Table of Contents
Chapter 19
Command Center, Kazi Depot
Osara System, Ballas Branch
Back at Kazi Depot, Johns and Rick wasted no time getting to Command, where Sara was waiting for them.
“Status?” Johns asked as the doors whooshed open.
“It’s still growing fast, but seems to have plateaued,” Sara said. “We have nine, maybe ten hours til it’s at Kazi Depot’s doors.”
“Well, we’re screwed,” Rick said, scratching his mustache.
“Maybe they won’t be able to break in,” Sara asked.
“At the Research Center, I heard them breaking through the windows. They might be triple-pane, but they can get through. And we have the same windows here,” Johns said.
“Oh…well then, yes. I’d expect them to be able to get in. And at the rate the helldogs multiply, even if we can hold off a first wave, we will eventually be overrun.”
Johns’ heart sunk. It seemed unthinkable that helldogs could break their way into Kazi Depot in just a few hours. They had just evacuated the Research Facility and now they were going to have to do the same here. The only problem was that there was nowhere for them to go. He couldn’t send all of the inhabitants out into the jungle to day. But maybe that was preferable to being ripped apart here.
“What’s our move?” Sara asked.
Johns thought for a moment. Things had gone sideways at the Research Station, and quickly. He had been banking on having more time to figure out what was next. He was learning that banking on anything was a bad idea right now. The way that Johns saw it, they didn’t have a whole lot of options.
The original plan was for them to send a team to take out a second queen. They had to. It was the only way to keep the helldogs at bay and away from the station. If that queen went down, the advance would stop. Then that would buy them time to take the third queen out. And maybe they could get out of here after all.
But they couldn’t afford to put all of their eggs in one basket. If the queen raid failed, they were going to need to keep them at bay. That meant fortification. Of course, if the queen raid failed it was just a matter of time until they all died anyway, either from the helldogs themselves or weeks later from starvation if they were forced to retreat to the bunkers.
“Queen’s gotta go down. Nothing has changed on that front,” Johns said.
“How do you figure?”
“Well, for one. If we kill the queen, we buy ourselves some time. Not a lot, given the way the growth has been accelerating once it hits a certain threshold, we still have that third impact site growing, but it’s miles away. We would have a week or two to prepare.”
“I don’t know if that’s an option. Our drones are seeing helldog numbers that are five to six times what they were at the other impact site when we killed the queen. You’d be lucky to get into the nest, let alone kill her and get back out before a sea of helldogs descended.” Sara said.
“We don’t have much of a choice,” Rick said. “If help isn’t on the way, holding out isn’t a viable strategy. We either take all three of those big bitches down or we die trying.”
“I say we send a team out for the second queen. Maybe fifteen to twenty. Whatever we can spare. A team that’s big enough to have a serious chance, but not so much that we drain our capacity here.”
“And why would we care about what we have here? If the queens live, we all die,” Rick retorted.
“Well, for one, if the first team isn’t able to get the job done, then we need some people left to help me formulate a strategy and give it another try. Second, these things might be at our door seconds after the raid ends…if it doesn’t work. We need to protect the gates,” Johns said.
“I guess,” Rick said. “But good luck with that. If those things want in, they’re getting in.”
“What about drones?” Sara asked. “Why can’t we just send all of our drones in there with bombs strapped to them again?”
“Sure. But again, only what we can spare. We don’t want to be left holding the bag with no explosives when the goo gets to Kazi Depot,” Johns replied.
Sara sat down in her chair before her screen, looking defeated.
“I’ll put the team together,” Johns said. “We don’t have time to sit around and sulk.”
“No you won’t. I’ll lead the team,” Rick said.
“Like hell. I’m going out there.”
“Nah boss, you can’t. Sorry. You have to sit this one out.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because you being with us isn’t going to make a whole hell of a lot of difference if we down the ol’ girl or not. But if we fail — we need you here to figure out what’s next.”
“I—”
“—He’s right,” Sara interrupted. “We need you here to oversee the fortifications if they fail, and formulate a plan for the third queen if they are successful. There is a chance that the helldogs will be breaching Kazi Depot before the raid ends.”
Johns nodded. He knew they were right. There wasn’t really any reason for him to go. He wouldn’t have let anyone in command go off on what amounted to a suicide mission if it were up to him either.
“Then put your team together, but leave me some people that know how to hold a gauss rifle.”
“We’re short on those too, boss.”
Chapter 20
Above the Kazian forest, Kazi
Osara System, Ballas Branch
The queen raid team was in the puddlejumper and up in the air on its way to the second site within three hours. Johns rushed to Command to watch the raid unfold with Sara and a handful of others who knew when it was taking place.
The station had been notified of the danger and was instructed to gather in the main corridor and begin welding off entrances as best as possible. Truth be told, there wasn’t enough time to prepare. All hopes were riding on the raid team.
Sara gave him a concerned look, but didn’t say anything. She just clutched her hands under her chin and stared at the screen, where she could see from the label in the lower right-hand corner said was Rick’s helmet. It was starting to get dark now. The brilliant green landscape beneath them was fading into darkness.
The puddlejumper was moving quickly. The pilots here on Kazi hadn’t been trained for combat missions, but they had adapted well. From their first landing to check out the damage at the Communications Station, they had gotten down and out quickly every time. When all this was said and done, he was going to recommend those guys for medals. Or maybe he wouldn’t. That might give them a better chance of receiving them.
Johns could feel the lump in his throat forming as they began flying over the first stretches of the blue ground creeping across the jungle, blue light breaching the thick canopy.. As the puddlejumper got closer to the second impact destination, the trees themselves were completely covered in the blue goo. Still closer, the trees were thinned and disappearing, torn down as the Goo decomposed the living tissue and turned it into energy for spreading like a disease across the planet.
Johns could see how this…orgasnism, he guessed was the right word…had found succcess in the harshness of the universe. As best as they could tell, they were space-faring creatures. They rode in on the space squid and crash-landed into planets with living organisms for the goo to devour. A mindless pseudo-hive-minded species that only lived to consume, best as they could tell. Evolution had been successful in some respects, he supposed.
The helldogs that were hatched, the jury was still out on. Initially, Johns had suspected that the helldogs themselves were the race. At least, until Sara had suggested that their proximity connection to the queens and the goo itself might suggest otherwise. She speculated that the helldogs might not be more than a security system — guard dogs for the queen and the goo. Designed to multiply and grow. Someday, if they failed to beat them back here on Kazi, the organism might launch a new squid into the black to crash land on another planet, like Osara Prime. Johns wondered if that was something that Raymond Duke had considered.
Truth be told, Johns both pitied and envied the goo. On one hand, they did live a pitiable life. Their only identifiable purpose was to spread and grow. On the other, Johns had always felt like there was a certain simplicity in being mission-driven. The goo and helldogs had the luxury of single-mindedness, unencumbered by their mistakes. They didn’t seem to think. They just did. And they were right for doing it.
The aura in the room twisted into a knot as the drop team arrived at the impact site. Here, the ground was completely covered and glowing a brilliant blue color. In some areas, it glowed so bright that the goo appeared to be almost white in color. It pulsed like the beat of a heart with blue color streaks, almost looking transparent with liquid blue veins flowing through it.
Sara grabbed Johns’ arm, wrapping herself around it. He could feel the ever-so-slight shake in her body. She was terrified.
They watched through Rick’s helmet cam as the twenty or so men stood and assumed their drop positions, as the puddlejumper positioned itself just to the side of the impact site. The ropes dropped, and the light turned green. Rick was in the back of the puddlejumper, barking orders. One-by-one they exited the plane and went down the rope. It occcurred to Johns just how proficient they had become in such a short amount of time. He could feel himself welling up with pride. He had been through some battles. Ugly ones. But the men here had stepped up in a way that had never been asked of him. Like the helldogs and the goo, they just did.
Rick arrived at the rope and began the descent, turning his head wildly to observe the terrain. Nothing in sight, except for the vast opening where the aliens had landed and the ever-stretching blue terrain. No helldogs here yet. But the goo spoke to itself. It could probably communicate instantaneously across its vast stretches. The helldogs would know the team was there and they would come. They might pull some helldogs away from Kazi Depot for at least a moment.
“Let’s go! Into the hole! Johnson, Brock, you hold the entrance until we are all through the poop shoot and then follow us down!” Rick yelled into the com channel, getting a chuckle out of the five or so people who stood in Command Room.
They watched as Rick ran for the anus-like opening at the far side of the impact crater. This crater was bigger, deeper than the one they had entered before. There was a lot more rock and general debris, so it took them awhile to make their way over to the opening.
“Sir, Oh my god,” Sara said, pointing to a screen to the side of Rick’s helmet cam, which showed feeds from several drones that were hovering in various areas over the goo. On one cam, what appeared to be a distant cloud of dust quickly came into focus to reveal hundreds, no thousands, of helldogs sprinting their way back toward their queen. The horde was like a river, flowing without thought and at its highest possible speed, kicking up goo as it ran back toward the threat. Protect the hive at any cost.
“Jesus,” Johns said as he reached for his com unit. “Rick, you got incoming. Every single helldog is hightailing it back toward you guys,”
“Roger,” Rick said into his helmet cam, choosing not to broadcast that information to his team. “Let’s go guys!”
They climbed their way over the final rocks and debris and reached the oozing entrance to the deeper caverns where they knew the queen would be. The first man jumped head-first into the opening, being sucked in like a rock that had been dropped into a pan of syrup.
One by one, they others followed suit. When Rick went in, everyone in the room got to see exactly what it was like to slide down the entrance to the Queen’s lair. It was like sliding down an esophagus that was too tight. Every wall of the esophagus pushed you through toward the exit, pulsating on all sides.
Rick dropped out of the end and fell a good seven or eight feet to the ground, landing on the man in front of him who groaned. That was different. There hadn’t been such a drop before. The queen’s cavern was larger than the first had been, too, spanning hundreds of feet across. It’s walls were completely coated in goo and the main bowl surrounding her hatching area appeared to be sitting in goo that was five or six feet deep.
The two men that were guarding the permieter slid out of the esophagus behind Johns.
Above ground, the swell of helldogs was getting closer. Now just a few miles away, they would soon descend on the impact site and swallow the team whole.
Through Rick’s helmet cam, they could see the queen, perhaps 100 yards away, at the other end of the cavern. She wasn’t looking in their direction. Johns felt a flit in his stomach. If they could surprise her, they might just have a chance to get out.
“Get close and light her up!” Rick screamed into coms.
The men ran along the shoreline of the blue goo bowl that filled the middle and deepest areas of the cavern. Running along the rock, they were going to be able to get within twenty to thirty yards of the queen, which would put them close enough to do some serious damage. They ran around the bank and when they go close enough, they opened fire.
The queen reacted quickly, detaching herself from a biological device that resembled a wet snails shell and lumbering in their direction. She screamed, and the ferocity and high pitched tones had a difficult time showing through the speakers. It was so loud it disoriented several men, who fell over or had to catch themselves on the screens in front of Johns and Sara in Command.
The gauss rifles launched hot lead into her and she screamed louder. You couldn’t see any connections, but you knew that hundreds of bullets were hitting the mark. A few of the men were screaming as they hurled bullets.
All of the drone cameras were now following the helldog horde. You could see, on the landscape in front of them, a few lone helldogs in the lead, making their way toward the nest.
Rick looked down at his belt, detached a grenade and hurled it at the queen. It stuck into the blue goo below her and blew, sending shrapnel into the queen’s soft underbelly. She screamed in pain and lashed out with her lobster-like back appendage in their direction. She was hurt.
The first helldogs made their way through the esophagus, where two men with flamethrowers were waiting. They could see through their helmet cams that they were easily able to burn them to bits as they came out.
“Helldogs are here,” one said over the com. The swarm was still a few minutes away, but Johns could tell that they weren’t going to have time to kill the queen and get out unscathed. This was going to be a one-way trip. He felt his heart sink.
The queen approached the cliffside and the team backed up to give her space without slowing down on the bullets. One young man was slow to move, and the queen punished him with a tentacle strike that cut him in half at the waist. His torso fell off the side of the cliff and slid down into the blue goo. They could hear him gurgling and watched as he spit up blood into his visor. Sara shrieked. Johns leaned forward and turned off his camera and audio.
The two men with flamethrowers were now steadily burning helldogs that came through the esophagus, a new one every couple of seconds. Soon the wave of helldogs would arrive and wash over them. They needed to get the queen killed.
“Nade the bitch!” Rick yelled.
The men reached into their belts and withdrew their grenades, launching at the queen. One man, Timothy Brown, a security officer in his mid-20s, fumbled his grenade after pulling the pin. It fell from his hands and landed in the goo below him. He reached down, grabbing it and pulling it up, but the goo had made it slippery and it slid out of his grip again. He reached down, squeezed, and the grenade pushed out of his palm, sliding forward into a thick slab of goo.
“Fuck,” the boy said, giving it one last reach. He picked it up just as it exploded, tearing him apart, along with the man next to him who screamed bloody murder into his coms before falling to the ground. The last thing the two men saw was a large, sharp claw bearing down on their heads before their feeds went dark.
Then, the swarm of helldogs descended upon the entrance. The drone cameras showed them make their way into the impact site, effortlessly launching themselves over the debris and down into the impact hole. They poured themselves into the esophagus opening, four or five at a time.
“Helldogs incoming,” Johns said into the coms. “Rick they need help!”
The helldogs began to pour out of the esophagus. The two men at the front lit their flamethrowers and kept them trained on the exit. Dozens of helldogs were exiting and suffering a quick, hot end. The smoldering bodies were piling up outside of the esophagus opening, and the two men with flamethrowers kept the pedal to the metal. .
Several team members had run over and were dumping rounds into the enterence as well. As the helldog bodies began to pile up, they tried to clear them. They tugged and pulled at the bodies, but there was too many. They were exiting the esophgas three to four at a time. The pile of helldogs began to reach the opening. A few more came out and quickly burned, dying on top of the pile and shielding the opening. Then, there was no stopping them. The dead helldogs ate the brunt of the flamethrowers, shielding the others as they exited. A few still died, but that only created more of a barricade between the flamethrowers and the esophogas opening, allowing more to sneak through.
“MOVE THEM!” one of the flamethrower men screamed into the coms.
They watched as the two men with flamethrowers were knocked to the ground and began to be torn apart by the helldogs. They pulled wildly at the flamethrower trigger, roasting helldogs with one of the men who had come over to help them. Sara sobbed next to Johns, and he grabbed her and held her tight.
He watched Rick’s helmet cam. The other team members had run toward the entrance, trying to slow a flow of helldogs that would never end. He looked from them to the queen, who had also been distracted by the commotion at the gate. She screamed her ugly scream.
Rick looked back at the team one more time.
“Sorry guys,” he said, as he unfastened a large-brick like object from his belt. Immediately, Johns recognized it as a tactical proximity bomb. “I’ve been savin this for a rainy day. Found it out in the storage facility. I really wanted to save it for the third one of these big bitches, but number two will have to do, I suppose.”
A tactical proximity bomb was a code name for what amounted to a small nuclear device. It was probably strong enough to level 10 square city blocks.
Rick held the bomb out in front of him, staring at it. He opened a compartment and turned a knob, which opened a second compartment, exposing a switch.
“It’s been a pleasure,” Rick said before reaching out and flipping the switch. All of the screens went black, as did several drone cameras near the impact site.
One drone, a few miles away, captured the blast. The shockwave knocked it off course and nearly crashed, but recovered to show a small mushroom cloud formed over the site. As he drew closer to investigate, all they could see was a giant hole in the ground. All blue goo and forrest in what appeared to be a mile radius around the impact side was completely gone – burned to a crisp.
Everyone in the Command room was completely silent. They had done it. They had killed the second queen. Within minutes, Sara would work through tears to confirm that the goo emanating from that impact site had started to recede.
Rick had killed the second queen. With a proximity nuke. Why Rick hadn’t told him about it was a mystery in itself. But it had worked. He had killed the queen and, with it, killed the entire helldog horde that had birthed from the second impact site.
There was still one more queen and growing swarm of helldogs out there, a few dozen kilometers away. But Rick had bought them time, and that was what they needed.
Chapter 21
Command Center, Kazi Depot
Osara System, Ballas Branch
The aftermath of the fight at Site B was quick. Immediately after Rick’s screen had gone black, Sara sat at a table at the back of Command and cried with an intensity that Johns had only seen a few times in his entire life. It was the kind of crying that was reserved for when a sibling, parent, or spouse dies. Second only to the kind of crying that you see when someone loses a child.
Johns was having trouble too. He had never cried in the war. Well, that wasn’t true. But certainly not in front of his unit. Plenty of deaths had cut him deeply. Even today, his dreams were filled with memories and conversations of the young men that had been killed due to an order that he had given. It’s strange—sending men you have come to know and love to their deaths. That camaraderie was something militaries relied on. They needed them to care about each other. And it was inevitable when you had been through hell together. But it made everything so much harder.
This one, with Rick, hit him harder than he expected. They had gotten to know each other well over the last decade of working on Kazi. In his first few years here, Rick had been his only friend. He was the only person that Johns had met since the war that seemed interested in who he was and did not judge him for his past deeds. Rick had never asked about the decisions that Johns had made during the war, and Johns respected him for it. Johns took a few minutes to cry in the bathroom, then steadied himself and walked back out into Command.
When Sara had calmed, Johns approached her. “When you feel up to it, can you give us a status report on Impact Site C. Let us know how much time we are working with.” She nodded through tears and wiped her nose with her wrist.
A few minutes later, with tears still streaking down her face, Sara walked up to Johns’ desk in his office. “Growth at Site C had accelerated, just like it did at Site B.”
“How fast?”
“It’s hard to say when it’s still accelerating. We’ll know a lot more in a few hours.”
“Alright. Let’s say it accelerates to about the same speed that Site B did at its peak?”
Sara punched some numbers into her handheld. “If it instantly began growing at that speed and didn’t fluctuate at all, they would get to Kazi Depot in about five days and…twenty-one hours.”
“So, six days.”
“That’s assuming that it grows at the same speed. We saw Site B accelerate quite a bit over its previous speed, Site C may end up even faster. Also, there will be some ramp-up time. Based on the modeling that we have from Site B, and assuming it ends at about the same acceleration — which I wouldn’t bet on — we may have even more time.”
“How much more?”
“Eight and a half days, give or take.”
Johns nodded. “But it could be less if it speeds up?” Sara nodded.
“So what do you think is a safe estimate? We have somewhere between five and nine days before the helldogs are digging their way into Kazi Depot? Five if we’re unlucky, nine if we’re lucky?”
“Yes that sounds about right.”
“Great.”
***
They had bought themselves time. Not a lot, but enough for Johns to catch a quick sleep and to send another update to Raymond Duke.
He hopped in the cart and made his way toward his quarters. The entire way, he thought about what he was going to say.
Raymond Duke had completely fucked up Johns’ life. He remembered the first hint that something had gone wrong. In the aftermath of the battle that would eventually become known as the Siege of Tillion, Johns was initially heralded as the man who ended the war. Leading the 15th brigade into the last well-defended stronghold of the revolters, they had taken the city.
The war was nearly in its tenth year. Nearly a third of the planet had revolted. In the end, after a regime change and years of war, disagreements on both sides had become more about revenge than political considerations. The revolt had initially started as a result of a rise in taxes for the Cocina Province, as a result of their blossoming Legavigne farming industry. A Legavigne was a poppy-like flower that produced a liquid intoxicant that numerous planets in the branch systems had gained a taste for.
The offensive into Tillion City had been brutal, which Johns had never denied. But he had received a lot of pressure from above to show no mercy. This is our chance, they had said. A chance to stop the war, for good. If anything, Johns had worked to limit the damage as best he could. But you can’t count on an exhausted army with a bloodlust to act the way you expect them to. In the end, almost 100,000 had died. 20,000 of his own men and 80,000 of the revolters had perished. Later, he would find out that the number included 40,000 civilians.
They had used some admittedly dirty tactics — drone bombing buildings, setting areas of the city on fire to push the revolters back, and eventually cutting off their water supplies were common examples of where he had overstepped. Then there were reports of brutal killings, rapes, and general mayhem in the heart of the city. Overall, Johns just hadn’t been as successful as he had hoped in limiting the damage. But the war had ended.
You had to look at it in the context of time. The war was entering its tenth year. The revolt had been mostly quelled, but a few hundred thousand revolters remained holed up in the third largest city on the planet, Tillion. The rest of the planet was suffering from continuous terrorist attacks. They lived in fear, constantly.
Raymond Duke was the newly elected Prime Minister, an appointment that lasted 10 years. The electorate had tasked him with ending the war. That was all they wanted.
Duke and Johns had been close, serving in the same Osarian Army task force for five years before the war started. When hell finally did break loose, Johns had re-enlisted and been deployed to fight immediately, while Duke had stayed out of the fray after securing a spot as a District Rep.
Ten years later, Johns led the largest division in the Osarian System, and Duke was the most powerful man in the system. When the word to siege the city came down, it had come from Duke himself. Johns remembered it like it had just happened that week. He was eating breakfast in a small hotel that had been repurposed into a barracks just outside of Tillion when his terminal rang. It was Duke. He had been surprised to receive a call from him — they hadn’t spoken directly for some time at that point. Duke had made it clear to Johns on that call that the 15th Division was to take Tillion by any means necessary and end the war. So they had. The city was secured.
That first hint that things might go wrong for Johns came a few short weeks after the end of the war. Johns had mostly been covered favorably by the media, who credited him with ending the war.
As time trickled on, numerous stories started to be released by the press. Some of the stories, such as Johns firebombing several apartment complexes that had been wrongly marked as rebellion safehouses on the eastern Side of Tillion, were true. There had been mistakes. Other stories were outright falsehoods, with little more than hearsay to back them up. Other war crimes and atrocities committed during the invasion also made the news, worsening the situation. But those crimes were perpetrated by individual soldiers. Johns had never wanted to say it out loud, but those kinds of things happened in war. He wished that wasn’t the truth. But it was. Some men behaved like animals. He’d gladly own up to what he had done. But he didn’t want to take on the sins of other men.
Raymond Duke’s support withered as that slow trickle of negative stories surrounding the Siege of Tillion began to make their way to the feeds. The Osara Prime Senate began talks of recalling him from his post and holding a special election. He had ended the war, but the brutalness of it was coming back to bite them both. Duke had to lop off the arm before it infected the rest of the body.
“We’ll be looking into that,” Duke had first said when a reporter had asked about Nicholas Johns’ war crimes. No denial. It was then that Johns knew things would go to shit. He may not have been a political type, but he knew how they operated. That small hint signaled a larger shift in his position. Johns knew then that he was getting thrown under the bus.
In the coming weeks, Raymond Duke completely turned on Johns, withdrawing his support for the offensive and calling for a trial to investigate his war crimes. It would be nearly a year before the trial would start, and by the end of it, even though he was found innocent, Johns’ reputation and family had been dragged in the mud for so long that there was nothing left for him to return to. His wife, exhausted, had left him. His daughter was sick of being yelled at and harassed by weirdos everywhere she went. She wanted her father to stay away from her too. So he did. He left. He ran to Kazi, where at least he wouldn’t be ruining anyone else’s life. Kazi. The forgotten planet. And now he’d die here, being fed to the dogs.
No matter how much he racked his brain, Johns still couldn’t figure out why. Not believing the alien threat to be significant enough to risk the bad press was the easy answer. He couldn’t just want to throw everyone here into the meatgrinder. These people had families. Eventually, the truth would get out and come back to bite him.
Maybe he thought they would easily dispose of the threat and move on.
On the other hand, maybe the aliens scared him. Sara had Johns sent along a pretty significant data dump when they had first arrived. Maybe they had taken a look at what was under the hood and decided that they couldn’t risk the safety of the whole system just to save 10,000 or so people.
Or maybe he just wanted to fuck Johns once more for old-time’s sake. The stink of having supported the Tillion City invasion had never quite washed off of Duke. Having Johns dead might lay that to bed, leaving Duke with a pretty comfortable 9 years left on his second term, then a lifetime of living like royalty. Throwing Johns under the bus had saved him. It had given both sides of the conflict a reason to like him.
Johns hunched looked into the biometrics, and the door to his quarters opened. Johns walked through the small room and sat himself at the metallic dining room table.
He positioned himself in front of the camera, blurring the kitchen background so people could focus on him and his message, and thought for a moment about what he would say. He whispered phrases he was considering to himself, running through the speech in his head. After a few minutes he gave up and decided to just wing it. Johns hit record.
“This is a message for Raymond Duke,” Johns started. “I’m here on Kazi, about twenty-five days after the invasion of the aliens that have become known as helldogs…”
He sat back in his chair and crossed his arms, shaking his head. He hit “Cancel,” then “Delete” on the screen. He grabbed his terminal and frantically flipped through several screens. On the dashboard in front of him, he punched in new coordinates for the light beam communication system and watched as the light beam repositioned itself on the outside of the ship, just a few miles away from Kazi Depot. When they finished, Johns cleared his throat and hit the record button.
“This is a message for the people of the Osarian system.”
Chapter 22
Johns’ Quarters, Kazi Depot
Osara System, Ballas Branch
It was about three and a half minutes of light time to reach Osara Prime. They would probably need five or so minutes to formulate their thoughts, then three and a half minutes back. Johns was expecting to have to wait more than a few minutes to see his plan bear fruit.
He stood up from the table and made himself a quick potato vodka on the rocks. By the time he had sat back down at the metallic table and was finishing the glass, he got the alert that a feed had started with his name in it.
“This is the Osara Prime Tillion News feed, and we have some breaking news. We have just received a message from Nicholas Johns — yes, the Nicholas Johns from the massacre during the Siege of Tillion — reporting the possibility of alien lifeforms that landed on the planet of Kazi,” the young anchor said into the feed screen, which flashed updates and notifications about his message. Johns let a giggle out over the fact that he had sent the Tillion feed was the first one to report on it. There was some irony in there, Johns was sure. “We would like to remind our viewers that this information is unverified. Nicholas Johns is our one and only source. Included in his message was a large collection of data, reportedly proving his assertions. Our team is working to evaluate this data. In accordance with his message, this data has been shared with other media outlets.”
Now that made him smile. That was exactly what they needed. His face popped up on the screen.
“Hello, this is Nicholas Johns. Yes, that Nicholas Johns. A decade ago, I left Osara Prime to accept the Head of Security position at Kazi Depot. I am sending this message out of complete desperation. I realize that I am an imperfect messenger for this message. The fact that my name is connected to it will make many dismiss it right away. I don’t blame them. But I am asking you to please, please, listen to what I have to say today. Not for me, but for the 10,000 residents of Kazi Depot that are certain to lose their lives if something is not done.
Approximately three weeks ago, Kazi was rocked by three impacts, which we initially thought might have been from a single asteroid, breaking up as it hit our atmosphere. One of these impact sites was a direct hit on the Kazi communications facility, knocking out our ability to communicate easily with Osara Prime. This message is being routed through the light beam communications system on the Transport Ship Donnelly, the only ship currently docked at a launchpad here on Kazi.
Shortly after the impacts, we realized that one of our environment analyst drones was able to take a picture of what impacted the planet. This is what we saw,” the picture of the squid-like creature showed up on the screen.”
Good. The media hadn’t made any noticable cuts to his statement so far. That was his biggest worry — that they would chop up his words until they no longer resembled what he had intended to say.
“Shortly after the impact, we toured the impact site at the Communications Station,” images of them first encountering the Blue Goo were shown on the screen. “There we found something truly alien. A blue, glowing substance was spread over the entire crash site, completely destroying the station and killing everyone inside. These deaths were reported to Osara Prime and in particular, directly to Prime Minister Raymond Duke. As best as I can tell, he has failed to relay these deaths to the families.”
The feed showed a picture of the blue goo over the annihilated communications station.
“Our situation quickly grew worse when we discovered that the Blue Goo was not just coating the ground, but growing rapidly, feeding off organic matter on the forest floor as it went. As you know, Kazi is known for its regenerative forrests. So this presented a concern for us.
As the organism grew it became more sophisticated, and so did our understanding of it. We found that the organism died when exposed to flame. With that in mind, we were able to fashion homemade flame throwers and burn back the growth at Site A, the name we have been using to refer to what was formerly the Communications Station. However, when we sent a team to burn back the growth at the second impact location, we were met with a terrible surprise.
That surprise was a small flock of reptile-like creatures. There were hundreds, and they quickly overran the team that had been sent out there to burn back the Blue Goo, killing them all.”
A few captured images and videos of the helldogs flashed on the screen over his voiceover. A broad smile crawled across Johns’ face, this first true smile that he had enjoyed in a while. Now they couldn’t deny everything. Let’s see Raymond Duke crawl his ass out of this hole. He named each of the men in the platoon that had died that day without explaining how it had happened. That was Johns’ way of giving them the recognition they deserved and hopefully informing their families. Maybe, with the truth, they’d be able to find peace some day.
“Within days it had become clear that the small hatchlings that had killed our team at the burn site were growing larger and also rapidly growing in number,” Another picture flashed on the screen. “Even after the failure of the second burn mission, we couldn’t let the Blue Goo growth go unchecked. Not wanting to send more men into harms way, we used the few bombs that we had at our disposal to push back the growth.
Shortly thereafter, Head Researcher on Kazi, Sara Rutherford, on a hunch, noticed that the impact sites all featured deep cavernous holes where the squid-like organisms had first impacted the planet. She managed to fly a drone through a tight cavern, and found the following footage.” The footage of the queen played on the screen.
“She hypothesised that there may be organisms living down in those holes, commanding and guiding the organism as a whole, like a bee queen. She thought that if we were able to kill the queen, we might stop growth at that node. With that in mind, we saddled up.”
Johns regaled them of the story of the death of the first queen and their narrow escape before the swarm of helldogs had arrived. He told them of Joaquin’s death, showed video of it, and talked about how bravely he had fought. Then Johns told them about how the growth at Site A began to shrink and, eventually, wither and die. He told them about how the growth at the other two impact sites began to increase after the death of the first Queen, hastening their efforts to kill the Queen at site B.
He explained how they had evacuated Kazi Station, and how the helldogs had managed to get into the train car and devour an unknown number of people. He left out his encounter with the old man. That he would never tell anyone about.
Then, he explained the second queen raid, and how the men had bravely fought at the entrance to the queen’s cavern to hold the line, but how they ultimately had lost the entire team as the Helldogs had descended into the pit. He explained how Rick had sacrificed himself for the greater good, using their proximity bomb to blow up the second queen, ending the spread at Site B.
“Here we are. That leaves us with one more site to take down. But nearly everyone that has been trained to hold a gun has been killed. By the time we can make an attempt at the third queen, Site C will have progressed much farther than the previous two sites. Additionally, recent drone scans have shown smaller packs of helldogs hanging around the entrance. Without any explosives left, we are going to have a hard time killing the last queen. But wish us luck.
Lastly, I’d like to talk about leadership and the lack of leadership that Osara Prime has shown in the face of the biggest threat the system may have ever seen. Now, I am undoubtedly an imperfect messenger. But had these monsters landed on Osara Prime instead of Kazi, you have to believe that they would have quickly defended whatever cities or structures needed it. But here? On Kazi? We are not worth the effort.
I am unsure why Prime Minister Raymond Duke decided to leave the ten thousand inhabitants of Kazi Station to die. Perhaps he didn’t want to send ships to Kazi for fear of them becoming contaminated and bringing the organism back to Osara Prime. That would be almost reasonable, if not for the fact that there are quarantine procedures for those situations. We might spend months floating around in deep orbit, but at least we’d be alive.
Or perhaps Duke’s calculations were political. Domestically, he might think that open knowledge of this event might cause panic. Again, a reasonable answer. Except that, at this juncture, the organism is no threat to Osara Prime. Even if they were to crash into the planet and begin growing, with the knowledge that we have here, there is no doubt that the Osarian Army could deal with them before they spread.
Could it be that our elected Prime Minister just didn’t want to suffer the political fallout from an attack like this? Or, maybe the duly elected Raymond Duke didn’t want word to get back to the Core Systems? Like they don’t have eyes and ears everywhere. Now that I’ve removed some of these concerns, will his opinion change?
My point is this — he ignored the interests of Osarian citizens for his own personal gain. He hid the deaths of Kazian residents members from their families. He hid the seriousness of this extraterrestrial event from the citizens. He has left ten-thousand people to die and has taken no steps to curb the escalation and growth of this event, even though the Osarian military certainly has the resources to do so.
Like I said — I may be an imperfect messenger. You may think I’m unreliable because of my past. You might think that I’m driven by a dislike for Raymond Duke because of how my situation was handled a decade ago. I don’t blame you. But I am telling you now, I am telling the truth.
I’ll back up what I have said here with all the data we have on this event. I hope it will be enough to persuade those that surround the Prime Minister and the citizens of Kazi of the seriousness of the extraterrestrial event taking place here on before the problem spreads to our home planet. Thank you.”
Johns watched as his broadcast switched back to the anchors, who immediately began commenting and speculating on what they had just seen. He switched the screen off, then his coms unit. He had seen enough. The Osarian people would know the truth, even if they died here on Kazi. That was enough for him, for now.
