There’s a truth you can’t avoid
Listen to Johnny Paranoid
Your life will end in the burning void,
Shaking shaking shaking like a rock ’n’ roll chord…
He grimaced. Maybe not the best selection to listen to right now. He pulled the headphones off.
Above the gurney there was a railing in the ceiling, a winch system. They followed it the length of the room, to another, bigger chamber…
They stepped out into the echoing, circular room. And almost stumbled into a pit.
Looked to be twenty-some feet down to the bottom of the perfectly round pit. Blood splashed the floor down there. The pit’s walls were lined with stainless steel.
Goat shined his gunlight into the pit, swept it back and forth. Gouges marked the steel, almost to the upper edges. The gouges couldn’t be what they looked like — not in steel.
They couldn’t really be claw marks…
“What the hell is that?” Portman asked.
“You never did time, Portman?”
“What?”
“This is a holding cell,” Goat said at last.
“Bullshit.” Portman didn’t want to believe that — if it was a holding cell, that might mean the claw marks were, well, claw marks. The pit could be for storage of some kind. “What makes you think that?” Portman asked as he knelt by the edge, reaching out to touch the slick steel surface of the pit’s walls.
A fat blue spark of electricity bit his hand, the current snapping his whole body like a whip, throwing him back against the outer wall of the surgery.
“Because the walls are electrified,” Goat said, Xing the upper wall of the room with his fluorescent powder.
Okay, Portman thought, numbly, trying to sit up and just managing it. Maybe Goat does have some sense of humor. In a weird kind of way.
He blew on his singed, stinging hand. “Goddammit!”
Goat gave him a hard look. He’d taken the Lord’s name in vain.
In the Weapons Lab, Sarge and Duke looked curiously at the workbenches with high-tech tool-and-die equipage, the deserted computer workstations — and they stopped, almost licking their lips, at the racks of neatly labeled, stacked weapons. Mostly familiar ones, in this rack.
Sarge was looking at a secure door at the far end of the room. He crossed to it, swiped his UAC ID badge in the slot.
“So what’s the deal with the sister?” Duke asked, carefully replacing the plasma cannon.
A small wall panel opened to reveal a palm print reader. “Reaper’s parents led the first team of archaeologists to Olduvai,” Sarge said distractedly. “They bought it in some accident up here when he was a kid. She followed in their footsteps, he didn’t.”
Reaper’s parents had been killed on Mars, when he was young — killed by archaeology? Duke shook his head. Archaeologists usually died of old age — or malaria. Weird.
So Reaper had been just a kid when they died. Maybe that’s why he’d gone into being a soldier. A way to deal with the predatory chaos of the world…
But aloud, Duke maintained his veneer of not caring about anything but partying. “Yeah, yeah, whatever, Sarge, what I meant was, Is she single?”
Sarge turned from frowning at the palm print reader to glare at Duke.
Then the panel spoke up, in a tinny computer-generated voice:
“Please provide DNA verification.”
So this one didn’t read palm prints after all — it wanted your hand so it could suck up a speck of flesh, get a DNA read.
Experimentally, Sarge put his hand into the reader. The device thought about it for a moment. Then:
“Advanced Weapons personnel palm print ID only. Access denied.”
Sarge shook his head, annoyed. Both he and Duke wanted to know what was in that room. The term Advanced Weapons made the two oldtime warriors nearly salivate…
Duke found a portable plasma cannon on the outside gun rack; he slung his automag on its strap and hefted the advanced killing machine. “Jeez. They leave this shit lying around, I’d hate to see what they lock up…”
Gunfire.
Three bursts of small-arms fire, the distinctive deep-throated rattling echoing to them down the corridors.
“What the…” Duke said. Surprised that there was contact so soon.
Sarge barked an order into his headset comm: “All units report contact.”
Destroyer slapped the Kid’s gun muzzle down. He broke off firing — having shot a bundle of ventilation hoses in the unevenly lit corridor.
The Kid looked at Destroyer sheepishly.
Destroyer spoke into his comm. “Misdirected fire, Sarge. Wasting ghosts.” And he shoved the Kid forward, back into the patrol route.
“It looked like it was moving,” the Kid said.
“There’s a lot of stuff looks like it’s moving down here. Including me.”
The Kid knew what Destroyer meant. That kind of jumpiness got soldiers killed. And a man killed by friendly fire died for nothing.
“I thought you were supposed to be a crack shot,” Destroyer grumbled.
“I hit it, didn’t I?”
Feeling pretty low, the Kid walked on ahead. Destroyer started after him — then stopped at the ventilation hoses the Kid had perforated, looking up into the ceiling gap they dangled from.
Destroyer noticed something on the floor, directly under the ceiling gap. He picked it up, held it up into the light.
A lab coat — with the left sleeve ripped away. Spots of fresh blood. Maybe, after all, the Kid had shot something besides dangling ventilation hoses.
“Sarge,” Duke asked, as they moved down the corridor, “remember when you said, ‘Any questions?’ and we all pretended like we didn’t have any questions?”
“Yep.”
“Uh — did you get any kind of briefing you haven’t shared yet on what we’re looking for here?”
“Nope. But I don’t need a briefing. I got a clue what the problem is here.”
“Yeah? What clue?”
“You notice the blood on the walls?”
“Yeah.”
Sarge looked at him deadpan. “That don’t give you a clue? The problem is something here is killing people. They get killed, here. It’s a problem. They’re supposed to die of old age, not get killed.”
“Thanks, Sarge.”
“I’m not done. We find what’s killing them. We kill that thing. Clear?”
“Uh…but if we knew what it was…”
“You’d be better equipped to fight it, Duke?”
“Yeah.”
“Bullshit. That’s not why you wanta know. You wanta know because something about this place makes you feel like you might shit yourself.”
See, this was why it wasn’t good to try to start a conversation with Sarge. He said things like that to you. Duke held on to his temper. “Sarge — you ever see me show the yellow feather?”
“No. But you never been here before.”
“I just want a handle on it, Sarge.”
They got to a corner, Sarge looked around it, gestured for him to follow. “Okay. A handle on it. You remember the talk about quarantine?”
“Yeah.”
“You notice this is Mars…an alien planet?”
“Yeah. You’re saying the enemy is aliens?”
“Something along those lines. Related to the damn aliens. Whoever they fucking were. Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s people. Some kind of brain-fever virus. Maybe we’ll get it, and I’ll be killing your ass dead because it’s fucking me up. Maybe that’ll happen in about ten minutes. Or maybe I won’t wait that long because I’m fucking sick of your mouth.”