TIN WARRIOR
The prisoner paced. It waited. Sometimes the prisoner lifted its head to sniff at the air. The smells were alien, yet becoming disgustingly familiar.
The cell was twenty paces by forty. There were soft places to stretch out but without frames under them; there was plumbing, designed to be impossible to pull out of the floor. The cell was resistant and seamless, so that nothing could be used as a weapon.
The electric lights dialed down automatically in the evening—was this a mock of night? But this dimness was nothing like the deep night of its own world.
The prisoner was reassured by the fact that these soft primates knew little about his world. They had worked long, so long, trying to understand the Yautja technology—what little they could find. They had tried to communicate, using a few words and phrases gleaned from some fool Yautja prisoner—some coward who had betrayed its people; a weakling who had died from a terrestrial disease, apparently.
But the prisoner had not responded to their feeble attempts to communicate. It told them nothing.
They had tried to weaken the prisoner’s mind by drugging its food, with no result except that it had almost died.
The prisoner had recovered—but still, it was trapped.
No matter. They did not control it. Not in its mind, not in its inner life.
The prisoner felt sure its moment would come.
And it would make them suffer for their presumption. Many soft, pink-skinned heads would be added to its trophies.
* * *
“You up for this, Sarge?”
“Lieutenant Curson said I get a week’s furlough after this,” Nialls said, peering into the helmet, reaching in to adjust the radio mic. “You were there, you heard her. She said it’s straight from Dault.”
“What an officer says to us don’t mean nothing,” Corporal Ramirez said, as he squinted at the seams of Nialls’ armor, going through the standard check. “Army gives and the Army takes away, Sarge. Big Green Machine rolls over you any damn time it wants to.”
“I’ve logged three and a half months straight! More’n three months in a blackout base in the middle of the high desert! I’m due, Corporal. I’d wrestle the devil to get that leave.”
Nialls put the helmet on, and Ramirez made some unnecessary adjustments—the helmet was already perfectly in place, because it sealed itself. It was as if a ghost were doing it.
The heads-up display instantly lit up in response, with luminous green readouts alongside his shield mask. It probably wasn’t as information-comprehensive as the Yautja’s own bio-mask, but the HUD had a lot of sensors, it had sharp zoom function, and, rear view scanning. And it fit well. Nialls had spent a lot of time testing in two other prototype armored suits. The Mark I and Mark II suits didn’t do a third of what this new one did. They’d been bulky, clumsy. But the Mark III…
Nialls pulled on his left-hand gauntlet, thinking, The Mark III fits like a glove.
He figured what he had to do today couldn’t be tougher than that last Mosul action in Iraq. He signed on for the armor-testing assignment so he could help develop new ways to keep his brother Rangers alive. Rangers and every other American in combat. The Mark III had the potential to do the job. Super lightweight composite materials made it easy to move in, and provided good ballistic protection. The nanotech cut down on weight and energy consumption, sped up responses. And the Yautja tech…
First time he’d seen the original tech, from a Predator scout ship shot down in this same desert, he’d felt a long, cold shiver go through him. The marl and gnarl of that gear— definitely not something designed by human beings. They’d retro-engineered a good deal of it; energy flow from the extraterrestrial’s bio-mask, the alternative micro-circuiting of the wrist gauntlet—and especially, the plasma caster. It was a whole new edge, all right, to U.S. military power. But it had to be tested in the field…
And then that crazy son of a bitch General Dault hit the team with his big idea.
Sergeant Nialls couldn’t upbraid a two-star general. So he finished his armor prep, went to full power and walked out, boots softly clanking, to the clean room, for a final inspection. Beyond the clean room were two sets of metal doors—and beyond those, the testing field…
* * *
Lieutenant Olivia Curson was just as fed up with the blackout base as Nialls was.
She’d met Nialls in the rec hall. They’d drunk a beer together, chatted, and she’d noticed how unfailingly respectful Nialls was—respectful but never obsequious. Of course, she outranked him. But that didn’t stop some enlisted guys from leering at her after they had a couple of beers. Nialls never leered, never spoke condescendingly, never tried innuendo. And he met her eyes steadily when they spoke—his own eyes were sky blue.
They talked again when she was brought into armor testing, after she’d read his file—his military history intimidated her. She’d seen barely any combat—and he’d been steeped in it.
Then there was Speevis. Captain Speevis, who’d smuggled a fifth of Wild Turkey into the base. The booze was contraband, even for officers, on a blackout base, because a drunk man, off-duty or not, forgot what high security was all about. And he forgot how to behave around women officers, too, which was why she’d had to knee the captain in the groin when he waylaid her behind the mess hall. She’d cracked his nuts hard enough to make him yelp; he’d staggered away and barfed on a flagpole in front of a major. He claimed, later, she’d come on to him and kneed him when he turned her down.
But Nialls, passing by, had seen the whole thing. He stepped up on his own to testify for her; stood up in military court against a captain and General Dault—Ervin Dault, who just happened to be Speevis’s drinking buddy.
Nialls had a silver cross, a bronze star, and three purple hearts. Every decent man at Area 57 looked up to him. So Speevis lost the case and got himself shipped to a radar base in the arctic.
Now she glanced at Dault: a paunchy, jowly middle-aged man in a perfectly ironed, excessively starched uniform. Dault cracked his knuckles, his tongue tracing the edges of his teeth.
What was Dault’s real motivation, she wondered, in setting up this particular test? They’d already tested the suit a dozen ways, put it through incredible stresses. The enemy they were to test the suit against today, while formidable, was unarmed. The whole thing seemed like a pointless exercise to her—unless the point was retaliation aimed at Nialls for testifying against Speevis.
Across the field, just above the gate that would release the Yautja, two snipers stood on a platform just behind the curved wall. One of them was Cliff Javitz, another sycophant of General Dault’s. Javitz had been caught by an IED, back in Afghanistan; he was missing his right ear and the right-hand section of his lower nose, fully exposing a nostril. Rumor had it his personality had changed after the IED, due to traumatic brain injury. He was as psychopathic a man as Olivia had ever met, though he did nothing he could be convicted for. The other sniper was Earl Smithson, a black man who rarely spoke. Presumably the snipers were there to protect Nialls from the Yautja, should the armor malfunction or the creature get the upper hand.
Below, the doors from the clean room opened, and they watched as Nialls stepped into the dull late afternoon sunlight of the acre-wide testing field. Nialls’ movements in the armor weren’t quite as free as a man in field cammies, but free enough.
Olivia wondered how far up in the chain of command Dault had gone to get approval for this. Maybe he hadn’t gotten any, anywhere. Far as she knew, this Yautja was the only living extraterrestrial in custody. There was a whole exobiology team in this building studying the Yautja through hidden cameras, watching it exercising, eating, pacing, eliminating wastes; using DNA testing and remote body scans they’d worked out what to feed it, how its body worked. She knew the entire exo team was mad as hell about this little gladiatorial setup. Suppose the alien got badly injured, or killed? They had already dissected other dead Yautjas. They wanted this one alive…
But Dault had overruled them. He had always been an arrogant son of a bitch. And he insisted this fight was going to be part of their research on these interplanetary Predators. The Yautja wasn’t likely to get killed, he said.
But from the reports Olivia had read, these things were fast and deadly. Suppose it slipped past Nialls’ defenses and killed him?
Her heart thudded as she watched the gate open, and the Yautja showing itself in the passage opposite Nialls. At first it crouched in the shadows of the passage, its hooded yellow-red eyes and mandibles gleaming…
* * *
Felt different, facing this thing up close and personal, instead of seeing it through an unbreakable window. Its cold inhuman intelligence gave him chills.
Nialls had the plasma caster gripped in his right hand, the weapon hooked to a power source in his armor by a jointed metal tube, and it could be attached to a pivoter on his right shoulder, more or less like the Yautja. But they hadn’t worked out the shoulder-based aiming as well as the Yautja had, and Nialls preferred to keep the weapon in his hand.
Then the Predator shuffled slowly out into the circular testing field, turning its head this way and that, the manelike thick dangle of hair about its bald, mottled head waving a little with its motions. It was assessing, calculating, taking in the high, slick, inward slanting walls, the snipers, the gate closing behind Nialls—and then the Yautja stared directly at its adversary. It looked Nialls up and down. Then the Predator hunched down and spread its arms like an old-style wrestler, making low, glutinous clicking sounds deep in its throat.
Nialls did his own assessing. The thing was at least a head taller than he was. It had claws. But otherwise the Yautja was apparently unarmed. It did have some chest armor, and that net-like material over its limbs that would project its camouflage. Its muscles rippled powerfully under skin that looked like something he’d seen on a desert toad. It had some form of gauntlet, but no plasma caster.
How should he handle this? He didn’t have orders to kill it—“just engage the alien,” as Dault put it.
It’s got no reason not to kill me if it can…
Then it opened its mouth—its jaws opening wide, showing the big fangs that pointed almost inwardly, the red-webbed mouth—and he was looking down the Predator’s throat as it lunged roaring at him.
Nialls quickly sidestepped—and then realized the Yautja had only been feinting, pretending to be coming at him to see how quickly he reacted; see if he could be startled into freezing.
“That’s not going to work, crab-face,” he told it. The armor had responded well, enhancing his movements but not overdoing the enhancement.
It responded to his remark—Nialls had heard the creatures sometimes parroted human speech. “Not going to work…” came the mocking voice.
Nialls squared himself, trying to keep his head clear, his pulse down. Focus and maybe get this over with early. Get it to accept defeat…
He pointed the plasma caster, and fired.
Nialls hadn’t aimed directly at the creature—not supposed to kill it. He aimed at the ground just in front of its clawed feet, to give it a warning and knock it back with a shockwave.
But by the time the blast hit the ground the Yautja wasn’t there. It had switched on its active camouflage, was all but invisible—he caught a barely visible cubistic outline of it as, far faster than he’d given it credit for, the Yautja leapt over the plasma caster’s blast trajectory, coming right at him, whipping metal spikes from its left-hand gauntlet at his helmet.
Nialls overreacted in his surprise, stumbled back, fell on his back—and then it was on him, its knees on his chest. It had triggered the long, barbed metal gougers from its left gauntlet. It did have a weapon—he could glimpse light reflecting from it, despite the electronic camouflage.
It slammed the heavy, barbed gougers at his faceplate; the transparent layers protecting his face held, but Nialls felt like his head was inside a ringing church bell. And he could sense the strain in the helmet. It slammed the gougers down again. Was that a crack in the corner of the faceplate?
Struggling to shove the creature off him, Nialls swung hard up at the Yautja’s head with his mailed left fist—but the Yautja, red-yellow eyes glowing with kill-lust, blocked it easily with the gauntlet. The blow somehow switched off its camouflage and he saw it all too well, roaring at him, its eyes bright with hate as it slammed his helmet again with the gougers.
The snipers were up there on the wall. Why didn’t they at least wing the Yautja?
The Yautja raised its tautly muscled left fist, gathering its strength—preparing to smash his faceplate. Nialls was reluctant to disobey orders but he was going to have to shoot this thing off him. He aimed the plasma caster at it almost point blank but it grabbed the caster by the muzzle, used all its strength and its better positioning to turn the weapon— just as the caster fired—right where it wanted the plasma beam to go.
The top of the enclosing wall on the right shattered. A piece of shattered wall struck the alien, and its grip was loosened for a moment. Nialls got his right knee bent, braced his foot under his hip and used the whole force of the leg— his and the armor’s force—to fling the alien away.
The Yautja roared as it was thrown back, and Nialls felt a wrenching in his suit. He lost the grip on his gun. He rolled, got quickly to his feet—and saw that the plasma caster was no longer in his hand.
The Yautja had it—had snapped its connective cable. It was crouching, aiming the caster at the sniper platform…
Neither sniper was in sight now.
It fired—blasting more of the upper wall away, then turned the weapon toward Nialls.
But he knew something the creature didn’t. The human-engineered version of the caster was fed by the cable; it only stored one shot at a time in its load chamber. And the Yautja had used that shot. The gun failed to fire—and the alien tossed it away.
It slashed at Nialls with its gougers; he blocked the blow with his right hand, smashed at the thing with his left, caught it on the side of its head. Its luminous yellow-green blood spurted from a scalp wound. He circled it—and it rushed him, slashing. He jumped aside… but it had simply gotten him out of the way.
It jumped to the break in the wall and pulled itself over.
Nialls bounded after it, jumped—but it could jump higher than he could. He couldn’t catch the lower edge of the break in the wall.
Cursing, he dropped back. Someone up there screamed. A gun fired. Then there was silence, except for the base’s alarms going off…
* * *
Sitting on the table, Nialls held the helmet in his hand, looking it over, as Olivia came in.
“Scratch on the faceplate, but no crack,” he told Ramirez. “It wouldn’t have taken much more.”
“Smithson is dead,” Olivia told him, as Ramirez checked over the armor. “The first blast broke his collarbone, stunned him—then the thing killed him. Javitz is alive—he shot at it, but it was smoky in there, not a good place for a sniper rifle, and he missed. It ducked out a fire door and killed two sentries… just tore into them…”
She took a deep breath. Nialls nodded. “Thanks for letting me know, Lieutenant. I’m sorry about Smithson. He was a good soldier.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “The alien breached the wall, not you.”
“Lieutenant’s right,” Ramirez said, taking the helmet and looking it over. “No one thought the wall was that vulnerable. But it was old. That wall’s thinner at the top, in that spot, to make room for the platform.”
“Seems to me,” Nialls said, “that weapon was powered up about double what it should’ve been for that situation.” He felt tired, dispirited. Three good men dead so far…
“It was powered up to where the General told me it should be,” Ramirez said. “I kinda wondered about it.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“I thought: more power, better for you, Sarge.”
“Yeah. No one told me it had those gougers.”
Olivia nodded sharply at that. “I was told it had no weapons.”
“I kind of thought the snipers would’ve taken it out, when it was on top of me. That angle, they could have put a couple of fist-sized holes right through its head.”
Olivia looked angrily at the door. “I had the same thought. Javitz says he was told not to fire unless the General gave him the order.”
The door opened—maybe Olivia had been expecting someone.
General Dault. He looked pale, and a little scared. “Sergeant Nialls. That thing’s just killed another sentry. Cooper shot at it, missed, and it gutted him. Took him a while to die.”
Nialls winced inwardly. He should’ve kept that thing bottled up. But no one had told him it had a weapon—and he’d been told not to kill it with the plasma caster. Still—it was his job to knock the thing down and keep it under control.
Dault seemed ready to confirm what Nialls was thinking. “This is on you, Nialls. Put that helmet back on. Get a jeep and get out there.”
“He hasn’t got the caster!” Ramirez objected. “It’ll take me a whole day to fix it!”
“Tough. He’s got the armor. Everything else in it works. He can take a rifle.”
Olivia shook her head. “Sir—what about an attack helicopter? We’ve got armored vehicles—”
“Negative. That thing is headed to town. It’s dark out. And by the time we track it it’s going to be out there with civilians around. We’re not firing any rockets into any civilian towns, Lieutenant. No. This is on Nialls.”
* * *
Javitz’s head was throbbing, and the bandage was too damned tight, but he was already dressed by the time the General came to the infirmary.
“You good for duty, Javitz?” Dault asked.
Javitz saluted. “I am, sir. Just a crease on the head. Nothing I ain’t had before.”
“Requisition a rifle. We’ve got more to think about than just a runaway monster. What I’m hoping is, Nialls gets the thing’s attention, gets it cornered. Then you put a round through its leg. We recapture it… I’ll send a backup team; you can call them when it’s down, they’ll be right behind you. Then—we shut all this up. No one needs to know how this shitstorm got its start.”
“Shut it up how, sir?”
“I’m counting on you, Javitz. I cannot trust Nialls, see. Or Olivia Curson. You saw what happened—Nialls testified against my man. Over a goddamn attempted rape accusation! That kind of disloyalty…” He shook his head. “Cannot trust him to keep his mouth shut. Anyway…” Dault went to the door, glanced out into the hall, looking both ways. He closed the door and came over to Javitz. Dault lowered his voice. “Nialls is going to get caught in the crossfire. You understand me?”
Javitz thought about it. It’d be good to have the General beholden to him. But this…
“Kind of a risk to me, General, if this comes out.”
“You want a promotion, special privileges?”
“For a start.”
Dault winced. Finally he said, “I can get you ten grand on top of it.”
“And… the lieutenant?”
“I’ll send her out to check on him. If the alien doesn’t get her—you make it look like it did anyway.”
Double the risk. But…
Promotion. Special privileges. Cash.
Opportunity like this didn’t come along too often. A man had to grab it by the tail…
After a moment, Javitz nodded.
“I’ll get ’er done, General. But—my rifle’s not much use against that armor Nialls is wearing.”
“That’s right—it stands up to snipers, small arms fire of all kinds, grenade fragments, flamethrowers, mines, and most IEDs. But you think it’ll protect him from a 30mm cannon? He’ll be pulverized inside it. Second shot’ll blow it open. I’m giving you a Stryker outfitted with a cannon.”
“Those things have some kind of self-destruct in their gauntlet? I don’t want to suck on a small nuke…”
“You don’t think it would’ve used that by now if it had one? It was unconscious when we found it. We stripped that out of its gear.” He sighed. “Only thing I gave back to it was the chest armor, its camouflage, and those spikes in its gauntlet. Mistake to let it have the active cammie…”
“Thirty millimeter. Only fired one once.”
“It’s pretty self-guided, these days. Just try not to use it on the alien. Not unless you have to. Only don’t let that thing get clean away either. But make sure Nialls is dead. Slam him with the shell dead center. We’ll say he just plain got in the way.”
* * *
It was dark by the time they’d picked up the trail. Just Ramirez, driving the Humvee, and Nialls, suited up beside him.
“It’s not headed for town, if the heat signature is right,” Nialls said. He could see its tracks glowing red in his helmet’s infrared scan mode. “It’s changed directions.”
“What the hell for? Those things are into taking trophies, right? More trophies in town.” Ramirez winced, put his hand to his throat. “They take the head off, the skin off the skull…”
“There’s a ranch out here. And there’s Special Hangar Fourteen right past the ranch. I don’t think it’s going for any more trophies. It already took some. Security camera has it shoving the heads of three sentries in a duffel bag.”
“Oh Christ. Cooper and Morris and Lapsky. I didn’t know it…” He grimaced. “What’s in Hangar Fourteen, anyway? Above my pay grade.”
“T situation, I guess you’ve got a right to know. They found the alien out cold after its vehicle was shot down— built the hangar around ship. They keep trying to take it apart without detonating it. It’s got armament—soon’s they took the Yautja off, the ship started up some kind of defense protocol. Two techs got themselves fried by its plasma casters.”
“So that’s one time the rumors were true.”
“Tracks are heading down that wash… right along the road there. Take the road for now.”
* * *
Gage Binch had spent all afternoon clearing brush from the back acreage. He figured he could turn it into pasture. The acreage was right up against that tall fence topped with razor wire around the Army outpost. Outpost Fourteen. Gage doubted it was an outpost—it was a distance off, across a pretty wide stretch of asphalt; but he could see it well enough: a long squat gray metal building, with two fifty-foot-high metal roll-up doors. Place looked more like a hangar than an outpost. And those searchlights, those four sentry boxes—lot of security for some little outpost.
Plus the fact that the Army MPs told him he was not to even get near the fence.
Screw them. This was his land. This was a “don’t tread on me” situation. If he wanted to turn it to pasturage, that was his choice. He could hear his cattle mooing from the other side of the ranch house. Soon enough he’d be able to put the new bull in with some cows and get another herd started. And he’d put it right here in the new pasture.
He surveyed his work. Six of those little desert trees cut down, room to move his tractor in so he could push the rock out of the way, lay down some soil for the grass. There was the old oak tree, likely to fall down on its own next big wind. But he had to leave it: too close to that fence to mess with. And nearby the oak was a small fenced pasture where he kept the new Brahman bull—Gage could see it tramping up and down, shaking its big horned head. Something was spooking it, seemed like. Maybe the chainsaw noise.
But it was dark out. Time to go in, drink some Scotch. Have a talk with Regina. Of course, his wife had died on him, but he talked to the urn of her ashes all the same.
Maybe just cut that one snag… He had enough light with the electric lantern…
Gage tugged his goggles into place, switched on the chainsaw, held it firmly in both hands, and cut through the snag on the scrub tree.
Then a shadow cut off most of the light from his lantern.
He turned. There was a big man there—he couldn’t see the guy’s face. Just a mane of some kind, a gnarly bald head, those strange hands… a bloody duffel bag lying on the ground beside it.
“Who the holy fu—”
Then the guy vanished. Just sort of blinked out.
What the hell? Was he having a stroke? He thought he caught some motion from the corner of his eyes, turned—in time to get a big military trench knife shoved through his belly.
He stared down at it, stunned, exploding with pain, gurgling, the chainsaw still in his hands—
He tried to swing the chainsaw toward the knifer—but the chainsaw was taken from him, all too easily pried from his grip. Then it reversed, and came right at his throat…
* * *
“Que mierda!” Ramirez burst out. He stopped the Humvee, and its headlights lit up the bloody, decapitated head of a bull, a gray-black Brahman with thick, curving horns. The hulking head was stuck on a post to either side of the road leading up to the ranch house. Its jaws were open, lolling tongue dripping blood onto the gravel road. Its dead eyes were still shiny in the headlight glow.
Nialls’ gut lurched at the sight. “Guess it didn’t have room in that duffel for the bull’s head—so it figured to scare us off.”
“Yeah. It’d work on me, too, if I was out here alone, Sarge.”
Ramirez accelerated slowly past the staring bull’s head, peering at the cactus garden in front of the ranch house. “Damn thing could be anywhere out here with that camouflage.”
Nialls switched on his infrared vision. Saw nothing but what appeared to be an owl sitting in a saguaro.
But there, to the right, maybe a trail of blood. Traces of footsteps. He switched to night vision instead. The dark landscape lit up in greens and yellows. No sign of the Yautja. “Pull up. Roll the windows down…”
Ramirez pulled up, the windows hummed down. “I hear something… like a… is that a chainsaw?”
“Yeah. Must be how it cut through that bull. He was probably watching someone using it and…”
“And they’re dead about now.”
“Go slow, around to the right. There’s a road to the back…”
They drove around the dark ranch house, Nialls considering cutting the headlights—and then they saw something big, bigger than the alien; shifting, falling—it was an oak tree tipping over onto the high razor-topped fence around the Hangar Fourteen compound. The big tree fell with a clinking crunch they could hear through the open windows. Ramirez picked up speed, drove toward it, bumping over cut shrubs and plant debris. Then Nialls spotted it, in pale gray outline. The Yautja, climbing up the slanting trunk of the fallen tree, which had fallen on the fence. It had cut down the tree with the rancher’s chainsaw, giving it a way past the guards at the outer sentry box.
The Yautja was already running, now, across the asphalt, going into active camouflage, the canvas bag of trophies showing over one shoulder as if the bloody duffel were flying along alone.
“That thing is crazy smart,” said Ramirez.
“We’ve got to get word to Fourteen—I’ll have to go through Dault.” Nialls spoke the code word that would voice-activate his radio, and heard its line crackle open. “Mark Three calling base, code twenty-three, connect me with General Dault.” He waited. The line crackled with static. No response. “Maybe the damn helmet was damaged after all,” Nialls said. “Try the Hummer’s radio.”
Ramirez picked up the mic, clicked the on button.
No response. He checked the dashboard radio unit. “Someone’s cut the wires! This radio’s dead, Sarge. We’re in this alone.”
“Maybe not alone,” Nialls said. “I just spotted a drone flying over.”
“Is it armed?”
“Just an observation drone. The General doesn’t want to hear from us, seems like. But he wants to keep an eye on us. Let’s jam through where the fence is down…”
There was just enough room to drive the Humvee through, following the Yautja. Nialls hoped the fallen razor wire wasn’t going to wreck the Humvee’s tires. But it kept on, rumbling over the broken fence and onto the asphalt.
“Some nervous nelly at the checkpoints might open fire on us,” Ramirez said.
“Someone’s got to have told them—”
That’s when the cannon shell struck the Humvee. One second they were driving steadily toward the looming light-streaked hangar, the next was all fire and splintering glass and the world flipping sideways. The Humvee pitched over, Ramirez yelling wordlessly, falling down on Nialls. The Humvee rocked and settled on its right side. The windshield was partly smashed out in front of Nialls, smoke was thickening, and Ramirez was groaning. Nialls said, “Mark Three, full operation.” Lights flickered inside his helmet. He reached up, pushed out the metal rooftop hatch, and wriggled through, then pulled Ramirez out by his collar, Ramirez shrieking in pain.
He got him out just as the Humvee lit up like a bonfire.
Carrying Ramirez in his arms, Nialls hurried away from the Humvee before the rest of the gas tank went up. Nialls turned, saw flame geysering, lighting the area around the burning wreck. It quickly died back, but there was no getting into that Humvee.
Which meant that Nialls had no weapon now—his assault rifle was in that burning Humvee. But then, his armor was itself a weapon. He could batter down a metal door with it—or an enemy’s skull.
Ramirez went limp in Nialls’ arms. He laid him gently on the ground, switched on a helmet light, and saw broken bones jutting up, pink and yellow, from the corporal’s chest; a blankness was coming into his eyes as if the night around them were pooling in the sockets.
Ramirez was dead before Nialls straightened up.
In a cold fury now, Nialls looked around, spotted the Stryker, its lights off, swinging toward him, the cannon centering itself. Maybe forty yards off. That looked like a 30mm cannon swiveling toward him. A direct hit and his suit would crack open like a lobster shell under a hammer.
Nialls ran left, his boots clanking, the armored suit working overtime; then he zigged to the right. The cannon’s muzzle tracked to compensate, and Nialls changed direction again, then leapt—as the shell hit the ground behind him, the shockwave lifting him, pitching him head over heels.
He came down on his back, dazed, ears ringing, but intact.
“You missed, you prick,” he growled. He rolled over, saw the smoking blast crater in the asphalt. He got up, ran to the crater, flattened down and tried to recon the field.
Who the hell was in the Stryker? Dault? Naw. Too risky. Most likely Dault’s bully boy, Javitz. Using a weapon that could be sure to bust through the Mark III armor in a direct hit.
Nialls switched on the infrared, hoping to pick up a body shape in the Stryker. No good, the Stryker’s armor was too thick—but he picked up another figure, silhouetted in red: the Yautja, moving toward the armored vehicle from its rear. No mistaking that outline. It had ditched the chainsaw, still held the duffel bag, and there was something else in its hand. The distinct shape of a special forces issue combat knife. Long, partly serrated, vicious. What the Predator had used to take the heads from the sentries at the base.
The Stryker was moving, coming slowly, implacably toward Nialls, the cannon tracking—wanting that direct hit.
But then the infrared outline of the Yautja was hunched atop the armored car. It was going after whoever was in that vehicle. Why them, in particular? But maybe it was the Stryker it wanted.
Nialls switched on his night vision, saw the creature more clearly, a glowing white-gray shape tugging at a hatch. Figuring out how to open it. The hatch swung back. Driver had neglected to lock it.
The Stryker suddenly stopped as if the driver had realized someone was breaking in on him and wanted to deal with it…
Nialls jumped up, ran toward the Stryker, making sure he was angling to keep out of the cannon’s current firing zone. He was aware of shapes moving beyond the Stryker’s windshield—a flurry of movement.
Then a pair of headlights swung into his path and a car came straight at him.
He had no way to evade the car in time—but it stopped, brakes screeching. A moment, then Olivia Curson got partly out of it, waving for him. “Come on, Nialls, now!”
He rushed to the car, his boots clanking on the asphalt. He was aware of sentries in the distance, shouting from the front of Hangar Fourteen—flashlights, men shouting orders, other men arguing. Nialls stopped by the car. Maybe he should remove his helmet, ID himself…
“Nialls—get in!” Olivia yelled, getting behind the wheel.
Nialls looked toward the Stryker—and then saw it had turned away from him. It was rumbling toward the hangar.
It knows how to drive it. Can it figure out how to fire the cannon?
Nialls reached the car, climbed in beside her, having to move the seat all the way back—there was barely room for him in his armor. “Turn this car around!” he shouted, not caring about rank right now.
She brought the car around, started toward the hangar— then had to jog the wheel, skidding to avoid a headless body lying on the asphalt. Nialls caught a glimpse of a sniper specialist insignia on the corpse’s shoulder. Javitz.
Up ahead the Stryker was picking up speed, the big armored car going faster and faster, heading for the big doors of the hangar. The cannon remained silent—he guessed it didn’t have time to figure out the firing interface.
“I think Dault’s trying to kill you—maybe me too!” Olivia said, as she drove toward the hangar. Her voice was taut, her knuckles white on the steering wheel.
“Be a good guess. And the Yautja’s got hold of that Stryker…”
“Oh no, it couldn’t—!”
“It did. Slow down! We’re liable to catch some fire from our own people!”
She hit the brakes; the car fishtailed to a stop about twenty yards from the hangar—where men were firing, but not at them, at the onrushing Stryker. Nialls could see bullets sparking from the titanium sheathing. Then the Stryker plowed over two riflemen, and kept going, crunching head-on into the big metal doors, smashing partway through—then grinding to a halt. Stuck. Its wheels kept spinning in place.
“Pull over there, around the corner of the building. I’m going in the personnel door.”
* * *
The front end of the vehicle had jammed partway through the big reinforced doors—still, the escapee was able to climb out the door on the right, then leap at the nearest onrushing primate, to bear him down before he could fire his weapon. Its blade flashed, slashed, and the primate soldier was jerking in death. The escapee picked up the automatic weapon, turned it to the men guarding the spacecraft, and squeezed the trigger, spraying awkwardly at the enemy across the brightly lit concrete floor. They scrambled for cover, though the clip was quickly empty, useless.
The escapee could see its landing craft, waiting, scarred but functional, in the middle of the hangar. But an enemy projectile struck the escapee in the right side; it ignored the pain, turned and vaulted over the front of the armored vehicle, dropping to cover. Then it reached through the shattered window, pulled out the well-stuffed bloody duffel bag.
Now…
The escapee growled to itself, switched on its active camouflage, and then sprinted, with projectiles banging and ricocheting around it, to the landing craft. The ramp was down, the door open— that much they had achieved. But after they had taken out their unconscious Yautja prisoner the vessel went immediately into self-protection mode. It had been keeping the enemy at a distance ever since, tolerating scans and superficial observations but not allowing disassembly.
Now that a Yautja master was in sight again, the vessel lit up, as if in welcome. The landing craft’s gun muzzles emerged and fired plasma bursts at the primate creatures, burning two of them to bubbling ashes, driving the others away… By now, the landing craft would be contacting the cloaked mothership…
Indifferent to the pain of its wound, the escapee roared in joy and ran up to the ramp into its landing craft…
Thinking: What glorious trophies I have…
But it had one more duty to carry out before it could leave this wretched planet.
* * *
Using full armor power, Nialls smashed down the locked personnel door, ran into the blazingly lit hangar, switched off his night vision in time to see the Yautja running up the ramp into the alien vessel. The craft was about eighty feet long, fifty wide; it was shaped like the spade of a shovel, with intricate aft parts, and insectoid metal legs holding it over the floor.
The ramp was still down. If he could get to it, penetrate the vehicle, he could stop the Yautja from escaping. The Mark III might protect him from the ship’s defenses—long enough.
And then he heard the helmet’s computer speaking to him. “External control engaged.”
“What?” His legs suddenly stopped moving—to be precise, the armor’s legs stopped, so his own had to stop inside them. The armor was frozen in place. “What external control is that?”
“Origin unknown. Centered in the mechanism directly ahead.”
The Yautja craft? Then Nialls remembered they’d copied some of Mark III’s circuits directly from the Yautja’s gear. It was responding to the alien’s control wavelength. Stopping him where he was…
The ramp lifted up, folded into the craft. The underside began to glow. A fat burst of energy turned everything blue-white. Nialls felt a wave of heat. He heard the screams of men who couldn’t get out of the way…
He was in a cloud of energy that threatened to burn through his armor.
The ceiling of the hangar exploded upward, the blowback clearing the air around the Mark III—and Nialls could see again.
He looked up, watching the Yautja craft levitating, its legs folding up under it, then arcing up, up on a pillar of energy. Gone.
The computer in his suit said, “Control returned to primary user.”
Nialls felt the armor’s limbs unlock. He felt a gush of cool, filtered air drawn in, cooling him down. Sweat running down his face, he turned and walked toward Olivia Curson who was bending over a soldier, trying to give him battlefield first aid…
Half an hour later they drove out past the long line of ambulances, back toward the blackout base. Nialls had removed his helmet and gauntlets, wiping sweat with the back of his hand. “Ramirez… he’s dead.”
She nodded. “He really looked up to you.”
“Another guy I should’ve saved.”
“You can’t be blamed for a round from somebody else’s cannon.”
They didn’t speak again till they were almost back at the blackout base.
She glanced at him. “What’ll you do now?”
“Testify against Dault. You?”
“Same.”
“After that?”
“Request relief from the Army. I’m done.”
She stopped the car, on a shoulder, turned to him, took his hands in hers. “Look—I—”
The flash of blue light made them turn toward the base, squinting against the glare—just in time to see the administrative building explode. The building burned— Dault was sure to be burning with it. Then another flash of light, a red beam fired from high above, destroying the exoteam’s building.
Nialls and Olivia watched, open-mouthed, as the Yautja’s spacecraft buzzed over the smoking wreckage, as if inspecting its handiwork… and came toward them. It seemed to hesitate above them, for a moment, and Nialls waited for the blast—it was too late to run. He hoped it’d be over quickly.
But then the craft backed away, hovered wobblingly— and shot up into the sky, vanishing into the thin cloud cover. Gone from this wretched planet…
After a long breathless moment, Olivia drove them back on the road, toward the base, to see if they could be of any help.
But up ahead a roadblock was being set up. MPs waved them away.
Silently, she turned the car around and they drove away from the blackout base. Fire trucks passed them, emergency crews in trucks from the external outposts.
“Why,” he asked hoarsely, “didn’t it blow us up, too?”
“My guess?” She cocked her head, thinking. “It seemed to know who you were. Someone worth fighting—the way a real warrior fights. Maybe another time. But not that way, from a distance. So… it was about respect.”
Maybe, he thought. Maybe so. “Let’s go into town,” he said. “I want to get out of this suit. And then—I want a drink. Or three.”
“Never was any doubt of that,” she said, as she turned onto the main highway.