Vault of Shadows

To Sara Crowe and her two little faerie princesses—Lilo and Phoebe!

And, as always, to Sara Jo.

Thanks to Brandon Strauss, for important (though creepy) information on insects. Thanks to David F. Kramer and Janice Gable Bashman, with whom I researched and wrote several books about the things that go bump in the night. I've been mining those books and our shared research for source material.

FROM MILO'S DREAM DIARY

Last night I dreamed that the world opened its mouth and swallowed me up.

I really hope that it was just a dream.

But way too many of my dreams have been coming true.

So . . . yeah, I'm really scared.

Far, far away, there is a beautiful Country which no human eye has ever seen in waking hours. Under the Sunset it lies, where the distant horizon bounds the day, and where the clouds, splendid with light and colour, give a promise of the glory and beauty which encompass it. Sometimes it is given to us to see it in dreams.

—B
RAM
S
TOKER

M
ilo Silk was trying very hard not to die, but the day was not cooperating.

It was that kind of day, in a week of days like that, and lately Milo seemed to have only those kinds of days and nothing else.

This one was a classic.

He ran through the thick foliage along the muddy banks of Bayou Sauvage, trying not to fall into the churning water, trying not to get eaten by alligators, and trying especially hard not to get shot by alien shocktroopers.

He wouldn't have bet a fried circuit board or a fused diode on his chances.

All around him the Louisiana swamplands seemed to be filled with lurching shadows, bizarre shapes, and the
clickety-click
sound of insect legs. Blue pulses of phased energy burned through the air all around him. One blast was so close that it set his hair on fire and he had to slap his head to put it out. It wasn't a big fire, but it was on his head, so it was big enough.

The stink of burned hair chased him through the swamp.

The hardest part, for Milo, was remembering that this was supposed to be an ambush.

Supposed to be.

It reminded him of an old saying his dad had said once when a bunch of things went wrong during a garage clean-out at their house: “When you're up to your armpits in alligators, it's easy to forget that you came here to drain the swamp.”

Yeah. Milo hated that saying.

Because there were alligators all over the place.

And they wanted to kill him too.

T
his is the story of what happened when everything Milo tried to do went wrong.

A
nd what happened after that.

“C
'mon, c'mon, c'mon,” muttered Milo as he ducked under the low arms of a dying pecan tree. He did it just in time, too, because less than a heartbeat later, another of the blue pulse blasts shot out of the dense shadows and blew the tree limb to splinters. Milo dove forward, rolled down a mossy slope, jammed his feet against the exposed roots of a bald cypress, came up running, and splashed through ankle-deep water until he reached a thick stand of slash pines. Then he squirmed into the tight cleft between two of the pines.

And froze.

Even though he was panting from the exertion, he forced his breath to go in and out of his mouth without noise. He tried very hard to become the bayou, to blend into it the way he'd been taught in survival classes.

To be one with the swamp. Or, as his backwoods Cajun pod leader, Barnaby Guidry, put it, “To be dere like you ain't dere, you.”

To be there like you're not there.

Milo tried to not be there while he hid and watched the aliens come hunting.

When he saw them, his heart nearly turned to ice. Even though he'd seen them before, fought them, killed them, the fear was always there. He knew he'd been lucky—luckier than he had any right to expect, because fully trained adult soldiers couldn't beat the Dissosterin shocktroopers one-on-one. The alien invaders were seven feet tall and powerful, with armored insect bodies, heads like praying mantises', bulging red eyes, quivering antennae, and six limbs. Sometimes they stood on two legs so they could fire four pulse guns simultaneously; other times they scuttled on four legs faster than greyhounds and simply ran people down. They wore nearly impenetrable body armor and carried guns, grenades, knives, and shock rods.

As he watched, the wild sugarcane that choked the slope quivered and parted and a shocktrooper stepped cautiously out. A crystal had been implanted in the center of its chest and it pulsed a ghostly green. Every soldier, every hunter-killer, every creature belonging to the Swarm had an identical jewel, and these “lifelights” were tied to the actual life force of the Bugs and their mutant creations. Soldiers spent hours in camp working on their marksmanship, because if you blew out the lifelight, you killed a Bug.

The alien warrior made a soft chittering sound. Milo wasn't sure if it was talking to itself, communicating with other hunters via radio, or just making creepy noises. Whatever was going on, it skeeved him out.

The reeds crunched under its weight as it moved slowly
down the bank toward the edge of the muddy water. It bent low and peered at the clear print of a sneaker.

Milo's sneaker.

Then the shocktrooper turned in a half circle, scanning the bank to follow the natural path of whoever had made the print. Those multifaceted red eyes glared right at the copse of slash pines. The long, slender trunks of the trees offered little cover except down toward the ground, where they grew together in tight bunches. The canopy of needles interlaced with the ceiling of leaves from big live oaks and cast everything in near darkness. Only the shocktrooper, standing exposed on the bank, was visible to Milo, and he was certain he was invisible to it.

At least he hoped and prayed that he was.

The insect warrior gripped a gleaming pistol in one hand, and its segmented fingers held it rock-steady. The glowing blue focusing crystal on the end of the barrel was like an azure eye trying to penetrate the darkness.

Please,
Milo thought, screaming the words inside his head.
Please, please, please.

He was not begging the creature to go away.

He didn't want the shocktrooper to go away.

In fact, Milo needed him to be right where he was.

No, actually, he wanted him to be about five steps to the left. Closer to the water.

But the alien held his ground, clearly suspicious, searching for his elusive prey.

Finally Milo decided that the creature was not going
to move in the right direction and this plan was going to fail and end very badly for him. Like so many attempts before this.

So, to save his own life, Milo Silk stepped out from between the pines, raised his slingshot, and yelled at the alien.

“Yo! Roach-brain!”

He fired the slingshot in the same instant the shocktrooper spun to face him. The stone hit the creature on the side of the head, bounced high, and fell into the water without having made so much as a dent in the alien. Milo wished he had something to fire that could shatter the shielding around the lifelight. No stone would do that.

The shocktrooper instantly raised its pistol and rattled off a string of clicks and buzzes that Milo figured were probably very bad words in a language he was glad he didn't understand.

That's when three things happened in rapid succession.

The shocktrooper fired its pulse pistol, and the bolt seared past Milo's cheek and blew a six-inch burning hole through the trunk of one of the pine trees.

Milo dove for cover behind a fallen log.

And the thing in the water, disturbed by the noise, the movement, and the fall of Milo's stone, lunged up, jaws wide, and
attacked
the shocktrooper. It burst from the surface of the bayou like something tearing its way from a nightmare into the waking world. Massive, muscular, scaled, furious.

A bull alligator.

Old Chompy. Fierce and murderous and evil tempered.

Milo screamed and shimmied backward up the slope as nine hundred pounds of gator snapped his powerful jaws shut. Teeth like daggers crunched through the armor and shell as easily as Milo bit through a corn dog. And Old Chompy bit the Bug soldier clean in half.

It was a horrible sight, and even though this had been Milo's plan, it was gross and shocking and mind-numbing. The alien's chittering turned into a single piercing shriek of pain, and then dwindled to a gurgle as the fourteen-foot-long reptile dragged his unworldly meal down into the muddy depths.

Old Chompy was the undisputed terror of this part of the bayou. The ancient gator had dragged down wild pigs and even a ten-point buck unlucky enough to come to this section of the bank for a drink. Now he had claimed a fully armed and armored Dissosterin shocktrooper.

Milo stared in horror as green blood swirled around and around in the vortex of ripples. He saw the glow of the lifelight beneath the surface, but it quickly winked out and did not reappear. Milo knew it never would.

Old Chompy never gave back what he took.

A ball of tension that felt like a knot of hot barbed wire burst from his lungs and he sagged to the ground.

It was a terrible, stupid, insanely dangerous plan.

And it had worked.

FROM MILO'S DREAM DIARY

I miss my mom.

All the time.

It's only been four days since she took a bunch of soldiers to check on a report of some dead shocktroopers down around the Atchafalaya River. She was only supposed to be gone for a couple of days.

But the Bugs attacked our camp the next day.

The Huntsman and an entire hive ship just came out of the sky and . . .

God, I can't even write down most of what they did.

Mom and the soldiers were long gone by then, and after the attack, we had to abandon what was left of the camp. It's way too dangerous to go back there.

I don't know if Mom's okay.

I don't know where she is.

I don't know if she thinks I'm dead.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

And I'm so scared.

Where are you, Mom?

T
he waters of the bayou gradually stilled, except for a line of bubbles that rose and popped on the surface. He didn't know if Old Chompy could digest what he'd taken for his lunch, and Milo tried not to think about it. Here in the bayou, the big reptiles were nobody's friends and they'd eat just about anything they could catch.

When it was clear that no other shocktroopers were coming to investigate, Milo hurried over to the remains, wincing at the mess. The gator had taken everything from the waist up, leaving the rest behind. The lower half of the creature still twitched, the way some insects do even when their heads are gone. That was so nasty.

But Milo gritted his teeth, held his breath, grabbed the alien warrior's foot, and dragged the remains up the slope. Once he was on solid ground, he went to work. He had a big canvas satchel slung across his chest, and he began filling it with the weapons and equipment strapped to the hips and legs of the corpse. It was an incredible haul: two pulse pistols, a fighting knife with a twelve-inch serrated blade, six shock grenades, four incendiary grenades, signal flares, and several items Milo couldn't
immediately recognize. Any kind of tech was worth scavenging, and alien tech ten times so. The Earth Alliance scientists had recovered very little of that tech intact, because taking down a shocktrooper usually resulted in most of the body and its equipment being turned into melted slag and ash. The drop-ships and scout craft tended to blow up when shot down—something about how the coolant systems on the Dissosterin engines worked. Superb designs for flying, but awful for trying to scavenge anything useful.