Bone Rider (2 page)

“Harris!” he bellowed, signaling the burly sergeant who’d been serving under him for a few years. Too many rookies around; he needed someone he knew was competent. “Sit rep in ten!”

Harris called back an affirmative and got going. He’d have a preliminary status report ready by the time Brennan had called in this SNAFU
{2}
. Now where the hell in this mess had the radio ended up?

Brennan scanned his surroundings again, pausing for a moment to squint at the column of dark smoke that had risen in the western sky over the crash site like an exclamation mark. Huh. Missiles usually didn’t burn up. UXOs didn’t employ brake mechanisms. Missiles in general didn’t usually
have
brake mechanisms. They were supposed to hit their targets at high velocity to add more oomph to their boom. So a missile, especially a defective one, slowing down before impact didn’t make sense. It might spin out of control, possibly flip around, especially when the targeting system was screwed up, but brake? No way. Manned aircrafts, on the other hand… that was a whole different ballgame. Could’ve been one of those top-secret jets coming down, only it had been too big for a plane. A shuttle, maybe?

They wouldn’t know for sure until they’d gotten to the crash site and done some recon, but first Brennan wanted to know for sure the rest of the world was still standing. The combat-net radio had been dug out of one of the collapsed tents and set up well away from the heavier pieces of equipment. Since the earth tremor had been caused by a shockwave and not an earthquake, Brennan thought this was probably unnecessary, but he wasn’t about to reprimand his men for erring on the side of caution. Especially not given the circumstances. He nodded at Sergeant Mosely, who’d been bent over the radio but looked up when Brennan’s shadow fell over him.

“Base on the line for you, sir,” Mosely barked. He didn’t have to put much effort into it; the man was so used to relaying orders through static and lousy reception that his voice easily penetrated the cottony barrier between Brennan’s brain and his surroundings. “Readability is five by five.”

“Roger that.” …
said the half-deaf captain
, Brennan thought ruefully. Nothing to be done about it. He sat down in front of the radio and got to work.

T
EN
minutes later, they’d established that at least the Texas incident had not been part of a bigger attack. This was good news as far as Brennan was concerned. The bad news was that whatever had crashed almost on top of them was definitely not of US origin. Brennan’s description of the glimpse he’d caught of a huge metal object spinning in the air and slowing down before impact had been met with a terse, “Wait out,” and a break that had lasted for several minutes before Base had called back with the information that a special recon team was about to be deployed from Fort Mabry. Since Brennan and his men were already on location, they were ordered to move in and assess the situation. “
Very fucking carefully
” was implied, seeing as most of the troops currently under Brennan’s command were inexperienced and Brennan himself had never actually seen combat.

Sergeant Harris, who’d been waiting patiently at a respectful distance, took the news with equanimity. The men were mostly fine, he reported. One of the engineers who’d been working on a jeep’s engine had broken his arm when the hood had come down, two privates had suffered minor concussions, and Private Rolston, with his usual luck and grace, had managed to get tossed into a prickly pear patch. That was it on the injury front. Most of the equipment had made it through in one piece, too, so they were good to go.

Brennan’s platoon was as eager to check out the wreckage as their captain and the men were ready to roll in record time. They left their wounded and a skeleton crew at base camp and went out in the jeeps, taking the direct route to the crash site. Brennan’s hearing was better than before, but he knew none of them were back to one hundred percent yet. So not only was he moving into a possibly hostile environment with rookie troops, he was also doing it while they were all deaf to some degree. At least it was only a recon mission, but it was still not his idea of a good time.

The closer they got to their destination, the tenser they all became. The air smelled burnt, pervaded with the dusty scent of overheated soil and the unexpectedly aromatic fragrance of charred vegetation. It was hard to tell how much of the eerie silence was due to the shock of the impact as opposed to their collective hearing impairment, but Brennan didn’t spot a single animal anywhere, not even from the corner of his eye. The bulk of what had once been a rounded hill covered in brush and summer-yellowed grass must’ve been pounded flat, driven into the ground and compressed into geologists’ delight, but more than enough material was still there, shoved aside by the blast wave. The men were forced to abandon their vehicles and continue on foot once they reached those wrinkled ridges of the crater, the four-wheel drive no match for the mess of rocks and overturned earth before them. They fanned out in three squads to cover a bigger area and Brennan led his unit straight up the slope and to the rim, the stones still warm under their feet.

They crawled the last few feet on their bellies, careful not to present a target when peeking over the edge. Brennan felt his stomach cramp a little with anticipation. He’d never done anything quite like this. Checking out crash sites wasn’t included in his usual duties, and this wasn’t a textbook situation by any means. It made him tense with nerves and an adrenaline-fueled sense of excitement. He was intensely curious about what they were going to find down there. A shuttle? A drone? Some sort of new stealth plane?

Turned out it was something completely different, in every sense of the word. Apparently, aliens did, indeed, have big, creepy eyes, and were on the smallish side.

They compensated with big guns.

Brennan stared, paralyzed, as his brain tried to work through a number of realizations such as, no, those weren’t people down there even though they looked humanoid, and yes, he was sober and awake, and damn, if the ufologists got so much as a whiff of this, they would cream their geeky pants. He counted eight aliens huddled next to the… God help him, that really was a spaceship. They looked tiny next to the immense metal structure, their skin milky white, their knees bent the wrong way, like a dog’s hind legs. They were dressed in something that reminded Brennan a bit of black battle dress uniforms. Looked like only four of them had made it out of the crash virtually unscathed; three were down on the ground, one writhing in pain, one holding on to an improvised tourniquet that kept it from bleeding out through the stump of its leg, one looking dead from the distance. The alien providing first aid didn’t look too hot, either. No telling if there were more of them still trapped or dead inside the wreck, which looked pretty mangled. It was a fairly big ship, though; seemed likely there’d be additional crew somewhere.

Brennan took all of this in with a glance, more interested in the four aliens standing guard. They didn’t look that different from their wounded companions, except that they were upright and alert, holding what had to be weapons and scanning the crater rim with glossy silver eyes. Sentries. The aliens were soldiers, Brennan thought, like recognizing like. Soldiers gone down in unknown but presumably hostile territory, and his heart started to hammer crazily at the realization.

He didn’t know what gave him and his men away, but suddenly the sentry aliens spun and focused on them, weapons coming up in what was probably reflex. Somebody on one of the other squads must’ve been spooked by the action—or the existence of aliens—badly enough to trigger a similar kind of impulse: they squeezed off a shot. Before Brennan could snap out an order to stand down, the aliens returned fire.

Things went to hell in a handbasket after that.

T
HIS
had
not
been the plan.

The plan had been to cut transmissions and sabotage the Widowmaker’s navigation system so they’d decelerate and drift off course for a bit. They were off course, alright. No contact with anybody, internal communications disabled as well as external, doors sealed shut, engines pushed to full speed. The ship was hurtling through space deep into uncharted territory—until a planet got in the way, that is. Then they barely scraped through a ring of small, artificial satellites, smashing a few of them in the process, and went down headfirst with little to no control over anything.

By that point, System Six had long come to the conclusion that he should’ve stuck to something simpler, because obviously the finer points of programming were beyond him. He might’ve owned up to what he’d done, but that would’ve meant signing his own death warrant and would’ve also been pointless, seeing as there was no way to relay the information to the engine room. He was stuck in the crew quarters with his host and three of the other armor systems, all of them strapped into the padded wall niches designed for this kind of situation and wrapped protectively around their vulnerable carriers.

Rik had stopped contributing semiconstructive suggestions and mindless bravado a while ago and was screaming unthinkingly in tune with the rising and falling wails of the audio alarms as the walls grew perceptively warmer around them. System Six hadn’t expected better from a creature like Rik. He did his best to tune out the shrieking and prepared to detach himself from his unloved host forcefully, unwilling to die twined into the slime bag who’d driven him to such extreme measures in the first place.

Out. Out. He wanted
out
, damn it.

He’d already started to tug free, unwrapping himself from Rik’s skeleton, pulling the connectors from his host’s spine, and was about to rip out of Rik’s skin, determined to take the fastest way out no matter what it did to Rik. They were going to die anyway. Just when he was about to launch himself to freedom, though, the ship hitched and jerked under them. Even buckled in securely, Rik’s stomach took offense at the flip and he would’ve thrown up their last meal, but System Six intervened. His host was disgusting enough on the inside; no need to put it out there for all the world to see. System Six suppressed the gagging brutally and strained all of their senses to figure out what was going on. Looked like the technical staff had finally bypassed the ill-conceived changes and regained a measure of control. Too late to avoid a crash, probably, but somehow they’d managed to spin the ship, righting them so the emergency brakes would actually slow them down instead of merely adding that final dramatic touch to their demise.

They still hit the ground at critical velocity.

I
T
WAS
dark when System Six and his host regained consciousness. Quiet. The only sounds around them were the creak of deformed metal settling and straining, the raspy breathing of the other survivors, and the drip of fluid somewhere close by.

What happened?
Rik thought, and System Six had to deliberate for a moment to come up with a non-offensive answer. He was still tied to Rik, still needed him to survive; he couldn’t risk offending Rik or tipping him off as to his armor’s mutinous disposition.

It appears we crashed
, he offered finally.

“But why?” Rik whined, fumbling for the buckles of the safety harness. “Jas?” he asked out loud, his voice shaking. “Cen? You there?”

Someone groaned; then, one by one, they reported in, unstrapped themselves, and regrouped near the exit of their quarters. Outside, emergency lights were flickering weakly, offering just enough illumination for them to comb the tilted, warped rooms and corridors for other survivors. There weren’t many. The tech crew had saved their lives by flipping the ship and engaging the tail thrusters at the last second, but that meant the rear section had taken the brunt of the impact. The doors had been sealed; there’d been nowhere to go and the techs had known it. They had sacrificed themselves to give the rest of the crew a fighting chance. System Six hadn’t been created to feel guilt, but he knew no other name for the uncomfortable emotion nagging at him when he realized that despite the techs’ efforts, most of the crew had perished anyway in his badly executed bid for time.

The four soldiers and their armor systems stared at the mangled, partly melted mess of metal that had once been the heart of the ship. They didn’t need to share the results of their mental calculations. Nobody could’ve survived in there, not even the two armor carriers that had last been seen headed that way. The entire back end had been destroyed, including the engine room, sleeping quarters, and parts of the science and medical areas. It was a miracle the crash hadn’t engaged the self-destruction protocols or directly activated the doomsday glands within the walls that would’ve turned the entire ship into a pool of acidic sludge.

Jas, the smallest, most agile of them, squeezed through a gap into the med lab. He found one dead doctor and one dying nurse whom he put out of his misery with a quick jab through the central nerve cluster at the back of the skull. In near total darkness, he searched the rest of the area, but couldn’t access the rooms beyond. They would’ve needed tools to cut through the compacted metal, but the burners had been in the equipment room next to the armory, which was situated next to the sleeping quarters, all of which had been squashed flat. Whoever might’ve survived and was trapped back there, they couldn’t get to them. Still, they spent some time searching for a different way in, checking air vents and supply chutes. Their efforts were in vain. The tail end of the Widowmaker had become a mass grave.

They did find some survivors in the end. The bridge was partly intact, but the systems failure had kept the shields from coming down over the huge, see-through front wall and the force of the crash had shattered the material and rained razor-sharp shards into the room. Two of the officers had been skewered in their seats. The commander had been lucky: he’d only lost a leg and was currently holding on to the belt he’d used as a makeshift tourniquet with grim-faced determination. Kir and Cen covered the broken window wall with the seat cushions and started the slow, painful process of moving Kom and his unconscious second-in-command out of the downed ship. They didn’t worry about whether or not they could survive in the environment outside. There were so many tears and holes in the hull they’d been breathing planet air practically since touchdown. It hadn’t killed them yet. Frankly, exposure to an alien biosphere was the least of their problems at the moment.