The Chemical Mage

Colm slid into the shadow of the byre, taking care not to step on the dead Ghosts sprawled against the wall. Lacking a battlesuit, he was vulnerable to enemy fire, so careful, careful, and remember that when you’re away from your ship you haven’t got eyes in the back of your head.

With a hurried glance, he took in the other buildings huddled at the cliff’s foot. He had grown up around farms, although his father was an entertainer and his mother a nurse. They had crofters for neighbors, so he was fairly familiar with the workings of mixed crop and livestock operations. Drumlin Farm was just a big croft on a distant moon. Cows here, chickens over there, that’d be the hay barn where they also kept the horses if they had any. Sad little heaps of feathers lay among the dead Ghosts. A gut-shot dog had dragged its own intestines halfway across the farmyard before dying. Colm’s heart twisted at the sight. What a desperate waste.

Movement beyond the hay barn. He flattened his back against the stone wall, gripping his machine pistol. But it was just plastic rippling in the night breeze: a row of polytunnels shredded by machine-gun fire. A truly ferocious battle had raged here.

“Vike?” he whispered. “Smythe?”

She’d said, I’m going inside.

Cursing under his breath, Colm skittered from shadow to shadow until he reached the cliff.

He knew exactly what he should do, having seen this shambles of a battlefield.

The same thing Smythe and Holmundsen should’ve done.

Return to the gunship and call for reinforcements.

But he also knew that they were the reinforcements.

Colm had been the only pilot in the ready room tonight.

The Fleet was stretched so thin on Upsandra d2, they were coming apart.

Oh, sure, the Unsinkable would send another gunship eventually. Maybe at first light, three sols from now. By that time, the two half-baked kids Colm had the pleasure of calling his crew might be dead.

He ducked under a garage door into, surprise, a garage. It was as dark as the devil’s arsehole but the smell of machine oil and biodiesel fumes gave it away. He stumbled against a tractor and got his back against a wheel taller than he was. Let his mouth hang open, listening.

There were certain advantages to operating without a battlesuit, apart from the obvious one that you didn’t need a fuel cell to move your arms and legs. For instance, you could hear better without a tangle of electronics in the way. It made no sense, but you just could.

Now Colm heard a faint rumbling noise from deeper within the cave complex.

Survivors?

Or just machinery?

Survivors operating machinery?

Surely not even colonists could be that dumb.

Colm could guess easily enough how this disaster had come about. As everyone knew, the Ghosts had been probing this archipelago for years. When they were Stage One, you just had to be vigilant: stamp them out before they had a chance to multiply, and for Christ’s sake don’t leave the battery in your car overnight. All powered equipment had to be carefully protected when Ghosts were about. But time and again that simple directive had proved to be too much for civilians. They forgot, they slipped up, they left a combine harvester sitting out in the back field with half a kilowatt of juice in it, and that was what must’ve happened here. Hello, Stage Two Ghosts, with rifles and shotguns and a strong enough grasp of guerrilla tactics to capture another power source, and another one, multiplying their numbers every time. Soon there’d have been enough of them to lay siege to the farm. At that point the colonists would have swallowed their pride and begged the Marines to come save them, but it had already been too late.

Two platoons of Marines could hold off any number of Ghosts … but only until they ran out of ammo.

Ritualistically, Colm cursed the duty officer who had denied the first medevac request from Drumlin Farm, and the OIC who had not appreciated how much danger his troopers were in, and everyone in the whole chain of command stretching all the way back to Earth. They’d all failed. Now it was up to him to not fail, too.

Sweating, he thumbed off the safety of his machine pistol. Twelve rounds in the magazine, another twelve in the spare. What a joke. He should’ve taken a Ghost gun from outside, but like everyone, he instinctively loathed the idea of touching Ghost stuff. Who knew where it came from?

He edged away from the tractor, only to bump into something else. Tines stuck up at thigh level. A rotary tiller. Without having to check, he knew it would be out of juice. The very fact that the lights were off proved that Ghosts had got in here and drained the power out of the whole farm.

So where were the Ghosts now?

And where were Smythe and Holmundsen?

He fumbled his way to a door in the back of the garage. Following the rumbling noise, he tiptoed down a narrow passage. His boots kept meeting soft obstacles. The floor was tacky. He was almost grateful for the darkness.

Outside, the night had been warm, but in here it was cold. Gooseflesh-cold. See-your-breath cold, if it weren’t so dark. The cold and the dark and the smell of death combined into a poisonous brew of fear. He stopped walking, slumped on the wall, eyes straining wide in the darkness.

28 months to go.

I don’t want to die.

Smythe. Holmundsen.

He flogged himself with the names of his crew, but fear dulled his concern for them, made him selfish.

He’d have turned around and made a dash for freedom if he had not, at that moment, seen a door faintly outlined in the wall opposite him. The light seeping between the hinges was very dim. Had his eyes not been dark-adapted, he wouldn’t have been able to see it at all.

He crossed the passage. Laid his bare left hand on the steel. Vibrations tickled his palm.

Yup.

The noise was coming from behind this door. Maybe someone was alive in there.

He did not give himself any more time to be afraid. Stupid bloody swing door had no handle, so he couldn’t pull it towards himself. He mule-kicked the door open and flinched back to the side of the doorway—

—just in time.

A shot roared, pulverizing the silence. The bullet ricocheted off the far wall of the passage. Stone chips flew in the dim light from the door, which was swinging shut again.

“Stay the fuck back!” roared a voice from inside the room.

“Vike?”

“S-sir?” Holmundsen’s voice shifted from furious defiance to childlike hope.

“I’m coming in.” Colm slid around the door as it closed.

The light came from machinery mounted atop a concrete platform. It gleamed red and green on the side of an enormous steel tank, on the belt buckles and buttons of Ghost corpses littering the floor, and on the face of Holmundsen, who sat at the bottom of the platform, legs sticking out in front of him, pistol in his lap.

In here, the noise was factory-floor loud. A smell of sulfur masked the odor of death.

Colm hurried to Holmundsen, avoiding the dead Ghosts. “You OK?”

“Nope.” Holmundsen gave a strained smile. A hand fluttered to his hip. Blood glistened on his leathers. “Fucking Ghosts. Know what they were doing?”

“What?”

“Feeding the grinder—” Holmundsen jerked a thumb at the big tank— “with bodies. Their own dead. And ours.”

“That’s new,” Colm said, playing down his revulsion. “I’ve heard of dropping in the odd sheep, if you don’t want the health inspectors to get a look at it.”

He knew what this towering cluster of pipes and tanks was. A farm like this got most or all of its power from biowaste. The juice in the fuel cells of the tractors, rotary tillers, and so on? Generated by the vehicles’ biodiesel engines, which fed front-end reforming hydrogen cells. The lights, the fridges, the computers, heating in winter, AC in summer, dairy processing machinery, whatever else the colonists had? Same deal. They’d either be powered by a biodiesel generator, or by process heat from biodiesel production.

And how do you make biodiesel?

With a thermal depolymerization plant.

Like this one.

In goes biowaste, out comes green gold.

Dead bodies, though.

Fucking Ghosts.

“Was this all of them?” Colm said.

“I think so,” Holmundsen said. “Turn it off, sir. I can’t reach.” Meaning that he was too hurt to move.

Colm was already climbing the steps onto the platform. He wanted to have a look at Holmundsen’s wound, but shutting down the TDP plant came first. He had no idea how long it would take for it to draw more Ghosts, didn’t even know how that worked. If the eggheads had theories about how and why Stage Two invasion occurred, they didn’t share them with lowly first lieutenants. All Colm knew was—turn off the power. He frowned at the displays, threw switches. The intake tank stopped grinding. The vibrations lessened.

But did not stop.

The generator was still running. Some quantity of biodiesel had already been produced, and it was fueling the genny, which had to be around here somewhere.

He ducked under pipes, said to Holmundsen, “Didn’t know you were a farm boy,” less because he cared than to hear Holmundsen’s voice, keep him talking.

“Not,” Holmundsen said, from the far side of the platform. “Forestry management. My parents. In Norway, they clear-cut the forest on a rotation. Put the unusable wood into massive TDP plants. We used to follow the clear-cutters all spring and summer, making sure that no rare plants get shredded. I was home-schooled.”

“That explains your lack of social skills,” Colm said, still talking just to talk. Generator, generator. “Jesus, it’s cold in here.”

“It’s colder in Norway.”

“Why do they clear-cut the forest?”

“We had to do something after the oil ran out.”

“Ha, ha.” Here it was. He’d been looking for a squat steel cabinet. Instead the generator was an anodized red torpedo, mounted on shocks, with its own set of computer controls. These colonists had had everything. Except the common sense it would have taken to save their own lives. As he bent over the display, it lit the fog of his breath green. Why was it so cold? He could scarcely feel his fingers …

“I’m just kidding,” Holmundsen said. “The clear-cutting is to eliminate sitka spruce. An invasive species. After they finish, it looks like a bombed-out whorehouse. But it’s not like they cut down everything. They have to leave enough trees for the woodpeckers.”

“There’s twenty-five kilowatts coming out of here,” Colm said. “But where’s it going?”

He felt like a complete idiot. If the generator was running, the lights should be on, at a bare minimum. So why were they still in the dark?

“Oh,” Holmundsen said. Colm whipped around.

A wave of cold washed over his face.

Sparks wriggled from the generator. Colm drew back sharply. It looked like the generator had turned into a Tesla coil, but instead of one large streamer, fifteen or twenty little streamers snaked through the air, spitting off fractal spikes.

When you lay your hand on the outside of a vacuum chamber with a Tesla coil in it, the streamers jump to your hand.

But these streamers were not jumping to Colm. They converged on a point between him and the biodiesel intake pipe feeding the generator. He stared, trying to make sense of the weird phenomenon.

The intake pipe rippled.

No, the air was rippling, as if he were looking at jet engine exhaust, but it wasn’t hot. It was icy cold.

The rippling turned into shimmering, and the shimmering got denser, sucking up the streamers of electricity. And this dense shimmer, this cold hole in the air, this impossibility, congealed into a shape.

The shape of a person.

The streamers died, leaving a faint glow that outlined a ghostly man.

Six feet tall, give or take an inch.

Stark-ass naked.

Except for a jaunty forage cap with the earflaps hanging down.

Brown hair stuck out under the forage cap. Gold insignia glinted on the cap, too blurry to read.

Not so the eyes in the knobbly-chinned, big-nosed face. Colm had never seen such lively eyes, sparkling with humor and curiosity.

Frozen, terrified, he stared … and the man smiled at him.

Solidity spread outwards from that smile, ghostly extremities resolving into pale flesh, arms and neck marked by farmer’s tan lines.

“Sir,” Holmundsen gasped.

His voice broke the spell.

This was not a man.

It was a Ghost.

Colm lunged to the generator controls, slapped the power switch.

The Ghost moved. Colm ducked—pure reflex. A steel blade crunched into the computer display, shattering the screen into pixelated mud. The Ghost had a sword, where there had been nothing in his hands before, and he was lunging at Colm, raising the blade overhand to stab—

Colm threw himself backwards off the platform. It was not a planned move, just panic. He managed to twist in the air so he struck the floor with his left hand and knee. His other hand was already reaching for his holstered pistol.

The Ghost jumped off the platform. By the time he hit the floor, he was no longer naked. He wore a short-sleeved khaki shirt and trousers, lace-up boots covered with dust. The sole of one boot flapped like a tongue. An undecorated leather scabbard slapped his thigh. Colm noticed these irrelevant details as he made the split-second judgement that he didn’t have time to draw and fire. He sprinted away, around the platform.

The Ghost pursued him, the loose sole of his boot slapping on the floor: thud-slap, thud-slap.

Holmundsen was trying to push himself to his feet. He brought his pistol up, his eyes like saucers.

Colm tripped on a corpse, fell, rolled. Holmundsen’s rounds passed over his head, eviscerating the air. Echoes piled on top of each other.

Thud-slap.

The sword whistled down, through the space Colm had vacated a micro-second before. The long, deathly-sharp blade bit into the Ghost corpse Colm had tripped on.

More shots from Holmundsen, and then a curse and a shout, “I’m out!” Colm raised his head to see Holmundsen frantically ejecting his magazine.

Thud-slap.

Colm rolled onto his back, drawing his pistol in the same motion. He fired and missed. Yes, you can miss at point-blank range, when the target is moving, when the target is a Ghost with a freaking longsword, a new twist on the madness that’s scrambled humanity’s understanding of the universe. We thought we finally had it all figured out, and then the Ghosts show up.

No one understood where they came from, much less how. Colm knew that they came out of nowhere, but this was the first time he’d ever seen it happen. It had undermined his confidence and dulled his reflexes. He fired again. Missed again, and then had time to scramble to his feet, because the Ghost was charging past him

Heading for Holmundsen.

“No, you fucker,” Colm screamed. He levelled his pistol, but he was scared of hitting his co-pilot.

The sword rose and fell.

It met Holmundsen’s neck. Holmundsen’s head fell off. it bounced on his thigh and rolled across the floor. Blood gouted from the stump of his neck, spraying the Ghost, turning his homely face into a horror mask.

Colm howled like an animal. He emptied his magazine at the Ghost, then bounded to Holmundsen’s body. The last he saw of the Ghost, it was crawling away on hands and knees, taking cover behind the platform of the TDP plant. Colm hoped he’d fatally wounded the fucker but he did not have time to chase it down and make sure. He had the idea that he might be able to save Holmundsen if he reattached his head right away. You could do that with limbs, provided you had a dose of regrowth accelerator on you, which Colm did, a single-use syringe in his belt pouch. It took him a couple of seconds to realize that of course that wouldn’t work with someone’s head.

Holding the gory, slack-jawed thing in his hands, he let out a scream of rage and despair.

A long, fluffy length of carpet wriggled out from behind Holmundsen’s seated body and dragged itself onto Colm’s knees.

“What the mortal fuck?” Colm said. He dropped Holmundsen’s head.

“Help,” the carpet murmured.

“Now I know I’m going mad,” Colm said.

In that surreal moment, when the whole world seemed to have lost its marbles in one epic implosion of gore, his training took over. His hands reached for Holmundsen’s body, lifted the dogtags from around Holmundsen’s neck stump, stuffed them in his pocket. He checked Holmundsen’s belt for spare magazines and dropped them into his own ammo pouch. Then he stood up and started for the door.

The talking carpet had wrapped itself around his hips. It was awkward, so he uncoiled it and hung it around his neck like a scarf.

As he reached the door, the grinder started up again behind him.

The Chemical Mage will be published on October 1st, 2017.

Meg cleared the outbuildings one by one. She wasn’t a farm girl. Grew up in Tokyo, thinking that produce grew on supermarket shelves. She didn’t know what all these sheds and barns were for. What they had become was abattoirs. Ghosts lay everywhere, cut down by rifle or machine-gun fire. It didn’t help that they looked so goddamn human.

Her breath rasped fast inside her helmet. She had the bleed valves of her suit open, exchanging suit air for local air. It carried the smell of manure, mingled with the stomach-turning reek of death. Blood glistened black on the cobbles in the light of the gas giant. She trampled the snarled wire of an outdoor chicken run. Pulped Ghost parts testified to a Marine’s effective grenade throw. But where were the Marines?

She radioed Colm, showed him the mess. “And I can’t raise Erik. Or anyone.”

As she spoke, she looked up at the limestone cliff towering over the farmyard. Several large caverns yawned at the cliff’s foot, partially shuttered by slat doors like the one on her garage back home. Inside this massif, she knew, the colonists had made their dwellings in a network of caves and tunnels, some carved out by water seeping down from the clifftop, some shaped by human machinery. It made sense to live pueblo style on Upsandra d2, given the sweltering summers here, and also the risk of predators. Apparently this moon had some really choice wildlife. Flightless birds as mean as hippos. Turtles that climbed trees and spat poison.

But now something worse had come to Upsandra d2.

The same thing that had come to Sirius A c.

Ghosts.

Meg shuddered, and took a fortifying sip of sweet, gritty juice from her battlesuit’s hydration nipple. She knew what she had to do, little as she liked it.

“I’m going inside to look for survivors.” She didn’t give Lt. Mackenzie time to talk her out of it. She ducked under the nearest garage door, popping upright with her combi levelled, swinging to cover a wide arc.

Dark.

But not to her, not with every kind of sensor known to man embedded in her helmet.

Night vision showed tractors and other farm machinery, haphazardly parked. Everything lurid green.

Workbenches, a mechanic’s pit.

Infrared revealed several spots of warmth in the cab of an enormous tractor.

She climbed up.

OK, so that was three of the missing Marines.

“Hey, sir …”

Shit, of course, she was inside a mountain. The rock was blocking her signals. He wouldn’t be able to hear her.

Swallowing, she inspected the corpses. The Marines had died in their suits, but with their visors open, which was weird. Why would they have opened their visors? Because what had happened after that was they’d got shot in the face. Boom, strawberry jam. Still warm.

Meg’s gorge rose, and on the point of throwing up inside her helmet, she crossed over into detachment. This always happened. The tipping point was different every time, the result the same: things stopped affecting her emotionally. She wasn’t sure if this made her a horrible human being, or a good soldier, or both. Anyway, it was convenient. Dead Marines stopped being people who’d signed on the dotted line like her, gone through basic training like her, groused about the war like her. They became facts to analyze and react to.

These Marines had died in the cab of the tractor because they’d been planning to drive it out of here. But the Ghosts had got to them first.

What a bunch of numbskulls. Rule number one when engaging Ghosts: do not operate powered equipment. That made modern warfare pretty freaking difficult, and obviously you had to make exceptions for your personal equipment and weapons, but there it was. Everyone, even civilians, knew that if there were Ghosts around, electricity would draw them like flies to shit. Why? Who the hell knows. Just one of the charming traits of our enemy.

Meg took the rule about powered equipment seriously, but all the same she now broke it. She leaned across a dead Marine’s lap and switched on the tractor’s engine, just long enough to see the fuel cell’s charge indicator rise up and then sink back to zero.

Yup. Totally drained.

As good as graffiti scrawled on a wall: Ghosts Were Here.

Meg jumped down to the floor with a clang. She looked around the cavern and shivered. All these big, powerful vehicles. A feast. The Marines must’ve brought them inside to try to keep them out of the Ghosts’ clutches, but that obviously hadn’t worked.

Was there anyone left alive here? Hiding, maybe? Once bitten twice shy, gone off-grid, scared to operate so much as a radio?

“Vike?”

Her suit was sending out an auto-ping every ten seconds, so anyone with a radio would know help had arrived. Now she added her voice, boosting it through her radio and her suit’s external speaker.

“Vike, where are you?”

No answer.

“If you get yourself killed, I’m gonna be really pissed,” she mumbled.

She headed for the back of the cavern, where night vision showed doors leading to the rest of the pueblo.

An important question kept bouncing around in the back of her mind.

These Ghosts were Stage Two. The kit she’d seen outside confirmed it. Bolt-action rifles with fixed bayonets. Pudding-bowl helmets. A shotgun or two.

But what if they transitioned to Stage Three? What would happen then?

Despite her emotional detachment, she felt cold. Her teeth were chattering.

Click here for Chapter 4.

The medevac request had come from a settlement called Drumlin Farm. Colm called the local artillery command post, located in a former mountaineering base camp on the island’s central peak, and asked them to lay off shelling the area until he got in and out. Just a professional courtesy. They said sure, we’re out of ammo, anyway. With Marines, it could be hard to tell when they were joking.

Anyway, no shells exploded below as Colm dropped the gunship towards Drumlin Farm. No tracer rounds lit the dark terrain.

Hot LZ? This didn’t even look like room temperature.

But the field sergeant on the radio sounded panicky, breathing hard, like he was running and talking at the same time. Holmundsen fed Colm the livestream from the guy’s helmet cam. Tight-curved, rough-hewn stone walls. A spiral staircase. The fighting had moved inside.

Colm simultaneously lowered the gunship onto his coordinates and watched it descend from a short distance. The sergeant had climbed onto some kind of balcony or lookout point. He leaned on a carved stone balustrade, helmet cam rising and falling as his shoulders heaved. The inverted blue candle-flames of the gunship’s plasma exhaust lit up the night. Another reason not to go down after dark: you made yourself into a big fat target. VTOL-capable, the gunship had secondary thrusters under its wings, pointing straight down. Colm had diverted the xenon-135 component of the exhaust to storage—that stuff was highly radioactive, not to be spewed all over friendly troops—but the un-spiked water plasma still glowed bright enough to leave after-images on your vision.

“Bang,” the sergeant said, making gun-hands. The ship-light silvered the backs of his battlesuit’s gauntlets. “Just to set your mind at ease, these Ghosts are Stage Two.”

“Very reassuring,” Colm said. Stage Two meant mortars. Those shells could actually do some damage to the gunship. He throttled back the combustion chamber’s output, aiming to get down fast—

“Incoming,” Smythe snapped. She pulsed the shockwave generator, the gunship’s key defense against explosive rounds. A pressure wave rushed outwards, generating a sonic boom. The sergeant on the balcony flung himself flat. Fuses triggered, the incoming shells exploded in mid-air.

Not far enough away.

Pain spasmed through Colm’s port wing. Half a dozen points of agony pulsed under the skin of his left arm. Shrapnel.

“Oh jeez, sorry,” Smythe cried. She had nothing to be sorry for. She had the best reflexes of any gunner he’d ever flown with.

Colm muted the pain and dropped the gunship the rest of the way to the ground. The jacks bit into soft, uneven soil. The jolt rattled their teeth in their heads. Not his cleanest landing ever. Residual exhaust heat incinerated vegetation, ringing the gunship in fire.

The computer fed him a detailed damage report. Shredded thermal tiles, not on the leading edge of the wing, thank God, but he didn’t fancy taking off again with damaged insulation. “I’m gonna slap a patch on that.” He sprang off his couch, while Holmundsen engaged in a shouting match with the field sergeant.

This was definitely not a routine triple call scenario. But right now Colm only cared about his ship. He bounded aft, grabbed tools from lockers in the annular space behind the crew cabin, and unsealed the side airlock with a thought. Pale smoke rolled in. He switched off all the lights, not to make the ship any easier a target than it already was.

Holmundsen brushed past him and dug in the ammo locker. Came out with a handful of spare mags for the machine pistols they wore as sidearms.

“Where’re you going, Vike?”

“Sarge said the casualties, plural, are somewhere around here.”

The gunship crew were not supposed to leave the bird.

“Lost him,” Holmundsen explained. “Last thing he said was ‘Ghosts are on the stairs.’”

“What a clusterfuck,” Colm said. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

Holmundsen replied with a snigger. Colm was well known for bending the rules. In Colm’s own opinion that explained why he was still alive, but he tried not to be a bad example to his crew. Both of them were younger, on their first enlistments. Holmundsen’s pessimism was a defensive pose, his bravery the real thing. Colm watched him jog away across the smouldering field, remembering what it was like to be 25 and feel invincible.

The damaged wing claimed his attention. He manhandled a collapsible ladder down to the ground, propped it against the trailing edge of the wing, climbed up. Dull pinpricks in his left arm told him exactly where the shrapnel had hit. Esthesia implants had their detractors, chiefly among squeamish types who opposed any kind of body modification, but Colm, like most working pilots, would not be without his implant. Instead of having to sort through readouts on a clunky HUD, he experienced his ship’s status physically. Saved a ton of time and guesswork.

He could also see through the gunship’s external cameras, via his infolenses—electronic lenses implanted between his own lenses and irises. It was like having eyes in the back of his head, slightly offset by the fact that he was now crouching on the wing.

Smythe clambered down the steps behind him. She carried a combi—the standard Marine rifle with grenade launcher attachment—on a sling.

“Not you, too,” Colm said.

“Vike’s heading for the farm. He’s such a fucking idiot. He might need help getting back.”

“Right. Thing is, I was briefed that there are still civilians at the farm. So if you get that far …”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope.” You had to admire colonists. They hung on like grim death while the Ghosts fired mortars at them. All too often, they died for their right to call a piece of some alien planet home. “If you find any of them, offer them a ride.” Colm wasn’t here to evacuate civilians, but he was rapidly getting the impression that the next command decision regarding Drumlin Farm would be to order its abandonment. The radio silence from the Marines on the ground was ominous. So was the fact that the Ghosts had not lobbed any more shells at the LZ. It suggested the enemy was busy with other things. Spooked by the damage to his ship, Colm wanted to get back in the air pronto, but at this point the gunship might be the only way out for whoever was still alive here.

“You’re the best, Collie Mack,” Smythe said. She blew a kiss off her armored gauntlet and ran across the field, straight through a stand of burning crops. The flames licked over her steel greaves and cuisses.

Colm wasn’t too worried about her. Unlike him and Holmundsen, she had a battlesuit. These were only issued to the Marines, but gear got passed around on the Unsinkable, sold and resold. Meg kept her battlesuit in tip-top condition. It would take a direct hit from an artillery shell to get through that armor.

He squeezed buckyball paste into the holes, smoothed it out with a spackle knife, finished each patch with four-ply carbon nanotube sticky tape. By that time, the smoke had cleared away and he was getting hot in his leathers. They weren’t really made of dead cow, of course, but the same carbon-fiber stuff used for motorcycle ‘leathers.’ The opposite of breathable. He unsealed his visor and inhaled the air of Upsandra d2. The lingering acrid smell reminded him of winter muirburns, when farmers would burn back the heather for better grazing come spring. But that had been in Scotland, where he grew up, and this was 48 light years from Earth.

After the momentary déjà vu passed, he detected an alien perfume in the air, a hint of peppery tartness. On the other hand, the crops he had inadvertently incinerated were just good old terrestrial wheat.

All human-habitable planets have a lot in common. Soil is soil, water is water, sky is sky. That illusion of familiarity was what got people, convinced them to put down roots on distant worlds.

But the night was warmer than it had any right to be, and so bright that the finger-leaved trees at the edge of the field cast shadows on the charred wheat. Both the warmth and the blue-tinged ‘moonlight’ came from the turquoise-striped crescent dominating the sky. An omnipresent reminder that this was an alien world.

The silence felt intense, meaningful, a kissing cousin to the hiss-whoosh of incoming shells, infused with the same promise of death.

Colm climbed down from the wing. Returned his ladder and tools to their storage places. Approved his own repairs, thus cancelling the ghostly pain in his arm. Drank some caffeinated orange juice.

Holmundsen’s transponder winked out.

“Vike! Gimme a sitrep, you reindeer-fucker. Over.”

Colm had a radio transmitter implanted in his jaw. Holmundsen had the same implant, so he couldn’t have lost his radio without also losing his head.

“Smythe, come in.”

“Copy.”

“Vike just went dark.”

“I know. I’m almost at the farm. I’m diverting to his last known location.”

“Roger.”

Colm returned to the cockpit. Control was trying to get hold of him, wanting to know why he was still on the ground. He put them off by reporting the mortar fire incident, without mentioning that Smythe and Holmundsen had gone walkabout. No need to get everyone in even more trouble than they were already in. He kept his voice level and calm, although his internal FUBAR-o-meter had spiked into the red zone.

“Hey, sir—” Smythe broke in on the FM channel.

“Yeah?”

“I’m at some kind of outbuilding.” She shot him a picture of a drystone byre roofed with solar panels. Ghosts corpses sprawled across the doorsill, littered the paved barnyard. Anger heated Smythe’s voice. “Looks like our guys died hard.”

“Died?” The carnage was shocking, but Colm saw no Marine bodies.

“I can’t raise Vike. Or anyone. I’m going inside—” Her transmission broke up.

“Smythe!”

Static.

“Smythe!”

Silence.

Oh, Christ on a bloody bike.

Moving fast, Colm grabbed his sidearm. Got a couple of spare mags from the ammo locker. Holmundsen had taken all the armor-piercing rounds, damn him. Well, Ghosts didn’t wear armor, anyway.

Colm swung down to the ground. Charred wheat puffed into carbon dust under his boots. He folded the airlock steps up behind him with a thought, sealing the ship. He was not concerned about leaving it, since he could operate its flight controls and point defenses from anywhere within radio range. He set the external sensors to maximum sensitivity. Now it would let him know if it saw so much as a bunny rabbit, or whatever the hell the Upsandra d2 analogue of a bunny rabbit was.

He loped across the field, into the darkness of the finger-leaf forest.

Click here for Chapter 3.

Beep. Beep. Beeeeep.

The duty officer on the flight deck of the Unsinkable, an FTL-capable supercarrier, took the call.

“Sorry, Sarge, we cannot launch a routine medevac after dark. Call back at first light.”

Colm Mackenzie, having opened one eye without being fully aware of it, went back to sleep. Curled on a storage chest in the ready room, he dreamed of the Free Church Manse. The derelict property overlooked Staffin Bay on the Isle of Skye. It was a short walk down to the stony shore.

Beep. Beep. Beeeeep.

“Sorry, Sarge. We cannot fly a priority medevac at this time. Call back at dawn.”

Colm walked the coast road out from Portree. The miles flew by under his dream-sneakers. He hurried through the windbreak of pines around the Free Church Manse, clutching his brand-new deed of ownership … and stopped short at the sight of a moving van parked outside. Windows open, decorators carrying out rotten skirting boards and a rusted hot water boiler. Children’s voices carried on the wind like the cries of seagulls. With the inevitability of dream logic, someone had beat him to it, bought the manse before he could. Happened every goddamn time.

Beep. Beep. Beeeeep.

“OK, Sarge. You got it.” The duty officer raised his voice. “Emergency medevac! Man your spacecraft!”

Colm uncurled, the dream dissolving into the funk of overheated circuit boards and stale sweat. He sat up in 0.5 gees of artificial gravity. His co-pilot and gunner sprinted out to the flight deck to initiate systems checks. Colm shook out his leathers, which he had been sleeping on, stuck one leg in, and hopped over to the duty officer while wriggling his other leg into the EVA-rated flight suit. “How bad is it?”

While the duty officer briefed him, the globe of Upsilon Andromedae d2, projected on the end wall, spun to display a blood-red electronic pushpin. The medevac request had come from the moon’s smaller archipelago, on the Upsandra d-facing side. This was going to be hairy. When you deorbited at night, you plunged through belts of intense radiation accumulated during the day, as the moon’s magnetosphere interacted with the more powerful magnetic field of the gas giant it orbited.

“Two platoons pinned down, taking heavy fire. Captain Best in command. Could be a triple call scenario,” Colm said to his co-pilot and gunner as he climbed into the cockpit of the gunship. Triple calls happened frequently: a field sergeant would keep upgrading the severity of his medevac request until he got to yes. So they were going to be flying into a hot LZ to evacuate a Marine who mightn’t even be wounded, might just have decided he was fucked if he’d fight another step. That happened frequently, too.

Colm was on his second enlistment. Four more months until he got rotated back to support duties. 28 months until he was his own man again. Would the Free Church Manse still be waiting for him? Who knows? He had given up hope of surviving that long. All he could do was be vigilant and do his job to the best of his abilities.

The launch platform rotated, pivoting the gunship to face the outer wall of the flight deck. Half a kilometer long, the cavernous deck held a sparse handful of gunships and larger dropships. All the rest were down on the surface of Upsandra d2, or had already been lost. The flight deck was in hard vacuum. Rampies in hi-viz skinsuits swarmed around the other craft, repairing and refueling them. They all retreated to the safety zones on the launch platforms when the deck lighting dipped from blazing white to ominous red. “Ready,” Colm said. He flexed his toes, ensuring the landing gear of his gunship gripped the platform securely.

“Warpig Ten, you are cleared for launch.” Warpig One through Warpig Nine were no more. Eleven and Twelve were out there somewhere. Like Colm, they were being slotted in any old place to fill holes in coverage. The colonel in command of the carrier’s air support division was fondly known as the Rat—he chewed through ships and crews like they were made of cardboard.

“Roger that, Zero,” Colm said. “Launching on my mark …” He inventoried his bodily sensations one last time. Everything checked out. Co-pilot Holmundsen and gunner Smythe were strapped into their respective couches, faces invisible behind their visors. “Mark.” He pulled the launch trigger.

Power flooded into the rail launcher under the platform. Like a tiny maglev train, the platform zoomed towards the wall, carrying the gunship with it. Hydraulic doors gaped ahead. At the end of the rail, an elastomer catapult snapped the platform back—this part was fully automated—and hurled the gunship into space.

The little ship fell away from the Unsinkable like a bottle chucked out the window of a 3-kilometer skyscraper. The Unsinkable might be one of Earth’s largest and most capable capital ships, but like all spacecraft designed never to land, it was an unaerodynamic mess to look at, solar panels and zero-gravity field generators and other bits and bobs sticking out all over its length. The gunship was a thing of beauty in contrast. It at least had wings. Colm used to fly commuter jets in his former life, and he still maintained the Cessna Mustang was the most beautiful aircraft ever built.

At the recommended minimum separation distance of 5 klicks, he opened the throttle. A mixture of water and xenon plasma gouted out of the aft engine bells. The gunship heeled over and dived towards Upsandra d2.

The Earth-sized moon orbited Upsandra d, a gas giant ten times as massive as Jupiter. Vivid sapphire and turquoise bands striped the giant’s waning crescent.

Upsandra, a bright G-type star, flared at the top of Upsandra d’s limb, then slid behind it.

The gunship fell into night.

“I see lightning, I see lightning,” chanted Megumi Smythe in a little-girl singsong.

“This better be a real emergency,” Erik Holmundsen said grimly.

Upsandra d2’s atmosphere sprouted a tail of particles ionized by magnetic field interactions. Charge built up during the day. At ‘sunset’—the moment when the shadow of the gas giant crawled over the moon—it reached spitting point. Electrostatic discharges fanned from the poles like sheet lightning. The fireworks obscured the geography of scattered islands below, and the remaining lights of human colonization.

“Cross your fingers,” Colm said. He flipped the ship—a sensation like somersaulting—and dived into the storm.

99 times out of a hundred, you’d be fine.

The other time, you’d be Warpig Two, who got struck by a discharge. All systems DOA. Went into a tumble and burned up on re-entry.

Colm’s luck held. They got through the electric storm A-OK.

So now they only had a couple million hostile Ghosts to contend with.

The night was looking up.

Click here for Chapter 2.