The Bounty Hunter: Into The Swarm (9 page)

“What?”

“There’s nothing but standard data on here. Nothing about the dross.
There’s atmospheric data. Temperature readings. There’s no mention of the
aliens in anything it recorded.”

“Then why the fuck did he send us to get it then?”

“I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I’m finished.”

He pulled on the handle and felt it resist. Even with the augmented
strength of the aegis, the drone’s core remained lodged inside of itself. He
turned his head and looked at the back of the machine, embedded in the tunnel,
and wondered if part of it had been crushed around the core. He kept his hand
around the handle and shifted his body onto the floor, bracing his right leg
into the drone’s side to anchor himself as he pulled harder. Still, the core
didn’t budge.

He pressed harder with his foot against the drone and yanked on the
handle at the same time. He strained both his arm and leg as he pushed and
pulled in opposite directions, pushing the drone away from him as he pulled the
core towards him. He felt something snap from around the core and it suddenly
came out whole as the drone’s body was pushed away.

He held the core in his hand, intact, as he watched the rest of the
machine collapse into the tunnel. It was like a blockage had been punched
apart, and the stuck drone now fell in pieces through the hole. The sound was
horrendous, like thousands of pieces of metal grinding and tearing each other
apart. The vibrations of it falling shuddered through the ground and his armor
as he sat there, dumbfounded, holding the processing core above his head and
staring at the now vacant tunnel. When the grinding stopped, a cacophony of
alien wailing and hissing erupted from the ground beneath him.

“We need to run,” Cass said frantically.

He didn’t move.

“Burke! Run!”

* * *

Burke scrambled out of the chamber and shot up to the surface. Cass
smoothly removed the low light filter from the suit’s visor but the morning
light still dazzled his eyes in the first few seconds. He didn’t have time to
stop and adjust to the change. The earth felt alive below his feet, shaking as
if every alien within the city had been woken up and was clawing its way toward
him. There was no more time to be careful and methodical; he pushed himself
into a run in the direction of their ship.

He drew out the grappling line at his belt without stopping. The
tremors in the ground seemed to be following his steps and he needed both of
his hands to fight. He threaded the line through the handle of the drone’s core
and tied it around his waist. Cass tightened it by retracting the line in until
it caught around the armor. With his hands free, he reached behind his back and
grabbed his rifle in one quick motion. As if the aliens had been waiting for
him to draw his weapon, the ground around him began to burst.

There were five dross. They emerged from the earth in a spray of
dirt and dust, immediately lunging out toward him. He raised the rifle to his
face and Cass linked the visor’s display with the scope of the assault rifle.
He squeezed the trigger and the first barrage of bullets punctured the alien’s
heads. He made a bloodied pulp out of two of them and then turned to the
remaining three.

One leaped into the air toward him. He swung the rifle in its
direction and shot another two rounds through its skull. He dived immediately
to the side after releasing the trigger. The alien’s body slammed into the
ground where he had just been standing, with enough force that he felt the
rippling vibration of the impact through his legs. The other two dross were
already charging at him and he led with his rifle to face them.

The aliens dug their claws into the ground as they ran, tearing
through the earth to pull themselves faster as they moved. The disturbed dirt
cloaked the air around them in a haze of brown but Burke had spent years aiming
through the mess they left in their wake. He lined the scope up on the closest
one and sent a single bullet to leave a crater in its head. The dross’s body
recoiled from the bullet and then slumped over, hitting the ground with the remaining
momentum it had gained in its run and skidding for a few more seconds before
stopping.

The last dross was closer than he anticipated when he turned to it.
He squeezed the trigger instinctively, not having time to properly aim, and
landed a few stray shots into the alien’s shoulders. It wasn’t enough to slow
the creature, never mind stop it, and it collided into him just as Cass braced
the armor’s defenses against the weight of the attack. Burke barely stayed on
his feet, the boots of the armor scraping through the earth as the alien pushed
him back. He held the rifle in his right hand and braced against the dross’s
head with his left, pressing back as the alien gnashed and clawed against his
armor.

The outer plates of the armor held against the dross’s teeth and
claws, but not without warnings of microcracks and fissures beginning to form.
The alien clamped its jaws around Burke’s arm before he thought to twist it,
springing the blade into the creature’s mouth and piercing through the back of
its head. He jerked his arm wildly with the blade, puncturing its skull from
within before the dross went limp. He withdrew his arm and stepped away from
the corpse, only then realizing that he had been holding his breath.

“We needed a whole squad to kill five of these in the war,” he
gasped.

“No time for that now. You need to keep running.”

Another series of cries filled the air as if to prove her right. He
started into another run, ignoring the sound of fresh tunnels being clawed open
behind him. The earth erupted and then fell like rain, splattering around him
in chunks. He pressed on passed the new holes and remembered the missions he
had during the war. He had been sent out with a handful of other soldiers in a
light buggy, with the sole purpose of drawing out as many of the aliens as
possible and leading them back to a slaughter. He had to maneuver the buggy
around the emerging tunnels as he jumped and dodged them now.

He felt the ground tremble directly below him and he jumped before
it gave way into a hole. He landed on top of a wrecked tank and stopped for a
moment. He could see the collapsed road that he had jumped down on his way to
the drone. The tunnels there were clear but his breath caught when he glanced
behind him. He could barely see the ground behind him from the aliens that
swarmed over it. It was worse than what he had seen while flying over the
planet. He had disturbed their nest and they charged toward him, an unstoppable
stampede that would tear him to pieces.

“I’m with you Burke,” Cass spoke quickly. “You didn’t come back here
alone. Now move!”

He dived off the tank and sprinted to the broken road. The drone’s
core slapped against his back with each bounding step but he ignored it, urging
his legs to run as fast as he could. The corpses of the two dross he had killed
were still around the tunnels at the base of the slope. The sound of screeching
came from near them and he hunched down, sliding for a moment before he
launched with the full force of the armor’s legs. He was propelled high over the
holes and sailed up the slope, landing hard near the top and sending a wave of
rubble from every direction at his feet. He immediately jumped again, with less
force, and landed where the road above him still remained intact.

He felt something against his side and he whipped around, ready to
slash at whatever was near him. He found nothing when he turned and stood
there, confused for a moment before he felt it again. He turned his head and
saw the drone’s core at his hip, now whirling to life and shuddering as its
cooling mechanisms began to work to maintain its processing.

“What?” he blurted before he turned back to the street. The aliens
were already clambering up the slope toward him. He didn’t have time to waste.

“I don’t know what it’s doing,” Cass said. “I’m still connected to
it but I don’t understand. It’s collecting data now.”

Burke’s feet slammed into the worn pavement and sent echoes through
the broken street with each step. He had been so careful to stay quiet on the
way to the drone and he now made a thundering racket on his way back. The
aliens he had passed while they slept were awake and waiting for him. Cass
painted each of them with a target reticule and he fired without stopping. She
locked the shoulder joints of the armor each time he braced to fire, steadying
his arms perfectly to line up each shot. He swayed the rifle between each new
target, squeezing off two or three shots into each head, clearing the way
forward and the main dross force behind him swept the street like a tidal wave.

“The core is collecting data on the dross now? After all this time?”
he roared out between firing the rifle.

“No,” she said. “It’s monitoring us.”

“What?”

“It’s recording us. It’s recording our fight with the dross. It’s
watching us, not them.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Is it broken?”

“I can’t tell.”

Questions flooded into his head but he pushed them aside, growling
as another group of three dross came into the street in front of him. He
shifted his rifle between them, letting loose the final bullets in the magazine
and putting two of them to the ground. He didn’t have time to stop or to
reload. He threw the rifle away and charged ahead, swinging his arms forward
with a burst of speed to meet the dross head on.

The alien leaped into the air and he had no firearm to kill it
before it jumped at him. He launched himself to meet it instead, springing from
the street and twisting his right arm to lead forward with the blade. He
smacked into the dross in midair, skewering it through its chest before they
fell straight down. He landed on top of the creature and the blade was driven
deeper into its body when they hit the ground. He retracted the blade without
confirming the kill. He left it dead or dying as he rolled back onto his feet.
The rushing swarm was closer behind him now that he had been slowed down.

“How far are we from the ship?” he asked when he had regained his
run. His left leg felt like it was on fire from the stress of running with the
armor, while his right augmented leg felt perfectly fine. The difference
between the two made it somehow worse, with each step his left leg took, as if
the straining pain was fresh and new each time.

“We’re close,” she answered and lit up a new marker on the visor’s
display, highlighting the ship’s location.

The streets shifted under his feet as he ran. He could hear new
holes emerging behind him, with more aliens falling in line with those chasing
him. More and more the ground was disturbed as he ran. Sometimes the road
itself would heave and move, as a dross dug out of its burrow and was
temporarily halted by an undamaged piece of the road. He would hop out of the
way from those rising indentations in the street, bulging upwards like a great
bubble ready to burst open.

He pushed himself forward with a final spurt of energy when he saw
the small building and their ship on top of it, undisturbed by the aliens
around them. He turned as he neared the building and saw the dross only a few
meters behind him, already chomping their jaws together and trampling over each
other to get closer to him. He slowed for a moment and launched himself upward
in the same second, catapulting himself directly upward rather than a forward
leap. He landed cleanly on top of the building and felt the walls below him
shudder as the herd of aliens crashed into it, flooding around it at all sides
and scraping their claws into the walls to climb up to him.

Cass lowered the ship’s doors and fired up the engines as Burke ran
across the roof. He felt a wave of relief when he first set foot on the ship
but he tried to ignore it, knowing how much complacency could cost him if he
relaxed before he was truly safe. He stood in the cargo hold and watched
anxiously as the dross clambered onto the roof and slouched their way to him.
He felt the ship begin to move and the doors began to close. There were only a
handful of the aliens on the roof. One was closer than the others. The ship
lifted from the roof as the doors were nearly fully raised. Two claws clamped
over the rim and one of the dross pulled itself over and dropped down in front
of him just as the doors closed.

A flood of anger replaced the relief he had been resisting. The
alien’s strength were always in their numbers, he repeated a third time. Here was
a lone alien challenging him, and the animalistic naivety of the race that
claimed his home made him flare up in a rage. The armor that shielded him now had
 come into his possession too late to save his home, and the bitterness of that
realization came with the crashing release of everything that had happened
since the war. Adam’s betrayal, being stranded, and Havard’s apparent lies;
that manipulation stung the most then, as part of him had been tricked into
thinking he was finally able to help his home planet, a trick he had vowed
never to fall for again.

There was a single alien in front of him, snarling its rows of teeth
and whipping its bunched tails around his ship. He stepped forward without
another gun and without releasing his blades. He stepped forward and punched
with the full force of the aegis’s strength in his right arm. The dross went to
bite him, and its teeth scraped harmlessly over his armor. He felt no joy in
how impervious he was to the attacks of a lone, cornered dross. He punched again,
and again, then pummelled the flinching creature with his feet after it fell to
the floor. He brought his knee down on its neck, ignoring the slashing of its
tails against his back as he did so, and slammed his fist harder into its head.
Its skull fractured and then broke apart, spilling its flesh and bloodied
insides onto the ship’s floor. He didn’t stop until the alien’s tails went
limp.