“Fast as we can,” Katz said.
“I think I’m gonna have to start shooting, man,” he said, talking just to talk and to hear another human respond.
“Still have your rifle?” Gilmore asked.
“Negative. Broke it on one of their heads. All I got’s my sidearm.”
“Okay, hang tight,” Jepson said, sounding out of breath. “From your signal strength, I think we’re close.”
“I ain’t the one dealing this hand,” he said. “Crap. Okay, we’re inside. Double-time it, will you?”
Inside the Floater was a world of deep shadows and even darker shapes moving through corridors and chambers of deteriorating flesh hanging from cathedral high vaults of bone. He was being dragged through a thick slimy sludge of rotted organic matter.
“Waiting on an update here,” he said.
“Shut up, London.” Gilmore’s voice came crystal clear through his headset and it was tense with suppressed panic. “We’re here. There’s got to be fifty of them out here.”
“And even more inside with me. Anybody got any ideas?”
“Just one,” Katz said.
* * *
The first mate raised his rifle and said, “Fire!” And then he did, making a slow, wide sweeping arc with the laser through a clutch of Leapers.
The creatures’ mouths opened wide. Dripping, secondary maws of deadly teeth protruded from their jaws as their bodies exploded into black and green bursts of flesh and acid blood.
“Look at ’em light up,” Gilmore shouted and started shooting. Jepson added to the chaos as the surviving Leapers erupted into a frenzied panic, like a nest of grasshoppers with a lighted match thrown into it.
“Unbelievable,” Jepson said with a gasp. “Aim for their bodies. The heads and limbs are armored but the rest are easy targets.”
* * *
The Leaper suddenly let London drop into the slime and turned to hop back the way they had just come. Then the rest of the Leapers moving around in the dark were also racing for the exit.
Rolling onto his stomach and then pushing himself onto one knee, London raised his gun and fired at the closest dark shape. Its body seemed to shatter and it collapsed.
“Bingo,” he shouted and clamored awkwardly to his feet on the slimy surface. Just for the hell of it, he popped off two more of the bastards, then turned to make sure nothing was about to land on him in the dark. That’s when he saw the nest. He switched on the small lamp on his helmet for a better look and saw, stretched between two of the towering ribs, a wall of Floater flesh into which thousands of leathery and irregularly shaped objects had been implanted.
He knew he should just get the hell out of there, but before he did, there was one thing he had to do.
* * *
Katz was holding the remaining flash-bang in reserve, waiting to regroup with London for use to help cover their getaway. The Leapers obviously weren’t accustomed to resistance, and the carnage the landing crew was inflicting on them was enormous. But there was still enough of them that if the Leapers decided to rush them en masse, they wouldn’t have stood a chance.
The first mate was almost sorry he had allowed the thought to enter his mind, because the moment it did, the Leapers behavior began to change, almost as though they were adapting their tactics to this new, lethal opponent. They were spreading out, widening the distances between themselves, creating scores of individual, harder to hit targets, tightening the circle around them.
“London!” he shouted.
* * *
“I’m coming, boss,” London said. “And I’m planning on leaving things hot behind me.”
“Explain,” Katz snapped.
London grinned, moving as fast as he could across the slick, slimy surface.
“I got a back-up oxygen tank and a gun. You do the math.”
A dark shape swept across his path. He lost his footing in the slime, but threw himself headlong toward the exit, sliding across the ground like a sled on ice under the shape and out into the open.
“Heads up,” he shouted, using the low-gravity to push himself to his feet. The others were back to back, eyes on the surrounding Leapers. London had already disconnected the small oxygen cylinder tucked into a pocket on his chest and now he gently tossed it into the entrance. He took aim and fired.
And missed with his first shot, and with his second. The third was even wider off the mark.
“Jeez, London,” Gilmore snapped. “Out of the way!”
A couple of hops brought her to London. She raised her rifle and fanned the beam across the canister until she homed in on it and blasted away.
The Leapers started to move.
Katz yelled something that was lost in the sweep of the concussive wave from the exploding oxygen tank which sent them all flying. The blast ignited the ground cover and the fiery heat seemed to transmit itself through the vegetation and the Floater carcass without bursting into towering licks of flame.
The blast was intense and even before the humans had stopped tumbling, the Leaper colony was in motion. But instead of pouncing on their stunned prey, they streamed as one into the smoldering carcass.
“You said you found a nest,” Jepson said, breathing heavily. “They must be trying to save the offspring.”
“Who cares?” London said. “Let’s go while we can.”
“Anyone know which way we came?” Gilmore said.
“I do,” Katz said. “I used to be a Boy Scout. I marked our trail.”
London looked at him. “A Boy Scout? You?”
Katz grinned and armed the concussive grenade and threw it at the mouth of the carcass, crammed with Leapers doomed by a hereditary instinct that made them race blindly into disaster to save their unborn.
“I said ‘used to be,’” he said.
The grenade went off and, in the billowing smoke, the crew of the Typhoon slipped away into the forest.
* * *
As the repaired Typhoon climbed into the sky, the crew could see the smoke billowing from the forest of giant stalks. Infra-red imaging showed that the conflagration had spread almost three kilometers from its starting point but seemed to be dying of its own accord. Jepson started to explain how the combination of low atmospheric pressure and certain flammable elements enabled the heat to burn without flames, but everybody was suddenly tired and headed off to bed.
In his quarters, London stripped down and allowed himself as long and as hot a shower as the ships’ system would give him before sitting down on the edge of his bunk with the souvenir he had collected during the E.V.A. While most of the biological samples of the vegetation and the Floaters had made it back to the ship, no one had the time or the presence of mind to grab something before their escape.
There had been a lot of grumbling about the lack of Leaper DNA gathered once they got back to the ship. But all agreed that coming out of the experience alive was better than nothing, and, besides, they still had the bonus they would be receiving for the Floater samples.
London kept his mouth shut and the object he had snatched up on his way out the door hidden. It was oblong, a little larger than a potato, and had a black, leathery shell. He guessed it was a Leaper egg and was willing to bet the bank the company was going to pay him life-changing money to get their hands on it. And he figured since the risk in getting it had been all his, the bonus money should be too.
“Fortune favors the bold, kid,” he said to himself, out loud and with a smile, left the egg on top of his locker before shutting the lights and drifting off to dream about what he was going to do with his fortune.
* * *
London was dreaming. He was seated at a poker table with five Leapers, one of them smoking a cigar, playing poker. Instead of chips, they were playing for Leaper eggs and London was winning big. He had a surefire hand, five Leapers straight, so he picked up his biggest egg to throw it into the pot, but the leathery shell was warm and alive in his hand, pulsating. And then, it began to crack open with a sharp, wet sound.
&nb
sp; London’s eyes flicked open. He came awake so fast, he could still hear the sound of the cracking egg in the dark of his cabin.
It wasn’t until he felt the warm, moist creature crawl onto his face and fire its tentacle down his throat that he realized he wasn’t dreaming, but by then, it was too late.
REAPER
BY DAN ABNETT
They slam-dropped out of the Montoro’s belly hangars and rode the rattling wind down to LV-KR 115.
A thirty-minute descent. Canetti had the stick of the lead drop. He lost sight of the other Cheyenne in a matter of seconds. After the bump and the stomach-lurch of clamp release, he looked up and watched the giant oblong shadow of the Montoro slowly turning away and receding into the pale darkness of near-space, as though it was leaving them behind rather than the other way around.
Drop two was at his nine, the small blue blades of its thrusters flashing on and off as it trimmed its headlong fall.
Then they hit cloud and he couldn’t see it anymore. Frame vibration increased and the stick quivered in his hand. The cloud was like whisked soup. He watched the track, the amber squares of the trajectory field lapping and overlapping around the steady cursor that was them.
“Still with me, drop two?” he asked into his helmet mic.
A rasp of noise.
“Copy that, lead drop. Nice weather for it.”
“Copy, two.”
Another belch of gritty sound.
“Coming up on the marker. Execution point in ten. See you on the other side.”
“Copy, two. Happy hunting.”
Out there in the soup, invisible, drop two was pulling west, diverting from the lead drop’s course, heading out across the northern continental towards the secondary LZ.
The intercom bleeped. Lieutenant Teller in the payload bay below him.
“How we doing, Canetti?”
“In the pipe. Looks good.”
“What have you got?”
“Weather, sir,” said Canetti.
* * *
Rogers pulled up the schematics for the crop tractor and Teller slid his seat along the deck rail to look at the wall display. The whole platoon had reviewed the data two dozen times during on-board briefs, and even done a walk-through in the simulator.
The airframe juddered. Teller kept his eyes fixed on the monitor display. Rogers knew the lieutenant was tense. He’d made eight drops, but every one had been with Captain Broome along, calling the shots. This time, Broome was on drop two, checking out the secondary LZ. Teller had command for the main excursion. Rogers knew it was a test. Teller was looking at SOCS promotion. He’d passed the boards, but he needed practical citations on his docket.
“Main upper hull is big enough for a set-down,” she said, pointing.
“Uh huh,” said Teller.
“Unless this chop keeps up,” Rogers added. “Windshear off the fields could swing us off the flat top into the control tower or the uplink masts.”
“In which case, we divert to the baler housing on the side,” Teller said. “There’s a large platform there.”
“Agreed,” said Rogers. They had already agreed all of this. Teller was just rehearsing. He was doing what Sergeant Bose called a “fine tooth,” a repeated workthrough until the mission parameters were like muscle memory.
Rogers tapped the keys of her console.
“Canetti was right,” she said. “Lots of weather. Storm formation’s kicking a serious crosswind.”
“Baler housing it is,” said Teller.
“I’ll let Canetti know,” she replied.
* * *
Teller studied the screen. He clicked through images of the target vehicle: Plan and elevation schematics, feed-cap shots of similar machines working on site, and images from the Weyland-Yutani product brochure. A model 868 “Ceres” Harvester Unit. 210,000 metric, 297 meters long, its steel carapace painted bright yellow with environment-resistant polymer. Hell of a thing.
Teller was fourth generation USMC. He’d grown up in Annapolis, and had spent many hours of his childhood in the Yard’s famous museum. The crop tractor reminded him of the old surface Navy aircraft carriers displayed there like trophy fish. The carriers were antiques, part of a school of warfare that had been obsolete for sixty years when he was born. Their spirit lived on in Conestoga-class light assault ships like the Montoro, and even more so in the massive Hellespont-class fleet carriers, the design ethic that had once commanded the oceans converted to space warfare. But the visual aesthetics endured in the Company-manufactured crop tractors, set on vast wheel-trains and programmed to endlessly harvest the prairies of gene-fixed agro-worlds like LV-KR 115.
The unit they were chasing was serial 678493, chassis name “Consus.” Crew of sixty-eight, working a five-year shift between replenishment cycles, harvesting and freeze-packing the crop into bales twenty-four seven. Remote-flown lifters transported the cargo to orbiting silos for freight collection. Five-year contract. Hell of a life.
The Consus was one of two harvesters working LV-KR 115. Six weeks after its last replenishment it had reported a malfunction. Contact dropped out, then Company tracking indicated that the tractor had diverted from its programmed harvesting grid. Demeter, the other tractor operating on the surface, had attempted contact, but then aborted five rescue ops in a row because of bad weather. The chief officer of the Demeter had logged “the worst storms ever seen on LV-KR 115.” Data supported that. LV-KR 115 suffered seasonal storms, but the atmospheric tumult that had hammered the planet for the last three months was unprecedented.
Agricultural fliers were grounded, but UD4L Cheyenne dropships were all-weather rated and built to take punishment. USMC pilots like Canetti were also better trained than the average company contractor. Teller had known Canetti land a drop on manual in the middle of sandstorm and 200 kph shear.
It wasn’t going to be much of a chase. The crop tractors maxed out at a crawling 7 kph surface speed, a ridiculously easy bounce for a UD4L drop.
And anyway, the Consus had stopped moving altogether three weeks earlier.
“You still think it’s the drive system?” Rogers asked him.
“Drives explains the dead-stop, but not the comms,” he replied.
“Power plant, then?”
“And aux? That’s unlucky. Besides, the Company has attempted four restarts by remote. They’re not getting a ‘fail’ message. They’re getting nothing.”
“I said it,” said Sergeant Bose. “Some joker’s lost their shit.”
Bose had unclasped his restraints and was standing behind them, strap-hanging from the overhead bar, his body rocking to the jolt of the airframe.
“Maybe,” said Teller. It was a sad truth that no matter what safety measures, redundancies, back-ups and secondaries were rigged into high-value hardware units, the most common cause of shut-down was human action. Despite rigorous vetting and psychological testing, people on long-ticket contracts snapped. One rogue actor with a firearm could take down a contained working environment and cause all the system damage that explained the data.
“More than maybe, I’d say,” said Bose.
“That’s why we’re loading plastics for entry,” said Teller. The clip of every weapon in the platoon was marked with blue tape. Non-lethal munitions. Teller did not want crossfire fatalities.
Bose shrugged. Everyone had live rounds in their webbing anyway.
A buzzer sounded.
“Coming up, two minutes!” Canetti’s voice reported through the speakers.
“Get up, get set!” Bose called, turning to the troopers in their rows of landing rigs. “Lamp goes on, we go clean and fast!”
The marines started to prep and shake out, each one ready to pop the lock of their restraint harness.
“Lids, goggles, rebreathers,” Teller said. “There’s a lot of chaff in the air, a lot of airborne dirt. Get through it, get inside. No one goes bareface until we’ve accessed the interior. If I have to write any of you up for any crap, I want you to be
able to see me as well as hear me when I do it.”
* * *
Canetti eased back on the stick. They were forty meters up, and way past stall-speed. VTOL mode was on, and the drop was nose-high. The air was filthy, like a blizzard of black snow. There was a hard cross pitching about 160 kph. Zero visibility. He tried kicking on the floods, but that made things worse. He guessed it was airblown particulates, maybe soil, or processed grain waste. It was as if the quartz of the cockpit canopy had been sprayed with blackout paint.
He switched to instruments. 3D imaging showed him the ground, and picked up a huge furrow in the top soil. The tractor’s track. He adjusted the scope and suddenly painted the side of the Consus, rising like the wall of a dam.
“Shit,” he said gently, and pulled hard. Collision warnings began to shriek. Hazards blinked on and off across his board. The airframe shuddered violently, and the turbines wailed in protest. The stick was like glue. He trusted the VTOL systems, but now he was worried about the blizzarding soup outside clogging his intakes and thrust nozzles. Software and autoflight were keeping the drop in the air, a plate-spinning balancing act of trim and vector-thrust beyond the manual abilities of any human operator.
“Come on, you dog,” he whispered.
The tractor was huge. He tweaked the resolution of the imaging, and got the datalink to run a comparison with the stored schematics. The screen pinged up an overlay match. As he had judged from the relative position of the track, they were approaching the port side of the beast. Canetti didn’t want to trust his instincts: it was too easy to get turned around in a blind-out like this.
He flipped the match view to the heads-up display, and panned for the port-side baler housing. It was easy to identify, a long loading platform like a lateral hangar bay with open sidings and weather-port roof overhang. The roof was low and tight. Between them, Canetti and the autoguide was going to have to slide the drop in under the overhang sideways, like posting a letter into a mailbox width-ways.
“Standby,” he told the cabin below. The thrusters were straining. Autoguide or no autoguide, one sudden gust of wind would mash them sideways into the tractor’s hull or the housing overhang.