Damage Unlimited Read online

  DAMAGE UNLIMITED

  A REVENGE SQUAD novelette exclusive to Legionaries

  Copyright © Tim C. Taylor 2017

  Published by Human Legion Publications

  All Rights Reserved

  HumanLegion.com

  * * *

  The author wishes to thank all those who supported the making of this book. In particular, Paul Melhuish for allowing me to raid the vault of filthy Skyfirean vernacular he invented for his Terminus sci-fi horror books, and my friends and supporters from humanlegion.com and the Legionaries group; in particular, Melissa, Pam, Reed, Ronnie, and Corporal Gordon. Finally, a big thank you to Jim Butcher, who has been entertaining me with his marvelous Dresden Files novels ever since I picked one up out of curiosity in 2016. His writing inspired me to create Revenge Squad.

  * * *

  — 1 —

  “The trees are moving. Moving, I tell you!”

  I readied both my carbine and myself to fire, and set my eyes to motion-sensitive mode. Tree, vines and shrubs surrounded us in a sea of lush purple foliage, but the only movement I could see was the flutter of leaves in the light breeze coming off the sea.

  We were in a forest. Our client ran a timber business. The presence of trees didn’t strike me as odd.

  I thumbed the safety on my gun, and regarded the representative of our client whom we were escorting to Logging Site Charlie, a base of operations that hadn’t reported in for three days.

  Tova Snetch-Lam was a human woman, by which I mean that instead of being a half-human cyborg like me, she was the kind of Homo sapiens they still make on Earth, although she claimed to be from a colony of the Terran Worlds, a planet called 3-Gravis Tianlong. They break easily, these baseline humans, which is one reason why I resisted the temptation to slap the back of her head for being the kind of panicky idiot who gets people killed. The other reason was standing behind me: my squad leader, Silky. Breaking clients was bad for business.

  Tova stood in front of me and glared up into my face, her little fists balled. “You think I’m mad, don’t you?”

  In the absence of any obvious life-threatening peril, I decided to take my time over the answer. Her wild eyes didn’t exactly support her case, but she represented Zhang-Unison Forestry Corporation and the premiums they had paid Revenge Squad spoke very much in her favor.

  “I think we’re wasting time,” I said carefully, feeling proud for filtering around her question rather than smashing into it headlong.

  Tova gave an exasperated sigh, rolling her eyes for good measure in case the dumb beast in front of her didn’t appreciate the depth of her contempt.

  “Revenge Squad is a waste of our money if they employ ex-Marines,” she grumbled. “Anything you can’t shoot, hump, or eat is completely beyond your comprehension.”

  I swear the forest went quiet. The insects and bats and little scurrying beasts picked up on the spike of tension, and either froze or went as quiet as they could without falling out of the air.

  I glanced at the faces of my teammates, which had suddenly turned to me out of the trees. Of the humans, Shahdi and Chikune looked obviously worried, César looked angry, and Sel-en-Sek seemed to have withdrawn into his beard. Even our unflappable Tallerman was gyrating his huge boulder of a head. Only the boss was untroubled.

  Silky believed in me. I don’t know why – Heaven knows there was no humanly rational reason why she should – but she was a Kurlei, a slender humanoid but not a human. I did know I couldn’t let her down.

  So I ignored the very large number of people who had died so that the likes of Tova Snetch-Lam were free to go about our little enclave of the galaxy, insulting people who deserved so much better, and indulging in paranoid fantasies about walking trees. And I very much didn’t ignore that the reason our little group was far out into the Oshia Ocean, 800 miles from the mainland, was because we were on a shakedown mission. If our team performed well here at Naddox Archipelago, when we returned home to Port Zahir, our probation would be over and we would have earned our place as a fully-fledged section of Revenge Squad.

  Everyone relied on me to be on my best behavior.

  “If the trees are moving,” I said to the annoying human biting her lip in front of me, “show me.”

  “All right,” she replied, the worry instantly fading from her face, to be replaced with a slightly puzzled look. I decided I didn’t like the reason why. Tova was a tech, a xeno-biolgist, and her comfort zone was solving technical problems. I’d just given her a real challenge – how to simplify her language so far that even a dumb Marine could understand her theory about moving foliage. The problem seemed to be occupying her brain’s entire processing power.

  “What’s on the trees?” she asked. “On the landward side of the path?”

  “A parasite?” I answered.

  The shock on her face was even more rewarding than slapping the back of her head would have been. Probably. I grinned. “I notice my surroundings,” I explained. “It’s something dumb Marines do if they don’t also want to be dead Marines.”

  She looked down, ashamed or embarrassed, but she didn’t apologize.

  In the last few hundred yards, the route we were following to the logging site had rapidly narrowed. The vehicular track, which ran about fifty yards inland from the cliff edge that dropped to the sea, had shrunk to a trail only wide enough to walk two abreast. Small trees, about fifteen-feet high, ran all the way from the inner edge of the trail until another hundred yards further inland where they gave way to much larger tree species. And to be clear, when I say ‘ran’, I mean running of the being there with roots planted into the ground variety.

  The trees bordering the trail were infested with a parasite, a leafy shrub with stems no bigger than my thumb that climbed up the trunks of their host plants.

  I squeezed one of these stems between thumb and forefinger. It had a little sappy give. I gave it a sharp tug and unstuck a small section from its host. It came away easily. A little too easily.

  “I saw something like this on Earth,” I told Tova. “Ivy, it was called. Green leaves rather than purple, but otherwise similar. The locals complained that once ivy took hold, it was hellishly difficult to get rid of.”

  “Very plausible,” said Tova. “Now explain away this. When I last left Logging Site Charlie, I drove back to the coast along the road we’re now following on foot.”

  I peered along the length of the path ahead. How could she possibly have driven down such a narrow forest trail? Then my sight shimmered and my mind reinterpreted what I was seeing in light of this new information. Tova was correct. The trees to the left didn’t belong there, and if you took them away, you would be left with a track wide enough to take a heavy truck.

  “And after the trees move,” said Tova, “this ivy, as you call it, is always left behind.”

  I felt Silky’s fear a moment before she screamed, “Get off the track!” and dove for the undergrowth.

  The trust I placed in her was so complete that by the time she was moving, I was sweeping Tova down to the floor. We crashed down onto the stony ground with me covering her with my body, which I’d arched in the hope that I wouldn’t crush her under my weight.

  All around me came the threatening sounds of weapons charging, but of the whip-like crack of lashing vines and the rumble of trees ripping their roots from the soil… not so much.

  “I see nothing,” I called. The other squad members gave similar all clears.

  “I definitely felt something,” said Silky. The alien spoke human words in her own crystalline voice, which sounded delicate but could cut through any din. She did not sound apologetic. “I felt a… malevolence.”

  “Probably background radiation from Chikune,” I suggested, and was only ha
lf joking. I didn’t just hate Chikune; his thoughts were a constant source of darkness and anger, and Silky could detect this. I don’t just mean she could interpret the scowl on his ugly face, but she was a Kurlei, an empath species with a limited ability to sense emotional state. Came in handy sometimes.

  “Stay sharp, McCall,” snapped Silky. “We are professionals, and you will act like one.”

  I felt movement beneath my belly and scrambled up to my knees. Tova dusted herself down and sat on her haunches, regarding me like a science project gone wrong. Damn her; she was watching my reaction to Silky’s admonishment. I hated an audience.

  I sighed. Sometimes I still struggled with my new existence as NJ McCall. My former life as Sergeant Ndeki Joshua had never been easy, but at least had been simpler, until fifteen ago when Lieutenant Cnundislir had informed me that I was retiring to become a reservist-colonist on the frontier world of Klin-Tula. A civilian. Retired. Learning how to be those things was the hardest campaign I’d ever fought. After taking a lengthy and near-fatal path, I’d eventually signed up with Revenge Squad, a professional retribution agency. And if we did well in our probationary mission, when we got home to Port Zahir, we would be given more serious tasks – the kind where I got to blow things up.

  I shrugged at Tova. Why should I care what she thought of me?

  “Stay frosty,” I said in reply to Silky. “Roger that, ma’am.”

  The real reason I was shooting my mouth off? Silky’s empathic connections worked both ways, and I was so much more attuned to her than the others that I could feel her intense anxiety as if it were my own. She had definitely sensed something out there in the forest. The only question was what?

  I switched my artificial eyes to UV, infrared, and every other filter available. All I could see were trees and seven worried people. Silky, Shahdi, Chikune, Sel-en-Sek, César, Tova, and even our other alien, Nolog-Ndacu were all feeding off my own tense alertness.

  Nolog was a Tallerman, and that meant he was always wary on the verge of anxiety. But Tallermans stay stuck at wary. To move them all the way to full-on worry usually required something of the order of a planet-wide epidemic, being sucked into an event horizon, or at least registering an incoming salvo of high-yield nukes. He kept pulling his head down inside the thickly muscled cupola of his neck.

  This was ridiculous; we were scaring ourselves silly like panicked children.

  “All clear,” I said in a loud voice, and looking pointedly at Nolog. “I detect no threats.”

  “Tova, stick with NJ,” Silky ordered. “We have a job to do, people. Let’s do it.”

  We set out cautiously. Tova and I walked along the path, but the others spread out a short way into the trees, looking for trouble from every direction.

  With each step we took deeper into the forest, the lush scent of the vegetation became more suffocating, and every shadow darker. What the hell were we getting into?

  — 2 —

  Logging Site Charlie hadn’t been developed very far. In fact, Zhang-Unison Forestry’s whole operation in the archipelago had the air of a hastily assembled forward base of which Charlie had been the newest outpost. The buildings were the same armored prefab bubbles I’d squatted inside on a dozen campaigns, but Charlie had aspirations of permanence. A crudely laid polycrete apron had been used as hard-standing for the bulky construction vehicles, which had been building the permanent structures. Foundations had been built and the outer frames had been partially erected.

  No one was building them now.

  Everyone was dead.

  No, dead, doesn’t quite cover it. The site crew had been chopped into body parts and scattered across the forest clearing.

  I checked Nolog-Ndacu and César. The Tallerman had scrambled onto the roof of a bubble structure, and the human was lying atop the cab of a digger; both were watching the perimeter for any signs of trouble, with guns ready. I drew comfort from the weight of my own carbine hanging from its shoulder strap.

  “This was the second site to go quiet? Silky asked Tova.

  The xeno-biologist nodded. Her face was pinched with guilt, and so it damned well should be.

  “Site Brintz went dark a week earlier,” she said.

  “Was it the same carnage?” asked Sel-en-Sek. “Did the victims working here know there had been a slaughter at Brintz? How many more people had to die before you did something?”

  “I didn’t know!” shouted Tova, her eyes red and wild. “I knew something bad had happened to Brintz but I had no idea what. You’ve got to believe me.”

  “Easy, Ms. Snetch-Lam,” I said, wrapping a protective arm around her before she did something stupid. “I do believe you.”

  She calmed a little; not much, but I think I did some good. She had the look of somebody racked with guilt for not putting two and two together, not the cynical sneer of a heartless deceiver. “Look,” I told her, “go sit with Shahdi over there. She is… less threatening to be with than me. She won’t judge you, I promise.”

  Poor woman. She gave a feeble nod and obediently shuffled over to the comfort of the youngest member of our squad. Tova was in such shock that I could have asked her to sign over all her possessions and then jump off a cliff into the sea; I think she would have done so without questioning.

  With her safely settling down with Shahdi, I gave the butchery a more forensic inspection. I’ve seen many corpses in my life, but nothing like this. They’d been sliced and sliced again. Almost as if meat chopped for a stew, but then discarded into the sea of blood that had pooled over the polycrete, crusting like half-frozen red ice.

  The loggers had fought back, though. Abandoned in the sea of meat were a rifle and a light railgun with two spent ammo bulbs nearby.

  The defenders had fought with fire too; the trees on one sector of the perimeter were badly scorched, depositing a layer of ash that still coated the undergrowth.

  Silky waved Chikune and me to join her in a huddle.

  “Could trees have done this?” Silky asked us.

  “I think the word tree carries too much baggage,” said Chikune. “Trees, no. Plants? Who knows? Possibly. I’ve heard of carnivorous and semi-intelligent plants. Even mobile plants such as the tarngrip, but their motion is extremely slow.”

  “Tarngrip roots kill sleeping and injured prey,” I said. “They curl around you and crush with enough hydraulic pressure to block your blood flow. In theory, with narrower stems, I suppose plants could slice through flesh like a woody garrote.”

  “All true,” said Silky. “But to move at human speeds requires fast-burning fuel for the equivalent of muscles, and that’s not present in any plant I’ve ever heard of.”

  I nodded at the scorched area. “I want to take a closer look over there.”

  “What you expect?” Chikune sneered. “Tree corpses?”

  “Perhaps. Probably nothing, but these people slaughtered here were mostly retired soldiers, and they were well used to killing work. Maybe they succeeded in taking some of the attackers down with them.”

  “Okay,” said Silky, “but be careful. Chikune, you go with him. Watch his back.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Chikune replied, and hurried after me because I was already jogging over to the perimeter.

  The charred bones of dead trees lay scattered in the ash. It must have taken a lot of heat to incinerate those trunks, but the fire hadn’t spread more than a dozen paces into the forest. What had prevented it from spreading?

  I heard a rustle behind me and spun around, fear supercharging my muscles. But it was only a bat panicked into sudden flight, probably by Chikune’s ugly scent. Damned animals got everywhere.

  I pressed on beyond the trees that were obviously burned beyond any hope of recovery to one whose outer leaves on the lower branches had been badly scorched, and were covered in soot, but whose trunk seemed intact. It was, however, playing host to the ‘ivy’ I’d seen earlier. I pulled at the ivy strands, hoping to detach it from its host tree. I didn’t know what I was l
ooking for, but Tova’s fear was beginning to infect me. Perhaps if I separated parasite from host, I would spot something important. Even if I didn’t, we could take the ivy back to Unity Ascent Base, the center of operations a few miles away at Golden Bay.

  But there was a lot of ivy, and this sample was glued on tightly. It would take both hands to get it off.

  “You still watching?” I asked Chikune.

  “I got your six,” he told me. “Just so long as the boss orders it.”

  Deciding that was as good as I would ever get from Chikune, I left my carbine on the ground where I could grab it quickly, and set to work, yanking with all my strength at the parasitic plant.

  Before long, piles of leafy stems began collecting on the forest floor, revealing details of the host tree that had been hidden by the dense foliage. Most noticeable were the large blisters covering the host’s trunk. The ivy hadn’t merely clung to its host for support, but had sent tendrils deep inside these bulbous areas.

  I’ve seen similar bulges in plants on other worlds. Usually they were the birthing chambers for parasitic wasps or worms, which would emerge as adults to infest other hosts. But these bulges were the size of my head. What the hell would emerge from something so big?

  Perhaps these trees had erupted into a legion of diabolical creatures that had swarmed out of those blisters to sting and slice the loggers. I stepped back.

  “Tova!” I called. “Those bulbs in the trees… could they be our enemy?”

  “Hardly,” she replied. “They’re what we’re harnessing for the…”

  “What? For the what?”

  “I’m not supposed to say.”

  I sensed rapid movement behind me. Silky spoke. “Tell Mr. McCall what he needs to know.”

  The whimper of fear from the xeno-biologist told me that Silky had lost patience with the human. She could do terrifying things with her knife.

  “The… bulbs,” said Tova. “We came to this island to cut trees – nothing more – but this may be even more important. We’re extracting a concentrated fuel from those bulbs. Not nearly as powerful as a fusion power plant, but the fuel would be far cheaper to produce, and the power generators simpler and much more robust. Just imagine – renewable fuel that literally grows on trees.”