Extinction (27 page)

“Thanks, Doc. You got anything for this
headache?” Bloom asked, rubbing his forehead.

“Just a little violin playing for you.
Just kidding, I have something that should clear it up for you. Scan, how’s
that hand coming? You gonna be able to make it down that hole tomorrow?”

“Yeah. I’ll just need to seal it to help
prevent an infection. If you have any of those steroids that you used on Davies,
that would help some.”

Daria got out the steroid spray and left
the cellular repair solution in the bag. The cellular spray tended to act as a
coagulant in Trizites, which actually inhibited and even sometimes stopped
their natural healing abilities.

Steroids, on the other hand, helped to
repair muscle tissue and increase the red blood cell count, which increased the
amount of oxygenation within the body. Put those two together and steroids had
a tremendous healing ability.

Of course, even after hundreds of years
of advances in protein supplements and body conditioning resources, steroids
were still abused. Daria hated to see a marine on ’roids. They were usually
mean and strong enough as it was. An extra dose of testosterone just wasn’t
necessary.

Although, one time she was glad that a
fellow marine was a junkie. She was in a trench sitting in mud up to her waist,
taking fire from all directions. Her platoon had been ambushed and help was
five minutes out. That was about four minutes and thirty seconds too far.

A ’roid junkie marine was in the pit
next to Daria and started to freak out. Daria kept trying to calm him down and
was starting to reach into her pack to put sedative in her medicspray.

The huge marine turned to her with
glazed over eyes and said, “Cover me.” He grabbed the rifle of the dead marine next
to him along with his own and began running towards the first enemy position.
His armor took several rounds before the first one pierced his left shoulder.
He kept firing.

He slung his right weapon over his
shoulder and pulled two grenades from his chest and threw them into the first
machine-gun pit. He was close enough that the explosion ripped off his left arm
as shrapnel tore through his armor. He raised his right arm and kept firing.

He ran to the second pit and triggered a
mine on the way. He was thrown forward while his legs went in every other
direction. He kept firing.

With the second machine-gun pit cleared,
he turned to fire on the force occupying the opposite side of the pit his
platoon was stuck in. He took two rounds in the chest through his destroyed
armor. He kept firing.

Only when his right arm was finally shot
off by the enemy did he stop firing. When he saw Daria starting to squirm from
the pit towards him to help, he used the stump of his right wrist to arm his
last grenade. He rolled over on it so he would take the full blast and not harm
his would-be rescuer.

The platoon had been saved by a junkie.
She had never really liked that guy, she couldn’t even remember his name, but
she was glad that he had been around on that day or she wouldn’t be around
right now. Of course, she mused to herself, that might not be for long anyway.
She handed Scan the medicspray of Deca.

Emily walked by and gave Daria a smile
and a nod. Bloom stood. “Hey el-tee, let’s see what we can make of this
equipment before we sack out.”

“Sounds good. I think I located a
command terminal in that room we were in before the attack. Hopefully it’s a
little friendlier than those lift wires.”

“Yeah, tell me about it. Let me get my datapad
from the gear. It has a decoding and language analyzer program that I created.
That guy,” he said pointing to the covered body of the alien prisoner, “sounded
like he was speaking some familiar languages mixed together. If so, it shouldn’t
be too hard to translate.”

“If they occupied this space more than a
thousand years ago, it would make sense that their language had been passed on
to indigenous species in this sector. Over that length of time and a separation
of cultures, it could’ve very easily sprouted into hundreds of dialects by now”,
Emily replied to Bloom as the two left Daria’s earshot.

Daria turned to Davies and took a vital
signs reading off the patch she had placed on his forehead. She stroked his
blond hair out of the way, which had grown a little too long since they took
this so-called “cush” assignment. She began to feel very attached to this marine.
She had already lost one man who she loved and didn’t even want to imagine
losing a second. Without even thinking, she bent over and gently kissed the
sleeping marine’s forehead.

Davies stirred but never opened his
eyes. Daria would watch him for the rest of the night.

~

“Hey el-tee, you really think that’s a
smart thing to do?” Bloom asked as he flinched every time Emily stabbed at
another button on the console.

“I don’t think that we could trip
anything from in here. But even if I could, it’s a risk that we’re gonna have
to take if we want to find anything out.” Emily stopped and smiled. Bloom
looked over her shoulder to see what she had accomplished. “There”, she said
and pointed to the screen. It was scrolling information. “One reason we haven’t
come even close to deciphering their language is that we haven’t found enough
characters to even try to configure a base alphabet to start from.”

Bloom’s lips curved into a smile that
matched his CO’s. “That should be more than enough for my program to run. I’ll
set it up to scan all night and it should compile enough characters to
translate this language. Unless, of course, this is an encrypted console and
these aren’t actual alphabet characters.” The two looked at each other. Bloom
shrugged and set up his scanner and started the program.

Emily left Bloom to his task and found
Wilks. He was talking to Fang about the watch rotation for the evening. “Sergeant,
can I speak with you for a moment?”

He gave a small nod and finished his
sentence to Fang, who then turned and walked towards the other members of the recon
team. “Can I help you, Lieutenant?”

“As you know, I’m new at this command
thing. I put Daria as my second because she is my friend and I trust her. But
you were right, corpsman aren’t put in charge for a reason.” Wilks tried to
interject but Emily waved him off and continued, “It might be even worse
command judgment to go back on my decision in the middle of things but I think
that it’s the right thing to do. From here on out, you’re my second, as it
should have been from the start. Daria will understand, and probably even be a
little bit relieved.”

“I think you’re making the right decision.
Daria is a good soldier and outstanding corpsman, but she isn’t a field leader.
Yet.” Emily looked at Wilks quizzically. “Snyder was my second and I’ll need
another. I think that Doc has the right temperament and instincts to do it
right. It’s just that no one’s ever taken the time to show her how it’s done,
because no one ever thought that she’d be doing it.”

“Isn’t Fang next in line?” Emily asked.

“Yeah, but he’d sooner run the team into
a death trap than try to think his way out of it. It’s just his way but it’s
not a way that I’ll condemn the rest of my men to if I’m not around to protect
them. No, Doc is the next best candidate. I’ll make her a part of as many of
the decisions I make as possible so that she gets a feel for it.”

“Good. And thank you.” Emily looked out
towards the center of the hole. “Now, let’s go over the watch rotation and a
few other things I have questions about.” Wilks raised an eyebrow as he cocked
his head towards his CO. “What?” Emily asked.

“Oh, nothing. It’s just, well, that’s
the first time an officer ever admitted to having a question. And especially to
a non-comm.”

“Well, get used to it. I’m sure there’ll
be plenty more.” The two soldiers talked for another hour before finally
hitting the sack.

~

Bloom was the first one up that morning.
He had been anxious all night and barely got any sleep at all. He was too
excited to see whether or not his translation program had worked.

“Yee haw!” Bloom shouted from the
console. He heard thirteen rifle bolts being worked and turned to see everyone
aiming in his general direction. “Sorry to wake you guys up. But it worked! My
program deciphered their language.”

All weapons were put to safe and groggy marines
roused themselves to walk to Bloom. Davies tried to get up but he was still a
little weak. Daria put her hand on his shoulder. “Just lie there. I’ll be back
in a few with some breakfast.”

“Where’s the can?” Davies asked.

“We’ve been using that room in the back.
It didn’t really hold anything that looked too important.” Daria helped her
friend to stand and then walked towards Bloom.

“After the first two hours,” the excited
linguist started, “the scanner started to only get repeated characters so it
guessed that it had a complete alphabet to go on. After a few hours of decoding,
it realized that the position of the character in a line was just as important
as the character itself.

“For instance, take the human letters
b
and
e
. Put together they spell
be
. Put them together with other
letters like “
in-between
” and they help to make a different word but
those two letters still sound the same. Everyone follow?” His teammates nodded.
He continued, “They have ninety-three characters in their alphabet. Each
character has a different sound depending on its numbered position in a
sentence. In English, a letter has one of several different sounds dependent on
the letters surrounding it.

“So to us, the
be
in
in-between
sounds the same as just a regular
be
whereas for them it would have a
totally different sound because the letters occupy the third and fourth
positions instead of the first and second.” He was bouncing like a puppy now.

“Well, that’s all wonderful, Mr. Wizard,
but have you actually learned anything?” Wilks was glad that his friend had
cracked the language, but alien dialect wasn’t as interesting to Wilks as
history or other fun subjects.

“Oh yeah, tons.” He gestured towards the
scanner. “It’s been reading all night.” The lieutenant pulled up shipping logs
and it seemed to be about six standard months’ worth of manifests.

“This hole was a main cargo bay with
weapons storage as well. My guess is that the team from site two set off the
weapons cache by accident somehow.”

“These shipping manifests.” Emily was
looking over the translated data. “They have food lists that show they had
quite a diverse population of species at this outpost. Many of these foods
represent the dietary needs of some of our Coalition members.”

“I ran a tissue and cellular analysis of
each of the aliens last night.” Daria spoke up from the back. “They have a high
level of animal proteins and very little or no plant proteins in their make-up,
suggesting that they are strict carnivores. They probably eat their food just
after death or even live. Either way, I don’t think that they cook it
beforehand.”

“That assumption would fit with the
large amount of game animals on this list. Some are things that I’ve eaten
before.” Emily continued to scan the list. “Let’s set the program to search for
keywords, like weapons, ships, and fuel. Anyone else got ideas?”

“How about prisoners, charts,
intelligence, and quarters assignments?” Wilks asked from Emily’s side.

“I’ll get right on it.” Bloom took the
device from Emily. “I’m going to set up a relay system that will allow this
unit to send information to a portable one that we’ll have with us. That way we
don’t have to wait around here for the data; we’ll just get it as we go.”

“All right, you’ve got as much time as
it takes for us to get our descent planned and rigged. Think you can do it?”
Emily asked, walking towards the group’s gear.

“All that and a few surprises to boot”, Bloom
answered without lifting his eyes from his console.

“We’ve reconfigured our gear for the
next leg of this trip”, Snake, the intelligence officer began. “We can dump a
lot of this commo and scanning equipment as we won’t be setting up a base camp.
We’ll need to be much lighter because we’re on the move now and just in case we
run into anymore of the indig pop around here.”

“I’ve got our descent planned and ready
to go as soon as we piton this side of the lift shaft and assign everyone their
positions. We should be ready for descent in fifteen mikes”, Fang offered.

“Get it ready and let me know when it’s
done.” Emily turned towards Daria. “Doc and Wilks, you’re with me. Everyone
else, get to work.”

“Aye, aye, ma’am”, came back at her in
unison.

Daria and Wilks walked to Emily, who
laid out the new chain of command to her soldiers. The threesome got casual
glances from the rest of the team; they knew what was taking place. Doc was a
good soldier, no one disagreed on that, but after what they encountered
yesterday, Wilks was the one for the job.

“Actually, el-tee,” Daria sighed, “that
takes a load off my shoulders. Wilks, you’re a good man. Piss poor drunk but a
good man.”

“Don’t think that you’re off the hook
entirely.” Wilks took over. “You’re still my second and you need to remember
that when the shit hits. And you know as well as I do, it’s not ‘if’ it hits
but ‘when.’ Especially after yesterday. I’m certain that we’ll have an
opportunity to test ourselves against those guys again.”

“You can count on me”, Daria said while
thinking,
just like Snyder knew he could count on you
.

“We’re all ready, el-tee”, Fang said.

“I’m just finishing up, too.” Bloom
walked out from the room he was in. “I was able to access their data banks and
sequence the download. It’s going to cycle through base operations first, then
their history files, and finally their personal logs.