But there was no saving the trooper. His visor cracked against the pressure and burst, shards of glass peppering his face. He’d no time to even register it as Saaart claws hooked their way inside. Rawlins screamed, voice redlining the comms with static, then went silent as a geyser of blood erupted from the hole where his visor had been. His body still thrashed and I turned my fire on him, punching smoking black holes through his torso, dropping him amidst the shattered husks of Saaart defenders.
The trooper whose comms were on the fritz turned his rifle full auto and sprayed the creatures as they choked the corridor, separating us. Golden surges tinted with splatters of green crackled between the swarming creatures as he unleashed volley after volley, but the Saaart defenders spilled into the gaps with relentless fury. A moment later I could see nothing but the horde.
“No! Nooooooo—”
With that gurgled screech ringing inside my helmet, the last of our force had fallen. I turned and fled, only to be detoured again as another sortie of creatures fell from a port in the ceiling ahead. Saaart skittered on my heels, razor-talons clicking against steel as I dashed blindly through the Worldbreaker’s labyrinthine corridors, chasing the only target available to me — the red dot of the disbursement chamber.
I wrestled with my pack and seized a wreck, grateful for the redundancy of packing more than one, and triggered it, tossing it behind me just before skidding around the corner of a side corridor. There was a tremulous whump as the wreck ignited, chasing the shadows away with a brilliance that rivaled Sol. It followed me down the passageway. I felt the heat an instant later, enviros struggling to cope with it and my injury at the same time, but the stims overrode the sensation of charred flesh as my back seared. I ran on, silencing my damage sensor alarms so they wouldn’t distract me.
My target grew closer and closer, but I realized I would never make it as the mechanical whir of the Saaarts echoed ahead. A wall of creatures clattered toward me, clambering across the floor, walls, and ceiling. I spun about and chose a corridor at random, nearly colliding with the bulkhead and sidestepped a protruding hatch, my visor display offering me few options for escape. The kron ticked on, relentless.
At a T-intersection I found both directions blocked by a seething mass of Saaart defenders. I let loose with a barrage of fire, spittle against an inferno, until the bolt mag zeroed. Then I retreated only to find the way back blocked. No choice left, I pulled a shapecharge from my pack and slapped it to the lock of the hatch and activated it.
Black smoke blurred my vision as I kicked the hatch open and leapt into the gloom beyond. I slammed it shut behind me, for all the good it would do, and leaned against the door as light globes flickered to life overhead, illuminating the room. My bio stats jumped across the visor in time with my thudding heartbeat. I’d done myself no favors coming here.
In the center of the oval room was a creature I’d never encountered before, yet recognized instantly: a Saaart overlord. A multitude of cabling streamed from every inch of his waxen flesh, running serpentine to the consoles encompassing the entirety of the chamber save for a blank plate at the rear. The dais rotated slowly, and the overlord faced me, bulbous eyes, like those of a fly, focusing. Little more than a skeleton of mummified gristle, the overlord stood impassive, lights dancing the lengths of the cables in random pulses.
I raised my rifle, only then remembering I’d spent its charge, so I just stared at the creature, unable to look away as it assessed me. The slanted triangle of its mouth split wide, blackened shards of teeth glistening in a sick imitation of a smile.
You are too late, a mellifluous voice sang inside my head, so at odds with the monstrosity looming before me. Witness what your failure has wrought.
The panel against the wall flickered and turned transparent, showing me an exterior view beyond the Saart Worldbreaker. My heart stilled as a planet filled the viewscreen, blues and greens under a haze of alabaster clouds. I slumped against the hatch. It wasn’t Zeti 5 in the ship’s deadly path; it was Rimot Prime.
My homeworld.
Brass had lied.
Impact in ten kron. Time enough to say farewell.
I started at the voice inside my skull and straightened, tugging my pack loose. The overlord watched me without concern. I glared at the alien and pulled the last of the wrecks from my pack. The creature’s crooked grin grew wider as I advanced, holding the bomb before me so it could see what I carried.
We admire your courage, Khaladan. It offered up a nod. You make admirable foes.
I triggered the wreck and held it to my chest. Rimot Prime drew ever closer.
The planet where I was born, the planet of my ancestors, was the last thing I ever saw.
Romeo And Julie
Mike Resnick
Call me Ishmael.
I won’t answer to it, of course — my name is Mortimer, though most people call me Morty — but I was told on good authority that the best way to sell this absolutely true tale of war and hardship and all that kind of stuff was to borrow the opening and closing lines of some classic novel, and Moby-Dick was the cheapest one in the second-hand store.
Anyway, on to business.
It was the damnedest war.
It began when maybe a thousand of them entered the solar system and set up shop on Jupiter. Lasted about two seconds, three at the outside. I don’t know much about setting up shop, but I do know that when you put your foot down on a gas giant, you immediately sink thirty or forty miles before you’re burned to a crisp. Or crushed to a crisp. Or whatever.
We figured that was an overt act of war, though the bleeding hearts in the press and the opposition party kept whining that we didn’t know it was an act of war, since they hadn’t communicated with us or we with them, and it may very well have been an emergency (if misguided, or perhaps misinformed) landing.
Now in truth, Jupiter really wasn’t worth fighting over, especially when the last of them had sunk down to its core, but we decided we weren’t going to take this invasion sitting down, or lying down, or eating breakfast, or indeed doing anything but retaliating. And somehow our scientists traced some radio signals from Jupiter to the Bella Donna Cluster, except that once they pinpointed the source they changed its name to the Evil Empire.
A navy of fifty ships took off amid a barrage of speeches, blessings, and best-selling patriotic songs, and since no one could find any fault with Einstein’s equations they just programmed a bunch of AI’s without reference to Einstein at all, and sure enough most of them found ways to far exceed the speed of light, and within a matter of two months, forty-six of our ships had reached the Evil Empire. No one ever figured out what happened to the other four, but since we were already initiating a galactic war nobody saw any need for a second one, so it was officially assumed that instead of being attacked they had stopped off for drinks on a neutral planet and gotten drunk, robbed, and incarcerated. As a result, more than two hundred private ships took off in the next month, each searching for the mysterious interstellar tavern. (They never found it. Thirty-seven of them did find a previously unknown and uncharted house of exceptionally ill repute, and the fourteen survivors eventually returned to spread a number of exotic alien diseases on five of Earth’s continents. None of them, it seems, were native to Australia or Antarctica, which are now the two population centers of the planet.)