Brick, New Jersey, Earth.
Not that it was easy to tell: The concrete—it was made of hexagonal slabs of poured concrete, rather than asphalt— had been breached by trees, and the forest that violated the hard-top was just as dense along the road’s length as in the good soil to either side of it. It must have been… oh, a hundred years or more since it had been last maintained. Had we not stopped to examine the dying creature, we might have just stepped over the concrete road surface, dismissing it as a rock formation.
But once you saw the hard straight lines of the carriageway’s edge, and saw the material for what it was, other details made themselves known. The way that little clump of tangled thorny vegetation over THERE had a suspicious hint of rusty metal chassis, and the way that the creepers and vines over THERE seemed to have grown down from some kind of scaffold. That sort of thing. Everything was so green and alive that it all but completely obscured those fingerprints of an industrial civilisation.
There are only so many ways to build a car, I suppose. And only so many ways to reliably make it move. Only so many ways to build an internal combustion engine. All fancy and artistry aside, engineering is the art of effecting an efficient solution to a problem, and air resistance is much the same everywhere in the galaxy, as too are the demands of being able to readily carry a reliable and efficient fuel source.
The point is… there they were. Cars. Road signs. clear and visible signs that, once upon a time, Prathama had been home to a civilisation every bit as vibrant and technologically proficient as our own was in the latter half of the 20th century.
A civilisation that was, it seemed, utterly dead.
Cimbrean Date Point: 3Y 8M 1W 3D AV
Lance Corporal Danny Michael watched the Australian shave with the kind of pleasure only possible for a man who’d gone without for a good long while, and the transition between wild-haired spaceman and barely-tanned skinhead was a quick once he got to it. The man, Captain Adrian Saunders of the ADF, was judged by Captain Powell to be of a particularly unstable variety, and so Michael and Marine Paul Richard—his good mate and current off-sider—had been assigned to watch over him in case he tried anything too manic.
Such as fuckin’ well killing everyone.
“You’ve got no fucking idea how good this feels,” Saunders told them, assuming a great many things in the process. Michael had once been taken captive by Islamists who hadn’t recognised him for a soldier, and had paid the price months later when he’d been able to get himself and the other surviving prisoners free and clear of their shitty little compound. It was amazing how thick hair could grow on a man in the hot desert sun, and shaving it off had felt like coming home.
Michael just shared a knowing glance with Richard; they knew each others’ stories and there wasn’t any need for words in front of a crazy bastard like Saunders. That fucker could think whatever he wanted for all Michael cared.
Saunders turned out to be a little more balanced than Powell had feared; there hadn’t been any outbursts of violence that would have required them to put him down like a mad dog, even if doing so would have allowed them to move into other, far more interesting duties. Most of what Saunders seemed to do was to focus on tearing all the alien shit out of smashed up alien ships, and moving it over to the one that was the least fucked up. He’d started work on repairs once he’d amassed a small mountain of technological garbage, and had spent the next few days turning large holes in the ship’s hull into equally large patches.
Even once he’d completed the work to his own satisfaction, the ship didn’t look anything like spaceworthy. If anything it looked exactly like it’d crashed a second time, and was waiting for someone to come and put it out of its fucking misery. Saunders seemed happy with it, however, and commenced his work on the inside with an enthusiasm Michael recognised as a man doing what he was made for. That was another thing Captain Powell had said to watch for: Saunders knew his way around alien technology, and that gave him the kind of dangerous edge that needed an eye kept on it; you could do a lot with a sharp knife, but if you didn’t watch it you’d cut your fucking finger off and then where would you be?
Nine days into their watch—Michael was thankful that they’d only pulled day duty on the bastard—Adrian Saunders was eating a breakfast of branflakes and fruit, sitting amongst a morass of cabling, panels, and all sorts of technological doodads that Michael could have told you sweet fuck all about. Powell walked in, took one look at the huge fuckin’ mess, and shot an angry look at Saunders. “Day nine, and this thing is a complete fookin’ mess!”
Unlike most men, military or otherwise, Saunders was entirely unintimidated by Captain Powell. If anything, he seemed to regard the concept of other people intimidating him as something of a joke, which Michael took as much of an affront that Powell himself did. “It’s a whole shitload better than it was when I started,” he said, although it didn’t look it from the unused junk that was laying everywhere. “And you’ll remember I said a week or two. I haven’t broken any promises yet.”
Insubordinate as usual, but Powell had taken to ignoring it. Had it been Michael in his place, he doubted he would have been quite so forgiving. “I’m told you’re still relyin’ on our generator to power this piece of shite,” Powell noted, still looking all kinds of pissed off. “Will this fookin’ thing even get into space?”
“Not without its own generators,” Saunders admitted, taking a big bite out of his fruit and chomping away happily on its crisp flesh. Michael wondered if he did that on purpose in some attempt to further infuriate everybody around him. “Don’t worry, I’ve got something in mind.”
The assurance didn’t make Powell any happier, and if anything his glare grew even darker. “You fookin’ well better, mate, because I’ve got people asking who the arsehole working on the ship is. It’s not lost on everybody that you’ve turned up alongside a bunch of prisoners, and you’re the only one walking around happy as can be. They’re wondering why that is!”
A fair question to Michael’s mind, he’d heard the talk amongst people in his time off and he and Richard both had gotten asked questions about it. Telling the colonists it was secret under ‘operational security’ had worn out its usefulness over the last couple of days, and now there were all sorts of fuckin’ rumours going around.
Saunders took his time and finished the piece of fruit with obvious relish before continuing, although it didn’t seem like he was being so much wilfully annoying as just crazy as fuck. “Well,” he said thoughtfully, “I’m planning on testing the kinetics tomorrow, and if all goes to plan I’m headed out to sea the day after. These boys of yours like water?”
Michael experienced the sort of sinking feeling most often attributed to submarinal activities and just being goddamned unlucky, and he could see that this little expedition was most likely going to involve both.
“They go where you go, so long as it’s on this planet,” Powell replied, effectively repeating what he’d said when he’d first assigned Michael and Richard to their duty. “That includes out to sea.”
“They’ll need some wet gear,” Adrian unnecessarily informed them with far more fuckin’ amusement than Michael cared to see. “You might be able to get by just using some vacuum suits. The Russians had some they might use.”
“I’ll see it’s done,” Powell replied curtly. “That all?”
Saunders hesitated in his response, and turned to check on one of the boxes of components he’d been separating from the others and had actually been taking notes on. He slid it across the floor with an extended leg, pushing it over towards Powell. “I got you a present,” he said. “Now you can be like Kevin Bacon.”
Powell looked into the box, apparently enjoying the same lack of comprehension about the fuckin’ psycho’s babbling that Michael and Richard experienced on a constant basis. “What the fook has Kevin Bacon got to do with fookin’ anything?”
Saunders had the temerity to sigh, as though he’d expected something more of them. “Hollow man. That’s the cloaking system I promised you.”
Irbzrk Orbital Shipyard
“I’d have preferred to leave you somewhere further away.” Kirk said. “The more we can do to minimize the rumours of Cimbrean’s continued existence, the better. And from what you’ve told me, the people on this station might know you.”
“I’m counting on it.” Jen replied, watching with apparent interest as Sanctuary slipped into the station’s tug field and was pulled in to moor—Julian knew that Kirk preferred a mooring to an enclosed landing bay. What it lacked in ease of access to the station’s facilities, it more than made up for in rapid departures.
Julian frowned. “Counting on it? I thought you were going to lay low.” he asked.
“Oh, I am. These people have had bad experiences with humans in the past though, so if we rock up and I start flinging around these… Dominion credits of yours, they’ll have me a ship built tomorrow.”
“Won’t they recognise you?” Julian asked. “I mean, if nothing else that red hair’s pretty distinctive.”
“Easily solved.” Jen said. She rummaged in the pack of gear she had persuaded Powell to give her, and produced a razor and shaving foam. Julian frowned, confused and a little shocked.
“What do you need those for?” He asked.
“Right now? Shaving my head.”
“But…”
“The nice thing about hair is that it grows back.” Jen interrupted him. “Whole heads don’t, and that’s what I stand to lose if the Hierarchy figures out that I’m still around.”
She found her scissors, and trotted towards the bathroom. “See you in a minute.”
About thirty minutes later, she returned, towelling off her head. She looked… skinnier, Julian decided. Even though he knew full well that removing her mane of red hair had done nothing to her waist or those firm dancer’s muscles, somehow the exposed line of her neck and scalp contrived to make her look taller and thinner, as if she had been stretched out. She made eye contact with him and he looked away, embarrassed. He hadn’t forgotten that she was the first—and to date only—woman he had met since his abduction, nor what she looked like naked. He mentally growled an order at himself to get it together. Kirk was good company, but if Julian had his way, their next trip to Earth would involve a visit to… Nevada, or Amsterdam, or Australia maybe. Somewhere he could rediscover that kind of human touch.
He briefly entertained the option of just coming out and suggesting it, but the same common sense that had seen him through seven Nightmare summers flagged that one as an immediate bad idea. Even if Jen didn’t react angrily, she definitely wouldn’t react positively, either, and he needed to salvage something resembling a professional working relationship with her.
She fished a green hat out of her bag. It looked like it was designed for cold weather, judging from the earflaps, the fuzzy insulated lining and the pocket on the cheeks which hinted at some kind of a mask to protect the face from wind chill. For now, she just tucked it onto her head with the flaps up.
“Is there anything else you need before you go?” Kirk asked her.
“No.” Jen said. She shook their hands, gripping Kirk’s cybernetic delicately, though he’d had it reinforced to cope with human grip strength. Then she was gone, out through the airlock and onto the station.
Kirk was already halfway to the command chair before Julian remembered to follow him.
“Next?” he asked. Kirk checked the inbox, then compared the codes within to the book he kept under the chair.
“Earth.” He said, mildly surprised.
“No shit?!” Julian exclaimed, delighted. “I get to go home?”
“Well… yes. If you want.” Kirk said. His simulated tone suggested very strongly that he’d rather keep Julian around, and Julian could see why—they seemed to have clicked well, Kirk providing the streetwise knowledge, political insight and galactic general-knowledge, not to mention his fairly substantial intellect, balanced nicely by Julian’s instincts, hard-won skills and sheer physicality.
“Sorry man.” He apologised. “It’s just been… years, you know? Do I get a vacation? I’ll want to catch up with family and… sort things out, you know.”
“And get laid.” Kirk translated, reminding Julian that he was dealing with a passionate student of human nature and a keen judge of people. Kirk knew the foibles both of humanity and of individual humans, probably better than they knew themselves.
He blushed. “That obvious, huh?”
“You’ve not been able to focus properly around Jen ever since we found her in the bathtub, and that was a month ago.” Kirk pointed out. “Yes, you’ll get shore leave, and an expenses account. My gift to you for all the Christmases you missed.”
“What will you be doing?” Julian asked.
“Planning the next phase in our mission.”
“You won’t be taking some leave yourself?”
“On Earth?” Kirk asked. “I can’t. Don’t get me wrong, I would dearly love to visit your great cities, tour your natural wonders and experience your culture first-hand. But a whole leave break spent inside the hazardous excursion suit would be torture.” he shrugged, an expansive four-armed gesture on his kind. “Besides, I love my work.” he added.
He disengaged the mooring clamps, pushed gently away from the shipyards with the gas thrusters, and then hit the wormhole drive. The instant it made contact with its counterpart in Sol, a crease in spacetime enfolded them, and they were gone.
Date Point: 3Y 8M 1W 5D AV
Scotch Creek Extraterrestrial Research Facility, British Columbia, Canada, Earth
“So what’s up, Kevin?”
“Intel, Martin. Important intel.”
“This to do with your friend?”
“You’d better listen to what I recorded…”
Folctha colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches.
“Alright, girl…” Saunders said to the ship, patting the console in front of him, “now we’re going to see some real cool shit.”
Michael wasn’t sure about that, or about much of anything else right now. Neither he nor Richard felt comfortable flying around on this haphazard mess generously labelled a starship, and even less so given the fuckin’ nutter who was in charge. The huge fuckin’ spaceship ahead of them had been more like the real thing, even if it was half-trashed and mostly sunken beneath the waves, but they hid the impressed expressions well.
Saunders had taken his ship around it, surveying the damage and looking for a half-decent entry point. There was hardly much of a consistent hull remaining, with huge holes decorating the whole thing, and entire sections were missing, but they soon found the top of a gap that Saunders deemed as sufficient for purpose.
Gravity shifted in a similar way to the feeling of an elevator in descent, and pushed them downwards into the cerulean depths. From here the fantastic wreckage took on a moodier, haunted appearance, and in spite of his certainty that there was nothing to be found aboard more dangerous than himself, Michael swallowed. “But this is a spaceship,” he found himself saying, “not a fuckin’ submarine…”
Saunders shot them a knowing smile. “Spot probably can’t go as deep as a sub, but she can probably get us where we need to go.”
Michael ignored the fact that the madman was naming his spaceship and focused on the important issue. “Probably?” he asked, not liking that sort of uncertainty. He might have been prepared for danger, and even death, when coming to an alien world, but he’d really prefer it if his death didn’t involve drowning in a patched together starship that was slowly sinking into an alien ocean.
Richard was less willing to overlook the eccentricity. “‘ang on a moment, did you just call this fookin’ thing ‘Spot’?” he demanded.
Saunders shrugged, looking back towards his console to hopefully focus on whatever crazy shit he was about to do next. Not that Michael wanted the fuckin’ maniac to do crazy shit, it just seemed like sort of a given at this point, and he’d rather the requisite amount of attention be paid to make it a success. “Just looks sort of like a fucking huge dog head…” he explained, although Michael didn’t see how, “in a certain light.”
At least Richard didn’t press the point on that, waiting quietly next to Michael with only a small amount of nervous fidgeting. Saunders was focused for several more moments before he turned to glance over at them. “Opening the airlock outer door,” he warned them, illustrating that he wasn’t a complete fuckin’ idiot.
There was a brief sound of machinery working near the airlock, but nothing that followed it. That, it seemed, was enough to please Saunders. “Kinetic bubble holding.”
Michael shared a glance with Richard, waiting for everything to turn to shit. When it didn’t, Saunders turned to face them properly, lifting up his own helmet in preparation, and grinning at them like the psychotic madman he was. “I’d put my fucking helmet on now if I were you. I’m about to open the airlock inne r door, and I’m not what you might call entirely confident we won’t all drown.”
They only hesitated for a moment before taking the advice. Now they were underwater, and in his hands, and they had to hope like hell that he knew what he was doing. Not fuckin’ reassuring. As it turned out they were worried for nothing, because the inner door opened to reveal a shimmering wall of water at the edge of the ship.
Saunders rose from his seat, stepped over to it and ran a hand through the water. “Gentlemen,” he said, holding up a dripping hand, “I give you the sea!”
Michael and Richard shared another worried glance, it was never good when the man you needed to keep you alive started making jokes at inappropriate times. Richard was unimpressed enough to tell the fucker what he thought, gesturing to his alien spacesuit as he did so. “You’re fookin’ mad if you reckon we’re going out there in these!”
Michael agreed with him though. “This is a space suit, mate,” he said. “See a lot of fuckin’ space out dere? How d’you think we’re supposed to swim in dese?”
That just got more crazy from Saunders. “Oh,” he said, waggling his eyebrows, “I wasn’t going to swim.”
At that he collected three stripped down alien hover devices, demonstrating his own for their benefit. He activated it, letting it pull him away, and dived into the ocean with mad laughter. Richard swore, repeatedly, and Michael was quick to join him. They grabbed their respective devices, repeating the demonstrated action, and let them drag them forward into the water beyond.
Michael hit the man with all of his might when they caught him at the entrance of the crashed ship, and was happy to hear the wind leave the stupid arsehole in spite of the water resistance. “Next time you do somethin’ like that it’s a knife,” he warned angrily. “What’s so fuckin’ useful down ‘ere that you needed to come back?”
Saunders coughed, putting a hand to his side protectively. “Starship reactor,” he said, “it was still live after we landed…”
“Then why are all the fookin’ lights out?” Richard demanded, raising a very good point, though Michael figured it may be possible that being immersed in an ocean hadn’t helped.
“I blew them up last time I was here,” Saunders admitted with an unwarranted casual shrug.
Michael stared at the man, and Richard shook his head in disgust. “You’re just about the worst fookin’ thing a man could put on a spaceship…”
Saunders only shrugged again, apparently fully recovered from his injury, then turned and set off down a burned out corridor lit only by the small red power lights on their makeshift personal propulsion units.
Not a problem, Michael thought, remembering that he’d been in places a lot more fucked up than this burned out alien wreck. Admittedly those had usually been better lit, and never underwater, but they had been full of arseholes with guns so he had that in his favour… probably.
He looked warily at the dark shapes looming in the debris filled environment, jutting out from beyond any place their meagre light could reach. He shook his head and made quick to follow the madman. At some point the day had to improve.
Scotch Creek Extraterrestrial Research Facility, British Columbia, Canada, Earth
The story was identical on Dvitiya, Trtiya, Caturtha, Pamcama and Sastha. We visited six worlds and found the same tragedy waiting for us every time. Six civilisations, all cut down in their prime. Most, their cities were flat fields, identifiable as having once been cities only by the eroded glass and corroded rebar that littered what was otherwise a verdant field.
On one, Mikhael and I had to flee for our lives back onto the Corti research ship when the biohazard alarms screamed at us. The buildings were still, to some degree, standing. Hvek later commented that the virus we brought back with us was about on par with the Spanish Flu in terms of virulence and deadliness. Given that the world on which we encountered it was a class ten, I can only assume that it killed… everyone.
Can you imagine, Mr. Jenkins, what those poor people must have felt? What the very last of their kind must have been thinking as he coughed his last bloody breath onto his pillow, having survived to watch everyone he loved and his whole world be torn apart by a disease that must have struck them like the wrath of an Asura?
I have nightmares.
Our tour lasted three years. We visited twelve more worlds. I ceased to name them after encountering that disease. But I did the mathematics.
According to conventional wisdom, sapience cannot, and does not, arise on deathworlds. And yet here I had eighteen planets that revealed that common knowledge as being utterly wrong. Statistically, deathworld species should be in the majority.
We are not unique, in short, in evolving here in such a deadly cradle. But we do seem to be unique in surviving the invention of the intercontinental ballistic missile.
The starship reactor had been a relatively unimpressive thing. Michael had been expecting something like out of Star Trek, but what he got was a big white box, about the size of a small truck, covered in small red and blue indicator lights. As it was the only thing lit in the room he didn’t need Saunders to tell him what it was, but the madman’s burst of happy laughter confirmed it.
Richard looked over at Michael and shook his head worriedly. “How are we supposed to move this fookin’ thing?” he demanded. “It’s the size of a fookin’ lorry!”
Saunders kept working, and soon the majority of the indicator lights shut down. “We don’t need the containment unit,” he explained. “I’ve already got like five of the fucking things.”
Michael guessed that wasn’t the same thing as having a functional reactor, a suspicion proven a moment later as the madman drew a two foot white cylinder from the unit; it was covered in a constant outpouring of bubbles from its entire surface, and Saunders passed it over to him without explanation. “Hang onto that for me, mate. I’ve got another four to pull out.”
Richard took the second in hand, inspecting it more closely. “How come you need all these fookin’ things when your ship is a bloody tiny thing compared to this?”
Saunders removed a third as he answered. “Because unlike the aliens,” he explained with unusual lucidity, “I believe in having some fucking redundancy. Four redundancies in this case.”
“Wait, you only need one of these?” Richard asked, looking between the alien technology and Saunders. “Won’t this be putting too much power through everything?”
That was a good point, but Saunders didn’t seem concerned. “Yeah, but I already took care of that,” he assured them. “Five times the power, five times the glory.”
That was less than reassuring, but what was Michael going to do? Saunders was dangerous, but he was also their only way out of a crashed alien starship, and back to base. He pulled the last of them free, setting them aside before wandering over to a small, completely sealed unit that he opened with a utility knife. A moment later he was flashing a grin at them, and hefting his own reactors. “Now,” he said, “let’s go back. We’ve still got two stops to go.”
“Where else are we fookin’ going?” Richard rightly objected. “We’re not supposed to be your fookin’ pack-mules, you know.”
The madman’s grin widened. “Art of war, mate,” he said. “It’s time for me to get to know my enemy. We’re going over to the Hierarchy ship.”
Hvek and Twanri were not bad people. They did not deserve to die. Neither did Mikhael. But in the Hierarchy, we are dealing with the kind of toes that are best left unstepped-on. And we had stepped heavily indeed.
Neither of the Corti suspected just how much Mikhael and I could hear, you see. They deactivated their translators when they wished to converse in private, and for the first two years, that approach worked. By the third, well… Corti speech is perfectly comprehensible to the human ear, after all. Aep rhafe newn dte etchlimya ogtup oonb zurtuu. We learned how to listen to them.
They spoke at length about this Hierarchy, enthused about how Twanri’s hypothesis was gaining evidence with every excursion. Alas, I never overheard them repeat exactly what that hypothesis was—they must both have been so intimately familiar with it that to speak it aloud would have been a waste of their time. But the essentials were clear. For some reason, within only twenty or thirty years at most after first splitting the atom, every species that has ever accomplished an industrial civilization as a native of a deathworld, has self-destructed, spectacularly.
We ourselves came painfully close, as I’m sure you know, but Twanri seemed to take that as proof that, rather than being an inevitable product of deathworld mentalities, perhaps these extinctions were precipitated somehow. She sense the invisible hand of this Hierarchy, gently pushing so many wonderful peoples off the precipice and into the long dark.
I dismissed the idea as excessive and outlandish, right up until the moment our ship came under attack. __
“Spot”. Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Saunders had installed the reactor cylinders as soon as they’d returned to the ship, and even without a passing knowledge in how alien shit worked, Michael could see the difference they made; the movements of the ship were faster and more reactive, while Saunders seemed less inclined to take painstaking lengths to ensure every little movement was the right one. They’d taken a quick trip out across the continent at incredible speeds before arriving in a forest clearing where the only thing of note had been an alien landing pod.
This, Saunders had explained, was the means by which Jennifer Delaney had reached the planet, but it was stripped of whatever he had been hoping to find. He hadn’t left empty handed, however, and had come away with a piece of tech he’d called the navigational unit.
After that they’d returned to the waters near the base, but this time they had remained above the water and Saunders had been content to conduct the dive by himself. The waters here were clearer than by the more recent crash, however, and the remains of a far more broken vessel were scattered on the sea floor below.
Michael squinted to see through the water, trying to get a good view. It was smaller than the previous ship by a long way, and there was more of it missing than remained. “What’s this fuckin’ thing then?”
“Space Illuminati starship,” Saunders answered candidly, and shortly noticed the looks this statement received. “Not making it up.”
Michael scoffed, but he remembered the interminable briefings back on Earth. The point had stuck that the galaxy was a damned strange place and that humanity’s combined experience of it to date probably wasn’t yet even a scratch on the surface. Next to the space dragons, UFO-nut big-eyed aliens and genuine bug-eyed monsters
“No shite?” Richard muttered, his attention returning to the shattered vessel. “Looks like it’s been blown to fookin’ ‘ell!”
Saunders flashed the mad grin at him. “Not all of it, I hope, because otherwise this will be a waste of my fucking time.”
Saunders dove into the waters a moment later, leaving Michael and Richard to watch him from above, although if it hadn’t been for the small glow of light from the propulsion device they’d have lost sight of him amidst all the ruin.
“Holy shit…” Saunders muttered several minutes into his trip, prompting Michael to demand a report, only to discover that the madman was easily startled by nothing more than a fuckin’ fish; at least he could be entertaining.
When he did finally return, it was with a sack full of goodies, and he was eager to try them out. Richard and Michael, still frustratingly dependent on the Australian to get them home, sat patiently while Saunders fiddled with what he’d recovered, plugging in device after device until he finally came to one that caught his attention.
That one had spoken his name. Saunders had paused, aghast, muttered the word ‘tricks’, and had then commenced a conversation with an alien speaker that included some of what Powell had told them and a shitload more besides, even if they could only understand his half of it. Michael and Richard exchanged a glance. FTL communication was supposedly expensive as all hell and low-bandwidth even for the Corti, which was about the only thing that exonerated Saunders of any suspicion that he might be talking to some kind of handler or agent.
For all their boredom, both men were career spec-ops, and knew valuable intel when they heard it—they absorbed every word for later reporting to the Captain. They listened for hours before the Australian unplugged the device and returned to the cockpit, whereupon he set course, at long last, for Folctha. His shoulders had tensed and risen and his expression was murder itself.
“We going home?” Michael checked, acutely aware that if Saunders chose now to set the ship to fly off to some godforsaken end of creation pursuing this ‘Hierarchy’, then both he and Richard were along for the ride and unable to fly the ship.
Saunders turned to look at him with a new kind of cold, hard gaze. It was the kind that revealed a perfectly lucid man in full possession of his faculties—however temporarily that might be—and wanting to use them all to kill someone. Michael felt a chill as that hateful gaze landed on him; he had considered Saunders a threat before, though merely a disjointed one that could be dealt with; the lucid man before him was a different beast altogether, one wearing the face of the War himself. It was the first time he’d actually looked like a soldier, to Michael’s eyes, and therefore truly dangerous.
“Yeah,” he confirmed coldly, “So take a fucking seat. I’ve got intel Powell is going to want to hear.”
Scotch Creek Extraterrestrial Research Facility, British Columbia, Canada, Earth
Did you ever encounter Allebenellin, Mister Jenkins? Vile things. Mercenary, callous, venal and stupid. The answer to how a race with such a startling lack of ambition ever accomplished intelligence, let alone how they used tools prior to the invention of their exoskeletons given that they lack limbs, eludes and mystifies me.
In any case, we were crippled with the first volley. They boarded soon afterwards, and poor Hvek and Twanri were reduced to jelly by their pulse fire, sprayed across the command deck. These were the biggest ones, so-called “anti-tank” weaponry, and their fire caught Mikhael in the head. The blow killed him: massive fracturing and cerebral haemorrhage.
Nevertheless, it gave the worms pause, because where the Corti had simply… splattered…here was a creature so tough that, though dead, he was still pretty much intact. They may even have thought he was still alive, which brought me the few seconds I needed to shout the commands, in Corti, which opened all of the doors and lowered the atmosphere retainment fields even as I shut the hatch of my escape pod. Every single one of the marauders was either blown out into space, or else died gasping.
I escaped.