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  What he and Thula also understood was that, as point men, they were potentially sacrificial lambs. Whatever was responsible for silencing an entire research team and turning a drilling platform into a ghost town could conceivably still be present, watching and waiting . . .

  Paul risked a glance behind him. The rest of the unit had left the shuttle, carefully following in the footsteps of the advance guard. Rizzo and Baudin had taken up positions at either side of the shuttle door, Rizzo standing, Baudin kneeling, their guns raised and ready to provide covering fire in the event of a retreat.

  A door stood open ahead, leading into the small living and laboratory quarters—a single-level building set against the northern defensive wall of the platform. A series of circular windows ran along its length, each set at roughly the height of an Illyri head, which made them slightly too high for any human other than Thula—and, at a stretch, Paul—to look through with ease. Peering inside wasn’t an option, though, as the windows were shaded to protect those within from the blazing Tormic sun. From outside, they looked like black glass, reflecting the exterior and nothing more.

  Paul and Thula took up positions at the door, and Paul signaled his intention to move in first and go left. Thula would follow and go right. The lights were still on inside, and Paul could see the edge of a chair, and a table on which stood some plates and drinking beakers, all covered with a coating of white sand. Sand on the table, sand on the floor, sand everywhere.

  Paul took another scorching breath, tightened his grip on his assault rifle, and risked a quick glance around the doorframe. He saw a rest area with functional chairs and a couch that didn’t look much more comfortable than the floor itself, and beyond it the kitchen. One of the chairs lay on its back on the floor. It was the only sign of disturbance. His lens bombarded him with information about the room—its length, width, height, temperature, and the results of a scan for movement and body heat signatures, which came up negative. There was nowhere anyone could hide, but Paul conducted a careful search nonetheless, even going so far as to check the interior of an oven and a couple of cupboards that turned out to contain nothing more interesting than rations. He spoke softly into his helmet’s microphone, his speech relayed to the entire unit.

  “Thula?”

  “It’s clear.”

  Paul turned and saw Thula finishing his own search of the small mess hall. Five plates stood on the two tables, from which the chairs had been untidily pushed back. One beaker had fallen to the floor. Thula shrugged at Paul, who was just about to give the all clear to the rest of his unit when marks on the interior wall of the mess hall caught his eye.

  “I have pulse strikes to the wall,” said Paul. “Weapons discharged.”

  He tried to assess the power of the pulse blasts: too weak to penetrate the shell of the building but powerful enough to put an end to any average-sized life-form that took its full force. Whatever the pulse rifle had been aimed at was big enough for the blast to be set at more than regular killing power, but Paul could see no blood, and no remains.

  “There’s a panel loose on the floor,” said Thula.

  They both approached it. Paul nodded, and Thula kicked the panel away. Beneath it was only sand. Thula shrugged, and they moved on.

  The sound of swearing came over the comms system. It was Cutler’s voice, quickly followed by the rattle of depleted uranium rounds being fired. Immediately Paul and Thula returned to the door, but by then the action was over.

  “Cease fire, damn it!” shouted De Souza. “Cease fire!”

  Carefully, Paul and Thula peered out of the doorway. Cutler was staring at a small black object by his right foot, as if mortally offended by it.

  “It’s a tormal,” said Olver. He was an Australian, and had it not been for Thula’s presence in the unit, he would have been the quietest among them. “It’s just a tormal.”

  The little lizard had reacted to the noise of gunfire and the impact of the shells on the sand around it by activating its carapace. It looked, thought Paul, like a resin model of itself.

  “You’re a moron, Cutler,” said De Souza. “You nearly blew my foot off.”

  Cutler poked at the tormal with the muzzle of his rifle.

  “It came out of nowhere,” he said, wonder in his voice. “I must have hit it with half a dozen rounds, and they just bounced off.”

  “Yeah?” said De Souza. “Well, if you fire your weapon again without cause, I’ll make you wish you had skin that thick.”

  He looked at Paul.

  “Pulse blasts apart, we okay in there?”

  “Yes, Lieutenant. We have a closed door to the left. Layout of the platform says that’s where the labs and living quarters are.”

  “Well, they’re not going to search themselves, are they? Let’s keep moving. Cutler, you stay out here. You’re making me nervous.”

  Cutler did as he was told. The tormal, having decided that it was no longer in imminent danger, stored away its shell and scuttled across the sand. Its movement seemed to signal to others that it was okay to emerge, for suddenly Paul could see at least ten of the lizards on the sand. They had probably been dozing away beneath it before being roused by the arrival of the soldiers.

  With Cutler outside, the rest of the unit completed the exploration of the living quarters without incident. They found no sign of the research team, although more pulse marks were found in the sleeping quarters—a heavy concentration of fire, as though a last stand of some kind had been made there.

  “Look at this,” said Cady, who was the only member of the unit with any real scientific knowledge. Before she was conscripted into the Brigades, she had been preparing her application to study chemical physics at the University of Edinburgh. She was standing in the lab area, staring at a screen. On it was a resonance image of the drilling equipment, its drill head—or what was left of it—buried deep in the sand and rock below their feet. From the image, it looked as though the drill head had exploded.

  “That’s impossible,” said Faron. “Those heads are practically indestructible. They have to be.”

  “I think we found a design flaw in this one,” said Cady. “Somebody should sue.”

  “Cady,” said Peris. “Run a scan for the research team’s beacons.”

  “We already did that,” said Olver. “We got nothing.”

  “Humor me,” said Peris, “but target below ground, not above.”

  Cady did as she was ordered, utilizing the research team’s own seismic scanners. Instantly, the screen lit up with fifteen flashing lights, scattered across an area of about half a square mile under the drilling platform, and in some cases as deep as a hundred meters beneath the ground.

  “What the hell are they doing down there?” said De Souza.

  “Being dead,” said Paul.

  “I think we should get out of here,” Peris told Faron. “Now.”

  Faron might have been green, but he was nobody’s fool.

  “Agreed,” he said.

  De Souza didn’t need to be told twice. “You heard what the captain said: back to the shuttle. Disposition remains the same as before. Kerr and Thula to lead. Go! De Souza to shuttle: we’re getting out of here.”

  “Understood,” came Steven’s voice. “Engines ready.”

  They moved out fast, and reached the door to find Cutler walking toward something that had caught his attention near the wall.

  “Cutler!” called De Souza. “Where are you going?”

  Paul adjusted the magnification on his lens with repeated blinks of his eye. He saw what had attracted Cutler’s attention: a red protective helmet, the kind used by miners. It lay on the sand, looking disturbingly clean; it hadn’t been there when they arrived. Paul was certain of it. He would have noticed, just as he now saw that the sand was scattered with the dark shapes of tormals huddled in their protective shells.

  �
�Cutler,” he cried. “Don’t touch it.”

  But it was too late. Cutler reached for the helmet, lifting it from the sand, and it was as though the sand came with it, and then the grains fell away to reveal a disturbance in the air, a shimmering like glass, and Paul had a vague impression of claws and teeth and hard angles. It enveloped Cutler, dragging him beneath the sand before he even had a chance to scream.

  And then all was gunfire.

  Gunfire, and dying.

  CHAPTER 7

  Later, all that Paul could remember—or, perhaps, would allow himself to remember—was chaos. Despite their training, despite their weapons, despite their veneer of arrogance and world-weariness, they were still just young men and women far from home, thrust into an alien environment, and now they were panicking, and the panicked and frightened would always be easy prey.

  A gush of blood rose from the patch of sand into which Cutler had vanished, fountaining like a red geyser. It reached its highest point before commencing an almost elegant descent toward the ground, but its impact was disturbed by another nearly transparent shape erupting from below, and Cutler’s blood splashed over it, giving it a kind of definition. Its jaws, so massive as to appear to be in a state of dislocation, became a crimson maw in which jagged shards of teeth were visible. Its head was flat and its body elongated, evolved to move swiftly and smoothly through sand, but there was a hardness to it as well. It reminded Paul of a great diamond drill carved into the form of a demon. This thing could cut through rock as easily as sand.

  Olver was the first to react, spraying the creature with a burst of fire. Fragments of it exploded from its body like splinters, and a spiked appendage shot from its torso like a glass thorn, spearing Olver through the chest and killing him instantly. Cady went down next, but this time there was no blood. The sand simply swallowed her, and she was gone.

  A shiny metal object flew through the air, and Paul heard Thula’s warning cry of “Grenade!” He turned his face away just as the device exploded, and with it the creature, shattering like crystal, the air suddenly alive with lethal splinters. Most of them impacted on Paul’s body armor, but some struck his exposed right arm. The pain was intense, and almost spurred him to react, but he felt frozen in place. He couldn’t take his eyes from Olver’s body, now lying on its back with the shimmering spike that had killed him protruding from his chest, the rest of the beast reduced to fragments by the grenade. Thula made for the shuttle while De Souza and Peris provided covering fire, aided by Rizzo and Baudin. Someone grabbed Paul’s left arm. It was Faron.

  “Move!” he ordered. “We have to get to the shuttle.”

  But even as Paul stood he saw the shuttle begin to shake, and it rolled enough on its right axis to send Baudin tumbling from the doorway and onto the sand. A flat head rose next to her, and its jaws closed upon her. Baudin struggled against it, but only for seconds, and Paul heard the snap as her neck broke.

  The door of the shuttle closed suddenly as it plunged even farther right, until the craft was standing on its side, partly buried in the sand. Slowly, it began to be pulled under.

  “Get off the ground!” cried Peris. “Head for the walls!”

  A railed walkway ran around the interior of the platform’s walls, accessed by a system of ladders. They were a standard feature of such facilities, enabling a watch to be posted, or a defense to be mounted in the event of an attack from outside. Unfortunately, this particular attack was coming from inside, but they could serve a defensive purpose nonetheless.

  Two figures appeared on the fuselage of the upturned shuttle: Steven and Rizzo had exited using the port door. As Paul watched, they jumped to the sand and made for the walls, and then Paul was running too, running for his life, trying and failing to keep pace with the longer strides of his Illyri captain. Thirty feet to go. Twenty. Ten. The ladder was almost within Faron’s reach.

  Paul’s slowness saved his life. As Faron made a leap for the ladder one of the creatures exploded from the sand to meet him, catching Faron in its jaws as soon as his feet left the ground and virtually biting him in two before dragging his remains below ground. Paul was almost blinded by the spray of Illyri blood but he kept running. He reached the ladder and felt strong arms hauling him up. He had a vague awareness of jaws snapping closed barely inches from his boot, and then he was on the walkway, and safe.

  For now.

  He dropped to his knees. His lungs and throat were aching from the exertion, for drawing deep breaths of the Tormic air had scalded his insides as surely as if he had swallowed boiling coffee. He could barely speak. He fumbled for his water bottle, and tipped half of its contents into his mouth, trying to ease the pain.

  Another hand forced the bottle away from his throat. It was Steven.

  “You might be glad of that water later,” he warned.

  Paul nodded. He desperately wanted to drink more, but his brother was right. Water was probably the most valuable commodity they had, more valuable even than ammunition.

  Only now did Paul notice De Souza. He was huddled into himself on the platform, his face gray, his left fist clenched while Thula worked on what remained of his right arm. It looked as though it had been bitten off just above the elbow, and Thula was trying to stop the flow of blood from the stump. De Souza screamed. Thula reached into the med pack, found a sedative shot, and injected De Souza in his left thigh. De Souza stopped screaming. His head sagged, and he was rendered mercifully unconscious.

  Six of them remained alive. That was all, and it wasn’t even certain that De Souza would survive for long, not unless he received proper medical care. In fact, the odds on any of them living very long didn’t look good.

  Peris activated his comms link.

  “Peris to Envion. Come in, Envion.”

  All of them heard the response in their helmet links.

  “This is Envion, Supervisor Peris. What is your status?”

  Paul recognized the voice of Galton, the big Londoner who was the ship’s chief officer and therefore the second-highest ranked officer on board next to its Illyri commander, Morev.

  “We have sustained casualties. Five dead or missing, one severely injured. Shuttle destroyed. We need a rescue, and fast.”

  Paul could only imagine the consternation that this news was causing on board the Envion. Their unit was one of two on board the ship, and despite the rivalries, and even hatred, that existed between certain Brigade members—inevitable when young men and women were thrust into close proximity for long periods—they were still intensely loyal to one another.

  “Can you give us more details?”

  Names: Galton wanted names.

  “Captain Faron dead. Privates Olver and Cutler dead. Privates Baudin and Cady dead or missing. Lieutenant De Souza injured.”

  Peris paused.

  “I’m sorry, Galton—sorry about Cady.”

  Cady and Galton had been in a relationship. They had been close for only a couple of months, but it had been clear to all that they were smitten with each other.

  “Understood, Supervisor.”

  Paul heard the words catch in Galton’s throat, and then his grief was pushed aside. Galton would mourn later. This was the time to worry about the living.

  “Nature of threat?” said Galton. He might have been a robot for all of the emotion that his voice now held.

  “Unknown alien life-forms.”

  “Is your position secure?”

  “For now. We’re on the walls.” Peris peered over the railing. “If they can climb ladders, we’re in trouble, but there’s no sign of that yet.”

  Another voice came over the comms. It was Commander Morev. He was a veteran of the Brigades and, like Peris, was one of the rare Illyri who didn’t seem to resent serving alongside humans.

  “Peris,” said Morev, “you’re going to have to hold out. Repairs are still being completed. The s
econd shuttle has a busted thruster and won’t be ready to fly for at least another six hours, and the Envion is in no condition to attempt a landing on Torma after being shaken up in the wormhole. We’re still running tests on the damage to the hull.”

  “Then it doesn’t seem like we have much choice but to wait,” said Peris. “I’d be grateful if you could keep us updated on progress, Commander.”

  “Affirmative. We’ll work as fast as we can. Hold on, and good luck.”

  The comms link was broken. The survivors sat on the walls and watched as the shuttle, now almost completely submerged beneath the sand, was finally pulled under. Steven slumped down beside his brother.

  “That was my first command,” said Steven. “My first ship.”

  “It could have gone better,” Paul admitted, and he was shocked by his own capacity for gallows humor, even as the blood of his comrades stained the sands below. But he couldn’t think of them, not now. Like Galton, he would store away his grief until there was time to mourn.

  Peris ordered an ammunition count. Between them they had a dozen grenades, a couple of pulse rifles, two semiautomatic weapons and more than a thousand rounds of depleted uranium ammunition, one pistol, and various knives. De Souza’s sawed-off shotgun lay on the sand, along with its accompanying belt of twenty shells. Yet water was the real issue. Out here on the walls they were exposed to the Tormic sun, and they would grow thirsty very, very fast. Altogether they had about four gallons of water. The rest had gone down with the shuttle.

  “It’s not a lot,” said Peris, “but it’s enough. From now on, we’re rationing. I’ll tell you when, and how much. Otherwise, if you touch your water, I’ll cut your hand off.”