A fifty cal would have been lost coming out of those. If rocket launching in a ship was bad, this was orders of magnitude worse. It appeared that they had been close to finishing putting it together. Just three more components, one of which looked like some sort of power supply, needed to be hooked up.
“Get the bodies out of the way and drag this thing back into the staging area,” I ordered. “BT, up here with me. We’ll keep an eye on things.
“You sure you want that thing in the midst of the troops? Could be a bomb,” he said.
For all I knew it could have been, and that was why it was on wheels. As soon as it was assembled they’d just activate it and roll it on down to us.
“Naw, no way. Bombs aren’t such a great idea. Hull breach or something would suck everyone out of the ship. We could be pulled through a hole the size of a straw; would look like multicolored Play-Doh on the other side.”
“And yet you had me fire two stinger missiles.”
“Not my ship. I don’t care if she gets scratched up a bit.”
“Yeah, but–”
Dee was looking intently at the unassembled parts of the mute machinery. “Michael, I know what this is. You must have your people pull back.” He stood up.
We were in contact with mutes on two fronts. Pulling back didn’t seem the wise or easy option. But that look on Dee’s face. He knew something was up.
I reached for the radio. “This is General Talbot. All troops pull back, fall back to the rally point!”
I was expecting to get questions of the type I had for Dee. Instead, I got some automatic fire, some twangs and sizzles from the mute weaponry, and then ear-splitting screams. I ran back to watch; at one entrance, my men were doing an orderly pull back, at the other, it was a pell-mell, fire in a crowded theater scenario. For a moment, I could not understand what all the furor was about until what had been a woman haltingly fell through the door. Her mouth was pulled back in a scream that was so voracious she didn’t have the ability to give it voice. Her clothes, hair, and skin were gone–as if she’d been dipped into a vat of acid that only removed those components. She was a textbook illustration of the musculature of a female, only in the flesh, so to speak. Her eyes, they said it all. She was in unimaginable agony.
“Dee, can this be reversed?” I shouted over my shoulder. I think he was in more shock than I was. He did not answer. “Dee!” I wanted to jump start his thought process.
“No.” He shook his head. “The Renderer is permanent.”
The woman on the ground was attempting to crawl, she was leaving a bloody handprint with every contact. I raised my rifle to end her suffering just as her head fell to the floor. The horror show had just got underway. Another soldier was being dragged through the doorway; his entire lower half had been stripped of all its skin. Another, just his right arm, and another had half his skull buzzed right to the bone.
“Get that fucking thing working, Dee!” I shouted over my shoulder. Bullets were bullets; in a combat situation, you could almost make a peace with the life-ending terminal velocity lead pellets. We’d even gotten somewhat used to the proton beams and lasers of our enemies–just a brighter bullet, basically, another way to cut straight through a man. But this fucking thing? This was a nightmare. This was the stuff that would haunt you until they laid you to rest. And the fear it induced was palpable. Worse thing? You had to stand there and look at it. It could suck the morale and willingness to continue fighting straight out of a person. Fifty years of enslavement was preferable to three agonizing minutes one lived with their skin peeled off like a fresh orange.
“BT, anything comes through that door, just blast it, no questions asked.”
“I only have two rockets left.”
“Make them count, then.” There were personnel running around, some helping the injured. Tracy was getting the others into a defensive position at the access points. I went to where Dee was. He was looking at the parts to the renderer we’d taken. The beauty about field weaponry is that it needs to be fairly easy to use. We’re talking about troops under incredible strain and in the most hostile and stressful conditions known to their species setting this stuff up to kill before they’re killed themselves. Definitely not conducive to calculus equations and minuscule assemblages. The mutes are not dumb, not by any standard definition, but that didn’t mean the Progs who developed the weapons didn’t think they were. These parts were color coded; my three-year-old son could have put it back together.
“No moral high ground here?” I asked Dee as I helped him slide the huge battery supply module into place.
“They have chosen their poison and willingly given it to others to drink. Your ancient moral code states: An eye for an eye.”
Our race had done a general re-think of the entire code he was referring to, the kind of convenient rationale that made for long, bloody wars. But they’d brought the nasty little toy to the party; now they could play with it. I would take whatever justification I could find to end this.
“Collins, Peppard! Help us!” I shouted. The thing might have been the size of a scaled down car, but it weighed as much as its full-sized counterpart. No wonder only the mutes had them.
“Effective range?” I grunted as we rolled the behemoth.
“Line of sight, perhaps as much as a hundred yards.”
“Tracy, pull everyone back!”
“They’re advancing! Our only chance is to hold them out of here!”
“Nope. They’re welcome to this party. Hold the south side down for now.”
Like most decisions I made, she didn’t agree. But in battle, she would usually defer to my insanity. No telling if it was the right move or not, but instinct shouldn’t be dismissed in favor of rational thought in life or death scenarios. I did things unconventionally, on auto-pilot sometimes, but we were fighting an unconventional, immediate enemy. So, in a twisted sort of logic, it made perfect sense to just go. The mutes were a lot closer than I’d thought, they started streaming through the door the moment they realized we weren’t offering any suppressive fire. A burst of severe panic radiated through my chest and into my extremities when I could not immediately find a trigger. It was Dee that flipped the large red switch in front of my face. The renderer hummed like an old refrigerator, and not much else. I was expecting lightning bolts of electricity to crackle out and fry anyone downrange. Maybe the weapon didn’t offer good visuals, but the mutes did. The effect was instantaneous and spectacular in a gruesome way. Their skin didn’t so much fall off, as evaporate, as if it had been boiled away under intense heat. I was stricken, not for them, but for my people that had been flash skinned. As I said previously, mutes aren’t dumb, ignorant brutes, so why they kept coming is beyond me. Maybe a part of them wanted to die, sick of being under the thumb of the Progs, maybe they just followed orders regardless of risk. More likely they had an intense hatred for us and did not care what they had to weather to get at us. Of all the reasons, this gave me the most resolve behind this monstrous weapon.
“They’re trying to get their renderer in place,” I said; it was the only thing that made sense. They were building a wall, one seeping body at a time. They got that thing in this room and it would be a turkey shoot. “Gotta move closer,” I told Dee. “Can’t let them in.” I leaned into the machine, I had to dig in to get some traction before it began to move. We were officially under siege as the hallway we’d previously taken was once again being attacked.
“Like fucking cockroaches,” BT said as he swung around with his rifle, “and not those tame suburbs cockroaches that have the good graces to hide real quick when the lights go on. I’m talking those big, relentless, city motherfuckers that run right at you when you come in the room, trying to chase you off their meal.”
Three entry points; they were attempting to breach all of them. They got into just one other and it would be game over.
“We have to bring the fight to them.” I think I was talking out loud, but I wasn’t really looking for an a
udience. We were making headway at our doorway. Only so many mutes can get skinned alive. Tracy was holding down her entry point. It was the one we’d just vacated, without leaving enough defenders, that was in some trouble. The men assigned to that door were getting closer and closer to us as they backed up.
“BT, put a rocket in that hatch!” I shouted.
“Have you lost your fucking mind?” Paul, Tracy, BT, possibly Dee, maybe even all of them said. “It leads to an outside panel!” I think it was Tracy that shouted that part.
Maybe not BT; he’d already picked up the weapon and swung around. He was a fan of the launcher.
“Through the doorway.” I felt the need to add. If he missed and hit the wall there was a chance that it could ricochet, and even if it just exploded on contact he could add some friendly fire to his kill count. This was akin to having battleships or planes drop ordnance on our location. When one has fewer straws to grasp at, they’re usually the dirty, used ones that have been discarded on the floor and stepped on a few times. If we were going to die today, it was going to be because we’d tried everything available to us and came up short; I was not going to leave anything untried.
BT threaded that needle, but it still didn’t stop the concussive blowback from pushing me into the renderer, if not for that, I would have ended up on my ass. Our room became a choking, clotting, smoke filled, burnt flesh-smelling quonset hut.
“Jesus, Mike! What the fuck are you doing?” Paul asked.
I didn’t have time for his piss and pony show. I was ordering troops up to secure that door and to push back anything and everything. He was still yelling a string of high-ranking obscenities; I’d stopped listening sometime after he’d blamed my mother for unwittingly unleashing another plague upon mankind.
“Michael, they have ceased their forward momentum.” Dee was pointing to our door. It was tough to look through the sea of glistening, oozing muscle, but he was right. I turned our microwave off.
“Jennings, grab four and start moving bodies, we’ll keep you covered,” I ordered. He liked that command about as much as I would, which means not at all. It was quiet for the moment, but this was one of those times where I wish it wasn’t. All we could hear were the grunts and retches of those who were moving bodies and the squelching, slime-dragging sounds they made as they were being pulled across the floor. More than one soldier lost their lunch or wept. Within ten minutes an opening appeared and we saw just how close to disaster we had been. The renderer was taking up the entire doorway and the mute that was about to engage it had his skinned hand draped over the toggle switch.
“Careful!” I shouted at Jennings, who had grabbed the free arm of the firing beast. I was staring down the barrel of the insta-flayer. Although, maybe that had been his plan all along, to leave his own body as a boobytrap. The mute was mostly intact except for his entire head, which had been completely cleaned of its leather, or whatever they call their skin. He looked like a twisted cartoon character, his eyes bulging out from their sockets and his mouth pulled into a leer like he’d just seen a beautiful woman mute in a bikini. Another man went over to extract the Mute’s arm from the firing mechanism.
“Get that thing turned around. Quickly. Dee, help me turn this one around and get it back to that exit. BT’s rocket had completely ripped the hatch from its moorings and the sides of the walls were blasted outward.
“Tracy?” I asked once we were in place.
“All quiet,” she answered.
“The renderer?”
“I don’t know, you want to peek your head out and look?” she asked.
“Not so much. Jennings, since you’re on my shit list for the moment, I want you to find a mute arm that still has flesh on it and remove it from its host.”
To his credit, he did so.
“Sir?” he asked, dragging the huge thing to me.
“Get some help and pitch that thing out the door by Major Talbot. And make sure you don’t go with it.”
“Gomez. Help me, man,” Jennings said.
“Punta,” Gomez hissed, but did as his friend asked.
“On three we toss.” They had the arm bridged between them and were swinging it to get some momentum. “One, two, thr…” Gomez had let go a fraction of a second early or Jennings late, Jennings was pulled toward the door. If not for my wife’s cat-like reflexes he would have been pitched into the hallway.
“Thank you, Major.” He breathed a sigh of relief.
“Who’s the punta now?” Jennings asked his friend when he stood back up.
“Sorry, man. I’ll buy you a beer when this is over,” Gomez told him. Funny. That truly would make it all better. Sure, I almost got you killed, but take this frothy malt beverage as my recompense.
We watched as nothing happened. I really wanted to peek my head around.
“Whoa, buddy. What if that thing only works on live flesh?” BT asked grabbing my shoulder.
“Hadn’t thought of that. Dee?”
Dee pointed our machine at the body of the one that had his head stripped and fired it. The skin on the body melted away.
“Satisfied?” I took a quick peek around the corner. There were a fair number of dead mutes but no extra renderer; they’d taken it with them.
“What now?” BT asked. I wanted to shrug my shoulders, but I was acutely aware that as the active general in this battle, all eyes were on me and shrugging does not instill confidence in the troops when they need it most. There was the clicking and clacking of the area cooling down; this was quickly being replaced by the moans of the injured, who were getting what care they could.
“Twelve dead, eighteen wounded; four of those will be dead soon if we don’t get them proper medical attention,” Tracy said, coming up.
“Good fucking plan, Mike.” Paul said, “got a dozen of our people killed. Good fucking plan!” He was close to shrieking.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” BT pushed Paul away. “This man saved your worthless ass, saved all our lives, really. While you were doing what? Checking on rations on deck five? Shut the fuck up!”
Paul was reaching for his sidearm.
“Don’t make me do it.” I had my rifle up and the barrel was less than six inches from his skull. I think after being with Beth for so long he’d started to travel down the same highway; his hand was on the hilt of his weapon and he was pulling it up.
“Dee, remove the general's firearm.”
“You will do no such thing. Stand down!” Paul’s face was red. “I want this…thing, that man, and General Talbot taken into custody!”
No one moved, no one said anything.
“Are you all fucking deaf? I am your commanding officer!”
“General, you are relieved of your command under article 93 of the UCMJ,” Tracy said.
“Well, if you knew anything, Major, about the articles, you’d know a junior officer cannot relieve the command of one senior to them.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “What the Major said,” I announced. “Dee, get his gun. If he does anything, you have my permission to break his arm.” I had not put my rifle down.
“Oh, look at you, big man. Finally got what you’ve been craving all along, haven’t you,” he spewed. “Got a little power, a couple of brutes behind you, and now you’re sick with it! I knew it would come down to this. It’s always those closest to you that turn.”
“Put your hands behind your back, Paul.” Tracy deliberately did not use his rank. Not sure where she got zip-ties, but she secured his wrists. Now if she could just find a gag that would be perfect.
“You bend over backward for these things.” He was still going. “They murdered and pillaged our entire world and you still want to hop into bed with them. Is it the giant green dick shoved up your ass that you enjoy so much?”
“I’m somewhat sorry about this,” I said as I swung my rifle around and cracked him in the skull with my butt stock, he collapsed into Dee’s arms. “Get him in the corner. I want a guard on him at all tim
es. He is not to be harmed.” Whether I wanted it or not, I was now the Commander-in-Chief and I was scared shitless. It is always nice to have the choice to defer to someone farther up the chain. Sort of a safety net. Now the buck stopped with me; there was no one else to hand it off to. I needed a second to clear my head.
“Alright, screw this waiting for the enemy to come to us–now we bring the fight to them. We’re going to start from this door.” It was BT’s destroyed one. “Then, in ten minutes, I want another group to fan out from the far door. The rest will hold this position and come to aid or inhabit once we gain ground. We’ll sweep the halls with this. No sense in putting anyone at more risk than necessary.”
“Do you think it’s wise, you leading the charge?” Tracy asked. “You’re in command now.”
“Leadership by example. There’s not enough of us to sit back and wait this out. Our best chance is to shove this victory down their throats.” I looked at my intelligent, courageous wife, questioning my decisions even as she loyally followed my lead. “Major Talbot, I hereby grant you field promotion to Colonel. Congratulations, Colonel Talbot; you are officially second in command.”
She didn’t question me on it, and I believe I saw a satisfied smile cross her face, but there would be time for that later. I’d just unseated the General; it would do no good for morale or my chances at a successful run if I tried to make it a one-man-show. The men and women under me might not understand my decisions, but they all respected Tracy’s carefully weighed opinions and strategies. They would follow her unconditionally.
“Colonel, you are not to lead the second charge, you will rightfully be in command if something happens to me. Ten minutes. We will stay in constant comm.”
I got a look that would have frozen ice, which was a neat trick since it was already frozen.