Extinction (53 page)

Bryce didn’t hesitate any longer.
He brought his weapon up and put three rounds into the rogue marine’s chest. At
this close distance, the training rounds still had a lot of kinetic energy so
the marine not only got three uniform shocks, he had three distinct thuds in
his chest as well. The shooter went down and Bryce followed the target with his
weapon to make sure that the threat was truly gone. Bryce had to clear his head
as he kept repeating to himself that this was only training; he hadn’t really
killed a marine from his own team.

The team leader came to Bryce and
put a hand on his rifle, helping Bryce to lower it to the ready position. “Why
did you shoot Marcus?”

Bryce looked at the man whose
name tag read O’Connor. “I, uh, he was shooting our own guys.”

O’Connor looked at him. “And? Do
you know why he was doing that? Did you stop to think about what was going on
before you just lit him up?”

Bryce felt as if his feet were
starting to get back under his body again so he spoke with a little more
confidence this time. “Once I realized it was him shooting at us, I thought to
myself ‘
WHY?!’
But then as I looked back towards him, I realized that it
didn’t matter why, he just was, and he had to be stopped. The
why
was
irrelevant at that point.” An old memory came back to Bryce and he added, “Sometimes,
we have to be the Reaper. We have to collect the souls of those who are broken,
who can’t be a part of society no matter how much we want them to be. I’m a corpsman,
and this was preventive medicine. I kept him from hurting any more of my men.”

O’Connor smiled at Bryce. “Reaper,
huh? That’s your new name, kid.” The marine who Bryce had shot was starting to
get up and Bryce brought his rifle back up but O’Connor stopped him. “Easy,
Reaper, all part of the game today.”

The marine got up fully. “Nice
shooting, killer.” He dusted himself off a bit. “Sorry, Gunny, you know how it
goes, orders and all that.”

Bryce looked around with
confusion so the marine filled him in. “Sometimes in these scenarios they give
a soldier secret orders to attack their own unit. It simulates the real
possibility that one of your own guys goes nuts in a firefight or maybe you
have a double-crosser in your unit. There’s plenty of reasons for that shit to
happen in real life and it
HAS
happened. That’s why they throw it in
every now and then.” He looked back at O’Connor with a huge smile. “Honestly,
though, I was pretty excited they picked me. I couldn’t wait to nail some of
you turds.”

O’Connor patted his buddy on the
shoulder. “Yeah, yeah, laugh it up. Everyone who’s still alive, rally up and
get ready to move out. We still have a mission to complete. Those of you who
are dead, make your way back to staging and get something to eat, clean your
weapons and get some rest—in that order.”

As the rest of the team moved
out, O’Connor could see that Bryce was still conflicted with what just
happened. “Look, son, you did the right thing. I know that even in a training
scenario doing something like can rattle your cage, but let it go. I have a
fourteen-year-old son at home, Mike Junior, and I always want to make it home
to him and his mother. So I don’t care who’s shooting at us, bad guys, good
guys, it doesn’t matter; shoot everyone who is shooting in your direction. You
got that, Reaper? Everyone.”

“Copy that, Gunny.” Reaper moved
out with the rest of his unit and eventually caught up with the larger force
that had been through the area first.

Two days later, Reaper finally
got to shower and sleep in a real rack and not on the ground. After the
graduation ceremony, O’Connor found Reaper and introduced him to his wife and
son. Then O’Connor took him to a major who was talking with a bunch of new marine
graduates.

“This is the major.” O’Connor
introduced Reaper to the officer.

Reaper came to attention and
saluted. “Good to meet you, sir.”

The major returned the salute. “Reaper,
huh? I like it. The irony of a corpsman being called that makes me smile.” The major
put a friendly hand on Reaper’s shoulder as they spoke.

“This is the kid who saw through
your mind-fuck, sir. Shot Jinx without a second thought. Well, maybe without a
third thought.” O’Connor was obviously proud of him.

“Good going, kid. I love that old
gag. I got to do it when I was a young lieutenant and it made my day. Not to
mention that after you get shot, you get to go back to staging for some rest.”
The major waved at some unseen person in the crowd. “I’ve got to go talk to an
old friend. I’ll see you two later. And Reaper, I know you want to be a doctor
but if you change your mind, let me know and I’ll be sure to get you a great
assignment right out of the gate if you’re interested. And even if you do
become a doctor, make sure you look me up. I’ve got some pretty good
assignments for officers, too. A lot of fun, I tell ya.” The last words he said
with an eerily excited tone in his voice.

Reaper looked at O’Connor. “How
do I look him up? I don’t even know his name.” Reaper realized that the major was
the only uniformed person he had ever seen without a nametag on his chest.

“You don’t really look him up; he
looks you up.” O’Connor was leading them towards the food tent where his wife
and kid were waiting for them. “Trust me, you’ll hear from the major again
someday, regardless of what path you choose.”

~

Gradually the food tent faded
from Reaper’s mind and he could hear a beeping near his left ear. He was
acutely aware of a dripping sound coming from somewhere in the…room? Was he in
a room? A bed? He had no idea of where he was or what was happening. Reaper’s
mind was foggy even though every sound he heard was crystal clear and almost
too loud for him to think it was a comfortable level.

He started to talk, to yell, to
something, anything to find out whether there were other people around him. He
felt his mouth was unnaturally closed, something holding it shut. As he worked
his mouth, he felt a plastic tube between his teeth. His senses were coming
back to him now, and he could also feel something pushing air into his lungs,
lungs that hurt with each breath, lungs that were being used by both him and
some unseen force trying to make them move at a rhythm different than his own.

In his cloudy mind, he started to
put the pieces together. He was on a ventilator; a tube was in his trachea and
the machine was breathing for him, or at least trying to. He couldn’t see and
everything was blurry because he still had the surgical tape over his eyelids
to keep them closed so his eyeballs wouldn’t dry out. He tried to move his hand
to his face to remove the tape so he could see. Damn, his arms were restrained—standard
practice for a sedated and tubed patient in the ICU.

He could feel his breathing
changing even more, still fighting the machine that was trying its best to keep
up with the parameters someone had given it to fulfill. Then the machine to his
left started beeping more and he realized it was his ventilator, telling the
nurse the patient was starting to buck the machine, starting to wake up.

He heard footsteps near his bed
and a soft feminine voice. “Hey kiddo, just relax, you’re safe now. You’re
okay.”

He reached again for the tape
covering his eyes, already forgetting that he was tied to the railing.

“No, no, dear, don’t pull, that’s
bad. We can’t have you taking your tube out yet; you’ll hurt yourself. Just
hold on for a few more minutes and we’ll have it out of your throat.” He felt
her hands covering his and holding them down.

I know!
He screamed in his
head.
I’m not trying to pull my own tube. I’m not an idiot. I just want this
damn tape off my eyes. Please!

Reaper heard another set of
footsteps and then felt gentle fingers pulling the tape off his eyes and
another hand shielding the harsh light above from entering his likely
over-dilated pupils. He blinked a few times, his eyelids now free from their
unjust imprisonment. When he was able to focus, he saw his dad standing over
him. A tear escaped Reaper’s eyes and even more came from his father.

Reaper’s dad leaned down and
kissed his son on the forehead and then hugged him as best he could given the
circumstances. Reaper tried to nuzzle him back with his face but the equipment
holding his breathing tube in place didn’t allow his head to travel far enough.

His dad looked him in the eyes. “Hey
son. I’m going to untie your hands but you can’t reach for your tube, all right?”
Reaper nodded his agreement. “I’m not your doctor, so I can’t take it out for
you but I’ll unhook the ventilator so you can breathe on your own. My buddy Hal
is on his way up, should be here any second to get this out of you. He did a
great job on your surgery. You’re going to be just fine.”

Reaper saw his medical chart
sitting on his legs; his dad must have set it down there. He pointed at it and
made a “give me” motion with his hand. His dad just chuckled at his son wanting
to read his own medical chart while he was still intubated.

Reaper took the chart that was
handed to him, found the writing stylus at the top of the tablet and then
flipped through his chart until he got to a blank screen that was for doctors
to free-hand patient notes that didn’t fit any of the pre-made forms in the
electronic chart. He scribbled, “Did the man live?”

His father looked at the chart. “Yes,
he did, thanks to you. They brought you two in with your hand still in his
chest. I have no idea how that worked for the entire transport but it did. They
separated you two in the ER. Tim took over for you and Hal took you straight to
the OR. Not a single trauma surgeon here could’ve done better. I’m very proud
of you, son.”

Reaper scribbled a few more
words. ‘Good. I’m glad. Dad. I think I want to do something different, not be a
doctor.’

Trevor cringed at the thought that
the trauma his son had gone through had just turned him away from medicine
forever. “Okay, son, whatever you want, you know that your mother and I will
support you. We can talk about it later, when you can actually talk again, that
is.”

More writing. “I still want to be
in medicine, but I want to be in the field, with the marines. I want to do more
of what I did today.“

And then he wrote, “Except the
getting shot part. That sucked. Horribly.”

The Warrior Interrogation
Planet – Knock Knock

The warrior sat at his post, never
wavering and always diligent in his duties. He had never been in battle and
always feared he would die without ever being in one. Among his brothers, dying
old was not considered a bad thing unless the years you lived weren't earned
and fought for in battle. Now that his base was being used to interrogate the
prisoners from the other side of the galaxy, he was hopeful for the first time
in his life that his days of not being battle-tested would soon end.

His warrior brothers weren't prone to
discussing rumors so the information he had heard passed along in the corridors
must be true. The War Council was close to giving the order to invade the
quarantined section of the galaxy. Once they were done processing the prisoners
at this base, they would make their move.

The Council had all of the information
they needed to attack but they had learned long ago not to take anything for
granted. Victory is won using all of your resources and abilities to their
fullest extent and not relying on just the warriors' seemingly inexhaustible
brute strength and numbers.

Ever since the quarantine, the warriors
couldn't rely on inexhaustible numbers because they lost access to their
birthing planet a short time after the disaster began. Luckily for them, the
member of the royal family who was assigned to the birthing planet, Royal
Cousin G'Pleh, saw what was happening and took actions to mitigate the damage
from the epidemic. He launched fifty million stasis birthing pods from the
planet and sent them to a warrior-controlled training planet.

According to the royal's personal logs,
he believed a revolt was occurring and the virus wasn't a natural threat but
instead an engineered part of the coup. He had had no physical contact with the
expansion fleet, none of the royal family or even any other Nortes for over a
month. He liked his privacy and spent most of his time in his private chambers
or other private sections of the palace that no one else was allowed to enter.
Dr. D’Bath had said that he was an agoraphobe but he had always dismissed that
diagnosis and just believed that he liked his personal space.

Either way, when the news of the virus
began to spread, he felt a certain sense of vindication for his choice of
living arrangements. After all, he would now become the sole surviving member
of the royal family and as such, the emperor. But then he, too, became sick.

The official reason from D’Bath was that
he must have been infected by the trinkets the emperor had sent to G'Pleh from
the infected region of space. G'Pleh rejected this theory because he hated the emperor
for making him the caretaker of the birthing planet and had never accepted a
single gift from the emperor. Every gift the emperor sent was summarily placed
in the incinerator before G'Pleh even touched or looked at it.

G'Pleh knew he had been poisoned but
couldn't prove it. He sent his logs, along with the warriors' stasis pods, and
they contained his theories on the virus and quarantine. More than a thousand
years later, his theories would prove to be very close to the actual truth of
what had happened but at the time the War Council thought he was just mad from
the infection. G'Pleh was always considered an odd man, as was evident by his
posting as far from the empire as possible.

As for the warriors' brute strength,
they found out that without the constant supply of reinforcements from the
birthing planet, they couldn't just pound their way to victory.

About two hundred years after the quarantine,
some of the slave races had taken the opportunity to flee the crumbling empire.
None of them dared to fight the warriors or outright revolt; they just left as
quickly and quietly as they could. The escaped slaves made contact with another
species known as the Cherta. The Cherta were strong and advanced and although not
completely peaceful, they had come to learn that sometimes negotiating was
preferable to fighting.

When the Cherta learned of the
collapsing empire, they took the opportunity to make contact with the warriors.
The Cherta had mapped out the empire and put together a list of resources they
wanted and in return they offered to help the warriors rebuild what they could
of the empire and learn a new way of living.

The War Council, of course, reacted to
the offer in the only way they knew how, in the way that was genetically mapped
and imposed on them: they fought the Cherta. It was a long and devastating war
that went on for almost ten years before the Cherta left the empire's space.
Thousands of Cherta were captured and became a new category of slaves never
known to the empire before: they were the advisors.

This war taught the warriors many things
and proved to be the unifying event that allowed them to break some of the
shackles that had been bread into them for millennia. They still needed and
craved a royal family to serve but they learned how to get by without an emperor
and maintain the empire until an heir to the throne could be found.

The Nortes were becoming extinct in the empire.
Their DNA had been checked and rechecked since the quarantine, looking for
someone with even a shred of royal blood in them. Unbeknownst to the warriors,
the emperor had been very thorough in making sure that no one with royal DNA
would be left behind or alive in the empire.

Shortly after the quarantine took place,
almost twelve percent of the Nortes population committed suicide, knowing that
their way of life was over. Those left in the military tried to take control of
the empire, knowing what would happen with the warriors and no royal blood to
lead them; the entire Nortes military was wiped out by the warriors because of
the attempt.

The rest of the Nortes tried to make the
best of the circumstances and continue with life as they knew it. There were,
of course, the Nortes involved with the coup who were supposed to help take
over the new empire and free the slaves after the remaining warriors had died
off. Unfortunately, G'Pleh ruined those plans when he sent out the fifty
million warrior stasis pods. So the Nortes did what they could to continue
planting the seeds of unity but eventually the movement all but died out. Every
once in a while, the warriors would run across a small cell of Nortes trying to
revive the movement or live according to their own beliefs but those Nortes
were always found and brutally killed to be made an example of.

The remaining Nortes still lived far
better than the majority of other races in the empire, coming in third to the
warriors and Cherta. Surprisingly, the Cherta had the best life of all the
races in the empire. The warriors were simple in their ways and needed very
little to be happy, or at least their version of genetically programmed
happiness. A place to sleep, food to hunt and eat, and someone to fight every
once in a while was all they needed or wanted.

Once the warriors' needs were met,
everything else went to their Cherta advisors to make sure they could keep
advising. More than once some of the Cherta tried to use their advisory
positions to move the empire in a new direction that gave the Cherta even more
power. Those schemes were eventually discovered and abruptly ended with savage
brutality.

So while the empire still existed, it
had inevitably shrunk in size, power, and intellect. There had been very little
advancement in any of the areas that are a part of any normal civilization. The
empire's focus had shifted from advancement to maintenance and had been
steadily failing on both fronts at a snail's pace for a thousand years.

~

A small shock brought the warrior's attention
back to the present and he checked his personal shield. The damn thing was
malfunctioning again. Most warriors in the empire didn't have personal shields;
they were issued to long-range scouting parties, infiltration teams, and of
course the War Council. Most bases had a limited number of shields that were
passed on to whoever was on sentry duty. Those shields were constantly used and
quite often constantly failing. This base only had three, two of which worked
and one of those was about to fail.

The warrior had found that throughout
every species, every culture, every level of sentient evolution, when a piece
of tech didn't work, the user hit the offending item to try to beat it into
submissive self-repair. The warrior's heavily manipulated genetic code was no
different and he let himself chuckle as he struck the shield's controls and
thought of the universal oddity.

His chuckling ceased when he realized
what he was doing and thinking. First off, warriors didn't chuckle. Second, his
thoughts had begun to stray into tangents about how some things were universal
among the slave races, Nortes and now even some of the warriors. And if some
things were universal, maybe they weren't all that different from one another.
These thoughts were unacceptable and he felt the urge to turn himself in to his
superiors for evaluation and most likely termination. He knew he should, felt
he had to, but somehow he was able to just barely keep from doing it. Another
thing he shouldn't have been able to do.

The warrior's internal turmoil ceased
when the perimeter alert on his control panel lit up a deep and bright blue. He
then began cycling through the security cameras until he saw something almost
as unbelievable as his most recent thoughts had been. One of the human prisoners
was escaping! But that was impossible. How could he get out of a torture tube,
which is impossible, and then get past any one of the thirty or so warriors
currently at this base?

However impossible it was, there he was
crawling away from the airlock at security station three, the post next to his
own. The human was in a torn uniform and bleeding from several places on his
body. Something just wasn't right about the scene he was looking at. The
torture tubes generally didn't cause that much bleeding or tearing of the
clothes; the process was much more surgical. Of course, no one had ever escaped
a torture tube before so maybe that's why this human looked differently than
what the warrior was used to.

Regardless, he needed to act. No one was
at security station three right now so it was up to him to take care of things.
According to protocol, he should have called for backup before exiting the base
security doors, but he didn't. He felt the need to prove himself and his
loyalty to the empire after having such seditious thoughts earlier. And just in
case he didn't go to war alongside his brothers against the humans, he wanted
to take this one chance to fight one of the humans on his own. He was just a
little disappointed that this human was already injured and wouldn't be able to
put up a proper fight.

~

Seth waited and watched patiently as
Blaze crawled from one airlock to the other. They made it to the base without
being detected but the airlocks seemed impenetrable with the gear they had with
them. Stealth had kept them alive so far, so they continued to use it to their
advantage.

The plan was simple: make Blaze look
like an escapee and then trip the base alarms. When an airlock opened to
retrieve the prisoner, the team would attack and infiltrate. The not-so-simple
part was setting off the base alarm. They tried prying the airlock, hoping it
would alert the base to an attempted break-in: nothing. Throwing rocks at what seemed
to be a communications array on the roof: nothing. Jumping up and down in front
of a security camera: nothing. Apparently the enemy also thought their base was
impenetrable because nothing seemed to set off the alarm. Seth wondered how
high their security thresholds must be in order to allow all of these attempts
to go unnoticed.

Seth hoped that his enemies were at
least a little similar in some security protocols, otherwise the last thing he
could think of wouldn't work. He told Blaze to go to the airlock entry code
interface and start typing in random patterns on the keypad. Hopefully too many
incorrect codes would set off the alarm. There was also the astronomically slim
chance that Blaze might accidentally enter the proper code.

Blaze had just barely touched the keypad
when it began to rapidly blink a deep and bright blue and the security camera
swung in his direction. Blaze hit the ground and began to slowly crawl away
from the door. Seth surmised that Blaze's bloody finger, from his prisoner
makeover, had set off a DNA sensor in the keypad and subsequently the alarm. He
thought it was odd that the alarm's color was blue.

The door began to cycle open and Seth
waited for the enemy soldier to cross the imaginary line in the sand that had
been decided on earlier. No one from Seth's team had seen the enemy yet so he
let out a soft whisper. “Holy shit.”

The comms were more than sensitive
enough to pick up a whisper because they were designed to transmit even
subvocal speech. Surgeon subvocalized, “Steady everyone. He's a big son of a
bitch but we have more than enough people and firepower to drop him. Get ready,
Blaze, he's almost at the line.”