“Up high?” Sergeant Apone shouted. “You saying these things are flying?”
Dietrich saw it then, slicing through the air. Just a glimpse of it, thin and wraith-like, body open to catch the wind as it glided toward her. She muttered a stream of profanity into her comm unit and pulled the trigger, firing a plasma burst that lit up the dust storm like lightning high up in a thunderstorm. The thing banked left, somehow made itself smaller, and then plummeted toward the ground, headed for her face.
She dropped, rolled right, came up onto one knee with her weapon aimed at the spot where the thing had alighted. It stood six feet away and for a few heartbeats they were eye to eye, Dietrich and this creature unlike any she’d ever seen. Despite what she’d seen overhead, the bug stood tall and thin, its limbs like razors. Its body seemed smooth and black, glassy as volcanic rock. She counted two sets of eyes, both covered by a gossamer membrane which seemed to screen out the dust and grit of the atmosphere.
Gunfire punched the air around her. Zeller shouted about incoming bugs. Wierzbowski kept insisting he didn’t see anything on his sensor.
As Dietrich pulled the trigger, the wind roared across the plateau and nudged her to the left, throwing off her aim. Plasma bursts tore up the rocky ground near the bug and it shot her a look that might have been nothing more than curiosity. Then it opened like a flag unfurling. The wind took it, blew it backward and upward and it angled its body so that it was soaring high out of range in the space between one breath and another.
“Holy shit,” Dietrich whispered into her comms.
“Cynthia,” a voice said, and she snapped her head around, distracted by the use of her first name. Stenbeck, of course. Even behind the goggles and inside that exo-suit, she saw the way he looked at her.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“You can’t hesitate like that,” he warned. “Coulda gotten yourself—”
Hudson backed toward them, firing off into the darkness, the bursting plasma rounds interrupting them. “Can you two hump each other later?” he said. “Like, after we kill all these damn locusts, or whatever they are?”
More shouting. More weapons fire. More shapes knifing through the atmo-storm. Wierzbowski complained again about his sensor until Spunkmeyer finally slapped it out of his hand.
“It’s broken, idiot! Use your goddamn eyes instead!”
Laughter all around.
“Shit, ’Bowski, you know you must be stupid when Spunkmeyer’s got to explain stuff to you,” Vasquez said.
Their gunfire had driven the bugs away for the moment. The unit regrouped around Lieutenant Paulson and Sergeant Apone.
“Fix that scanner, Hicks,” Apone ordered.
They all heard it through comms, and Dietrich watched Hicks march over and pick up the faulty sensor. How he was supposed to get it working out here with no tools, and unable to take off his exo-suit, she had no idea, but he started by just banging the thing against his thigh a couple of times. Hicks let his plasma rifle hang by its strap, smacked the sensor against the palm of his hand, then pressed a button on the thing’s underside while the rest of the unit watched the plateau for more bugs.
Dietrich heard Hicks sigh over comms. Even in the shifting gray dust of the atmo-storm, she saw the sensor light up. Hicks turned to hand it back to Wierzbowski, just as Zeller started shouting again. The sensor in Hicks’s hand lit up red.
“Incoming!” Zeller shouted.
Dietrich and Hudson backed up, side by side, and she heard him swear as he tripped and fell. Shapes sailed overhead and she stitched the storm with plasma fire, forcing the bugs to break off. She dropped to one knee to help Hudson, who scrambled to get up in spite of the awkward weight of the exo-suit.
“You all right?”
Hudson gave a sick sort of laugh. “I’m better than these assholes.”
Confused, she took her eyes off the sky and turned to see what the hell he was talking about. They had known the two small research teams sent here by the company had died, so it shouldn’t have come as a shock to her, but when she saw the withered corpses, the bare, grit-scoured bones, the dried skin stretched tight across a face beneath the headpiece of a shattered exo-suit, she froze.
This is no way to die, Dietrich thought.
“Get up!” Stenbeck shouted. “Incoming, damn it, get on your feet!”
Dietrich and Hudson rose in the same moment, both of them staring as Stenbeck raced toward them. He lifted his plasma rifle and fired above them, but Dietrich’s focus stayed on the pair of bugs slicing through the dust storm, gliding down behind Stenbeck. By the time she raised her plasma rifle, they were too low for her to take the shot without hitting Stenbeck.
“Down!” Hudson said, taking aim. “Stenny, hit the dirt!”
Even from thirty feet away, through the dust, through the goggles of his exo-suit, Stenbeck’s moment of epiphany showed in his eyes. He dove to the rocky ground, rolled, propped himself onto his elbows too late. The things were almost on him. Dietrich and Hudson started to fire.
A figure came out of nowhere, emerging from the dust to the east. Tall and thin, wrapped in an exo-suit, weapon at the ready. Only when she started shouting and cursing did Dietrich recognize Private Malinka’s voice. On the range, Malinka had no peer. Nineteen years old, but she could shoot the whiskers off a cat from a hundred yards. But Malinka had never seen real combat before today.
The girl’s first two shots missed. Stenbeck had fallen on his own weapon and struggled to bring it round, even as the first of the bugs landed on him. One of its wings sliced the exo-suit open like it was made of cobweb.
Dietrich opened fire again, shouting Stenbeck’s name. She got one syllable into it when Malinka’s third shot hit one of the bugs.
The creature exploded in a roiling ball of flame that hit the second one—the one on Stenbeck—and then that bug exploded as well. The blast blew Malinka off her feet and she tumbled into the rising dust and smoke, lost from view in the storm. For a few seconds Dietrich could only blink and stare at blossoming clouds of fire as the wind carried them away, painting the darkness red and orange and blue.
“Aw, man, what the hell was that?” Hudson whined. “Stenny, man. Stenny!”
Hudson started toward the burning air, barely seeming to notice the way gusts would ignite above them, a chain reaction that seemed to threaten the possibility of the whole sky lighting on fire.
Dietrich grabbed Hudson. “Get your shit together. Nothing you can do for him now. Don’t you have eyes?”
Hudson stared at her, goggle to goggle. She had denied it to herself, but in her heart she knew what had ended his friendship with Stenbeck, knew that Hudson wanted her for himself even if he’d never say it. Stenbeck had known it, too, and it had complicated things. The friendship between the two men had been half the reason she had ended it with Stenbeck. They needed each other more than she needed the familiar comfort of Stenbeck in her bed. For her sake, she was glad she’d had too much to drink and hooked up with Stenbeck last night, one last memory. For Hudson’s sake, she wished none of it had ever happened.
Now she had to watch Hudson swivel his head around to stare at the slowly extinguishing fireball, and the charred, blackened bones it illuminated, all that remained of Stenbeck.
“Aw, man,” Hudson said. “This is bullshit.”
Thunder crashed across the sky. They turned to see a fresh fireball streaming toward the ground. Pieces of the bug whipped past them, hitting the dirt like shrapnel. Dietrich glanced around, saw nobody, and knew the only way home was to kill their way out.
“Do your job, Hudson,” she said. “Light ’em up!”
He snapped his head up, then nodded. Killing bugs was just about the only thing he’d ever been really good at. Back they moved toward the center of the plateau. Bugs whipped overhead like flags unfurling. Dietrich took one out with a burst from her plasma rifle, staggered by the blast as it exploded. Hudson shot two.
“Damn it, Lieutenant,” Hicks growled
on the commlink. “What the hell are these things?”
Before Paulson could reply, a chorus of voices filled Dietrich’s head. Above them all, she could hear Zeller and Wierzbowski shouting about the next wave of attacks coming from the cliffs to the northwest. Even as she and Hudson turned in that direction, a gust of wind cleared some of the dust off the plateau and Dietrich spotted the rest of the unit closing ranks. Malinka limped as she hurried to join them, injured but alive.
“Hand to hand,” Lieutenant Paulson barked. “If they come in close, you can’t shoot ’em. You have to take ’em hand to hand!”
Ice slid through Dietrich’s veins. She thought of the bodies of those scientists, withered skin tight against their skulls. What the hell was Paulson playing at, thinking they could kill all of these things with just the combat knives sheathed at their hips? She drew her blade but confusion hissed at the back of her brain. They didn’t even know how many of the bugs there were. Trying to kill them hand to hand was suicide, but she saw Frost drawing his own knife and realized it was the two of them, now. The others would keep firing, but if the aliens got too close it would be up to her and Frost to protect them.
This is it, then, she thought. Dietrich only hoped they wouldn’t leave her corpse behind on Clytemnestra, that she wouldn’t end up a lonely ghost, wandering this rock forever. She glanced at Stenbeck’s charred remains and prayed his spirit had gone elsewhere, that if any of them had souls, they would end up in a better place than this.
Gunfire tore through the dust again. A rising crescendo of plasma rifle fire traced its way through the darkness in all directions. Crowe and Spunkmeyer had begun to roar and now Vasquez and Hudson and Wierzbowski joined in. Zeller and Malinka, too. The black kites sliced through the storm, descending. Lieutenant Paulson waited, following them with her weapon, and when she opened fire one of the bugs exploded in a fireball that struck another, and another, destroying four of the deadly kites and turning them into a chain reaction conflagration that swept into the whirl of the storm until the whole sky became a churning tornado of grit and debris and blazing embers.
To Dietrich, it looked like they were in Hell.
The gunfire continued. Each new kill fueled the inferno overhead and she felt its heat baking her inside her exo-suit. She glanced southward, tracking movement in her peripheral vision, and saw a kite slicing low over the ground, headed right for Malinka and Zeller.
She acted without processing the risk. Instinct and training kicking in, she ran half a dozen steps in her bulky exo-suit, and put herself between the bug and her people. It kept low to the ground until it was within a couple of yards, then it cut upward, right for her face.
Dietrich twisted sideways, shot a kick at the center of the thing’s mass. Its unfurled body began to collapse and she saw in that moment what was about to happen—the way its razor-thin wings would tear right through her suit. She drew her leg back, spun away, sliced the knife down at the back of its wing as its momentum carried it past her. The blade scratched that black glass wing, but did not cut.
She froze. Blades wouldn’t work.
“Lieutenant!” she shouted, turning to scan for Paulson, ready to run to her. They had to retreat, had to get off this godforsaken rock.
She didn’t see the bug come sailing along the southern edge of the plateau until Zeller started shouting that it was too close, that someone had to kill it. Dietrich turned. Zeller was right—if he’d shot it, the explosion would have torched him and Malinka both. Even knowing the blade would do nothing, Dietrich started toward them, wouldn’t leave them to die.
Zeller managed to get his blade out. He fought the thing, stabbing at it, even punctured one of the thing’s shielded eyes, but its wings kept slicing at him, tearing his suit to ribbons, and in seconds Zeller was on his knees.
“I can’t…” he said on the commlink, for all of them to hear. “My eyes… I think my eyes are bleeding.”
Dietrich halted her approach. Even if the bug didn’t kill Zeller, the atmosphere had already poisoned him. He’d be choking on his own blood, his skin bubbling with pustules.
The gunfire continued. Other voices shouted on comms. Bugs exploded in the air along the outer rim of the plateau. The brighter the burning air, the easier it was to spot them, to kill them before they came closer.
Malinka backed away from Zeller’s weakening struggle against the thing that had killed him. They were wrapped together, the Marine and the black glass kite. When Malinka reached her, Dietrich saw the shock in the girl’s eyes and knew that no matter how tough she had been in training, she understood combat now. Understood horror. Understood what it meant to be a Colonial Marine.
Dietrich sheathed her knife, raised her plasma rifle, and fired three rounds into the thing that was killing Zeller. The explosion incinerated Zeller on the spot and knocked Dietrich and Malinka off their feet. They hit the ground, rolling on the super-heated rocky soil.
Blinking, Dietrich realized she’d been out for a few seconds. She looked up to see Malinka above her, shouting at her to get up. Then Hudson and Vasquez were there, cursing at her. When she reached out to Hudson, she saw the fear in his eyes. Fear for her. But it was Vasquez who grabbed her hand, hauled her off the ground, gave her a shove to get her running.
Lieutenant Paulson had ordered a retreat. Dietrich could hear Apone’s familiar growl over the comms, urging them onward. She had lost track of her position, so she could only rely on the others as they hustled back to the dropship, their withdrawal punctuated by a dozen more explosions that heated the air so much the air inside her suit burned to breathe.
Then they were at the dropship. Khan had lowered the ramp and Dietrich stumbled a bit going up. She dropped to the floor inside, surrounded by the others, and as the ramp began to close and she stared out at the burning storm, she wondered about the ghosts of Stenbeck and Zeller. The dropship’s external guns shot a couple of the kites to keep them away from the closing ramp, and then it was over.
Over.
She remembered Stenbeck’s hands on her skin last night, the taste of whiskey on his lips, and the way she’d broken his heart. The morning’s nausea returned, but she held it together.
“Anyone wanna explain that?” Vasquez snapped, stripping out of her exo-suit. “How the hell do those things just explode? The whole sky went up in flames!”
The pilot, Khan, craned his neck around to look back at them all as they tore out of their suits and stowed their weapons, checking themselves and each other for injuries.
“Just proved the company’s science team right,” Khan said. “Species is carbon-based, like most known life forms, but the solvent for all life from Earth is water. For these aliens, it’s propane.”
Dietrich lay on her back, still in her exo-suit, trying to find the will to get up.
Hudson laughed. “Oh, that’s beautiful. They knew the things were gonna go boom if we shot ’em and they sent us out there anyway?”
“They knew there was a chance,” the pilot admitted.
“Khan, get us off this fucking rock,” Apone grumbled as he slumped onto the starboard bench, already starting to strap himself in.
“Sorry, Sarge. Can’t do that.”
Dietrich had been catching her breath, knowing she’d have to get up in a few seconds to strap herself in for dust-off. Now she rolled over and sat on her knees, glaring toward the front of the ship. Around her, the rest of the unit had stopped their bitching, stopped stowing their weapons, stopped grieving for the ones they’d left behind.
“What the hell are you talking about, Corporal?” Apone snapped, emphasizing Khan’s rank, reminding the pilot of the chain of command.
But Khan wasn’t looking at Apone. His gaze locked onto Lieutenant Paulson instead. They all turned to stare at her.
“You want to explain this, Lieutenant?” Apone asked.
Dietrich listened to the thump and scuff of kites attacking the hull, but her eyes were on Paulson, on the way the woman seemed to deflate
with regret.
“Corporal Khan,” Paulson said, “I assume by your reaction that you’ve gotten readings from the dropship’s external instruments? You’ve located the source of the stabilizing element?”
If you’d taken a poll of the unit, pretty much everyone would have voted for Hicks as the most even-keeled of the lot. But it wasn’t Spunkmeyer or Wierzbowski or even Vasquez who smashed a hand against the hull and glowered at the lieutenant.
“What the hell is this?” Hicks snapped. “Not only did you have intel about the bugs that could’ve saved Stenbeck and Zeller, but now you’re saying you and Khan have been keeping this other shit from us, too?”
Lieutenant Paulson squared up to him. “You’re going to want to stand down, Corporal Hicks.”
Dietrich forced herself to stand, reached out for Hicks’s shoulder. Said his name. He shook her off, kept glaring.
Apone stepped between Hicks and Paulson. “Stand down, Corporal,” the Sarge said, but then he turned to face the lieutenant. “Maybe you want to explain yourself? If there were mission parameters you couldn’t share before, I’d like to hear them now.”
Lieutenant Paulson at least had the decency to look uncomfortable. She nodded slowly, glanced at Khan, and then backed off, obviously aware of the animosity growing against her.
“We had an additional set of orders,” Paulson said. “You all know how this works. Every mission has multiple objectives. Objective one was to clear the plateau and pave the way for the next science team to drop a temporary base there. Objective two was to see if the instruments could scan and locate the source of the stabilizing element. Based on information transmitted back by the last group who died here, the company had some theories—”
“That’s what I started to say, Lieutenant,” Khan interrupted. “They’re not theories anymore.”
Dietrich simmered with anger. Rage helped to make her forget her grief, at least for a minute. She stared at Khan and Paulson, silently blaming them for the deaths of Stenbeck and Zeller, knowing it wasn’t really their fault. The company was to blame. Weyland-fucking-Yutani.