I only have shadowy images of what happened next. It’s like my mind doesn’t want to remember what I saw as I pushed past the big dead ape and looked out into the darkness of the rest of the doom ship down a dark passage filled with the future’s monsters. I have images. Impressions. Nightmares. A sea of something so angry and hateful it makes being human seem like a weak and scared thing.
I was popping the grenades and flinging them out… I felt numb. My fingers were numb and bloody. I got the grenades off my chest rig. The Kid’s too. And I flung them into the angry monkeys crouching and crouch-running forward to do us in. Coming from the darkness like the monsters they were. Are. Screaming and shrieking. Words I could almost understand…
I think that’s where my mind broke.
The Kid blazing away behind me because this is the stuff heroes are made of. That’s what we all tell ourselves, right? That’s what the dead were thinking before they went down.
Gains. Boom Boom. All the others.
The Monarch in my ear telling me she had what we’d come for. But that might as well have been from far away and not right now.
The Kid pulling me away as the captain gave the order to pull back to the next station.
I didn’t come to myself until we were away from the Node. There was another firefight. Another element of monkeys and apes tried to intercept us. It wasn’t until the lift out of the starship, crossing through a glass tube toward the hive-like science base that had been built in the rock wall of the canyon, that I came to myself. Sort of.
I looked down at my chest rig.
The claw of a dead monkey was still hanging there. Clutching in death and its removal from whomever it had belonged to.
Had I done that?
Things were hazy.
The Little Girl was looking at me the way she always did.
“He’s coming soon,” she whispered. Just to me. I don’t know that anyone else heard it. We weren’t out of this just yet. Her friend was coming to play.
“Three Ultra Marine Raptor-class dropships inserting onto the station, Captain,” announced Hauser. I looked up and saw their shadows cross over the opening of the canyon above the Crash. We were inside a lift moving from the ruins of the ship to the wall of the tube where a new science lab had been established by the science teams.
“Well,” said Choker. “That’s just great.”
I did the reloading work. Wiping away the blood. New magazine in sidearm. The Bastard was dry, and no one had any spare ammo.
Last mags for everyone else.
The captain handed me his shotgun. The legendary Beretta 1301 Tactical. A relic from when man was free and made great weapons to keep it that way.
Freedom. She, the Monarch, was gonna set everyone free with a superweapon that made the mem the Monarchs controlled us with good and useless. Sure. And all that mem Amarcus and Dog Platoon was recovering, it would be worthless too. And wasn’t that our deal? Her deal with us. All the mem we could carry away to get paid enough to fix the ship on Blackrock?
I wanted to tell the captain. But I didn’t. And I had no idea why I didn’t. I just didn’t.
Choker was wrapping the captain’s wounded hand as the elevator climbed up along the canyon wall. Raging about Ultras and this being a real gyp-job on the company. Boy, I thought, he didn’t know the half of it. We weren’t even gonna get paid. I had no idea what to do with that info. But as I looked around, everyone was alive. Banged up. Even the Monarch had caught damage from a claw that had dragged itself across her fancy suit. Cutting through armor that should have resisted mere monkey claws. I saw the rage evident in the white flesh and blood there where she’d been caught by the slash.
Down below us, just as we reached the science base hive along the far canyon wall, I looked back at the ship one last time. It was crawling with apes and monkeys, surging along its length. They looked like demons in the darkness racing for souls.
Our souls.
And I heard the Little Girl whisper again, “He’s coming soon, Sergeant.”
I smelled fall leaves. Fall leaves burning.
He was coming.
The Wild Thing.
Chapter Forty-Seven
“I am currently tapped into the station’s motion detection systems,” stated Hauser as we moved through the upper decks of the science station built near the Crash. “Tracking three Ultra teams moving into the base now. Combat posture alpha.”
We were in a wedge and we looked rough. At best. Even Hauser was limping from a badly articulating leg joint. His combat chassis had taken a lot of abuse. Abuse meaning heavy damage. A lot more than the rest of us. But he was still carrying the Pig and scanning for targets. We were low on ammo and had to make the terminal for the high-speed tube to the airfield. The problem for us right now was the Ultra Marine Raptor dropships. High-speed hunter-killer variants, down in the main plaza between the terminal and the hive-like science base full of windows and levels looking out at the big wreck of a starship disappearing off into the tunnel darkness.
The drops had come in and landed their teams. Now the teams were hunting for us and the drops were on ground standby.
The science labs we were currently moving slowly through were quiet and heavy in that way deeply reinforced data-gathering stations feel. The soft lighting and carpet. The heavy processors quietly humming their number-crunching titterings. The opposite of what we did. Here
