Warrior Chronicles 5: Warrior's Curse Read online

  Only one baby this time. A plump black girl with almost no hair was about to be carried by the rail system through series of curved paddles Cort recognized from his own time, as a mechanism to scrape hair off of the scalded bodies. Which means next up is… Cort took the little girl down and laid her body on the machine that ran the paddles. Then he stepped on the head of the lizard at his feet. Keep calm, Cort. Don’t become one of the loose cannons.

  Cort was thankful that one of his people had cleared the next machine. It was an incinerator that burned any remaining hair off the bodies. On his Earth, it served to sterilize the carcass as well. The next section of conveyor held a plump baby that appeared to be a hybrid of human and neanderthal. It had been gutted, and the entrails lay below the body in a pile of eviscerated organs.

  Cort had to stop for a moment. Remembering his own training, he took several deep breaths and shut down his own emotional responses. There would be a price to pay later, as there always was when you stopped their flow, but right now he needed a clear head.

  In the next area, he found a baby with its head hanging by just a small section of skin. The neck was cleanly cut and cauterized by what Cort thought was some sort of laser knife. He absentmindedly noted that his HUD showed the temperature had dropped more than thirty degrees Celsius. The baby’s eyes were open, causing Cort to turn away as he disconnected yet another body from the conveyor and tried to arrange the body with some dignity.

  The next victim was splayed across a saw that had been stopped halfway down the body. Both of its legs had chains on them, suspended from the same hook. The child next to that one was completely halved with the body’s right half still holding the head.

  After that, the bodies were processed even further, to the point that Cort could not offer them any further grace. The frozen cuts of meat were stacked in bins according to body part, and further separated by skin tone. Cort realized he hadn’t seen a single modern human baby with the olive-green skin tone that all post-Cull humans possessed. So where are the people who have been abducted recently? Have they not had enough time here to give birth? Time, he thought. It keeps coming back to time.

  Beyond the bins of body parts was another door. Cort opened it, stepped inside, and was immediately hit by three ballistic weapon bursts.

  “Ares under fire! Form on me!” he shouted as thoughts of slaughtered babies left his mind, replaced by only those of survival and revenge. He pulled the VERG to his shoulder looked at the command ‘SMOKE’ in his hud and fired into the room. After reactivating his active camouflage he switched to infrared on his helmet and peered into the smoke from a prone position on the floor.

  There were several dozen lizards firing from around the room, which was nearly as large as the processing area had been. Most were hiding behind the bins body parts were stored in, and Cort realized he would have to fire through the frozen human flesh to hit his targets. He entered the room and rolled to the right, firing his VERG every time he was prone. Three lizards fell before something struck him from behind. A large, muscular, tail swept his CONDOR further along, using his own momentum against him and sending him into a pile of offal.

  Cort stood up quickly, distantly registering the material clinging to his armor and around his feet as he fired at the lizard who had unknowingly swept him aside. The round went through the enemy’s head and seemed to stop in the doorway to the room. Cort heard the screams over his comm and realized the round had hit another CONDOR entering the room. Fuck!

  Two more CONDORs pulled the wounded Marine back through the door and then took high and low positions to fire toward Cort before he could identify himself. The twin blows of subsonic carbon slugs knocked him back ten meters, and he fell into a pit, at the bottom of which was a still-functioning conveyor belt.

  “Ares down! I’ve been hit! Check your targets!” he yelled as he tried to stand up again, only to find that the belt had entered a tunnel or pipe and he had no room to move at all.

  “This is Ares. Track my signal. I’m on a conveyor belt inside a pipe of some sort. I can’t move. Figure out where I am and come get me.”

  “Yes, sir!” someone answered. “We are tracking you now and will retrieve you after we clear this area.”

  “Copy that. Ares out.”

  Cort followed the action above on his HUD, while his CONDOR self-repaired. He took note of his surroundings and realized he was once again in a pile of human offal. He wondered about how the suit would self-repair. Will it encase the baby flesh, or somehow purge it? Funny how I’ve never thought about how the self-repair systems work. He called up the specs on the suit, as much to keep his mind off of his surroundings as to learn about the suit.

  He looked at his HUD and, seeing the suit designation, remembered he was in one of the third-generation CONDORs, not an earlier version that simply laminated new layers of graphene onto the old damaged sections. The process started the same, but after a sealing layer was built up over a dent, the dent itself was reabsorbed into the suit’s repair kit. What about other materials? Like baby flesh. Will I be carrying atoms from human babies for the rest of this suit’s lifespan?

  Cort was roused from his thoughts by a voice. “Ares, this is Voss. We have the enemy neutralized and are conducting a sweep of the rest of the building. What is your status?”

  “I’m still moving through the pipe. Why wasn’t the building already cleared?”

  “We thought it was, sir. In the uh, confusion, some areas were not searched.”

  Cort recognized what the confusion had been. “That’s understandable, Voss. Don’t make the mistake again though. What’s the time frame for getting me out of here?”

  “Unknown, sir. We show you still in building, but several levels below us. Should we risk a tachyon scan of the area?”

  “No. We still don’t know what took our people down, but it was either tachyons or telepathy. Until we know which, I don’t want to risk our people. How’s the man I shot?”

  “That was me, sir. It hurt like hell, because your round dented my chest plate so deeply, but I’ll be fine.”

  “Good to know. Is the building clear now?”

  “Unknown. We think this level is, but you’re heading into an area we don’t know about. Stay on your toes, sir. If it hits the fan for you, we’ll come through the pipe. Otherwise, we’ll catch you at the other end.”

  “Copy that. Be careful.”

  “No, sir. We don’t get paid enough to be careful.”

  As the comm with Voss cut, Cort smiled before dropping into a pit filled with both fresh and rotting material. There was a grinding sound somewhere on the other side, probably toward the floor. The pit was round, nearly two meters in diameter, and about four meters deep. It was partially filled with human remains, and when Cort got to his feet he found the offal rose to just above the CONDOR’s waist.

  The walls of the pit were some kind of metal and smooth all the way around, so Cort punched holes in its sides with his fingers, creating hand and foot holds that allowed him to climb out of the tank. As his helmet crested the rim, he realized he was in a tank, not a pit, and there was a single unarmed lizard staring at him from a control panel.

  Cort pulled himself over the rim of the tank and dropped to the floor, causing a length of intestine to shake loose from his boot and splatter on the floor. He looked down at the mess, then raised his sidearm to fire at the lizard. As the gun lined up with the alien’s skull, Cort felt the beginning of headache, something he hadn’t felt since he first took a dose of synthetics.

  As Cort was about to pull the trigger, an unfamiliar voice in his head said, Why can’t I stop you?

  It was nearly the same sensation Cort felt when linking with Bazal, so he knew the alien was communicating with him. He looked as his HUD and saw that the jammer used to insulate Marines from Bazal’s influence was active, so he waited to pull the trigger, thinking I will let you live only as long you stop fighting me.

  The headache was gone. You are different. D
oes your clothing protect you from us?

  I ask the questions. You can answer them or you can die. Do you understand?

  Yes. What do you wish to know?

  Cort’s proximity alarm sounded just as three Marines burst into the room. He yelled, “Hold your fire!” just a moment too late. The lizard’s head exploded, thanks to Corporal Voss’s weapon.

  “Are you okay, sir?” Voss asked.

  “Yeah. But catch me one alive. Notify units everywhere. I want a live lizard to interrogate.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  It was three hours before a live prisoner was pushed off a shuttle. Cort was still in his CONDOR and had ordered all humans out of the area. There were six old-brood Jaifans, including H’uum, surrounding the alien, and all of them appeared ready to kill their prisoner at the slightest sign of Cort’s discomfort.

  Cort felt the familiar headache as the creature looked at him. In his mind he heard, Why don’t you do my bidding? The lizard gestured toward a Jaifan. I know they will not, but you should, human.

  This ain’t my first rodeo, lizard. I know your trick. Now you have to convince me to let you live.

  Your species has called us crocodiles, alligators, skinks, frogs, and lizards. Are we so similar to so many of your kind?

  I ask the questions. You answer. What are you called?

  You are asking my species or my personal name?

  What is your name?

  I am called Skinback Windtail. What is your name, human?

  You will call me Ares. What is your species called?

  We are the Gryll. Why are you immune to me? Please take off your armor.

  That’s not going to happen, Skinback. Tell me about your telepathy.

  How many times have I interrogated a prisoner? Cort wondered idly. I hope it’s not necessary to torture Skinback.

  It will not be, Ares. I will cooperate. But do you not take pleasure in inflicting pain?

  Cort wanted to maintain control of the conversation, so he ignored the question and asked his own. How do you abduct us?

  I don’t know. We were abducted ourselves. Some ten thousand suns ago. The species which abducted us was susceptible to our minds. Please take your armor off.

  Cort felt just the slightest urge to do just that, so he told George to lock his armor and weapons down and to take it over if he fell to the alien’s influence. I’m not going to do that, Skinback.

  Who is George, Ares?

  Can you speak aloud?

  We cannot. Your ability to is intriguing to us. Who is George?

  What did you do to your captors?

  We broke their minds. The same way we broke those of your… Marines.

  How did you break my Marines? They were blocking your telepathy.

  To understand that, you would need to understand our anatomy. It harmed us to do so.

  Cort’s head was starting to hurt more. He ordered the Jaifans to put a hood over Skinback’s head and turned around to walk away.

  “I only want old-brood Jaifans near him. He can have water for now. Nothing else.” After George unlocked his armor, he took his helmet off and said, “H’uum, walk with me.”

  As they walked away, H’uum clicked, “Are you well, Pledge Father?”

  “Cut that crap, you damned cockroach!” Cort rubbed his temples. “There’ll be none of that bullshit between you and me, H’uum. Not anymore.”

  H’uum’s mandibles flexed into a smile as they walked away from the prisoner. “You know better, Cortland. When my people are near, I am required to address you as such. Why can’t you accept that?” The question was clearly rhetorical and he went on. “But you seem to be in pain. Are you okay?”

  “Communicating with Skinback is painful. We need to establish a protocol for it.”

  “First we need to make sure you are okay.”

  “The med panel in my suit says I’m okay. It’s just a headache.”

  “What is a headache? I’ve never heard the term.”

  “That is because humans are not supposed to have them anymore.” Ceram fell in behind them as he answered H’uum’s question. “It is a stress of the blood vessels in the human brain.”

  Cort stopped and turned. “What are you doing here, Doc?”

  “George noted the stress you were under and notified your wife, who insisted I join you. Now stand still.”

  Ceram ran a light across Cort’s eyes, then plugged a flexpad into Cort’s CONDOR. After looking at it for a moment, he echoed Cort’s earlier words, clicking, “We need to establish a protocol for human and new-brood interaction with the enemy. Had you been exposed to him much longer, it would have caused permanent damage to your pineal gland.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’m not sure, to be honest. But it would certainly affect your melatonin production, and thereby your sleep patterns and reproductive system.”

  The group started to walk again as Ceram clicked out his instructions for how to protect humans from Gryll influence.

  --

  All told, more than ten thousand humans were found in the camps around the planet. All of the camps were run by the Gryll. Very few prisoners were taken in first hours, and none were taken after the second grisly discovery of the day.

  “Voss to Ares. We need you inside the plant, sir. We’ve found something you need to see.”

  “Send me a vid feed, Corporal. I’m in the middle of something.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Cort looked down at his flexpad as he listened to Voss speak. The vid showed a vat filled with small human organs that was under what appeared to be a faucet.

  Voss pointed at a grinder. “The remains from the babies are processed here. It’s cleansed, ground up here, then dried and pressed into a meal.”

  Voss held a handful of pellets up to his camera. “It’s the same stuff they were feeding the breeder humans, sir. They’ve been eating a food supplement made from their own children.”

  Cort interlocked his fingers behind his head and leaned back closing his eyes. Soylent Green. “This just keeps getting better.”

  “Sir?”

  “Nothing. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  After meeting with Voss, Cort went first to the Mare’s Leg, where he got the results of the alien autopsy from George. The species appeared to be genetically engineered, having only six diploid chromosomes, compared to forty-six in humans, or thirty-two in alligators. George told Cort that nearly every part of the Gryll DNA was relevant to the creatures’ physiological profile.

  “Humans, modern humans, Father, only use about nine percent of their genetic material. The rest is leftover from earlier stages in evolution. We have found similar statistics in Nill, Jaifan, and Centipod DNA analysis.”

  “Okay, so what does that mean about the Gryll?”

  “It means they have not evolved. They are exactly the same as they have always been. The only noncoding DNA I have discovered in their genome exists only to link and bond other genetic material.”

  “So someone built them?”

  “Yes, Father. They were engineered as they are now.”

  “By who?”

  “Unknown.”

  “Try and find out.”

  “I cannot unless I interact with one of them, Father.”

  “Then no. Give me a list of questions you want asked, and I will ask them.” Cort turned to look directly into the young man’s eyes. “George, under no circumstances are you to communicate with the Gryll. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  Cort shuttled to the Remington, which was being used to house most of the rescued humans. Liz Thoms reported Homo Neanderthal, Heidelbergensis, and Erectus had also been found in the various breeding facilities around the planet, and that many of them had produced children with Homo Sapien females. All Jaifans had been temporarily transferred to other ships to minimize the shock to the humans, and the Remington’s munition holds were being converted to temporary quarters for the newcomers. />
  “Cort, it’s like a living history book. We have people who were taken throughout human history. We have Roman gladiators in there! Ancient Egyptians, Huns, but those are the little ones, Cort. You won’t believe the mysteries we’ve solved.”

  Liz was acting like a schoolgirl. “Settle down, Admiral.”

  “I’m sorry, Cort. It’s just I thought you were being silly when you asked me to investigate disappearances from Earth’s past. So a lot of these people you have sent up to me are people I know about.”