Kill Before Dying (Tau Ceti Agenda Book 5) Read online

  “Howser!” Major Sellis’ voice snapped in her helmet, catching her off guard and startling the shit out of her almost literally. She realized that she was far too jumpy and needed to settle the fuck down.

  Stay frosty, Marine, her AIC reinforced the thought for her. The kids don’t need to see you jumping like that.

  Damned right.

  “Major?” Rondi turned from the two corporals and moved closer to the edge of the giant column that was carved out of the granite wall of the ravine. The yellow and green light from the star peeked over the edge of the cliff wall across from them, casting an eerie brightness against the ruins and a faint shimmering over the small river that ran through the basin. The light shimmered and reflected off the ripples of the flowing water and illuminated the strange glyphs on the ruins. Patterns of the star system covered the wall, and there were indentations spread about the surface of the granite that looked like some sort of insect, about the size of a twenty millimeter armor-piercing HVAR round with eight legs. The spiderlike things appeared to be a central theme in the artwork, but Rondi wasn’t an artist or an exo-archaeologist. She turned her mind to what she did know, and that was being an AEM.

  “What can I do for you, sir?” Rondi asked Major Sellis.

  “Colonels Jones, Slayer, and Strong have set up a bit of a TOC behind the tank perimeter in a large antechamber we found. Shag ass up here for a minute,” the Major ordered her.

  “Yes, sir. Do I bring the corporals or leave them at rear guard?” she asked.

  “Bring them. Not sure we want to leave any stragglers about until we know what the hell all this place is,” Sellis told her. “Double-time.”

  “Roger that, sir. We’re on the bounce.” Rondi turned back to Roy and Weems. “Alright, you two, on my ass and stay there.”

  The three of them bounced their jumpboots along the ravine staying as close to the gray and beige granite wall as possible and away from the center of the basin near the running water. Just in case the Chiata decided to start lobbing those blue beams down at them, Rondi wanted to at least make themselves more difficult targets. And while the river looked docile enough, this was an alien planet and Rondi’s imagination was doing its level best to fill every dark nook, cranny, and other unknown with monsters that Chiata were afraid of. For the meantime it just seemed smart to steer clear of potential unknown threats until she had a better grip on their overall situation.

  The ruins or temples or whatever they were filled the northwestern wall on a continuous path as far as the eye could see. Had Rondi not known better she’d say the ravine was the entrance to a giant underground city, but as far she could tell there weren’t any passageways leading inward. They had just found stone walls with all those glyphs scattered about them.

  “Look at those.” Weems pointed at several concrete-looking three-meter-tall spires along the river that seemed to be spaced every ten or twenty meters. “What the hell are those things supposed to be?”

  “They look like termite mounds from Africa or the giant blue ants that live on Ares about seven hundred klicks south of New Tharsis. Those things will eat you alive in seconds,” Rondi replied. “Never seen ’em myself, but I’ve seen video that will make you puke.”

  “Shit.” Roy sounded like a frightened kid who had just been told a campfire horror story. “Like the Chiata aren’t bad enough, and then these fucking ruins, and now giant ant hills with no telling what kind of bad shit lives in them. I am liking this planet more and more every minute.”

  “Just don’t touch any of that shit. Who knows if they are still in there or not?” Rondi warned them. “Besides, it might just be some cute fluffy creature or a weird geological thing.”

  “You don’t believe any of that shit you just said, do you, Gunny?” Roy asked rhetorically.

  “Fuck no. Let’s keep moving,” Rondi replied. She wasn’t sure, but she could have sworn she saw something skitter across the riverbank and up one of those mounds.

  Settle down, Marine! I’m letting my mind play tricks on me, she thought.

  Did you see something, Rondi? I have not detected anything on sensors, her AIC asked with a concerned tone in her mindvoice.

  Uh, well, no. No. I didn’t see anything.

  About a klick upriver the tankheads and the mecha jocks from the Maniacs had managed to find a much larger archway and had formed up a perimeter underneath that. The arch was cut into the granite ravine wall and had a peak height of more than thirty meters. The width of the archway at its base was at least fifty meters. The stonework on the ground had been intentionally laid out like a cobblestone roadway leading out of the archway and then vanishing into the river. There were no unusual colors or shapes, but the construction was made with laser-precise cut square granite blocks with dovetails set precisely into each other with less than a hair’s width of error where they mated together. Rondi was pretty certain that whoever built this place weren’t primitives.

  The eight hovertanks that were left were strategically blocking the entrance with their guns pointed upward. There were seven Marine FM-12s also. Four of them were in bot mode standing guard with their large plasma cannons at the ready. The other three were in fighter mode and were sitting inside the large-hangar-sized cavernous room with their canopies up.

  Rondi could see the three colonels, Major Sellis, and Major Dana Miller standing just inside and out of the sunlight, waving their hands about. They were clearly doing some sort of battle planning in their collective mindviews. Rondi recognized Major Miller without the blue force tracker. The mecha jocks all had their handles painted across their helmets, and hers read “Popstar.” Colonel Strong’s read “Jawbone.”

  “What’s going down, Top?” Howser bounced in beside Sergeant Major Tommy Suez. Major Sellis was involved in the DTM conversation and she didn’t want to interrupt him. Besides, his blue force tracker would alert him to their arrival.

  “The Hillenkoetter and the rest of the second attack wave were just overwhelmed by Chiata megaships. They’ve all bugged out to an asteroid field farther out in this system and it appears that most of the Chiata followed them in pursuit. The colonels are working a plan with Captain Penzington to zip in and extract us without getting everyone blown to hell,” Suez explained.

  “Jesus. There were thirty supercarriers in the second attack wave,” Rondi gasped.

  “Well, there are twenty-four of them now,” Top replied. “Maybe they all just need to come down here and hang out with us.”

  “Pretty fucking eerie, ain’t it.” Rondi nodded. “I mean, I’m not complaining, but what the fuck?”

  “More than eerie. Whatever this place is the Chiata are leaving it alone,” Top said, motioning to the ruins with his armored hands. “Maybe this is why we’re here. I’ve been scanning for signs of Chiata tracks, garbage, hell, anything, and I’ve found nothing. If they have been down here there’s no sign of it.”

  “You think whatever is blocking the QMTs is in these ruins?”

  “I overheard Colonel Strong say that. Not my idea,” Tommy said.

  “We need some techs down here then. Or Buckley, or Captain Penzington.” Rondi thought about it and was pretty sure the fact that the Chiata wouldn’t come down into the ruins meant something important.

  “The colonels and Penzington are working on it, but there’s more. Even if we could all load up right now, I don’t think we’d leave. Or, well, at least not Captain Penzington.”

  “More what?” Rondi couldn’t think of what in the universe could keep the Captain in the system a second longer than she needed to be there. “There’s no way we can hold this planet until we can get scientists in here.”

  “I agree, and I’m sure even General Moore does. But I’ll guarantee that he’ll be back as soon as he can, and that Captain Penzington isn’t leaving just yet.”

  “Why?”

  “Major Moore was shot down and is running escape and evade near the northern pole,” Top explained to her. Rondi almost gasped. She was
friends with Deanna and if she needed help, Rondi would be one of the first in line to volunteer to go to her.

  “How far away? Can we get to her?” Rondi asked Top.

  Give me Major Deanna Moore’s current location, she thought to her AIC. A blue dot near the northern pole region popped up in her mindview, and only a few hundred meters from her dot four red dots appeared to be closing in on her position and one of them was trying to flank her.

  She is outnumbered. From the lack of motion she is presenting, it would appear she is dug in and hiding.

  Shit. She is really far away. There is no way to get to her in any time that would help. Hang in there, Dee, she thought.

  Chapter 13

  February 19, 2407 AD

  Northern Region

  Alien Planet, Target Star System

  700 Light-years from the Sol System

  Monday, 2:25 P.M. Ship Standard Time

  While Deanna had ripped the alien creatures from within enemy fighting mecha with her own armored mecha’s giant robotic hands during space dogfights, she hadn’t truly seen one up close and personal—at least not until now. As far as her AIC and Dee could tell, it appeared that the stealth mode of her suit did hide her from the Chiata’s sensors and eyeballs. Once Dee had realized that she was not going to outrun the search party, she had decided to dig herself into the mud at the bank of the now rapidly flowing swamp waters to add to her camouflage. Her hopes were that she could either lay low until they gave up the search and moved on or that she could at least manage to maintain the advantage of a surprise ambush.

  Three of the four Chiata were spread out about the bank of the fairly fast-flowing murkiness, and the fourth was somewhere behind her and beyond her visual field of view. Were it not for her suit’s red force tracker, the alien would clearly be in the perfect position for an ambush. The alien closest to her was only about six meters away and Dee was getting a very close look at the thing. It was a monster if she’d ever seen one.

  Until that instant, she’d thought of the Chiata as purely amorphous blobs stuffed into armor and shields, but Dee realized that wasn’t the case at all. In fact, she was beginning to think the amorphous blobs were actually part of the armor and less a part of the creatures. The alien things were a mix of red and green fluorescent colors, from the tip of their heads to the end of their toes and, as far as Dee could tell, they were bipedal with two arms. The alien’s legs were a meter and a half long and bent at the knee just like a human’s. The boots of the thing’s armor were much larger at the toe box than at the heel, which suggested to Dee that the creatures had something radically different about their feet. Perhaps they were like primates or even birds, but there was know way to no from her hidden viewpoint several tens of centimeters buried upright in the mud on the banks of the swampy tributary. Dee left her suit’s audio sensors up as she detected the sounds of the search team slightly louder than the sounds of the swamp waters rushing out, into, and across the boulders nearing the main channel of the flowing river. Water swirled about the rocks, creating swiftly moving eddies and upwardly churning whitewater that Dee could barely make out just beyond the tree line. The marshy soil appeared to be turning more rocky and the trees were thinned along the high muddy bank she’d managed to bury herself into.

  The Chiata closest to her, now only about four meters away, searched for her as it pressed through the water and pushed back vegetation, thorns, and downed tree branches. One of the branches extended like a catapult and recoiled as the alien pushed passed it. The branch slapped against the alien behind it and Dee could see ripples of reds and greens swim across the alien’s torso. The personal armor was also a personal barrier shield.

  The arms of the creature were longer than those of humans, again, possibly primate-like, but there was something different about the hands. As far as Dee could tell the thing had five fingers, and one long, slender double-jointed thumb. The Chiata’s hands were not in gauntlets. Dee noted that instead of gloves there were tendrils extending from the backs of its hands and up its forearm from within the creature’s skin that led into the weapon it was carrying in its left hand. Dee wasn’t sure if the tendrils were part of the alien’s body or if they were some sort of interfaces to what appeared to be its body armor. In fact, Dee wasn’t truly certain where the alien’s body stopped and the armor started. It was possible that they were somehow connected or even fused, but she wasn’t sure.

  More of the tendrils reached out from the creature’s torso and touched leaves, limbs, and the water as the Chiata schlurped and splashed and stomped about in the mud, rocks, and knee-deep water. The amorphously growing appendages ranged from a centimeter to upwards of five or six centimeters in diameter and sometimes stretched out as long as a meter or more. Each time one of the tendrils stretched, out a ripple of light would wash over the armored suit. Dee could see the similarities in the alien’s armor and the Buckley barrier shields of her own.

  The torso of the creature had no particularly interesting features other than the tendrils that would appear and disappear from within the outermost armored layer. At the waist the creature was only about seventy-five centimeters around, but at the shoulders, about a meter above the waist, it was at least one hundred twenty centimeters around. Front-to-back width of the torso was no more than its waist width most of the way up, widening slightly at the chest. Just above the chest area there was a V-shaped ridge in the body armor suggesting something like a collarbone and maybe a ribcage that had a long thin neck protruding from it.

  The Chiata’s neck was no more than thirty or so centimeters wide and was maybe as long as it was around. There were ridged overlapping green plates or bands protecting the neck and that led to a head that, to Dee’s surprise, did not have a helmet on it. The back of its head was covered in spiky tendrils almost five centimeters long each that waved about continuously as if they were sensors testing the air for something. Dee thought for a brief moment that the tendrils could be confused for hair if she hadn’t gotten a really close look. All in all, the creature stood more than two and three-quarters meters tall. That was a good head taller than a Marine in a fully armored environment suit.

  Don’t move a muscle, Dee, Bree warned her while keeping a very resolved three-dimensional map of the local area out to a few tens of meters away in her mindview. Several possible courses of action plotted about the image in Dee’s mind. Maybe they will not detect you.

  Which one do I hit first and then in what order, Bree? Give me some scenario options here. Dee worked through how she was going to fight if they found her. And unlock my ankle. I’ll need full range of motion, ready or not.

  Done, Bree noted. I suggest rushing past the one closest to you and hitting the third target. This will put the other two between you and the one behind us. Perhaps some grenades along the way will help.

  Right. Dee almost gulped once the creature closest to her turned and almost looked right at her. At first she thought that it had detected her because it seemed to look right through the mud at her. The hair-like tendrils on its head stopped moving and pointed in her direction as well.

  The eyes were pointed upward in the middle of the thing’s face near the bridge of its flat, ridged nose. The eyes were menacing and yellow with dark, vertically slitted pupils. Dee thought that if she had ever imagined a scary monster in her closet as a little girl, this one would certainly fit the job description. The nose was larger than she’d expected and was much flatter. The four horizontal ridges gave the appearance of reptilian or insect exoskeletal plates. The nostrils were almost as big as twenty millimeter hypervelocity automatic rifle rounds and were more holes than nostrils. The alien’s face had scars and age lines across it and looked like it had seen its share of rough times. There was a continuous snarl that led from its extra-wide, toothy mouth up to its smaller-than-looked-natural ears. The ears had no lobes, only holes. Instead of lobes they were simply ridges external to the skin on the sides of the head that matched the exoskeletal ridges on t
he nose. There were also ridges at what might be considered the alien’s hairline.

  The Chiata’s skin looked green and like worn leather from an ages-old sofa, with freckles of bright reds strewn about. The freckles appeared so bright against the green skin that Dee believed them to be bioluminescent. The alien closest to her had one long scar that stretched from its forehead across its right eye and down to its understated chin. And when it would turn, tendrils would jut out from its body and wave at the other members of the search team as if it were commanding them with tendril signals. Dee thought of how whitetail deer back in Mississippi would signal each other by flashing their tails. And that concerned her. Clearly, they were nonverbally communicating with each other, but what they were saying eluded her.

  Certainly, they have DTM comms, right? she thought.

  Who knows? Bree replied in her mind.

  Dee held herself perfectly still and did her best to remain calm and at the ready. The Chiata continued to fan out about her location, with the closest to her within spitting distance. Had she not been wearing an armored suit she could have felt the thing breathing on her.

  Steady, Major Moore! Steady!

  I’m frosty. I’m frosty. I’m frosty, Dee repeated to herself. She’d had been through escape and evade training before, many many times, but she’d only ever trained to fight humans. Nobody really knew for sure if fighting styles would translate to hand-to-hand with aliens. But Marines were trained to adapt, improvise, and overcome, and Dee was as good a jarhead as any.

  The Chiata that appeared to be the leader made several hand and tendril motions and then turned his back to Dee’s location. As he appeared to be stepping away Dee almost sighed with relief. But then, three red and green glowing tendrils shot out from the alien’s back armor and into the mud, just missing her torso enough that they glanced off the shields. The shields of the tendrils and the shields of Dee’s suit clashed, sending flashes and ripples of light through the mud like electric arcs. The alien’s tendrils then wrapped around Dee’s waist and yanked her out of the mud, tossing her head over heels past the alien, her arms and legs twisting from the mud as she was yanked up like a rag doll.