Dominant Species (3 page)

The thermoform container marked "Spare Parts" had been an innocuous part of their caravan for the last eight Waking Years. While a clear breach of Marine regs and most quarantine protocols, Ridgeway secured the modest luxuries for his team with neither recrimination or concern. Few benefits came from serving as a very secret unit, but at least nobody looked through your luggage. The boost to morale was immeasurable.

Hell, what do they expect anyway, Ridgeway reasoned as he poured the strong black liquid, they trained us to improvise and overcome. This is just an occupational hazard.

His state of mind improved greatly as the aroma of steaming coffee flooded his nostrils. With aluminum mug in hand, Ridgeway angled across the bay to his own footlocker. Rounding the well-worn box he eased himself down onto one of the cots that had been spot-welded to the floor.

Ridgeway took another long sip before he opened the lid. The case, three feet long and two feet deep, was the only permanent home Ridgeway could remember since taking command of the RAT Squad. As a highly mobile force, the marines were called upon to move from ship to ship at a moment's notice. Everything that represented Ridgeway's private life existed within the case.

Even by military standards, his locker was spartan. Aside from a small collection of casual clothes, such as the sweats he now wore, the footlocker contained only his toiletries, a first aid kit and a personal computer. That, Ridgeway thought as his attention shifted to the inside of the open lid, and the Three Moments.

As always he thought of Grissom when he looked at the three artifacts taped conspicuously to the inside of the lid. Saul "Grizzly" Grissom had been his first battlefield commander and grew to be both friend and mentor. A decorated veteran who possessed a profoundly sage view of life, Grissom taught Ridgeway that a man should never forget three moments in life; his first, his finest, and his darkest.

"Your first moment reminds you of where you came from," Ridgeway softly recited. The photograph was old and tattered along one edge. Still, he could not help but smile at the image of the blonde-haired boy who beamed from the cockpit of a mottled green military hovercraft. Although his feet couldn't reach the pedals at that age, young Danny dreamed of being a marine pilot just like his father. The senior Ridgeway had been killed in a tragically mundane accident just two years after the photo had been taken.

"Your finest moment reminds you of what you can achieve." The laminated copy of the magazine cover had been reduced to half it's original size, but the bold headline was no less readable. The single word ‘Unstoppable' appeared in all-caps above the image of black and gold-jerseyed players holding the Tri-World Hyperball Championship trophy high overhead. Ridgeway was just to the left of center, hoisted to shoulder-height by Monster's powerful arm. The faces caught in that dizzying instant had just handed the reigning champions a stunning defeat in an upset that nobody believed possible. At that instant they were immortals, warrior-kings, and as the headline proclaimed, unstoppable.

He paused, very much wanting to break tradition before invoking the final memory. He didn't need to look to know what hung there, or to remember what it meant.

"Your darkest moment," he muttered beneath his breath, "reminds you of what can happen when you least expect it."

A discipline ingrained through repetition dragged his focus away from the magazine cover and brought it to rest on the medal that hung unceremoniously on the right. The points of a platinum-colored star peeked out from behind the globe and laurels of the Corps, suspended beneath a quilted ribbon of royal blue. The Medal of Valor, the second highest honor awarded by the United Systems Marines.

Saving a platoon of besieged fellow marines may have been meritorious service, he thought grimly, but not if you ask the women and children of Cygnus Prime. He swallowed, the coffee soured in his mouth. If there were any of them left to ask.

Ridgeway stared at the medal awarded to him after the Pelton's Bluff engagement, a medal he had never worn since. Some of his peers took the decision as some aberrant gesture of humility from the young officer, as though he had chosen not to take on airs from such a high honor. They couldn't have been more wrong.

Only a few even suspected the truth. Grissom knew, but then again he knew everything in Ridgeway's heart. The Grizzly tried repeatedly to convince Ridgeway that his first duty was to support the encircled Marines, an assertion that provided little comfort.

Trust me, the airlifters are coming. Ridgeway remembered the words with a cold detachment that held no hint of the confidence with which they were first uttered. He had urged the Cygnus leaders to stay put, speaking through a frightened translator. "Wait here. I'll be back. I promise."

Well they waited all right, Ridgeway thought dismally, waited while I charged off to slog it out with a column of Rimmer tanks that had backed a platoon of Seventh Marines against a steep bluff. They waited while Rimmer airpower claimed the sky, driving the poorly-armed airlifters away like leaves in the wind. They waited, still expecting rescue when dark, bat-like shapes dove from the clouds. Not until the dandelion-puffs of ordnance bristled from sky-grey underbellies would the truth have become obvious. Then the waiting ended.

Ridgeway had been a mere three clicks away, his small force staging a series of hit-and-run strikes against the flank of the column throughout the night. By dawn, seven tanks lay in smoking ruin across a field strewn with Rimmer corpses.

He remembered the dull pink glimmer as the first of Cygnus' two suns broke the horizon, and the streaking roar as U.S. air support finally arrived. A swarm of stubby A-63s pounded the fractured side of the broken Rimmer arc straight to hell. Trapped between Ridgeway's team and the very pissed-off Seventh Marines, the Rimmer's unsupported left flank disintegrated.

The images in his mind were blurred by fatigue, but he could not forget staggering dead-tired and hurt across three clicks of shell-blasted jungle to the smoking remains of Cygnus Prime.

Frightened screams had long since faded, the only moan now came from the wind that crawled through the skeletized buildings. Airburst thermalite had carbonized them, along with vehicles and bodies, into an inseparable crust of black ash. Over four hundred people who had trusted Ridgeway to return, gone.

He couldn't remember how long he knelt on that blackened street as he watched the ash swirl about him like flakes of dead snow.

Closing the lid to his footlocker, Ridgeway pushed the memory aside for the thousandth time, knowing that his Darkest Moment would wait quietly for his return. It would wait forever, just like the civilians of Cygnus Prime waited-- the way a part of him would always remain, waiting for a second chance on the blackened hillside.

He turned his mind from dark memories to the unknown mission ahead, to the marines whose survival would be in his hands.

A furrow creased Ridgeway's brow. Some things never changed.

CHAPTER 2

"Oh man, it sucks to be me." Almost two thousand meters below the planet's surface, Private David Jenner's muttered lament was lost in the persistent noise of the tunnel. He paused at the four-way junction, looking down nearly identical corridors that angled off in different directions.

Left and then right, or was it another left?

Jenner smoothed the crumpled yellow dispatch, trying to make some sense of the hand-scrawled map on the back of the last page. Moisture had already transformed one leg of his route into an illegible smear of blue ink.

He held the paper aloft to better catch the meager overhead light. Rotating the dubious map on end, Jenner struggled to align some part of it to his surroundings. Nothing matched.

With a forlorn sigh Jenner dropped his arms and opted for a mental coin-toss. With no sense of confidence he turned right and plodded past a stained aluminum sign bearing the words ‘CONTAINMENT AREA.'

Jenner's boots sloshed through an unbroken chain of puddles. Moisture leeched incessantly from the slabs of reinforced concrete that made up the tunnel walls, leaving mineral streaks of chalky white amidst the burnt-copper hues of rusted iron. A film of green mold spread web-like across the walls, fanning out from every crack and crevice. Here and there, dark wet clumps of fungus hung from the walls like rotting grapes.

The air was thick with dank smells; corroding metal, musty ozone from electrical arcs, the acrid stench of fluids that bled from old machinery. Miners with pale, stained skin told him of even fouler smells that seeped from collapsed tunnels even further below, the putrid reek of bodies crushed into paste beneath countless tons of stone.

A shiver ran along Jenner's spine and he picked up his pace, nervously shifting the pack on his shoulders. The private muttered without conviction as he shuffled along the narrow pathway, "They're just screwing with your head, that's all."

Lighting functioned properly back in the main cavern, but here in the secondary tunnels things were hardly up to par. Entire sections of corridor stretched out in tomblike darkness, broken only by brief pools of sputtering white light.

In those twilight borders where light wrestled with shadow, the snarl of pipes that lined the walls took on an ominous, serpentine appearance. Cables resonated with the hum of high voltage. Water dripped from heavy steel tubes that groaned from internal pressure. Behind it all, the deep bass thrum of the massive reactor pulsed through the floors and walls like an giant heartbeat.

With every plodding step Jenner's feet squished miserably against wet socks. "Waterproof my ass," he snarled, glaring at the cheap codura boots. His toes buzzed with the nagging itch of pruned skin and he scuffed his steps fitfully, but the tingle persisted.

"Man, I am not cut out for this underground shit."

In the brief time since Jenner unwittingly threw himself into the Outer Rim Alliance, things had gone from bad to worse. Life on the filthy streets of the Los Diablos colony had been no picnic, but at least there a dull reddish sunlight almost constantly suffused the atmospheric dome. The darkest basement in LD was brighter than the crypt-like gloom of this subterranean hell. That world seemed a lifetime away.

Slogging through the frigid cold in wet army boots, Jenner could scarcely believe that only a few months ago he was sitting behind the wheel of a sleek, silver-grey Vendetta, driving the one and only Eddie DelMonico down the back streets of Los Diablos. The stainless steel attaché in Eddie's lap contained four kilos of lab-quality Rage. All Jenner had to do was get Eddie to the deal and back in one piece and life would have been fine.

He recalled the warm evening breeze and the streaks of light that washed across the hood as the Vendetta slid with liquid grace beneath an endless row of street lamps. He even remembered the music that played as Eddie walked away from the car. Chad Bruce, ‘Something in the air.'

The mental images that followed were smeared by the unsteady paintbrush of fear and adrenaline. A sudden drum-roll of gunfire. Red flowers that blossomed on the lapel of Eddie's grey jacket. Window exploded in a shower of diamond-like fragments, angry streaks burning through the air. Eddie reaching for the open door with bloody fingers. All a blur.

The one detail Jenner remembered clearly was the sight of Eddie's eyes wide with fear as the Vendetta lunged forward, leaving the gunfire, and Eddie's fading scream, in a cloud of dust.

There Jenner's memory sank into a dark, muddy pool, surfacing eight days later in a rancid, back alley dumpster on the tail end of a drug-slurred haze. Eddie, the Vendetta, the Rage-- all gone. Sold, lost, snorted... hell he had no idea. All he knew was that every streetrat in Diablos would be looking to sell him out for the money that would already be on his head. Eddie had friends.

Crusted with wet garbage and vomit, Jenner had staggered from one shadow to the next until he saw a small screen hawking travel to distant worlds. The sign sputtering overhead read Recruiter, something called the ORA. By the time Jenner sobered up he was showered and shorn, on an Army transport to some godforsaken place called Balratha.

Helluva career move there, Dave.

Jenner looked around the freezing tunnel as he flipped the collar of his jacket up around his neck. A soft cloud swirled with his every breath. At just under six feet in height, the lanky private felt lost in the oversized milspec field coat. Yet he was thankful for the thick insulation. The meager bristle of hair left on his scalp did nothing to keep his head warm.

He pawed at the quilted sleeve to reveal his watch, certain that he'd been wandering for hours. Instead, just over forty minutes had ticked away although he felt no closer to the destination typed across the transfer.

Special Detail, Driver, HM-1. The gruff Duty Sergeant had called for a volunteer to drive some kind of garbage truck; not a popular job the Sergeant stressed, but one that would opt the volunteer out of any frontline infantry duty. Garbage detail sounded nasty, but it beat getting shot. Jenner had taken the deal in a flash.

The deal was a little clearer now, Jenner thought as his mouth curled downward. The son of a bitch sergeant never said anything about driving the garbage truck somewhere near the planet's core.

Stuffing the transfer into his pocket, Jenner hitched the backpack higher on his shoulder and set off in search of Garage 39-D.

The geeky seismo guy in the commissary had told Jenner that the entire planet was a series of natural caverns stacked one on top of another. Often as not, miners had only to bore down through the floor of one cavern to break through the ceiling of another below. The network of caves and tunnels made the mining operation a lot easier to run, and that made Balratha a very lucrative planet for the Outer Rim Alliance.