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Demetria, now bearing the name, hull number, and transponder of a free trader called the Beryl Zephyr, sliced through Pacifica's night sky, pitching and yawing as Avril Ducote fought the high stratospheric winds. On a planned approach to Eisener City, a minor spaceport in the tropics, the disguised ship would overfly the island group that included Amali's retreat.
Hera Talyn, sitting in the co-pilot's seat, kept watching the excruciatingly sensitive stealth generators they'd installed on the ship's hull. They were essential to the mission since they disguised the fact that the Beryl Zephyr looked exactly like a ship the Amali family and the Sécurité Spéciale desperately wanted.
They also concealed the unusual cargo in its hold: four Warthog assault boats loaded to the gunwales with a squadron of Marine Pathfinders, armed, and equipped for a deadly night raid.
Should the incursion go wrong, there was no doubt in anyone's mind that an official inquiry by the Adjudicating Authority would lead to a severe political crisis and heavy pressure by the Senate to disband the 251st and its sister squadrons. But every mission lately carried the same risk. Special operations commandos didn't exist for simple strolls in the park. Major Ryent and his troopers knew they were deniable and expendable. If they were caught, the Grand Admiral would disavow their actions and throw them to the wolves. The same went for one Commander Hera Talyn, of Naval Intelligence.
These thoughts were far from Talyn's mind as she double checked the ship's planetary positioning system and flicked on the intraship radio.
“Raider-Niner, this is Mother Two, launch in five minutes. Opening doors.”
Down in the cavernous cargo hold, the four sleek gunboats waited in silence. Their black hulls seemed to absorb what little light the red emergency lamps provided.
Within, the four assault troops of the 251st sat patiently in well-ordered rows, the troopers joking in low tones as if their voices could give them away. This would be, for most of them, just another in a long string of combat jumps.
Zack Decker was dressed like the others in black scout armor and wore the standard utility belt loaded with grenades, spare magazines for his carbine, detcord, and a fighting knife. He sat half way down the outboard bench, wedged between a pair of troopers. Ryent had assigned him to Raptor Three. It would be the first to jump and the first to land. Its mission was to destroy the hive.
Just like everyone else in the craft, Decker was feeling the old pre-jump jitters turn his stomach into a seething nest of angry hornets. He had hundreds of jumps under his belt, but he still felt anxious before each one, which was just as well. When fear vanished, mistakes happened. At an altitude of five thousand meters, those mistakes were often fatal.
“Raider-Niner, this is Mother Two, launch minus sixty. Counting down. Have a good one, Pathfinder.”
“Raider Team thanks you, Mother,” Ryent’s ironic voice crackled over the general net, “and promises to come home for supper. Out to you. Raptor Leader, stand by.”
At launch minus thirty, the Warthog pilots started their gunboats' thrusters for the short burst that would free them from the trader's hold. At the word 'go', Raptor Three sprang through Demetria's rear cargo doors, quickly followed by Raptors One, Two and Four.
The gunboat pilots, inertial guidance systems pointing their shuttles at the target, made final course adjustments, hoping they were still within the ship's stealth field, and then turned all systems off.
“Okay, Avril,” Talyn grinned at Ducote, looking eerie in the green glow of the instrument panel, “prepare to make the thrusters look like goners.”
“Ready.” If Ducote was nervous, she gave no sign. Talyn admired her calm, a rare thing in an untrained civilian thrust into a military operation.
“Hit it.” Almost at once, the ship began to buckle as the atmospheric thrusters malfunctioned.
“Eisener control, this is the Beryl Zephyr.” Talyn's voice sounded suitably fearful. “We have a malfunction in the atmospheric thrusters. Switching to sublight drive and aborting descent. Request parking orbit so we can fix the problem before trying again.”
“Eisener control here,” a bored voice replied. “Roger your last. Go to two-seven-four mark three-five. Contact orbital control once you reach two-hundred thousand.” The controller's tone seemed to suggest he expected this sort of incident with free traders.
Ducote punched in the course and flicked on Demetria's sublight drives. Immediately, the two women were pushed back into their seats by the increase in thrust. The ion stream from the sublight drive wiped out any trail the Warthogs might have left.
“Roger, Eisener control, we'll try again later. Beryl Zephyr out.”
“So far, so good,” Talyn commented through clenched teeth.
*
Invisible gliders, the gunboats slipped through the clouds on a shallow descent, their sharp beaks aimed at Amali's island. No light reflected off their black skins, no sensor wave bounced back to betray them. At best, with the most sophisticated gear, an experienced tech would mistake them for a flock of birds or sensor ghosts.
The Pathfinders, silent and contemplative now that they'd left the safety of the ship, dealt with the coming battle in their own way. In the semi-darkness of the jump bay, the armored Marines looked like eerie cousins to the semi-sentient insects they were about to destroy. No sound but the wind whistling along the fuselage disturbed their peace.
Some prayed to the God or gods of their childhood, some thought of the enemy below and drowned their fears in a rising tide of bloodlust, while others meditated, focusing on inner harmony. Veterans all, the Pathfinders had learned to channel their fears away long ago.
Two bright red lamps switched on: the signal for ten minutes to jump. In Raptor Three, the jumpmaster rose and stood below the lights. He extended his arms in front of him, hands flat, and palms facing upwards. Slowly, he raised them.
“Stand up.”
The Pathfinders unbuckled their seatbelts and stood, facing the rear of the shuttle. Automatically, the seats folded back into the bulkheads, freeing up space for the bulky troopers. The jumpmaster hit his chest with both fists, just below the shoulders, where the parachute straps joined the harness.
“Check your equipment.”
In pairs, the Pathfinders checked their altimeters, manual release handles, parachute covers, and harness buckles. The 'chute taken care of, they made sure their small packs were strapped on, their rifles, carbines, rocket launchers and machine guns were secured against their chests, but ready to use with a single tug, and their various pouches and pockets sealed, so nothing fell out five kilometers above the ocean.
The jumpmaster raised his hands to the sides of his head, palms facing the troopers.
“Sound off for equipment check.”
From back to front, each Marine slapped the shoulder of the trooper ahead of him and yelled “Okay.”
When the signal reached the jumpers at the head of the four files, they gave the jumpmaster a thumbs-up signal. Any Marine, who wasn't okay, would have stepped out of line and left the stick.
The jumpmaster then placed his right hand on his helmet visor, at the level of his mouth
“Go to internal.”
With a flick of the hand, the troopers buttoned up their suits and began breathing the stale, canned air that would keep them alive until they reached the lower altitudes.
The JM raised his hands to his ears again.
“Sound off for breathing check.”
Again, the signal passed from front to back. Again, no one stepped out of line with a problem.
The JM turned to the intercom. “We're ready back here.”
“Okay,” the pilot replied. “Hang on. I'm dropping the ramp now.”
“Secure for ramp opening.”
The Pathfinders grabbed straps dangling from the upper bulkhead while the ship's aft bulkhead opened downwards and turned into a narrow ramp reaching out over the abyss. The jump bay's air pressure dropped, tugging at the standing Marines.
Wind howled through the small craft, making speech, even thought, impossible. The Pathfinders stared at the black opening as if hypnotized. Those who weren't absorbed by the daunting task of keeping their instinctual fears away thanked the gods of war for a cloudy sky. They would be less visible to ground watchers, and therefore less vulnerable to ground fire.
The JM made a broad chopping gesture with his right arm.
“Stand by!”
The four files shuffled forward until the lead troopers were level with the edge of the opening. Above the red jump lights, a glowing chronometer counted down the remaining seconds. When the digital readout reached zero, the lights changed to green, a screeching siren filled the bay, and the JM made a sweeping motion with his arm, releasing the Pathfinders into the night sky.
Almost like a single mass, the thirty-three troopers and one retired noncom jogged to the edge of the ramp and flung themselves into the void, arms and legs outstretched. Within seconds, the bay was empty. A final glance back and the jumpmaster let go of his strap, joining the black swans swooping down in Pacifica’s tropical sky.
*
Decker and the one-hundred and twenty-five Pathfinders flew through the night air for a long time, guided only by their helmets' targeting computers, using their bodies as wings and rudders. The sky around them and the ocean below were both of the same unrelieved black. Deep space had more orientation markers. If it weren't for the tug of gravity, and the rush of wind, they could have been floating in a dark limbo where there was no up or down.
Zack reveled in the exhilaration of flight. Only crazy people would jump out of a perfectly good shuttle, trusting their lives to a square of material strapped to their backs, but Decker was one of those, and he knew it. You had to love parachuting to be a Pathfinder. And he loved being a Pathfinder.
At a thousand meters, the kite-parachutes popped open, and the Marines' descent slowed to a shallow glide. By now, they could make out the richer black of the island as it grew in their visors. Lights too had begun to separate land from sea as Amali's compound came into view.
Tugging on the wires above his shoulders, Zack controlled his 'chute's course, his computer projecting a target grid on the inside of his visor. This was the most dangerous moment. They were close enough for a sharp-eyed watcher with night vision gear to spot them and then kill them. But Amali's mercenaries didn't expect a Marine assault on a Commonwealth planet, let alone a tricky and dangerous airborne attack. Surprise, as always, would be the Pathfinders' best ally.
And if all else failed, they could always call on the Warthogs, whose shallow glide had brought them to a nearby, deserted island.
*
“Everything quiet?” The mercenary noncom hitched up his trousers as he walked into the compound's operations room.
“So far, sarge,” the duty tech replied. “Our Lord and Master can have another night of undisturbed sleep.”
“More like undisturbed perversion, if you ask me.”
“Dangerous talk, sarge, especially since that fucking Marine got away. The boss has been acting vicious.”
“Scared is the word you want to use.” The sergeant sat on the corner of a console and burped. “He's fucking scared that Marines will come down here and wipe the island off the face of the planet.”
“Would they do something like that?”
“Naw. It'd be against the fucking law. Only the buggering Senate can authorize military action on a member planet, and there's damn little chance they'd to do it for this place. The boss' family and friends own half the cocksucker politicians. This is just bullshit we're doing, acting as if we're a fucking Marine base on the edge of the fucking Shrehari Empire. Still,” the noncom burped again, grimacing this time as acid rose in his throat, “gotta keep up appearances, so pay attention to your screen and make sure the logs are complete.”
“Yeah, yeah, sarge. Cover my ass. I know the drill.” The tech turned back towards his screen and yawned. “Nothing out there but a flock of stupid birds coming in.”
He pointed at the indistinct blips a few hundred meters away from the shoreline and the same distance up.
“Hah,” the mercenary sergeant cackled, “with any luck they'll be geese, and we'll get some hunting tomorrow morning.”
“Doubt they're geese, sarge. Too big. Must be another kind of bird. Maybe they'll make good hunting anyways.”
“Yeah. What's weather say for tomorrow?”
“Another storm coming up, as big as the one the other day, when this Decker guy vanished.”
“Fucking hurricane season's started early.”
“Yeah.”
“Take it easy. I'm going to go have a crap and then take a walk outside.”
The tech yawned again and gave his sergeant an ironic wave. The noncom grinned and replied with the rigid digit salute before leaving the ops room.
*
The ground came up fast under Zack's feet, and he could no longer judge the distance. Facing in the direction of his drift, he bent his knees slightly and waited for the impact.
It came as a surprise as it did every time.
His feet hit the ground with a jarring thump, and he took several quick steps forward to absorb his momentum. Then, when he was sure he had his balance, he knelt to reduce his silhouette while his canopy collapsed to the ground with a sigh. Around him, muffled thuds and the rustling of parachutes were the only signs of Third Troop's landing. To Zack's ears, they were incredibly loud, but he knew the jungle's nightly concert of bird chants and predatory yowls would cover the noise.
With practiced ease, he freed his carbine and swung it out while his other hand twisted the 'chute harness buckle, releasing him from its anchor-like drag. His helmet visor, set to light intensification, showed the estate in detail. He marked the building he'd been taken to after his arrival and quickly spotted the door.
Two red blips suddenly appeared in his visor's targeting grid. A loud shout of alarm rang across the tarmac, and a bright plasma shot split the night.
Instinctively, Decker raised his carbine to his shoulder and lased the merc who'd shot. When his weapon's sight found the target, an exercise that took less than a second, he pulled the trigger twice, in double-tap fashion. His shots were true, and the merc died without another sound. A trooper beside him dispatched the other sentry with the same efficiency and speed.
But neither had been fast enough. The night gave birth to the eerie wail of an alarm siren.
The troop leader slapped Zack on the shoulder.
“C'mon, Decker, let's shag. Let the CO take care of the opposition.”
They reached the relative safety of the blind walls after a short sprint. Zack was pleased to see he wasn't even breathing hard though the weight of the armor dragged at his body.
From somewhere on the other side of the estate, a mercenary machine gun opened up, but it was silenced quickly when a Marine rocket launcher whomped in reply.
Ignoring the developing fight, as Major Ryent had instructed them to do, Zack slipped around the corner of the building, carbine at the ready. He immediately came face-to-face with a five-man merc patrol emerging from the barracks. His reflexes still ran true, and he mowed them down in a sustained burst from the hip, nearly cutting two of them in half at the waist, while the others died when his shots flash-boiled their innards.
With the sounds of a growing battle around him, Zack sprinted from cover and headed straight for the dark rectangle that led to the labs, and ultimately the hive.
*
Walker Amali moaned with pleasure as his latest lover, the daughter of a Senator with more ambition than ability, rode him with consummate skill. She had arrived on the island earlier in the day, sent as an offering by her father, who wanted to join the select circle of politicians who held the real power, and he knew Amali was the financing behind that power. He also knew the head of ComCorp had a weakness for well-rounded and pliable women. His daughter Yelena was both.
Amali's climax was building when the alarm siren started wailing and mounting panic replaced the pleasant warmth of lovemaking. It turned to a sick feeling of nausea when he heard gunshots outside.
He pushed the girl away and rolled off the bed, stabbing his vidcom terminal. She protested at the treatment but fell silent when she saw the look in his eyes. Gunfire lit up the night, and he thought he saw black shapes move with deadly swiftness among the shrubs and trees of his gardens.
“Amali here. What the hell is happening?”
“Technician Hillier, sir,” a frightened voice replied. “We're under attack by Marines.”
“What?” Amali demanded, wide-eyed. A tic tugged at the left corner of his mouth.
A sweaty, panicked face replaced the tech's. “Sir, they're Pathfinders. We're under airborne attack. I figure there's more'n a hundred of 'em, a full squadron. The captain is down, and we're getting slaughtered.”
Amali was stunned, speechless. Not only had Decker escaped, but the bastard had also come back with a commando force.
He abruptly cut the link and headed for his walk-in closet. All that mattered now was to flee and save himself. The girl looked at him, frightened by what she heard, but even more frightened of the tortured expression on his face. She remained silent.
The magnate quickly dressed in a black one-piece outfit and strapped on a pistol belt. The Marines had murdered his cousin and wouldn't stop at killing him either. As for the experiment, he mentally shrugged. It was over. There would always be more experiments. One day, the Navy would pay for all the outrages. He swallowed the bile that had risen in his throat.
Walker looked at the girl, still naked, still beautiful and still a whore, sent here by a pimping father who lusted for power. She whimpered softly, flinching every time a burst of plasma came too close to the windows. Amali couldn't take her with him, she'd be a liability, and he couldn't afford to leave her behind to tell the Marines about his bolthole. Her father wasn't important enough to matter. The daughter mattered even less.
Slowly, he pulled out his pistol and aimed it at her head. She stared at him, wide-eyed. With deliberate care, as if he were on a shooting range, he breathed in and out, tightening his finger on the trigger.
The shot punched a small hole in the girl's perfect forehead, leaving a smoking hole in its wake. But its exit wasn't so neat. The plasma flash boiled her brain on the way out, and when it blew away the back of her skull, pinkish-white matter bubbled out, splashing all over the bed. She voided herself as she died and a strong odor of urine and feces mixed with the smell of charred flesh.
Without warning, Amali vomited on the plush carpet, sickened by the stench. He had never killed anyone with his own hands before. Someone else had always done his dirty work for him. Trembling, he heaved until nothing but bile joined the growing stain at his feet. Sounds from the mansion’s front hall snapped him out of his misery: the Marines were inside.
He ran to an ornate wooden panel in one corner of the room and placed his palm on an elaborate design in its middle, opening the door to a hidden lift. No one but his father knew about it, the builder having long since died in an accident.
Walker slumped against the lift's curved walls as the doors closed, his entire body trembling. He was swept down into the island's underground warren, where a submarine waited to whisk him away. But when he stepped out of the lift and into the tunnel, the sound of exploding charges from the submarine pen pushed his panic to a peak.
He ran to the pen's door and poked his head around the corner. A squad of Marines in black armor had found a way in and were busy sabotaging everything in sight. One of the troopers spotted him and pointed in his direction.
Amali vaguely heard a voice call his name and order him to stop, but his instincts drove him back into the tunnel, towards the other door that opened into the jungle. His father had used that one for solitary walks and quiet assassinations.
The thick steel door opened with a creak at his command, and the humid night air hit him like a fist. Pounding feet echoed behind him, and he ran out of the tunnel into the dark forest. With a loud clang, the door slammed shut again, cutting off his pursuers.
When he stopped running, deep in the jungle, Walker Amali realized he had nothing but a small handgun with a half-empty magazine. All the Marines had to do was come pick him up.
Hidden and alone, the most powerful man on Pacifica trembled, fighting his fear and rage, unable to think of a way out of his predicament, except hope the Marines didn't come after him.
Things like this weren't supposed to happen. The Amali family thought itself above the law.
*
A single shot fried the door's locking mechanism, and Zack pried it open. Major Ryent and his troops had turned the raid into a full-scale battle, distracting every mercenary in Amali's employ. Most of the arc lights had died, shot by snipers, plunging the compound into a darkness punctuated by the flash of plasma ammunition, rocket exhaust streams, exploding grenades and satchel charges.
One of the Pathfinder troops had already taken out the ops center, cutting the island off from the rest of the universe. Another had captured the fusion reactor, selectively cutting power to enemy-held areas, while a third was rounding up everyone in the private part of the estate, looking for Walker Amali himself.
Helmet visor switched to infrared, Decker stepped into the darkened corridor and put his back against the wall, to reduce his silhouette. There was no one in sight, no unusual heat signatures, and no booby traps. He signaled for the troop's scouts to join him.
Two armored figures slipped past, one holding a sensor, the other covering him. They moved carefully but quickly, searching for signs of life, human or alien. At the first door, they stopped and signaled. Zack didn't need to look inside to know what it was.
“Interrogation room,” he said over the radio.
“Clear it,” the troop leader ordered.
“Roger. T'chin, Douala, number one team. Sisulu, Rajmurti, security positions. Move.”
The two scouts crouched on either side of the corridor, weapons pointed into the darkness. Number one team stepped up to the door, one on each side, concussion grenades in hand. Corporal T'chin slapped the lock pad, and the door slid open with a sigh. In unison, the two Pathfinders armed and tossed their grenades into the room.
Before the explosions died down, the team burst into the room, weapons at the ready, eyes scanning for survivors. Decker followed them in. Other than the slight damage from the grenades, it was unchanged. Seeing the mind probe, he remembered every painful second of the interrogation. A crimson curtain of hate closed before his eyes, and a murderous rage gripped him.
“Someone in the back,” the scout warned, “single human, no sign of weapons.”
“Cover me, Dal.” T'chin cautiously neared the door, keeping to one side and out of the line of fire. He palmed the lock, and it opened. “Whoever's in there, surrender or die.”
“Don't shoot, don't shoot,” a quavering voice replied. “I'm coming out.”
Zack knew that voice intimately. When Doctor Cantos crossed the threshold, the former sergeant stepped forward and grabbed him by the throat.
“Remember me, you fucking mind rapist? Or did you see so many customers in the last week you forgot Zachary T. Decker?”
“N-n-no,” the doctor croaked weakly. “P-please let me go.”
Zack laughed. It was an ugly, hate-filled sound.
“Not a fucking chance, Cantos. You raped my soul, now it's time to pay the piper for your fun.”
Decker lifted the man and threw him into the reclining chair he'd occupied so recently. Snapping the restraints into place, he lowered the probe over Cantos's head.
“What are you doing, Zack?” A low voice asked from the doorway. “We've still have a mission to complete.”
“Your major said I could get my revenge, Reggie,” he snarled back. “It'll just take a moment.”
Sergeant Reginald Warwick, the troop leader, shrugged and ordered his men to continue their advance down the main passageway. Decker, true to his word, spent little time fine-tuning the probe. He switched it on and set the automatic programming to the most acute setting. Cantos screamed in terror as he felt the awful tendrils of the machine bore through his skull and sink into his brain, infiltrating his mind and tearing at his soul.
In a few minutes, his personality would start to break down, and he would slowly, irreversibly, turn into a human vegetable, alive only because the probe could not destroy the brain's autonomous functions. Without a backward glance, Decker left the room and shut the door behind him. A rape for a rape, and a soul for a soul: frontier justice had come to Pacifica.
The red haze lifted enough for him to remember his duties, and he rejoined the scouts. The mercs had abandoned the laboratory complex where the gunner had been held prisoner, ordered outside to fight off the Marines. They met a few technicians who gladly surrendered. A loaded plasma gun was a convincing argument. Quickly, they cleared out sophisticated labs, taking precise recordings of the extraordinary array of powerful scientific equipment.
“This is it.” Zack pointed at an unremarkable door on the right side of the corridor, just before the passage ended at a set of heavily armored portals. “That's the room where they showed me the bugs.”
“So it probably figures the hive is behind those starship hatches there,” Warwick replied. “It'll take more than we have to blow them.”
“No problem. The window in there'll give under a rocket.”
“Your call, Zack.”
The viewing room was as dark as the rest of the compound, and the scouts slowly scanned it before anyone else went in.
“Human, hiding behind the sofa,” one of the scouts warned. “No weapons.”
“Another of your friends?”
The gunner stepped past the scouts and stopped at the sofa.
“You can get up now, Professor Rocheford. I promise that you will come to no harm.”
He still remembered her silent tears when Amali had displayed the depth of his depravity in this very room. The woman rose unsteadily, unable to see him in the dark.
“W-who are you?”
“We met a few days ago, Professor. I was strapped into the chair over there while Amali showed me his home video of Diego Strachan getting eaten by a bug.”
“The Marine.”
“Retired Marine, Professor. Zack Decker, in case you forgot. But the people with me are still serving. We're here to destroy the hive.”
Rocheford sighed and reached out to steady herself.
“Then the nightmare is finally over.”
“Yeah.”
“I didn't know what he intended to do with the Quas, Mister Decker, I swear.”
“Later, Professor, later.”
But the floodgates had opened. She had to justify her part in this experiment, rationalize her participation in cold-blooded murder.
“He hired me from the University as a private researcher, promised me the best labs and facilities. And money, lots of money. By the time I realized what he wanted, it was too late. He would not let me go.” She sobbed. “He's sick, Mister Decker. I had to do as he ordered.”
“I know, Professor.” Zack laid a gentle hand on her trembling shoulder. “You're as much of a victim as I was. Sergeant Warwick, can you escort Professor Rocheford out of here and keep her safe?”
“Sure, Decker. C'mon, Prof.”
“No, wait. What will happen to all this?”
“We're going to kill every bug, pupa, and egg, and then wipe the hive from the face of the universe, along with the labs and all.”
“Good.” She shuddered. “The hive is behind the window. On the other side of the hatchery is a tunnel. The left side leads to the nursery, the right side to the queen. Amali has placed his two remaining soldiers in a special holding pen in another part of the facility. I can show you where.”
“Thanks, Prof, we'll get to it right after this.”
“And Amali?”
The anger and loathing in her voice rung a chord with Zack's own feelings. Their eyes met for a few seconds.
“Dunno. Wait.” Decker switched to the squadron net. “Niner, this is Gunner One. Can you give me a sitrep on Amali, over?”
“Two Niner here, Gunner One,” the leader of the second troop replied. “He escaped into the jungle through an underground tunnel. If we have time, Niner says we can go look for him, over.”
“Gunner One, thanks, out.”
When he told Rocheford what he had just learned, the woman's face hardened into a mask of hate.
“I can find him for you, Mister Decker, by using the two soldiers in the pen.”
Her eyes met his and held him in their powerful grip.
“I guess that makes two of us who want to see Amali receive what he deserves,” Zack growled. “We'll do it. Right after we clean out the hive.”
He turned towards Warwick. “Unless you have objections, let's do this.”
“Right. Everyone, clear out of the room. Berenguez, take the Professor back to the last bend in the corridor. Grabowski, arm your LAW and prepare to fire on order.”
Moments later, the only people left were Decker and Trooper Grabowski. The latter lifted the LAW's disposable launch tube to his shoulder and aimed.
“Ready, sarge.”
“Fire.”
Spouting a tongue of flame, the short, stubby missile erupted from the tube and slammed into the window. It exploded, shattering the reinforced plas alloy and lighting up the room bright as day. The back blast knocked Grabowski and Decker off their feet.
Zack rose and breathed in deeply. But instead of smelling the familiar scent of burnt explosives, a dry, acrid stench assaulted his throat.
“God Almighty,” Grabowski swore. “I haven't smelled something like that since we destroyed a vytyrek nest on New-Tasman.”
“It's the stench of bugs, Trooper.” Zack walked to the window, shattered plas crunching under his booted feet. “Prepare another rocket.”
The hatchery was bathed in orange light, but the eggs glowed with their own internal luminescence. Decker felt the rest of Third Troop gather behind him as he looked at the obscene, glistening spheres. He was oblivious to the curses, comments, and half-jokes circulating among the Pathfinders.
With slow, deliberate care, he raised his carbine to his shoulder and aimed at the first egg. He pulled the trigger twice and watched it burst in a spray of gelatinous, off-white matter. The sound was sickeningly wet and gooey, like throwing a rock into a hot mud pit.
Chitin rubbed against chitin as three drones burst into the hatchery, bent on protecting the precious eggs. Even without a soldier's stinger, Quas drones were formidable killing machines.
“Grabowski, target the bug on the right. You,” Decker grabbed another trooper with a LAW by the arm, “take the one in the middle. Someone else with a LAW, front, and center and take the left one. Move! Fire when you're ready.”
The words were barely out of his mouth when Grabowski fired. The rocket hit the bug squarely in the upper segment and exploded. A bare second later, the center bug also vanished in a flash of light. When the explosions subsided, nothing remained of the two drones except a few jagged pieces of chitin. A bright smear of ichor decorated the wall behind the bugs. Oblivious, the last bug kept on heading for the invading Marines, but a trooper with a medium machine gun fired his weapon on full automatic and disintegrated the Quas.
Zack methodically started shooting at the eggs again, one round per egg, one egg after the other. By the time he'd done ten, several more Pathfinders had joined him by the broken window, and each took their own row. Gradually, the acrid stench of Quas succumbed to the even more sickening odor from the burst eggs.
The Marines worked in silence, dispassionately; they stopped merely to concentrate their fire on the eyes of a fourth drone that belatedly came to check on its charges. It survived only marginally longer than its three comrades did. When the last egg disintegrated with a splash, Zack jumped over the window ledge and into the unhealthy miasma of the slime-covered hatchery. After a moment's hesitation, the others followed.
The nursery was exactly as Decker had seen on the vidscreen: a honeycomb-like structure with dozens of niches occupied by white, moving blobs: Quas pupas, rapidly maturing into fully-grown adult bugs.
The gunner stepped back and slammed a fresh magazine into his carbine. He sent a burst into the first niche, puncturing the pupal bag. An eerie, nerve-rending screech erupted from the hurt creature as it thrashed about in pain, ichor flowing from half-dozen shot holes. Taken aback, Decker lowered his carbine and stared, but only for a moment. Other Marines joined him, and the wholesale slaughter of immature Quas began, to the horrific concert of alien death screams.
More shots resonated from the corridor as the Marines massacred the remaining drones rushing to defend their charges. When the last pupa died, the Marines suddenly realized that another, desperate voice had been answering the dying bugs. Chills ran down Decker's spine at the horrible sound.
“The queen,” he whispered, and jogged off deeper into the hive, towards the chamber.
As he entered the warm, stifling room, he saw the immense female Quas writhe, as if fighting something. Then, with a nauseating sound, she tore free of her egg sack and stood up, raising her wet, glistening, and stinger-equipped tail in challenge. She bellowed something in her chittering, incomprehensible tongue and charged at Decker.
Sudden terror gripped the gunner, and his finger closed around the carbine's trigger, spewing round after round of plasma at the huge bug. The plasma splashed off her chitin like drops of water as she kept coming. Her tail swooped around her lower legs, and the stinger scraped across Zack's chest armor with a scream of tortured metal.
The sound somehow snapped Decker's ancient, racial fear of killer insects and he aimed his stream of plasma where it would do the most damage, in the eyes. Before he could punch through to the creature's brain, her tail swept at Zack again, knocking him down. The female bellowed, but her triumph was cut short by a rocket from the entrance to her chamber. She exploded in an apotheosis of light and sound, her body transformed into chitinous shrapnel that rattled against the Marines' armor like hail. Decker was drenched in sticky fluid and nearly vomited in his suit. When he finally hauled himself up, he turned his blank visor towards Warwick.
“What the hell took you so long, Reggie?”
“Don't you know it's impolite to enter a queen's palace without an appointment?”
“And I suppose the royal chamberlain wasn't available to make one.”
“Yeah. C'mon, let's find you somewhere to wash off.”
While the troop leader and his Marines placed explosive charges in the hive and the adjoining labs, Zack returned to the shower room where he'd punched out a merc on his last visit and washed the queen's bodily fluids off his armor. As he did so, he remembered Rocheford and the two penned-up soldiers.
He found the researcher waiting in a lab nearby, eyes bright with hate. She explained her idea in a few sentences and Zack, after calling Ryent, took her to the ops center.
“I can't say I approve of this, Decker,” Ryent told Zack, after introductions, “but we have a bit of time. You have one hour to find Amali. After that, we leave, whether he's dead or not.”
“Aye, aye, sir. I need just one thing to help, and that's an airborne sensor to pinpoint his location so the Prof can vector the bugs.”
“The Warthogs are inbound. I'll have them overfly this side of the island in a standard search pattern. In the meantime, the Prof can start by directing your bugs towards this area.” He pointed to the spot on the tactical display that corresponded to the secret exit.
The search took very little time.
“Got him.” Zack's tone held no particular pleasure. The sensor feed from the hovering Warthog was impersonal as if the quarry wasn't a human being.
“Roger,” Rocheford replied, “vectoring the soldiers to the spot. Shall I release them from control to take Amali?”
“No. Keep them from attacking until I tell you. I still need to talk to the bastard.”
“You can use the Warthog as a relay, sergeant.”
“Thanks, sir.”
*
Walker Amali heard the rustling of chitin and the chittering of hunting Quas in the darkness. A fear he'd never believed possible burned through him. Somehow, the soldiers had escaped from the pen and were hunting for food.
They were near, very near, yet the richest man on Pacifica was unable to move from the spot, paralyzed by his terror. His nose twitched as he caught a hint of the Quas' acrid scent. A sudden chatter on his right drew his attention, and he saw the outline of a soldier, close enough to touch.
Wetness ran down his legs as he voided his bladder in fear while tears ran down his cheeks as he sobbed, mind teetering on the edge of madness. A brilliant beam of light stabbed through the canopy of leaves and illuminated his hiding place. The two Quas appeared in all their terrifying bulk, stingers sweeping the bushes as they waited for their controller's next command.
“Amali,” a loud voice called him from above, from the source of the light. “It's your old friend Zack Decker. Remember me, your second test subject? I promised you I'd come back and see you die for your crimes. We'll I'm back, but I've had a better idea. I'll let your little monsters take care of you as you wanted them to take care of me. Fitting isn't it: a punishment that measures up to the crime.”
The richest man on Pacifica fell to his knees and weakly raised his hands towards the voice.
“Please, no.” The desperation in his whine made Decker want to puke. “I'll make you a wealthy man. You know I can. Just call these things off. I haven't done anything. I demand justice. I have the right to a fair trial before a jury of my peers.”
“You lost that right when you used me like a fucking guinea pig.” Decker trembled with rage as he shouted into the comms unit. Major Ryent laid a calming hand on the gunner's shoulder and spoke.
“Mister Amali, we found the body of a young woman in your bedroom. Your work, I believe.”
“Yes, yes, I admit it. Just get me out of here.”
“Then you admit to committing murder, Mister Amali?”
“Yes.” The twitching Quas were pushing him into the arms of full-blown panic. “I'll tell you anything, admit to everything. Just call them off.”
“Too late, Mister Amali,” Zack Decker whispered. He nodded at Rocheford to release the soldiers.
He and the Professor forced themselves to watch the video feed as the Quas, responding to their primitive instincts, tore a screaming Amali apart and ate him. The Marines turned away, unable to face the horror exposed by the Warthog's uncompromising illumination.
When it was over, Ryent, in a quiet voice, ordered the pilot to destroy the last two Quas with the Gatling gun slung under the Warthog's nose.
Decker and Rocheford stared at the screen for a long time after the picture had faded, trying to come to terms with what they had done. Revenge was rarely, if ever, satisfying. This time had been no exception.
In the end, Walker Amali hadn't been a rich, perverted monster whose ambitions could have led to another civil war. He had been a wretched, terrified human being who, for all his crimes, did not deserve such a horrible end.
Zack knew the final image would remain with him for the rest of his life. He had appointed himself judge, jury, and executioner. That a real court would probably have acquitted a man like him, with his political friends and money enough to subvert any judge, didn't make it any more justifiable.
“You know, sir,” he said, throat tight with long suppressed emotions suddenly boiling to the surface, “revenge is a dish that is better not eaten at all. There is no honor in something like this.”
“I know, sergeant, I know.” Ryent gripped his shoulder in sympathy. “I've been there myself. You never get it out of your memories, but if you remember the next time, you won't do it again, and that's something we can claim over those of Amali's bent. They never learn the price of honor. If it makes you feel any better, we couldn't let Amali live after this. That he died at the hands of his illegal pets was justice of a kind.”
“The kind that had best not happen too often,” Vanlith chimed in softly, “even if it sometimes must.”
“Time to go, people. Professor, we'll have to take you with us. What will happen to you depends on the Fleet.”
Rocheford shrugged.
“I've deserved any punishment they want to give me.”
“Your help tonight will be noted, and will mitigate whatever the authorities decide.” Ryent turned towards his executive officer. “Mo, order the load-up. Sunrise is in less than an hour, and a nasty storm is brewing to the north. We won't have a better time to slip away unnoticed. Release all the prisoners and tell them to head for the hills. This place is about to become a massive bombing range. If they're lucky, someone will come and save them before they die of hunger or disease.”
Ryent invited Decker to sit in the lead Warthog's empty co-pilot seat, to give him a front row view of the compound’s devastation.
With a precision born of long practice, the four gunboat pilots methodically destroyed the estate's aboveground buildings, swooping down like birds of prey. The charges set by the Pathfinders added to the havoc.
Zack's final view of the island where he'd nearly lost his life was of eight fuel-air bombs exploding in a huge ball of flame that flattened and charred everything on the shores of the lagoon. Amali's estate vanished, along with everything he and his people had done there.
The few survivors in the jungle would spread the word pour encourager les autres. Even if they didn't survive, the thoroughness of the attack was a strong enough message to the Coalition.
