Greenflies Read online

  The XTB soldiers were forced to deactivate their low-light vision as the Japanese soldiers descended, flashlights mounted to the conventional rifles. Gamma Team began creeping up the tunnel, two-by-two but rapidly, their laser rifles projecting cones of reddish illumination. Beta fell in behind, with the Major staying in the rear, directing pairs of Japanese troops to cover tunnel intersections as they passed them. Murray fancied he saw a shape clinging to the wall down one tunnel, but further investigation revealed nothing.

  It was several minutes before the first alien was found. Klugman and Hegerty came to a T-junction, and Klugman knelt at the corner. He poked the tip of his laser rifle beyond the corner and adjusted the sight so that he could see 90 degrees down the unexplored tunnel. There, planted sideways along opposite walls of the tunnel twenty yards down, were a pair of domed shapes. They had the unmistakable profile of turret bugs, the bores of their plasma cannons point parallel to the sewer wall. While the appearance of the tip of the laser rifle had not been enough to motivate them to fire, they were certainly aware of its presence. Their carpet-like feet scuttled against the wall, and their cannons maneuvered on their carapaces to face it. The bugs maintained their position, as if daring the humans to set a foot into their field of fire.

  “Sir, I think we’ve hit a defensive perimeter. A pair of heavy weapons turrets have the tunnel covered,” whispered Klugman over the comm.

  Marshal and Decker moved up to join them, and then Marshal gave a quick hand signal to Klugman to take out the turrets.

  Klugman began to pivot around the corner to make a sideways shot at the turrets from cover, but before the rifle could even swing around to face the turrets, their plasma cannons had opened up. Klugman and the other gamma troops sprawled backwards as plasma blasts obliterated the corner wall that had sheltered them a moment before. The turrets were firing in turns, creating a nearly continuous volume of blinding light across the tunnel junction. The soldiers were forced to back away, lest the waste heat from the blasts alone burn them. Even fifteen feet away from a blast, the plasma could cause burns to unprotected skin.

  The unarmored soldiers farther back in the tunnel were either blinded or shielding their eyes from the volume of harsh light. The flash suppression in the XTB helmets was compensating, but there were other complications to the plasma. A heavy wind was being blown from the intersection as the plasma rarefied the atmosphere there, and the result was a steam bath being blown down the tunnel in either direction. While the armor would protect the XTB soldiers for some time, it was only a matter of time before the steam began to scald the unarmored soldiers farther down the tunnel. As the plasma cannons could not run out of ammunition, the defensive turrets could continue to fire until the humans had been killed by peripheral effects or the intersection itself was destroyed.

  “Can you get off a shot?!” Marshal yelled at Klugman over the howling wind.

  The answer was obvious. With every passing second, there was less corner to be used as cover, great chunks of it being melted to slag and tossed, steaming, into the water.

  Klugman withdrew a large grenade with a rubberized exterior and hurled it, not down the defended tunnel, but rather at the wall opposite it. The grenade bounced energetically and rebounded towards the defensive turrets, both of them attempting to blast the small object but failing miserably. There was a deafening explosion, and then the volume of plasma fire down the hall fell off sharply. Evidently, one of the turrets had been damaged by shrapnel from the grenade. Hegerty followed up the attack by moving into the hall during a lull in the plasma and firing two laser blasts in rapid succession. The plasma fire ceased completely as the two turret bugs fell limply from their walls.

  Gamma Team crept slowly into the new tunnel, allowing for Beta and the civil defense soldiers to secure the T-intersection. The tunnel where the turret bugs had been deployed was only lightly damaged from shrapnel, and the trough in the middle was gently steaming. Once again, Klugman and Hegerty took the lead, with Klugman a few feet in front. They were just past the point in the tunnel where the turret bugs lay dead, when, without warning, Klugman disappeared in a flash of light. One moment he had been standing there, and the next there was a spherical gap in the tunnel about ten feet in diameter and a rush of wind. While everything else around him was sucked toward the site of the void bomb explosion, Hegerty himself was blown backwards as the periphery of the blast neatly cut his laser rifle in two and caused the volatile chamber to explode. There was now a hemispherical depression in the middle of the tunnel, into which water was beginning to pool.

  The rest of Gamma Team rushed up to the crater and Hegerty now laying on the ground. Ramachandran began stripping the armor off his arms and tending to the many wounds caused from his weapon's explosion. Marshal, Decker, and Rice focused their attention down the hall, beyond the missing section of wall. There was no trace of any enemy or any other directions from which the attack might have come.

  “It was smaller than a normal void bomb,” stated Colonel Marshal, flatly, “Could they have just teleported it in?”

  “Look, sir,” said Rice.

  As the steam was clearing from the water in the trough, thanks largely to the rush of wind by the void bomb, objects became visible in the water beyond the crater. Whether or not they were related to earth clams, they certainly stemmed from the same inspiration. Six-inch wide opalescent shapes could be seen in the trough, spaced every ten feet along the corridor. They appeared non-mobile and possessed a squat-spherical shape, like a bulky clam or oyster.

  Marshal signaled for Beta team to join them, and then he gestured at the intermittent line of creatures before them, “Mines.”

  “Damn. Everything’s new this time, around. Attacking a civilian population center, turrets taking defensive positions, landmines…”said the Major, trailing off.

  Marshal nodded, then fired a continuous beam from his laser rifle up the center of the trough. The clams burst as the beam swept over them. Then Marshal signaled to Decker and Rice to take point, and he followed closely behind.

  “Not wasting much time grieving for his demo man, is he, sir?” Murray asked Captain Arnold as they stared after Gamma Team.

  Arnold nodded but the look he gave Murray was sympathetic, “The mission continues. I’ll tell you, if ever there was a time when I imagine their lack of emotion was handy, I think it was just now. I certainly could’ve used it a few months back.”

  “Lousy way to go, that,” said Farcus, stepping up to his team.

  “What do you mean?” asked Murray, “The freak just vanished. Seems like a pretty quick way to me.”

  “The Greenflies don’t ‘just vanish’ anything,” corrected Farcus, “He’s been teleported elsewhere. If the mines are like the other void bombs, then that guy… Klugman, was it?… is right now somewhere in space, between here and the moon. The air supply in his armor is meant to supplement the air filter. If it’s all he’s got, it won’t last long. Maybe fifteen minutes.”

  “And then?”

  “Either slow asphyxiation if he keeps his helmet closed or the vacuum of space if he opens it.”

  “You want to join the ‘freaks’ at point, John?” asked Arnold.

  “Um, no.”

  Up ahead, Gamma Team was inspecting the trough carefully, blasting the mines they found, and pausing to look around every corner. They had found another pair of defensive turrets, but they were pointed away, probably a continuation of the perimeter defense. It was a simple matter for Decker to dodge around the corner and obliterate the turrets with a volume of laser fire.

  “So, if we’re skirting the perimeter…” began Rice.

  “Then we want to move inwards,” Colonel Marshal completed his thought, with a hand gesture down an apparently vacant tunnel.

  As if in answer, the strange mixture of growl and howl reverberated down the sewers again, this time much louder. While it gave most of the soldiers pause, for Gamma Team, it did little more than orient them as to the most lik
ely direction of their target. They proceeded down the tunnel towards the animal scream, carefully inspecting for teleportation mines and dispatching them with short bursts of laser fire.

  When they sighted the source of the scream, it unfortunately sighted them first. The creature rounded a corner in a quick burst of speed and gave the humans only an instant to size it up before the plasma fire began. It resembled a crocodile in its gait, but the legs were somewhat longer, and its face was closer to that of a bear than a reptile. It stood six feet at the shoulder and was at least a dozen feet in length, from snout to the end of its stubby tail. Save for a pair of eyes, all black like a rodents’, its entire form was plated in armor bugs. These armor bugs were different from those on the Greenflies, probably requiring less flexibility in this larger animal. They were the size of dinner plates, and the impression was that there was more than one layer. They even covered two basketball-sized protuberances, one on each shoulder. These bulges were just barely recognizable as small turret bugs, and the pistol-sized plasma cannons mounted there began unloading.

  The first blasts were at great enough range that the soldiers on point could evade and dive back behind a corner wall. The plasma washed the walls of the sewer, less powerful than the blasts which dismantled chunks of masonry earlier, but sufficient to leave a smelly layer of carbon on the walls. Unfortunately for the soldiers, this creature was not satisfied to remain in place, defending a hallway as had been the earlier turret bugs. It ran in a scuttling, reptilian way towards the corner where Gamma Team had disappeared. Its mouth hung gaping with prominent canine teeth and a lolling red tongue.

  The soldiers, Gamma, Beta, and a half dozen civil defense men, heard the calamitous approach of the creature and assembled in positions for an ambush. Ten laser rifles, a laser pistol (Hegerty’s sidearm replacement for the rifle which had been destroyed), and six assault rifles blazed into the animal as it rounded the corner. Some of its armor plates appeared to glow red after the onslaught, but the creature didn’t even slow. It attempted to bite off Colonel Marshal’s head, succeeding only in getting an excellent grip on his helmet.

  With the main body thrashing the armored old man around like a doggie chew toy, the shoulder mounted plasma weapons washed the defensive line in blinding light. The plasma was erupting in a diffuse cone this time, and while the XTB armor was sufficient to dampen this limited damage, the Japanese soldiers had no such defense. Four of them fell to the sewer floor screaming, having sustained damage in seconds that would have taken nearly a minute of being on fire. The last two had sought shelter behind the armored soldiers and only suffered minor burns.

  Not hesitating for a moment, Hegerty stood from his kneeling position and began trying to pry the plasma weapon off the monster’s shoulder. It evidently found the action painful, perhaps because of the powerful adhesion the small turret bug was exerting on the monster’s skin. It released Colonel Marshal, miraculously not having broken his neck from the thrashing, and it plowed Hegerty against the wall, snapping at his breastplate. Hegerty, while beating the creature with his injured arm, held up a broken plasma barrel in the other.

  Seeing the potential of a similar follow-up attack, the medic from Beta team rushed up in an attempt to grab the other plasma weapon. Unfortunately, the monster’s new position gave the little turret bug a perfect angle. From the viewpoint of the remaining soldiers, the Beta medic’s head was surrounded in an aura of bright light, and then a single pinpoint of light escaped out the back.

  Before the limp soldier could fall to the ground, Rice swept up and caught the body around the waist for use as a shield. Three more plasma blasts caught it, the last one blowing the body’s head clean off, but the cover had allowed Rice to close the distance. He tossed the body aside and ripped the plasma gun off of the shoulder turret, much as Hegerty had done on the other side. The creature howled with rage and spun around again, dropping a bloody Hegerty to slump against the sewer wall. Rice took the creature’s shoulder to his chin and went flying a good ten feet before splashing into the sewer trough.

  “Stun batons!” Yelled the Major.

  Beta team and what was left of Gamma Team brought the cattle prods to bear, and the metal shafts extended up to six feet into the bulk of the creature. Great arcs of light appeared across the monster. It howled and thrashed again, this time much less voluntarily than before. Large clumps of armor bugs went unconscious and fell off of their host. After a few moments of this, the creature slumped to the ground, its mass allowing it to collapse on both sides of the sewer trough at once. Its tongue lolled almost comically from the side of its bear-like face as its breath became deep and peaceful.

  “Holy shit! Look at the size of this thing,” said Murray, coming forward to point his rifle at one of the creature’s armor-less portions. “It’s like a giant lizard dog thing with plasma cannons.”

  “I think it’s a therapsid,” said Farcus while helping Rice out of the water, “A creature somewhere between mammals and dinosaurs from as much as 200 million years ago. Pretty close to what’s in the fossil record, although quite a bit bigger… and the plasma cannons are new.”

  Colonel Marshal was himself getting rockily to his feet, his right shoulder hanging obviously lower than the other, and that arm limp. He picked up his laser rifle in his left. There was no trace of pain as he spoke.

  “Leave the two Japanese with stun batons until the creature can be collected. The rest of us continue on. From this point on, the second tier personnel have javelins prepared at all times,” he turned his attention to Ramachandran, already tending to Hegerty, “What’s his status?”

  “I’m ready to move out, sir,” said Hegerty, barely audibly.

  “Punctured lung,” corrected Dr. Ramachandran, “He couldn’t get ten feet. I need to stabilize him and get him to the surface. I’m not willing to do a chest tube down here.”

  Marshal grimaced, from inconvenience, not pain.

  “Rice, Decker, point. Arnold, Murray, you’re second tier with javelins. Ramachandran, take the civil defense and get out of here with Hegerty,” said Marshal, “Forward.”

  Rice and Decker were already moving, but most of Beta team just looked on at this ancient soldier with his arm hanging useless at his side, the bodies of five soldiers lying nearby, roasted in the sewer. Marshal did not need to add anything to underscore the seriousness of the mission. A great vibration and rumble ran through the tunnel, the tell-tale sound of another building being destroyed on the surface. Arnold and Murray looked at each other, pulled the anti-tank weapons from their backs and prepared to move out.

  The next twenty minutes was a steady routine of checking corners and systematically lasing the teleporting landmines. Another pair of wall-mounted turret bugs was detected, but the group managed to avoid engaging it. Its appearance gave the communications men something to work with, though. Having plotted the earlier turrets on the map, the third alien ‘checkpoint’ provided an obvious curve on the map, most likely indicating a circular perimeter. At that point, they were able to map a path to the center of this hypothetical target zone. While this may have seemed a little arbitrary and anthropocentric, in doing so, the maps showed the center to be a very large cistern chamber.

  The approaches to the cistern were a set of long radial sewer lines, fairly large in diameter. There were utility tunnels linking the spokes, but the ways to get to the cistern were all very straight. The tunnels were pitch dark here, the glowing utility lights having been stripped, and the low light vision offered only the grainiest of images of the far end of the tunnel. The point men moved up carefully, but they had to blast a set of landmines only thirty feet up the tunnel.

  The therapsids charged. Two of them, so large as to be blocking the tunnel with their mass, stormed down the tunnel, kicking up splashes of water from the trough. The two Gamma Teamers on point dropped to the ground, and they were pleased that the Beta team soldiers with the javelins had been paying attention. A pair of white smoke trails raced down t
he tunnel and terminated at the pair of therapsids. The anti-tank weapons blew them apart, as well as most of the ceiling. The humans were blanketed in dust, and the tunnel before them lay sealed.

  Colonel Marshal stepped up to the point men and observed the obstruction, “Lasers won’t do it, and explosives will just bring down more of the tunnel. Options?”

  “Backtrack, sir. We can reach another approach to the cistern in twenty minutes,” suggested Rice.

  “Twenty minutes is two more buildings and an undetermined number of alien reinforcements on the other side,” said Marshal, “We need to go through.”

  “There are mines under there, sir,” said Decker, somewhat timidly. Unlike a normal human, the hesitance in his voice was not a sign of fear per se, but a concern that his suggestion might end in the reduction of his weekly dose.

  “Explain.”

  “I saw them beneath the water before the javelins struck. They didn’t activate when those creatures passed over them, but they might if a human draws near. Buried where they are, if they were to activate…” Decker trailed off.

  “The rubble would be teleported away without much more damage to the tunnel,” Marshal finished for him.

  The three Gamma Teamers looked back at the five members of Beta team behind them. They were covering the rear and waiting for Gamma Team to report on the tunnel obstruction.

  “Stun rods,” Colonel Marshal said quietly.

  They walked back towards Beta team, not a trace of their plan visible on their faces. Indeed, the Major appeared eager that they were returning, no doubt with some idea as to how to bypass the blockage. The Colonel could have reduced their preparedness further with some quick comments about alternate strategies, but he felt no need based upon the odds, and time was a factor for the city above. With his one good arm, he unslung the cattle prod-like stun baton and shoved it unceremoniously into the Major’s face. Rice, whose stun rod had been damaged earlier in brawling with the therapsid, dropped Arnold with a brutal kick to the head and then tackled Murray before the Aussie infantryman had any idea what was happening. The two remaining Betas were knocked unconscious by a single swing of Decker’s stun baton.