Aliens: Bug Hunt E-Book

Jonathan Maberry

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 516

Beschreibung

The premiere short story anthology based on the movie ALIENS, featuring the Colonial Marines in deep space, doing what they do best—hunting bugs! When the Colonial Marines set out after their deadliest prey, the Xenomorphs, it's what Corporal Hicks calls a bug hunt—kill or be killed. Here are eighteen all-new stories of such "close encounters," written by many of today's most extraordinary authors. Set during the events of all four Alien™ films, sending the Marines to alien worlds, to derelict space settlements, and into the nests of the universe's most dangerous monsters, these adventures are guaranteed to send the blood racing— One way or another.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

COVER

READ ALL OF THE EXCITING ALIEN™ NOVELS FROM TITAN BOOKS

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

INTRODUCTION by Jonathan Maberry

CHANCE ENCOUNTER by Paul Kupperberg

REAPER by Dan Abnett

BROKEN by Rachel Caine

RECLAMATION by Yvonne Navarro

BLOWBACK by Christopher Golden

EXTERMINATORS by Matt Forbeck

NO GOOD DEED by Ray Garton

ZERO TO HERO by Weston Ochse

DARK MOTHER by David Farland

EPISODE 22 by Larry Correia

DEEP BACKGROUND by Keith R.A. DeCandido

EMPTY NEST by Brian Keene

DARKNESS FALLS by Heather Graham

HUGS TO DIE FOR by Mike Resnick and Marina J. Lostetter

DEEP BLACK by Jonathan Maberry

DISTRESSED by James A. Moore

DANGEROUS PREY by Scott Sigler

SPITE by Tim Lebbon

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

BUG HUNT

READ ALL OF THE EXCITING ALIEN™ NOVELS FROM TITAN BOOKS

ALIEN: OUT OF THE SHADOWS by Tim LebbonALIEN: SEA OF SORROWS by James A. MooreALIEN: RIVER OF PAIN by Christopher Golden

THE RAGE WAR by Tim Lebbon:PREDATOR: INCURSIONALIEN: INVASIONALIEN VS. PREDATOR: ARMAGEDDON

THE OFFICIAL MOVIE NOVELIZATIONS BY ALAN DEAN FOSTERALIENALIENS™ALIEN 3™ALIEN: COVENANT™ALIEN: COVENANT – ORIGINS

ALIEN RESURRECTION by A.C. Crispin

THE COMPLETE ALIENS OMNIBUSVOLUME 1VOLUME 2VOLUME 3VOLUME 4 (June 2017)VOLUME 5 (December 2017)VOLUME 6 (June 2018)VOLUME 7 (December 2018)

THE COMPLETE ALIENS VS. PREDATOR™ OMNIBUS

THE COMPLETE PREDATOR™ OMNIBUS (January 2018)

ALIEN ILLUSTRATED BOOKSALIEN: THE ARCHIVEALIEN: THE ILLUSTRATED STORYTHE ART OF ALIEN: ISOLATIONALIEN NEXT DOORALIEN: THE SET PHOTOGRAPHY

BUG HUNT

EDITED BY JONATHAN MABERRY

TITAN BOOKS

ALIENS™: BUG HUNTHardback edition ISBN: 9781785655777US paperback edition ISBN: 9781785654442UK paperback edition ISBN: 9781785655784E-book edition ISBN: 9781785654459

Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: April 201710 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

TM & © 2017 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Did you enjoy this book?We love to hear from our readers. Please email us [email protected] or write to us atReader Feedback at the above address.

TITAN BOOKS.COM

To Ridley Scott and James Cameron.Thanks for taking us out into the big blackand scaring the bejeezus out of us.

And, as always, to Sara Jo.

INTRODUCTION

BY JONATHAN MABERRY

On a beautiful spring day I drove from Philly to New York with a movie projectionist buddy of mine to see the premier of a new film by Ridley Scott. We had only ever heard of the director from one previous piece, the period drama The Duelists. No idea if the guy could handle a science fiction flick. Mind you, this was years before Blade Runner. No one knew who Scott was. And no one knew what his new movie, Alien, was going to be like. All we’d seen were the trailers.

My buddy ran the Alien trailer every day for weeks and he was convinced it was going to be good. I was skeptical, having been disappointed in most recent science-fiction films and was, frankly, hoping for another flick like Star Wars.

We settled in, both interested but jaded. We’d seen every flick and thought that nothing could do more than form the basis for a critical discussion. We never expected the movie to have punch.

Or, rather, to have bite.

It was a packed house on a matinee. Outside it was a sunshiny New York afternoon.

Suddenly we were in outer space. Aboard a rusty old piece of junk freighter. Far away. And in real trouble.

The tagline of the film was: “In space, no one can hear you scream.”

Well, they sure as hell could hear people scream in that damn theater. Everyone. Every. Single. Person.

Me, too… and I’m a hard sell. I’m a big guy. I was working as a bodyguard back then. Tough as nails. My buddy had seen every horror flick ever made. We were the film critic guys, not the rubes who would jump, and yell, and yelp, and cry out at cinematic monsters.

Except that’s what happened.

That movie scared the hell out of us. Nothing had done that since I saw Night of the Living Dead when I was ten. And because it scared me so badly I did the same thing with Alien that I’d done with Romero’s zombie flick. I stayed to see it again.

Over time I got to know those characters. I read Alan Dean Foster’s rather brilliant novelization. I read the comic adaptation Heavy Metal published. I bought the damn calendar. I was hooked.

I even watched every cheap knock-off of it, hoping for something that would approach the blend of intelligent storytelling, subtlety and excitement. I never found another movie that came close.

Until the summer of 1986.

James Cameron hit us with Aliens. Not a remake, as so many sequels are. And not an inferior follow-up. A masterpiece. Another masterpiece. Brilliant and different. Where Alien was a horror movie set in outer space, Aliens was a war story set in space. Like the first movie it relied on the talent of a rich ensemble cast of character actors. Like the first movie it paved new ground. Like the first movie it scared the hell out of me. In all the right ways.

Since then there have been more sequels and prequels. There have been comic books. There have been tons of novels. And there have been video games. The world of Alien has grown and continues to grow because it’s captured the imagination of the public while at the same time respecting their intelligence. That’s a hard balance.

Of all the movies, though, my personal favorite is Aliens. I loved the story of the Colonial Marines. Apone and Hicks, Hudson and Vasquez, and all the others. I even liked Gorman. Kind of.

The camaraderie between those marines was one of the inspirations for Echo Team, the Special Ops shooters in my bestselling Joe Ledger weird-science thriller series.

Several of my author friends have done superb novels set in this world. Alan Dean Foster did the first three books, knocking each one out of the park. The late—and much missed—A.C. Crispin did Alien Resurrection. There have been a lot of others, including some by contributors to this anthology, Yvonne Navarro, Christopher Golden, James A. Moore and Tim Lebbon.

I’ve long wanted to suit up and go into battle with the Colonial Marines. A couple of years ago I was in London having dinner with the publishers of the Titan Aliens novels, Nick and Vivian Landau. I mentioned that I wanted to do an anthology set in this world. Not the meta-world of the whole Alien franchise, but specifically the world of the Colonial Marines. They put me in touch with in-house editor Steve Saffel, and we closed a deal.

Which is when I got to play. I made a wish list of who I thought could write the absolute hell out of short stories of soldiers going into battle against aliens. Not just against the Xenomorphs, but other kinds of aliens featured in the movies and related books and comics; no, this book also contains stories that pit the Marines against all sorts of otherworldly threats. The Marines have a catch-all nickname for any alien that wants to turn humans into brunch: bugs. Hence the famous line from Aliens.

HUDSON: Is this a stand up fight or another bug hunt?

There are all kinds of bug hunts here. Against Xenomorphs and against critters that don’t even have a name yet. Scary things that lurk in the dark. We went on the premise that it’s a large, weird, dangerous universe filled with creatures who aren’t warm and fuzzy E.T.s and who don’t necessarily want to share. And who are looking for a hot lunch.

I thought it might take me as much as a month to fill my roster of literary gunslingers to go hunting with me. Ha. It took me about two days. You see, I’m not the only writer out there who’s been itching to tell a story in this world. Not only did I get enough commitments for a thick, delicious collection of stories… once the news got out that I was doing this book I had to turn down a couple of hundred pitches.

Yeah. Nice.

So, Aliens: Bug Hunt.

The stories here are all different. They range from pure adrenaline-fueled action to introspective human dramas to the deeply weird. As the editor of the anthology I got to read them first—and there is a greedy little joy in that. As a fan of the genre I feel like I’ve been invited back into the world of Xenomorphs, corporate greed, kickass action, heroics, horror, and the kind of dark magic that is particular to this kind of horror-based science fiction.

These are grand tales of heroism, cowardice, struggle, betrayal, remorse, and the cost in human terms of taking up arms against unknown foes. Some of these tales fit easily into the existing canon of the Alien/Aliens franchise. Other stories won’t necessarily be considered canonical, though—they’re farther out on the edge, suggesting that it’s a bigger, darker, stranger and more dangerous universe than any of us think…

So, grab your pulse rifle and let’s go hunting.

Enjoy!

CHANCE ENCOUNTER

BY PAUL KUPPERBERG

“Double or nothing they don’t get the tub off the ground before the next shift,” London said.

“No bet,” Gilmore said, only half paying attention to her E.V.A. companion.

“Okay, you call the time.”

“Leave me alone, London.”

Gilmore picked up her pace, springing ahead of him in slow motion arcs through the thin atmosphere and less than one-quarter Earth gravity, keeping an eye out for ground obstacles in the tall rust red tree-like growths and brown grasses through which they tromped.

One of the disadvantages of a full-suit extra-vehicular excursion was that no matter how far ahead of London she pulled, she couldn’t escape his voice buzzing in her earpiece. And listening to London was a waste of time. London just liked to talk. She didn’t know if it was a nervous habit, the natural patter of the confidence man, or because he loved the sound of his own voice—probably all of the above—but most of the crew aboard the USCSS Typhoon knew to tune out or avoid conversation with the Navigation Officer. At least those who planned to end this tour with any cash left in their jumpsuits.

“C’mon, what’s the big deal, Gilmore? Double or nothing.”

Except when forced down on an unexplored low gravity, bio-diverse planet in the Zeta2 Reticuli system for emergency repairs and paired with him for a recon to gather data for the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. It was S.O.P.; explore for exploitable resources, an order the company backed with substantial financial incentives and a call London never failed to answer.

“Double or nothing what?”

“One of us gotta owe the other for something,” he said. “When have I ever gambled with you?” she said, not bothering to hide her annoyance.

London thought about it. “Never,” he said. “Whatever. Just trying to keep things interesting.”

“Thanks, but this is interesting enough for me.”

Gilmore came to a stop at the edge of the pale grassy plain. Ahead, the grasses began to give way to a forest of impossibly tall, thin trees that rose even more impossibly high through the crystal clear air into the cloudless sky. She checked the sensorpad strapped to the forearm of her suit. Lines of many colors rose and fell and numbers flitted across the screen as the device measured and recorded every sort of environmental and atmospheric condition. Of course, none of it meant squat to the Warrant Officer, but it was all being transmitted back to the Typhoon where Science Officer Jepson would analyze it at her leisure.

Confined by her suit, Gilmore had to lean backwards to follow the lines of the great trees into the sky. “Get a load of these things, huh? Bet they’re at least twice as tall as the giant redwoods on Earth.”

“How much?” London said.

“Shut up, London.” She took a few low-gravity leaps to the nearest tree. It was a little more than a couple of meters wide, but the same low-gravity that made it possible for her to cover many times the normal distance with each step allowed that slim structure to grow to almost a thousand meters tall.

Gilmore pushed at the tree. It bent easily under her touch. “I don’t think these are trees. More like a species of giant grass. You getting a sample?”

London had already unhooked a tool and sample bag. “Ten-four. Imagine the size of the tomatoes they’re gonna be able to grow once they crack this genetic code.”

Gilmore switched the view on her visor to telescopically scan the area. “Crazy world,” she said. “Twenty-two percent Earth-grav, but it’s got an atmosphere, oxygen, water, developed flora, probably fauna.”

London carved a sliver of the rust red stalk into the bag. “Surprised there’s anything at all. Planets with gravity this low don’t usually hang on to much atmosphere.”

“Jepson said they’re rare. Something to do with orbits, rate of rotation, magnetic field, the escape velocity of oxygen… but you know, once she starts explaining, you better have a Ph.D or forget it. Hey, London! Check it out.”

London turned to see Gilmore pointing into the distance, at the forest. “Holy crap.”

They looked to be some form of aquatic life, part jellyfish, part squid, great gray and rust behemoths floating through the thin atmosphere from the cover of the giant stalks like creatures deep beneath an Earthly sea. The oversized scale of the surrounding landscape, made it difficult for Gilmore to gauge the creatures’ size by eye, but her visor read-out tagged them at sixty meters and more. There were too many to count, all moving at a good clip, their trailing tentacles emitting wispy puffs that propelled them along.

“Look at them go,” Gilmore said in awe. “They got to be doing eighty, ninety klicks.”

“Yeah, they’re sure in a hurry. What do you think can scare something that big?”

“Something bigger?”

“I hope not.”

Gilmore started to say maybe this was their normal migratory or grazing behavior when the giant stalks behind the floating creatures began to shudder and sway. The creatures responded to the disturbance by picking up speed and starting to scatter.

A black form a fraction of the size of its prey exploded from the forest, springing into the air on massively muscled hindquarters on a trajectory for one of the Floaters. The behemoth was struggling to gain altitude, its tentacles throbbing with the effort, but it was too big a target to miss. The black thing, its long tail trailing behind it, landed on its back, anchoring itself with great claws dug into its rust-colored flesh. Almost immediately, the giant thing faltered in its escape, starting to collapse like a balloon losing air. The attacker was obscured by undulating mounds of flesh, but there was no mistaking the contrails of blood and viscera that followed the great creature in its slow, spiraling descent.

Through her helmet, Gilmore more felt than heard a high-pitched vibration that made her wince. She could only imagine it was the Floater’s death wail.

“Jesus,” London whispered.

“Yeah,” Gilmore said, breathing heavy. All of a sudden, this lightweight world no longer seemed so much interesting as dangerous. “Come on. Let’s get back to the ship.”

* * *

By the time Jepson was done synching the raw sensor data with the feeds from Gilmore and London’s bodycams, the Typhoon’s Science Officer had clear images of the alien life forms and theories about both. She brought them up on the screen in the Mess, where she sat with London, Gilmore, Captain Lawford, and Executive Officer Katz.

“Let’s start with the Floaters,” Jepson said. “There’s nothing like them in the E.T. database, but the odds of there being many low-grav planets capable of sustaining an atmosphere and life at this scale are pretty damned slim.”

“I’ll give you twelve to one,” London offered to a chorus of groans.

“They’re significantly higher than that,” Jepson said, then turned her eyes on the grinning Warrant Officer. “Besides, you still owe me from last week’s poker game.”

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” the Captain said.

“I’ve worked out their mass, specific gravity, and I have some educated guesses on their chemistry, means of propulsion, etcetera. Nothing about the Floaters’ physiognomy suggests that they’re in any way aggressive. In fact, everything points to a species that evolved in a relatively benign environment, with no need to develop defensive capabilities. I suppose the low gravity favors the lighter, weaker species against an aggressor species with what one would assume would be a necessarily heavier structure to support its biological armaments. Genetically speaking, it’s…” Jepson said, starting to wander off down a speculative path before the Captain brought her back on point by saying, “You say the Floaters evolved without any natural enemies. What do you call the thing that attacked one of them?”

“An alien,” the Science Officer said. Jepson tapped her pad, changing the image on the screen from the graceful behemoth to an enlarged freeze frame of the Leaper. “It’s big by our standards, anywhere from five to seven meters, but tiny in comparison to the Floaters, and ninety-nine percent certainly not native to this planet.”

London whistled. “Man, the odds just keep getting better, don’t they?”

“Where did it come from? How did it get here?” Katz said.

Jepson shrugged. “Beats me. Tissue samples would go a long way to answering that.”

“Well, unless the Leaper ate that entire Floater, we know where we can get a sample of at least one of ’em,” Gilmore said.

“And the Leaper might have left some of its genetic material on the corpse,” Jepson said, sitting up in her seat with excitement.

Engineer’s mate Knutson stuck his head through the hatch and said, “Got a message coming in on the company comm, boss. Scrambled and urgent.”

“What the hell do they want now?” Lawford grumbled as she pushed back her seat.

“Hell if I know,” Knutson said, and was gone. Lawford followed.

* * *

Two hours later, Gilmore and London were once again suited up and hopping over the rusty landscape. This time, they carried assault rifles and were followed by the similarly armed XO and Science Officer.

Lawford had returned to the Mess from taking the comm with deep frown lines creasing her forehead and said to the crew, “Jepson’s preliminary report’s got the company all excited. We must’ve stumbled across something because I’ve been ordered to bring back a Leaper specimen, dead or alive at, quote, any reasonable cost, unquote.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Katz said.

“Then you’re going to like this even less. The order’s accompanied by a warning to approach the Leapers with extreme caution.”

“Now that sounds like a job that ought to come with a nice, fat juicy bonus,” London said with a grin.

Lawford nodded.

“Then count me in,” he said.

“You’re already in. So is Gilmore. Katz and Jepson, you go too. And everybody goes armed. It worries me when even the company’s nervous about what they’re sending us into.”

Gilmore and London retraced their steps to the edge of the plain of high grass that fed into the forest of giant stalks. The hike was little different than their first across the alien landscape, except for the weapons in their hands and the nervous awareness that they might have to use them.

“Keep your eyes open,” Gilmore said. She pointed east. “The Floater was brought down less than a klick from here. The Leaper might still be in the area.”

“I’m getting a thermal on the downed Floater,” Jepson confirmed. “Going to take a good long time for that giant to cool down.”

“Anything on the Leaper?” Katz said.

“Can’t tell. I’m getting all kinds of bio readings, but I think most of them are from the Floater. It’s taking a long time to die, but it’s really all just a lot of data noise if I don’t know what I’m looking for.”

“A twenty-foot plus monster with an ass and hindquarters like a kangaroo on steroids,” London said. “Can’t miss it.”

“Yeah, I’ll try not to,” Katz said. “Okay, let’s go. Stow those pads and check your charge, Jepson. There’ll be time for science as soon as the area’s secured.”

* * *

When he was still just a kid, London had wheedled his way into a backroom poker game with a bunch of Marines and corporate spacers. He was already a pretty good player and he had enough in his stash to last him through as many hands as it took to get the feel of the table. So he kept his mouth shut and his eyes open. Most of the guys were strictly amateur, easy enough to take, but usually only for small change. The one real player at the table was a grizzled Marine named Klonsky. He played like he didn’t give a damn. He kept up a running commentary and stream of joking patter, hardly bothering to glance at his cards or the growing pile of cash in front of him.

London played it cool, losing a little more than he won and throwing a few hands to come off as just another casual player, biding his time until he had the cards in his hand to make his move. It came, in a game of hold ’em, and while Klonsky blathered on, London built a beautiful hand, a surefire winner that got better and better as the pot grew bigger and bigger, until every cent he had was on the table.

But when they laid down their cards, Klonsky had him beat.

“Fortune favors the bold, kid,” Klonsky said with a wink and a grin, and London watched his former stake disappear into the other man’s pile of cash. Much to his surprise, he wasn’t the least bit angry or resentful. It had cost him everything, but it was worth it to find out just how much he had to learn. London walked away from the encounter poorer but wiser, and wearing his own version of Klonsky’s personality, an ill-fitting suit that he gradually tailored to fit himself.

London knew he rubbed a lot of people the wrong way but didn’t care. As long as he could suck you into his game and take your cash, he didn’t need your love.

Signing on with Weyland-Yutani had less to do with wanderlust than it did with cash. The pay was good and space was filled with bored people with money in their pockets and no place to spend it.

Fortune favors the bold, he thought, and there wasn’t anybody aboard the Typhoon bolder than him.

London moved gradually ahead of the others through the tall grass. First come, first serve, though not at the price of caution. All the cash in the universe was useless to him dead, so he kept one eye on his environment, the other on his instruments, and his finger on the trigger.

* * *

Death had reduced the Floater to a slowly collapsing mountain of organic matter. It was still twitching and undulating when they found it, here and there, a tentacle lay twisted and exposed along its length, writhing like giant gray snakes in the rusty grass.

“Are you sure it’s dead?” Gilmore said. “Seems awful twitchy for a corpse.”

“As sure as I can be without a normal biometric to compare it against,” Jepson said. “As far as I can tell, this thing’s got at least four hearts, three brains, and what I’m willing to bet is at least six separate nervous systems.”

“Is it safe to approach?” Katz said.

“I think so,” Jepson said.

“You think so? That fills me with confidence,” Gilmore said.

“It’s fine, wiseass,” Jepson said. “Just don’t forget there’s a third life-form on the loose somewhere nearby.”

“Okay, let’s see if we can find where the Leaper struck this thing and get our samples,” Jepson said.

“Stay in visual contact with one another at all times,” Katz said, looking around. “Where’s London?”

Gilmore pointed to a spot a dozen meters closer to the forest of giant stalks. “I just saw him, right over there.”

Katz cursed and called the Warrant Officer’s name a few more times. There was no answer.

* * *

While the rest of them took their readings and poked cautiously at the body with sticks, London gave himself a running start and hopped onto the Floater. It was like trying to grab hold of a rubber sheet in the rain, but London managed to scramble awkwardly up onto the creature and find his footing.

London grinned as he listened to his shipmates’ speculative chatter over the radio. By the time they decided to do anything, he’d be back with the bonus already as good as in his pocket. The Floater was headed due north in its flight from the Leaper, so the spot they were looking for would be on its south end. What was so complicated?

As it turned out, not complicated at all. Within minutes, London saw ahead of him the massive, ugly trench torn in the sea of rust-colored flesh. Its edges were graying and oozing, splayed open to reveal a yawning cavern of hideously mottled and visibly decaying organic matter.

London’s stomach churned at the sight and for a second he thought he was going to lose his lunch, but he shut his eyes and thought of the reward, choking down his nausea and getting to work. He filled some bags with samples of flesh and viscera from the wound, but the money was in specimens from the Leaper. He searched the wound carefully for anything that the striking predator might have shed.

He heard Katz calling his name on his headset but he ignored it and went on with his search. Let them wait a few more minutes. He’d claim a radio glitch and none of the others had to be the wiser.

“Answer me, London,” Katz’s voice crackled in his ear. And then his radio did glitch, the voice hissing into static and the static stretching into a high-pitched whine that made London wince in pain.

It was followed by a Leaper exploding from the Floater’s wound and rising high into the air, its shadow falling across the stunned Warrant Officer before the creature began to descend on him.

* * *

Gilmore grabbed at her helmet as though trying to cover her ears when the feedback squealed through her headset. The sound made her weak at the knees and she found herself starting to twist and slowly fall. The low-grav made her motions almost balletic, and as she turned to sink into the grass, she saw, rising above the Floater the great form of the Leaper, a thing of darkness and sinew and sharp-edged claws and fangs.

“Incoming!” she screamed, but even she couldn’t hear herself over the Leaper’s call.

* * *

The black thing was coming down on top of him. As London tried to scramble out from beneath it, he lost his footing on the rubbery flesh and fell. He was just able to wrap one gloved hand around the barrel of his rifle, which he had put down while he collected his samples before tumbling down the Floater’s flank like a rock in an avalanche.

He hit the ground as the Leaper landed where he had just stood and then bounced, as if on a trampoline to follow its prey. London didn’t have time to turn his rifle around. Instead, he swung it like a bat, smashing it against the creature’s massive, narrow head. London didn’t know whether he had hurt or just annoyed the creature but had no intention of sticking around long enough to find out.

As fast as he could regain his footing, he pounced into the air and took off in leaps that covered three or four meters each, knowing full well the Leaper could catch him in a single jump. But so far, nothing was breathing down his neck and the squeal was no longer coming from the radio.

* * *

The realization that she hadn’t adequately thought this situation through struck Jepson like a punch to the gut. She had been so excited by the one Leaper that she never even stopped to consider there would be others.

But she considered it now.

They were bursting through the Floater’s flesh, four, five, six, and more of them. They were huge, five or six meters high, and everything about them spoke to an evolution as a killing machine. Their hides were like polished ebony and every appendage bristled with something pointed and deadly. Long narrow heads opened into impossibly wide maws lined with rows of razor-sharp teeth, and their lower halves were powerfully muscled to take advantage of the low gravity, with long, thick spiked tails.

Gilmore was staggered by the screech, her finger tightening reflexively on the trigger. The laser blast scorched the ground as she struggled to gain control of her muscles. The scream was rippling through her, making it difficult to think, much less take aim.

The moment the Leaper had been spotted, Katz pulled a flash-bang from his pouch and armed it. If it was a choice between getting the company its Leaper samples or blowing every last one of the ugly bastards to smithereens to save their asses, Katz knew which way he was going.

He tossed the flash-bang underhand, floating it right into three of the monsters who were converging on him. As it left his hand, their scream ripped through his head and he tried screaming loud enough to drown it out so he could get his rifle up and pull the trigger.

The concussive went off with a blinding light and deafening force enough to make the thin air ripple, spreading a cloud of gray smoke all around them. Katz couldn’t see through the smoke what, if any damage, he had inflicted, but the explosion seemed to have stopped the scream, at least for the moment.

Then London’s voice came screaming over his static-filled headset, “Heads up. I’m coming in… and I ain’t alone.”

He wished to hell he had more than three of the little canisters left in his pouch. Two, after he used one to repel a quartet of Leapers that were coming for Gilmore, and then down to one after they linked up with Jepson. But the first three blasts seemed to have made the Leapers more cautious, giving them a wide berth as the shipmates backed slowly from them.

“London,” Katz said. “Where the hell are you? We’re surrounded here.”

“I got my own problems,” the Warrant Officer grunted. “I’m cut off. I’m gonna take cover in the forest.”

Jepson consulted the pad on her forearm. “Keep your transponder on so I can track you, London.”

“Roger that. I’ll try to find an observation post so I can… uh-oh. Sh—,” they heard, but the scream started up again and washed the rest of his words away in static.

* * *

All of a sudden, the world was spinning and London didn’t know which way was up. Something had hold of his leg and he was being dangled like a ragdoll high into the sky, the rusty landscape whizzing by over his head. Then the sky and ground disappeared and the world turned dark and he was being battered on all sides before plummeting into deepening darkness.

The Leaper landed smoothly on the forest floor, its powerful legs flexing to absorb the impact. It dropped London and he tumbled to the loamy ground with a groan. He lay as he fell, face up, catching his breath after his dizzying ride.

The creature stood over him, crouched on massive haunches and cocked its head, as though listening.

London tried to catch his breath, his eyes never leaving the Leaper. He had been turned around and was deep enough in the forest to have no idea which way was out. He still had his sidearm in its holster, but this monster didn’t look like it would be much bothered by a few slugs.

He tried his radio, whispering through clenched teeth, but he only got a few words out before the electronic squeal obliterated his message. To add to his problem, the alarm on his oxygen supply was trilling a thirty-minute warning. After that, he was down to a ten-minute emergency tank.

The Leaper turned its dead, empty face to him.

Talk about long odds, he thought.

* * *

“Son of a bitch. I think they’re herding us, into the forest,” Katz said, slowly sweeping the barrel of his rifle across the wall of alien creatures surrounding them and forcing them back towards the forest of giant stalks.

“The Typhoon’s not answering our distress call,” Gilmore said.

“They can’t hear it,” Jepson said, speaking fast through her fear. “It’s the Leaper. I think the Floaters communicate using some sort of sonar, like whales. The Leapers disrupt it with a counter-frequency to confuse their prey. Our radios operate close enough to the Floaters’ frequency to be affected. I’ve switched suit-to-suit comm over to another band, but it’s only effective in close proximity.”

“I don’t think that’s going to be an issue,” Katz said. “So here’s the way I see our options: we try and shoot our way out now and they kill us here, or we let them herd us wherever and they kill us there.”

London’s voice cut briefly into the comm, saying one of them had grabbed him but he was okay before the shrill scream obliterated the rest of his message.

Jepson gasped. “He’s alive.”

“I guess if anyone’s going to beat the odds, it’s him,” Gilmore said.

* * *

They were on the move again, the Leaper dragging London by his leg through the dark forest. The company assured crews that their E.V.A. suits were made to stand up to any conditions, but he doubted being dragged by giant clawed aliens had been included in their testing protocols.

Do or die, he thought. More likely do and die, but anything had to be better than being a pull toy for this nightmare. He reached for his sidearm but didn’t dare draw it while he was being jostled about. It was the only weapon he had and he couldn’t risk dropping it.

He didn’t have long to wait. The Leaper pushed past a giant stalk and into a clearing. London’s heart sank. A Floater had been brought crashing down in the forest, its massive carcass flattening the surrounding vegetation and serving as the hive for a colony of Leapers. London couldn’t tell how long the Floater had been dead, but from the look of the gray, rotting flesh it had been a while.

London’s stomach churned and he licked dry lips. No matter how he ran the game, he couldn’t come up with a winning hand. He was outnumbered and even with a good head start, one of these things could bring him to ground with a few good leaps. He might be able to take a few of them down before they got him, but so what? He was starting to think it might be smarter to just turn the gun on himself and get it over with.

“London? Do you hear me?”

Gilmore’s voice crackled in his ear, half static and breaking up. He winced in anticipation of the answering squeal, but it didn’t come.

“Gilmore? You guys okay? You reading me?” he said, his heart starting to pound even harder.

The response was garbled but the signal was improving by the second. They were still alive but the Leapers were herding them deeper into the forest. From the strengthening radio signal, they were headed his way. That was the good news. The bad was, the Leaper once again grabbed him by the leg and began dragging him towards the gaping rotting cavern of Leaper flesh.

“If you’re gonna ride in to save my sorry ass, now would be a good time,” he said, his voice hoarse. He pulled his gun.

“Fast as we can,” Katz said.

“I think I’m gonna have to start shooting, man,” he said, talking just to talk and to hear another human respond.

“Still have your rifle?” Gilmore asked.

“Negative. Broke it on one of their heads. All I got’s my sidearm.”

“Okay, hang tight,” Jepson said, sounding out of breath. “From your signal strength, I think we’re close.”

“I ain’t the one dealing this hand,” he said. “Crap. Okay, we’re inside. Double-time it, will you?”

Inside the Floater was a world of deep shadows and even darker shapes moving through corridors and chambers of deteriorating flesh hanging from cathedral high vaults of bone. He was being dragged through a thick slimy sludge of rotted organic matter.

“Waiting on an update here,” he said.

“Shut up, London.” Gilmore’s voice came crystal clear through his headset and it was tense with suppressed panic. “We’re here. There’s got to be fifty of them out here.”

“And even more inside with me. Anybody got any ideas?”

“Just one,” Katz said.

* * *

The first mate raised his rifle and said, “Fire!” And then he did, making a slow, wide sweeping arc with the laser through a clutch of Leapers.

The creatures’ mouths opened wide. Dripping, secondary maws of deadly teeth protruded from their jaws as their bodies exploded into black and green bursts of flesh and acid blood.

“Look at ’em light up,” Gilmore shouted and started shooting. Jepson added to the chaos as the surviving Leapers erupted into a frenzied panic, like a nest of grasshoppers with a lighted match thrown into it.

“Unbelievable,” Jepson said with a gasp. “Aim for their bodies. The heads and limbs are armored but the rest are easy targets.”

* * *

The Leaper suddenly let London drop into the slime and turned to hop back the way they had just come. Then the rest of the Leapers moving around in the dark were also racing for the exit.

Rolling onto his stomach and then pushing himself onto one knee, London raised his gun and fired at the closest dark shape. Its body seemed to shatter and it collapsed.

“Bingo,” he shouted and clamored awkwardly to his feet on the slimy surface. Just for the hell of it, he popped off two more of the bastards, then turned to make sure nothing was about to land on him in the dark. That’s when he saw the nest. He switched on the small lamp on his helmet for a better look and saw, stretched between two of the towering ribs, a wall of Floater flesh into which thousands of leathery and irregularly shaped objects had been implanted.

He knew he should just get the hell out of there, but before he did, there was one thing he had to do.

* * *

Katz was holding the remaining flash-bang in reserve, waiting to regroup with London for use to help cover their getaway. The Leapers obviously weren’t accustomed to resistance, and the carnage the landing crew was inflicting on them was enormous. But there was still enough of them that if the Leapers decided to rush them en masse, they wouldn’t have stood a chance.

The first mate was almost sorry he had allowed the thought to enter his mind, because the moment it did, the Leapers behavior began to change, almost as though they were adapting their tactics to this new, lethal opponent. They were spreading out, widening the distances between themselves, creating scores of individual, harder to hit targets, tightening the circle around them.

“London!” he shouted.

* * *

“I’m coming, boss,” London said. “And I’m planning on leaving things hot behind me.”

“Explain,” Katz snapped.

London grinned, moving as fast as he could across the slick, slimy surface.

“I got a back-up oxygen tank and a gun. You do the math.”

A dark shape swept across his path. He lost his footing in the slime, but threw himself headlong toward the exit, sliding across the ground like a sled on ice under the shape and out into the open.

“Heads up,” he shouted, using the low-gravity to push himself to his feet. The others were back to back, eyes on the surrounding Leapers. London had already disconnected the small oxygen cylinder tucked into a pocket on his chest and now he gently tossed it into the entrance. He took aim and fired.

And missed with his first shot, and with his second. The third was even wider off the mark.

“Jeez, London,” Gilmore snapped. “Out of the way!”

A couple of hops brought her to London. She raised her rifle and fanned the beam across the canister until she homed in on it and blasted away.

The Leapers started to move.

Katz yelled something that was lost in the sweep of the concussive wave from the exploding oxygen tank which sent them all flying. The blast ignited the ground cover and the fiery heat seemed to transmit itself through the vegetation and the Floater carcass without bursting into towering licks of flame.

The blast was intense and even before the humans had stopped tumbling, the Leaper colony was in motion. But instead of pouncing on their stunned prey, they streamed as one into the smoldering carcass.

“You said you found a nest,” Jepson said, breathing heavily. “They must be trying to save the offspring.”

“Who cares?” London said. “Let’s go while we can.”

“Anyone know which way we came?” Gilmore said.

“I do,” Katz said. “I used to be a Boy Scout. I marked our trail.”

London looked at him. “A Boy Scout? You?”

Katz grinned and armed the concussive grenade and threw it at the mouth of the carcass, crammed with Leapers doomed by a hereditary instinct that made them race blindly into disaster to save their unborn.

“I said ‘used to be,’” he said.

The grenade went off and, in the billowing smoke, the crew of the Typhoon slipped away into the forest.

* * *

As the repaired Typhoon climbed into the sky, the crew could see the smoke billowing from the forest of giant stalks. Infra-red imaging showed that the conflagration had spread almost three kilometers from its starting point but seemed to be dying of its own accord. Jepson started to explain how the combination of low atmospheric pressure and certain flammable elements enabled the heat to burn without flames, but everybody was suddenly tired and headed off to bed.

In his quarters, London stripped down and allowed himself as long and as hot a shower as the ships’ system would give him before sitting down on the edge of his bunk with the souvenir he had collected during the E.V.A. While most of the biological samples of the vegetation and the Floaters had made it back to the ship, no one had the time or the presence of mind to grab something before their escape.

There had been a lot of grumbling about the lack of Leaper DNA gathered once they got back to the ship. But all agreed that coming out of the experience alive was better than nothing, and, besides, they still had the bonus they would be receiving for the Floater samples.

London kept his mouth shut and the object he had snatched up on his way out the door hidden. It was oblong, a little larger than a potato, and had a black, leathery shell. He guessed it was a Leaper egg and was willing to bet the bank the company was going to pay him life-changing money to get their hands on it. And he figured since the risk in getting it had been all his, the bonus money should be too.

“Fortune favors the bold, kid,” he said to himself, out loud and with a smile, left the egg on top of his locker before shutting the lights and drifting off to dream about what he was going to do with his fortune.

* * *

London was dreaming. He was seated at a poker table with five Leapers, one of them smoking a cigar, playing poker. Instead of chips, they were playing for Leaper eggs and London was winning big. He had a surefire hand, five Leapers straight, so he picked up his biggest egg to throw it into the pot, but the leathery shell was warm and alive in his hand, pulsating. And then, it began to crack open with a sharp, wet sound.

London’s eyes flicked open. He came awake so fast, he could still hear the sound of the cracking egg in the dark of his cabin.

It wasn’t until he felt the warm, moist creature crawl onto his face and fire its tentacle down his throat that he realized he wasn’t dreaming, but by then, it was too late.

REAPER

BY DAN ABNETT

They slam-dropped out of the Montoro’s belly hangars and rode the rattling wind down to LV-KR 115.

A thirty-minute descent. Canetti had the stick of the lead drop. He lost sight of the other Cheyenne in a matter of seconds. After the bump and the stomach-lurch of clamp release, he looked up and watched the giant oblong shadow of the Montoro slowly turning away and receding into the pale darkness of near-space, as though it was leaving them behind rather than the other way around.

Drop two was at his nine, the small blue blades of its thrusters flashing on and off as it trimmed its headlong fall.

Then they hit cloud and he couldn’t see it anymore. Frame vibration increased and the stick quivered in his hand. The cloud was like whisked soup. He watched the track, the amber squares of the trajectory field lapping and overlapping around the steady cursor that was them.

“Still with me, drop two?” he asked into his helmet mic.

A rasp of noise.

“Copy that, lead drop. Nice weather for it.”

“Copy, two.”

Another belch of gritty sound.

“Coming up on the marker. Execution point in ten. See you on the other side.”

“Copy, two. Happy hunting.”

Out there in the soup, invisible, drop two was pulling west, diverting from the lead drop’s course, heading out across the northern continental towards the secondary LZ.

The intercom bleeped. Lieutenant Teller in the payload bay below him.

“How we doing, Canetti?”

“In the pipe. Looks good.”

“What have you got?”

“Weather, sir,” said Canetti.

* * *

Rogers pulled up the schematics for the crop tractor and Teller slid his seat along the deck rail to look at the wall display. The whole platoon had reviewed the data two dozen times during on-board briefs, and even done a walk-through in the simulator.

The airframe juddered. Teller kept his eyes fixed on the monitor display. Rogers knew the lieutenant was tense. He’d made eight drops, but every one had been with Captain Broome along, calling the shots. This time, Broome was on drop two, checking out the secondary LZ. Teller had command for the main excursion. Rogers knew it was a test. Teller was looking at SOCS promotion. He’d passed the boards, but he needed practical citations on his docket.

“Main upper hull is big enough for a set-down,” she said, pointing.

“Uh huh,” said Teller.

“Unless this chop keeps up,” Rogers added. “Windshear off the fields could swing us off the flat top into the control tower or the uplink masts.”

“In which case, we divert to the baler housing on the side,” Teller said. “There’s a large platform there.”

“Agreed,” said Rogers. They had already agreed all of this. Teller was just rehearsing. He was doing what Sergeant Bose called a “fine tooth,” a repeated workthrough until the mission parameters were like muscle memory.

Rogers tapped the keys of her console.

“Canetti was right,” she said. “Lots of weather. Storm formation’s kicking a serious crosswind.”

“Baler housing it is,” said Teller.

“I’ll let Canetti know,” she replied.

* * *

Teller studied the screen. He clicked through images of the target vehicle: Plan and elevation schematics, feed-cap shots of similar machines working on site, and images from the Weyland-Yutani product brochure. A model 868 “Ceres” Harvester Unit. 210,000 metric, 297 meters long, its steel carapace painted bright yellow with environment-resistant polymer. Hell of a thing.

Teller was fourth generation USMC. He’d grown up in Annapolis, and had spent many hours of his childhood in the Yard’s famous museum. The crop tractor reminded him of the old surface Navy aircraft carriers displayed there like trophy fish. The carriers were antiques, part of a school of warfare that had been obsolete for sixty years when he was born. Their spirit lived on in Conestoga-class light assault ships like the Montoro, and even more so in the massive Hellespont-class fleet carriers, the design ethic that had once commanded the oceans converted to space warfare. But the visual aesthetics endured in the Company-manufactured crop tractors, set on vast wheel-trains and programmed to endlessly harvest the prairies of gene-fixed agro-worlds like LV-KR 115.

The unit they were chasing was serial 678493, chassis name “Consus.” Crew of sixty-eight, working a five-year shift between replenishment cycles, harvesting and freeze-packing the crop into bales twenty-four seven. Remote-flown lifters transported the cargo to orbiting silos for freight collection. Five-year contract. Hell of a life.

The Consus was one of two harvesters working LV-KR 115. Six weeks after its last replenishment it had reported a malfunction. Contact dropped out, then Company tracking indicated that the tractor had diverted from its programmed harvesting grid. Demeter, the other tractor operating on the surface, had attempted contact, but then aborted five rescue ops in a row because of bad weather. The chief officer of the Demeter had logged “the worst storms ever seen on LV-KR 115.” Data supported that. LV-KR 115 suffered seasonal storms, but the atmospheric tumult that had hammered the planet for the last three months was unprecedented.

Agricultural fliers were grounded, but UD4L Cheyenne dropships were all-weather rated and built to take punishment. USMC pilots like Canetti were also better trained than the average company contractor. Teller had known Canetti land a drop on manual in the middle of sandstorm and 200 kph shear.

It wasn’t going to be much of a chase. The crop tractors maxed out at a crawling 7 kph surface speed, a ridiculously easy bounce for a UD4L drop.

And anyway, the Consus had stopped moving altogether three weeks earlier.

“You still think it’s the drive system?” Rogers asked him.

“Drives explains the dead-stop, but not the comms,” he replied.

“Power plant, then?”

“And aux? That’s unlucky. Besides, the Company has attempted four restarts by remote. They’re not getting a ‘fail’ message. They’re getting nothing.”

“I said it,” said Sergeant Bose. “Some joker’s lost their shit.”

Bose had unclasped his restraints and was standing behind them, strap-hanging from the overhead bar, his body rocking to the jolt of the airframe.

“Maybe,” said Teller. It was a sad truth that no matter what safety measures, redundancies, back-ups and secondaries were rigged into high-value hardware units, the most common cause of shut-down was human action. Despite rigorous vetting and psychological testing, people on long-ticket contracts snapped. One rogue actor with a firearm could take down a contained working environment and cause all the system damage that explained the data.

“More than maybe, I’d say,” said Bose.

“That’s why we’re loading plastics for entry,” said Teller. The clip of every weapon in the platoon was marked with blue tape. Non-lethal munitions. Teller did not want crossfire fatalities.

Bose shrugged. Everyone had live rounds in their webbing anyway.

A buzzer sounded.

“Coming up, two minutes!” Canetti’s voice reported through the speakers.

“Get up, get set!” Bose called, turning to the troopers in their rows of landing rigs. “Lamp goes on, we go clean and fast!”

The marines started to prep and shake out, each one ready to pop the lock of their restraint harness.

“Lids, goggles, rebreathers,” Teller said. “There’s a lot of chaff in the air, a lot of airborne dirt. Get through it, get inside. No one goes bareface until we’ve accessed the interior. If I have to write any of you up for any crap, I want you to be able to see me as well as hear me when I do it.”

* * *

Canetti eased back on the stick. They were forty meters up, and way past stall-speed. VTOL mode was on, and the drop was nose-high. The air was filthy, like a blizzard of black snow. There was a hard cross pitching about 160 kph. Zero visibility. He tried kicking on the floods, but that made things worse. He guessed it was airblown particulates, maybe soil, or processed grain waste. It was as if the quartz of the cockpit canopy had been sprayed with blackout paint.

He switched to instruments. 3D imaging showed him the ground, and picked up a huge furrow in the top soil. The tractor’s track. He adjusted the scope and suddenly painted the side of the Consus, rising like the wall of a dam.

“Shit,” he said gently, and pulled hard. Collision warnings began to shriek. Hazards blinked on and off across his board. The airframe shuddered violently, and the turbines wailed in protest. The stick was like glue. He trusted the VTOL systems, but now he was worried about the blizzarding soup outside clogging his intakes and thrust nozzles. Software and autoflight were keeping the drop in the air, a plate-spinning balancing act of trim and vector-thrust beyond the manual abilities of any human operator.

“Come on, you dog,” he whispered.

The tractor was huge. He tweaked the resolution of the imaging, and got the datalink to run a comparison with the stored schematics. The screen pinged up an overlay match. As he had judged from the relative position of the track, they were approaching the port side of the beast. Canetti didn’t want to trust his instincts: it was too easy to get turned around in a blind-out like this.

He flipped the match view to the heads-up display, and panned for the port-side baler housing. It was easy to identify, a long loading platform like a lateral hangar bay with open sidings and weather-port roof overhang. The roof was low and tight. Between them, Canetti and the autoguide was going to have to slide the drop in under the overhang sideways, like posting a letter into a mailbox width-ways.

“Standby,” he told the cabin below. The thrusters were straining. Autoguide or no autoguide, one sudden gust of wind would mash them sideways into the tractor’s hull or the housing overhang.

“Are you getting paid proportionally to this shit?” Rogers asked over the intercom, her tone light and measured to calm his focus.

“Absolutely not,” he replied.

Jesus Christ, that overhang was low. With an almost angry stab, he flicked off the collision warning. It wasn’t telling him anything he couldn’t already see on imaging, and the noise was drilling his nerves.

“Come on, come on…” he murmured.

The drop, all twenty-five meters of it, drifted into the slot sideways. Not even a scrape to the tail boom. He could just about see the deck below him, picked up through the broiling grit by the floods. He let the drop sink.

Contact. A sprung bounce as the landing gear made contact. A slight lateral drag as the skids travelled. He heard metal-on-metal squealing.

And they were down.

“Everybody off!” Canetti yelled into his mic.

* * *

Rogers dropped the ramp and opened the exteriors. A combination of funneled wind and pressure exchange almost blew the ready marines off their feet. The payload bay instantly filled with swirling airborne filth. Teller could feel it pattering off his body armor and sleeves. It felt like his goggles were being jet-washed.

“Go!” Bose yelled over the set-to-set.

They scrambled down into the grit-storm. It wasn’t the most dynamic or heroic de-bus in the history of the Corps. Fighting the gale, the marines moved like clichéd mime artists.

“Achieve the hatch!” Bose ordered, leading the way. “O’Dowd, get ready with your damn tether!”

There was an entry hatch on the hull-side of the baler platform. They had already run tether cables from the payload bay deck rings, roping the men together in strings of five. Fighting into the wind a step at a time, each lead man carried the snap-hook for the front of the tether line. The last man in each file played out the end of the cable from the ramp drums.

“Jesus!” Private O’Dowd protested.

“Jesus loves you, son,” Bose replied. “Now get the line secured!”

At the head of one string, Bose carried the snap-hook. He almost slammed into the hatch, and then groped frantically for a lock-point. He found one, flipped it out, and snapped the hook in place.

“O’Dowd!”

O’Dowd was beside him, leading the second string in. A gust blew him into the hatch, and he dropped the snap-hook. It was swinging from his waist. He fumbled to grab it. Blind, his hands found the wrong hook and disconnected his own harness from the tether line. Trusting too much in a line he was no longer connected to, O’Dowd relaxed slightly, and the wind took him off his feet. He crashed away, rolling and sliding along the deck.

O’Dowd’s barreling form took Teller off his feet. Teller had been advancing at the front of the third string. They both went down. Rogers, in the string behind Teller, grabbed at Teller, her heels sliding on the deck plates. Teller, on his side, lashed out and got hold of O’Dowd’s webbing. From the schems being projected onto the inside of his goggles, Teller could see that O’Dowd was about three meters shy of falling into the through-deck cavity, a five-meter drop straight down into the metal guts of the baling machinery.

“Lieutenant? Lieutenant!” Bose called.

“Get the hatch open!” Teller yelled back, strained to keep his grip on O’Dowd.

Bose turned back to the hatch. The lever mechanism felt misshapen. He tried to locate the bar. He pulled out his cutting tool, lit the torch, and sliced through the handle and the cross-bolt.

There was no power. He and Private Belfi had to haul the hatch open together. It slid surprisingly easily in its groove, as if the wind had loosened it in the frame.

The entry lock was dark, and the wind and grit followed them inside. One by one, the strings fought their way in behind them. Teller’s group was the last through, dragging O’Dowd with them.

“Get that hatch shut!” Teller ordered. Rogers and Pator slammed it back home, shutting out the storm.

The air went still. Slowly, the eddying dust and grit began to settle. They could hear the bang and surge of the wind against the hatch, the monsoon patter of particles hitting the hull. The marines were breathing hard. Helmet and pack lamps went on, revealing a grey haze and shadows. Teller pulled up his goggles. Visibility hardly improved.

“Interior hatch,” he ordered. His voice sounded dead and hollow in the dull, confined air. He could feel the scratch of dust in his throat and it seemed like his nostrils were plugged with grit.