Red company invasion, p.19
Red Company: Invasion, page 19
I pushed the barrel of his weapon away, and I reached down. I took that hand, which clasped mine as if we were shaking hands, and although I half-expected it to yank me down into the abyss, to whatever was underneath these tanks—it didn’t.
Instead, the floor beneath my boots began to buck up. Someone was beneath the deck plates and pushing up.
Taking a big chance, I took a step back, and I helped the waving hand to lift the vast burden. The deck plates were actually on top of the survivor, who was hidden underneath.
We circled around and stared into the faceplate of a miner. He had the wherewithal to snap on his lights at that point and identify himself in a whisper.
“I’m a boiler tech,” he said. “Boyd. Boiler tech, second class.”
“Come out of there, Boyd,” I said, lifting him up with my one massive arm.
He glanced at my arm with bulging eyes, but he made no comment. He looked around fearfully because there was a hell of a lot of rifle muzzles aimed at his belly. He knew that we must have seen the horrors that had come from this place and that all of us had itchy trigger fingers by this point.
“Look,” he said, “I’ve been hiding down there underneath the deck plates for a whole day now. I figured it was only a matter of time until I ran out of food, air, heat, or they found me. I need a little oxygen in my tanks. Can you share up?”
I grabbed his wrist, pulled it toward me, and checked his meter. “You’ve got at least two hours to go,” I said, “before it’s toxic inside your suit. We can’t take any chances of infection.”
“I understand,” he said.
“Ledbetter, Samuelson! Take this survivor back to the ridge and point out the way to the carryall. Do you need an escort or other medical aid?”
“No,” he said. “I can make it. I can climb that ridge like a monkey if I have to. In fact, don’t waste any men on me. You’re going to need everybody you have.”
“What are we up against, Boyd?” I asked.
He looked thoughtful for a moment. His eyes were big, round and staring. They didn’t seem to blink.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “It has to be from that alien ship. It’s something weird. You would think it was a machine, but then another moment, you think it’s made of flesh instead of metal. Maybe it’s made of both. But it’s not a cyborg the way that we think of them, with parts of metal crudely grafted into meat. It’s much more complicated than that.”
He described something then, something which I vaguely remembered. It was like the creature I’d seen in the past. This ran a chill through me, but I didn’t let on with the others.
“Where is it?” I asked him.
“Up forward. It took over the medical bay. It killed a bunch of men—or stunned them or something—when it first arrived. It has some kind of defensive field that it generates. You can’t get near it.”
I thought about that, and then I thought about a certain piece of high technology, which I’d taken from Redgrave long ago. It amounted to a cut stone in a talisman which I’d worn habitually since I’d faced Redgrave and these aliens on Ganymede.
Since that time, it had served as nothing more than a souvenir. A lucky charm, essentially. But when I’d faced the alien’s tech in the past, it had served to block the paralysis effect that they could project upon humans.
I reached up and touched my chest through my thick, rumpled spacesuit. I could feel the pendant pressing against my skin. I still had the thing. I still wore it, even though from that day to this, I’d never used it for much of anything. Perhaps today was going to be different.
“So, it’s in the medical bay, and it’s changing men into the things that have been attacking us?”
“Yes, that’s it,” Boyd said. “That’s it exactly. It seems to roam through the ship, find one of us that is hiding, and then alter them. It’s really good at altering people against their will.”
I nodded. All of this was not entirely unknown to me. We’d met up with many alien influences, including the mutation which had altered the size and strength of my own left arm.
These alien creatures operated with a different kind of technology than we did. Theirs was not limited to the physics of manipulating metal and electricity, all those inventions we held dear.
Their tech was more organic in nature. They worked with things like viruses, diseases, genetic alterations, all kinds of technology that we were nowhere near as familiar with. In essence, humans were raw materials in the eyes of this enemy.
I finally let Boiler Tech Boyd go, and he tottered off down the passageway and out onto the Martian sands. I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to stop running until he found the carryall and was huddled inside or under it.
“Is that it, then?” Ledbetter asked me. “We found a survivor. I’d call that a win. We followed our orders. We can do a U-turn right now.”
“Forget it, Corporal,” I said. “Shut up and follow me.”
We made our way through the installation until we found the medical bay. Unsurprisingly, all the doors that led into the facility were sealed tight. There were, however, large, heavy windows around the module, which was placed on the floor of the factory itself.
There were lights inside, and we could see something large moving around—something larger than any man. It had a colorful head.
I remembered that look. It seemed as if lights spun in the air where its brain should be. These lights were contained, like a kaleidoscope of colors within the region we would call a skull.
What was that phenomenon? Were we seeing the alien’s brain performing operations? Or was that how it communicated with its own kind, displaying a complex code of lights in a unique configuration of bright and dim moving hues?
I didn’t know. What I believed was that it was artificially intelligent. But what did that really mean? Where was the line distinguishing forms of intelligence once you got to a being like this? I wondered about these concepts vaguely while we quietly crept under the windows and checked one hatch after another. We found that all of them were sealed tight.
Did it really matter in the end if an intellect was animalistic and made purely of organic cells like ours was, or if that mind was artificial in nature? I wasn’t certain, but I was certain that I would be much more comfortable fighting a purely organic foe. Instead, I was dealing with a machine that knew how to control organic beings the way we controlled robots.
The thing inside the medical bay worked feverishly. It ignored us.
What was it making in there? I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to give it any more time to prepare for us.
There were four hatches that led into the medical module. I set two men at each. Then, I waited at one of the windows, watching the alien work inside.
There were several flat beds. They looked more like gurneys, actually. A body laid on each. The bodies were in various states of disrepair. All were male, all were human. Some had missing limbs or obvious gaping wounds from which no blood dripped. They had to be comatose or dead.
Sprawling on the deck between all of them was a big pulsating hump of gray matter. From this unknown nightmare thick tubes sprouted. These tubes weren’t like wires, but more like hoses. They ran from the gray lump to the bellies of each of the men. Through the hoses, a dark purplish liquid pumped into each of these unfortunates.
That gray thing on the floor… It was awful to behold, purely alien in nature. It seemed at first glance to be made of the same sort of material that the bolas had been. A gray-white quivering mass of something that was flesh—or possibly artificial flesh.
On my signal, my men set charges at all four of the doorways and blew them all open at once.
They rushed in, guns raised. Maybe one or two bolts actually fired—but then, to my amazement, every one of my men froze in place.
Some of them, being already in motion, pitched forward and fell on their leveled carbines. One man, I think it was Jackson, already had his finger squeezing the trigger.
His finger froze in that position, and the carbine spun around, spitting out bolts. These cut through one of the corpses on the gurneys, blasting it apart, spraying gore everywhere.
Jackson’s weapon, firing nonstop on full-assault mode, stitched across one of the windows and up to the ceiling. There bolt after bolt still fired from his stiffened hands, chewing a hole in the roof of the medical complex.
I knew in an instant what had happened. The enemy alien had used the stasis effect that I’d seen them use before. All of my men were helpless.
Chapter 24: The Trap
Unlike everyone else in my squad, I wasn’t stopped dead in my tracks. I was as immune to the stasis field these aliens projected.
I’d never given up the strange artificial stone I’d taken from Redgrave. I was very glad I’d chosen to wear it on today’s mission. I’d worn it for so long, I didn’t even really think about it anymore, just as a man might automatically put on a wedding band before he left for work.
The alien first moved to Jackson and slapped away his rifle, which was still chattering away in his hand. That stopped the weapon from gouging up the ceiling at least.
Choosing Jackson as his first victim, he lifted him up. Poor Jackson was as stiff as a board, but I knew he was still aware. He must be shitting himself on the inside.
The alien effortlessly placed the man onto an empty gurney. These creatures weren’t weak and were always larger than a man.
I had no doubt that within a few minutes, Jackson would have a hose shoved into his guts. The transformation process would begin, making him into an abomination that served the will of this alien.
While the alien was busy with his latest captive, I moved in. This was the moment I’d been waiting for. In the meantime, I’d been standing quietly in that window, not moving an inch.
I figured the alien had probably spotted me, but it had assumed I was just one more statue. Just one more easy prey.
When it was distracted, I stepped around on its six, and raised my laser carbine. For about a second, I considered attempting to capture the thing. What kind of valuable intel could the boys back at Mars City get out of it? How would you question a thing that had the power to incapacitate practically anyone it met?
I made the quick and safe decision. I aimed my laser carbine at the enemy’s back, and I unloaded.
Countless bolts showered the creature. The thing staggered. It spun around, half sagging to the deck. It seemed like it was surprised. Was an alien creation like this capable of an emotion like that? I had no idea, and I didn’t much care.
As it was still moving, I shifted my aim toward that colorful light show it had in place of a head. I fired another dozen bolts, and then another dozen after that.
Shattered and leaking, the thing began to flop about. It never made a sound, other than the noises created by thrashing.
It still didn’t die. Not yet.
But my men were coming back to life. All the damage I’d done to this alien had apparently stopped it from projecting its stasis effect.
My men crawled stiffly onto their numb feet. They groped for their weapons, and finally aimed at the monstrosity that was still flopping around on the deck in the midst of us.
“Let’s finish it, Sergeant. We have to be sure.”
I thought that over. “No,” I said. “We’re going to leave this for the Intel boys to investigate. Everybody, I want you to transfer your body cam footage to me. I’m going to upload it right now. This has got to be valuable information.”
We hooked into the facility’s network and transmitted our findings back to Kaine, who relayed it to Mars Command. As I suspected, calls came in not to do any more harm to the monster on the floor. We were to capture it if at all possible.
We helped our own wounded first and then tried to help the men on the gurneys, but they were all too far gone. They were dead, or undead, or zombies, or alien monstrosities. It didn’t really matter at this point. They were no longer functional as human beings.
While we were mopping up, a call came in directly from Captain Hansen herself.
“Yes, ma’am?” I said, answering immediately.
“Starn, are you injured?”
“No. A little shook up, maybe…”
“Listen to me. There were two other mining installations like this that reported an invasion similar to the one that you faced. Teklution sent men to one of those two mines. None of them have been heard from since.”
I thought about that, and I thought perhaps I knew why. Perhaps they’d been overcome by these strange creatures and their artificial flesh bolas, or possibly they’d reached the alien itself and the alien had put them all in a stasis field.
That was an awful thought. Those men were even now being converted into soldiers for the enemy. I wanted to voice these possibilities to Captain Hansen, but she went on in a rush. She wasn’t listening.
“On the third operation,” she said, “they took the facility as you did. But then they met the alien—and the whole place blew up.”
I thought about that, and I realized how dangerous the ice processing plant still was. What if the alien had wired it to blow up in case it was defeated?
“Self-destructed, hey?” I said.
“Yes,” she said, “I want you to get your men and any survivors out of that facility right now.”
I listened to her, and I obeyed her. It was an easy choice, as I agreed with her sentiments. I exited the facility with every man that I’d gone in with, plus that guy Boyd. The boiler tech we’d saved was going to have to go through some serious quarantine time, I figured. But he was indeed a fortunate individual. To the best of our knowledge, he was the only miner who’d managed to evade the onslaught of this single alien.
Captain Hansen had recalled the task force. We were to saddle-up and head back to Borag.
Lt. Quinn joined us at the carryalls. He said his men had been hunting around and had met up with a few of the converted miners in the farthest zones of the storage chambers, far from the medical bay. I guess I’d been the unlucky one, drawing the short straw and dealing with the alien itself.
Whatever the case, the word from our commanders was to withdraw. We were to let others—scientific egghead types—investigate in hazmat suits. Captain Hansen didn’t want to see us all get blown up out here in the desert. I appreciated her priorities as they matched my own.
We climbed into the carryalls and made our way to the VTOL vehicles. Although he was viewed with vast suspicion by pretty much everybody, we took our lone survivor home with us.
It was when we’d loaded up and were prepping to fly that I realized we no longer had Chief Chase to pilot the vehicle.
Another flyer-rated Green Company man, the guy who’d been driving the second carryall, replaced her. He rolled both the carryalls aboard the deck plates, secured them, and we flew away back towards Mars City.
We went skidding along over the deserts. We hugged every cliff, dipped down into every crater, and zoomed at top speed over the dusty flat sands whenever there wasn’t any cover.
On the way, I thought about Jenna Smith and Chief Chase. Chase had been about to ask me out that one time. I was pretty certain of that.
But now, she was dead. I felt a heavy pang of regret.
On the long journey home, I had time to consider what compulsion the alien had inflicted upon Jenna Smith. Why had she behaved the way she had? All throughout the time I’d known her, from the first moment we met out in space at her life pod, she’d been more or less normal. She’d seemed sane, like a normal, cooperative human who was just trying to survive out here like the rest of us.
But the moment she’d gotten close to that facility—and therefore to the alien itself—she’d changed. She’d come under its spell, I was certain that’s what it had been.
After that, she’d obeyed whatever instructions the enemy had given her. She’d done whatever she could to kill the most important person she could find in the team.
I recalled seeing tears roll down her cheeks inside her faceplate. She’d clearly been having some kind of emotional breakdown. Could she have been trying to resist the compulsion the alien was exerting upon her? It was my impression that she had been—but she hadn’t been able to resist. She hadn’t blown me up, although she clearly had had the opportunity.
What had she said? Something about acknowledging the fact that Chief Chase was higher rank than I was? That Chief Chase was a warrant officer, while I was a mere sergeant?
That simple fact, I think, had saved my life. Her compulsion must have been to kill the commander of the approaching troops. She’d followed this compulsion, but she’d done so in a manner that had inflicted the least harm upon our forces. Chief Chase had been an officer, but she wasn’t really leading us to battle.
Her choice had allowed us to complete our mission. If she’d simply tried to kill as many of my squad mates as she could have, she might have broken our attack and caused the entire mission to fail.
Certainly, if she’d killed me, I wouldn’t have had the anti-stasis pendant, and all of my men would have been trapped by the freeze-effect. That evil alien in the medical center would have won the day.
So, in a way, although Jenna Smith had turned on us, I felt that I had her to thank for our ultimate success. She had provided us a critical warning that all was not well at this facility, and she had killed someone who was not mission-critical in the end.
In a strange way, I thought to myself, I owed her one. I vowed to lift a beer in her honor at the first opportunity, when I returned home to Borag.
Gliding and jouncing across the desert floor with the loud, monotonous buzzing of the VTOL’s engines in my ears, I actually managed to fall asleep.
It was the sleep of exhaustion. Many of my men did the same all around me. Combat with vicious aliens had a way of taking it out of a man.
Chapter 25: Mars on the Brink
When we got back to Mars City, I was pleased to see no further air raids had happened. It was better to fight this enemy in the deserts of Mars than among the civilian population of Mars City.
