Deathstalker (34 page)

“How are your boys doing, Sergeant? Any problems?”

“Nothing I can’t handle. They’ve been thoroughly briefed as to what happened to the last contact crew, so they’re not exactly happy about the drop, but at least they know what they’re getting into. The triple combat pay brought a smile to their faces, and the new battle drugs should help. The
stuff we’ve been supplied with would make a mad dog killer out of a sainted nun. But I think we’ll save that for emergencies. Chemical courage is all very well, but I prefer the real thing. Personally, I put more faith in the state-of-the-art weaponry they’ve given us. Very tasty. Recharge time is still two minutes minimum, but for sheer power and destructive capability, I’ve never seen anything like these guns. Gives me a warm, comfortable, secure feeling just looking at them.”

“I’m glad to hear that, Sergeant. But I feel I should remind you that the first contact team was also armed to the gills, and it didn’t seem to help them much. So I want all your men armed with shrapnel clusters, concussion grenades, incendiaries and force shields, as well as disrupters. Never mind the expense; I’ll take care of all that. You load your men down with as much as they can carry and still move freely. I’m also authorizing the use of two portable disrupter cannon and a tangle field. Get your people prepped; we’ll commence planetfall one hour from now.”

“Understood, Captain.” Sargeant Null hesitated for a moment. “Sir … we’ve worked with battle espers before, but … Wampyr? Are they really going to be part of the combat team?”

“That’s correct, Sergeant. Do you have a problem with that? Perhaps you’d like me to issue garlic and crucifixes to the men?”

“No, sir. No problem, sir.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

Silence broke the link, and the sergeant’s troubled face disappeared from the screen. Although he hadn’t actually come out and said anything, Silence knew what Null meant. The Wampyr weren’t exactly battle troops, like the marines or even the espers. They were more like a weapon; you pointed them at the target and then stood well back and let them get on with it. The battle espers weren’t that easy to handle, either. They were already borderline psychotic, or they wouldn’t be able to handle working in a combat situation. You surrounded them with esp-blockers till you needed them, and then let them loose and hoped for the best. Pound for pound they could be more devastating than ranked disrupter cannon, but you couldn’t always trust them to stop when you wanted. They’d been officially scrapped, and the fact that the Empress had insisted on the last few for this
mission said a lot about how dangerous it was likely to be. Silence had decided early on to keep them all in stasis until just before the drop. Safer all around for everyone. He just wished he could have done the same with the Wampyr.

He frowned thoughtfully. Officially, they were Stelmach’s pets, operating solely under the direct command of the Security Officer. It was the Wampyr’s last chance to prove their usefulness. If they didn’t distinguish themselves on this mission, the Wampyr project would be discontinued. That should encourage them to follow orders and not make much trouble, but Silence didn’t hope for much more than that. The Wampyr made excellent individual warriors, fast and strong and utterly fearless, but they were no damn good at all at working with other troops. The never-ending thirst that drove them made them fierce fighters, but prone to … distraction. Silence sighed. He’d been putting it off as long as he could, but had to talk to them. He contacted their quarters and waited patiently. They had their own separate territory down below, keeping them apart from the rest of the crew, to the relief of all concerned.

A dead man’s face appeared on his private screen. Its flesh was pale and bloodless, and its expression was cold and distant, as though listening to some absorbing song the living could never hear. Beyond the face, the Wampyr living quarters were as dark as night. They preferred it that way. Silence cleared his throat, and then wished he hadn’t. It made him sound weak.

“This is the Captain. We’ll be making planetfall within the hour. Are your people fully briefed and prepared?”

“Yes, Captain. We are most eager to begin.” The Wampyr had their own leader under Stelmach; something to do with alpha dominance. Just another thing the humans didn’t understand about the race they’d created. According to the records, this particular Wampyr had been called Ciannan Budd. Once he’d been a living man, with hopes and dreams and human emotions. Then they killed him and filled his veins with synthetic blood, and whatever feelings he had now were no longer anything a human would recognize. Silence’s mouth was almost painfully dry, but he forced himself to maintain eye contact.

“Any problems with the blood substitute we’ve been providing?”

“It nourishes, but it’s not the real thing. It doesn’t satisfy.”

Something in the flat, peremptory voice made Silence’s skin crawl, but he kept it off of his face. “Stand ready. I’ll contact you again just before the drop.”

The Wampyr nodded and cut off the comm link from his end. Silence sighed quietly, slowly relaxing in his chair. It could have been worse, he supposed. They could have been Hadenmen.

“We can’t trust them,” said Frost, almost casually. “They’re not human.”

“People have been saying that about you Investigators for years,” Silence caid calmly. “The Wampyr are a useful tool in certain situations, and they’ll do their duty for the same reason we will: because nothing less than one hundred percent commitment will get us off Grendel alive. You let me worry about the Wampyr. I want you concentrating on the Sleepers.”

Frost shrugged. “Show me one, and I’ll give it my undivided attention. You keep saying
we
. Are you still determined to join us on this drop?”

“Yes. When we break open the Vault, decisions are going to have to be made in a hurry, and I don’t want to leave them to Stelmach.”

“Talking about me again?” said Stelmach, appearing soundlessly on Silence’s other side, opposite the Investigator. Silence wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of jumping.

“Just saying we’d better take one last look at the records the first contact team left us. Ugly viewing, but necessary. Anything we can learn from them could end up saving lives, There’s always the chance we’ll spot something new. Something useful.”

Stelmach nodded expressionlessly, and the three of them peered silently at the images appearing on Silence’s private screen as he entered the restricted codes. Most of the footage from the first team’s cameras was useless. It was fine until the team actually entered the city below the surface, and then just the proximity to the alien technology began to interfere with the cameras. They cut in and out, apparently at random, so that what was left was a shifting montage of people, scenes and events. A lot of it was blurred and uncertain, as though things had been happening too quickly for the cameras to keep up with them. Computer enhancement hadn’t helped much. A lot of what was on the film was so strange, so different, that the computers had nothing in their
records to compare it to. Silence couldn’t bring himself to feel unhappy about that. He had a feeling seeing the whole footage, intact and uninterrupted, would have been enough to turn his hair gray.

The record consisted of impressions and brief bursts of detail. It began with glimpses of the alien surroundings, dark and disturbing. The huge buildings had no lights, and strange shadows moved slowly across their surfaces like drifting thoughts as the contact team proceeded. The structures weren’t just buildings. Wrapped around them like dreaming snakes, or protruding from walls and windows like so many tumors, were all kinds of alien machinery. Nightmares of twisting, shiny materials that seemed almost alive. There were machines that breathed, and coiled tubes that glistened with sweat. Stranger shapes with unblinking eyes, and things that looked like they might have been moving until you got close to them. The contact team moved among the massive buildings like rats caught in a maze they could never hope to understand, and their voices grew high-pitched and hysterical.

The party’s lights glanced across shifting scenes like flashes of lightning in a storm as they shorted in and out, until finally the contact team came to the great steel doors of the Vault of the Sleepers. According to the computers, they were twenty-three feet tall and ten feet wide; great featureless slabs of shining steel with no trace of lock mechanisms. The team fussed around with them for some time before losing patience and blasting them open with a portable disrupter cannon. The doors blew back, light flared within the Vault, and the Sleepers came boiling out.

Guns flashed desperately, but the aliens were everywhere. Huge creatures, eight to ten feet tall, wrapped in spiked silicon armor that was somehow a part of them. Mouths stuffed with steel teeth, gaping and grinning. Blood dripped and spattered from their jaws. Marines were firing in all directions. Swinging swords. Shouting and screaming. The aliens darting among them, almost too fast to follow, despite their size. A clawed hand tore a human head from its body, which walked on for several steps before collapsing. Another alien ripped a hole in a marine’s belly, despite his field armor, and buried its face in his guts. Blood flew on the air, intermittent light from discharging guns, screams of pain and horror. A face filled the screen, begging and pleading, and then was
snatched away. An alien posed for a moment before the camera, wrapped in human entrails. A marine stuck his gun in an alien’s mouth and blew its head off. Another alien thrust its clawed hand into his back and out his chest, and waved the dying body like a banner. An alien ripped the lower jaw from a marine’s face and used it like a club till it shattered. There were aliens running on the walls and on the ceilings, like huge impossible insects. The last marines fell, and the aliens swept past the bodies, heading for the surface. The screen showed light fading away into darkness, and then went blank.

Silence sat watching the blank screen for a moment, then reached forward and turned it off. The record didn’t lose any of its impact, no matter how many times he watched it. Everyone who’d recorded those scenes was dead, their footage preserved by their ship’s computers. He still found it hard to believe that the aliens had slaughtered the contact team so effortlessly. But he’d seen swords shatter on the alien’s crimson armor, and disrupter beams ricochet, leaving the aliens unharmed. He was beginning to wonder if anything could stop them, short of another scorching.

And these were the creatures the Empress wanted him to capture and train as shock troops.

“I don’t think we’ll show this to the troops at their briefing,” said Stelmach. “It would only upset them.”

“I’ve already shown it to them,” said Silence. “It’s my experience that informed troops last longer.”

“Then with your permission, Captain, I’ll set things in order for the drop. I still have arrangements to make.”

“Do whatever you have to,” said Silence. “We drop on the hour. If you’re not ready by then, you can walk down.”

Stelmach nodded briefly and left the bridge. Frost sniffed.

“That man needs more fiber in his diet. Are you sure we haven’t got any more footage of the first contact?”

“This is all that’s viewable. I don’t think I could stand much more. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything as vicious and deadly as those creatures.”

“Damn right,” said Frost, grinning broadly. “I can’t wait to go head-to-head with them. Been ages since I had a real challenge.”

The trouble is
, Silence thought dryly,
I think she means it
.

*     *     *

The surface of Grendel was even more depressing in reality than it had been on the viewscreen. The great sea of ash stretched away in all directions, smooth and featureless and dead. There was more ash in the air, diffusing the pale crimson light of the sun, till it looked like the sky itself was bleeding. The five pinnaces from the
Dauntless
touched down one after the other on the specially constructed steel landing pads floating on the ash and waited just long enough for the contact team to disembark before taking off again. Captain Silence looked about him, getting the feel of the new gravity. Bit heavier than he was used to, but he could manage. The rebreather built into his uniform’s collar surrounded his head with a bubble of fresh air. Even if he could have breathed the vomitous mixture Grendel called air, the ash suspended in it would have blinded and choked him in seconds. He watched the departing pinnaces arrow up through the bloody skies with mixed feelings. Without them, he really was on his own.

He looked back at his team, noting without surprise that it had already split up into its three components of marines, espers and Wampyr. They still all looked to him for orders. As though he had any better idea what to do than they did. Still, when in doubt, sound confident.

“All right, pay attention! There’s an elevator to take us down to the buried city attached to the underside of these rafts, courtesy of the mining equipment. Bad news is it’ll only hold fifteen at a time, so the marines will go down first to check things out. Once they’ve given the okay, the Investigator will go down with the espers, and then Stelmach and his Wampyr. Weapons in hand, ladies and gentlemen. If it moves and it’s not us, shoot it. You don’t have to wait for my permission. And watch yourselves once we get down there. The alien technology can have a somewhat disquieting effect on the human mind. Just concentrate on the mission, and you should be fine. Any problems?”

“Do you want the bad news, or the really bad news?” said Frost.

“Give it to me straight,” said Silence heavily. “What’s gone wrong now?”

“First, we’ve lost all contact with the
Dauntless
. Something in the city below is interfering with our comm systems. That’s a new development since the first team was here. Which means, if we need to leave here in an emergency,
we’re stuffed. We can’t call for help, reinforcements, or a pickup. We’re stuck here till the pinnaces return at the agreed time. Which is four hours and counting. You might care to consider that the first team lasted a grand total of two hours and seven minutes.”