Chimera Company: Rho-Torkis. Issue 2.: A sci-fi adventure serial Read online

  “The real Sybutu gets the job done,” Osu told him. “However hard the route I have to take. The same goes for any true legionary. That’s why none of us are going back to Faxian. We’re heading east to complete our mission.”

  “Anyway,” hissed Zy Pel as they stowed the camo-sheets in their bikes. “They are not vampires.”

  “Maybe not,” Yergin replied, “but whatever the hell they are, they’re still out there. They’re close by and they’re coming for all of you.”

  “Stop that crazy talk!” snapped Osu. “We get through this nightmare by acting like professionals. We are not Militia. We are not RILs, rebels, or bandits. We are sappers of the Legion and this is where we prove it, by holding the line.”

  “I’m not crazy,” growled Yergin. He accelerated away, hard, heading southeast off the glacier and disappearing into the eerie glare of the red sky and burning legionary base reflecting off the snow.

  “I know they’re surrounding us,” Yergin shouted, his receding voice cracking. “I can smell them.”

  The air snapped as streaks of fire hit the upper atmosphere, punching shockwaves that transmitted down through the clouds. They were warships coming in hot, bigger craft than the fighters that had been scrapping. All hell must be breaking loose in orbit.

  But there was enough to worry about down here in the snow.

  “Get him back,” ordered Osu, as he adjusted his goggles to search the skies.

  The fiery streaks resolved into mid-sized freighters. Jump-capable, maybe a dozen crew, and with so many modifications in the centuries after they’d rolled off the production fab-plants that their configuration was effectively random. They were the kind of ships you would see dotted around any port. The kind that went unremarked.

  Perhaps the Legion was imposing an orbital interdiction and these were traders with something to hide.

  Legion Spikeballs screamed after the freighters in pursuit, their fuselages dotted with the force keels that gave them half their name. The other half of the Spikeball designation came from the four beam generators that curved around their bodies to combine in a central nose spike. These lanced energy beams at the freighters whose shields flared briefly before safely dissipating the weapon strikes.

  Freighters with shields? Smugglers weren’t shy about making a few after-factory alterations. To emerge unscathed from that kind of firepower, though... even for the Smuggler’s Guild, that meant serious mods. Those ships had military-grade shielding. What were they really? Troop transports?

  The Spikeballs broke away to engage with a wing of mismatched and mostly obsolete fighters just emerging from orbit.

  Up ahead, Yergin was laughing. It was a demented sound, almost a cry of pain. “Follow me,” he yelled in a voice that sounded little like the friend Osu had known these past four years.

  The glacier the bitten man was crossing descended gently to the southeast with sharp drops to the north as it fell away to the forest, and to the south where it butted against the Great Ice Plain.

  The light was dying, the bright red skies being swallowed by the gray maw of a storm advancing aggressively from the south, so it took a moment for Osu to resolve the awful sight in front of Yergin.

  Blurry white figures were rising out of the snow. They formed a horseshoe several ranks deep, blocking the exit from the glacier.

  Osu raced to catch up.

  The sappers opened up with bike cannons on the blocking soldiers. Some went down, but not nearly enough. Yergin wasn’t firing; he was head down and speeding for the center of the enemy formation.

  The air above the bikers rippled as railgun flechettes cut through, but despite wearing Legion armor and firing PA-71s, the enemy were clearly no legionaries. They fired wildly. Or perhaps they were firing deliberately high. For now.

  Osu desperately sought options.

  A few hundred meters behind the enemy, the glacier fell away in a sheer drop, with the promise of cover in the forest beyond. Stryker had ridden off a similar drop and survived. Could anyone else?

  “They want you alive,” screamed Yergin. “Follow my example. Don’t let them take you.”

  Yergin pushed his bike even harder, its engine rising in pitch until it screamed. He kept going. The powerplant shrieked like a banshee – he must have disabled its safeties.

  “Yergin!” Osu screamed. “Don’t do it!”

  “Gonna take some dirty vamps with me,” he screamed as his bike rammed the enemy, knocking several flying before its nose pitched down, caught in the snow, and began a high-speed tumble, scything through the phony legionaries like a boomerang drone.

  “Grab him,” shouted Osu, speeding through the other bikes and heading for Yergin. With so much snow and bodies thrown into the air, and the whine from the bike motor like screeching nails running along the inside of his skull, he couldn’t locate his friend. But he was in there somewhere.

  A fireball erupted as the powerplant on Yergin’s bike blew, and Osu was off his bike and flying through the air.

  Once again, the bogus legionaries were slow to react. Zy Pel wasn’t.

  “Yergin’s bought us an exit,” he shouted as Osu mounted his fallen bike. “Use it!”

  They raced through the gap Yergin had blown through the enemy ranks, kicking, stabbing, and shooting the dazed survivors who threatened to block them.

  In the flickering light of the burning bike, Osu slowed to scan the snow, hoping against all the odds that Yergin had been thrown clear.

  He hadn’t. Osu saw his burning corpse steaming in the snow. His friend was beyond rescuing.

  “I’ll keep them safe,” he promised Yergin. “No matter what we’re really facing here.”

  Osu saw a flash on his bike armor, inches from his thigh, and felt the tiniest of nudges as a flechette round deflected away.

  “Gotta go,” he told Yergin and threw his bike forward.

  Rounds zipped past him but within moments he was inside the howling snowstorm rolling in from the plain, and being beaten by balls of ice pummeling him like fists. The others slowed down and allowed their engine heat to radiate so he could find them with the IR overlay on his goggles.

  They altered their bikes to limit their emissions in case they were being followed. Doing so robbed them of performance, but with visibility so poor that the legionaries couldn’t see the ground, it made sense.

  Instead of riding off the glacier’s edge into the howling gale, Osu ordered his team to turn right, taking them behind the enemy who had halted to lick their wounds. The wind caught snatches of shouted commands to the beaten soldiers to pick up their boots and head north.

  Soon, though, the voices fell away and they were left alone in the whiteout with only the dots in their goggles to reassure them that they were still together.

  After a few klicks, the storm blew out and they seized the chance to get clear off the glacier. Following Stryker’s instructions, they accelerated off the edge of the ice cliff to make it easy to keep their mounts balanced. Osu misjudged it and had to throw himself clear of the bike. But both of them were undamaged after their fall into the accumulation of fresh snow and headed off for the shelter of the trees as the storm rolled back in.

  Here the dense tree canopy protected them from the worst of the howling gales and replaced it with a muffled silence. But as they drove beneath the pines, they had to dodge falling piles of snow that slid off laden boughs.

  Osu preferred the violence of the storm out in the open. It was something he could fight. The way the world closed in on them inside the forest felt suffocating. The ghosts of those he’d lost that day seemed to cling to the trees, and he was glad when nighttime soon fell. Darkness was a form of sensory deprivation he was much more familiar with.

  They encountered no one.

  No birds. No Littoranes. No one friendly, but also no zombie legionary vampires or whatever the hell they’d encountered out there.

  If the image of nuclear fire hadn’t seared itself so strongly into his memory, it would
be easy in this oppressive silence to start believing they had imagined the disaster they’d escaped. De Ketele, Colonel Malix, the new lieutenant, and Nydella… he was certain they were all dead, along with everyone he’d known who wasn’t with him, wrapped in cloaks and riding bikes through the night. It was a deadly fact waiting for him in the darkness like an underwater mine, but he hadn’t yet felt its emotional impact. Yergin was different. It was Yergin’s death he struggled to process the most, the image of Yergin’s burning corpse he kept seeing lying on the forest floor out the corner of his eye. And the way he had claimed to smell the enemy – the same way their Kurlei officer had sniffed out Zy Pel.

  If Osu survived this mission to make a report, he would paint Yergin as a hero who had sacrificed himself to buy his brothers an exit. The horrifying truth was that Yergin’s terror of what he might become was so powerful that Osu was sure he would have blown his bike anyway.

  Osu suspected the other survivors in the party were consumed by similar thoughts. Or maybe they were sucked into a different private hell. In any case, they pressed on in silence, willingly numbing themselves with the mindless task of threading the hoverbikes through tree after tree.

  “Yergin was right about one thing,” said Zy Pel, breaking the silence on the first rest stop. With Zavage keeping watch, they sat in a circle of their bikes munching on ration bars without enthusiasm. “He was my brother. I miss him already. But if those freaks we encountered were what I found at Azoth-Zol, then... he’s better off dead.”

  “I’m not in the mood for anyone talking drent,” shouted Osu in an instant rage. “You said it was mind control. And it only worked on aliens. It’s obvious to everyone here that you’re freaked out by whatever it is we’re facing. You! The unflappable Hines Zy Pel who laughs at any suggestion that he was SpecMish, and then proves he is with the skills and hoarded kit that makes regular legionaries like us look like junior cadets.”

  “I was trying to calm Yergin. Finding words to cool all your heads. It’s still only a hunch.”

  Osu got to his feet and glared at Zy Pel. He was uncomfortably aware of his hands. They needed to hit something. Or someone. “I am in charge here, SOTL. You will share what you know. Next extended stop, you will tell us everything. In the meantime, if these freaks are who you suspect, is there any intel you might care to share with your surviving brothers that improves our odds of staying alive a little longer?”

  He shook his head and then looked away. “I’m sorry.”

  Sorry? He didn’t look it! Zy Pel took a battered leather pouch from the inside of his cloak and drew out his clay pipe and tin of synth-bac. Ignoring his NCO standing over him, he tamped leaves into his pipe bulb.

  If it were anyone else, Osu would have snatched the pipe away and thrown it into the night at such insolence. But there were multiple levels at which he didn’t want to escalate conflict with this man.

  He did so anyway, but selected a different angle of attack. One Zy Pel wouldn’t see coming.

  “We’ve got more mysteries than we can cope with,” Osu told the group. “We move out in three mikes.” He stared at the man happily puffing away without a care in the world. “Let’s see if we can solve a few before we do. You with the pipe! Are you the Hines Zy Pel who supposedly died on Station 11?”

  Zy Pel froze for several seconds, the pipe clamped between his teeth. “That doesn’t matter now.”

  “The hell you say!” Stryker erupted with anger. “My best friend got bitten and blew himself up. The main guns at the base turned inward and nearly everyone we know is dead. I’ve seen zombies wearing Legion kit, newts in rad-gear who knew this attack was coming, and bombers that miraculously snuck through the orbital defense system. No one’s told me what’s so important about these damned dig sites, or why the colonel gave us an off-grid mission like we’re some hard-ass secret agents. Maybe he chose us because buttoned-up jack-head legionaries are the most unlikely spies ever, because we always do everything by the book and once we join the Legion family we never interact with outsiders except to shoot them or drink at their bars. The idea of undercover SOTLs is so ludicrous, no one would ever suspect us. The colonel was either an idiot or a genius.”

  He stood beside Osu and joined him in glaring at Zy Pel. “I don’t know who I can trust any more, Hines. Right now, I’m not trusting you.”

  Zy Pel took a long draw on his pipe. He rolled the smoke around his mouth as if trying to capture the last lingering taste of a pleasure now lost.

  “Yes,” he replied. “That was me on Station 11 back in ’87. There wasn’t much of me left after we had beaten off the final wave of assault droids. Half of me was rebuilt, rejuved, and augmented.” He took another puff on his pipe. “More than half, actually. And mostly with advanced techniques I don’t understand myself, but a few of my repairs came straight out of the Bronze Age.”

  He pulled back his hood and then used both hands to draw apart the skin on his neck to reveal a gleaming plate underneath. Zavage brought closer one of the dimmed glow stones they were using to stave off the dark of the forest.

  Beneath false skin, was a curved plate of an orange-brown metal.

  “They used to call me Bronze.” Zy Pel blinked – almost flinched at the sound of his old name. “Though that’s not what it’s made from. It is primitive, though. I think they put it there to remind me who it was who had rebuilt me. Who owned me.”

  “And who was that?” pushed Stryker.

  “SpecMish. They owned me for a few years. Then I was kicked out for… reasons.”

  “Theft, hacking, extra-judicial dustings.” Stryker held out his hands. “I’m just repeating the rumors.”

  “Everything you think you know about the Special Missions Executive is a calculated lie. They are not the paladins of the Legion you see on the holo-dramas. I have my reasons for my actions and I’d do the same again. What I did, and why – trust me – you really don’t want to know.”

  “Almost time to go,” said Osu. “But I want one more answer out of you, Zy Pel. SpecMish seems to me like the kind of operation no one gets busted out of. If you ever retire, you do so permanently. And yet here you are, drawing your pay as a sapper of the Legion.”

  “Now that,” said Zy Pel pointing the mouthpiece of his pipe at the other legionaries in turn, “is why our sergeant is the one person who can get us through this skragg-pile of a mess in one piece. You’re right, Sarge. I was kicked out but allowed to live. That never happens, which means someone is keeping me on a long leash. Who? I don’t know. And I’ll give you another answer for free. Yergin was convinced he’d been bitten by vampires, but I know for a fact that’s not what they are. I could smell them too, though not as strongly as Yergin could.”

  “You?” Osu shook his head, but he couldn’t shake away the sense that Zy Pel’s latest inconsistent story was finally hitting a rich vein of truth. “You were bitten?”

  “I was.” Zy Pel busied himself with stowing his pipe. “I’m one of them, after a fashion. And I know what they’re after, too.”

  “The ship,” Osu found himself saying.

  The others shot a bewildered look at him, all except Zy Pel who gave him a scan of appraisal.

  “What ship?” pressed Stryker.

  Osu never understood why people talked of their cheeks flushing hot with shame; his felt cold. He almost apologized. “The dig site. All over the sector, we knew there were buried signs of a great war that ended thousands of years before the Exiles arrived at Far Reach. Then the Legion pressed scattered teams of archaeologists into military service and upped the scale of operations a thousandfold. We all assumed they’d found something. I can only guess about what that might be on other systems, but I do know what they found here at ASI-39. Sanderson spotted it when we were… I guess I was trying to impress her. It’s like nothing you’ve seen before. Mid-sized – 120 meters from bow to stern and a hull covered with what looked like bone hairs. And it wasn’t a twisted wreck. It was powered. Maybe even space worth
y. I think the phony legionaries were headed for the alien ship. That’s their objective.”

  Stryker laughed. “Security around the site is tighter than the defenses around a federal senator’s private bank vault. And you snuck in to impress a girl?”

  “Not just any girl,” Osu replied. “Sanderson.”

  “She was a fine legionary,” said Stryker. “And so are you, Sergeant. Mr. SpecMish here is right about one thing. Even when you’re playing hooky, you’re Legion to the core. Now, let’s get out of here.”

  Osu was a hypocrite for keeping such a secret while condemning others for keeping theirs. Stryker knew that – they all did – but Tavarius Stryker possessed the precious ability to easily brush aside issues that weren’t about to kill him. Matter closed. Move on. Osu too pushed away any sense of guilt or shame. Not because it was easy, but because he had to.

  The others, though, shot him looks of disdain as they formed up, ready to move out.

  Only Zy Pel kept his thoughts guarded.

  And Urdizine, Osu realized. The Zhoogene hadn’t said a word during their stop.

  Whatever was eating Urdizine would have to wait. They first had to survive Rho-Torkis and its Great Ice Plain because Bresca-Brevae lay at the far side, about 260 klicks away.

  They had rested near the eastern border of the forest. As they pushed on, the trees thinned and the pelting of snow dropping through the needles stopped altogether. The snowstorm had ended.

  It was dawn when they reached the edge of the forest and looked out upon the ice plain that stretched to the horizon. The rising red sun transformed the ice-scape into a sheet of polished fire.

  There were no signs of ambush. No indication of life in any form once the trees stopped. It was a barren land, but that’s what Osu was counting on. His route took them due east for three days, never passing closer than twenty klicks to a geographical feature significant enough to appear on his map. No one would find them here.

  They set off into the endless sea of ice, wondering what horrors this new day would bring.