Writers of the Future, Volume 28 (44 page)

Step after step, I stole forward in my armored carbon-fiber skinsuit, wondering if the next defensive scan would come in eight minutes, or if it would strobe more frequently as I approached whatever lay at the forest’s heart.

Had Yaradua, Balogun, Obasanjo and Tamunosaki made it through their first shutdown already
?
Were they seeing the same critters as we converged from our five points around the perimeter
?

The HUD’s alarm blared, and I dropped to the forest floor, heart hammering in an adrenaline burst I didn’t clamp down on fast enough. My HUD shut down and the world went silent.

As I stopped my heart, the shadows seemed to crawl with cutter-bugs poised to attack.
Make sure you come back,
Sarge had said as my feet hit the alien dirt and I glanced back at him silhouetted in the airlock.

“Yes, sir,” I whispered before squeezing my eyes closed and stilling my lungs.

K
ilometers bled past. My head grew fuzzy from too many shutdowns, and my chest ached each time I inhaled.

I checked the time; it felt like twenty minutes had passed since my last shutdown. It had only been five.

According to my HUD, I was coming up on my twentieth shutdown. Over six hours and fourteen kilometers had passed since I’d entered this hellhole. I slipped through some spiny shrubs and came out in a clearing. Exhausted, I sat cross-legged in the middle of it, sucking at my nutrient tube. My HUD counted down the minutes until the next anticipated defensive scan.

The backup scanner strapped to my calf felt like a brick weighing down my every step. I pulled it off, contemplating leaving it behind. The defensive scans had been coming like clockwork every eight minutes, so I probably wouldn’t need it. I sipped water through another tube, beyond caring that it was recycled piss. Grimacing, I transferred the scanner to my other leg. Its crude circuits might survive if something took out my HUD, and I still didn’t know what lay at the heart of this forest.

I hoped to hell that whatever it was, I’d find it soon.

I envied Tamunosaki, who was probably back on the dreadnought already, kicking back with a pilfered glass of Yaradua’s whiskey. I bit my lip. Were the others even still alive
?

They had to be.

A metal-shelled creature the size of a dog scuttled past, and I reminded myself that everything I was seeing, everything my HUD was recording and writing to archaic plastic storage devices, was new intel. I had to make it out. I would get my prosthetic and be able to dance again.

But right now, that hardly seemed to matter.

My HUD blared its warning, and I killed myself again.

U
p ahead, the vines thickened. I crouched low, sweeping foliage gently aside. Forward, ever forward.

The vines grew denser. I backtracked, cursing the extra distance as I sought a way around the thicket. But the tangle of vines stretched on. After wasting two precious minutes trying to go around, I steeled myself to go through.

My muscles quivered as I crawled on hands and toes through a narrow gap, feeling for solid footing through the thin fabric on my skinsuit’s hands and feet, trying to disturb the vines as little as possible. I groped forward and the vines constricted. My pulse ratcheted up. They must have identified me as an intruder.

Somehow, I kept my wits and froze. Breathing deep, I studied the vines, arms shaking with the strain of holding myself still. They weren’t moving. They simply grew close together, knotting and weaving around each other as though in a deliberate barrier.

My pulse still pounded in my ears, but now as I twisted my shoulders and hips, my heart hammered with excitement. I shimmied, pulled and wiggled through, anxious for sweet, bonus-worthy intel on the other side.

Another meter forward, and the light brightened suddenly. My HUD dropped its gain and I blinked past the spots in my eyes, confused by the open space stretching before me. Disbelieving after so many hours in the forest’s close confines.

I craned my head to see the roof of the canopy arching high above, and for a moment, I forgot the protests of my muscles, forgot the vines gripping my ribs and tangling my feet. A dozen meters of open space stretched before me, ending in what I first took to be a building. As my gaze traversed it, I realized it was an enormous tree.

My neck began to ache from craning up, and my body rushed back to me, screaming protest at holding such an unnatural position after so many hours of travel.

I pulled myself forward and somersaulted, slipping my legs out from the vines and crouching, one hand on my slug thrower as MilComm training kicked back in. My eyes tracked the open space in automatic threat assessment, but soon I was gaping like a tourist.

The vines I had just pulled myself out of ended abruptly in what, as far as I could tell, was an enormous, gently curving ring, stretching off into the distance, fading into a yellowish mist. The thick tangle of vines climbed twenty meters into the sky. Above that, enormous branches arched outward from the forest I’d just escaped, forming a cathedral ceiling thousands of times bigger than anything on Hope’s Landing.

Vertigo swept me, and I put one hand on the springy moss carpeting the open space, glad I hadn’t stood from my crouch. I knew I should move on, should pay more attention to the tactical data scrolling in my periphery, but I kept staring upwards. The limbs from the trees behind me merged with those sprouting like spiky hair from the great structure in front of me, and I felt like an ant crouched between two skyscrapers. That analogy wasn’t quite right. An ant in an inverted donut of skyscapers—forest to my back, the enormous tree in front of me, and a thin ring of open space between, fading away into the distance on my right and left.

The canopy wavered and shifted in a breeze I couldn’t feel, and the sunlight, which had looked so sickly before, seemed suddenly beautiful. Gold glinted off aluminum-plated leaves, and I took a deep breath, somehow expecting the fresh scent of new growth.

The faintly metallic tang of my suit’s air shook me, reminding me I was in hostile territory. I swept my surroundings. A few bugs skittered across the moss, absorbed in their own tasks.

I studied the enormous tree, its sides a familiar, mottled gray bark. The HUD used its faint curvature to calculate a diameter of 200 meters. It had to be a building; why else would it be so large, so isolated
?

Whatever I was going to find, I would find it there.

I slipped the safety off my slug thrower and launched from my crouch like a runner from the starting blocks, beelining for the tree and hoping to hell that my sprint wouldn’t trigger new defenses.

No cutter-bugs swarmed, and I pressed my back against the giant tree-building, scanning the way I had come. Time to stop being a tourist and become a spy.

I realized with a start that fifteen minutes had passed since my last shutdown. No other scan had taken so long. The hair on the back of my neck prickled, and I wondered if I’d made it past the scans. My stomach knotted in anticipation of what else awaited me.

I wouldn’t come so far only to die.

Gritting my teeth, I slunk along the tree wall, seeking an opening. Ten minutes passed before I found it.

Three meters up from the ground, the HUD outlined a jagged shadow. Magnified, it resolved into an opening, and I couldn’t help but smile. At least all those years drilling
soubresauts
would be good for something.

I holstered my gun and leaped, catching the fissure’s lip and chinning myself up. I hung with just my eyes above the edge, toes digging into rough bark. An empty tunnel twisted into darkness, a meter wide at its center, three meters tall, narrowing to sharp points at ceiling and floor.

I heaved myself over the lip. Nothing rushed out of the darkness to attack me, so I pressed my back against the tunnel, one leg on the steep wall beneath me, the other angled out to the wall opposite. Slug thrower in hand, I scanned back the way I had come. No sign of pursuit.

After a few steps down the tunnel, I holstered my gun. I needed my hands to balance against the tunnel walls as I placed one foot in front of the other like a tightrope walker, struggling to step on the narrow crack where the sloping walls met. Whenever I stepped too far to the right or left, my ankles protested.

The aliens must not walk on the floor, I decided, because this tunnel was hell. The image of giant, sentient cutter-bugs skittering out of the shadows sent a chill down my spine.

Something was watching me, my hindbrain screamed, and my hand closed about the slug thrower. I squinted up into the darkness at the peak of the narrowing crevice, but even at full gain, my HUD failed to distinguish anything from the shadows.

Swallowing hard, I blamed the fear on shutdown stress. After a few deep breaths, I managed to holster the gun and keep walking.

T
he passageway darkened until my HUD failed to pick the merest outlines from the black. I wanted to turn on my headlamp, wanted to activate the suit’s sonar. But those could trigger defenses, so I kept on, trailing my fingertips along the walls, groping forward with my feet. The tunnel branched, and I turned right then left, right then left, climbing and descending. My breath sounded loud over the breather’s hiss, and the audio inputs amplified the scuff of my steps.

A faint
squelch-pop
. I froze, holding my breath. My hand dropped to my gun.
Squelch-pop.

Squeezing my eyes shut, I concentrated on the sound, trying to pinpoint its direction, trying to imagine the creature that could make it. When I opened my eyes, a faint light shone down a tunnel ahead on my left.

I crept toward the glow, weapons holstered to keep my hands free for stealth and balance.

The tunnel opened into a lumpy, spherical room. Flattening myself in the shadows, I craned forward.

A bulbous creature with a dozen tentacle limbs clung to one wall, vines wrapping its body. The air before it shimmered and shifted—a display of some sort
?
I couldn’t resolve what it showed and wasn’t ready to waste time cycling my HUD through different EM frequencies. The scientists could sort that out later from the recording.

I studied the creature, but couldn’t find anything on it I could call eyes. Maybe it saw through the puke-colored splotches the vines didn’t cover.

Squelch-pop, squelch-pop.
The sound came from above me. My head snapped up.

Another creature scuttled down from a fissure in the ceiling. A chittering screech emanated from it as it flowed down the wall and out of my line of sight. The vine-wrapped creature chittered back.

I leaned further into the room, hoping to see them interact. Was the new creature here to rescue the other from the vines, or had the first wrapped itself up intentionally
?
Had I stumbled upon a prisoner or bioengineered technology
?

Several vines lashed out, wrapping the new arrival’s limbs as it chittered away. A shimmer appeared before it, then widened, extending around the room to merge with the other’s.

Suddenly, both fell silent. The shimmer disappeared.

My breath caught. Had they seen me
?

Heart hammering my ribs, I flattened back into the shadows. Maybe I was overreacting. Maybe they’d responded to something else.

A vine whipped around the corner and lashed about my arm. I yelped and jerked away, but the vine held. Without thinking, I grabbed my knife and hacked at the tendril. The blade bit, and I ducked another tendril as I sawed through the first. The vine tore loose, oozing grayish-white slime, and I stumbled back. More vines groped out from the room faster than I could retreat on that damn fissure floor. I slashed at one, but more flailed forward, whipping through the air around me and slapping my suit.

One caught me about the throat and yanked me forward. I hacked it off, but not before the tip of another wrapped my leg and jerked my feet out from under me. I fell hard, helmet cracking against the floor. But I was too desperate to register pain, and my fall loosened the vine’s hold.

I kicked free. Knife in hand, I scrambled back on all fours until I could get my feet under me. My left ankle screamed in protest—I must have twisted it in the fall—but the vines no longer slapped my suit.

I edged backward. The vines still lashed the air, but could no longer reach me. Part of me wanted to hang around and learn more, but the aliens had clearly spotted me, and who knew what they would do next.

Suddenly, the vines retreated and three of the bulbous creatures scuttled into the tunnel, clinging to the walls. I picked up my pace, reaching for my slug thrower. One of the aliens clutched a dark, boxy device in a front tentacle, and before I could grab my gun, the boxy muzzle flashed, and something slammed into my chest, sending me sprawling backward while my HUD screeched alarms. The enhanced image flared white, then black.

I landed hard on my back. Impact drove the air from my lungs.

Through my faceplate, I saw only darkness. I chinned the HUD’s reboot, but nothing happened. A bubble of silence quarantined me from the creatures’ chittering.