Extinction (25 page)

Emily couldn’t hold back the tears and
slumped against the wall. Daria came running from behind and lashed out with a
fist to Wilks’ face. Scan and Fang held her back. “What the fuck! You murderer!
I could’ve helped him.”

Wilks stood and wiped the blood from his
mouth. In an even and unaggressive tone, he offered, “Bullshit and you know it.
We,” he said, looking to his team, “have a pact with one another. If it comes
down to this,” he pointed to Snyder, “we do what needs to be done. No suffering
among friends. None.” Turning to Fang, he said, “Take Jockey and Cannon and
make sure that we won’t have any more surprises. I don’t think there’s any more
of those aliens, otherwise we wouldn’t be talking right now, but check anyway.”

Turning to Daria, he spoke quietly. “Please
take care of my wounded men.” Still looking into Daria’s eyes, he added, “Lieutenant,
please come with me and we’ll see about the one Doc tranqued.”

Wilks and Emily entered the room with
the sleeping giant. The sticky blood seemed to act as an instant coagulant and
the severed leg wasn’t bleeding anymore, as were none of the other wounds Daria
had inflicted.

Emily turned to Wilks. “I know you did
the right thing back there. Daria’s a corpsman and it’s her job to save marines’
lives. I’d have hit you, too, in her place.” She looked away. “But I’d also
have wanted you to do it for me.”

Great, Wilks thought, another person
he’d have to face in a dream some night. Just what he needed.

“Poor Scan”, Emily said aloud. “Too bad
we don’t have his hand to put back on.”

“Ah, don’t worry about him. He’ll be OK”,
Wilks said. Emily turned to him with a confused look in her eyes. “Don’t you
know? Trizites are Echinoderms. They can grow limbs back under most
circumstances. He’s lost a whole leg before. A hand won’t be nothin’ to him.”

Emily was embarrassed. “As a
xenobiologist, I guess you’d expect me to remember something like that. Hell,
right now I’m surprised I even remember my name.”

“Lieutenant,” Wilks placed his hand on
Emily’s shoulder, “you did great for your first engagement. I’d go through a
door with you any day.” He looked back down at the body that lay before them. “Now,
what do you make of this guy?”

Bloom entered the room before she had a
chance to answer. “Sarge, I still can’t get command on line. I figure they’re
either gone or we’re just cut off.”

Emily had forgotten about protocol and
informing command of their situation. She was sure Wilks hadn’t. He just
assumed—knew—that Bloom would be making contact because it was his job and he
needn’t be told by Wilks to do it.

“Keep trying. Send a flare up the hole
if you have to. Give me an update every five minutes”, Wilks said, kneeling by
the giant and taking the weapon from the alien’s still hand. “Let’s get to
work.”

Vengeance’s Pride
–
Consequences

The captain listened to the report his
operations officer gave him. He already knew the details of the mission as they
had been played out before him on the vid screen, in the captain’s room, as
they occurred. But nonetheless, he had to listen to the official report that
would be sent back to Supreme Command. The report would describe how he had purposely
and willfully gone against the direct orders of the Supreme Command.

The operations officer finished reading
the last sentences of the report. They were death sentences for the captain. “And
so I hereby relieve the captain of all further duties and command until ordered
otherwise by Supreme Command. He will be placed in a torture tube until such
time his death can be carried out by a duly appointed executioner in accordance
with article…” The captain stopped listening; he knew the rest.

“I’m sorry, sir. It was an honor serving
with you. And between you and I, I fully agr—”

The captain cut him off. “Don’t condemn
yourself as well. I appreciate your thoughts. Now, carry out your duty.” He
paused and handed the young officer his rank insignia. “Captain.”

Both officers stood at attention and
then the former captain led the way that he knew all too well, to the torture
tubes. At their present position in the galaxy, he knew it would be weeks, if
not months, before an executioner would arrive to finish the task. Hopefully
the new captain would “accidentally” have a surge of power directed at his tube
during a training drill, which would end it quickly for him.
Months
. His
body almost shivered at the thought.

Dig Site One – Taking
Stock

Twenty minutes after the attack had
ended, the squad was formed up on Wilks and Emily while individual debriefings
of the incident took place. After everyone had given their account of the
attack, Wilks asked for a situation report.

“We found a shield generator at the far
end of the hole”, Fang started. “It seems to have put a barrier between us and
the surface. There is an impenetrable roof at one hundred meters up. The
generator is protected by its own shield that we can’t penetrate even with our
EMPs.”

Cannon took over. “I don’t think that
I’d be able to get through it even if I had my heavy weapons down here. Even if
our people are still up top, we can’t get to them and they can’t get to us.”

“Those shields are also blocking
communications”, Bloom offered. “There’s no way to let them know what happened
here or to even warn them of what might be coming their way. I don’t know how
those guys slipped in here without being detected like that.”

“I think we should assume,” Emily said
gravely, “that they didn’t slip in. We should assume that our forces topside
were destroyed prior to or during our attack.” All eyes focused on her. “We can’t
go up, so our only choice is to go down. Something very important is inside
this base and we need to know what.”

“Casualty report”, Wilks said, not even
looking in Daria’s direction.

“One casualty and three minor injuries.
Fang’s jaw is broken. I’ve applied a molecular splint and it should be healed
in twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Scan’s right hand is gone but his natural
dermal regeneration has already begun. He’d know better than I would how long
it’ll take before he can use it again.”

Scan jumped in, “I should have a hand in
a week or two. And please, no ‘give me a hand’ jokes from anyone, all right? I
got real tired of those leg jokes after the Kaland mission.” That got a
much-needed laugh from the squad.

“And Davies has a minor concussion with
a dislocated right shoulder. I’m gonna need some help getting that back in”, Daria
concluded.

Wilks offered himself, explaining that
he had helped with one of these before. “All right guys, hold his legs and body
down. We need him still for this. Right, Doc?”

“Yeah”, Daria said, turning to Davies. “Remember
when we did this on Mike? Lay still and let us do the pulling.” Davies nodded
and made an effort to smile.

Daria gripped Davies’ right wrist and
placed her right foot up against his rib cage and laid her left leg across his
chest, holding his arm between her legs. Fang wrapped his enormous arms around
Davies’ chest to help pull him opposite of Daria. Wilks grabbed the upper
thighs and hips while Scan held onto Davies’ legs.

“On my mark, I’m going to pull and reset
the socket”, Daria said. “Fang, you pull in the opposite direction while
everyone else keeps him still. OK, three, two, MARK!” Fang was quick to pull on
Daria’s early cue. Davies hadn’t a chance to tense up yet so the shoulder went
back into the joint easily, accompanied with a loud pop and scream from Davies.

“It’s in.” Daria checked his wrist for a
pulse to make sure that they hadn’t accidentally damaged anything after
reducing the dislocation. “Sorry to have to fool you like that. But without any
pain meds to give you, I couldn’t have you tighten up on me at the last second.
Fang here would’ve ripped you apart.”

“No problem, Doc.” Davies couldn’t
manage a smile this time. “Just don’t fix that concussion yet. I think that
it’s the only thing stopping some of the pain right now.”

“He should be fully operational in a day
or two”, Daria said as she applied a medicspray with steroidal and cellular
healing agents into Davies’ shoulder.

“Form up on me”, Emily called to
everyone. “There’s something you should know.” This got everyone’s attention. “The
information you are about to get is top, and I mean top, secret. I was briefed
before we entered the hole and was given strict instruction that all of you
were on a need-to-know basis only. Well, I think you need to know.”

“Damn right”, Scan said, holding up his
stump. Wilks eyed him down into silence.

Emily gave them a complete history of
the dig site that was found more than five years ago and what had happened
since then. “We were sent to this planet to find,” she gestured to the corridor
that they stood in, “this. Although the top brass didn’t know what they were
looking for, it seems that our team has found it.” Actually, she thought, the
other team was unlucky enough to find it first.

“I knew as much as the rest of you did
up until my briefing this morning. They never thought that we would encounter
resistance down here. Those aliens,” she pointed to the only one left, “must
have come from a nearby ship. They weren’t on sensors but I’m willing to bet
that they can easily defeat our sensors.”

“So what’s our place in the whole scheme
of things?” Davies managed to get out.

“We are looking for technology that will
help us fight whoever those things are. This outpost was destroyed almost a
thousand years ago and if we can find who did it or how they did it, we just
might be able to save the Coalition.”

“A thousand years is a long time, Lieutenant,”
Wilks interjected. “Don’t you think that they might have advanced in that time?
Their own past technology might not even be strong enough to defeat them now.”

“Their thousand-year-old technology is
still two thousand years ahead of us. Anything we find will surely be of some
benefit.” I hope I’m right, she thought silently. “And consider our most recent
encounter. Something down here is worth their effort to protect it. We just
need to find it, and fast.”

Wilks stood. “Considering what the
lieutenant has just told us, I have some information that might be pertinent as
well.” His crew looked at him; they knew exactly what he was talking about. “Before
this mission began, my team performed a recon on some of our outer region
colonies. They had been destroyed by these aliens. At the time, we only knew
that we were investigating some colonies on the outer rim that had been
attacked. We weren’t informed of everything the lieutenant just told us.”

Daria realized that she must have met
Wilks on the night he finished the mission he was now debriefing them on. He
continued, “The colonies were mostly just gone. No blown up structures, hardly
any bodies, nothing. Just gone. No other way to really describe it. Some
buildings around the outer edges of the colony were still standing but no one
was home.

“The few bodies we did find looked like
Snyder’s. Had to have been the same aliens with these energy weapons. If anyone
from my team remembers something, anything that you feel might be pertinent,
let the lieutenant know. It could be the difference between living and dying
for us. I’ll take the heat for you revealing top-secret information if it comes
to that.”

Everyone nodded but no one could think
of anything that might help. Wilks had summed it up. Nothing.

“Scan and Fang”, Emily took a commanding
posture, “those energy weapons are too big for any of us humans. Do you think
that you two can handle them?”

Fang looked like the weapon almost fit
him as he held it, but not quite. Still, he was definitely strong enough to
carry it without a problem. “We tried using one on the shield generator already
but even it couldn’t defeat it. I can use it, though, if any of those guys come
back.” He nodded with disgust towards the pile of scraps that once belonged to his
enemy who had no honor.