Ten Little Aliens: 50th Anniversary Edition (2 page)

‘It’s you that’s drawing the droids here, Shadow,’ she shouts over her shoulder at us. ‘Your damper’s dried out.’

Jeez, we’re a droid magnet. ‘Where are the others?’

‘Lindey’s dead.’ Denni’s voice is terse, like it’s all our fault somehow. ‘I don’t know about Joiks.’

We get up, join her and fire some more into the thick smog. ‘Then I’ll hold them off here,’ we say. ‘Get out of here. Pod’s that way.’

Denni scoots without another word. She doesn’t get far.

‘Shadow,’ she shouts. ‘The ground’s blown out. No one can cross this.’

‘Sure they can.’ We hear the whine of a kill-charge building, and criss-cross the corridor with pulse-fire. ‘Look, the pods are just two hundred metres through that smoke. Don’t think about it. Go.’

‘You’re crazy. I’ll have to double back.’

‘We can
do
it. The pods are waiting. Follow me.’

‘No! If you hold them off, then I –’

Fine. So stay. We’ve got to take this jump. We’re gonna prove we can do it. Denni won’t take anything on trust from us no more but everyone watching this back on base, every dammed one of them, is going to watch us,
feel
us clear this gap.

We push away from the crumpled lip of the floor. In the vids, leaps like this come in slow motion. The thrill stretched out so we can enjoy the long moments of
will we, won’t we
clear the gap.

It only takes us a split second to know Denni’s right. We’re not going to make this.

We reach out for the twisted edge, helplessly, as the jump becomes a fall. Denni’s shouting something, we think maybe
she’s
hit, but we blank her out. We’ve caught a blackened metal spur projecting from the lip. We’re gonna haul ourselves out of here. Our muscles feel like they’ll split our skin open as we raise ourselves level with the charred floor.

And we see a Kay-Dee’s glassy head, sparkling blue-grey as it blows out of the smoke ahead of us. It waves the stubs of its twin-barrels at us, a victory dance. The guns swivel into position.

The charge kicks in, energy builds ready to take our face off.

Well, we’ve been through that once. This is where thinking we know best always gets us. We’re jinxed. We bellow out curse after curse in frustration. And we drop into the blackness.

Hitting the force mats a hundred metres below.

We lie there, panting for breath in the darkness. Eyes screwed up.
We’ve
screwed up, again. It’s too dark for the webset to function right down here, there’s no image to relay. Thoughts cloud up. We can imagine how it is for them watching back in Debrief as we disassociate from these recorded feelings, start to drift.

Something crashes down beside us. Hears us holler back up at the distant patch of white smoke high above. A few seconds later it scrambles over. We’re too tired to even react. It’s black down here, we can’t see anything, but we recognise Denni’s breathing from better times in the dark.

‘Is your webset off, Shadow?’ she murmurs. ‘There’s something I have to do.’

It isn’t. We don’t say anything.

Denni spits in our face.

Cheers and wolf-whistles cut through the dark silence. Colonel Adam Shade found he was wiping his cheek when the lights went up in the visual debriefing room. He felt exposed. The rest of his team were going wild with laughter, gesturing obscenely, throwing their websets to the floor.

‘Nice jump, Shadow,’ jeered Frog, and her pale blue eyes bulged even more grotesquely than normal. ‘Maybe you shoulda asked your lovely pretty Denni to give you a push, huh?’

Shade gritted his teeth. Frog’s voice synthesiser made her every sentence a fire alarm.

‘Or how about a
good luck kiss
, huh, Shadow?’ She laughed, a metallic buzzing Shade was growing far too used to. ‘For old times’ sake, huh?’

‘Shut it, Frog,’ Denni said, shifting uncomfortably in her hard seat, sounding bored. ‘And Shade, get me killed one more time and I will see to it you never walk again, do you get me?’

Shade smirked at her. ‘Don’t I always?’

Denni tutted. ‘Those days are long gone, Shadow. Just be grateful I’m still speaking to you.’

‘Hey, did you two ever, like, get it together with your websets on?’ This was Joiks. Obvious, fatuous, unfunny, of course it was Joiks. He stooped to pick up Denni’s discarded webset, displaying the large bald spot that nestled in his short black hair, and spun the slim metal band round his finger. ‘Man, I’d pay to see that little vid.’

‘I did already,’ said Lindey from the row in front of him. She turned to face the audience of twenty or so, her mouth opened in an exaggerated yawn. Shade took a swipe at the tangle of red ringlets that crowned her thin, angular face. She was too quick for him, as usual, bobbing back out of reach.

She got her laugh from the others in the room. Shade wondered how she’d stayed quiet for so long amid so many opportunities to put him down. He shut his eyes to help him wake up, willing himself to drag his feelings free of the sensor net. It was days since the drop now. His team had failed, failed totally. Meanwhile some new guy fresh out of Academy Intelligence had led his bunch to the pods safely and got away to join Marshal Haunt and second and third AT Elite Corps on Central Ship.

As if he’d somehow conjured her, Haunt’s face snapped up onto the viewscreen, her salt-and-pepper hair scraped back off her high forehead into a stubby ponytail. She didn’t look happy. That was nothing new.

‘So you failed,’ she said flatly. ‘And now you’re all dead. A handful more human sacrifices to rid ourselves of another hundred Schirr.’

Shade removed his webset, wishing he could crush the flimsy metal construction. He hated the things. You had to wear them in exercises so that everyone could learn from your many, many mistakes. The rest of his team had lived his part in the mission with him, seen it through his eyes, felt the same frustrations and hurts he’d had for real. And of course, when they got back out they killed themselves laughing about the way he’d got killed himself.

‘Your suit’s systems were no longer damping your vital signs, Shade,’ Haunt remarked. ‘You were drawing every droid in the place straight to you.’

‘Yes, Marshal,’ Shade snapped. His voice didn’t seem quite real after hearing the world inside him for so long. His head was throbbing like an old engine.

Haunt kept on staring at him, her thin lips pursed. Once, she might’ve been attractive, but anything soft or feminine about her had been ground away by the soldier she had become. Her face was lined, and held a permanent look of fatigue; Shade didn’t like to think too hard about what she had lived through. Now almost forty, she’d had fifteen years’ experience in front line combat before Pent Central had pensioned her off to the training corps.

‘You were aware that you were risking the life of a team-mate,’ she said, deliberate and clear.

‘I thought if I could clear the gap we could reach the pods together,’ Shade said, meeting her cold grey gaze.

‘It’s clear to see what you
thought
,’ Haunt snapped. ‘You were wrong. What should you have done?’

Shade blinked, opened his mouth to speak.

‘Denni told him Lindey was out of the game,’ said Joiks. ‘Shade
could
have asked Denni for Lindey’s last location.’

Frog nodded, absurdly enthusiastic as always. ‘He coulda led the Kay-Dees away from Denni,’ she said. ‘Taken Lindey’s suit. Tight fit, but chances are the dampers were still functional.’

Lindey threw up her hands, pretended to gag. ‘No! No way!’ She looked at Shade and shook her head. ‘You’re
never
seeing me naked, Shadow. Not even in death.’

‘Damned right.’ Shade smiled coldly back at her. ‘That plan occurred to me, of course. Figured I’d rather take the jump.’

He got his laugh. Lindey pressed her lips into a mocking pout. ‘Love you, baby.’

‘All right, enough,’ Haunt said. ‘That’s good, Joiks.’ Haunt always sounded particularly disinterested when she was giving praise. ‘That would’ve been the best action you could’ve taken, Shade. In the circumstances.’

Shade didn’t want to concede the point. ‘Then again, we could be issued with more reliable combat suits.’

The room fell deathly quiet.

Haunt looked at Shade, and he registered the sneer on her face. ‘You go in,
Colonel
Shade,’ she said quietly, ‘and you kill Schirr with whatever you’ve got.’

Shade nodded stiffly. ‘Marshal.’

‘And Denni,’ Haunt went on. ‘I don’t know what bodily fluids you may have shared with Shade in the past and I don’t want to know, but you don’t spit them in his face.’ She smiled faintly. ‘We have to function here as part of a team. A single unit. One whole.’

Denni nodded. ‘Marshal.’ Then she blew a kiss at Shade. Amid catcalls and laughter the atmosphere lightened again for a few moments.

‘All right.’ Haunt’s eyes, grey as old stone, stared out at them all from the screen. ‘You’ve got five minutes downtime. Then
you’ll
join the rest of the year in Theatre One for full mission debrief. And Shade…’

Shade shut his eyes and inwardly groaned.

‘…
You
will kindly report in full combat armour. Out.’

II

Theatre One stank of sweat and polish. Shade looked around with worried interest at the two hundred-odd faces in the lecture hall, sticking out from the stiff necks of their regimental uniforms. Most of them he’d seen around before. He’d gone head to head with them on various missions over the last year. Now he was dressed for the part again, the only one here in a combat suit. But if Haunt had his humiliation on her mind, he’d settle for standing out. With a face like his, quite apart from being an Earthborn, he usually stood out wherever he went.

And as usual, he was terrified that someone might recognise him, remember him for what he’d done. Might see him in training here and work out something they shouldn’t.

A round of fierce applause started up as a long and motley line of Academy Elite training instructors filed onto the stage. These people were veterans of a dozen wars. Once they’d fought for the Empire; now they were glorified Phys. Ed. instructors.

And there was Marshal Haunt. As one of the four Senior Staff Heads, she was almost the last to walk on. Only Principal Cellmek came after her. He’d lost both arms, but refused to get artificials fitted. He believed – and he had told them this so many times – that you had to take what life dealt you. Just take it. Brave and inspirational, Shade supposed, but the man stayed alive by sucking soup up a straw. That was just dumb. Shade had taken some flak from life – his face was full of it since New Jersey – but life had also made him an Earthborn. With that
behind
you, you could take pretty much anything, and entirely for granted.

Shade hated that. He wanted to do different. But where would he be right now without his connections?

Thinking about it, he could be lying in luxury someplace. Not about to get a rocket up his ass from the one person here he respected.

Cellmek left the line to take up his habitual position at the lectern, and Haunt followed him. He stepped aside respectfully to allow her to take the stand.

‘Colonel Adam Shade, A-TE 287645,’ she rapped. ‘To the front please.’

Shade attempted to saunter to the front, to try to salvage some dignity by making out he was some kind of rebel. But he was too self-conscious to do it well. He probably just looked constipated.

Finally he reached the front of the hall and stood smartly to attention before the podium.

‘If I may crave your indulgence before Principal Cellmek begins mission debrief.’ Haunt intoned the words like a child saying prayers by rote, but immediately she had the whole audience rapt. She cut an imposing figure, staring them all out from the podium. The Beloved Butch Bitch, Joiks called her. Amongst other things.

‘Shade here has queried the reliability – and hence the validity – of the combat suits we issue to our troopers.’

She jumped down from the platform to face him. Shade had never seen her in the flesh this close up. He was surprised to find he was almost a head taller than she was.

‘As many of you have witnessed in the viewing rooms, Colonel Shade and his team failed in their attempt to liberate the
Harbinger
from an incursion by the Schirr. Colonel Shade has since blamed his combat suit for his failure.’

She was doing a good job on him, thought Shade. He’d be
lucky
to scrape through the year with any merits at this rate. Then he noticed movement in the wings. Saw two medics, standing by.

Shade’s eyes snapped back to Haunt, alarm bells ringing. She pulled out a pistol and pressed it against his chest. He looked down at it in surprise, just as she opened fire.

The blast knocked him screaming halfway across the hall. He heard the shocked reaction of the crowd. His heart was knocking at his chest like it wanted to jump out.

Haunt spoke calmly over the astonished whispers filling Theatre One. ‘The standard-issue combat suit, sculpted from carbon nanotubing, you will observe, gives the wearer more than adequate protection from a direct hit at close quarters.’ He watched, helplessly winded, as she strode towards him once more. ‘It dampens your vital signs while signalling your location on a secure frequency to your team’s scanners – leaving you practically invisible to the enemy. However…’ She kicked him savagely in the ribs, then stamped down on his stomach. Shade grabbed hold of her foot, tried to twist it so she’d lose her balance.

She shot him again, in the arm this time. He shrieked in pain, saw a rip in his suit and a livid gash in the flesh, felt a sharp pressure bite into the skin around it.

‘Obviously, since the suit must be more flexible around the soldier’s extremities,’ Haunt went on casually, ‘the combat suit is more vulnerable to gunfire in these areas. However, those sitting near the front – and Colonel Shade himself, of course – will note that the fabric of the suit constricts around the wound to staunch blood flow.’

Shade rolled about on his back in agony, like some overturned insect trying to right itself.

‘In any combat situation,’ Haunt told her audience, ‘wear and tear on your suit may lead to the impairment of certain functions. In this eventuality, what do you do?’ The shocked
silence
went on, and it seemed no one was brave enough to break it for fear of being targeted themselves.