ATLAS 2 (ATLAS Series Book 2) (11 page)

What if there was something waiting for me down there?

I turned on my helmet lamp. Suppressing the feeling of terror that was slowly rising inside me, I swung my feet over the ledge and onto the ladder. I almost expected a tentacle to latch on to my leg from the depths.

Making a point of not looking down, I started the descent.

The intensity of my helmet lamp was low—my suit power was reduced to ten percent by all the climbing—and only a small cone of light surrounded me. I could see the ladder in front of me, and the concrete walls in the immediate vicinity, but everything else was pitch-black.

It felt like I was descending into the dark heart of hell itself.

The climb took about an hour.

Since I never looked down, the floor came up rather abruptly. One moment I was lowering myself down into the empty air, rung by rung, then the next my heel struck solid ground.

I froze as the thud echoed up and down the pipe. When the sound faded, only dead silence remained.

I lowered my other boot and stepped fully onto the concrete floor.

Weaponless, I slowly turned around and scanned the area. I was ready to throw myself onto the ladder at the first sign of trouble, but all I saw were the various machines slumped about. Most of the machines were inactive, though weak LEDs did shine from a few of them. The illumination from my helmet was really dim at this point, so I couldn’t see all that far. Still, I was satisfied that the area was clear of any beasts (other than those found in my imagination) because they would’ve attacked by now.

As I had hoped, the servers that harbored the door sensor still had power, so I installed my SACKER privilege escalation kit. It used a brute force approach to crack the admin password, which could take anywhere from ten minutes to an hour.

Leaving the kit do its work, I moved off to one of the machines that still had a working LED. I retrieved the knife from my utility belt—so perhaps I wasn’t entirely weaponless. With the knife I opened up a side panel in the machine, revealing the terminals of a magnesium-ion battery pack.

At this point I was in far greater need of power than oxygen, so I retrieved the charging cord from my utility belt, and attached one end to the universal charge port on my wrist and the other end to the battery.

I sat down and rested while my main battery pack recharged. My helmet lamp grew stronger, but the darkness around me didn’t seem to recede. I was getting this creepy, tingling sensation at the back of my neck, like someone or something was watching me.

When my battery pack was charged, I disconnected and stowed the cord, then hurried over to the oxygen storage tanks. I just wanted to replenish my O
₂
and get the heck out of there.

I examined the nearest oxygen tank. What the . . .

Impossible.

The pressure gauge read zero PSI.

It was empty.

I moved on to the next tank.

Empty.

The next.

Drained as well.

The remainder all proved empty, down to the last one.

I didn’t understand it. The tanks were supposed to store a month’s worth of oxygen, even after the Forma pipe failed. There was no way every tank could be drained like that.

I opened the valve of the closest, thinking there was some readout malfunction, but the sniffers in my gloves detected nothing. I backtracked, opening the valves of three other tanks.

The oxygen was truly gone.

Someone, or something, had drained the tanks already.

No no no.

And that’s when I saw the beast.

It was crouched at the edge of my light cone, between two oxygen tanks.

One of the “crabs.”

Sharp spikes over a black carapace from which protruded eight pairs of legs, with pincers and crushing mandibles on all sides. About one meter tall by two meters wide. Black, semitranslucent skin.

I stepped backward, reaching instinctively for my rifle-scythe—which I didn’t have anymore.

I unsheathed the knife from my utility belt instead. The blade seemed pathetically small against the claws and mandibles I now faced.

The crab had remained motionless the entire time.

I kept still, waiting for the alien to make the first move.

The ladder was roughly ten paces away behind me. Could I make it in time? Doubtful.

Neither of us moved.

I don’t know how much time passed. Thirty seconds. A minute.

The crab still didn’t move.

Could it be . . . ?

I approached. Cautiously.

Keeping my eyes on the motionless creature, I knelt and retrieved a loose pipe. I took three more wary steps, then slowly lifted the metal tube toward the beast.

I touched the pipe to the crab, and shoved.

The carapace shifted lifelessly. I shone my helmet lamp directly onto the body: through the translucent skin I could see its three hearts.

They weren’t beating.

Yup. Dead.

I ran my helmet lamp over the thick cord that trailed away from the alien corpse. The cord led between the large machinery to a sinkhole in the concrete floor, about three times as wide as the crab itself.

I squeezed past the dead crab and carefully approached the opening.

Spent shell casings lined the perimeter. Some military personnel could read the marks on shell casings to determine the make and model of the weapons that fired them, but I wasn’t one of them. Nor did I have the necessary app for my aReal, unfortunately.

Slowly my angle of view increased until I found myself peering straight down the hole.

Inside resided more dead crabs. A whole bunch of them.

There was no host slug that I could see, but the bodies of the bigger creatures usually evanesced after death.

I crouched at the rim, letting my light illuminate deeper. I realized a cave-in blocked the tunnel’s lower recesses. Good.

I stepped away from the hole, edged past the dead crab, and hurried to the door sensor. The SACKER hadn’t cracked the administrator password yet, so I went to the ladder and sat down. There I waited, keeping my eye on the lifeless crab and the sinkhole beyond it. I was ready to vault up the ladder at a moment’s notice.

The moments passed, and I relaxed somewhat. Enough to ponder the puzzle of the missing oxygen, anyway.

There were no signs that the tanks had been punctured in any way. So the crabs hadn’t done it.

Still,
something
had drained the oxygen. Likely it was the same thing that had killed the beasts in here. The spent shell casings pointed to either another human being, or a robot. A robot wouldn’t need oxygen of course, but there was always the possibility that the Forma pipe had never been active in the first place, and the tanks had never filled.

Robot, or human being, I supposed I’d never find out. I only had five hours of oxygen left, and the next Forma pipe was about a week away.

As I waited for the SACKER to work its magic, my mind concocted fantasies: Rade had found a way to reach this planet, and he was actively searching for me, fighting his way from Forma pipe to Forma pipe. He’d been here in this very pipe mere hours before, and would soon return. When he found me, he’d take me back to Earth. Once there, we’d quit the Navy, and after we were deported we’d move to France and live out our lives in peace.

I had to laugh. It was a pleasant fantasy.

Unfortunately, Rade wasn’t coming for me.

No one was.

The chime of the SACKER kit informed me it had attained administrator access to the door sensor.

I went to the sensor and added my embedded ID to the list of recognized entrants, and the steel panels of the door irised open.

Queequeg was waiting for me outside, jumping up and down with his typical irrational excitement at seeing me.

“My weapon, Queequeg,” I said. “Show me where it fell.” I pantomimed the plunge of my rifle-scythe from the heights.

The animal led me toward the weapon in great exuberant leaps.

Despite the fall, the rifle-scythe seemed intact—all the tape and superglue had held up.

Now if only
I
could hold up.

“All right, Queequeg. Let’s go.”

Queequeg led me onward. I didn’t care where he went, just as long as it was away from here. His lope was ebullient.

I wished his joy was contagious. I really did. But it wasn’t.

Five hours of oxygen left.

Maybe I’d find another source of O
₂
somewhere.

Right. It would take a miracle.

I marched after Queequeg, unable to shake the sense of impending doom.

I’d already used up all my miracles.

CHAPTER THREE

Rade

T
he war that had hung over all our thoughts and deeds these past eight months, the war we had dreaded, the war we had never talked about yet knew was coming, had finally arrived.

It didn’t take long for the media to disregard the news lockdown. You couldn’t really hide disaster on a planetary scale, not when everyone and their dog had a camera.

It was all over the networks. Every station on the Net and Undernet. There was no escaping it: an entire moon had been invaded by an alien species.

Seemingly from nowhere, the Skull Ship had appeared in orbit above Tau Ceti II-c fifty-five days ago. It was a black starship about one-fourth the size of the moon itself, and vaguely shaped like a human cranium—the SK news media frequently referred to the ship as the “Great Death” in their commentary.

The orbital defenses proved useless against the alien vessel. The Skull Ship proceeded to power right into the crust, unleashing a black cloud that enveloped half the planet and inflicted an unseasonal blizzard on the only major city.

Tau Ceti II-c sent out an emergency distress call, which was nearly masked by the powerful EM interference from the Skull Ship. The combined naval defensive capabilities of the system responded to the call. SK capital ships, battlecruisers, battleships, destroyers, and frigates gathered near the moon for a unified assault.

The Skull Ship destroyed or disabled them all. It was equipped with some sort of coronal point defense weapon. Get too close, and the hull would erupt with a sweeping, superheated gaseous envelope, similar to the coronal discharge from a star. The eruption was capable of disintegrating anything in its path, from torpedoes to supercarriers.

On the moon itself, meanwhile, things were quickly going downhill. From footage pieced together by armchair broadcasters, a grim story emerged.

A deadly rain fell when the black impact cloud consumed the sky, a rain that disintegrated any people unfortunate enough to be caught outdoors. The survivors called the rain the
Yaoguai
—demons from the underworld with a particular bent for the souls of men. The rain also happened to turn most of the robots against the inhabitants, and the machines systematically hunted down the survivors. The rain became a blizzard, and when the storm lifted one week later, few survivors remained amid the melting snow.

All communications with Tau Ceti II-c ceased one month ago. The remote scans weren’t pretty. Shangde City was overrun, and the outlying farms and bases had been razed. It was unclear how many of the one million colonists had escaped. With its coronal weapon, the Skull Ship had incinerated many of the fleeing vessels, and destroyed the ship lots and ports.

According to surface probes, Shangde City was patrolled by robots and ATLAS mechs, and defended by automated anti-air weapons. The streets crawled with the infamous crabs and slugs my platoon had first discovered on Geronimo, with sinkholes leading to vast subterranean caverns below the city. The lower parts of the buildings were caked in black bulbs of Geronium-275, like the swollen protrusions of some disease. The snow was gone, and recent atmospheric readings returned by probes had indicated elevated levels of carbon monoxide and chlorine, which told us the invaders were terraforming the moon in some way.

In addition to the crabs and slugs, and the roving bands of robots, stagnant pools of glowing liquid had collected in some of the city streets. The Yaoguai. What I called Phants, because when I’d first encountered them on Geronimo, the alien entities had appeared as a ghostly mist. The Phants on Tau Ceti II-c were in liquid form presumably because of the more Earth-like atmosphere. The SKs reported that bullets went right through them. Explosions temporarily dispersed them, but they simply re-formed. My platoon had experienced exactly the same effects during our own brief encounter with the alien entities.

No one really knew what the Phants were yet. How sentience could be bottled up in some liquid or vapor was completely beyond our comprehension. Fleet scientists postulated that we saw only a small fraction of the entities, the tip of the iceberg so to speak, while the remainder of the beings resided in some higher plane or dimension.

Species X25910 was the working designation for the alien race, of which the Phants were X25910-A, or X-A for short. If you wanted to get into more detail, a purple, faster Phant was X-A i, while a blue one was X-A ii. Crabs were X25910-B, or X-B, and slugs were X25910-C, or X-C. There were alternate naming conventions for the bigger crab and slug variants. Crabs were also called Workers, because they were the ones who laid down the deposits of Geronium-275 that coated the buildings of Shangde City. And the slugs were called Burrowers, because of their tunneling abilities. The vast subterranean network beneath the city? The handiwork of the slugs.

X25910. The fleet scientists must have thought it a brilliant idea to give the alien race the most impersonal name possible. That way there would be no chance we’d feel empathy for them. A nice sentiment on the part of Fleet, but entirely unnecessary as far as I was concerned. The things looked like giant crabs and slugs, so I don’t think any of us would be developing feelings for them. For me, it didn’t matter what names Big Navy came up with, because those aliens would always be evil butchers in my mind.

They’d murdered my brother in life and best friend in the world, Alejandro Mondego. And they had taken Shaw Chopra from me, the only woman I’d ever cared about.

During the initial stages of the Tau Ceti II-c attack, eleventh hour negotiations had taken place between the SK and UC governments on Earth, culminating in a peace treaty that ended all extra-solar aggression between the two space-faring empires. With the flipping of a few bits in a rad-shielded, error-checking-and-correcting memory chip, privateering was outlawed, economic sanctions repealed, and borders opened up.

Humanity had united against its common foe.

I never thought I’d see the day, but we were actually going to help the SKs. They
needed
us. Just as we would probably need them in the coming days. Though I had to wonder just how long this “alliance” would hold.

Because of our proximity to the necessary Gate, my platoon was part of the second wave of responders. We were teaming up with a battalion of Marines who were also in the region. We’d be working with them in more of a traditional combat capacity, rather than a direct-action-type role. At least at first. Meaning we’d be taking part in the heart of the fighting.

Just the way we liked it.

For me, I was just glad the war had finally come.

It was payback time. My misgivings, my feelings of inadequacy, had lessened with the announcement of the war. I still wanted to transfer to a different task unit eventually.

But first I wanted some payback.

The
Royal Fortune
dropped us off at the
Gerald R. Ford
, the lone UC supercarrier in Gliese 581. With a crew complement of five thousand, it was basically a mobile space city.

We proceeded through
Tiàoyuè De Kǒng
Gate to Tau Ceti. It felt odd, traveling through the Gate in a full-blown UC warship, given that previously we’d had to sneak past inside the cargo hold of an SK bulk carrier.

More starships and troops were on the way of course, from all of humanity’s space-faring empires. No one wanted this alien plague spreading beyond Tau Ceti.

The
Gerald R. Ford
spent the next few weeks crossing Tau Ceti. Giving the enemy vessel a wide berth, we arrived at the gas giant Tau Ceti II roughly two months after the Skull Ship’s arrival. The
Gerald R. Ford
took up a position in orbit around the massive planet near the orbital station
Lequ
(“Pleasure” in Korean-Chinese), a merchant hub that had been appropriated and transformed into a forward operating base. There the
Gerald R. Ford
joined the remnants of the SK Navy in the system, alongside other United Countries and Franco Italian (FI) warships. The location
had the added benefit of stealth, because
Lequ
orbited the gas giant in a position directly opposite the Tau Ceti II-c moon, masking the heat signature of our fleet from the enemy.

The remaining orbital stations were being used as staging centers for the evac of the other two moons. An evac of this magnitude took time, and only a quarter of the populations of the moons had departed so far. More rescue ships were on the way from outside the system.

Anyway, a few days after our arrival, the commanders held a fleet-wide teleconference. A plan of action was conceived. The troops were mobilized.

The day before we dropped, I found myself in the mess hall with half the platoon. We’d just finished a war game sim with some Marines, and we were chowing down on much-needed carbohydrates.

My eyes drifted to Dyson, seated beside me. He hadn’t said a word the entire meal. He stared straight ahead, and from the glazed look in his eyes, I knew he was inside his Implant.

He was Asian American, like Lui, but I suspected he had at least one parent from a different nationality because of the blond hair and Romanesque nose. Or maybe he’d merely had reconstructive surgery. His brow bore the scar of a botched tattoo removal, and though he never said what the tattoo had originally depicted, I thought it looked like a Chinese dragon (though most of us told him it must have been a penis). Dyson had grown his beard out, and its thickness matched the beards of the other MOTHs. Well, except for Tahoe, whose inability to grow a decent beard earned him daily jibes.

None of the Marines here had beards, by the way. They simply weren’t allowed. Beards were the cachet of the Special Forces.

“Must have some great porn in that embedded ID of yours,” I told Dyson, not one to miss an opportunity to ridicule him. I didn’t really care if the Marines listened in: they knew we fought among ourselves just as much as they did.

Dyson’s head jerked up and he stared at me. His eyes smoldered.

Finally he forced a smile. “Hey, Rage.”

“So come on, what’s your deal?”

He frowned. “What do you mean? Nothing. I was just listening to the ‘Star Spangled Banner.
’
 ”

“The what?”

“You know, the old anthem? Before Unification?”

“Ah.” I nodded slowly. “That’s a good song. But have you heard ‘Al Grito De Guerra?’ One of the best anthems
out there.”

“I haven’t,” Dyson said. “Different lewds for different dudes, huh?”

“I think he just called you gay,” Tahoe told me, jokingly.

“Quiet, Tahoe,” I said. “We’re trying to have a conversation here.”

“Why do you call him Tahoe?” Dyson said. “Everyone else calls him Cyclone. That’s the callsign programmed into my aReal . . .”

“Only I’m allowed to call him Tahoe,” I said. “And we’ll leave the explanation at that.” I decided I’d try to treat him as more of an actual human being. At least for today. So I said, “Tell me, Dyson, are you looking forward to the upcoming battle?”

“I’m here to do what I signed up for. Kill some baddies. Save the world. You know how it is.” Dyson could fake bravado with the best of us.

“I do indeed.”

“Just never thought I’d be fighting side by side with stinking SKs.”

I regarded Dyson thoughtfully. “Interesting. I thought you
were
Chinese.”

“
Half
Chinese,” he said. “The other half is Swedish. The better half.”

I shook my head. “No wonder Lui doesn’t want you to hang out at our table.”

“Hey, I’m only telling you the truth.”

“And what’s the truth? That you hate your heritage, your origins, your ancestry? That you hate your own genes? Not a lot of sense in that. If you’re going to fight with us, you have to put aside your own self-hatred. I’m surprised you even made it through training with an attitude like that.”

“Yeah, well, this attitude of mine was exactly what got me through training,” Dyson said. “My hatred for my Chinese half. It kept me going. Made me want to prove to myself I was better than that half. And I am. I’m not some weak Chinese.”

“Who says the Chinese are weak?” I stared at him incredulously. “You’re lucky, you know. You’re going to be fighting alongside the Sino-Koreans today. Try fighting
against them
sometime. Just ask Tahoe.”

“Hey, don’t drag me into this,” Tahoe said. “I’m not touching this conversation with a seven-foot pole.”

Dyson glanced between Tahoe and me. “You don’t understand,” he said quietly. “I’ve been fighting the Chinese my entire life.”

“What do you mean?” I said, though I had a good idea.

“Try growing up in the UC when you look like a member of its greatest enemy,” Dyson said bitterly.

“You don’t really look all that SK to me,” I said.

“Not anymore.”

Ah. Reconstructive surgery, then.

I swallowed a particularly large serving of rice.

“Thanks, by the way,” Dyson told me.

“For what?”

Dyson hesitated, then: “For being so nice to me.”