The Mammoth Book of SF Wars (65 page)

We hear something.

I catch Boring’s eye and offer him the Steiner. He signs me to keep it, to keep it and cover him. I swallow. I toggle to single shot, ease off the safety, and rest my right index finger on the trigger guard. The stock’s tight in the crook of my shoulder, the barrel down but ready to swing up. I feel naked without a body jacket. I’d have given real money for a full suit of ballistic laminate. The Surge drops back behind us. I edge in beside Boring. He picks up a tube-steel work chair by the seat back, one-handed, and uses the legs to push the door open. Like a lion tamer, I think.

There’s something in the bio-store. It’s down the end, in the shadows. The tops have been pulled off some of the vitro jars, and slabs have been taken out. There’s fluid on the floor. One of the jars has tipped, and stuff is drooling out like clear syrup. I can see a pink, ready-to-implant lung lying on the tiles, like a fish that’s fallen out of a net onto the deck.

The thing in the shadows is gnawing at a flesh slab. It sees us. It rises.

The fact that it isn’t Mendozer is hardly a consolation prize. It’s just steak. A man-shaped lump of steak, raw and bloody, tenderized with a hammer. It has eyes and teeth, but they’re none too secure, and it’s wearing the soaked remains of a 2nd Infantry jump suit. It takes a step towards us. It makes a gurgling sound. I can see white bone sticking out through its outer layer of mangled meat in places.

“Bang it,” says Boring. “Put it down.”

Not an order he needs to repeat. I bring the nose of the Steiner up, slip my finger off the guard onto the trigger, and put one right into the centre of its body mass. In the close confines of the bio-store, the discharge sounds like an empty skip being hit with a metal post. Booming, ringing, resounding.

The thing falters. It doesn’t drop.

I punch off two more, then another pair. The post hits the skip again: boom-boom, boom-boom. I see each round hit, see each round make the thing stagger. I hear the vitro jars on the shelves behind it shatter and burst.

Boring snatches the Steiner off me. In my fuddle, despite my best intentions, I’ve slotted AP rounds. The hyper velocity slugs are punching right through the advancing mass, not even stopping to shake hands and say hello.

Boring ejects the clip. I yank one of the spares from my pocket, this time checking it’s got an HP stencil on it. Boring slams it home, charges the gun and bangs off on semi.

The hollowpoints deform and expand as they hit, preventing overpenetration, while simultaneously creating maximum tissue damage. They gift their entire kinetic force to the target. The thing kind of splatters. It shreds from the waist up in a dense cloud of wet and vaporized tissue and bone chips.

Now
it drops.

We approach. There’s wet everywhere, splashed up all surfaces. Flecks of gristle are stuck to the wall, the ceiling, the jars, even the light shade.

The Surge grabs a lamp and a stainless steel probe. He squats down and pokes the mess.

“What the hell is it?” I ask, hoarse.

The Surge holds up the probe in the beam of his lamp. There’s a set of tags hanging off it.

“Hangstrum, private first class, Nine Platoon.”

“The one killed in the accident?”

“The pattern of injuries is consistent with crush damage from a cargo mishap,” says the Surge. He looks at Boring. “Not counting the mincing,” he adds.

“Any idea why he was walking around like it was a normal thing to do?” asks Boring.

“Maybe he wasn’t dead,” I say, grasping at straws. Reassuring straws. “Maybe Nine should’ve held a wake to make sure he was—”

“He was dead,” says the Surge. “I read the path. I even checked in the box when we first came on station.”

“But his body was in the fridge with Mendozer’s,” says Boring. It’s not so much a question.

“Yes,” the Surge says.

Oh, it’ll all come out later. It always does. The stuff we don’t know about the Scaries. The stuff we’re still learning about how they tick, why they tick, their biological cycle, what they do down there in the blind-as-midnight darkness of Scary Land. We’re still learning about how they kill us, how their bioweapons work, how they evolve as they learn more about our anatomy from killing us.

The techs don’t even know for sure yet whether it’s part of their regular life cycle, or just something they developed specially for us. It wasn’t claws the Scaries killed Mendozer with; it was ovipositors. Parasitic micro-larvae, jacking the blood cells of his cooling corpse, joyriding around his system, multiplying, leaching out into the other dead meat in the fridge, hungry for organic building blocks to absorb.

Even now, we don’t know what they’d do to living tissue. We don’t take the chance to find out. Incinerators are SOP. Incinerators, or disintegration charges. The Surge keeps grumbling about airborne particles and microspores, about tissue vapour and impact spatter contamination. But Boring tells him to zip it. We’ve got bleach and incinerators and sterile UV, and that’s all, so it’ll have to be enough.

We find Mendozer back in the Rec. He’d been shuffling around the halls of Relay Delta aimlessly, lost, late for his own wake. Everyone stops and stares at him, baffled, drunk. Fewry actually raises a hockey stick like a club to see him off, like you’d chase away a stray dog.

Mendozer’s blank-eyed. Glazed over. His mouth is slack, and his chin and chest are bruised black and yellow where the Surge tried to save him and then stapled him back up.

He makes a sound I’ll never forget. Boring doesn’t hesitate, even though it’s Mendozer and it’s got Mendozer’s face. He hits him with the rest of the HP clip.

Boring says something, later on, when we’ve washed the Rec down with bleach, dumped the remains in the furnace, opened the rest of the bottles.

He says the wake was Command’s idea. When he signalled them that we were bringing back a casualty, they advised him to watch it to see what happened.

Like it wasn’t the first time. Like they were trying to establish a pattern. Like they were conducting an experiment to see what happened to the things that the Scaries killed. An experiment with us as lab rabbits. Middlemen, Middlemen, same as bloody usual. Fun, not to mention frolics.

We were going to miss Mendozer. Of course we were. I’m just glad Boring decided not to. Emptied the rest of the clip making sure he didn’t. I’ll drink to that.

I wish that extract would hurry up and get here.

THE PYRE OF NEW DAY

Catherine Asaro

Who cares what befalls the inhabitants of a failing colony world when nobody will admit responsibility for its failure? Sauscony Lahaylia Valdoria: Jagernaut, that’s who. Distinguished theoretical physicist, teacher, singer, former professional dancer and award-winning author, Catherine Asaro unveils a new chapter in the glittering history of the Skolian Empire – a story that features the incomparable Soz Valdoria.

Following up a BS with highest honours in Chemistry from UCLA with a Master’s degree in Physics and a PhD in Chemical Physics from Harvard isn’t the worst way to start a career. Becoming a visiting physics professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and holding positions at various times at the University of Toronto and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics isn’t a bad way to continue. Doubtless this helps explain why Catherine Asaro is as renowned for building complex mathematical concepts into her fiction as she is for the action and romance it so often features.

H
YPRON OPENED HIS
eyes into the darkness and sensed emptiness. The house was too quiet. He called out to his brother. “Oxim? Are you there?”

Silence. Usually by this time, his brother was in the living room, listening to reports from the mainland areas of the colony.

“Lumos on,” Hypron said.

The room remained dark. That surprised him less then the silence; the Evolving Intelligence, or EI, that ran the house had failed months ago. The backup systems worked, but they weren’t reliable. He wanted to believe that was why he heard nothing from the other room, but the silence was in his mind as well, and that shook him, for he always sensed his brother’s moods if the two of them weren’t separated by too much distance.

Hypron slid to a small table by the bed and brushed a panel there, trying to toggle on the lumos. Nothing. The room stayed dark. With care, he eased off the bed, intending to sit on the floor, but he slipped and fell onto the ground with a thud, groaning as pain shot up his calves. At least he could still feel his legs. The sensation in them would probably go next.

Rolling onto his stomach was easy; after that, matters became more complicated. He braced his elbows on the floor and pulled his legs under him, but when he tried to kneel, his legs gave way and he pitched forward onto his stomach. With a grimace, he pushed up on his elbows and crawled across the floor, using his arms, dragging his legs.

The entire time, he kept searching for Oxim with his mind. He felt nothing, which meant his brother was either asleep or far away. Surely Oxim wouldn’t come home without letting Hypron know he was back safely. Perhaps he had just fallen asleep on the sofa. Nearly a day had passed since their last full meal, and hunger gnawed at them both. Oxim had gone to find supplies, searching for an outpost or any place where survivors still lived out here. The mud-sloop didn’t have enough fuel to travel any great distance, which meant if Oxim had ventured too far, he might be stranded and unable to return home.

When Hypron reached the bedroom door, he sat against it, catching his breath. Then he grabbed one of the bars he and Oxim had installed on the wall and pulled himself to his feet. Leaning against the door, he used it for the support his withered legs could no longer provide. Unbidden, memories came to him of when he had been healthy, when he could stride, run, jump, full of vigour. He pushed away the images, hiding them in recesses of his mind where they wouldn’t hurt so much. As he slid open the door, he hung on to it so he could stay upright. Outside, he made his way along the hallway using bars hammered into the walls, dragging his legs along. Despite the cool air, he was sweating by the time he reached the front room where he and his brother often sat in the evening, watching the holo-vid, reading, talking.

It was dark.

“Oxim, are you here?” he asked. “Did you fall asleep?”

No answer. No snores or grunts. Nothing.

He slid his hand across the wall until he found the control panel for the EI. He scraped at it, tapped the surface, banged it with his fist, all to no avail.

“House, answer!” Hypron said.

Silence.

He edged forward – and stumbled on some object. With a curse, he fell to his knees. Grabbing at whatever had tripped him, he caught a wheel of the mobile recliner he had built. It must have rolled out of its usual place when the house shifted on its floating supports. He pushed it against the wall and slid into the seat, his legs stretched in front of him, his arms draped over the armrests, his palms flat on the cool floor. The velvety darkness surrounded him with a quietude that could have comforted had he felt secure, but that offered only fear now, as he worried about Oxim.

He rolled the recliner across the room. If he opened the outside door, the blue moons would flood him with their cool light, and he could see if anything was out there. Or anyone. He easily reached the door, a crude airlock, little more than a double panel with a layer of air between. When he pushed its autolock, nothing happened. He tried the safety release, which was supposed to work even if the power failed, but it was either jammed or broken, because the door refused to budge.

Hypron exhaled in frustration. Maybe his brother couldn’t get inside. With neither their house nor their personal comms working, Oxim had no way to contact him. They had also lost contact with the mainland when their neutrino transmitter failed. Hypron could fix it if they located replacement parts, but whatever remained of the colonial authority had stranded them out here with little recourse. They had never had many neighbors this far from the mainland, and only a few had survived the civil war that devastated the colony. Even more colonists had died in the aftermath of the war, when mud-pirates took to the seas and looted the drifting homesteads.

Although Oxim would never talk about it, Hypron knew his brother had killed to defend their home. Oxim had always been the protector. When Hypron’s health had failed, a neurological disease that took more from him every year, Oxim became a caretaker as well. Without that lifeline, Hypron would have died on this godforsaken mudball of a world.

Oxim, where are you?
Closing his eyes, Hypron let his thoughts spread outward, searching. Oxim was like everyone else; he didn’t feel the ebb and flow of other people’s moods. The rest of humanity inhabited a barren land where people knew only their own emotions. Hypron had starved his entire life for the touch of another mind like his, but Oxim came closer to understanding than anyone else. His mind was strong and deep, a bedrock to Hypron’s mercurial moods.

For so long it had been just the two of them. Their parents had died in a mining accident when Oxim had been fifteen and Hypron eight. Oxim had gone to work in an ore refinery on the asteroid where they lived, but he insisted Hypron stay in school. At age fifteen, Hypron had joined him on the job, both of them saving their pay, day by day, year by year, until finally they had enough to escape the planetoid. Six years ago, on Hypron’s twenty-third birthday, they had signed up as colonists for this world called New Day. So they had come here, full of optimism, to a colony that promised a sunrise in their lives. They had dreamed of so much: their own algae farm, air they could breathe, warm days, all those luxuries they had never known.

Sunrise. Right. He gritted his teeth and banished the memories, trying to clear his mind. Gradually his mood calmed and his thoughts expanded like ripples in a lake. On the edges of his awareness, far distant, he caught a mental warmth. Oxim? He tried to focus, but the sense drifted away from him.