Infinity Squad (39 page)

We opened the heavy door six inches and rolled grenade after grenade out to our right, like a broken grenade vending machine. It's not like we didn't have enough.

One shotgun blast panged off the door before the explosions started.

Red-Stripe turned his head, sensing the air. "One is killed. The rest are fleeing."

"Which way?"

"Right."

We went right.

They turned to fire at Zazlu and Juan, who were on point, crouching behind riot shields as they ran. Butcher and I popped over the shields to fire, because you couldn't hold the shield and a rifle at the same time. We chased the nine Omegas into one resurrection room at the end of the hall and paused outside the door.

"Zazlu, Butcher, you hold the hall with two spiders. Juan, rest of spiders, you're with me. Kill all infected."

We paused to breathe, and then Juan kicked in the door with me poking around his shield and the spiders behind me.

Non-Murphy resurrection doctor was dead on the floor and nothing was moving in the room. Just three by thirty rows of sleeping clones lay in the tanks before us. All wore buffering bands. All were naked.

"They took off their clothes," Juan said, nodding towards the piles of fatigues next to the door. "There's no way to tell which ones they are!"

"Oh, we're not even playing this game," I said, starting to fire my rifle into every single tank up the nearest row.

Eight clones sprang into motion in tanks throughout the room, pulling handguns or shotguns out of the water. Juan and I ducked as the spiders surged forward.

In a short, intense, fire- and claw-fight, we got them all. We tried for headshots or razor claws through their skulls, but about half the Omegas would be resurrecting again, somewhere. One spider was hit twice in the side, blue blood oozing out, another hit once in the knee. Damn it.

We pulled all the wires from of all the clones' heads, then I went to the main panel and read it before I grenaded it. There were four other resurrection stations active besides this one, the other three rooms and the one working lifeboat in orbit.

We came back out to the hall to see that Butcher and Zazlu had advanced all the way up to one junction of the 'H' and were involved in a rough firefight there. Made sense. If you were going to hold a hallway, you didn't want to hold just an end of it and get trapped, you wanted to hold an intersection. I heard the two grenades I had left on the main panel go off behind us. Three rooms to go.

We ran up to the intersection, two spiders limping.

"Phoenix and Immortals," Ann-Marie said between shots. "Some BlackShirts." And Omegas we had just killed, running up still dripping from the res tanks.

We needed to get past. Waiting only brought more enemy towards us. But these guys had rifles and shotguns, and I wasn't going to kill myself to get behind them again. We were pinned.

"Hey sir," Butcher said, crouching next to me. "Do you think any of these spiders can do a good Oakley impression?"

I started laughing.

It turned out White-Sort-of-Boobs could, even with a bullet in his knee. What the soldiers fighting us at the intersection heard in their heads was, "This is General Oakley. If you are fighting in one hallway, retreat to the other hallway! NOW! We are re-cuddling there."

"Re-grouping!" I whispered, sending him a better mental image.

"We are re-grouping there," the spider corrected.

And like good soldiers following the voices in their tactical implants, they retreated. Well, the BlackShirts and some of the Phoenix did. The infected listened to their own psychic voices in their head and stood their ground, not afraid to die. We weren't afraid to kill them, so it worked out. We kept their heads down while the spiders advanced but most clones died with their buffering bands on. We ran to the door of the other res room in this hall. We paused outside of that one too.

"Three, two, one-" I said, and then we kicked the door in.

This time the inhabitants did fire back right away, hard, and before the riot shields started cracking I looked up and saw clouds of seaweed hanging from the ceiling, just waiting to drop slugs on us. The clones waking up in the res tanks, probably the ones we had just killed, were already being showered with the white insects.

"Back! Back!" I yelled, and we rushed backwards out the door.

I looked over at Zazlu. "Gee, this would be a great time for a
flamethrower
."

He sighed. "Hold on."

He ran down the hall with some spiders to our barracks, where he had hidden the last working flamethrower before we had blown the armory up. They returned with it thirty seconds later, fresh human blood on his arms and the spider escort's claws.

"We got rushed by a group with clubs," he said, strapping the flamethrower on. He nodded at the res room. "They're probably waking up in there right now."

We set up. Standing well to the side of the door, I kicked it in once. A hail of bullets from at least three different guns went where I should have been standing. I kicked the door open from the side again. Same result. Kicked again, and fewer bullets this time.

I looked at Red-Stripe. "Tell me which kick they're not going to fire."

"Okay."

"Don't be wrong!"

"Okay."

After about five more kicks with varying responses, he said, "This time."

I motioned Zazlu forward, put Juan with a half-destroyed riot shield in front of him, then kicked again.

We heard their screams as Zazlu emptied half his tank spitting fire up, down, left, right before they could fire back. But they died with their buffering bands on, even the ones that came screaming back into the same room we were killing them in.

"This is just going to get harder," Zazlu said, noticing that. "Now they're all concentrated in two res rooms."

Yes, it was going to get harder. Doc Murphy was manning one of those two res rooms in the other hallway.

This main panel I smashed with the butt of my rifle. I only had one grenade left, and I was saving it. As it broke, it read three other res stations active. Two rooms down, two to go.

As we were running down the long middle hallway of the H and past many panicking civilians who were trying to get themselves shot, I heard Oakley's voice in my head.

"To the soldiers fighting in the hallway! Surrender! Now! Or face dire consequences!"

I turned to White-Sort-of-Boobs, run-limping next to me. "Quit it."

"It was not me, Bunch of Trees."

I tapped my throat mike. "Oakley?"

"That's General Oakley to you, criminal! Now surrender! This has gone far enough!"

"Has it? Do you finally believe that psychic bugs are trying to take over this entire base?"

"The only ones acting possessed is YOUR squad, you fuckwad!"

"Yeah, that's right," I said, ducking behind a corner as a BlackShirt took a parting shot at me. "
We're
the ones that have been taken over.
We're
the ones trying to make every human into food in the bottom of a cave.
We're
the ones who put all that seaweed hanging over these res tanks so brain slugs infect this entire base. Why don't you put that in your report to Earth?" I said, only half joking.

"I have already made my report through the wormgate! And you all are named! Every criminal act you have done has been reported!"

"Not
every
act," Zazlu said, firing a quick burst to kill another clone who was charging us.

Another three clones burst from the cafeteria as we passed, trying to ambush us with knives. One sliced Zazlu across the back but then the spiders attacked, killing two permanently but not knocking the headband off the last one in time.

"Do they even have any clones left at this point?" Ann-Marie asked, coming up after sniping another Immortal through the civilians running away from us. She started treating Zazlu's wound as Steve had taught us.

"Have we killed five hundred yet?" I said back.

"Not likely," she replied.

"Then yes," I said. "Hey, Oakley! What are you going to do when we destroy the last res room and all your lights turn red? You still going to send soldiers out to die against us?"

"What are YOU going to do, fuckwads, when I get a hold of you? Try taking these last two resurrection rooms! I dare you!"

"Sir," Zazlu panted, grabbing my shoulder before I moved forward, even as Butcher was finishing bandaging his back. He covered his mike. "It's getting worse each time, sir. Next room it will be twenty or thirty of them. After that maybe forty or fifty."

"And Oakley's got to be barricaded in one of the res rooms with the BlackShirts," Butcher said. "That's the obvious place to retreat to. That's the last stand location. We won't be able to take that."

Juan came up too. "Yeah, what's the point? They're just going to rebuild them."

"The point is," I started, then stopped. "It's the right thing to do."

"But what's the
point
?" Zazlu asked. "We can't win. Not permanently. What do we
want
?"

When the bullets had started flying, I had focused too much on the mission and not enough on the war. Ridley had warned about that. So yeah, what did I want?

I wanted Three-Spot to be safe, and that was done, I guess. I wanted the brain slugs dead, but we had hosed that chance. Hector was out of reach, too. I wanted my squad safe, and half them were bleeding, maybe on their way to another death but definitely to jail. I wanted the spiders safe but they had been protecting us as much as we did them. But mostly, I wanted to ask my entire squad and a certain red-headed doctor to come with me, as I got out of this army, out of this war, off this planet, and just disappeared forever.

I had one idea how to do that. It was a long shot, but I had been thinking about it for a long, long time and it was the only explanation.

I started yelling into my mike. "Fuck you, Oakley! We're going to kick down the door of that res room you're in, and then we're going to hold you down as we feed your brain to the white slugs we've hidden in the res tanks! Get your BlackShirts ready, and prepare to be eaten, because HERE WE COME!"

Zazlu and Butcher were looking at me like I was insane. I covered my mike and whispered, "Let's go to Comms."

Into our ears, Oakley was saying, "What? Those white things- what are those? Are they supposed to be there?" as we threw away our throat mikes, backed away from that hallway and climbed the stairs leading to the Comms tower.

Where our last hope lay.

After a short firefight with two BlackShirts we unfortunately had to kill (one resurrected), we kicked open the door to Comms and discovered it was where something else also lay.

Inspector General Himenez.

His leg was bandaged, propped up on the counter as he was uploading something and listening to comms traffic with another officer. There was a gun and a walkie-talkie on the counter as well. He saw us and dove for it. So did I.

I got to the gun first. But he was going for the radio.

"They're in here! Comms tower!" he yelled before we wrestled the walkie-talkie away from him.

"Now why did you have to go and do that?" I said.

Himenez put on his own buffering band and held it down. "I don't care if they kill us all. Anywhere you wake up, I'll follow and bring you to justice."

"Not anywhere," I said, and then there was knock on the door.

"Lieutenant Forrest?" Doctor Murphy said, being let in by Butcher. "It's chaos out there, the slugs are everywhere and I was looking for you when I heard this voice telling me..." Her eyes got wide, seeing the five spiders crammed into the tiny office with us.

"This is the correct female?" Blue Wave asked me. "The one that is easy to tip over?"

"Yep, you did great Blue Wave." I turned to their leader. "Red-Stripe, you better get your guys out of here. They don't make these in your size," I said, tapping my buffering band.

"It has been a pleasure," the knives-on-knives voice said in my head. "You are truly one of the greatest hunters of your clan."

Why did his praise make me so proud again? I looked up at the towering spider.

"Thanks, Red-Stripe. As are you." I touched his slick, black shell. "Also, no matter what happens, search for a man called 'Tornier' in the farms behind the base. Working together, your clan and his could tame this planet in ways you can only dream of."

"I will. Good luck."

The spiders left and we shooed the terrified Comms officer out with them, but I grabbed the buffering band off her head as she passed. Himenez wouldn't move.

"Anywhere you go," he said, holding his own buffering band around his head with both hands.

"Suit yourself," I said.

Zazlu caught my arm. "We are trapped in a tower. If they just kill us here, we will resurrect into their hands."