She could feel what was coming. Not the detail their pilot was about to reveal, but what it would mean for all of them. What it would cost them.
“Spill it already,” she said.
Khan glanced at Paulson. The lieutenant nodded, giving silent permission for him to speak. Khan scanned the back of the dropship, taking in the rest of the unit with a glance.
“The element the company’s looking for,” Khan said. “The bugs produce it. Just like we breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, they breathe in whatever the shit in this atmosphere is, and they exhale the gas we’re looking for. Without it, the whole sky would ignite.”
Dietrich massaged her temple, trying to process that. “So if we killed enough of them—”
“We’d destabilize the atmosphere,” Apone finished for her. “Maybe blow up the planet. Shit.”
“But now we don’t want to kill them,” Dietrich said, glancing around at the others, at Hicks, Hudson, Malinka, Vasquez and the rest. She saw it dawning on their faces, even as she worked it out.
Dietrich swore under her breath and started checking the seals on her exo-suit. She reached for her helmet.
“I don’t get it,” Wierzbowski said. “That’s why we’re here. To kill ’em.”
He’d never been very bright.
“Not anymore,” Vasquez sneered, glaring at Paulson and Khan as she reached for the exo-suit she’d already removed.
“The job’s changed, Wierzbowski,” Dietrich said, sharing a worried glance with Hicks. “We’re not supposed to kill them anymore. Turns out these things are the goddamn prize we came looking for. Now the job is to catch one.”
The sick expression on Wierzbowski’s face reflected the twist in the pit of her stomach. In silence, the rest of the unit exchanged scowls and then began dragging their exo-suits back on, reaching for their weapons. Malinka grinned, visibly excited at the prospect, and that was when Dietrich knew she wanted to stay far away from the girl. That excitement would make her reckless.
The scraping on the hull continued. The bugs were out there waiting, almost as if they knew the dropship wasn’t going anywhere.
“All right, Marines,” Sergeant Apone growled as he walked toward the rear of the ship, waiting for Khan to lower the ramp. “Let’s get it done. Watch each other’s backs and try not to die.”
Vasquez and Hudson high-fived each other, even in the exo-suits, trying to amp themselves up. As Khan hit the controls and the light started to flash, indicating that the ramp was opening, they all gripped their weapons tighter and watched the gap for those thin fingers, those sharp black glass edges. Air vented out of the ship and the whole unit started forward.
Try not to die, Apone had said.
Dietrich intended to try her best.
EXTERMINATORS
BY MATT FORBECK
Corporal Cynthia Dietrich and Private First Class Ricco Frost stumbled into the Last Chance like drunken rhinos, shaking off the hot rain as if they’d just emerged from a boiling river. Almost every other head in the main room of the backwater saloon—all four of them—spun to glare at the two Marines with undisguised disgust. The grizzled bartender, who looked like he might have come with the ancient pre-fab place when it was new, was the only exception.
“Fuck,” Frost said as he wiped off his face. “It’s hotter than hell out there.”
“What’ll it be, ladies?” the bartender said, splaying both hands on the rough surface of the chipboard bar before him.
Frost squinted at the man, trying to make out his face in the darkened place, lit only by flickering ad signs for liquor and beer and a guttering gas lamp. After a moment, he decided who the barkeep was didn’t matter. He didn’t know him. Hell, he and Dietrich didn’t know anyone on this entire soaking-wet ball of shit.
“Tequila,” Dietrich barked out with a grin. “All of it!”
The pair held onto each other for support as they made their way to the bar and planted themselves on top of a couple of rickety stools. The bartender produced a couple plastic shot glasses and filled them with a clear liquid from a labelless bottle.
Frost wrinkled his nose at it. He couldn’t say if it was tequila or not, but at this point, he didn’t think it mattered much. Whatever its name, it was potent enough to do the trick.
He plucked up one of the giant plastic thimbles, and Dietrich did the same. They tapped their shot glasses together and then slammed back the contents in one go. Both Marines howled as the liquor burned its way down their throats, then collapsed against each other, laughing. They slapped their empty shot glasses down on the bar, still chuckling.
Frost finally glanced about to see who they were sharing the bar with, and he saw only grim faces staring back at them. He tapped Dietrich on the shoulder and gestured toward the others with his chin.
“Well, what the hell’s wrong with you people?” Dietrich said, still smiling.
“You two oughta get the hell out of here,” a black man with graying hair and beard said with a snarl.
“What?” Frost said, determined not to let the man bring him or Dietrich down. “But we just got here! We’ve been trapped on a slow transport from the outer rim for the past six months, and we have a shitload of accumulated steam to blow off!”
“Let ’em be, Jesse,” a fat, bald white man cradling his hand in his lap and sitting next to the black man said. “It’s already too late.”
“You don’t know that, Tim,” the black man said. “They’re young. Fit. Soldiers. They start running right now, they might still have a chance.”
Frost glanced at Dietrich. Neither one of them liked how these men were talking. They’d run into some real jackasses in bars before, but they hadn’t been expecting any trouble here. Sullivan 9 was a remote refueling station with damn little to offer anyone but a steady supply of fuel—oxygen, hydrogen, even propane and wood—and a drink or three to warm visitors on their way.
And they hadn’t even been able to find that in the main building where they’d left the rest of their platoon. They’d had to bribe one of the station attendants for the directions to this place so they could slip away to it. She hadn’t wanted to give it up to them, but Dietrich was a heavy tipper.
“Long as there’s still drink here, we’re not going anywhere,” Dietrich said, her voice loud enough to make sure everyone in the room heard it.
“Or until the captain comes looking for us,” Frost said with a chortle. He looked at the bartender and gave his shot glass a meaningful tap. The bartender filled it up and did the same for Dietrich.
“Come on, Berto,” Jesse said. “They don’t need to die here with the rest of us.”
“Ain’t no one dying here today,” the bartender said. He left the bottle there in front of them and sneered at Jesse. “Either way, I’m doing my job. You oughta try to do the same.”
“Fuck the job,” Jesse said. “They don’t pay any of us enough for shit like this.”
“You want to leave?” Berto said. “There’s the door.”
Jesse eyed the exit, but instead of making a move for it, he took a slug of his beer and wiped his mouth on his grimy sleeve. “We’d never make it.”
“What the hell are you gas-gulpers going on about?” Dietrich said. “You’re creeping me out.”
Berto hemmed and hawed for a moment. “You shouldn’t have come here. It’s not safe.”
Frost had never been one to let anyone intimidate him, and he wasn’t about to let some backwater bartender manage it now. He slapped his hand on the table to get the man’s attention, gave him his best “you’d better not be threatening me” glare, and spat one word at him. “Why?”
Berto couldn’t meet Frost’s eyes. He just grimaced at Tim and Jesse and said, “Show them.”
The two men pushed their chairs to the side and stood up. At the far side of the table behind them sat another man, face down. He had been so quiet the entire time that Frost had assumed he was just a passed-out drunk as the Marine soon hoped to be.
<
br /> Tim reached over and grabbed the man’s cap by its bill and pushed his limp form back into a sitting position. The man’s head lolled back, and his button-down shirt fell open, revealing what looked like an armored jacket underneath.
Dietrich stared at the man while Frost coughed a harsh laugh at Berto. “You trying to tell us this piss you’ve been slinging at us isn’t safe to drink?”
The bartender shook his head. “Take a good look at him. He ain’t drunk.”
“Holy shit,” Dietrich whispered. “What the fuck happened to him?”
Frost had rarely heard Dietrich sound so serious, and it stopped him cold in the middle of concocting a snarky retort for Berto. He got up from his stool instead and took a few cautious steps toward the quiet man.
He was an Asian man with wide, reddish cheeks and streaks of gray slicing through his shock of hair. His face had fallen slack, and a layer of sweat covered his skin. His eyes sat open, but the irises had rolled back up into his head.
“Is he dead?”
Jesse shook his head. “Not yet anyway.”
Frost crept closer. There was something odd about the armor the man wore on his chest. He’d never seen anything like it before. It looked hard, chitinous even, but it didn’t cover his entire chest, just the front of his undershirt.
He didn’t see how the thin straps coming out on six sides of the armor could keep it attached to the man’s chest. They didn’t go all that far.
Then he gasped. The armor didn’t have straps. It had legs.
Frost stepped back toward the bar and tapped his empty shot glass. Berto filled it all the way to the rim and did the same for Dietrich too.
Frost slammed back his shot, and Berto refilled it without being asked. “What is that thing?” Frost asked.
Tim shook his head. “We don’t know. Park here staggered outside after having his regular nightcap and just started screaming. We came out to help him, and we found him like this.”
“What the fuck?” Dietrich said. “Why’d you bring him back here then instead of to the main station. They got an infirmary there, right?”
Tim pointed at the thing on Park’s chest. “There were more of these things out there in the dark. Don’t know how many, but enough we didn’t want to try to carry him through it.”
Frost groaned. “And you couldn’t just have called for help?”
Berto snorted. “This look like a legal place to you? You think we got comm lines installed?”
Jesse shook his head with regret. “Shocks me every day that Weyland-Yutani hasn’t shut us down yet.”
“Well, you can’t just leave him like that,” Dietrich said. “Get it off him!”
Tim held up the hand he’d been favoring. The fingers on it were as red as if the skin had started to melt off them. “Tried that,” he said. “Didn’t go so well.”
Frost could now recognize the strain in the bartender’s voice. It hadn’t been from having intruders in his place but from the agonizing pain he’d been trying to hide.
“I tried to pull it off with my bare hands, and it set Park screeching like a gutted monkey. Figured that meant I was doing something right, so I dug my fingers in around that thing’s edge and pulled.”
“It used some kind of acid to glue itself to Park’s chest,” Jesse said. “Shit spurt out with a gout of Park’s blood and did that to Tim’s hand.”
“And you didn’t go run for help?” Dietrich said, agog. “Are you fucking insane?”
Tim slumped back down in his chair. “We didn’t get ten meters before those things cut us off.”
“We ran right back here. That was three hours ago. We’ve been trying to figure out what to do ever since.”
“And then we walked in,” Frost said with a low groan.
“And now you’re stuck here with us,” Jesse said.
“I didn’t see anything out there while we were running through the rain,” Dietrich said. “Maybe those things are gone now.”
Frost strode toward the door and hauled it open on its squeaky hinges. The rain still pounded down out of the night sky, warm as blood. He squinted into the blackness, unable to see much but the lights of the refueling station in the distance. Their ship sat somewhere beyond it, entirely out of sight.
It wasn’t that long of a walk to the station, he knew, but it seemed light-years away. The captain, Frost suspected, wouldn’t come looking for them until morning. Hell, up until now, he’d been relying on it.
“I got a bad feeling about this.”
“You always say that.” Dietrich pushed past his shoulder. “See anything?”
Frost shook his head. The light that hung over the bar’s door only illuminated the ground beneath it and the massive propane tank out front that powered the bar. The rest of the area stood shrouded in soaking wet darkness.
Lightning flashed, and Frost spotted something rustling along the open, rocky landscape, just out of range of the bar’s outside light. At first, he thought it might be leaves, something like giant palm fronds, rustling in the wind, but despite the rain, the air remained still.
“There.” He pointed it out to Dietrich. “What’s that?”
Dietrich leaned forward to peer into the darkness. Thunder rumbled, close. Lightning flashed again, and this time Frost got a better look at them. They weren’t leaves. They were large insects. Lots of them, swarming over each other.
Frost pulled a small flashlight out of his pocket and pointed it toward the things he’d seen. Its bright light lanced through the darkness and caught the pile of bugs in its beam. They scattered from the brightness, looking for someplace dark to hide.
Some of them just ran away, while others disappeared into fissures in the ground. In an instant, they were gone.
Dietrich leaped backward, her hand over her mouth to stifle a scream, and Frost slammed shut the door. “They’re just bugs,” Frost said as he held Dietrich’s shoulders to help calm her. “It’s no big deal.”
“That’s what Park thought,” Jesse said. “Now look at him.”
Frost refused to. He turned to Berto instead. “It’s safe in here, right?” he said. “We can just wait them out. Someone will come looking for us eventually.”
“Maybe,” Tim said. “As long as those things out there don’t get them too.”
“You got a better plan?”
Frost wished he and Dietrich had brought their weapons with them. It was one thing to sneak out of the ship to go on a bender, though, and something far worse to do it while fully armed. They’d left everything they’d had back in ship.
Tim just stared at the floor. Jesse shrugged at the Marines. “Not like we had anything better to do. That’s why we were here in the first place.”
“Right.” Frost motioned to Berto. “I’d like to buy a round for the house.”
The bartender waved Frost off, but he put the bottle of supposed tequila out on the bar anyhow. “Forget it,” he said. “We’re past worrying about payment at this point.”
“Very kind of you,” Dietrich said as she reached for the bottle. While she topped off the two shot glasses on the bar, Berto produced four more, and she filled them too.
Frost picked up two of the shot glasses and brought them over to Jesse and Tim. Despite the fear his hands might start shaking, he didn’t spill a single drop.
Berto knocked back one of the remaining shots himself and then gazed at the other.
“Who’s that for?” Dietrich said.
Berto nodded toward Park. “He ain’t dead yet.”
Frost came back to the bar and scooped up the extra shot. He walked it over to the unconscious man and set it on the table in front of him. “I don’t think he’s in the drinking mood.”
“Maybe,” Tim said as he picked up the shot. “But you never know until you try.”
Using his good hand, Tim waved the shot under Park’s nose, letting the pungent odor of the crude alcohol waft up out of the glass at him. “Come on, pal,” he said. “You know you want it.”
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To everyone’s surprise, Park’s entire body twitched.
Tim leaped back, spilled the shot all over Park. “Shit!” he said. “Son of a bitch.”
Park’s head moved now, and his eyes rolled forward. He gazed out at the others, struggling to focus on them.
Jesse patted Park on the shoulder. “It’s all right, man,” he said in an even, steady voice. “We got you back inside.”
Park tried to sit up straight, but the shell on his chest stopped him. He looked down at it, confused and unable to comprehend it. He opened his mouth to complain about it, but nothing came out.
“We’re stuck in here,” Jesse told Park. “We want to get you to a doctor, but I think we’re going to have to wait until daybreak.”
Park tried to speak again but failed. His face contorted in frustration, and tears welled up in his eyes. Frost wanted to go talk with him, but with the state Park was in, Frost didn’t know how the man would react to a stranger approaching him. And if he was honest with himself, the thing on the man’s chest terrified him.
Tim stood next to Park and tried to comfort him. “It’s gonna be all right,” he said.
Frost suspected no one in the room believed him.
Park reached out and squeezed Tim’s good hand. The human contact calmed him, and he took a deep breath to steady himself. For a moment, he seemed like he might be all right.
Then Park began to cough.
It started out low at first, as if the man was only clearing his throat. Jesse reached around and patted him on his back.
Soon, though, Park’s distress became worse, developing into a hacking cough. It seemed to become more and more painful every time he flinched forward, hunching over the shell of the creature still attached to his chest.
“We need to get him to a doctor,” Frost said. “Now.”
“You gonna try to move him like this?” Tim said.
“Then we need to go get a doctor,” Dietrich said as she stepped toward the door.
Frost followed her. “What about those things out there?”
Dietrich shrugged. “We don’t know how fast they are, right? We just run flat-out for the station, and maybe they don’t catch us.”