It felt so pointless. Insect-eyes could’ve stripped me down for parts, maybe even sold my flesh; instead there was just this suffering, the point of which was beyond me. Pretty soon it wasn’t me up on that frame atop the dune buggy. It was just a lump of suffering flesh that wasn’t capable of the higher forms of thinking. It was a mindless wounded animal, a broken machine. The form and the mind were mutually exclusive, neither able to identify with the other beyond the electric signals from screaming nerve endings. I would’ve passed out, but every time I tried I was jarred awake by the pain in my back and arms.
Really the last thing I remembered that made any real sense was the feeling of panic, a reassuringly human sensation at the time, as the dune buggy inched precariously over the side of a huge crater. It felt like it was going to turn over but the driver, in his radiation-proofed vestments, held it as we drove down into the crater at a shallow angle, leaving a dust cloud of hot dirt behind us. The crater seemed huge and a pool of reddish liquid had collected in its centre. I couldn’t work out the reason for this hole.
18
Over and over in my head I could hear Shaz’s voice repeating our grid coordinates and requesting, practically begging, for immediate evac. It was more slender than the Berserks; it moved with more grace and it looked more humanoid, more like us. You couldn’t look at it straight on for some reason. It didn‘t seem to make sense that way, some kind of camouflage effect that affected even our sophisticated optics. Fire, realign target, fire, realign target, fire again, reload. It just stalked among us, rarely getting hit, and the few times it did it just seemed to stagger back slightly and then move on.
Mudge went down first. He was behind it, I think, or maybe he was in front and we were behind. I’m not even sure it mattered. I could see the flickering light of Mudge’s AK-47, when the alien just reached out towards him and something black, sharp and slightly impossible-looking detached itself from it at speed and then seemed to accelerate. I watched as Mudge’s AK-47 came apart in his hands and he was thrown off his feet into the air. It looked like the upper left part of his chest was trying to separate from the rest of his body. He seemed to be in the air for ever as I watched him, high on my boosted reflexes, Slaughter and amphetamines. Finally he hit the ground and remained still.
Suddenly the thing was gone again. Shaz had no head, the stump of his neck a brief red fountain before he slumped to his knees and then forward onto the ground. His urgent comms request for an evac still echoed in my head. I fired the remainder of the rounds from my shotgun magazine over Shaz’s body at absolutely nothing.
It was standing next to me. I swung round to face it. It was holding Shaz’s head. For some reason it occurred to me he was studying the head sadly, trying to find answers. I don’t know how I had the time to think of that or where it came from, but it was an impression I couldn’t shake.
The head dropped, forgotten. My shotgun exploded as it swept its claw-like hand through the weapon as if it didn’t exist. The alien pierced a solid breastplate, a hardening inertial undersuit and subcutaneous armour with little apparent effort. I could feel it inside me. Panic made its way through training, conditioning and combat-grade narcotics as its hand split apart into what felt like thousands of tendrils that flailed through my chest cavity.
Gregor was in the air. I’m not sure that made sense to me. The muzzle flash of his PDW seemed welcoming, a friend to me. The impact of the bullets on the alien looked like ripples on the surface of a dark pond. Gregor body-checked the somehow solid alien, knocking it back. Its arm slid out of me. The alien’s liquid flesh had separated into many thin, swaying tendrils that, inanely, reminded me of a sea anemone as I sat down hard on the mud. I had no idea what to do.
Gregor was all but on top of the thing. He scrambled off it, throwing aside his empty PDW and grabbing desperately at the Tyler Optics laser pistol on his right hip. He put himself between the alien and me.
The alien sat up, reconfiguring itself in a way that made my head hurt, as bright red beam after bright red beam stabbed through it, creating greasy black steam. It was like the alien was melting, collapsing in on itself like a mountain of mud, but it was still moving towards Gregor when his laser pistol’s battery ran dry. Gregor flung the weapon at it and reached for his sword bayonet just as the alien surged forward. Part of it seemed to be falling away, dissolving into the murky black puddles of the useless junk genetic code we had come to expect from Them. The rest of it was separating into more thick tendrils. Gregor screamed, a noise I somehow couldn’t connect with him, a noise quickly cut off as a tendril forced itself into his mouth, his eyes, ears and nostrils. I saw his face contort and bulge as his veins stood out, turning to black as the thing forced itself into him. I could make out his skin moving beneath his inertial undersuit. He slumped back into my lap, dead. No, not dead, still breathing. His eyes were solid black pools and all his veins were black also. I stared at him.
‘This is Kilo Two Zero requesting a sitrep from call sign Wild Boys, over.’ Rolleston ‘s calm, well-enunciated voice over the command net was so incongruous as to be meaningless. I had no idea how long I sat there cradling Gregor in my lap. I laid my friend down in the soft mud and stood up, walking over to Shaz as Rolleston repeated his message.
Shaz had no head. He was still dead. Shaz was dead, Gregor may be worse. I was aware, at some level, of movement among the perimeter of Berserks, but they were not approaching yet. They seemed so normal, so commonplace.
Ash, Ash was still dead as well. Didn’t have to worry about Ash, only Gregor, but didn’t want to think about him. I went back to Gregor and closed my eyes, reaching down blindly, every movement causing me to leak more blood from my wounded chest cavity. I couldn’t make sense of the information I was seeing regarding the wound on my internal visual display. I felt the still-hot barrel of Gregor’s laser pistol and picked it up. I opened my eyes and looked at it. I tried to work out what it was and what it meant. Eventually I ejected the spent battery into the mud. I bent down, searching for spare batteries, trying not to look at black eyes and black veins.
Mudge groaned. I felt irritation but that went away when I realised that I would have something to do, something to take my mind off Gregor. Rolleston’s message came across the command net again. He sounded angrier, more demanding, but it was still just ambient noise to me.
Clean the wound. Apply the medgel and a medpak to drive it, then a stim to wake him up. Pain for Mudge as he sits up. A stricken expression on his face as he sees Ash and Shaz and asks me about Gregor. I ignore him. I can’t answer him, wouldn‘t know how. Rolleston’s voice becoming more annoying now. I commit only a little act of treason by giving a journalist access to our command net.
I walk around for a while. Mudge all but has to wrestle me to the ground to get me to lie down. I can feel his hands on and in my chest. All the while he is requesting an immediate evac. I can hear sporadic shard fire. Mudge is hunkered down low over me as he tends my wound. He is still screaming across the comms connection at a Rolleston reluctant to come and get us. Fine, we die here, big surprise.
Heavier shard fire now, Rolleston wants information. Wants to know exactly what happened to Sergeant MacDonald. Mudge isn‘t telling him what he wants to hear. I can hear the Berserks charging across the mud towards us.