The Mammoth Book of SF Wars (66 page)

Hypron wasn’t certain how long he searched, but eventually he had to let go. He sagged in his chair, exhausted. His health had deteriorated until just this much effort wore him out. He would rest a bit and then see if he could fix the generator and open the door. The air still smelled fresh, and he was warm, so the house hadn’t completely failed. After so many years of living on the edge of survival, he had learned a great deal about coping with faulty systems.

The darkness pressed in on him. It was lonely. Well, hell, he should be used to the loneliness. He had hoped to find a wife here, but he’d never had much luck, even in the beginning, when he had been healthy. He could meet women; they found him pleasant enough to look at. But they always ended up saying he was impractical, moody, unreliable. It wasn’t that he minded work. He could toil for hours and never know time was passing. But the farm he and Oxim had started here, growing crust-algae in slop-flats, bored him mindless, and he came home every day stinking of sweat and mud. If he’d been a woman, he wouldn’t have wanted to marry him, either. He’d joked that way once with a girl he liked, but instead of laughing, she had stared as if he were an idiot. So much for his sparkling humour.

Oxim claimed Hypron was out of his element, that he was an artist, a dreamer full of imagination. He swore Hypron just needed an outlet for his creativity. Hypron didn’t see it. He wished he could be like the other colonists, satisfied with New Day. Except instead of a new life, they had come to failure. So many had died. And each time another colonist passed away, the survivors mourned, until it scarred Hypron’s mind, for he couldn’t turn off the grief, neither for himself nor for what he felt from others around him.

A thought came to him. Oxim’s filter mask might have clogged. It was unlikely; Oxim hadn’t been outside long enough, and he always took a spare. But the worry lodged in Hypron’s mind. If his brother was unconscious, put out by the noxious atmosphere, that could explain why his mind felt distant.

Hypron felt along the wall to the storage niche at waist height. He pulled out a filter mask and fastened the mesh over his mouth and nose, then crumpled a spare mask into his pocket. He had two options to open the door: repair the generator and return power, or break down the door and do repairs later. He knew from experience that even if he managed to fix the generator without replacement parts, it might take hours. If he could break the door, that would probably be a lot faster. Once he found Oxim, they could live in a back room until they fixed both the door and generator. They had equipped every room here with air filtration systems after the atmosphere of New Day had degraded so much, they couldn’t breathe it for more than an hour. That had been two years ago. These days, they couldn’t take it for more than fifteen minutes. If Oxim was trapped out there with a faulty mask, he needed help now, not in a few hours.

Steeling himself, Hypron grabbed a bar on the wall and yanked, twisting at the same time, trying to wrench it free. He kept pulling and twisting until sweat soaked his shirt.

With a screech, the bar tore away from the wall, and the momentum of his yank sent the recliner rolling backward as the bar thumped into his lap. Grunting, he stopped the rolling chair with his hands and pushed it back to the door. Then he hefted up the bar and swung at the airlock, and again, and again, hammering the recalcitrant barrier.

When the strained composite of the door finally buckled and collapsed, it sounded as if the house were groaning. Wet, warm air hit Hypron’s face. Even wearing his mask, he couldn’t escape the stench, and bile rose in his throat from the stink of fetid mud. Blue light poured across him, limning jagged pieces of the door that jutted up from the ground. The larger moon was full and overhead, the smaller one a fat crescent near the horizon. Bathed in their eerie light, a pier stretched in front of him from the doorway to a dock. Hypron inched his recliner out onto the pier, using his hands to clear a path as best he could. The mud-sea swelled around the house, endless, its fluorescent sea-mats glinting with iridescent specks like small islands in the vast, dark expanse.

As Hypron rolled forward, the pier swayed, its stabilizers as compromised as the rest of the house. Mud slopped over its sides and across his hands, oozing between his fingers, coating his skin, thick and granular with the remains of dead lobsterites no bigger than the tip of his finger. His palms scraped the rough pier as his hands slid through the gunk. The recliner had good traction, but in this mess, he could slide into the mud-sea, which teemed with fish-snakes that grew bigger every year. Then what? He doubted he could pull himself back onto the pier. He grimaced and tried to stop thinking.

As he neared the dock, a shadow at its end resolved into the sloop docked at the boathouse. It meant Oxim had returned. The big seine net was attached to the pier to snag the smaller, edible eels, so Oxim must have disembarked from the ship. If he had collapsed out here with a faulty mask, gods only knew how sick he might be by now.

The dock shook as Hypron rolled onto it, and mud squirted between its uneven boards, slowing the recliner. He forced his way onward, his biceps straining. The sloop was pulling on its tether, swaying in the lethargic waves—

Hypron hit a barrier. He stopped, peering into the blue-tinged night. A ridge stretched in front of him, a few handspans high. He felt along it … uneven and soft, like a bulky sack …

A body.

Suddenly he couldn’t breathe. He struggled to draw in air and gagged on the rancid smell. Bracing himself, he searched the body until he found the neck. His fingertips scraped the bumps of a raised tattoo there. An ID mark. Imperial Space Command, or ISC, provided one for every colonist, a means to identify anyone.

Anyone.

“Oxim!” Hypron shook his brother. “Oximsonner! Wake up!” He fumbled with Oxim’s mask, looking for the toggles that would tell him how badly it had failed. They were smooth on a working mask, but became progressively rougher as the gunk that saturated the atmosphere clogged the filter.

The toggles were as smooth as a burnished coin.

“Oxim,” he whispered. “Answer me.” He pulled up the sleeves of his brother’s jacket to take his pulse.

Nothing.

No.
No.
This couldn’t be. It
couldn’t.
Yet he didn’t sense his brother’s mind even here, right next to him. Clenching Oxim’s bicep, he planted his other hand on the pier and strained to push the recliner backward, bringing his brother with him. He just barely moved the body. Taking a ragged breath, he tried again and pulled Oxim another handspan.

Bit by excruciating bit, Hypron dragged his brother home. He struggled to ignore the stiffness of Oxim’s muscles.
Rigor mortis
his mind screamed, and he refused to acknowledge it, as if that could undo this agony. But nothing could change the truth, that mud-pirates prowled out here, using weapons they had stolen from ruins of the colony. They killed the owners of homesteads and looted the remains with impunity. No one went after them, no retribution even from the supposedly oh-so-formidable ISC. No one gave a flaming damn about this world that was tearing itself apart while its desperate colonists killed one another.

Hypron didn’t realize he had reached the house until he rammed backward into the door frame. He choked in a breath. Only a little further. He strained to pull Oxim’s body over the broken remains of the entrance, and debris ripped his skin. Mud seeped into his bleeding cuts, probably infecting him with gods only knew what. He didn’t care. He would rather die than leave Oxim to rot out in this miserable night.

Finally they were inside. Like a pressure valve that suddenly released, knowledge burst within him. Oxim was dead.
Dead.
The one constant in his world, the one person who cared whether he existed, the one person he loved, was gone.

He had no food. He had no way to contact anyone. He couldn’t pilot the mud-sloop alone. He had used all his resources except one – the projectile pistol. He could make his death quick instead of long and gruesome from starvation and exposure.

Hypron cradled Oxim in his arms, his head bent over his brother’s body while he cried.

“This planet is disgusting,” Soz Valdoria said.

She stood at the prow of the mud-racer while the ship cut through the viscous glop of a sea. Gunk splattered her uniform, the black knee-boots, leather pants and vest. It left dark blotches on the two gold armbands around each of her leanly muscled biceps, the sign of her rank as a Jagernaut Secondary in Imperial Space Command.

The sea ahead suddenly roiled and churned. An enraged creature once again lifted out of it, a snakelike monster with giant green eyes and a body armoured in purple and silver scales. Just the part of its neck that showed above the mud was four times Soz’s height and twice as thick as her body. Fangs ringed its huge mouth. It reared above the ship, whipping back and forth while screaming its challenge at her.

“Just a little closer, you ugly reject from hell,” she told the monster. “Come on, babe.”

Yells were coming from behind Soz, someone shouting at her to go below the deck, but she ignored them. This critter had pissed her off.

Its teeth glinted as its maw gaped above her, ready to snap her in two. Soz raised her jumbler, a mammoth black gun that glittered in the watery sunlight of this ridiculously named planet, New Day. She waited until she had a clear shot straight down the snake’s throat.

She fired.

The jumbler shot sub-electronic particles known as abitons, often called wimpons because of their low energy. They annihilated bitons, making flashes of orange light. In the air, the anti-particles created only a few sparkles – but when the beam hit the serpent, its head disintegrated in a dramatic burst of light. The beheaded neck snapped wildly over the boat. If the racer hadn’t been marginally intelligent, the spasming monster would have shattered the ship’s mast. As it was, the pole barely managed to bend aside in time to avoid being smashed.

With a final whip of its body, the headless serpent slammed into the mud and vanished below the surface. Black waves leaped above the boat and rained sludge over the deck and Soz.

“Gods,” she muttered. This planet deserved to be shoved into a black hole.

“Are you out of your flaming mind?” someone shouted behind her.

Now that the commotion was dying down, Soz turned around. Dale Yaetes, the racer’s captain, was standing there, soaked in mud, staring as if she had grown a second head. Rex Blackstone was leaning his towering, bulky self against a strut of the ship not far away, his brawny arms crossed, his Jagernaut uniform covered with mud. Yaetes was wearing a silver filter mask that covered his nose and mouth, but neither Soz nor Rex needed one; their physical augmentations included filters in their respiratory tracts that could deal with the atmosphere for short periods. As usual, Rex looked intimidating. But Soz felt his mood. He was struggling not to laugh. Honestly. She ought to throw him in the brig. Except their star-fighters didn’t have brigs, lucky man.

“I don’t think I was ever in my mind,” she told Yaetes. “So I suppose I’m out of it.”

“You can’t do that!” He waved at the revolting sea, which was still sloshing around. “Those serpents kill anything that threatens them.”

“Didn’t kill me.” Soz hefted her gun, which unfortunately was drenched in mud. She’d have to take it apart to clean it properly. Damn. Dismantling a miniature particle accelerator was no small task.

“It wanted to eat her,” Rex said. “The poor thing.”

She glowered at him. “And you just stood there?” In truth, she knew Rex had her back. He had in all the years they had flown together in a Jag squad, from the days when they had been cadets at the Academy until now, when she commanded the squad and he served as her second.

Rex grinned at her. “I felt sorry for the critter, the way it was so outmatched.”

“Colonel Valdoria,” Yaetes said. “If you decide to kill every creature that looks at us cross-eyed, we’ll never get the colonists evacuated.”

He had a point. Monsters infested this planet. She couldn’t get rid of them all; besides which, destroying the mutated wildlife here wouldn’t help what remained of the colonists. This world was too far gone.

“We’ll set up a base as soon as we find a suitable location,” she said. Then she added, “I’m a Secondary, Captain. The rank is roughly equivalent to colonel, but not the same.”

“Ah. Yes. Of course.” He looked as flustered now as he had yesterday when her squad had arrived with the rest of the ISC forces to help the beleaguered colony. He didn’t shield his mind well; she could tell he thought she looked too young for a colonel. Actually, he thought she looked like a sex goddess from an erotic holovid. What a bizarre thought. Some of his images were vivid enough that she picked them up even with her own mind fortified by mental barriers. No way could she contort her body into those positions. She wondered if he realized Jagernauts were psions. They had to be, given that they linked mentally to their ships. She hadn’t said anything because he was a good officer who genuinely wanted to help these people, and he’d be mortified if he knew she had picked up his, um, creative imagination.

Rex walked forward with that easy gait of his, his jumbler holstered at his hip. Soz nodded to him, and he nodded back, acknowledging her thanks for his backup. Yaetes watched as if he were observing the tribal rites of some dangerous alien race. Soz supposed he had reason. ISC classified Jagernauts as a different species from
Homo sapiens
because they were human weapons with biomech systems in their bodies that let them think, move, and react faster and with more strength than normal humans. Soz thought it was absurd to call them another species, given that Jagernauts and humans could interbreed just fine. Regardless of how ISC labelled them, their function remained the same. Kill.

Well, not always. Sometimes they ended up on missions like this one, cleaning up ISC messes. Not that ISC would admit they had screwed up royally here on New-drilling Day. The terraforming had become unstable, turning the supposed paradise into crud. Another few decades and the planet would be uninhabitable. Her squad had come with a recovery team assigned to help the colonists. Not many remained; most of those who had survived the miserable environment had killed each other off in a vicious civil war that erupted over the shortage of supplies and livable habitats.