn’t hurt a bit. We have so much in common, she thought. If they could really communicate with him, she could explain he didn’t need to restrain her. She offer her help as a fellow scientist.

With startling precision for someone with no thumbs, the alien stabbed the needle into the base of Ling’s neck, into her spine. Too late she realized the alien wasn’t taking a sample from her; he was injecting a sample into her. A surge of energy rushed through her body, starting at the base of the neck where he had injected her. As she watched, her body took on the same rainbow-colored glow as the strange fluid in the jars. What is that stuff? she wondered.

She didn’t get long to contemplate the answer before a fresh wave of pain shot through her body, worse than anything she’d experienced on the ride down in the pallet or afterwards. To her horror, she watched a bone poke through the skin on her left side, sending a new stream of agony through her body. But this was no bone; it was a burgundy-colored leg like those of the alien scientist.

Before she passed out from the pain, Ling finally understood that the alien intended to make her into his Frankenstein’s monster.

The navigation computer gave one last shrill beep to indicate they had arrived at their destination. Alicia looked through the front window of the truck, but she didn’t see anything different about this spot of desert compared to the rest they had driven through in the last eight hours. There was the same unending sea of dunes as far as she could see. So why had the birdman brought them here?

“I guess that’s it,” Lester said. “We’re here. Wherever the hell here is. You hear anything from your pal yet?”

“No. I guess he wants us to wait here. Maybe he’ll tell us more later.”

“Or something’s happened to him. The aliens might have got him.”

That might be nice, Alicia thought. She discarded this notion in her mind a moment later. No, the birdman wasn’t dead, not by a long shot. He was out there waiting for her. Why the hell didn’t he just get it over with and show himself already?

“Why have we stopped?” Tyler asked from the trailer.

“The navigation computer told us to stop,” Alicia said. This didn’t seem to reassure the young ensign. Alicia couldn’t blame her. With aliens crawling around this planet, she didn’t relish the thought of sitting out here in the open. “We’ll get moving again in a few minutes.”

“To where?” Lester asked, spoiling Alicia’s attempt at comforting the frightened ensign. “There’s nothing out here but sand and more sand. If we keep going we’ll wind up driving into the ocean.”

“It’s better than sitting around here waiting for the aliens to come back,” Alicia said. “A moving target is always harder to hit.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.” Lester turned back to look at Tyler. “While we’re stopped, see if you can pick up any signals. We might have better reception now.”

Alicia waited until Tyler left to ask, “That’s not true, is it?”

“No, I just thought she needed to do something productive. I guess you guys didn’t see a lot of action on Mars.”

Alicia unconsciously patted her stomach. “No, there wasn’t much for us to do except deal with the occasional pirate or smuggler. Full-size navies went by the wayside after TAG went down.”

“Too bad. We could have used one right about now.”

“I guess—” A warning buzzer interrupted Alicia. She glanced across the control boards, seeing a number of dark shapes on the rear-facing infrared cameras. “Looks like our friends are back.”

“They must not have learned the first time. Time to give them another taste,” Lester said. He went back into the trailer, Ensign Tyler yelping to indicate he must have explained to her what they were up against. The doors to The Monster’s trailer opened, followed by a mechanical rumbling as the guns lowered into position.

Only Lester had been wrong; the aliens had learned from the first encounter. Even as the guns opened fire on one cluster of targets, Alicia heard warning alarms sound from the sides of the trucks. The aliens were using a classic pincer maneuver to flank the truck.

Some kind of projectile smashed through the passenger’s side window, whizzing less than an inch past Alicia’s nose. “Jesus Christ!” she shouted. Another projectile followed, this one coming from the opposite side. “Hold on to something back there,” Alicia called out.

She kept low as she scrambled over the center console and into the driver’s seat. Though she had never driven anything as big as The Monster, the basics weren’t too different from the transports she’d driven at the Academy. Shifting the transmission into drive, she stomped on the accelerator to get the huge truck moving forward. The Monster responded as nimbly as a sports car—and just in time. Another of the projectiles went through the side of the cab, embedding itself above the passenger’s seat. The projectiles were longer than a bullet, almost like an arrow, though a bit smaller. It was more like the poison darts some primitive cultures on Earth used for weapons.

At the moment though what they were shooting wasn’t as important as getting away from the shooting. The guns in the trailer stopped firing, Lester lurching into the cab a moment later. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“They’re trying to surround us,” Alicia said. Even as she said this, her peripheral vision caught sight of an alien leaping at the driver’s side. She ducked in time for a razor-sharp claw to smash through the window. Another claw followed closely after, this one grazing Alicia’s left cheek. “Get these things off me!”

“Right. Just hold still.” Like any sensible businessman plying the highways and byways of Earth, Lester kept a small arsenal in the truck’s cab should anyone get past The Monster’s other defenses.

The sound of a shotgun firing deafened Alicia, but the claws slipped away from the driver’s side door. She didn’t have any time to thank him as another of the aliens leapt at the side of the truck, this time from the passenger’s side. Its claw swiped through the open window to slash the shotgun from Lester’s hands. With the other claw it hoisted itself up, the image of a painted skull poking through the window.

“Get down!” Alicia shouted. A tube appeared in one of the alien’s claws to open fire inside the cab. One of the darts tore into Alicia’s leg, the metal tip coming out the other side. She screamed, but kept the injured leg on the accelerator.

Before the alien could get another shot off, Lester scooped up the shotgun and fired wildly. Most of the shot missed, but a chunk of shrapnel lodged in the center of the skull mask. The alien began wheezing, one claw swiping at its face. Another blast from the shotgun sent the alien tumbling to the ground.

“Is that all of them?” Alicia asked just as a scream came from the back. A burst of darts came through the trailer and into the cabin, shattering the front windshield. One of the darts lodged itself in Lester’s shoulder, spinning him into the passenger’s seat and then to the floor.

Alicia looked back to see three more of the aliens inside the trailer, one of them sticking a tubular appendage into the limp body of Ensign Tyler. In a few more seconds Alicia would undoubtedly share the same fate. With Lester knocked out on the floor and the shotgun lying against the wall, she didn’t have any way to stop them. But at least she could slow them down.

She pressed on the brake with both feet, the sudden deceleration sending The Monster into a skid. Alicia fought against the steering wheel to maintain control of the vehicle, somehow managing to keep it from turning over. The maneuver had the desired effect of sending the aliens in the back tumbling around. Now if Alicia could just get the shotgun before they got to their feet.

Snatching up the shotgun from the floor next to Lester, she aimed it at the aliens in the back. She pulled the trigger—and nothing happened. It was out of ammunition! The aliens in the trailer had recovered now, one of them hissing something at Alicia she assumed was not a compliment. Turning the shotgun around to use it as a club, she readied to make her last stand.

Only she didn’t have to. A door slammed down between the trailer and cab, followed by the truck grinding forward again, or at least part of The Monster. While the cab plowed forward through the sand, the trailer remained behind. “They’ll have to get another ride,” Lester said groggily from the floor.

Alicia looked down to see his hand on the navigation computer. He had keyed the autopilot, which sent the truck forward on its own and then jettisoned the trailer, leaving the aliens stranded. They were safe for the moment; at least until the aliens caught up with them again.

“Don’t worry about them,” Lester said. He tapped another button on the console and through the window in the cab’s back door, Alicia watched a miniature mushroom cloud form as all the ammunition and explosives in the trailer went up.

“My God,” Alicia whispered. She looked down at Lester to see tears in his eyes. “Are you hit?”

“No. It’s just that I built all that with my own two hands. It was mine. And now it’s gone,” he said, wiping the tears away.

“At least you still have half of it. And your life.”

“Yeah, I suppose you’re right.” He looked up at Alicia. “Looks like you took one. There’s a medical kit in the compartment over there.”

“There won’t be any need for that,” a familiar voice whispered in Alicia’s ear. “I will take care of you. At last you are mine.”

She turned around in time to see the dunes ahead of them parting to reveal a platform of silver metal. The Monster’s cab stopped on the platform on its own, or at least without any human intervention. Then with a creak of ancient machinery the truck began to descend into the ground.

The last crate was opened, its contents just like the other fifteen inside the pallet. This crate and eight of its brethren went straight into Lieutenant Wheeler’s transport for safekeeping. The other six had already been opened and the contents assembled by Sylvia Barker and a trio of mechanical engineers left among the colonists. Teresa watched them work from her place on a rock, marveling at what they had found.

Private Renteria trotted up to her, breaking into her thoughts. “We’ve looked all over the mountain with no sign of her,” the private reported. Renteria lowered her voice to continue, “We found sign of a struggle about a kilometer from here.”

“A struggle?”

“There’s a lot of tracks in the area and we also found traces of human hair and blood. It has to belong to Dr. Chen.”

“You’re probably right. Anything else?”

“There was a patch of ice from snow that had melted and then refrozen.”

“Like from a landing craft. Then we’re too late. They already took her.”

“Looks that way, sir.”

“Don’t let anyone else know this. We don’t want to start a panic.” Teresa looked back over to where the engineers were feverishly working on the strange machines. “I want you and Angelo with me along with Deivi, Jose, and Orlando. Everyone else goes with Wheeler’s transport.”

“Yes, sir.”

Before Teresa could process the information Renteria had imparted, she found Sylvia Barker at her elbow. “Are you finished?”

“I think so. We aren’t really sure what they are so it’s hard to tell. Anyway, it’s time to give them a test. I figured you would want the honor,” Sylvia said.

“It’s my job,” Teresa said. She cleared her throat before continuing, “If this works, I want you and the others to get into the transport and head for lower ground.”

“I can’t leave you here by yourself. If something goes wrong with these things you’ll need me.”

“We have nine more of them that will need set up. If something goes wrong then you use those to get the others to safety. Do you understand?”

“Teresa, please—”

“Don’t make this harder than it already is. We all have a job to do, including yours. Please, just do what I ask.”

For a moment Sylvia looked ready to argue, but in the end she nodded. “All right. I just want you to know that I’m not sorry about what happened in the mayor’s office. I love you and nothing’s going to change that.”

Teresa looked down at the snow, taking a deep breath for courage. “I love you too,” she said at last. “That’s why you need to go. When the shit hits the fan I don’t want to be thinking about you being in danger.”

“I understand. Here, for luck,” Sylvia said and then kissed Teresa on the lips the way she had back in the mayor’s office. Only this time Teresa didn’t put up any resistance. She gave in to the kiss, letting the passion flow between them.

When they broke away, Teresa took Sylvia’s tiny hand in hers to give it a squeeze. She felt as if a heavy burden had been lifted from her shoulders now that everything was out in the open. “Stay safe. I mean that. I’ll be back for you later,” Teresa said.

“I can’t wait.” Sylvia ran off towards the transport. She paused at the ramp to blow Teresa a kiss. At another time Teresa would have been annoyed, but now she merely smiled and waved to the one she loved.

A long time ago she had felt this way about Sherman, but he had died a quarter century ago in real time. If these were her last few hours, she might as well enjoy them with a freed heart. She didn’t think he would mind. If anything he would want her to be happy, that was why he had sacrificed his life to save the children of Santa Rosa.

The transport lifted off a few minutes later with the remaining colonists, leaving only Teresa and five of her men. Everyone else had already gone to a lower elevation in the other transport, including the other six of her troops. They would wait there until Teresa came to fetch them or the aliens came to finish the job, whichever came first.

Besides the six of them there were also six of the machines from inside the pallet. Sylvia had given her a brief overview of how they operated—in theory. No one knew quite what they were or what they did, nor would they get a chance with Dr. Chen probably dead by now. Only one way to find for sure, Teresa thought as she climbed off the rock and headed towards one of the machines.

Slipping inside the machine, she found the command helmet and put it on. Computer displays lit up, including a targeting crosshairs. The crosshairs followed her eyes as she looked around the area, finally settling on the rock where she had been sitting. The weapons systems of the machine followed along with the targeting system. Now she just needed to find the trigger. “Where the hell is the fire—”

With the last word, a machine-gun on the left side opened fire, pounding the rock into fine dust. “Stop!” she said and the weapon ceased fire. So the weapons operated by voice control. Very convenient, so long as she watched what she said.

She stepped out of the machine to see the other five members of her team gaping. “That was amazing,” Cabrera said. “How did you do that?”

“I’ll show you,” Teresa said. “Just be careful. We need to save our ammo for the aliens when they show up.”

And when the aliens did show up, she would give them a hell of a surprise to make up for the loss of Alejandro, Dr. Chen, and everyone else the bastards had taken from her.

Chapter 29

2008-04-09T05:42:00.003-07:00

Chapter 29

The transport landed on the flat top of the mesa, letting out its cargo of colonists. By now all but the twelve Angeles de Muertes who had elected to stay behind were at the fallback position, as well as half the colonists. The transport pilot lifted off before the last colonist touched the ground, turning her ship towards New Jamestown for the next wave. There was no time to waste, not with hostile aliens in orbit over Lancaster.

Alejandro found himself inadvertently in the position of commander over all the chaos. With Teresa and Sylvia Barker still at New Jamestown and Captain Stowe presumed dead, Alejandro was the closest to an authority figure at the fallback position. He hoped his term of office would be a short one, lasting until Teresa and the last of the colonists arrived to take over.

In his life of military service, he had commanded small units before—squads and platoons mostly—but never over a thousand people, most of them with no training and carrying nothing more than rocks or lengths of pipe for weapons. At least until Teresa showed up, he had to somehow keep this rabble alive and under control. Even with the rest of his unit to help in the policing and administrating, it proved a daunting task.

The colonists knew something was going on. They had no doubt realized this when soldiers began herding them onto transports to ship them three hundred kilometers from the colony and into dark caves. No one had said what was going on exactly, allowing rampant speculation to spread among them. All manner of natural disasters from meteors and comets to a horde of marauding insects was mentioned. Others suggested an outbreak of disease that could wipe out the colony if not quarantined immediately. And a few brought up the laughable proposition of alien invaders. Even in their panicked state, the colonists refused to believe in little green men coming to wipe them out.

Alejandro allowed the colonists to go on speculating in part because it kept the colonists busy and in part because he had no idea what specifically to tell them. No one had any information on who the aliens were or what they looked like. Teresa had told him only that they used small ships loaded with explosives to ram into the Persephone until Captain Stowe scuttled the human ship to keep it from enemy hands. If he brought such limited information to the colonists, the relatively idle speculation would turn into a full-blown panic. With only eighty men and women under his command, he didn’t have nearly the force to cope with such a riot. If and when Teresa got here, she could think of something to tell everyone. Her and that awful Barker woman—the woman who had a crush on Terry.

Though not widely experienced in romantic love—most of Alejandro’s trysts involved payment left on a night stand or in a G-string after the deed was done—he knew enough to know from the way Barker looked at Teresa that she was madly in love. And from the way Terry had steadfastly avoided Barker for the last few days, he knew the feeling was mutual. If not for this emergency, they would probably have ended up as a couple before long, at least in private. He wasn’t sure if the colonists were prepared to see their leader holding hands with the head of security just yet. Alejandro wasn’t sure if he was prepared for it either.

In a way he supposed it made sense for Teresa to fall for Barker. Throughout his late teens he thought he might be the one to make Teresa forget about Colonel Sherman’s death. Only after a drunken encounter in a Juarez cantina wherein she broke his nose and blackened both his eyes did Alejandro realize Colonel Sherman was the only man Teresa would ever love. That didn’t mean she couldn’t love another woman. While Alejandro didn’t necessarily approve of the situation he wouldn’t try to get in the way either. His commander and best friend deserved a chance at happiness after all she’d led the children of Santa Rosa through. Too bad the aliens had come along to ruin everything.

Ronaldo Cortez came running over, the grim look on his face telling Alejandro he was not bringing good news. “The transports report alien ships are coming down,” Cortez said. “They’re heading our way.”

“Any way to tell if they’re landing craft or more of those bombs?”

“Afraid not.”’

“Guess we’ll have to wait until they get here.” Alejandro looked around the top of the mesa, where the last colonists were being herded down to the caves below. “Tell the transport ships to stay at New Jamestown. There’s nothing more they can do for us here. Then get everyone down to Position One.”

Cortez nodded before running off to carry out the orders, leaving Alejandro alone at the top of the mesa. The aliens were coming down to finish what they had started in orbit. They would be in for a surprise though when they got here.

As the mission commander, Bolli had the honor of being the first one to emerge from the fleet of transport ships atop the mesa. Without waiting for the rest of his troops, he loped to the edge of the mountaintop in search of the enemy. From the sensor readings they should be here, but if they were not on top of this mountain, then they had to be inside it like the mindless slugs on his last mission. Those slugs had turned out to be a formidable opponent, as might Species 48038-8203.

The path leading down the mesa was narrow for a shock trooper, meaning they would have to go in single file. Classic ambush strategy, he thought. So these creatures possessed at least some knowledge of military tactics. That would make it slightly more challenging, but the end result would remain the same: he would destroy them and drain every last bit of bio-energy from them.

Once the bulk of his force assembled on the mesa, Bolli searched for one of the recon troopers accompanying the group. “You will scout for a clear path down to where the enemy is hiding. When you locate their lair, report back to me. Under no circumstances do you engage the enemy,” Bolli said.

“Yes, Commander,” the recon trooper said before scuttling away.

Bolli found another recon trooper. “You will follow him if he fails.” From experience, Bolli knew it was more a question of when the first recon trooper failed. The distant rumble of an explosion a minute later confirmed this thought. The second trooper began moving down along the path only to meet a similar fate. Three more recon troopers met their demise before one finally reached the end of the path and reported the existence of a cave.

Now that he knew where the enemy had congregated, Bolli made his way along the path with his regiment behind him. These creatures may have the intelligence to put up a few booby traps to kill a handful of recon troopers, but they couldn’t stand against an onslaught of Brachyuran shock troopers. He reached the cave to find the surviving recon trooper huddling against the wall. “Go in and fire an electric charge to flush them out,” Bolli said.

The recon trooper hesitated a moment, knowing he would soon share the fate of his comrades. But in the end he had no choice and began making his way into the cave. He didn’t get far before Bolli heard a series of sharp cracks. The recon trooper emerged with two legs on his right side and a good portion of his shell missing. So, the booby traps continued inside the cave. These creatures are cleverer than I thought.

“Dispose of this,” Bolli said to one of his troops, motioning to the dying recon trooper. Then Bolli charged into the cave with his thrower at the ready. The sensors in the breathing mask allowed him to see in the cave’s darkness, but he didn’t see anything other than rocks. The cave narrowed the farther he went until it became a tight squeeze for his legs. Bolli tried not to think of the embarrassment he would face if he became stuck in the cave.

At a curve in the passage ahead, his sensors picked up a tremor of movement. It could be nothing more than some kind of insect or other insignificant creature even though no creatures like that had been found yet. Or more likely it was the enemy preparing another of their traps for him. He would hate to disappoint them.

Moving as fast as he could in the narrow passageway, Bolli froze at the sound of a sharp crack like had felled the recon trooper. A projectile struck Bolli’s right front leg, but here the enemy had made a critical error. The armor of a shock trooper was seven times thicker than a recon trooper’s. While the feeble recon trooper would have lost a leg, the projectile merely glanced off Bolli to ricochet into the ceiling.

The sensors picked up two of the bipedal creatures ahead, crouching behind a pair of rocks for concealment. Bolli aimed his dart thrower at one creature, waiting until the enemy rose to launch another projectile. He never got the chance; Bolli’s dart burrowed into the creature’s skull. The other, seeing what had befallen its comrade, took off running. Bolli cut him down with a pair of darts in the back.

Before he moved on, Bolli extended his bio-energy stalk, plunging it into the chest of one creature and then the other. The bio-energy flowed into Bolli, storing itself in his bladder until he could deposit it later, after taking a small amount for his personal nourishment. These two were the first of many who would buy freedom for Bolli’s family in the ration camps.

“Shock troopers, proceed forward. They are ours,” Bolli said into his communicator. He didn’t wait for anyone to respond before charging down the passageway for more of his prey.

The battle took less than an hour and in the end netted more bio-energy than Bolli had hoped, but far less than he needed. With their projectile weapons useless against the shock trooper armor, the enemy creatures were reduced to throwing rocks or using clubs, fists, and legs in close combat. This made them easy targets for Bolli’s sharpened claws, their soft flesh rending at the slightest touch.

In the furious battle in the main chamber of the cave Bolli lost track of how many he personally killed. He saw only a whirling storm of bodies all around him rising and then falling away. So caught up in the battle, one of his lieutenants had to physically restrain him to explain the battle was over. Over eighteen hundred enemy dead while he lost only five from breathing mask failures.

His bladder ached from the amount of bio-energy inflating it, but still it was not enough. He needed more bio-energy. He needed more of these puny creatures to fall before his claws so that his family could live. As soon as the last of the bio-energy from this battle was emptied into the tanks, he would proceed to the next point on his map to wipe out what resistance remained there. He only hoped that would be enough.

Teresa knew something had gone terribly wrong when the transport returned and the pilot emerged from the craft. The exhausted woman—Lieutenant Wheeler from the name stitched on her jumpsuit—trotted over to meet Teresa on the makeshift tarmac. “There’s a problem,” Wheeler said. “They’re coming.”

“Who?”

“Them. The aliens. A whole bunch of them are on the way to hit the fallback point. I was told not to bring any more people until things cool down.”

Teresa nodded at this. Dumping relatively unarmed colonists into a hot landing zone would be suicide. But that would leave Alejandro and the others to fend for themselves against a potentially superior alien force. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. New Jamestown was supposed to be the target with Teresa making the heroic stand to buy time for the remaining colonists to get to the safety of the mesas. She should have gone with them instead of sending Alejandro. He was a capable enough soldier, but it was her place as the unit commander to fight with her men.

“What’s going on?” Sylvia Barker asked, interrupting Teresa’s thoughts.

“They’re going after the fallback shelter,” Teresa said.

“The aliens?”

“Who else?”

“We have to help them,” Sylvia said.

Teresa kicked at the hardened dirt of the landing area. “There’s nothing we can do for them right now,” she said, hating herself more with every word. One thing Sherman had preached early on was never to leave another soldier behind during combat. But then he had gone on to violate that same rule in the final battle at Santa Rosa. Teresa would have to violate it now to get the remaining colonists to another fallback point where they might have a better chance at survival. After that, she could go back to help Alejandro, if he could hold out that long.

“There has to be something,” Sylvia insisted.

Teresa looked over to Lieutenant Wheeler, who gave a slight nod. Wheeler understood the decision as a fellow soldier. Sylvia, as a civilian couldn’t grasp the grim logic of the situation. Time to burst her bubble, Teresa thought with no small amount of glee. “What do you want us to do? There’s only a dozen of us with guns. You want me to drop two hundred people armed with clubs and rocks into a battle against who knows what kind of technology?”

“But—”

Teresa poked the smaller woman in the chest. “This isn’t a fairy tale where the knights go riding in on horseback. Our job is to save as many people as we can, not to sacrifice them on some half-baked rescue mission. Right now we have to do what’s best for those people who are still left here. That’s what we’re going to do. Understand?”

There were tears in Sylvia’s eyes by the time Teresa finished. “I understand,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “I don’t know how you can be so cold with your own people.”

“In my place Alejandro would do exactly the same thing. He wouldn’t throw away the lives of everyone here for no good reason and neither will I.” Teresa turned to Lieutenant Wheeler. “I want you to get everyone you can into the transports. Put them on the wings if you have to. We’ll try those mountains up there. They should give us better cover.”

Wheeler nodded before hurrying off to begin loading the transport. This left Teresa alone with a defeated-looking Sylvia. “I’m sorry about this,” Teresa said. “It’s the way things have to be.”

“I guess,” Sylvia said.

“Go get on the transport. Lieutenant Wheeler and I can handle this.”

For once, Sylvia didn’t have anything to say; she shuffled off towards the transport as if she’d aged a hundred years in the last five minutes. Teresa couldn’t blame her after getting the last of her illusions shattered. The little architect was learning what Teresa had as a child in Santa Rosa: the world was a cold and cruel place, no matter which world you were on.

By throwing out all nonessential equipment and squeeze tightly enough to make breathing difficult, they managed to get everyone aboard the pair of transports. Teresa rode in the co-pilot’s seat of Lieutenant Wheeler’s transport so she could help find a suitable landing site in the mountains. From the sensor data, these mountains were higher than those where she’d sent Alejandro with thick caps of snow that would make travel difficult. She only hoped that applied to the aliens as well.

With so much extra weight in the transports, getting them up to the higher elevations of the mountains proved difficult. The engines of Wheeler’s transport strained and Teresa overheard the pilot whispering prayers for the ship to hold together long enough to get them to the top. She chimed in with a few prayers of her own to any deities listening that she wouldn’t die so ingloriously as to fall from the sky in an overworked transport ship.

The engines held together, the stain easing as they reached the lighter air of the higher elevations. Now they just had to find a suitable place to put down and find shelter. As she scanned the mountaintop, her eye caught something bright red sticking out of a snow bank. “What’s that?” she asked.

“Looks like a pallet from the Persephone. Probably came down when the ship blew up.” Wheeler edged the transport closer to give them a better look at the object. “Definitely a pallet. Seems like it’s mostly intact.”

“Then it might have something in it we could use. Set down here and I’ll go out to see if there’s anything left.” Before the transport reached the ground, Teresa was already bounding down the ramp with two of her men. They carried their weapons, though Teresa doubted this was an alien trap. The aliens didn’t have any way of knowing the transports would come up here, would they? And Wheeler had identified it as a pallet from the Persephone.

While mostly intact as Wheeler had said, the pallet had clearly taken a lot of damage. Streaks of black lined most of the surface along with numerous large dents. If it had come down on the plains the pallet would have no doubt been completely destroyed but here in the mountains the snow drifts cushioned the impact. “Let’s see what we’ve got here,” Teresa said.

Inside, she found rows of crates lined up, one of them already opened. As she stepped over to one of the crates, she stopped and looked down at the floor. There she saw charred remains of fabric mixed with something else—human hair. Teresa picked up a hank of the burnt hair to examine it. While not trained in forensics, she didn’t need formal training to know the chunk of long, straight black hair belonged to Ms. Chen. She must have used the pallet as an escape pod when the Persephone blew up. And if she had survived, that meant Stowe and the others could also be alive somewhere in these mountains.

“What the hell is this stuff?” Private Cabrera asked, looking into the opened crate.

“Looks like some kind of machinery,” Private Renteria said.

Teresa let Chen’s hair fall to the floor to see what the two privates had found. In the crate she saw what looked like some kind of bizarre robot. On the top of the pile she saw a helmet like the one on a spacesuit, only with more buttons and lights on it. Out of curiosity she slipped the helmet onto her head and confirmed her suspicions about the pallet’s occupant. “Attention anyone who can receive this message: this is Dr. Chen Ling. My ship has crashed and I am badly injured. I need an emergency pickup. Please respond,” came a voice through the helmet’s communications system. The transmitter must have suffered damage in the crash, but it at least proved Chen was alive and if she wasn’t here then she was somewhere else on the mountain. She wouldn’t be able to get very far if she were injured.

“We need to form a search party,” Teresa said. “Dr. Chen is somewhere on this mountain. Go get Ramirez; he’s the best hunter in the bunch. She’s probably won’t have gotten too far. Oh, and if there’s a doctor on one of the ships bring him along with a medical kit. Get going.”

Cabrera and Renteria hurried off to organize the search party while Teresa studied the contents of the crate. What kind of crazy machine was this? She lifted up what looked like a robotic arm to find a miracle. Throwing the helmet aside, Teresa ran out to the transports to find Sylvia and any engineers they had left. If they hurried, she might still be able to help Alejandro and the others after all.

Chapter 28

2008-04-09T05:42:00.001-07:00

Chapter 28

The Monster carried a solar power array along its roof, which really came in handy in the middle of a desert. The Lancaster sun provided just as much sun as Earth’s to power not only the truck’s drive train, but all its electronic systems as well. This included the air conditioner, which Captain Stowe kept going at full blast. Despite the arctic chill in the cab, she continued to sweat.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” Jacoby said. “Once the sun goes down we’ve got enough reserve power to last for a week.” That is if she didn’t use it all up on the air conditioner, he wanted to add but decided against.

“I know,” she said. “It’s not that.”

He drove on in silence for a minute, thinking what else might have the captain in such an agitated state. Well, she had just gotten her ship blown out from under her and was now stranded in the middle of a barren desert with a panicky ensign and a suspected murderer. Under the circumstances, he supposed she had every right for concern.

“Look, if the aliens come after us down here we’re not exactly going to be helpless. The Monster has the best mobile defense system ever built. I should know: I built it myself.”

“That’s very reassuring,” she said. “You remember what happened to the ship, don’t you? They threw enough explosives at it to drill straight through this planet.”

“Hey, it’s not your fault about the ship. You did everything you could.”

“Of course it’s not my fault. Why would it be my fault? I didn’t ask those things to come here and hurl flying bombs at us.”

“OK, I’m sorry. I just thought you might be feeling down about what happened.”

“Well I’m not exactly thrilled about that, but we’ve got other problems right now.” She glanced knowingly at the navigation system. Whatever had been controlling The Monster’s autopilot had shut down two hours ago, but the navigation system kept prompting them towards an unknown goal.

“Do you have any idea where this is taking us?” he asked. “If you do, it might be nice to know what kind of reception we’re in for.”

“I don’t know where we’re going. All I know is wherever he’s taking us, it’s not going to be like Disneyland.”

“He? Who’s he?”

“The one behind this,” she said, waving to the computer. “Whoever he is.”

“Maybe it’s not a he at all. You think of that?” The captain didn’t say anything. Jacoby studied her flushed cheeks and sweaty forehead. After spending most of his life with a veteran conman like Abe, Jacoby considered himself an expert at reading people. In this case even a novice could tell Stowe was hiding something important. “If you know something the rest of us have a right to know about it. We’re in this as deep as you are. So go on, spill it.”

Stowe looked back towards the trailer, where they’d left Ensign Tyler to man the communications gear on the off chance someone might try to contact them. And the task would give the nervous ensign something to focus her mind on. Whatever Stowe wanted to say, she clearly didn’t want the ensign to hear, which couldn’t be good news. “He talks to me. It started when we were asleep in the pods. He kept chanting this stupid poem about how I would come to him and then—” Her voice trailed off.

“And then what? What’s he going to do?”

“He’s not going to do anything. He said I would give my life to him in return for something that would allow the rest of us to live.”

“Jesus Christ. So who is this guy?”

“I don’t know. I never saw him close-up. He was always this fuzzy blob that looked sort of like a human crossed with a bird. I call him the birdman. I know how crazy it all sounds, but I’m certain he’s the one behind this and when we get to wherever he wants to meet us, he’s going to offer me something to defeat these aliens and in return—” Her voice trailed off again.

“In return he’ll make you a ritual sacrifice?” In some of the backwards cities in the ruins on Earth, the people had reverted to such backwards religious rituals like human sacrifice to appease their phony gods. Most of these sacrifices involved young woman or little girls; maybe this birdman had different standards.

“Maybe. Or maybe something worse.”

Some of the water on her face was now coming from tears that had sprung from her eyes as she spoke. Jacoby leaned over to pat her on the shoulder. “We don’t have to go. I can stop the truck and we can get out. There are enough supplies in the trailer for us to get us across the desert.”

“No, it wouldn’t do any good. If I don’t come to him then he’ll find me. He’s not going to let me go without getting what he wants.”

“Fine, we’ll get to his little nest and then blow his fucking head off.”

“It’s not that simple,” Stowe said, mopping the liquid from her face with the back of a sleeve. “I don’t think we can kill him, at least not with conventional weapons.”

Before Jacoby could try to say anything else, a warning buzzer sounded in the cab. A red light flashed on the display next to the navigational computer, indicating they had picked up a tail. From the look of it, they had picked up a dozen of them. Against the backdrop of the burning sands their infrared signatures showed up as blobs of black. Jacoby thought about Stowe’s description of the birdman, but these didn’t appear to be bird-shaped at all. These had a wide, squat shape like an insect. Maybe they were some kind of local bug that had been waiting in hiding.

This theory melted away when a bolt of blue energy shot past the The Monster’s engine. Slamming on the brakes, Jacoby brought the tractor-trailer to a stop at the top of a sand dune. The black blobs stopped moving, holding their ground. Not for much longer, Jacoby thought. “Time to show these things what we can do,” he said to Stowe and then rushed into the trailer to arm The Monster’s defensive systems.

The transport ship dropped Brevlar and his group of hatchlings about ten kilometers from the vehicle Bolli had assigned them to follow. Since the transport ship didn’t have any windows, Brevlar had not gotten the chance to see his quarry yet. He knew only from what little information Bolli had given him that the creatures were traveling in a wheeled vehicle as big as the transport ship. The regiment commander did not bother to mention if the vehicle was armed or how many of Species 48038-8203 it carried inside. As with every recon mission, Brevlar would have to determine this the hard way.

But not until some time later. For now he intended to follow the vehicle as Bolli had instructed. Brevlar still rankled at the assignment; given his inexperience in spying and lack of knowledge on the quarry he didn’t anticipate this mission ending well. Then again, Brevlar never expected any mission to end well. That explained why he had survived so long when many, many other recon troopers had perished.

The scant data on the planet indicated they would be operating in an arid environment. Like any Brachyuran, Brevlar did not enjoy running around in dry heat that could boil water with sand blowing into every crevice of his shell. Give him a nice muddy swamp any day of the week where he could burrow into the cool, soft mud until he disappeared.

The transport hit the ground with a dull thud, jolting Brevlar from his daydreams. Such daydreams would end up getting him and all these hatchlings killed; he had to keep himself focused on the mission. He had to think solely about survival and not what lay ahead after this and then one more mission.

The hatch irised open, revealing waves of white sand. To his relief, the breathing mask functioned, though it could do little to remedy the hot, dry air blowing sand into his face. This would be just as annoying as he had assumed. He might as well get on with it then. “Gather up the supplies and then let’s move out. We must be quick in order to catch up with the enemy.”

Given the enemy’s large head start, Brevlar didn’t anticipate catching up with them anytime soon. Ordinarily the sensors in his breathing mask could detect the enemy transport in seven kilometers, but with all this heat and sand, the range would go down to as little as two kilometers, far closer than Brevlar would have liked. Still, there was nothing he could do about it now.

The hatchlings brought out the extra rations and breathing masks quicker than Brevlar would have thought. Like most young soldiers they were anxious to get their first real taste of action—a first and last taste for most of them. “Remember our directive from Commander Bolli: we are to follow only. We do not engage the enemy under any circumstances. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir,” the hatchlings replied in unison.

Brevlar only hoped they heeded this order and didn’t get overanxious to die. “Let’s move out then,” he said.

The six legs on each Brachyuran recon trooper were more adept at moving through mud than sand. Walking along the dunes, Brevlar kept having the discomforting feeling that at any moment he would sink into the sand and not be able to recover. From the cautious pace of the hatchlings, he surmised they felt a similar discomfort moving through this hot, blowing sand. Nevertheless, if they wanted to catch up to the enemy, they needed to make better time. Brevlar pushed himself forward, urging his legs to move faster and ignoring the sinking feeling. In turn, the hatchlings pushed themselves faster to keep pace.

After three hours of the grueling march, they lost the first hatchling. All at once the recon trooper began gasping for air and blindly tearing at his face with his claws. The others could do nothing but watch since removing the breathing mask would most likely kill him anyway. From his position at the head of the column, Brevlar paid little attention to the scene. He knew without looking what had happened: the sand blowing all around them had clogged the delicate machinery in the breathing mask, triggering the deadly malfunction.

The hatchling pitched forward in the sand, his legs and claws going limp. The others milled around him, unsure of what to do. “Take his supplies and then move on,” Brevlar said. “We still have a mission.”

Most likely the other hatchlings would hate him for so callously disregarding the death of one of their comrades, not that it would matter. From experience, he knew most of them would end up dying on this mission, unable to lodge any formal complaints or whisper gossip above his shell. Those who survived would come to understand the importance of survival over everything else.

Another two hours went by before Brevlar got his first glimpse of the enemy transport. Through the blowing sand, he could make out what appeared to be a black crate grinding over the dunes. The vehicle looked imposing enough from this distance that Brevlar didn’t relish trying to get any closer. These creatures, so easily defeated in space, would not go down as easily here on the ground.

“Proceed with caution to within two kilometers and then maintain following distance,” Brevlar ordered the hatchlings. They replied again in unison, or almost in unison. He noticed one at the far right of the formation who hesitated. Was this one fatigued from the journey, still in shock from the death of his comrade, or something else? Perhaps he was a troublemaker. Brevlar would have to watch him carefully.

They closed to within two kilometers without the enemy seeming to notice their presence. The black vehicle continued plowing along unabated through the sand, blowing it back in waves at the recon troopers. Brevlar shielded his breathing mask with a claw to keep as much sand out of it as possible. He didn’t want to end up clawing at his face like the hatchling earlier.

The possible troublemaker shifted his position until he was at Brevlar’s right rear leg. The sense of purpose in the hatchling’s movements sent warning sirens blaring in Brevlar’s mind. This one was up to something.

Brevlar saw the electrical charge in the hatchling’s claws too late. “Now we will make them pay!” the hatchling shouted as he pulled the trigger. A bolt of blue energy shot past the enemy vehicle, dissipating harmlessly in a dune.

“You fool!” Brevlar roared. He slapped the electrical charge from the hatchling’s claws. “You’ve doomed our mission.”

“Our mission is wrong,” the hatchling said. “We are not spies. We are warriors. It’s time we demonstrate this to the enemy.”

“Very well then. You make them pay. Go. Take anyone foolish enough to follow you,” Brevlar said. He looked around at the rest of his squad. Two of the troublemaker’s companions fell in with him and then charged towards the enemy vehicle as it came to a stop.

Brevlar knew what would happen even before the vehicle’s doors opened. “The rest of you fall back to those dunes over there and wait for my signal.” Through the sensors in his helmet, he watched as metal tubes emerged from the rear of the enemy transport. The three foolish hatchlings raised their dart-throwers to open fire, but the enemy vehicle was quicker.

Tongues of flame leapt out of the rear of the vehicle, launching projectiles smaller and more numerous than the Brachyuran darts. These tiny projectiles smashed into the body of the troublemaker, tearing off the two most forward legs and the claw on his right side. The recon trooper to his right collapsed to the ground, his breathing mask shattering from more of the impact of more projectiles. As for the third one, he lost one of his rear legs and a good third of his shell as he fled.

Another burst from the tubes inside the vehicle, albeit a smaller barrage, finished off the troublemaker. The enemy seemed content to let the third one flee over the dune, where he collapsed at Brevlar’s feet. “Return to the transport ship, if you can,” Brevlar said with little concern. “And let this be a lesson.”

It was a lesson for all of them. These creatures were dangerous. Should he meet them in combat again, Brevlar would have a better idea of what to expect. At least the foolish troublemaker had served a useful purpose. Better him than me, Brevlar thought. Then he turned back to the remaining hatchling. “Get the supplies and prepare to move one the enemy departs.”

Within minutes the doors on the enemy vehicle swung shut and it began moving through the sand again. Brevlar and his recon troopers followed, now much more cautiously. They still had a mission to perform.

Like its counterparts on Earth, the air in the mountains of Lancaster were similarly lacking in oxygen. As a result, Ling didn’t get her battered body far before she needed to sag against a rock for support. Getting enough air into her lungs proved to be a challenge, making her wish the pallet would have come equipped with a bottle or two of pure oxygen. Then again, the bottles probably would have exploded in the crash, perhaps taking the rest of the pallet—and Ling—with them. At this point, she didn’t necessarily see that as a bad thing.

After spotting a fleet of alien craft heading for the surface, she had abandoned her unlikely plan to summon help with a signal fire. With aliens swarming over the planet, she doubted the fire would draw the right kind of help. For now at least she was completely on her own to find some way down the mountain and to safety. She didn’t have any idea where she might find a safe place on Lancaster anymore, nor did she know how she could get down the mountain in her sorry condition.

Sitting on the rock, she considered staying here until she passed out from oxygen deprivation or from exposure—whichever came first. At least then it would all be over. She wouldn’t have to carry around the guilt of failing her father, Morton, and the rest of the colonists, not to mention humanity in general anymore. If the Christians like Morton were right then she might go to paradise to find him and her father waiting. As a scientist such beliefs seemed childish and primitive, but right now she saw a certain beauty in them. After all, wasn’t that what she and Morton had wanted to do here?

That explained why she heaved herself off the rock and set off through the snow again. She and Morton had wanted to create a paradise of reason, justice, and hope away from the violence, chaos, and bigotry on Earth. As long as she still had even a breath of oxygen left in her lungs she had to continue to fight for this dream. If she quit now, she would give up on everything they had come so far to create.

She continued the slow trek through the snow, dragging the broken half of her body along with the good half. Pain continued to needle her as she went, though the painkillers from the medical kit had taken care of most of that, with numbness from the cold pitching in as well. The snow became deeper the farther she went until it reached up to her knees. This made dragging her broken leg that much more difficult.

Looking down at the rest of the mountain below, she wondered if she could fashion a sled from the pallet or one of the crates. Then she could slide right down the mountain like she had done when Daddy took her sledding in the mountains as a little girl. She remembered waddling through the snow in a bulky pink suit with Daddy holding a mittened hand in case she toppled over. They spent hours going up and down the mountains, until Ling’s cheeks stung from the cold and Daddy took her inside for a mug of hot chocolate to warm her up. Maybe at the bottom of these mountains she would find a lodge with a mug of hot chocolate to warm her—

I’m getting delirious, she thought with a frown. The lack of oxygen, cold, injuries, and painkillers were all finally getting to her. She didn’t have much longer until her body shut down completely, leaving her to freeze to death in the snow. If only she could be four years old again with Daddy holding her hand, reassuring her nothing bad would happen. But then look what happened to him. He had been killed for the information he possessed, information that had brought her out here to meet a similar fate.

The irony would have made her laugh if she had the oxygen in her lungs and control of her numbed face to do so. Instead, she pitched onto her back to stare up at the dark blue Lancaster sky. At this height there were not even any clouds to drift by, just the faint outline of the planet’s moon and a few early-rising stars. “I made it, Daddy,” she whispered.

Her exhausted body barely registered the metallic screech of an alien transport landing a hundred meters away. She managed to turn her head towards the sound in time to see the first of the aliens emerge. It was a giant crab at least two meters in length and another meter tall when it reared up on its six legs. The crab’s body was all a brick red with strange designs of white carved into its shell almost like tattoos on Earth. A plastic hood—some kind of breathing apparatus?—covered its face so she couldn’t see into its eyes. But the black tube it clutched in one claw told her its intentions were to finish what the crash and Lancaster environment had started.

Five more of the red crabs came out of the transport, followed by another one about two-thirds their size and with an undecorated burgundy shell. This burgundy crab spoke to one of the red ones in a language of strange clicks and hisses. At the conclusion of this discussion, the burgundy crab approached Ling with the red ones fanning around him as an escort.

If she had a gun or even a knife and the strength to use it, she might have gone down fighting in a blaze of glory. Instead, she lay in the snow as the burgundy crab made his way over to her. This alien prodded her with a claw hard enough to coax a grunt from her. Satisfied with this examination, the burgundy crab motioned to her with a claw. The red ones swarmed around Ling, one placing its claws beneath her legs and another putting its claws beneath her back. As one, they hefted her into the air, the hard shells of their claws bringing fresh waves of pain to her scarred back.

With a final scream, Ling passed out as the crabs took her towards their transport. Her last thought was not of Morton or her father, but rather Jacoby Lester. She wished she would have gotten the chance to apologize to him for what had happened. Maybe if there was a Heaven she would.

Chapter 27

2008-04-09T05:41:00.001-07:00

Chapter 27

From his temporary office in the bowels of the collection vessel, Bolli did not watch the first drone explode from a projectile launched by the enemy ship. Nor did he watch another drone ram itself into the front end of the enemy craft while a third smashed into the rear. He didn’t even look up as the opposing ship exploded in a brief cloud of flame before shattering into billions of tiny pieces that would burn up in the planet’s atmosphere or else get snatched by gravity to drift in orbit for decades to come.

Bolli simply did not care about the naval battle going on over the planet. The tactical computer would perform its job to get rid of the enemy ship or it would fail and the collection vessel would be forced to retreat. In either case, it was out of his claws. At the moment he was more interested with the sensor readings from the probe that had been in orbit.

Though not trained in anything more than addition and subtraction, Bolli didn’t need higher math skills to deduce he was in trouble. No matter how many times he ran through the readings he always came up with far too little bio-energy for the necessary bribes to locate his mother and sisters. Unless he took every bit of the supply for himself—not even the corrupt bureaucrats back home would miss that—he wouldn’t have enough.

An aide tapped a claw on his door. “Commander, the navigation computer has put us in orbit over the planet,” the aide said.

“Good. I want the planetary scans as soon as they come in,” Bolli said. He waved a claw at the aide to shoo him away so he could return to the numbers. No, it would not work. He needed more bio-energy and for that he needed more bodies than were on the surface below. The only two ways to get them would be to find another planet with life—impossible since the collection vessel did not carry its own probes—or sacrifice his own soldiers. Bolli did not want to even consider the latter alternative.

But what else could he do? At the rate collections missions were being launched, he might wait another six months for another chance or even longer to get another chance at commanding an expedition. By then Bnural’s offer would have expired, the window of opportunity closing forever, leaving Bolli’s family languishing in their respective ration camps.

He slammed a claw against the desk, cursing his bad luck. All this waiting for the chance to get the bio-energy he needed only to have it slip away. What had seemed like good fortune at getting his own command turned out to be a colossal heap of bad luck. Of all the missions to get, he had been assigned to the one with the least bio-energy. The gods must be testing him.

The aide scuttled back into the office, carrying the report from the first sensor reports. Bolli again waved the aide away, not wanting to discuss anything at the moment. He might not be able to resist slicing off the aide’s head from frustration and then draining his bio-energy just to add a little to the haul. As if sensing all this, the aide darted away faster than Bolli thought possible.

Turning to the report on his desk, Bolli’s mandibles twitched. Species 48038-8203 was on the move. Instead of one cluster on the southeastern continent, there were now two smaller groups, one forming in a more mountainous area some distance away from the original encampment. This would make collection more difficult, but not impossible. Splitting up would only delay the inevitable, a delay he could scarcely afford if he wanted to get as much bio-energy as possible while using the least he could.

Something else on the report caught his eye. It was little more than a blip on the surface, nothing to get excited about and yet Bolli’s mandibles clicked together rapidly with glee. There was a third group of Species 48038-8203 on the northeast continent. From what the sensors could tell there couldn’t be more than a half-dozen of the creatures at most. If not for the utter lack of bio-energy on the world, the sensors wouldn’t have picked anything up at all.

This group was most likely a reconnaissance unit, much like the feeble recon troopers the collection vessel carried. They were probably trying to find a safer burrow to scurry into, oblivious to their impending doom. But given the situation, another possibility dangled in front of Bolli’s eyes, tantalizing him. This group could be heading for another nest of the creatures, one hidden beneath the ground or using some kind of exotic camouflage the collection vessel’s sensors could not see through. If he continued to track them, they might lead him to the bio-energy he sought.

A moment later Bolli came to his senses, discarding the idea as extremely unlikely. Chasing after a few of the puny creatures would waste some of the ship’s reserves of bio-energy better used to destroy the main group. And yet, how could he ignore the possibility that they were scouts for a larger body?

The word ‘scouts’ hung in front of him. An elegant solution formed in his mind. He knew how to find out while not significantly draining his bio-energy reserves. Tapping a button on the desk, the aide shuffled into the doorway, one leg twitching with obvious fear that Bolli would kill the messenger for delivering bad news.

“Find the recon trooper commander and bring him to me,” Bolli said. After the aide hurried away again, Bolli allowed himself a moment of satisfaction. Expending a handful of weakling recon troopers would not seriously endanger his supplies and if they succeeded…

It was definitely worth the risk to get his family back.

Most veteran soldiers hated to serve with a first-time commander. A rookie mission commander was prone to making gross strategic errors and then having too much pride to back off after the situation collapsed because a defeat on his first mission meant he would probably never get a second one. A commander with nothing to prove didn’t need to throw wave after wave of soldiers against a determined foe in a foolish attempt to gain victory, or so the logic went.

In his ten years of service, Brevlar had never seen this logic borne out. All commanders wanted to succeed at all costs for their personal glory. Whether they had one year or a hundred of service, a mission commander lusted after the bio-energy a victory brought the way one lusted after a female ready to mate.

The only real difference is that an experienced commander tended to horde information, afraid the underlings would somehow use it to their advantage. No one Brevlar knew ever created a term for this; he referred to it in his own mind as simply the sickness. The sickness would invariably drive commanders to become miserly with information while generous with the lives of their soldiers in their foolhardy pursuit of more and more bio-energy wealth. Most of those mission commanders—as on Brevlar’s last mission—ended up dead sooner rather than later after taking one stupid risk too many.

It surprised Brevlar then to see this Commander Bolli already in the most acute stages of the sickness. The way the young mission commander hunched over the reports on his desk was the first sign. The agitated clicking of his mandibles at Brevlar’s appearance provided yet another clue. Whatever was coming, Brevlar knew he wouldn’t like it.

“I have a mission for you,” Bolli said.

“Of course, sir,” Brevlar said. “What is it?”

“There is a small group of creatures on the northeast continent. I need you to track them.”

“Track them? I don’t understand.”

“You will follow them unseen to find their ultimate destination. Then you will report to me. Is that clear?”

“With all due respect, Commander, we are not spies. Our job—”

“Your job is to do as I command, recon trooper. Or are you a coward?”

The young commander had Brevlar on a figurative spike. He had to perform this insane mission or else he would have five more years tacked on to his service, if he didn’t end up on a literal spike first. “No sir.”

“Good. The transport ship will take you down. You will be equipped with extra breathing masks for extended duty. That is all.”

“Thank you, sir,” Brevlar said and then beat a hasty retreat. In the hall he found Bolli’s aide looking ready to defecate right on the deck. Yes, Bolli had the worst case of the sickness Brevlar had ever seen. If he were not a mere recon trooper, Brevlar could have Bolli’s fitness for command challenged to possibly remove him as mission commander. But no one would care what a recon trooper thought.

Espionage. Never had a recon trooper—or any Brachyuran soldier—in recorded history performed such a task. While in the grand scheme of things not much different than what a recon trooper usually did in locating an enemy nest, the idea of stalking a small group of enemy creatures did not sit well with Brevlar. It was not the work of a soldier, not even a recon trooper.

As he neared the barracks, Brevlar considered the positive side of the equation. He would be far more likely to survive such a mission than by putting himself in harm’s way flushing out a nest of Species 48038-8203. Then he would only have one final mission to perform before he could retire to his nest with Callida. Perhaps the sickness wasn’t so bad after all.

The rest of his recon troopers were not thrilled about the assignment either. They were young and foolish enough to want action. None of them could appreciate the simple joy of staying alive to see their families again. “Glory means nothing if you’re dead,” Brevlar reminded them. The hatchlings continued to grumble about getting the blunt end of the claw on this mission. “We have our orders and we will obey them. Now, assemble your gear and get down to the hangar. Our mission awaits.”

Watching the hatchlings scurry away, Brevlar tried not to smile. A few days of scurrying after a wayward group of creatures and then he could go home. Now he just had to hope the transport ship made it to the ground safely and his breathing mask didn’t malfunction.

Another perk of being the ancestor of the Master Scientist was unlimited access to every computer system on the collection vessel. From the terminal in his quarters, Bytellen watched the destruction of the alien ship from the perspectives of all five drones and the collection vessel itself. One of his mandibles twitched as he witnessed the destruction of the alien craft and felt a small twinge of guilt that he would not get the chance to examine the wreckage. The remains of the ship could have told him a great deal about the alien civilization that could help in his next experiment.

Although the ship now lay in tiny pieces, he had found something almost as good: the logs from the communications system with the messages sent by the alien ship before its demise. None of the audio messages were understandable, all of them recorded in the grunting gibberish they called a language. The visual message made almost as little sense. In it he saw the bipedal sacks of meat in both male and female form. From what he could tell, they had a variety of subspecies denoted by differing tints to their fur and flesh. He wondered about the social organization of these creatures; he didn’t want to capture the equivalent of a recon trooper.

The navigation computer flashed a signal indicating the collection vessel had reached the planet. Bytellen shut down the computer at his desk. He would have time to sift through the data later. For now he had more important matters to contend with.

He found Regiment Commander Bolli in his office, the commander’s aide quaking outside the door. “The commander does not want to be disturbed,” the aide whispered, casting a nervous look towards the office interior.

“I do not care what he wants,” Bytellen said. He brushed past the aide into the office. “Commander Bolli, my squad is ready to accompany your troops to the surface.”

The regiment commander glared at him. “Those thugs you hired will not get anywhere near my soldiers,” Bolli said.

“Excuse me—”

“There will be no argument. This is a military operation, not a science experiment. I cannot have you getting in the way.”

“The Council has sanctioned my mission. You must give me what I require.”

“The Council has no say out here. I am the mission commander.”

“I will have you brought up on charges.”

“You are welcome to do so when we return. Now get out. I have work to do.”

“This is treason! You are violating a directive of the Grand Council!” The regiment commander did not look up at this. “Very well, Commander Bolli. I will have my specimen with or without your support.”

Now the commander looked up from his desk. “If you interfere with my operations I will have you executed,” he said with a dismissive wave of his claw.

For a moment Bytellen remained standing before the desk, ready to burst from his shell with rage. After all he had put up with from the science director not to mention Blutax and Forty-One only to be stymied by some hatchling commander. “This isn’t over,” he growled as he left the office.

To his surprise, he found Blutax waiting for him in the hall, the commander’s aide nearly lying prostrate before the former shock trooper. “Hail, my lord. I thought I might find you here. Are all the arrangements made?” Blutax said in that infuriatingly faux-cultured voice.

“The regiment commander will not let us land with his troops,” Bytellen said.

“An unfortunate development. I’m sure I could reason with him.”

Bytellen knew Blutax’s method for reasoning. Although the idea of the veteran shock trooper pummeling Bolli into submission appealed to Bytellen it would no doubt lead to his execution once they reached Brachyura. “That will not be necessary. We will have to think of another way.”

“I suppose we will. Of course I have a transport ship already waiting to take us down to the surface.”

“We can’t go in ahead of the shock troopers. Bolli would have all of us executed.”

“I am aware of that, my liege. However, there is another solution if we could continue this discussion in your quarters.” They said nothing on the walk back to Bytellen’s quarters, though Blutax clicked his mandibles together in an irritating fashion the whole way. Once the door closed, Blutax reached out with a claw to activate the computer. With expert skill Bytellen would not have thought possible, Blutax brought up the sensor logs from the environmental computer. “There are three clusters of these things. Here, here, and here.”

“Yes, I know. Bolli will know that as well. What is your point?”

“Patience, Your Highness. Bolli may notice these, but he’s not going to waste his resources on this faint bio-energy reading.” Blutax indicated what was little more than a speck of dust on the screen in the mountains of the southeastern continent.

“How can you be sure he won’t? And how do you know this is even one of those creatures? It might be another species altogether.”

“Agreed, my lord, but if there were other species they would be more plentiful across the surface. No, this is one of the creatures, or perhaps two. Isolated from the others and completely out of harm’s way.”

“Ripe for the plucking,” Bytellen said.

“Very good, Your Highness. Shall we go?”

“Yes. And let’s be quick about it. I don’t want Bolli getting his claws on it first.” After Blutax gave a phony bow and scurried off, Bytellen opened a drawer in the desk. Inside he found the small metal case with the syringe of retrovirus. The key to the survival of every Brachyuran. It was close now. So very, very close.

Chapter 26

2008-03-23T12:14:00.000-07:00

Chapter 26

The transport circled around the mesas and canyons, the view reminding Teresa again of home. A home she’d left behind to come to this far away world in the hopes of rebuilding where violence and destruction couldn’t possibly follow. She shook her head at the thought of naïve she had been to ever think about rebuilding.

From Captain Stowe’s final transmissions, the alien craft approaching the Persephone were flying bombs that would probably tear the ship into spare parts. As a last ditch effort, Stowe planned to scuttle the ship to at least take some of the aliens with her. A noble sacrifice from someone Teresa had never considered to be a warrior. Perhaps she had misjudged Stowe as much as this entire enterprise.

Teresa shook those thoughts away, focusing on the terrain around the transport. Yes here in the canyons that seemed so much like home she could make her last stand. The walls would give her protection from above and if they found somewhere to camp near the tops of the mesas any possible invader would have to fight an uphill battle. So long as they rationed food and other supplies, the colonists could hold out for weeks.

Of course all this assumed the aliens had something like human technology and would attack the colony. Just because they destroyed the Persephone didn’t mean they would do the same to the Lancaster colony. Or they could just as easily use some kind of exotic technology to kill everyone and everything on the planet. There was no way for her to know for certain until it happened. Not that it would matter at that point anyway.

Her job was to prepare a defense as best she could and for that she’d taken the transport out to this area dubbed the Badlands by the colonists. Against an unknown opponent with unknown technology and unknown goals she could only rely on the strategies that had worked in the past. Sherman’s strategies for the most part. She would have to use everything he’d taught her now to save the lives of her men and the colonists—including Sylvia.

Her stomach churned at this thought, the kiss still fresh in her mind. She couldn’t worry about that now, not with so much else to do. If they survived, then she would have to deal with Sylvia and tell her…what? All night she’d tossed and turned, debating this issue in her mind and she still didn’t know the answer. As annoying as Sylvia could be, there was the genuineness and innocence in her elfin face but underneath that a toughness and determination to prove herself. That kiss, so full of passion and love and then the look of heartbreak on her face when Teresa left. The feelings and emotions swirled in her mind until the transport bucked from a pocket of turbulence, snapping her back to reality.

“Let’s get back to New Jamestown,” she called to the pilot over the intercom. They had a lot to do and who knew how much time to get it done. Airlifting over two thousand people plus supplies and equipment with only two transports would take days under normal conditions. To get it done in a quarter of the time would require a miracle.

On the way back to New Jamestown, Teresa went through the grim calculations in her mind. Each transport could carry seventy-five people if packed in tight with little in the way of equipment. That meant a hundred fifty with each run. They would need seven runs altogether, plus more for the supplies and equipment. Flight time from New Jamestown to the Badlands was three hours if the pilot pushed the engines, which she wouldn’t be able to do with a full load. There was simply no way to get it all done in less than a day.

She set to work on another set of grim calculations, a mental triage to prioritize those to take first and those to go last. Most of her troops would have to go in the first flights to establish the perimeter, leaving behind a small rearguard. After that, any healthy colonist with some kind of combat. Then the able-bodied men who could be easily trained to handle a weapon, followed by the able-bodied women. Last would come the old and the sick, if time permitted. If not, she would have to sacrifice them so that those who could fight could survive. Such cold-blooded thinking set her stomach churning again, but she saw no choice. Now was not the time for nobility. At least, she thought with a sigh, we don’t have any children to worry about.

This thought reminded her of the last days of Santa Rosa, when she had been little more than a child herself. There Sherman and his men had sacrificed themselves to save the rest of the town, including their wives and children. Their sacrifice had bought the time Teresa and the others needed to make their escape, to go on living. She knew she could do no less for the people of Lancaster, including those last survivors of Santa Rosa. She would stay with the rearguard to do what she could to make sure the transports go the others to safety. If she died in the process, then so be it.

As soon as the transport touched down, she pulled Alejandro aside to explain her decision. “I want you on the first transport to organize from the other end,” she said.

“I’m not going to leave you Terry, not after all we’ve been through,” he said.

“That’s an order,” she said, looking him in the eye. They stared at each other for a moment until he finally nodded. He understood as she did what needed to be done. There was no point in continuing to waste time arguing.

“I’ll pass the word along. Who else do you want to stay behind?”

Teresa considered this, finally shrugging. “Ask for a dozen volunteers,” she said. “If there’s more than that, have them draw straws.”

“Right. If I don’t see you again—”

“You will. Now get moving.” After Alejandro trotted off to carry out her orders, Teresa allowed herself a thin smile. There would be more than a dozen volunteers to stay behind. They were her men—her soldiers—and none of them would want to leave their comrades behind. No matter what happened to her and those dozen who stayed, she knew the rest of her men would be in good hands.

The ride down felt like riding a sauna down a ten-mile elevator shaft. During the long descent through Lancaster’s atmosphere, Alicia thought she must have lost twenty pounds through the sweat drenching her and the pallet shaking her around. While her stomach had shot up to her throat soon after they left the Persephone, at least its contents remained there, unlike Ensign Tyler’s, which had emptied itself all over the deck. Lester’s glare at her for defiling his precious truck was almost as hot as the heat from reentry.

For its part the truck held up well throughout the flight, proving it was as tough as Lester had boasted. While the heat inside the trailer was unpleasant, it was a far cry from what they would have faced in the pallet alone. Out there Alicia’s flabby stomach would have sizzled away like bacon in a frying pan, leaving nothing more than some burnt cinders of bone. This thought made her think of Ms. Chen, who had gone off alone to perform some kind of errand. How would she get to the surface? Or perhaps the real question was in what condition would she reach the surface? Probably as nothing more than ashes.

After a few minutes the heat lessened, gradually cooling to leave Alicia shivering as the sweat covering her turned to frost. Her teeth chattering, she said, “I wish the thermostat could make up its mind.”

“We’ll be down in a couple minutes,” Lester said, his face similarly lined with frost. “There’s blankets in the other room.”

Next to Alicia, Ensign Tyler continued to look miserable, her pale skin tinged with blue from the cold. “It’s almost over,” Alicia said into the young woman’s ear.

Or at least this part of the ordeal. Once they reached the ground they would have to meet with Rosaro and Barker to plan for some kind of defense. Not that Alicia knew what they could do against a ship that big. If it so chose, it could wipe out every trace of life on the surface.

“There is a way,” a familiar voice whispered into her ear. “I will show you.”

Alicia looked around the trailer. “Did you say something?” she asked Lester. He shook his head. The voice whispered into her ear again and this time she recognized it. It was him. The birdman from her dreams. She must have passed out during the reentry; this must all be a dream.

“No, it’s real. As you will soon see,” the birdman hissed. “I will show you how to destroy them.”

Whoever or whatever it was, the birdman could read her thoughts. She closed her eyes and tried to clear her mind. Where are you? Who are you? she thought.

“I am nearby. I will guide you.” With that, the pallet banked sharply to the right, throwing Alicia against her straps.

“What was that?” Tyler shouted, her voice in a full panic.

“Something must have gone wrong with the guidance system,” Lester said. “Must have taken damage during the reentry.”

No, it was damage from the reentry. It was the birdman. He had somehow commandeered the pallet. Who are you? Alicia thought.

“Now is not the time. You will know soon. And then you will be mine.”

Alicia waited for him to say more, but the birdman remained silent. He must have gone back to wait and prepare a welcome for them. She shivered at the thought of the birdman waiting for them wherever the pallet ended up, killing her as he had threatened to do in his grotesque poem. Why me? she asked. If the birdman heard, he continued to remain silent.

The pallet touched down with a hard jolt that again threw Alicia against her straps. But the shocks of Lester’s truck cushioned the worst of the impact so that none of them were injured more than probably a few bruises where the straps dug in. They all waited a few moments to make sure the pallet had stopped moving and then began to unstrap themselves.

“We made it,” Tyler said.

“Let’s find out where we are,” Lester said. He bolted for the cab of the truck to check its navigation computers.

Alicia remained in her seat, not wanting to emerge from the relative safety of the trailer. Where are you? she asked the birdman. What do you want? He said nothing. For the moment at least she was on her own.

“Son of a bitch!” Lester shouted from the cab. He stormed back into the trailer, his fists clenched. “We’re on the wrong fucking continent! That fucking navigation system put us down on the northeast continent.”

“Can we fly the pallet over to the colony?” Alicia asked.

“Not a chance. This thing’s had it.”

“Then we’ll have to call for a pickup. Are the communications working?”

“They will be when we get The Monster out into the open.”

“Let’s get to it then,” Alicia said. The sooner they called for help, the sooner they could get out of here and away from the birdman and whatever he had planned for her.

Getting the truck out of the pallet proved to be a minor challenge. The ramp controls for the pallet were destroyed along with the rest of the systems. Lester ordered Alicia and Tyler back into their seats while he rocked The Monster back and forth, finally building up enough momentum to punch the armored trailer through the pallet’s rear doors. The jolt from this gave Alicia another welt on her gut from the restraints.

The doors of the trailer opened then, giving Alicia her first taste of fresh air in thirty years at least. The air was not much cooler than inside the trailer during the height of the reentry, which brought to her mind the survey reports of the northeastern continent: predominantly arid desert seas of fine-grain sand. As the ramp lowered, she saw this report was correct; around The Monster were nothing but rolling waves of dunes made up of sand as white as that of a tropical beach on Earth.

Alicia stepped cautiously to the end of the ramp, expecting the birdman to make his appearance at last. Instead, she found nothing but more sand, which blew into her mouth and eyes. She had just cleared the last bits of sand from her teary eyes when Lester came to stand beside her, his fists again clenched. “It’s not good news, is it?”

He shook his head. “I tried to get the colony on the horn but no one answered. I tried the transports too. Nothing. There’s no sign of an equipment failure on our end.”

“Which means they’re not receiving,” Alicia said. Which meant they were probably either dead or under attack. For now Alicia, Lester, and Tyler were alone.

“What do we do now?” Tyler asked.

“I don’t know—” the roar of The Monster’s engine interrupted Lester. He rushed back into the cab, Alicia on his heels. “What the hell? Something’s tapped into the navigation system.”

“Maybe it’s the colony,” Tyler said, hope tingeing her voice.

Lester’s hands flew across the computers in the cab for a moment. He finally shook his head. “No, it can’t be them or the aliens. The signal is coming from below ground somewhere.”

“What? How can that be?” Tyler said.

Alicia knew the answer. It was the birdman, guiding her just as he had promised. He was steering them to his hideout beneath the surface, where he would kill her. But he had also promised her a way to stop the aliens. If he was serious then it would be worth risking her life and if he wasn’t then they wouldn’t be any worse off than waiting around here for the aliens to find them and finish the job they’d started in orbit.

“Let it go,” Alicia said. “We should see where it takes us.”

Lester glared at her, not wanting anyone to fuck with his toy except for him. She held his gaze until he finally shrugged. “What the hell. Beats sitting around here eating sand,” he said at last. “You guys better get buckled in. We’re going for a ride.”

At the end of that ride, Alicia hoped to finally get some answers to who was pulling her strings and why.

Ling awoke in a haze of pain. The pain seemed to blanket her entire body so she couldn’t identify one source of agony. But at least all this pain confirmed that she was in fact still alive—more or less. She had made it through the atmosphere and onto the ground. Now she only had to figure out where on the ground.

She decided to try sitting up first only to remember she’d strapped herself in with the freight ties like so much luggage. Switching tactics, she tried to move her right arm. The shoulder moved but the limb at the end of it hung limp, a white shard of bone sticking through the heavy material of her spacesuit. Yes, that was definitely one source of all this pain.

The left arm still worked properly, allowing her to release the straps holding her down. With this accomplished she tried to sit up again. A scream escaped her lips from the pain of peeling her back off from the deck. White spots formed in front of her eyes and her head spun from the supernova of agony she had unleashed. She clamped her teeth together and grabbed onto a nearby crate until the flash of pain died down to a slightly more manageable level.

Trying to turn her head sent more ripples of pain through her as the scorched remains of her hair had become embedded in the mess of her back. At last she got those loose strands that remained free and then took a look around the pallet. From the look of it the crates around her had survived much better than her. If she could get one operational, she might be able to get out of here and find help.

She screamed again as she tried to stand up. Not only was her right arm broken, but her right leg was twisted to an unnatural angle as well. Tears began to flow down her puke-encrusted cheeks as she realized the grim reality: she couldn’t possibly get one of the units operational in this state. Nor could she get very far like this no matter where she had ended up on the planet.

Sagging back to the deck, Ling broke into sobs that aggravated her bruised or possibly broken ribs. How stupid of her to run away from Lester and the others to go on this fool’s errand. All to get these machines down here where she thought they would do some good. Lot of good they would do if no one could find them. She had failed everyone, especially her father and her husband, who had hoped to turn this planet into a new bastion of freedom and peace for humanity. Some bastion; in two weeks of landing violence had already come to the colony. “It’s not fair,” she whimpered, feeling as helpless as in the motel room while she watched her father’s murder.

In time the tears dried up and her scientific reason came back. There was still some hope, if she could get one of the crates open and access the communications gear of one of the units. With it she could maybe raise the colony and get a transport out here with a medical team to treat her injuries.

Each crate came equipped with a laser security lock with a special encryption code only she knew: the date of her father’s murder. She dragged herself over to the nearest crate, grimacing from the pain of each step, and found the keypad. After typing in the digits, the keypad processed for a moment, long enough for Ling to think with dismay that the lock had suffered damage in the landing. At last the keypad flashed green and the lid popped open.

Somehow the flashlight on her spacesuit had survived the crash so she could see inside. The unit didn’t look to have suffered any damage, at least on the outside. Internally might be another story, just like herself. As long as the power and communications system worked, that was all that mattered at this point.

Inside, among all the parts for the unit, she found what she needed: the command helmet. With her good hand she scooped it up and clamped it down on her head, feeling a twinge of discomfort from where the helmet touched the burns on the back of her head. “Come on, do it for Mommy,” she whispered, fiddling with the controls on the helmet.

The display in the helmet came alive, numbers scrolling in front of her eyes. The many red numbers told her the unit had suffered some damage from the landing. She scrolled down to find the status of the communications array and sighed with relief to see it came back green. Now she just had to hope she could find someone listening.

“Attention anyone who can receive this message: this is Dr. Chen Ling. My ship has crashed and I am badly injured. I need an emergency pickup. Please respond.”

She waited through a full minute of static before repeating the message. Again nothing but static. Did that mean the communications gear wasn’t working or that no one was responding to her call? Perhaps no one could respond to her call. Maybe she was all that remained of her husband’s grand expedition.

The communications system came equipped with an automatic distress message that would repeat over all frequencies until someone responded or the system lost power. With that activated, someone might be able to track down the pallet and rescue her. In the meantime she needed to do something about her injuries and take a look around to see where she’d ended up.

In a prescient move, she had equipped each unit with a basic field medical kit. The kit’s surface had cracked, but the contents remained intact. It didn’t have nearly enough to repair the massive damage she suffered, but at least she could relieve some of the agony with the painkillers inside. After popping two of the tablets inside, she felt a surge of relief. She resisted the urge to sag back to the deck and take a nap, knowing she might never wake up again.

Instead, she dragged herself to the lip of the pallet’s rear entry and slapped the release button. The button did nothing, but she saw she didn’t need it anyway; a large crack had opened up on landing. Through that crack she saw a field of white and felt a rush of cold air. “Oh no,” she said.

Crawling through the opening she confirmed her assessment of the situation. The pallet had wound up landing the mountains, probably on the southeast continent, about three hundred kilometers from New Jamestown. Too far for anyone there to see her and at this altitude—the mountains there ranged upwards to five kilometers high—no one likely would see her. At least not without help.

She thought back to a story her father had told her as a little girl about a man stranded on an island. When he saw a ship out to see, he gathered what wood he could find and lit a fire to attract rescuers. Perhaps if she lit a large enough fire a transport or patrol might see the smoke and come to investigate. It beat sitting around here waiting to die of cold or internal hemorrhaging.

Except looking around her she saw a minor flaw in her plan: a complete lack of trees anywhere around her. She saw plenty of snow and gray-purple rocks but not a single tree, log, or bush. She had crashed into the most barren part of the mountains, scuttling any hope of create a rescue fire. Or perhaps not. The smell of fuel in the air brought a smile to her face. She could do much better than piling up some twigs. If she could create a large enough pool of fluids from the pallet’s propulsion system, she could make a fire sure to draw attention.

After popping another painkiller tablet, she used a broken length of pipe from inside the pallet as a crutch and hobbled out into the snow. She needed to find a spot far enough away from the pallet not to damage the contents inside and then clear away the snow to create her signal pool. Getting the liquids to the spot could prove tricky, but she would find a way. She didn’t have any choice.

As she set out, she heard a rumbling sound overhead. The cheer in her throat at being rescued died quickly away when she got a look at the craft approaching. It had the same hammerhead shark design as the alien vessels that had attacked the Persephone. The aliens had come to finish the job. Ling hobbled away from the pallet as fast as she could, her mission of rescue turning to one of simple survival. If the aliens saw the wreckage of the pallet she didn’t want to be anywhere near it. Maybe later, if she held out that long, she could come back, not that it would make a difference as lighting a signal fire now would no doubt draw the attention of the wrong species. As she dragged herself through the snow, she felt a cold pit in her stomach, the bitter realization coming to her again that she had failed.

Chapter 25

2008-03-23T12:13:00.002-07:00

Chapter 25

Like the transport ships, the Brachyuran collection vessels didn’t have a captain or crew. There was no bridge per se, rather a central hub of computers operated from the center of the ship to keep it flying. A handful of technicians scurried around the two-story high banks of computers, checking for any burnt-out circuits or broken power connections. Should anything happen to the computers the collection vessel would be completely powerless, lost and adrift in space. For this reason, the systems were designed with quadruple redundancy with minor hubs scattered throughout the ship’s lumpy hull.

In the annals of Brachyuran naval history, a collection vessel had gone into actual combat only a half-dozen times. The first encounter nearly turned disastrous, as the projectile weapons that worked so well on the surface did nothing in space. Facing no other alternative, the tactical computers directed the navigation computers to ram the opposing ship. The lighter ship’s thinner hull crumpled under the impact while the much tougher collection vessel survived to complete its mission.

Afterwards, the Master Scientist oversaw a refit of the collection vessel, arming it with a new weapons system that would function in space. This weapons system was based on that first naval encounter. If the collection vessel could ram the other ship and survive, perhaps a smaller, disposable object could do the same thing.

The first drones were nothing more than converted transport ships with reinforced noses that could in theory allow them to plow through anything. In the next battle in space, the drones performed adequately, with sixty of them smashing an enemy flotilla into bits. While this strategy worked, the Master Scientist’s heir thought he could make the process more efficient by equipping the drones with explosive charges. He also went along on several collection missions to observe a battle for himself. Though he never saw one in person, his grandson did and recalibrated the tactical computer to more effectively target the drones.

In the battle that followed, the opposing ships were wiped out in minutes, never getting to fire a shot in anger. Given this success, none of the Master Scientist’s heirs or anyone else had bothered to tinker with the weapons or tactics of the collection vessel any further. There seemed little point as no collection vessel had come under enemy fire in over fifty years.

At the edge of the system, the tactical computer did not consider any of this history. Its systems only processed another vessel around the target planet and set to work on its calculations. First the tactical computer linked to the environmental computer to access the sensor data. From this it determined the structure of the other ship and a rough idea of its hull strength. It scanned for emissions, power surges, and weapons emplacements to calibrate the proper drone positioning.

If it were possible, the tactical computer would have grinned smugly at the end of this process. The enemy ship seemed to have no weapons in any traditional configuration. Moreover, it had about a quarter the hull strength of the collection vessel. The rows of engines located in the back would also make crippling the enemy ship a breeze. In short, the enemy ship was a sitting duck.

While the tactical computer made its decisions, the communications system received a number of transmissions from the enemy ship. Great pains had gone into programming the tactical computer, but no one had bothered to equip the communications system with a linguistics module. No one in the Brachyuran military or scientific circles ever saw the need for one. They had nothing to say to the enemy they planned to harvest. So the goodwill messages in English, Chinese, Russian, Swedish, and every other known Earth language fell on uncaring, uncomprehending ears.

The mathematical and pictorial message met a similar fate. The limited logic circuits in the communications system could barely add two plus two, let alone unravel any complex equations. Nor had anyone programmed it with any appreciation for art or the human form. Simply put, the communications system was designed only to deal with Brachyurans and cared nothing for anything else.

At last the tactical system had finished processing all the data. After sounding the alert siren, three doors opened in the forward half of the ship. From each opening came a pair of sleek drones resembling a hammerhead shark. Since the Brachyuran technicians in charge of the drones cared as much for other cultures as the communications system, they didn’t waste time writing any spirited messages or drawing fearsome images. They watched the drones go with sleepy disinterest, stifling a yawn before they floated off to retrieve more from the supply lockers.

The drones lit their drive engines, streaking towards the enemy ship. From the tactical computer’s calculations, the enemy ship would cease to be in approximately one hour. In the meantime, it linked to the navigation computer to plot a course for the target world that would keep it out of the inevitable debris field left by the enemy ship.

The half-dozen tiny craft launching from the alien ship signaled their response to the Persephone’s goodwill messages. From Lester and Chen’s calculations, they had less than an hour until the enemy ships arrived. Whether the alien vessels would attack from the outside or attempt to board, Alicia knew wouldn’t matter. They wouldn’t last very long no matter what the aliens threw at them.

If they could get the main engines back online they could run away, at least for a few minutes. The six alien craft were obviously faster and more agile. Even with a big head start the Persephone didn’t have much chance to outrun them. And a ship that could create its own wormhole shouldn’t have any trouble catching up to them.

As for making a heroic last stand, Alicia had consulted with Lester about that at length. The best he could come up with for a weapon on such short notice was a probe modified to carry a load of explosives from his truck. Alicia thought this akin to hurling a pebble at a stampeding elephant; she doubted the meager load of explosives on the probe could dent even one of the smaller ships.

The only option that made any sense at all was to scuttle the Persephone, rigging it to explode in the hope of taking as many aliens with it as possible. Chen had gone down to the engine room to investigate this possibility while Lester continued to search for some kind of last-ditch defense. Poor Ensign Tyler, her face so pale it had become almost translucent, was in contact with Rosaro and Barker on the surface, keeping them apprised of the situation.

This left Alicia with little to do. She floated in the center compartment on the bridge, watching the alien flotilla approach her helpless ship. In theory as the captain and the only one trained in modern naval combat tactics she should be designing some clever strategy to destroy the aliens. In reality, she stared at the screen and longed to swim for the nearest airlock.

Her parents would have done the former. They had both died barking orders even as the ship and the station around them were torn apart by traitors. They had gone down fighting, making the heroic sacrifice for TIC. And in the end, what did it gain them? TIC still lost, dissolved, became nothing more than a memory. All their heroic posturing did was to leave their daughter an orphan. She had far less to live for, but she had no illusions about going down with the ship.

Too bad the Persephone’s designers hadn’t considered the possibility of the captain needing to bail out of her ship after an alien attack. There were no handy escape pods or any kind of lifeboats and the transports on the surface couldn’t get up here and flee before the aliens caught them. As she watched the aliens close in, she considered the only possibility for escape besides throwing on a spacesuit and jumping out the airlock. It would be dangerous, but not any more than staying on board.

That would be a last resort. First they would have to exhaust any other chances. Maybe the aliens only wanted to talk or maybe throwing a pebble at them would give them pause. She couldn’t pretend to have any idea what they were thinking; she didn’t even know what they looked like.

A chill ran through her as she considered that perhaps these aliens were the same species as the birdman who’d haunted her dreams with his childish rhymes. Except the birdman had said she would come to him, not the other way around. Either way, she didn’t relish the idea of running into him and giving up her life—not that she would have much choice before long.

“Captain, the aliens are coming in range of the probe now,” Lester said.

“Great. Go ahead and hit them,” she said with a tired sigh. A moment later she watched on the display as a tiny object shot out of the Persephone, heading for the formation of alien craft. Down in his truck, Lester was steering the probe, lining it up for the impact. If he missed the probe didn’t have the maneuverability to come around for another pass.

He didn’t miss. The probe hit the lead alien ship right in the center of its blunt nose. To Alicia’s surprise, the ship exploded in a brief fireball, spraying debris in a circle around it. The other five vessels maneuvered around the debris, but didn’t slow down in the slightest. One of the remaining ships took the leader’s place in the formation as they continued to drive towards the Persephone.

“That thing blew up way too easily,” Alicia muttered.

“It must be rigged.”

Another shiver ran through Alicia. “They aren’t going to board us. They’re going to ram us. All five of them.”

“That’s a good bet,” Lester said. “If we had more probes we could knock them all out pretty easily.”

“But we don’t.” My kingdom for five probes, she thought miserably. That was it then. Their one attempt to fight back had done more than expected, but not nearly enough. She punched the intercom for the forward section. “Ensign, let Major Rosaro and Ms. Barker know we’re scuttling the ship.”

“Yes, sir,” Tyler said, her voice little more than a gasp. If the girl were scared now she would probably faint at what Alicia would propose next.

“Then get yourself down to the cargo hold with Mr. Lester,” Alicia said.

“Sir?”

“Go on. We don’t have a lot of time.” Alicia changed over to the line with Lester’s truck. “I need you to do a quick calculation on whether that truck of yours can survive a trip through the atmosphere.”

Lester didn’t hesitate for a moment. “Of course it can. The shocks on The Monster can handle a 10,000-meter drop without any kind of protection. So long as the pallet doesn’t have any cracks in it we’ll be fine.”

“Let’s hope so. I’m sending Ensign Tyler down to you. Ms. Chen and I will be there shortly. I trust you have enough room for all of us?”

“The more the merrier,” Lester said and then broke off the connection.

Finally, Alicia hit the button for the engine room. Chen’s voice came on, sounding strained. “Yes, Captain?”

“How’s it going down there? We’re running out of time. Those little ships are packed with explosives and they’re going to ram us.”

“I’ve got it just about ready. Shouldn’t take me more than another five minutes.”

“Fine. When you finish, get down to the cargo bay. We’re going to use Lester’s truck as our lifeboat.”

“Right,” Chen said, her voice clipped. “I understand. See you there.”

As her last official act as the Persephone’s captain, Alicia gathered up all the maps and other data on Lancaster. She figured it wouldn’t be much longer until she needed them, provided she and the others made it that far. No doubt Lester had copies in his truck’s computer, but who knew what shape that would be in after this drop? His confidence in his creation aside, the heat, rattling, and final impact of the landing wouldn’t do the truck’s systems any good. Some backup might come in handy.

The trip down to the cargo bay seemed to take forever. No matter how hard Alicia paddled, she hardly seemed to move at all. It was like the nightmares she used to have as a child of trying to run away from an unseen monster only to find her feet wouldn’t move. This turned out to be a figment of her imagination for the most part as within a few minutes she reached the cargo bay doors.

Ensign Tyler had already made the journey. Alicia found her strapped tightly into a seat in Lester’s workroom, hugging herself and whispering some kind of prayer. Whatever god Tyler worshipped, Alicia hoped He or She would favor their landing. If not, well, there probably wouldn’t be much left of them to bury.

Lester himself came into the workroom with a computer pad in his hand. “I’ve checked over the pallet. Everything looks clean.”

“Great news. Any word from Chen?”

“Nothing yet,” Lester said, his voice turning icy as it always did at any mention of his former lover. “She should be here soon.”

As if she’d heard, Chen showed up a minute later, wearing a spacesuit presumably as a precaution if the aliens hit before she could get to the cargo bay from the engine room. She barely seemed to notice Lester—her grudge surviving this stressful situation intact—and turned to Alicia. “Everything’s set up, Captain. The second one of those things hits us the reactors will go into a feedback loop that should cause a chain reaction and blow the whole ship.”

Alicia nodded, not knowing what to say. With most of her time aboard the Persephone spent in a cryogenic pod, Alicia hadn’t the time to grow very attached. Still, it seemed like such a waste after all the effort that had gone into obtaining the ship and getting it this far. With the situation on Earth when they’d left, she didn’t imagine anything as advanced coming along for some time.

But she didn’t have a choice in the matter. She had done everything in her limited power to stave off the alien attack and it hadn’t gotten them anywhere. All she could do now was to strap into her seat and wait. An inglorious end to her career as the ship’s captain—its first and only captain.

“Everything is set,” Lester said, consulting the pad in his hand. He sat in a seat across from Alicia, strapping himself in.

Chen remained standing in her spacesuit. As the pallet began to move, she took a step back for an open seat—and then punched the button to lower the pallet’s loading ramp. “There’s one more thing I need to do,” she said.

“What the hell are you talking about? We’re leaving and the ship is going to blow itself up,” Lester shouted over the noise of the pallet’s engines.

“Don’t worry, I’ll catch the next one,” Chen said. Then she bounded down the ramp, lighting the jets on the spacesuit to clear the pallet exhaust.

Lester reached for his straps, but it was too late. The loading ramp on the pallet went back up and then it began to move towards the cargo bay doors. Over the sound of the engines, Alicia couldn’t hear what Lester screamed, but the look on his face told her all she needed to know—it was the same one she had worn as her parents died.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time to stay behind so she could fetch the red pallet from its hiding place. Now plowing through the eerily silent corridors of the empty ship in a forklift with five alien vessels approaching and the Persephone’s reactors set to blow, Ling thought she might have made a mistake. The contents of the pallet could help the situation on the ground, but were they worth her life?

She kept telling herself that if she didn’t get the pallet out of storage then it wouldn’t matter if she died here or waited to die on the surface. Major Rosaro and her troops were capable fighters, but their firepower was limited. They didn’t have anything in the way of artillery of air support, a problem Ling could solve if she removed the pallet from the galley pantry.

One look at the galley told her this would be more difficult than she’d hoped. Someone in the process of loading some of the galley supplies for transport to the surface had left a pile of empty shelves in front of the pallet. Whether she moved them with the forklift or by hand, it would eat up precious time she didn’t have. Cursing to herself in Chinese, she hopped off the forklift to begin the process; she had gone too far already to stop now.

By the time she cleared the path, three minutes had gone by. From her calculations the alien vessels would reach the Persephone in ten minutes. That didn’t give her much time to get the pallet down to the cargo bay and herself inside. She would have to pray the pallet didn’t have any microscopic cracks that would roast her alive in the atmosphere. If she made it that far.

As she loaded the pallet onto the forklift, the entire galley rattled from the ceiling down to the deck. This could only signal one thing: the aliens had arrived ahead of schedule. She didn’t have much time left now before the booby trapped reactor went off, vaporizing everything fifteen kilometers around it.

Turning up the throttle on the forklift to its maximum setting, Ling backed out of the galley and into the corridor outside. She didn’t get far before she felt another quake rattle the ship, this one threatening to overturn her load. Ahead of her came the shriek of twisting metal followed by a tidal roar as the ceiling collapsed, blocking the route to the cargo bay.

“No,” Ling whispered to herself. There had to be some other way to get to the cargo bay to get the pallet out. She tried to remember the schematics of the Persephone for an alternate route around the blocked corridor. There was nothing she could fit the pallet through. And without the pallet her only choice would be to wait for the ship to explode or take the more proactive—albeit pointless—step of throwing herself out of an airlock.

An airlock! There was an emergency airlock about fifty meters behind her, though calling it an airlock was being generous. In reality it was nothing more than a door someone in an emergency could jump through to in theory await rescue. The odds of such a rescue being successful were extremely remote, but the ship’s designer must have been an optimist. And in this case that optimism might save her life.

She backed the forklift up as fast as possible, searching for the emergency airlock as she went. Another impact reverberated throughout the ship, signaling that she was nearly out of time. By now the reactors were already overloading, giving her about two minutes to get clear of the blast. Before she could finish calculating the probability of this, she spotted the big gray door with red trim.

Without any kind of measuring device she had to make an educated guess on whether the pallet would fit or not. Either way it would be a tight squeeze. But without any better options she didn’t have much choice other than to try.

She left the pallet floating in front of the door, backing the forklift away a good twenty meters so that when the door opened it wouldn’t get sucked out with her right away and damage the pallet. Then she punched the button to open the door. A siren blared, an automating voice warning her she had twenty seconds to get into the pallet before the door blew open. She didn’t need to be told twice; she clawed her way into the front door of the pallet, where the primitive controls for the propulsion system were.

A pallet was designed to be piloted by remote, so it didn’t have creature comforts like seats, straps, or padding. This left Ling to strap herself down in the cargo hold with a spare set of freight ties like an ordinary crate. She would have to pray the spacesuit could protect her from the gravitational forces and heat of entering the atmosphere, not to mention the impact of landing.

Just as she finished tying herself down, the pallet began to move. Bile rose in her throat for a moment as the pallet rattled in place, struggling to free itself from the airlock. What seemed like an eternity later, the rattling stopped and the pallet resumed its forward momentum. She had made it!

Her joy was short-lived as she had cut her escape a little too close. A violent shockwave bucked the pallet, spinning it end-over-end until Ling threw up against the faceplate of her helmet. The contents of the pallet around her creaked, threatening to collapse onto her, but the ties held them—and Ling—in place until the pallet settled. Before she had time to celebrate, the pallet began shaking, the back of her spacesuit heating up to the point of scalding her.

She screamed from the pain and as she finally passed out, she knew she’d made a huge mistake.

Chapter 24

2008-03-23T12:13:00.001-07:00

Chapter 24

For the last two weeks, Teresa had spent more of her time as a construction worker than as a soldier. The quaint buildings of New Jamestown provided some housing, but not nearly enough for the two thousand colonists, nor her unit. The prefabricated buildings they had brought along would have solved the housing problem if a crack hadn’t formed on one of the pallets so that half of the buildings crashed into the surface as a ball of molten slag. So with some help from the Persephone, she had taken three platoons to the northwest continent of Lancaster to harvest some of its ancient trees—conifers that went as high as ten stories.

The trees like most of the life on Lancaster were similar those on Earth, only heartier due to a lack of deforestation, pollution, and nuclear weapons. The industrial saws taken from the construction supplies required crews of two taking fifteen-minute shifts. Working in this fashion, they managed to cut down one tree an hour. After a day they had sixteen of the trees, the highest coming in at five stories.

The size and weight of these trees made for difficulty in shipping them back to the colony. Two transports were needed to life one of the trees off the ground and had to fly in perfect sync over thousands of kilometers. They lost the first two trees in one of the oceans and another into the bottom of a canyon. These first runs allowed Captain Stowe’s pilots to figure out how to work cooperatively so that the next thirteen runs went without incident.

From there the trees needed cut apart and fashioned into lumber. Back in Santa Rosa, Teresa had worked with mud and clay far more than wood, so this went far beyond her expertise. But some of the colonists had experience in a sawmill and volunteered to oversee the grueling process.

There was so much work to be done that neither Teresa nor any of her men had the time to bitch about being used as laborers instead of soldiers. They worked for eighteen hours a day and then simply dropped off to sleep in their bags. Besides, a portion of the cut lumber would go to fashion a barracks for them.

After a week of lumber processing, they finally begin on slapping together some temporary housing for the colonists. The weather on Lancaster so far had been sunny and mild, but that didn’t mean a violent rainstorm or something worse couldn’t pop up at any second. Captain Stowe promised to alert them if the Persephone’s sensors picked up anything, but no one knew how fast a weather system on Lancaster developed.

Another downside to working as a construction worker became apparent before Teresa had the chance to hammer her first nail. As the most senior architect in the colony, Sylvia Barker became the foreman. She brought the same perky energy to this as she did everything else, chirping encouragement until Teresa wanted to bash her skull in with the hammer.

“That’s excellent, Major. You must have done this before,” Sylvia said.

“Once or twice,” Teresa growled. Her first experience with a hammer and nails came at seven years old when Sherman had trained her and some of the older kids in how to make rudimentary siege weapons. With three other children, Teresa had built a catapult that could hurl bundles of grenades over the walls and into a cluster of enemy soldiers. She never found out how well the weapon would have fared in combat before they abandoned the town and Sherman sacrificed himself.

Teresa lowered her hammer. She hadn’t thought of Sherman in what seemed like forever. He was still back there on Earth, by now his flesh rotted away and bones left to bleach in the sun, while she was out here on Lancaster. So far away. In time would she forget about him completely? Would Santa Rosa and the earth itself become as alien as Lancaster seemed right now? She didn’t want to think about this.

“Is something wrong, Major?” Sylvia asked.

“No. Just taking a little break.”

“It looked like—”

“Mind your fucking business,” Teresa snarled, poking the short woman in the chest.

“I’m sorry. I just thought—”

“Don’t.” Teresa turned around, setting back to work on her part of the building. She heard Sylvia shuffle off, sniffling like a scolded child. Serves her right for sticking her nose into other people’s business, Teresa thought. She pounded in a nail with glee.

Later on she went over to one of the food stations and found Sylvia nursing a cup of coffee, her energy sapped away. That’s what she gets, Teresa thought again, but this time with less joy. No matter how hard she tried to convince herself, looking at the devastated Sylvia made Teresa’s cheeks flush with shame. After grabbing a sandwich and coffee for herself, she went over to sit next to Sylvia.

“I’m sorry I yelled at you,” Teresa said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“I wish I knew why you didn’t like me,” Sylvia said, looking into the cup of warm liquid as if it were a crystal ball. “I thought maybe after a while things would be different but they aren’t. You still hate me.”

“I don’t hate you. We’re different people, that’s all.”

“Right, you’re the big tough soldier and I’m just the cute little civilian who should be wearing a diaper because she can’t wipe her own ass.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That’s what you think. That’s what everyone thinks. I see the glances people give me and not just you or the other soldiers. The others too. No one thinks I can do as good of a job as Mr. Lancaster.”

Teresa looked around to see if anyone was paying attention, but the few people at the picnic tables around them seemed focused on their own business. She wished one of them would come over and take over; cheering people up wasn’t a part of her training. When one of her men had a problem she could simply tell him or her to stop whining and act like a soldier. If that didn’t work, a little tussle would get rid of any negative energy. She considered applying this strategy, but decided it wouldn’t work on a civilian.

“You’re doing a fine job so far,” Teresa said in her most cheerful voice. “It’s not your fault about the prefab buildings. You couldn’t have known.”

“Thanks.” Sylvia finished the rest of her coffee and then stood up. “Could you come over to the mayor’s house with me? I want to go over some of the new plans.”

“Sure.” As they walked down the fake-tree-lined streets of New Jamestown, Teresa ate her sandwich and finished her coffee while Sylvia went on and on about how some of the other colonists wanted to replace her, only none of them could agree on who else should be in charge. Though she hated to admit it, Teresa really didn’t think Sylvia had done a bad job in Lancaster’s place so far. She doubted any of the others could have managed things any better.

The moment the door to the mayor’s house closed, Sylvia did one of her calisthenics moves to kiss Teresa on the lips. Before Teresa could react, Sylvia had already wrapped her legs around Teresa’s waist so their lips could stay locked. To break the hold without doing serious harm, Teresa had to wedge her arms between her waist and Sylvia’s legs and then push outward. At last Sylvia dropped to the ground, landing on her rear.

“What the hell was that?” Teresa said.

“I can’t help it. I love you. Ever since that first day in Alaska I’ve wanted to kiss you. I thought since you were being so nice that maybe you felt the same way. I guess I should have known better.” Tears welled up in Sylvia’s eyes again. “You don’t care about me at all.”

“I think you’re a fine person, but not in that way.”

“You mean I’m not some big blonde with enormous tits like Mrs. Randolph.”

“What? How did you hear about that?”

“That’s not important.” Sylvia tried to take Teresa’s hand only to get swatted away. “You’re a beautiful, strong, intelligent person Teresa and I love you. We can start a life together out here. Like Mr. Lancaster always said, we can start over fresh. A new beginning for both of us. Think about it.”

“I have work to do,” Teresa said. She stormed out of the mayor’s house, her mind in disarray as she thought of that passionate kiss, the electricity running through her body in a way it hadn’t since Sherman died. None of the men and women since then had evoked the same reaction. “No,” she said aloud. It was impossible for her and Sylvia to have a relationship. They were too different.

For the remainder of the day she worked with Alejandro on erecting some rudimentary guard posts, keeping as far away from Sylvia Barker as possible. As she worked, she again thought of how far away Sherman was now if she could fall in love with someone else, a civilian no less. She only hoped his spirit couldn’t get out this far to haunt her.

Even after two weeks and a thorough investigation disproving any wrongdoing, Ling would not speak to Jacoby. She wouldn’t look at him if they passed in one of the corridors. For all intents and purposes, he no longer existed to her. Needless to say that put a damper on their working relationship. The only way for him to get anything from her was to ask Captain Stowe first.

The first couple of days he’d tried to persuade Ling that he hadn’t done anything wrong. He pointed out that Stowe and her people had investigated the records—had given Ling a copy of them as well—and could find no sign of sabotage. This did nothing to convince Ling of his innocence. “It would be child’s play for you to wipe any trace of your involvement,” she said through Stowe.

After this he tried to respect her and give her space. If he needed anything from her he went through Stowe. If they happened to be in the same room together he didn’t say anything to her. He didn’t try to convince her of his innocence, waiting for her to come around and see that he wasn’t a murderer.

That is until three days later when she came into the galley. With the colonists and most of Stowe’s people on the surface, the galley was empty except for him. Ling didn’t even glance at him. She took her ration bars and cup of coffee to the farthest table, sitting on a chair with her back turned away from him.

“Goddamnit, this has gone far enough! You’re acting like a fucking child!” he screamed across the empty galley. She didn’t give any sign of hearing him. “What do you think this fucking immature silent treatment shit is going to solve? It’s not going to bring Lancaster back. It’s not going to help anyone.”

When she still didn’t react, he swam over and took a handful of hair to yank her head back. “I didn’t do anything!” he roared into her face. Her eyes focused on something over his head and too the left as if he were a ghost instead of floating two inches away from the lips he’d kissed a hundred times. “Fine. Have it your way.”

He moved into The Monster that day, sealing himself up in its trailer. With its emergency supplies of food and water, along with its bed and toilet, he could survive in the trailer for a year. Maybe in that time Ling would finally grow up and see he hadn’t done anything wrong. An accident had taken Lancaster’s life; there was nothing anyone could have done to prevent it.

It was a good thing he’d decided to keep The Monster aboard the ship while they unloaded the supplies. Getting the huge vehicle from New Jamestown into the cargo hold took some doing, but with no gravity he and a couple of Major Rosaro’s people pushed The Monster into the cargo hold and up into one of the empty pallets to drop to the surface later. The reason for this move was in part that he didn’t want his precious toy to burn up should something happen to the New Jamestown module on its drop, but mostly he didn’t want Rosaro or some nosy colonist to go poking around his stuff. While he trusted the vehicle’s security systems, he didn’t want to take any chances.

On the seventh day living inside the vehicle he followed his usual routine of floating out of his sleeping sack to use the bathroom. Looking in the mirror, he rubbed the patchy, adolescent beard growing in his period of solitude. By the time he emerged it might finally resemble something like an adult beard. He just wished it wasn’t so damned itchy.

From here, he went into his workroom to check on the Persephone’s systems. So far he hadn’t noted any irregularities that would indicate an imminent catastrophic failure. At least he didn’t have to worry about the ship falling out of the sky to end his self-imposed hibernation. He’d hate for it to end before Ling relented, but then he supposed she would probably leave the ship to head down to the surface anyway. Knowing her, she would select the continent farthest away from everyone else to keep her back figuratively to him.

“Pig-headed bitch,” he muttered for the thousandth time.

With the check of the internal systems done, he examined the latest sensor readings of the planet. Still nothing much of interest. A lot of weeds and trees and a little bit of water, but nothing else that he could find. That a single insect, fish, mammal, or even an amoeba had developed on this otherwise lush world didn’t make sense. What little he knew about biology and evolutionary theory suggested this was impossible. But then it was an alien world; the rules might work differently than on Earth. That was something for the scientists down below to figure out. Still, every time he looked at the sensor readings an involuntary shiver ran through him. It was just damned creepy.

He punched the intercom to the bridge. “This is Lester. All systems normal.”

“Roger that,” came the bored voice of one of Stowe’s crew. He never bothered to learn their names, not wanting to get involved with them and risk alienated the closest he had to an ally in Captain Stowe. If not for her Rosaro and that irritating little woman would have tossed him out into space already. He might have gotten himself involved with the captain to solidify this alliance if she were about ten years younger and a hundred pounds lighter. The thought of all that naked flab bouncing up and down in bed sent another shiver down his spine.

A shrill alarm on his control board shook away these disgusting thoughts. A quick check revealed the alarm came from one of the deep space probes fired off to report on the rest of the system. While primitive compared to The Monster’s equipment, the ancient probes would at least give them some idea of what the system looked like.

Right now the probe had found some kind of disturbance at the edge of the system, just past the sixth and final planet. Some kind of energy cloud. Jacoby turned up the probe’s sensors to their highest setting—only a third of the Persephone’s own sensors—to get a better idea of what they were dealing with. A high percentage of neutrinos in a roughly circular opening that seemed to be getting larger.

Jacoby knew about as much about astrophysics as he did of biology, but he remembered hearing something about this phenomenon: a wormhole. No one had ever seen one before, but they were believed to exist. If you could find a stable wormhole in theory you could use it as a shortcut across the universe, popping out on the other side of the galaxy—if you survived.

The opening became wider, taking on a more regular circular shape. From what the sensors could determine it was white and about as bright as the sun, though with no heat coming from it. A moment later the probe vanished.

Jacoby punched the intercom button with a numb finger.

With Lieutenants Wheeler and Kline piloting transport ships on the surface, the bridge crew of the Persephone consisted of only Alicia and young Ensign Tyler. So far Tyler seemed genuinely afraid of Alicia, a nervous tremor in her voice whenever she had to answer a question. This was not a professional attitude even for MAC, with its loose standards of conduct, but Tyler was just a raw eighteen-year-old kid. A kid who had just spent a third of her life frozen in a cryogenic pod to an alien planet and was now being asked to man the helm, a job she’d never been trained to do. Under the circumstances, Alicia understood the kid’s nervousness.

Since it was just the two of them, they would have to work twenty-hour shifts, with one covering the entire bridge while the other caught four hours of sleep. Alicia had just returned from her nap, during which she didn’t get a lot of sleep. That damned voice had been taunting her again, singing its gruesome nursery rhyme. When she got a chance to go down to the surface she would have to see one of the shrinks to discuss it—and get some pills to make it stop. Until then, well, she had gone without sleep in her younger days. She could do so again.

They had a third member of the bridge crew in Ms. Chen, but she came and went at random intervals, usually without saying anything. Ever since Alicia had closed the case on Lancaster’s death, Chen had given her the silent treatment just like Jacoby Lester. Though as the ship’s captain, Alicia could hardly lock herself in a trailer somewhere. Frankie sure picked himself a hell of a crew, she thought. They had been lucky to get this far.

“Captain, Mr. Lester reports all systems are functioning properly,” Tyler said, her voice low and eyes looking at the floor.

“That’s good news. Thanks for the update,” Alicia said in her most congenial voice. Not that it would do any good. Most new recruits needed at least a two-year tour until they became comfortable around senior officers. That had never been a problem for Alicia, having grown up around a pair of senior officers, but it was true enough for those from nonmilitary families. If she tried anything like taking Tyler out for drinks—providing they had some kind of bar down on the surface yet—it would only make the young woman more uncomfortable. Best to let the problem take care of itself.

In the meantime she turned her attention back to the box of reports magnetically attached to the deck at her feet so it wouldn’t float away. The reports consisted of status updates from the surface, data from the planet and system scans, and the ever-present administrative reports that seemed to have followed her from Mars. Only now the administrators were herself, Rosaro, and that Barker woman. Eventually Alicia hoped to shuck this authority onto an elected body of some sort. Then maybe she would retire to some isolated part of the planet to live off the land. Having lived her entire life on military bases she doubted this would work, but at least then she might lose some weight. Somehow she had gotten fatter sitting around in zero-G and eating rations. She supposed it was because she didn’t have the chance to do any kind of exercise. A few months of chopping her own firewood and making her own food would probably get her back into shape—or drive her insane.

The door to the front compartment opened, Chen slipping through the door. “We’re all right in here, Ms. Chen,” Alicia said. “Lester just reported in.”

Chen nodded slightly and then went to one of the computers to run her own systems check anyway. There was another problem that Alicia hoped would go away in time. She remembered periods of brooding for a year after her parents died. A couple times when things seemed the darkest she considered suicide, but never seriously. She doubted Chen would try it either, though it wouldn’t hurt to keep an eye on her just in case. There were plenty of opportunities on a ship to commit suicide; Chen had only to open one of the emergency airlocks to end it all. That she hadn’t already done so was a good sign she wouldn’t do it, or maybe it meant she hadn’t thought of it yet.

The intercom at Tyler’s station beeped again. Alicia couldn’t hear what Lester said, but his voice sounded frantic. Tyler sounded even more so as she said, “Captain, Mr. Lester wants to talk with you.”

Alicia punched the intercom button on her station. “A problem, Mr. Lester?”

“One of the deep space probes has picked up something,” Lester said, his voice not much more than a whisper. This sent a chill down Alicia’s spine. When someone as cocky as Lester sounded frightened then something bad must have happened.

“What is it?” she asked.

“It’s a wormhole. And…something came through it.”

“You mean radiation or—”

“I mean another ship. An alien ship.”

“An alien ship? That’s impossible.”

“No, just improbable,” Lester said, some of his arrogance returning. “I’ll put what I’ve got through to the bridge.”

A moment later, Chen gasped. “My God, he’s right. Unless he’s sending us a doctored sensor report.”

“Why would I do that?” Lester shot back.

“That’s enough,” Alicia snapped. She floated over to where Chen sat to take a look at the report for herself. Her mouth fell open in shock.

It was an alien ship. Certainly no one on Earth had the resources to design what looked from all appearances to be a kilometer-long flying turd with its lumpy, brown tear-shape. And even if they had, unless they’d discovered some magic new method of propulsion in ten years there would be no way to get the ship here.

But perhaps that was what had happened: some breakthrough in technology had allowed humans to generate wormholes that could instantly get a ship from one system to another. The theory had existed for almost two hundred years; maybe someone had finally made theory into reality. No matter how unlikely, she couldn’t rule it out yet.

“Ensign Tyler, I need you in the communications section. Send them a greeting in all known languages on Earth and see if you get any reply,” Alicia said.

“Yes sir,” Tyler croaked. If gravity had allowed it, she would have fainted to the floor. Instead, she swam back towards the middle compartment in unsteady spasms.

Alicia considered what to do next if this didn’t turn out to be a fellow ship from Earth. In those two centuries humans had been devising theories about wormholes, they had also tried various ways to contact alien intelligences. These usually involved pictures and mathematical equations. Neither of these were her forte, but fortunately for her, she had two such whiz kids on board.

“Ms. Chen, I need you to work with Lester to get some kind of first contact message together. Tell them we don’t mean them any harm and we want to talk with them in peace. That sort of thing,” Alicia said.

“That won’t be necessary,” Chen said.

“What do you mean?”

“We already have a message preprogrammed in. I wrote it on Earth.”

“And you didn’t think to tell me?”

Chen shrugged. “I didn’t seriously think we’d need it, but Morton didn’t want to take any chances.” The mention of her dead husband had brought tears to her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Alicia said. “Can you get the message ready?”

Chen nodded, her hands slowly tapping at the keyboard. Meanwhile, Alicia had other things on her mind, like what happened if the message didn’t work. The Persephone didn’t have any weapons. Apparently Lancaster had thought to program a first contact message but not to put any weapons on board should that contact prove unsuccessful. But then rigging up missile launchers would have taken another month at least and they might have broken off or exploded during the ten-year flight.

“Captain, there’s no response to the message,” Tyler said. “The computer sent it out in every known language including binary code.”

“Thank you Ensign. Stay there in case they decide to send something through.” Alicia turned back to Chen. “Go ahead and send your message. Maybe they’ll respond to that.”

While she waited for that message to be sent, Alicia hit the intercom button to raise Lester down in the cargo bay. If anyone would know how to rig up some kind of defenses, he would. If he didn’t, then they were in big trouble.