Hard Drop (2 page)

“What is this?” The older of the two veterans asked, staring from the fragments to the platform to the dark of the bay beyond. “What the hell happened here?’
 

The Captain stared back at him quietly. “If I knew, we wouldn’t be here.”
 

“Bridge is locked tight.” Came the update. “We’re going to try to breach it.” The Captain tapped twice in quiet acknowledgement.
 

“Shouldn’t we bring them down - ?” The younger soldier asked, glancing up towards the gangway above anxiously.
 

“No time.” The Captain answered, grimly. “They’ve seen us.” And in that moment, Tyco felt it – the presence in the bay with them. Eyes watching from the darkness. He glanced back at the Captain as he tapped his rifle. “Shoot to wound.”
 

“What - ?” The younger man spat out into the silence.
 

“Admiralty needs to know what we’re dealing with here. They want them alive.” Tyco's breath quickened; if the Admiralty didn’t know, who
did
? The rumors came dizzyingly back into focus, the sideways glances and fearful eyes, dismal in their unspoken suspicions. The carnage on board had done nothing to put them to rest, leaving only the pressing question,
where were the bodies?
 

The smooth path continued along the floor, leading into the dark. Something groaned up ahead, metal grinding heavily against metal before falling to the floor with a loud clatter. The Captain moved towards it quickly, beckoning for the team to follow. The veterans slowed, knowing they were near their goal, dreading what they were going to find.
 

The rust trail ended abruptly, and the troopers found themselves stranded, in the middle of the cargo bay, anchored by their boots and staring at the barely-hovering, thousand-ton containers. The silence was heavy, punctuated only by the intermittent roar of the engines. Beads of sweat trickled down Tyco’s neck, and he was suddenly aware that he was drenched to the skin under his suit.
 

The
Conrad
shifted, tilting back slowly as its engines cut out. Something thudded, hard, against a nearby container. Tyco broke on it immediately, rushing past a half-dozen sealed containers until, in a half-opened crate, he found the source of the noise. He stopped, staring in horror through the partially opened door as its contents swung slowly with the motion of the ship.

The soldiers rushed past him, prying the container open in a frenzy. Fury trumped dismay as they flung the doors wide and stared at the carnage that greeted them.

Stacked inside but floating freely, colliding in gruesome slow motion, the crews of the
Conrad
and
Portnow
were a horrible sight. Distended, torn flesh, cracked jaws, and gaping eye sockets, their eviscerated bodies now lay tangled, too many and too mangled to tell one from another. A gallery of tortured flesh floated slowly before them, confirming the worst of the troopers’ suspicions and fears.

The younger soldier gagged, retched, and looked away, putting a hand out against the container to steady himself. He pulled it away, slick with blood, and vomited.
 

“What is this?!” The older veteran demanded, turning to face the Captain. “What does something like this?”

The Captain stared, slowly shaking his head, saying nothing. Tyco looked away, willing himself to look anywhere but at the surreally floating mass of flesh, feeling sick to his stomach.

Something flashed overhead. Tyco wheeled, quickly and angrily, his rifle at his shoulder in an instant. He squinted through his sight, trying to get a clear look at their enemy, but it had disappeared back into the shadows.

"Cap -" He said, and then stopped abruptly, as a heavy, loud impact jarred the crate to his left, slamming it against the metal floor. He lifted his eyes and stared up into the brilliant light above him.
 

Crouched on top of the crate was a distended, hideous grotesque – a horrifying creature, squatting low on four legs, hissing venomously across the metal deck.

Even as Tyco swung his rifle, the hiss became a full-blown roar, and the creature leapt, swinging a curved, blood-caked blade down at him.

Tyco shot instinctively, ignoring the Captain's command and the preferences of the Admiralty with it, emptying his magazine into the leaping horror.

The bullets slammed home, rocking the creature backwards, slamming it against the crate. Dark blood flew into the thin air, and the creature’s limbs went limp in an instant.
 

Tyco racked his rifle immediately, waiting for the second attack. It didn’t come.

“Sorry, Cap –“ he said at last, eyes scanning the depths of the bay. “I tried –“

But the Captain had already pushed forwards, pulling the corpse up from the floor and into the light. Its limbs flailed horribly as it came, rolling unnaturally across the floor and bending backwards upon themselves. Tyco watched as the Captain’s face fell, and his jaw set in bitter disappointment.
 

“You did well, Rookie.” He said to Tyco, and then turned and thrust the corpse towards the veterans. “You wanted to know who did this.” He said. “Take a look.”

They stepped forwards, guns ready as if the corpse might come back to life, and took hold of the floating, bloodied lump. They tore away at the layers of bloody rags that covered it, ripping through the bundled clothes and torn Admiralty uniforms of a dozen victims that must have been woefully inadequate protection against the freezing cold of the cargo bay, frenzied in their need to know their enemy.
 

And then the body shifted under their hands, and the last piece of cloth fell away. The face that greeted them was wild and feral, its mouth curled in a snarl, its skin cracked and bleeding from frostbite. It was hideous, without question, but more than that, it was human.

“You’re kidding me.” The younger man said in a small, hollow voice, and the Captain turned away, his face now hard and determined.
 

“Don’t look for demons.” He said coldly, staring at the bodies still floating in the open crate. “Men are more than enough.” He set his jaw and turned away, scanning the empty bay above. “Men are always more than enough.”

Tyco stared at the frozen corpse, at his vacant, human stare, and nodded, slowly understanding. The ghost ships, the murdered crews, the broken, splintered bodies – all of it, the rumors notwithstanding, had only been the work of men.

A hail of bullets sounded through the comm, exploding into the full-throated rattle of open combat. The unit had finally breached the bridge.

ONE: HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

Drop Commander Tyco Hale inherited very little from his family. Not money, not land, not even a potentially profitable berth on a spacegoing prospecting vessel. They had been poor workers on a satellite colony, cut off from the inner rim and left to the mercies of the authorities. Tyco had left home at eighteen with the clothes on his back and a small talisman bracelet of his home world around his wrist, the kind inner rim tourists purchased on vacation and lost carelessly, long before reaching their home worlds. The clothes were long gone, replaced by a long line of regulation service uniforms, but the talisman remained, wrapped tightly around his skin where it had stayed through twelve long years, eight official campaigns, and an endless tally of unofficial actions.
 

He had kept his other inheritance as well, passed down to him from his father: hope.

It was in his name, given to him by a man who looked at the sky, at the deafening, intermittently pitch-black silence of outer space and saw possibility, not doom, and new worlds beyond the horizon. And so he gave his son the name of one of the early, great astronomers, and hoped for a better future he could not provide.

Now, at age thirty, eleven years after the incident on the
Conrad
, Tyco had met that future: in stasis, in transit, in the sullen, quiet light years between assignments, and most of all, in the hollow, uncaring eyes of the bureaucrats who decided his fate. He had seen the galaxy, and several others beside, and he had seen little to support his father’s dreams. He had joined the Orbital Tactical Legion with an eye to staying at the leading edge of those dreams, rolling back the frontiers of the galaxy with the firm hope of finding something good there, something noble and new. He had given twelve years of his life to the Legion, many of them in stasis, in cold space, shuttling between one objective and the next. Thrusters and the gravity engine had cut down significantly on the time debt needed to reach the outer planets, but they had not eliminated it completely. OTL deployments were nearly always urgent, but the distances were great. It was common to find that units had deployed only to find they had reached their strategic objectives too late, finding them abandoned or overrun. Often, they arrived just in time, to tired faces and dire situations. They were never early.
 

To some, including Tyco's father, the star systems were a tranquil sea, a peaceful demonstration of the vision and cooperation that man could achieve. After twelve years in the Legion, Tyco knew better: the surface might be calm, but dark, angry currents roiled beneath it, threatening always to break out into full-scale storm. In countless shadow wars, he had seen the true weakness and fragility of the peace, and the high cost of keeping it in line. After twelve years of fighting, he could say with grim certainty that the universe would never be so large it couldn’t be contained by the small-mindedness of those who oversaw it.
 

If you asked him, now, what the odds of his mission’s survival were, he would tell you zero. It wasn’t that he was a pessimist, or that he was used to failure. Nor was he exaggerating: the odds of reaching a coordinated landing zone from low-earth orbit were next to zero, make no mistake. Doing that, and then regrouping into an effective fighting unit was even more improbable. Effecting coordinated assaults after that, with all the inherent logistical difficulties that presented, was, quite simply, ludicrous. And doing all that in hostile territory, behind enemy lines, that wasn’t worth considering.

But that didn't mean he hadn’t done it, time after time. He just knew, with every jump, that he was being sent to his death. That the people giving the orders knew that. And, more than that, that they didn’t care. In spite of that, his inheritance – hope – remained, and it sparked anew every time a new planet came into view through the observation deck windows: the hope that, this time, the dream of a brighter future could come true. Even this time, as the shimmering green pearl lay below, even with the derision in the eyes of the Lieutenant before him, Tyco Hale felt that hope.
 

The Lieutenant was only the most recent in the progression of overpromoted academy kids who preferred the way they looked in dress whites to getting their hands dirty. The name on the uniform changed from op to op, but never the starched white uniform itself, or the matching, smug, brilliant white smile that completed it. Tyco, in his standard-issue camouflage, imagined shooting the boy now. Not to kill him, mind you, but just to see his horrified reaction as the deep red blood soaked into the snow-white fabric, never to come out again. Tyco set his teeth to keep from smiling, trying to banish the image from his head.
 

The planet below was like so many others he’d seen, a graceful curve, its mountains and deserts brown and desolate, its plains marked by large, geometric fields of green vegetation. It was a planet made beautiful by design, from horizon to horizon – and marred, now, by billowing clouds of smoke that rose through the sky and into the upper atmosphere. Even from space, the fingerprint of destruction was evident: a wide, high smoke cloud streamed in long, grey trails across the sun-side of the planet. Tyco had barely had to look at the thin intelligence packet in his hand to know they were being sent into a full-scale war. He’d known that since they’d entered orbit. But that didn’t change the fundamental insanity of the orders.

“And if the Admiralty ordered you to take this jump?” He asked now, his voice hollow and angry.

The Lieutenant turned to face Tyco head-on, squaring his shoulders so his nametag was clearly visible:
Sorenson
. Tyco would remember that. Just like the shit-eating grin on the boy’s face and the condescension in his eyes.
 

“With all due respect, Commander, jumping’s your job, not mine.”
 

Tyco shook his head, disbelieving. “It’s a bloodbath down there.”

Lieutenant Sorenson raised his voice purposefully so the aides around could hear. He had been amused, but now he was tired of entertaining Tyco’s frustration. “Oh, I’m sorry, are you scared?”

“It’s a question of firepower.” Tyco growled back, matching his volume. “My forty against four thousand, minimum, with no armor or artillery. Seem like a good idea to you?”

“You’re questioning me - ?” Sorenson snapped, rising to the bait.
 

“I’m questioning the orders.” Tyco answered, sidestepping the issue while pressing his point home. “I’m asking for a
minor
tactical change, not to abort the mission.”
 

“I know they don’t teach this in the lunar colonies – ” Sorenson answered, accenting
lunar
as if it were some kind of disease. Tyco gripped the amulet around his wrist more tightly, feeling his knuckles go white. “But let me explain the chain of command.” He paused for emphasis, making sure he had the room's full attention before continuing. “I command, you obey. Understood?”

“I am responsible for the lives of my troopers.” Tyco responded, and then added, as a resentful afterthought, “Sir.”

“And you can make this drop with or without your heat shields. Your choice, soldier, but I suggest you make it quickly.”
 

Sorenson was smarter than the others, Tyco had to give him that, and he stood, hands balled in fury, staring down at the younger man.
 

“I’m really damn tired of seeing my men die for your mistakes.” He said, with sudden, unexpected bitterness. One of the aides gasped at that, shocked either by the vehemence of the words or the sentiment they expressed, or both. Probably someone fresh off the central planets, Tyco thought instinctively. A little insubordination always got them hot under the collar.