Element x, p.20
Element-X, page 20
“What happened to cooperation?” Malena asked him. “What happened to comradery in the field? We’re allied forces, Haak.”
He shook his head. “No, not really. We’re mercenaries. We draw huge paychecks. We aren’t fighting for love of country. Get real.”
“Our government won’t stand for this, Haak. You won’t get the X off the island, even if you find it.”
He shrugged. “Perhaps. But I think we can. In any case, once I’ve delivered it I’ll be paid and I’ll no longer care.”
“It could cause a war.”
He chuckled. “No. What would the U. S. do? Send a thousand of your cowboys to invade a small European nation? Fire ICBM’s at Amsterdam? Don’t be absurd. They’re too chicken to even send real troops down here. If they don’t want to be seen invading Cuba again, they certainly won’t do anything to the Netherlands. In fact, I expect you’ll cut a deal to buy our energy in time—as will the rest of the world. Wealth will overflow our hands. We’ll be like one of those tiny sheikdoms circling the Persian Gulf. We’ll dredge the North Sea and build islands to live on as the Arabs do, just for the fun of it!”
Malena eyed Tanner. He was glowering and about to lose it. She couldn’t blame him.
“All right,” she said. “We’ll go with you. There’s a hatch about a hundred meters up the side. I’m sure your people can scale a steel wall.”
She turned and began marching back toward the ship.
“Ah, hold a moment, Agent Marin,” Haak called after her.
She saw that the ring of commandos hadn’t broken, so she stopped reluctantly.
“There is the small matter of your weapons. I require them. We don’t have any accelerators of our own, as Tanner has taken pains to point out.”
She backed up uncertainly. Tanner put his back to hers, both took up stances that seemed nonchalant, but no one was fooled. All around them, rifle bolts clicked and muzzles shifted. Everyone planted their feet carefully.
“I know what you two are thinking,” said Haak quietly. “A wild blazing sweep with those weapons of yours and all your problems will be cut in half. More importantly, your suits can take a few bullets and keep you alive. But think again. We know all about your suits. We will aim for the head. No second chances. No hospitals. Just a pile of corpses. The aliens will surely win the day if we can’t cooperate now.”
Tanner and she didn’t move for several long seconds. Finally, Tanner threw down his accelerator in the mud disgustedly. He turned and stalked toward the ship. Malena hesitated a second longer, then followed his example.
Haak rushed forward and grabbed an accelerator for himself. He gifted the second one to the redhead named Sofie.
As they all marched toward the ship in the darkness, Malena wondered how this would end. The Dutch around her seemed amused and cocky. But they hadn’t seen these aliens yet. They hadn’t seen the hundreds of giants that were inside that ship. They’d been lined up in rows in their frosty coffins. How many had awakened?
As they advanced on the ship, and its spectacular size became increasingly apparent, Haak’s team quieted. Their eyes moved constantly, and Malena’s did the same. Everyone was watching for an ambush. Aliens, guardian machines—no one knew how it would come, but they never stopped thinking about it.
When the attack did come, it was a surprise. Malena never saw it with her headset, as the enemy had no X to detect. Instead, it was a Cuban company of regular troops. They’d come in while the barrier was down, and they intended to be the next to explore the ship and plunder her wealth.
A single shot rang out from the trees to the group’s left at about ten o’clock. Their point man, Carl, grunted and stumbled. He didn’t go down, however.
All hell broke loose after that. Malena wondered forever afterward if that initial shot by the Cubans had been intentional or just an honest error by a nervous conscript. Whatever the case, the heavily-armed Dutch team threw themselves on the ground. They then returned fire with everything they had. After first barrage of shots slowed, Haak called the targets. His stone eyes worked better in the dark than anyone else’s.
“Suppressing fire, left flank! Hold your fire with the accelerator, Sophie.”
More popping shots erupted, seemingly all around them.
“Inbound hostiles, right flank!” shouted Tanner.
Malena moved to his side and crouched in the reeds with him. They’d almost reached the crater around the ship, but not quite. The Cubans shooting at them, whoever they were, kept out of sight. She could only see their muzzle flashes and hear them shout in Spanish.
She pulled out her pistol and waited. The Cubans were shuffling around, staying low, trading shots back and forth with them. Every now and then she saw Haak aim carefully into the brush and squeeze off a shot. Occasionally when he did so, she heard a cry of pain. It wasn’t fair, really. Haak could see as if it was broad daylight. Maybe his stone eyes were even better than that.
“There’s about a company of them out there,” Haak said. “They don’t have night gear. Hold your position, but don’t scare them. They’ll want to advance on us to get a better shot.”
After a few minutes of sporadic fire on both sides, a series of three flares went up and came down, brilliantly lighting the landscape with burning magnesium.
“Duck, hold your fire. Wait until they charge us.”
Lying on her belly, Malena endeavored to make herself as small a target as possible. She heard shouting, and then they came in a rush.
There were at least a hundred of them. They charged with AK-47s, bayonets fixed. In the temporary light of the flares, they were a terrifying sight. She squeezed off shots with her pistol and after four tries saw a man pitch forward. There were dozens more coming, however.
Bullets whined and snapped all around. She remembered Haak’s last team, which had been destroyed in just such an attack. She looked around for the sneaky Dutchman. If he took off, she knew it was time to run as well.
But Haak was standing his ground. At least, he was crouching on it. He had out one of the accelerators. He held it in both hands.
“They’re in range,” he shouted. “Sophie go North. I’ll take South. Everyone else stay down as low as you can.”
Malena didn’t know what to expect, but she stayed down on her belly in the mud. She reloaded her pistol with a fresh magazine—and then the scene was lit up by unnatural flame.
Both Haak and Sophie pulled the triggers of their stolen accelerators and held them down. They cut sweeping arcs with their weapons at about waist-level. Malena was amazed at the firepower these weapons could put out when used against a large number of targets.
The advancing troops were struck by twin blazing beams of plasma and cut down. Many fell in two jagged pieces. Legs toppled to lie smoldering. Torsos, heads and arms slid away to land with ghastly thumps. The dying men flailed and howled. Some fired their weapons until they couldn’t squeeze the trigger anymore. A few crawled on their bellies, using their elbows, desperate to escape.
After revealing these horrors for a few minutes, the flares mercifully went out.
-23-
Malena hugged the ground and felt sick. She’d never been in a pitched battle before. Somehow, this one seemed grossly unfair. She supposed war was never fair, especially if you were on the losing side. But this was worse somehow. The enemy had been brave, they’d been tricked, and they’d been slaughtered by weapons they didn’t even know existed.
What bothered her most, however, was watching humans kill one another in the face of a greater enemy. The visitors were less than a mile away, plotting unknown plans of their own. There might be an army of them in that ship, and it seemed to her every human fighter in the region should be teaming up against them.
“Keep low, everyone,” Haak said. “That was a full company, maybe more. There might be a few that can still operate their weapons. Give them all a chance to die in peace.”
The team lay on the ground quietly, listening to dying men shout, groan and cough. Some hung on for a long time. Their wounds had been cauterized and clean, and their bodies wouldn’t let them die easily.
Haak finally called a whispered withdrawal. They got up and crawled away in the direction they’d come. When they reached thick cover, they got up and trotted into the darkness.
“We’ll circle around the battlefield and get to the ship from the south.”
“We’re still going to try to reach the ship tonight?” Malena asked, unable to contain herself.
Haak seemed honestly surprised. “Of course,” he said. “Why wait until another company finds us? Why give them the advantage of daylight?”
And so they did as he asked. Malena had an opportunity during the maneuver to drop back and lose the Dutch. She considered it strongly, but passed on the idea. Her orders were to go back to that ship anyway. And besides, Haak still had her accelerator, and she wanted it back. It annoyed her to think he’d so easily tricked her into going through the barrier, risking her life so that he could waltz in and take the prize after she’d done all the hard work. No, she was going to stick with Haak until she saw her chance to change things.
About an hour before dawn, they reached the hull at a new spot. They kept their lights off and worked by starlight. The swamp was relatively cold now, which made it more uncomfortable than ever. Predawn mosquitoes swarmed them, looking for an early meal. Malena shook out the last of her repellant and spread it over her face. It was a thin coat, but it would have to do.
She and Tanner let Haak’s crew puzzle over the bizarre external surface of the ship’s hull for several minutes before speaking up and showing them which components were latches that opened doors. Once they understood, the Dutch team was impressed.
“You managed to get these things open? Just the two of you?”
“We were highly motivated,” Tanner said.
Unfortunately, the nearest entry point was about ten meters up. Haak sent a pair of nervous commandos up to perch on anvil-shaped handholds and footrests which were far too widely-spaced for them. They had to use their pack shovels to get leverage and worked desperately to force the latch to move. It groaned and squeaked with the familiar sounds of grinding metal.
“Those people are completely exposed up there,” Tanner said. “You don’t care if they get shot by Cuban snipers, do you Haak?”
“On the contrary. Losing two good mates before we even break into the ship would be a disaster.”
Haak took a moment to swagger in the midst of his squad. “I want that X, people. That means I care about every one of your lives as if you were my own children. I need everyone to pull through right to the end. But if we do get out of here and the helicopter crashes the lot of you into the sea the next day—I won’t give a shit then, of course.”
Everyone exchanged glances. Judging by their expressions, Malena gathered that Haak wasn’t too well-loved by the team. He was in command, but they all had to know what had happened to the last crew that had served under him. She filed that away for future reference.
Haak’s team was professional when it came to scaling the ship. The entrance was much higher than the one Malena and Tanner had used, so they had to climb up to it. Using climbing gear was difficult, as the surface wasn’t porous rock. They couldn’t drive a piton into the steel hull of the ship. They soon learned to use the anvil-shaped protrusions, which Malena believed more strongly than ever were footrests, to tie off their lines.
With speed and professionalism she found impressive, two of the team members worked to open the hatch while the rest watched. Sophie was one of them, the redhead that carried Malena’s accelerator on her hip. The other was Johan, an ape of a man who grunted and strained at the L-shaped latch handle.
After one full revolution of the handle, however, it became stuck. They couldn’t open the hatch.
“We’ve got to get above this to get leverage,” Johan called down. “I can stand on it and force it down.”
Haak waved for them to proceed. It was still dark, but Malena was able to watch their efforts when the moon rose. They worked like two shadows on the hull of the ship, strung there by lines they’d carefully tied to various footholds. After another minute, they’d managed to reposition themselves higher. They’d looped lines above the hatch and hung from them, placing themselves above the big steel bar they had to get spinning.
Johan was jumping up and down on the bar, grunting, when disaster struck. He suddenly fell. There was little or no warning. One moment he was forcing the latch handle to move, and the next he had tumbled thirty feet to the ground.
The team quickly clustered around him. He didn’t move. Malena shined a light in his face. His eyes were blue and they stared lifelessly. Blood ran over his face.
“Broke his neck,” Haak said in disgust. “He must have hit something on the way down. It spun him around and he landed on his head.”
“But why did he fall?” Malena asked.
Sophie rappelled down quickly from her position. She bent over Johan. “I can’t believe he cratered,” she said. “But here’s the reason.”
She held up a frayed line. “Cut right through. We tied it off on one of those icicle-looking things over the hatch. Turns out it was sharp.”
Malena grimaced. She felt like she should have warned them about that. But then again, they had rudely confiscated her weapon and demanded she accompany them. It was hard to feel like she owed them much.
The team packed Johan in a body bag, labeled him like cargo and left him on the ground outside the ship.
“We’ll come back for him,” Haak promised.
Malena wondered if anyone believed him.
The team managed to get the hatch open after that, and one by one they climbed up the wall of the ship to the entrance. Haak made sure Tanner and Malena were in the middle of the pack. They weren’t given any chance to slip away.
Once inside, the Dutch team behaved differently. They marveled at the strange equipment. After their initial curiosity waned, they focused on the L-shaped latches. There was at least one in every passageway. They set upon these with an eagerness Malena found distasteful. She’d gathered that these people were a somewhat different sort than the XCU team. They were more profit-oriented. They were mercenaries, just as Haak had said, paid on the basis of how much X they could loot.
Greed gleamed in their eyes as they pried open the first hatch. It was a relatively easy one, being located in the floor. The interior chamber behind the entrance was a disappointment however. It was mostly empty. They did find a set of strange spindle-like objects with needle-like tips and rubbery bulbs attached to them. Malena had no idea what it did—and neither did anyone else. But they took a few along.
Their job was to grab what they could and take it back to labs that would figure out the purpose in time. They wrapped up their finds quickly with foam and tape then stuffed them into their packs. Soon, the party was moving again, headed deeper into the ship.
“My senses are all tingly in here,” Haak said happily. “But I feel we’re too low to reach our goal. Should we go up?”
Malena considered lying. But she figured it was a waste of valuable time. If she didn’t lead Haak to the big ball of X they’d found, they would simply keep looking for it. That would mean more time spent inside this dangerous ship. Her best course of action was to get them to the spot where they’d left the sphere as quickly as possible.
“No,” she said. “We need to go down a level and then follow the central passage to across the ship’s interior. The sphere should be there, near a shaft.”
Tanner tossed her a glance, but she ignored it. Haak eyed the two of them for a moment, and then nodded. “We’ll go down then. Get out the climbing equipment, team.”
There was a chorus of groans. Malena couldn’t blame them. They’d already lost one member and bumped and cut themselves on a dozen obstacles in the bizarre passageway.
A few minutes later, they reached the first shaft. The Dutch stared down into the abyss unhappily. Malena enjoyed a grim smile at their expense. Her pleasure was short-lived, however.
“You first,” he said, waving the accelerator at her.
Tanner stepped forward. “Why her?”
“Because she told me the truth. Now that I know where the X is, and she’s the least important member of this team.”
“What do you mean the least important?”
“We don’t need a sensitive now. I need firepower, muscle and experience. She’s got none of those. She’s expendable, so she’s my new scout.”
Tanner’s face darkened and he opened his mouth to protest. Malena stopped him with a touch to the shoulder.
“It’s all right, Tanner,” she said. “If they’re all too scared to go down, I’m happy to lead the way.”
Haak chuckled at this. The Dutch team watched her skeptically as she worked the tackle and attached a line to her belt. She set up a belay device and began to rappel downward. She moved down the wall quickly, but safely, flashing her lights in every direction in case one of those blades was positioned to cut her line. She’d done enough climbing to feel at home on a line, but not inside a shaft full of metal obstacles.
“Well done so far,” Haak said watching her from above.
“I’ll go next,” Tanner said.
“Sorry,” Haak said, “can’t indulge any protective instincts today.”
“Why not?”
“Because the moment both of you are out of my sight you’re as good as gone, that’s why. Sophie will go next.”
Malena continued moving downward. The last hops she did slowly. Coming down to another intersection was terrifying, despite the display of bravado she’d put on in front of the team. She was effectively alone now, and the passageways were dark. Anything could be hiding down here, waiting for her.
