Рич Ларсон - Tomorrow Factory - Collected Fiction

Some of the squad swivel instinctively. Elliot pulls up Jan’s channel. “Prentiss, there’s a bogey heading towards you,” he says. “Might be mechanical. Get eyes on it.”

Jan’s reply crackles. “Hard to miss,” he says. “It’s fucking glowing.”

“And what is it?” Elliot says. “You armed?”

Jan’s reply does not come by channel, but his howl punctures the still night air. Elliot is knocked back as Noam barrels past him, unslinging her gnasher and snapping the safety off. Snell’s fast behind, and then the others, and Elliot finds himself rearguard. He’s still fumbling for his weapon when he rounds the back of the downed Heron.

His eyes slip-slide over the scene, trying to make sense of the nightmarish mass of bioluminescence and spiky bone that has enveloped Jan almost entirely. His night vision picks out a trailing arm, a hip, a boot exposed. The creature is writhing tight around Jan’s body, spars of bone rasping against each other, and the glowing flesh of it is moving, slithering. The screams from inside are muffled.

Snell fires first, making Elliot’s dampers swell like wet cotton in his ear canals. The spray of bullets riddle the length of the creature, and a fine spray of red blood—Jan’s blood—flicks into the air.

“Don’t fucking shoot!” Noam smacks Snell’s weapon down and lunges forward, reaching for her brother’s convulsing arm. Before he can grab hold, the creature retreats toward the tree line with Jan still ensnared, impossibly fast.

It claws itself forward on a shifting pseudopod of bone spines, moving like a scuttling blanket. Someone else fires a shot, narrowly missing Noam running after it. The creature slithers into the trees, for an instant Noam is silhouetted against the eerie glow of it, then both of them disappear in the dark.

“Shit,” Tolliver says. “I mean, shit.”

Elliot thinks that’s as good a summary as any. He can still see Noam’s vitals, and Jan’s too, both of them spiked hard with adrenaline but alive. They’ll be out of range in less than a minute.

“I hit it,” Snell says. “Raked it right along its, I don’t know, its abdomen. Didn’t do nothing.”

“You hit Jan. That bloodspray, that was Jan.”

“Jan’s inside it.”

“We’re going after them, right?”

Elliot looks around at the squad’s distorted faces. Tolliver’s eyes gleam like a cat’s in the dark. There is no protocol for men being dragged away by monsters in the night. He opens his jaw; shuts it again. Mirotic shifts in his peripheral, taking a half-step forward, shoulders thrust back, and Elliot knows he is a nanosecond from taking the squad over, and maybe that would be better for everyone.

“Mirotic,” he says. “You stay. Get a drone up and guide us bird’s eye. Everyone else, on me.”

Plunging through the dark swamp, Elliot expects every mud-sucked step to trigger another smartmine. Sweat pools in the hollow of his collarbone. The whine of the drone overhead shivers in his clenched teeth, and the squad is silent except for heavy breathing, muted curses as they follow its glowing path in their implants. The Prentii’s signal comes and goes like a static ghost.

The warped green-and-black blur of his night vision, the drone’s shimmering trail of digital breadcrumbs, the memory of the monster and Jan’s disembodied thrashing arm—none of it seems quite real. A nightmare, or more likely an overdose.

“Rebels stay out of these swamps,” Snell says aloud, dredging something from his post-clamp war briefing. “All the colonists do.” His voice is thin and tight.

Nobody replies. The drone’s pathway hooks left, into the deepest thicket of sponge trees, and they follow it. Pungent-smelling leaves slap against Elliot’s head and shoulders. It reminds him almost of the transplanted eucalyptus trees where he grew up on Earth.

“Can’t get any closer with the drone,” comes Mirotic’s crackly voice in his ear. “Trees are too high, too dense. They’re right ahead of you. Close now.”

The twins’ signal flares in Elliot’s skull, but their channels are shut and their vitals are erratic. Elliot’s feels his heart starting to thrum too fast. Eyes blink and heads twitch as the rest of the squad picks up the signal. Tolliver’s face is drawn, his mouth half-open. Santos is unreadable. Snell looks ready to shit himself. Hands tighten on stocks. Fingers drift to triggers.

The sponge trees thin out, and Elliot sees the same bioluminescence that swallowed Jan whole. The shape of it is indistinct, too bright for his night vision, so he flicks it off. When he closes and reopens his eyes, he sees what’s become of the twins.

They are tangled together in a grotesque parody of affection, limbs wrapping each other, and it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins because they are coated in a writhing skin of ghostly blue light. Long shafts of dull gray bone, humors or femurs from an animal Elliot knows was not killed by any plague, skewer them in place like a tacked specimen.

Reminding himself it might be a hallucination, Elliot steps slowly forward.

“Prentiss?”

A sluggish ripple goes through the twins’ tangled bodies. Elliot follows the motion and finds a neck. A head not covered over. Noam’s eyes are wide open and terrified. Elliot watches her face convulse trying to speak, but when her bruised mouth opens, glowing blue tendrils spill out of her throat. It’s inside her. Elliot recoils. In his own throat, he feels bile rising and burning.

“Shit, they’re conscious,” Tolliver breathes. “What is that stuff? What the fuck is…” He reaches for Noam’s cheek with one hand, but before he makes contact the other head, Jan’s, buried somewhere near his sister’s thigh, begins to wail. It’s a raw animal noise Elliot has only ever heard men make when they are torn apart, when their limbs have been blown off, when shock and pain have flensed them down to the reptile brain and all it knows to do is scream.

He claws Tolliver’s hand back.

“Don’t touch them,” he says. “We have to run a scan, or…” He looks at the bones pinning them in place, at the writhing cloak that looks almost like algae, now, like glowing blue algae. He has no idea what to do.

“Look at the feet,” Santos says thickly. “Fuck.”

Elliot looks. Noam’s feet are not feet any more. The skin and muscle has been stripped away, leaving bits of bone, crumbling with no tendon to hold them together.

“Kill them,” Santos says. “It’s eating them alive.” She pulls her sidearm and aims it at Jan’s screaming mouth. Her hand tremors.

Elliot doesn’t tell her no. It would be mercy, now, to kill them. Same how it was mercy for Beasley.

A vein bulges up Santos’s neck. “Can’t,” she grunts. “The implant.”

Elliot aims his own weapon at Jan and as his finger finds the trigger he finds himself paralyzed, blinking red warnings scrolling over his eyes. Convict squads have insurance against friendly fire same as any other. Maybe in a combat situation the parameters would loosen a little, but this, an execution, is out-of-bounds.

“Send the nudge, Noam.” Tolliver squats down by her wide-eyed face. “You in there? You gotta send the nudge. So we can trigger you. Come on, Noam.”

The yellow message doesn’t appear. Maybe Noam is too angry, too colonist, thinking she is invincible, thinking somehow she’ll get out of this scrape how she got out of all the other ones. More likely her mind is too far gone to access the implant. Jan starts to scream again.

“I’ll fucking do it manual, then,” Tolliver says, with his voice shaking. He looks at Snell. “Give me your knife. Unless you want to do it.”

Snell wordlessly unclips his combat knife and slings it over, handle-first. It’s a long wicked thing, not regulation or even close. Elliot thinks he should offer to do it. He’s in command, after all. He knows where the jugular is and where to slit it without dousing himself in blood. But he only watches.