Chapter 17
Subject: Maddy
Maddy sat as close to Liselle as she could without touching. They were on a couch in front of a display screen in the science team’s dorms. Carney stood in the corner, chewing on a fingernail and looking nervous. Liselle had a presentation up on the screen that she was overwhelmingly excited to share with Maddy. As soon as the first slide popped up, she jumped out of the couch and started talking. The slide showed countless bizarre looking microbes on a white background.
“Okay, so, one of the main things our team does is analyze air filtration media to catalog and observe changes in the local micro biota over time. We don’t really do the data processing here in house because we don’t have the computing power, but we can filter out the noise and send good data back home to be analyzed.” Liselle explained. She was adorable when she got excited about her science stuff. Maddy appreciated the break from reality, and nodded to encourage Liselle to continue.
“Okay. This is what a typical filter deck looks like,” she gestured at the screen, “if you look closely you'll see that there is extreme diversity in the sample; you’ll hardly be able to find two alike. This is why we can’t process the data, there’s simply too many of the little guys to really see what’s going on. We can observe and document notice macro level changes though. For instance, if the population adopts a color change or some new organelle.”
She clicked to the next slide; Carney shuddered. It showed the same countless tiny creatures against a white background, but a solid quarter of them were circled in red. Maddy squinted, to see if she could tell a difference between the circled ones and the others. She could not.
“An event happened about a day after the big battle in space that started the fires. We don’t know exactly what it was, but something triggered the monitoring station by the village to take a ton of air samples. It consumed three months worth of sample decks between the space battle and when we went to the village. That’s highly unusual, so of course we looked into it. This is what we found.” Liselle pointed at the screen. Maddy had a sinking feeling in her stomach. She didn’t know what the fuck Liselle was talking about but it sounded ominous, and Carney’s uncharacteristically nervous body language wasn’t helping.
“Look closely. About one-quarter of the organisms on this slide are identical and have not been cataloged before. They don’t appear to have anything any traits in common with either Terran or local biology. They are something new. Another ten percent or so are apparently chimera, or partially native organisms and partially this new organism. Look at the next slide.” Liselle advanced to the next slide. Again, thousands of organisms, but this time more were circled. Almost half.
“This is a day later.” She clicked again. More were circled. And again, and again, until she rested on a final slide. None were circled. They were all the new thing. Carney stepped up next to the screen and the slide advanced to close up of one of the tiny creatures next to a series of lines. The lines probably meant something to scientists.
“Terran organisms use DNA. Local organisms use a different system that I’m not going to bother explaining, but it’s consistent. This thing uses a mishmash of both, apparently, plus some other system that we haven’t seen before. If this wasn’t all strange enough, these creatures appear to be from the same tree of life as the creature you encountered in the village. The samples off your knife and clothes prove it. It was local genetic material mixed with human genetics mixed with something else.” A chill washed over Maddy as she listened to Carney explain.
“We don’t understand anything about this yet aside from the fact that its very strange. There’s something big going on here, and this is only the tip of the iceberg,” Carney tapped her fingers on her thighs, thinking. Maddy’s smartlink started buzzing; she pulled it out and looked at the caller.
“The fuck? I’m getting a call from the Systems Intelligence Division?” Maddy was totally caught off guard by that one.
Carney, without hesitation, looked at Maddy and said, “put it on speaker.” Maddy answered, and did as Carney asked.
“Hello, um,” fuck, Maddy thought and tried again, “this is Sergeant Turner.”
An androgynous voice answered back, “hello Sergeant Turner, I am the SIU Wraith’s intelligence analyst AI, you may call me Wraith.”
An AI? That’s weird as hell. Fleet AI almost exclusively act behind the scenes. They don’t call people. “Uhm, pleasure to meet you but it’s a little unusual to get a call from a fleet AI. Can I ask what this is about?”
“Of course! I’m not a fleet AI, I’m an intelligence analyst. I am assisting crisis command staff in assembling a team for a research mission into an anomaly we have observed from orbit but are unable to collect data on. We would like for you to be the mission commander, Sergeant Turner,” the AI replied.
Carney and Liselle nodded their heads enthusiastically and gave thumbs up. Maddy could tell they wanted to dig into the mystery as much as they could. “What are the mission details?” Maddy asked, before adding, “two members of the science team are listening to this call, just so you are aware.”
“Perfect,” the AI, Wraith, responded, “we will need their participation for this mission to be a success. I am currently speaking with NCPD Detective Ward to further solicit necessary local resources, just so you are aware of my actions as well. I’ve read her reports on your encounter with the unusual xenofauna at the village, and that is why I have chosen you to lead this mission.”
That made sense, Maddy supposed. The AI had probably also seen the helmet cam footage. Wraith continued, “there is an unusual concentration of biomass at several locations within the surrounding area that appear related to an atmospheric dispersal of an unknown aerosol.” Carney and Liselle’s eyes went wide, and they started frantically whispering to each other. “We have located a biomass in what we believe to be an ideal area for an aerial insertion and recovery. The terrain supports a fast mission. We want your team to run a ground reconnaissance and collect as much data as possible.”
Maddy imagined the creature in the village. She envisioned it swallowing Liselle as she screamed for help, it’s weird little mouth parts pressing her face into it’s throat. She pinched at her side, hard. The pain grounded her and brought her back. “If you saw the footage you’ll know that those goddamn things are numerous and extremely tough to kill, why are we the right choice for this? We’ll have about five minutes on the ground before we’re overrun and we don’t have the firepower to hold them back.”
“There are many reasons, Sergeant Turner. You have the appropriate instincts for battle and you are effective at leading your team. I am authorized to send materiel support to increase the firepower of your team. Additionally, Detective Ward is offering the use of the containment team’s light dropship. This is a snatch and grab operation and your team will be permitted to keep the firepower to aid in your own operations. You will engage the enemy in a fast operation with overwhelming firepower and evacuate the area before opposition is able to organize. You will have the full support of the SIU Wraith,” Wraith said, referring to the ship as a separate thing from itself.
Maddy hated the idea of going back into the maw of one of those things, but there was no question she was going to do it. She had to understand what was happening. She had to protect the people in her circle. “What do you need from me?” She asked.
“Meet the dropship at the New Carthage Police Headquarters tomorrow morning at 0500 local. You will need to bring four team members, including yourself, and whatever sampling equipment your science team feels is appropriate given your capabilities. Detective Ward is accompanying you on this mission. Contact me when you have chosen your team and I will air-drop you a care package, expect it on the ground in front of your station within an hour of your decision. Familiarize yourself with the gear and contact me if you have any questions. I do not sleep, call whenever.”
Maddy agreed and dropped the call. She looked at the science team members. Carney looked back and forth between Maddy and Liselle. “Of course I’m going,” she said. Maddy was relieved she wasn’t sending Liselle.
“Yeah,” Maddy said, “I figured. I’m going to go talk to my team. I’ll call you when the gear gets here.”
A little under an hour later, a military shipping container descended from the sky. Maddy was vaguely familiar with the tech. The container is launched in an ablative aeroshell that decelerates the container during the drop and burns away, protecting the cargo within. Once the container hits a sufficiently thick pocket of air, drogue parachutes deploy and a set of propellers engage, turning the container into a quadcopter. The props used a ton of battery power, and usually the containers have just enough juice to course correct and land. This container landed perfectly aside the front door to the station.
Maddy had chosen her team. Herself, Carney, Dad, and Felix, plus Detective Ward. She’d considered bringing Peanut and leaving Felix to keep an eye on the others, but his cardio was shit and she didn’t want him on a mission that involved the word ‘fast’. So, she took the best that she had. Inside the container, there were several metal cases with their names etched on the outside. They drug their cases inside and opened them up.
“Oh this is fucking bad ASS!” Felix yelped when case popped open.
“Hey!” Gremlin screeched, “I have seniority! Where’s mine!?”
“Gremlin, stop complaining and help us get this shit laid out,” Maddy responded, opening her case. She was stunned at first, but it made total sense when she thought about it. Military hazardous environment recon armor. Lightweight powered armor designed to seal the wearer inside and protect from external contamination. Used for teams that needed to carry out operations on inhospitable worlds, which was most of them. The fleet in orbit would have tons of this stuff for their marines.
Each person had their own set. It appeared they were sized perfectly for each team member. Maddy opened another case and found a battle rifle with some twenty magazines pre-loaded. The magazines appeared to be containing different munitions, some magazines had red tipped rounds, some black, and some orange. She looked over and saw Dad admiring a new combat shotgun. Carney has some sort of large pistol; Maddy wasn’t sure Carney had any formal weapons training, being a professor and all, but she handled the weapon with a calm competence.
They donned their new armor, testing the fit and getting a feel for it. As soon as Maddy slid her helmet on, Wraith’s voice cracked over the helmet comms system. “How do you like the new armor, Sergeant Turner?”
“It should make a big difference, thank you,” Maddy said, extending her arm and flexing her fingers. Everything was power assisted, and smooth. She felt like she could lift a car.
“These suits have secure communications channels pre-programmed. You’ll be able to communicate with ships in orbit instantaneously and we will be able to monitor your vitals and helmet camera video feeds remotely. As squad leader, you can access any of your team’s helmet cam feeds into your heads-up display.” Wraith explained.
Maddy played with her display. It gave her a real time feed of her team’s vitals, a toggle-able helmet cam display, an overhead view of their location, and an ammo counter for her rifle. It even seemed to recognize the type of munition loaded into the magazines. “What’s up with the different mags?” She asked.
“We are unsure which munitions will work best on the enemy, so we have given you an assortment. The magazines with the black tipped munitions loaded on top are armor piercing incendiary and explosive rounds in alternating sequence. Red is incendiary, and orange is explosive. Please collect battle data on which munition works best.” Wraith responded.
Maddy looked up to see Felix holding a new battle rifle just like Maddy’s in one hand, and a huge pistol in the other, “THIS IS GONNA FUCKING RULE!” He shouted.
The next morning moved fast. The team had a police escort to get through the barriers, which were still deployed on the streets. Peanut drove the Black Mamba and Gremlin rode in the gunner’s seat. Two-Feet stayed behind. The team stood in the center aisle, their armor made them too big for the truck and too big for the jump seats in the IFV. It was extremely awkward.
They met Ward at the station. She was also outfitted in recon armor and held some type of bizarre submachine gun. She greeted them hastily and they all climbed into a waiting combat dropship. The dropship tore away without ceremony, it’s engines whistling. Maddy played with her heads-up display on the way and found that she could patch the cameras from the dropship’s nose and door cameras into her live feed. She settled on a thermal feed from the gunner’s gun mounted camera.
As the dropship came in on approach, Maddy could clearly make out the target. It was a cluster of boulders with a huge heat signature emanating out from underneath them. The area around the boulders was clear of vegetation, and the whole place reminded her of the savannah she’d been in during her first mission. It was also quite close to a small human settlement that had gone quiet. And, it was inside the barrier.
“Okay team, check in. Everyone ready?” Maddy asked the group.
“Yes ma’am,” said Dad.
“Hell yeah!” Said Felix.
“Ready,” said Carney.
“Sure,” said Ward.
“When we hit the ground I want two fireteams. Dad, you’re with me and we’ll take the right side of the formation. Ward, Felix, take the left. Carney leads the show until we start fighting. We protect her at all costs. She knows what kind of science shit to do down there.”
“No hostiles observed on approach, be ready to drop!” The dropship gunner or pilot announced. The gunship spun through the air and felt like it dropped a thousand meters in a second before thudding against the ground. Maddy’s stomach went into her throat and she steadied herself.
“Go!” The dropship crewman shouted. Maddy jumped out of the side door, rifle raised. Her team fanned out around her, Carney lugging a huge backpack out of the dropship’s sixth seat. She slung it over her back and cinched the straps down. The team advanced on the target in a modified wedge formation with their weapons at the ready.
Once again, Maddy noticed how quiet it was. She decided to say it out loud, the folks in space would have no idea that something like that was unusual. “It’s dead quiet, usually this place is full of life. I don’t see anything.”
“I noticed that too,” Carney added. “We should have seen bird-analogues or the insect things, but I am not seeing anything. Even the larger vegetation looks off.”
In the distance, something howled. It sounded more like a cry of pain than anything else. Maddy took a few deep calming breaths.
They came up on the collection of boulders after a few minutes of walking. The situation display in her HUD showing that the temperature had increased three degrees from where they landed. Before them lie a field of massive boulders, and in between two of the boulders they faced lay a mound of fresh dirt, and what appeared to be a newly dug burrow into and underneath the crevice between two of the rocks. Maddy scanned the area to her right and saw several more mounts of dirt, each one at a junction between two rocks.
“Heads up,” she muttered. “Looks like this is some sort of nesting area. Be ready for anything.”
“Safety’s off,” Dad replied.
“I never turn mine on,” Felix responded, a smile evident in his voice.
“Jesus Christ,” Ward added.
Maddy and the team approached to the edge of the first burrow. Aside the dirt pile was a small mound of black dust. Maddy pointed it out to Carney, who nodded and slid her backpack off and onto the ground. Maddy gestured at her team to pause behind the dirt mound. Everyone silently took up firing positions covering all directions. Maddy looked at the dropship feed. It was orbiting the area, it’s gun camera swiveling to scan the area around the ground team.
Carney fished out a small glass jar and filled it with the black dust. She filled a second one with the dirt, and a third with pieces of vegetation she broke off of a withering plant. She put them back in the backpack and slid the backpack back on. “Okay, lets continue,” she said quietly. Maddy nodded.
“Felix, Ward, cover the rear. Dad, take point with me. Carney, stay behind us and let us know if we need to pause.” Everyone answered in the affirmative, and Maddy turned the corner and walked over the threshold into the burrow.
The burrow was a short tunnel that turned at a right angle only a few meters in. At the threshold of the tunnel, the suit’s HUD noted a five degree temperature increase and flashed the warning HAZARDOUS ATMOSPHERE DETECTED: TOXIC in a rolling ticker at the bottom of her screen. A small red gas cloud icon popped up next to her green status icon. An icon that was a picture of a heart with a the letters HR+ flashed across all of her team members status. HR+? Increased heart rate?
Maddy turned paused at the turn in the tunnel. She considered clearing it like a room; tossing in a flashbang and rushing in, but she decided going loud now was not the correct approach. Maddy took a deep breath, looked at Dad, who nodded, and turned into the room, rifle up.
The space inside was out of her nightmares. Several of the fat, bulbous creatures were positioned inside of the room. The walls were coated in writhing yellow and red flesh, with pockets of familiar shapes among them. Legs, arms, and some alien shapes that reminded her of sea creatures and insects. The bulbous ones were excreting a pink gelatinous slime onto fleshy protrusions from the walls. One of them choked and vomited black dust on to the ground. Maddy could see what appeared to be half formed humanoid shapes that were melted into the walls, their arms forming into long, sharp blades. One of them saw her and tried to pull away from the wall. It screamed.
“GOING HOT!” Maddy shouted, and unleashed the wrath of her new rifle. A pair of short bursts exploded the face of the wall-creature and set pockets of white hot flame ablaze behind it, the armor piercing round punching straight through the thing. Dad lined up a shot on one of the bulbous creatures and fired a pair of shots into its torso. Each shot plunged past the armor and exploded, sending limbs and flesh flying through the air. Maddy moved with machine like precision, turning in an arc from one side of the space to the other, sending bursts of fire and death into anything that moved. The new rounds were devastating. Everything she engaged screamed and died in flaming agony. Dad did the same. “Take your samples Carney!” Maddy shouted.
“You’ve got movement outside, converging on your location,” the dropship crewman said over the comm. Maddy looked at the thermal gunship display. Sure as shit, forms were emerging out of the burrows and a pack of them was running wildly through the jungle. The dropship’s autocannon started firing and the aircraft banked and twisted to line up shots. The HR+ icon on Felix and Ward was red now, and she could hear firing from outside.
Dad was pacing the room with a huge handgun in his hand, shogun slung over his back. He prodded and shot the wall creatures he came across, making sure they were dead. Carney followed behind, shakily filling sample jars and dropping them into a sack that was over her shoulder.
“You guys need to hurry up! It’s getting bad!” Ward shouted over the comm. Maddy checked her overhead view and saw movement converging from nearly all sides.
“Carney, its time to move! Dad, take up the rear! Let’s get the fuck out of here!” Maddy shouted, dropping her mag for a fresh one. The new rifle was unfamiliar to her, but it handled remarkably similar to the service models she’d trained on in the marine corps.
Maddy rose out of the tunnel with her rifle up and saw Ward kneeling on the ground, firing into a great yellow fleshy looking spider like thing that was climbing down over the top of a nearby boulder. Felix was throwing grenades at a pack of vaguely humanoid creatures that were emerging from the forest, the grenades exploding into liquid fire, creating a barrier that the creatures seemed hesitant to plunge into. The dropship whipped overhead, it’s autocannon letting out a deep THWACK as it fired, gouts of dirt rising into the air where the rounds impacted. Maddy took up a firing positing near Ward and started sending bursts of fire into the spider-thing.
“Set in close!” She yelled to the dropship.
“This is going to be extremely hot, be ready to move as soon as we touch down!” The dropship crewman shouted. His voice shook with adrenaline.
The spider crumpled and fell off it’s rock, screaming a horrible high-pitched wail as it burned. Maddy immediately turned to the next target, firing in short bursts. Dozens of creatures of all shapes were visible from all sides. Her team formed a line outside of the burrow, each firing at the oncoming wave of monsters. Maddy watched the video feed from the dropship’s gunner as it fired into the boulders behind them, trying to hit a fast moving blur. There were several fast moving blurs climbing over the rocks, heading towards her team.
The gunship found stability in front of them and started descending, turning to present it’s side to her team. It’s gun firing as it descended and turned. Maddy shouted orders to her team, “Ward! Carney! Get aboard! Felix, Dad! Cover the rear!” Her team advanced, firing as they went.
Dad was to her right, everyone else was to her left. She turned to get a bead on whatever it was coming up from behind them when she saw a blur jump down from the rock, landing between the gunship and Ward. Maddy didn’t have a shot, the thing was between them and the dropship, a missed shot would hit their ride out of there. Maddy moved to the right in an attempt to arc around the side and improve her firing line. The creature was sort of humanoid, but ran on four pointed legs. It was thin and tall, and it’s front arms were as long as it’s body, jutting out straight and then bending down at a right angle to dig into the ground. It’s head looked human, but the skin had a melted pallor and it’s eyes were black. It cocked it’s head at Ward and swiped with one of its arms. Ward was cut in half.
“Holy fuck!” Maddy screamed, diving towards the dropship to get a shot off. Wards vitals indicator on her HUD turned black and faded. The creature moved towards Felix. He turned and fired at the thing, but it swiped down with one long arm. The blade caught the front of Felix’s armor and dragged him to the ground. It’s second arm came down and stabbed Felix in the back. It pulled it out and raised both arms, stabbing in and out as Felix lay on the ground, his vitals indicator turning black to match Ward’s.
Maddy threw herself against the side of the dropship and turned her rifle on the god damned thing, firing desperate bursts into it as it savaged Felix’s dead body. It screamed and fled into the burrow in a flurry of motion.
“GET IN NOW!” The dropship crewman shouted. Dad hopped into the side door and started firing wildly at everything that moved. The dropship started lifting off as Carney climbed in, and Maddy shoved her in and grabbed the side railing, her rifle dangling to her side by it’s strap. Her powered armor assisted strength pulling her into a seat and strapping in. As she looked down, the a creature much like the one that had killed Ward and Felix sat on a rock, staring at her. She made eye contact with it’s black eyes. Human, and expressive. Like it understood what it had done. The dropship banked hard and rocketed back towards New Carthage. Below, Maddy watched as the wave of creatures crawled over the bodies of her team. She felt numb.
