Invasion (Contact Book 1) Page 11

  Loreto’s hands were on his knees and he was panting.

  “That’s good?” he asked.

  “It’s different, sir. It’s more than we had before.”

  “The systems? This thing… whatever the hell just happened… it didn’t shut them down? We’re still a working ship?”

  “Well, sir. We weren’t really a working–”

  “You know what I mean, Eliot. Have we been compromised?”

  Brushing the long hair back again, the man tapped his page.

  “Not that I can tell, sir.”

  “Good.” Loreto tried to gather his breath and slumped into his chair in front of the ruined codex. “Good.”

  As the officers began calling through to their departments, trying to assess the damage, Loreto stared at the wall of his office. The screen, stretching from roof to floor, showed a star map. It had shown the Exiles before.

  A map of nearby systems, the Vela’s position marked. Olmec, some distance away. The whole planet was in focus and, on the far side, near a tiny human settlement whose name Loreto couldn’t read, a red dot blinked.

  That’s the Symbiot. Loreto had never been surer of anything in his life. He felt a savage glee surging through his veins, massaging his temples with triumph.

  “Hertz?”

  The captain dabbed at his forehead and worried.

  “Yessir?”

  “I want you to set me a course.” He couldn’t help but smile, convinced his gamble had paid off.

  “Now, sir? Where to?”

  Loreto allowed his hand to hover over the ruined codex on his desk. Still hot.

  “We’re going hunting, Hertz.”

  11

  Cavs

  The solar flares slowed their descent. Jimmy Cavs gripped the strapping and stared at a rusting bolt. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The corroded metal had life in it yet but the whole shuttle just about held together. Everything on the Vela was almost broken.

  Loreto, too, Cavs told himself.

  The noise swallowed everything. Cavs tried to listen but couldn’t concentrate. He held on to the straps that hung from the ceiling, looking at his crew, determined to lead them better than Loreto ever could.

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  “I want quick feet when we land,” Sergeant Rucker shouted. “We’re here to find out why Olmec’s gone quiet.”

  This was the first time Cavs had been sent out from the Vela. He’d been allowed to bring his crew from the gunnery department but it still felt like a punishment. He wanted to be on the flagship, but Loreto was burdening him with the command because he’d dared to question the admiral’s authority.

  “Vanis! Day!” Rucker continued. “Eyes alive!”

  Cavs was used to noise. The gunnery quarter in the Vela became deafeningly loud when Loreto concocted his madcap training exercises.

  “Masks on when we land!” Rucker swung in circles, her cheeks puffing, yelling over the clamor. “Atmosphere reads breathable but we don’t take chances.”

  Olmec was a nothing colony in a nothing corner of a nothing system. They mined low value minerals until the terraforming could take hold. Cavs knew the situation: thousands of families shipped in and forced to work on making the planet livable. His father had been part of the same missions. The same story as everywhere else. Regular people, trying to make their way in a hostile universe.

  Cavs hadn’t left Mars until he was grown. His mother had raised him in the slums, pointing his head up to the stars, humming lullabies, begging him to escape their tumbledown house tucked into an alley nook with Japanese art on the walls. To remind him, she said, that there’d been a home once, centuries ago.

  Heritage meant remembering. Cavs thought it was a different kind of prison, trapped in the past rather than the slums. There were two ways out: either work fingers-to-bone on some colony to make someone else money or sign up to the Fleet and protect humanity from the dangers beyond the Pale.

  The Fleet didn’t take many in peace time. Cavs got in first time. He’d repeatedly requested a post in Loreto’s Fleet, even when they told him he was throwing his career away. Jimmy had ambitions and he knew the stories about Red Hand Loreto. He’d idolized the man, wanted to be the best goddamn admiral in the Federation.

  Rattling down to a nothing colony as a form of punishment wasn’t what he’d had in mind. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  “Isn’t that right, sir?”

  Rucker watched him. Cavs blinked and tried to set his thoughts right. He shouted agreement and looked around at his crew. No one in the Fleet liked having their feet on the ground. Touching down meant something was wrong.

  “Listen,” he shouted, thinking their worried faces needed a speech. “The admiral wants us to check out Olmec. It’s probably nothing. Could be comms failure. But no response means we go down.”

  Cavs swung through the cramped interior of the shuttle, his shoulders aching from the strain. Officers weren’t supposed to be involved in assignments like this.

  “You take one of these each.” He pointed at the pulse rifles. “They’re just like our cannons, only smaller. Eyes and ears sharp. Alert. These people, they’re not soldiers. Neither are we. We’re all trying to get by.”

  Hardly a rousing speech, Cavs knew. He looked at the familiar faces and felt their worries. They depended on him and he hoped they couldn’t read his emotion as easily. Fear, perhaps. Anger certainly. Disappointment. In Loreto, in himself. All of it whirling around his mind like a hurricane over a village.

  “Let’s just… let’s just do a good job,” he finished, his throat raw from all the shouting.

  The amber light above them turned green. Landing soon.

  “Masks on!” Rucker shouted. “Strap in!”

  The Olmec atmosphere wreaked havoc with the navigation computer. They’d picked an unauthorized spot, half a click from the nearest LZ. They were already buckled into the standing alcoves in the walls of the shuttle. Worn-out padding cushioned their bodies.

  Cavs closed his eyes and tried to think of home and his mother standing in the doorway, watching him go. Leaving Mars had been a respite. Not happy and not sad, simply a relief. He hummed to himself, stretching his neck and feeling his pip rub up against his vertebrae.

  But all he thought about was Loreto, sitting behind the desk with the codex. Stupid risks. I’d do it differently, Cavs assured himself. I wouldn’t infect my own ship with an alien virus. Not that he could think of any alternative options.

  The jolt of the landing opened his eyes. If he was going to be sent to Olmec as punishment and forcibly ejected from the admiral’s circle of advisors, he’d do a damn good job anyway. There was a catharsis in spiteful competence.

  The bay door opened, and light crept in, cool and pale. Midnight in sol hours but each planet had its own cycle. Few actually matched the Earthbound timekeeping. The crew unbuckled themselves and gathered the foldable command stations. They adjusted their masks and stepped down the ramp and into the unknown Olmec atmosphere.

  Olmec was an arid planet; the terraforming did that. The machines were erected and men were sent to work the pipes and levers that adjusted the air outside. They turned the planet dry and, eventually, wet. After that, the humans brought life with them. Trees and moss and horses and any other life that made them feel almost like they were home. Eventually, every colony became a half-hearted clone of Earth.

  The crew erected the equipment under the thick murky clouds, which crashed into one another, blotting out the sky. Cavs nodded to Vanis, who stood beside a terminal. It floated half-a-meter from the ground and instruments clicked.

  “Comms first and then we’ll move into the town,” ordered Cavs.

  The planet was flat. No mountains lurking in the distance, no trees yet. Just an infinite plane of indifferent dirt.

  “Atmosphere seems normal.” Rucker unclipped her mask. “They must have been deep into the terraforming.”

  Cavs removed his own mask
. Olmec smelled like stale death. No matter where he went, nothing tasted like the air on Mars. Each colony had its own flavor.

  They set up the remaining equipment. Cavs found his field glasses and scanned the horizon. Quiet in every direction. Most colonies dispatched a greeting party for shuttles. Maybe the atmosphere interfered with their instruments, too.

  “I don’t like it,” said Cavs. “It’s too quiet. We need comms.”

  As Rucker rallied the crew, Cavs glassed the horizon again. The heat shimmer made it hard to tell the distance. Could be a few clicks, could be less. Each breath brought the taste of dried-out flesh. To the east, he saw a string of large familiar terraforming towers, hundreds of feet high. They churned out chemicals that made the worlds livable.

  Every colony kid grew up in the shadow of a tower with a pip in his neck. The machines inside were a closely guarded trade secret. Common folk didn’t know how the process worked; it might as well have been magic. Cavs glassed them again. There should have been a crinkle in the skyline above the towers, a reassuring wrinkle to show they were working. They’d gone cold.

  “Comms?” he asked as the hairs prickled along his forearm.

  “Trouble, sir.”

  “Trouble?”

  “I can’t make a connection.” Vanis slapped the unit. “Piece of junk. At twenty percent now, it’s going slow.”

  “Calm down, Vanis,” Cavs cautioned. “We’re not in the guns now. Just keep me updated, okay?”

  The peaceful tone in his voice had an effect and Vanis nodded, turning back to the unit. It was a lie, Cavs knew, but these were his men, his crew. He wanted them to function as a team and he wanted to show Loreto that he could be trusted.

  The field glasses pressed hard against his eyes as he strained to see. He drew in the distance and the screen flickered inside the unit as the lens changed. There was still nothing. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  The towers should be smoking. There should be a greeting party. The solar flares weren’t natural. The comms should be working. Cavs tried not to think about it. He cracked his knuckles and kicked the side of the comms unit.

  The way the codex had fused with the admiral’s desk should have been a warning. Nothing good reacted like that. When the whole ship came alive far quicker than projected, the engineers marveled and Loreto smiled and the red tracking dot on the map blinked furiously, urging them to Olmec.

  None of it was right, Cavs knew. The admiral kept making bad choices, not acting like himself. Everyone else ignored it because they wanted their ship online and they all bought into the cult of Red Hand Loreto. I was a fool to ever admire the man, he realized.

  “I got a reading,” squeaked Day. “Over there!”

  Cavs lifted the field glasses. They were emerging over the arid horizon.

  “People,” Cavs announced. “I want comms.”

  Vanis hit his terminal again.

  “Still only thirty percent. I’m trying.”

  Cavs clicked his fingers and pointed toward the shuttle.

  “Weapons, Day. Get them down here.”

  “You think it’s–”

  “I don’t know what it is.” Cavs lifted the glasses again. “I want to be prepared.”

  He saw a group running toward them.

  “Welcoming party?” Rucker muttered in his ear.

  They sprinted, their limbs flailing like guy-lines in a sudden storm.

  “No,” Cavs whispered. “Survivors.”

  Day stumbled down the loading ramp with the crate of rifles balanced on a hover-cart. It tipped over and the weapons spilled onto the dusty ground.

  “Pick that up!” Cavs shouted. “Come on!”

  He sensed a nervousness in his flesh and still he thought about Loreto and that codex and his mother alone in the doorway. He hummed gently to himself.

  “Get it together!” Cavs shouted at his crew.

  Get it together, he thought. Day grasped at the rifles on the ground.

  Glasses up, he clocked the runners at eight hundred meters, closing fast. Survivors? Cavs scanned the horizon to see if they were being chased. All he saw was the dead towers looming, their shadows touching everything around.

  “Seven hundred meters! Get me comms, Vanis!” Cavs shouted.

  “Forty percent, sir.” Every syllable worriedly stabbing through the air. “It’s slow.”

  This is Loreto’s fault, Cavs cursed. That codex was interfering. He lifted the glasses and saw the runners. Wild armed and fast. They ran like creatures. Five beasts, hurtling toward them.

  “Weapons ready.” Cavs heard Day struggling. “One each. Quick!”

  Day fumbled with the crate, trying to open the rifle-chest with fear-filled fingers. The crew were raw, not trained for this. Loreto knew we weren’t ready and sent us out to fail.

  He’s teaching me a lesson, Cavs told himself. Screw him. One transfer request and he’d be in Fletcher’s Fleet. A fool, but at least he got things done. I bet I’d get a bit of respect from him.

  Cavs heard them. Their feet pounding. He chased the stupid thoughts from his mind.

  “Comms?”

  “Fifty-eight, sir.” Vanis sounded scared. “Getting there…”

  Three hundred meters away and Cavs finally saw their faces. Their eyes were open as they ran toward the shuttle. Blood crusted in streaks along their cheeks.

  “Sixty!” Vanis shouted.

  Cavs smelled them, a rotting, putrid stench. Nothing living smelled like that. They were dead and running fast. Wounds on their bodies and ripped clothes. He saw a black contamination spreading across the skin, patches of corruption which seemed like a sinew, and ate into the flesh.

  “Weapons ready!” Cavs threw the field glasses to the side.

  Day struggled with the crates.

  “We need more time!” Vanis pleaded. “Seventy percent!”

  Rucker ran to help Day and they ripped open the crates, snatching out the rifles. The runners were a hundred meters out, if that. The smell of tainted flesh grew stronger. They were emerging out of the wind. Cavs heard them grunting.

  “Eighty percent!”

  Rucker threw a rifle to Cavs.

  “Cluster around Vanis,” Cavs shouted. “Get the comms link working! Broadcast everything to the Vela.”

  Duty took over, shunting fear and thoughts of Loreto aside. Cavs watched the people running and raised a rifle. He wasn’t good at this. Ancient clumsy weapons. Put him in charge of a cannon, give him the math and the calculations. Not this primitive tool. He squeezed the trigger.

  Rucker winged one. Sent it stumbling and skidding along the dry ground. Cavs missed.

  “Ninety percent!”

  They were close enough to see the amber in their eyes. The black pustules across their skin, the dried blood etched across their faces. Cavs felt the world slow down as he swung the barrel left to right. His shot caught the lead runner in the shoulder. He sprawled. It, Cavs corrected. It’s not human.

  Cavs fired again, cut down another. One left. The rifle patter reverberated around the camp. Day fired and it fell, skidding along the ground.

  Cavs scanned the horizon and saw nothing. Just a dust storm gathering. He walked out while the others covered him and he reached the bodies. The nearest victim had been shot in the hip and its feet writhed in the air.

  The body had been human, but not anymore. A previous wound had scabbed over and spread across the skin. Not just dried blood, but black slime and swollen boils festered along the flesh.

  Cavs raised the rifle and aimed at the beast’s head. He didn’t want to think of it as a colony man, trying to carve out a living. Another person who’d spent his life slaving beneath the towers, just like his father. He pulled the trigger.

  The skull shattered and left a stain on the ground. The smell of rot became unbearable and Cavs felt the wrench in his gut. He bent double and vomited. Not in front of the recruits.

  He didn’t need to visit the town to know they were dead. Whatever the hell
Loreto was chasing, they meant to kill, to corrupt people and turn them into these… creatures.

  “Sir…” Vanis tried to sound quiet while shouting. “No comms yet, sir.”

  Cavs looked at the dead. The other colonies would wind up like this. Corrupted bodies. He pictured his mother on Mars in her doorway with her Japanese art on the short wall of their cramped slum.

  “Call Loreto.” Cavs heard his voice crack.

  “Sir–”

  “Tell him to get down here.” Cavs shivered. “Now.”

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  12

  Clough

  The worried Bingham Clough paced up and down in his shared quarters, stepping aside and apologizing whenever anybody had to pass.

  Even for the junior officers, the crew quarters were a cramped afterthought. Clough saw his own pinched face stare back at him from the small mirror bolted to the wall beside his bunk. He forced a smile and desperately tried to look commanding. The smile faded.

  The uniform was immaculate. Clough pulled up his sleeve and used it to buff the brass plate attached to his breast. He wanted Fletcher to see it. He didn’t want the man to have any excuse to forget his name. Not again.

  After all, this was the Pyxis. Fletcher’s ship. The newest and most expensive vessel ever conceived by man. It was a privilege to be aboard, and Clough kept reminding himself that it was the least he could do to keep his brass buttons polished. The glint might catch an important eye.

  “Bing!” a familiar voice demanded.

  Clough turned with sharp shoulders and sagged immediately.

  “Norris,” he sighed. “Thank God it’s you.”

  The fellow officer strode confidently toward Clough. They wore the same junior insignia, but Norris’s buttons were not nearly as well-presented. The man made up for it with self-assurance and charm.

  All Clough could do was polish his buttons.

  “Hear you’re on deck for this one, Bingy?” Norris parked himself on his friend’s bed and ruffled the expertly laid sheets. “Nervous?”