Behind her, she heard a terrific roar from the rows of tractors, and a shriek like metal claws dragging over a gigantic, amplified chalkboard. But she barely registered the sounds as her right hand drew the sawed-off shotgun and her left reached for the Glock—then stopped uncertainly. Instead, she slipped the shotgun back into its pocket and snapped one of the grenades off of her belt. Her thumb popped the tab and she threw it directly at the creature, then dropped flat on the floor and covered her head with her arms.
The explosion sent a shockwave through her bones and the thing that had been about to attack Jex released a full and ear-shredding screech—what Mad had always imagined hell would sound like if it were a real place. She jumped to her feet and raced through the thin, stinging smoke left by the grenade toward Jex, who had taken advantage of the monster’s momentary distraction to roll over, push himself up, and try to stand. But the alien was not distracted long enough.
Mad felt as if she were in a dream in which everything, including her own body, moved in agonizingly slow motion as she tried to run to Jex. The creature behind him lunged forward, moving slowly through the air as it reached out one of those long-fingered claw-hands and clutched Jex’s right ankle.
Reaching for another grenade, she watched helplessly as the creature dragged Jex backward by the ankle, toward the shadows.
Mad heard the savage growl again, but this time it came from above her.
Something large dropped from the top of one of the loaders and onto the back of the creature, which reared up, dragging Jex with it. The alien lifted him into the air and swung him around by the leg to swat its attacker. Instead, the creature slammed Jex into the side of a loader with a leaden sound. Jex suddenly dropped to the floor in a splattering shower of white fluids. His right leg was gone.
Raising her eyes to the creature, she saw Jex’s leg still clutched in its claw as it fought with the mammoth red beast that kept slamming his horned fist into the side of its head. The creature had a pronounced, gorilla-like face with what appeared to be tusks, a head of wild, bushy red hair, and eyes that glistened in the dark shadow cast by the pronounced brow.
The leg could be replaced. She reached down, grabbed Jex’s arm, and dragged him away from the roaring and screeching. As they entered the clear passageway between the stored tractors and loaders, she saw Enzo Jaeger staggering out from between two tractors, his shotgun at his side, head down. He had not seen her yet.
She clutched the Glock, drew it.
He lifted his head, then began to raise the shotgun.
Mad fired and Jaeger’s right kneecap exploded beneath the pantleg of his olive-green suit. He screamed all the way to the floor, and as his back hit the concrete, the 12 gauge spun in circles as it skittered away from his hand.
The hellish sounds continued to reverberate off the walls from the cluster of loaders.
Mad looked down and said, “Don’t go anywhere, Jex.”
“Oh, all right. But I won’t wait forever.”
As she stalked toward Jaeger, he reached for a holstered gun. She kicked his hand and the gun slid away from him.
“Enzo Jaeger, I presume?” she said, lifting her faceplate so he could see he had been brought down by a woman. She always enjoyed the hell out of that part.
He stared up at her with pain pulling the features of his face backward on each side, making sounds that vacillated between whimpers and grunts. Nearly squinting shut, his eyes studied her through his pain. “You’re… you’re…”
She smiled. “Madison Voss.”
“Muh-Mad.”
Lifting her eyebrows cheerily, she nodded. “You’ve heard of me.”
He gave her a pain-twisted smile, nodding. “Yeah, I’ve heard about you. Here to… to take me in, huh?”
“That’s right. You and your buddy. Where is he, by the way?”
“Well, I think… he just… saved your ass.”
Mad thought of the beefy, towering beast that had intervened in time to save Jex, skin thick, heavy, red, and horned. That was Jack Bates. She remembered his claim that he had been experimented on by MetCon.
“I don’t have time to fuck around,” she said, looking down at Jaeger again, still holding her gun on him. She opened her mouth to say more but realized abruptly that the roaring and shrieking had stopped. Turning to the loaders again, she took in a surprised breath when she saw a naked man emerge from the shadows, bleeding at his neck, shoulder, belly, and thigh. He staggered into the opening.
“Enzo?” he croaked.
Jaeger propped himself up on an elbow. “Jack! You’re OK!”
Hunched over weakly, limping, Bates said again, “Enzo? Zat you?”
“Yeah, it’s me, Jack, I’m here. Over here, on the floor.”
“Jack Bates?” Mad said.
Bates turned to her slowly, frowned. “Who’s she?”
She smirked and said, “So, this is the one who ate his mother, huh?”
Jaeger grunted as he struggled to sit up. “Don’t pay any attention to her, Jack. You hear me? Ignore her.”
“My mother?” Bates said, standing in place now, staring at her. “You talkin’ about my mother?”
She drew the Smith & Wesson and aimed it at him. “Over here, mama’s boy.”
“Ma… mama’s…”
“I said ignore her, Jack!” He turned to Mad and said, “Will you shut the fuck up, bitch?” To Bates again, he said, “Listen, Jack, she’s nobody, just fucking ignore her, listen to me, Jack, you listening to me?”
Bates began to sway where he stood, back and forth, and he groaned, a long, sustained sound that lasted until he screamed.
“Oh, shit!” Jaeger shouted. “You dumb fuck!” He looked around for his shotgun, then crawled toward it frantically.
Bates started toward her, limping at first, looking weak and wounded, but with each step, his speed increased, along with his size and height, impossibly fast, so fast that she could not process it. His skin became gnarled and darkened to a rusty color and small thorns popped out of it like spring buds on wild flowers in a children’s cartoon. His face reshaped itself into one resembling a gorilla’s, and tusks grew upward from his lower lip.
And she watched in frozen awe, stunned into paralysis for a moment as the monster Bates had become lumbered toward her.
He reached a colossal hand toward her as he approached, and it grew bigger and bigger, filling her field of vision.
She fired the gun.
He stopped and flinched, making a low, gurgling sound. It lasted no more than two seconds, then he was moving toward her again.
“Jack!” Jaeger shouted.
The thorny monster that, a moment ago, had been Jack Bates stopped and turned toward Jaeger, first its head, then its body.
A blast of the shotgun took off much of Bates’s large, malformed face and knocked him backward. He hit the floor with a heavy, resounding smack.
Mad quickly turned to Jaeger and aimed the gun.
“Drop the shotgun, Enzo,” she said.
He did not. “You’ve gotta take me with you,” he said, his voice low and gravelly, moist with emotion. “I’ve gotta get off this fucking moon. You understand? He was my friend. Jack was my only friend. You understand me? I killed him to save you. You were dead, you hear me? Dead. He was going to end you because of what you said. I’ve seen him do it before. But I stopped him. That’s got to mean something. Goddammit. Something.”
“You’re wanted dead or alive, Enzo. And I never intended to take you back.”
She fired the gun and a hole appeared above his right eye a fraction of a second before he flopped back on the floor.
* * *
Mad headed for the bay door, still lodged open by the abandoned tractor. Jex was strapped to her back, surprisingly light, and his leg, held in her hand by the ankle, flopped limply as she walked.
“You got the fingers?” Jex said.
“Please. You think I’m new at this?”
She had cut a finger from each
fugitive. Back at the Tartarus, the fingers would be tested for prints and DNA and matched with the escaped prisoners so she could be paid her remaining five million bounty.
“We can go on vacation after this job,” she said.
“You could use one. I don’t need one.”
As she neared the door, a blurt of static came from the speakers and a female voice shouted, “You! Whoever you are! Send help! We need help!”
Mad heard screaming in the background, then the woman who had spoken screamed.
Voices in the background screamed, “Let us out!” “Open the door!” “We have to get out!”
“Not our problem,” Mad said. She began running. “We’ve gotta get the fuck out of here.”
She lowered her faceplate as she passed through the bay door and into the cold storm outside. The rain became a sharp, machine-gun assault on her helmet. Jagged tendrils of lightning jittered across the dark sky in all directions.
“I can’t believe this shit,” she said, running through the downpour. “I’m running through this storm with you strapped to my back and your leg flapping around in my hand like an old fishing pole.”
“Oh, admit it. You’ve been wanting to get a piece of me for four years.”
She chuckled and said, “Fuck off, Jex.”
ZERO TO HERO
BY WESTON OCHSE
LAMBDA SERPENTIS: LV-666
9 JULY 2182
Corporal Franklin Sykes had everything he’d ever wanted. There was no place farther from the core systems than the tiny moon LV-666 in the Lambda Serpentis system above the water planet Lambda Serpentis II. Nothing ever happened other than an oxygen scooper sinking every now or then on the planet below or a particularly virulent form of herpes spreading among the No Wey-Yu molybdenum miners. Which was exactly the reason he’d orchestrated his move here ever since word started spreading about some sort of alien monster that shit acid and ate metal.
Whether or not it was a rumor, he’d spent a silver bullet he’d earned when he’d looked the other way when he caught a No Wey-Yu administrator doing the dirty to an underage girl in the back of his office. The corporate hack was more than happy to get Sykes out of there and the young Colonial Marine soon found himself in stasis and on his way to the emptiest corner of the known universe… a corner safe from the sort of aliens everyone had started talking about in low whispers at the ends of long boring days.
When Sykes had arrived on LV-666, he’d found the station even more to his liking. The mine was almost played out and rumors were that No Wey-Yu might be pulling out. Their leaving was of little concern to the small Colonial Marine contingent. The marines would stay no matter what happened, lonely guards on the edge of nothing.
When he wasn’t working, Sykes immersed himself into Charity Rock, the intergalactic trading game that was all the rage. He was an Iberian Level trader with palaces in seven systems, a fleet of merchant ships, and his own private navy. He was trying to take an eighth system, but a handful of lesser traders had formed a consortium to edge him out.
His life was near on perfect.
Whenever Sykes wasn’t playing, he was breaking up bar fights, or monitoring the ever-silent emergency broadcast system from the mines along with the rest of his eighteen-person Colonial Marine platoon, whose boredom had reached truly majestic levels. So it came as a complete and utter shock to him when at 0553 hours on Tuesday the emergency broadcast system lit up like an old-Earth Christmas tree with the following report:
S.O.S. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE. ALCON.
NO WEY-YU MINING CONCERN LV-666 REQUIRES
IMMEDIATE EVACUATION OF TUNNELS 10—14. 3 KIA
AND 7 WIA. S.O.S.
Sykes stared at the screen as it rebroadcast the S.O.S., his eyes wide and unbelieving.
His thoughts went immediately to the impossible. How could this happen?
He’d manipulated the system like a genius, ensuring he was as far away from those monsters as possible. Now the very things he’d been afraid of were in his backyard and he was about to be asked to lead a team to eradicate them. He breathed deeply, reminding himself that he was so far away from the center of things that it would be impossible for the monsters to be here. It was probably something else, like a cave in or loss of oxygen. Nowhere in the message had it mentioned anything like he feared.
Still… he re-read the emergency missive that detailed dead and wounded miners. Something had to have happened and it could very well be those—he stopped himself. He needed to be in control. He needed his wits about him. He breathed deeply again, this time through his nose. He needed to remain calm. The last thing he needed was to hyperventilate. After a few breaths, he looked at the facts. There was no denying that there was a problem. What the problem was, he’d need to ascertain before he’d allow himself to panic.
He reminded himself that the S.O.S. wasn’t his only problem.
He also had some serious Charity Rock gameplay he needed to perform to stop the others from getting through a back door he’d intentionally left open. They knew about it. He knew they knew about it, but they didn’t know that he knew that they knew. The trap had been set, and all he had to do was spring it, but he had to be online to do it.
And now there were dead and wounded miners to take care of.
He felt his insides wrench.
It was all just too much.
He wanted to puke.
He bent forward and hugged his legs, hoping, praying that the signal was an accident.
Maybe if he ignored it, it would go away.
But the system buzzed again and the same message broadcast across the screen.
Lance Corporal Haywald stepped into the office with a toothbrush in his mouth. “Did I hear the—” He leaned forward and read the screen. “Holy shit. Is that for real?” Then he noticed Sykes with his head between his legs. “What are you doing down there, corporal?”
Sykes sat up so fast he saw stars. He managed to clear his throat. “Adjusting my boots,” he said, his voice a little more high-pitched than he’d wanted. He deepened it and added, “Get first squad together for response. I want them ready to deploy in five minutes.”
Haywald stared at Sykes as if he’d just spoken Chinese. Sykes shook his head and stood as he shouted, “Move, Lance Corporal!” That broke the spell and a second later, Haywald hit the alert button.
Sykes did a complete security sweep of the system. They hadn’t had any visitors since a ship full of No Wey-Yu med techs had come to vaccinate the miners with a new strain of penicillin. Of the seven-hundred and forty-two miners, two hundred and seventeen were on shift. Sykes sent a message to the No Wey-Yu site manager ordering him to hold off sending in the next shift.
Sykes got an immediate terse reply: NO CAN DO!!!
Sykes typed furiously. YOUR MINERS ARE SENDING AN S.O.S.
I’M SURE IT’S NOTHING.
There it was.
His out.
If the No Wey-Yu corporate site lead didn’t want Colonial Marine support, who was Sykes to shove it down his throat?
Everything was suddenly right with the world.
Sykes brushed his hands together, then typed a message. COLONIAL MARINES. NO WEY-YU DECLINES ASSISTANCE. STAND DOWN. Then he pressed send and turned off the alert. He put his feet on the desk and grinned, relishing the silence. Now he’d definitely have time to finalize the trap for the consortium. Who in the hell did they think they were messing with, anyway? His thoughts burrowed into the virtual reality of Charity Rock as he planned his Machiavellian machinations. Not for the first time, or even the hundredth, did he wish the realities were reversed and the game he played as an intergalactic trader was being a Colonial Marine.
He was hungry too. Wasn’t it time for breakfast?
Sykes found himself in the galley drinking the last of his coffee, when Lance Corporal Haywald ran in wearing full battle rattle: an M41A Pulse Rifle, M3 Pattern Personal Armor, black fatigues with knee, elbow, shin and forearm ballistic pads, and a ballisti
c helmet with a riot mask that served to both protect the face and be a visual locus for the Heads Up Display or HUD.
Sykes felt a slash of pain go through his head as a headache was born and died. “What is it, Lance Corporal?” he asked. Breakfast lay like a brick road across his gut.
Haywald hesitated before he answered, then said, “No Wey-Yu Site Lead has requested our assistance.”
He changed his mind? “He can’t change his mind.” Sykes pounded the table. “He said they didn’t want any assistance,” he said, realizing his voice had again risen too high.
“Apparently he did,” Haywald said.
Sykes put his head in his hand and shook it back and forth, slowly saying “No,” over and over again like it would be the magic word to change reality.
Haywald shifted from his right foot to his left. “Uh, Corporal?”
“What, Haywald?”
“Me and the others are gonna go take care of this. Uh, you can take it easy, if you want.”
Sykes stopped shaking his head and stared coldly at his subordinate.
Haywald held out his hand. He flashed a false grin. “Really, sir. We got this.”
It was one thing to be a coward, but it was another to be treated like one. Sykes fought the urge to accept Haywald’s offer. Yeah, he could sit back and let his subordinates take care of things. After all, he was the ranking Marine. Who was he to put himself in harm’s way? But there was something in Haywald’s eyes that made him balk. Sykes couldn’t put a finger on it, but it was almost like the younger Haywald felt sorry for him, and that Sykes couldn’t stand.
Sykes pushed himself to his feet. “Are the others ready?”
“First Squad is, Corporal,” Haywald answered.
“Have Second and Third Squad stand by. Let First know I’ll be with them in ten minutes.”
Haywald started to walk away.
“Lance Corporal.”
Haywald turned. “Sir?”
“Never presume to know what the Corporal thinks or wants. Understood?”