The Chemical Mage: Supernatural Hard Science Fiction (The Tegression Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  After the momentary déjà vu passed, he detected an alien perfume in the air. An unsettling hint of sulfur.

  And the night was warmer than it had any right to be, and so bright that the finger-leaved trees at the edge of the field cast shadows on the charred crops. Both the warmth and the blue-tinged ‘moonlight’ came from the turquoise-striped crescent dominating the sky.

  The silence felt intense, meaningful, a kissing cousin to the hiss-whoosh of incoming shells, infused with the same promise of death.

  Colm shivered. He climbed down from the wing. Returned his ladder and tools to their storage places. Approved his own repairs, thus cancelling the ghostly pain in his arm. Drank some extra-caffeine Irn Bru.

  Bekkelund’s transponder winked out.

  “Vike! Gimme a sitrep, you reindeer-fucker. Over.”

  In addition to his esthesia implant, Colm had a radio transmitter implanted in his jaw. Bekkelund had one, too, so he couldn’t have lost his radio without also losing his head.

  “Smythe, come in.”

  “Copy.”

  “Vike just went dark.”

  “I know. I’m almost at the farm. I’m diverting to his last known location.”

  “Roger.”

  Colm returned to the cockpit. Control was trying to get hold of him, wanting to know why he was still on the ground. He put them off by reporting the mortar fire incident, without mentioning that Smythe and Bekkelund had gone walkabout. No need to get everyone in even more trouble than they were already in. He kept his voice level and calm, although his internal FUBAR-o-meter had spiked into the red zone.

  “Hey, sir—” Smythe broke in on the FM channel.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m at some kind of outbuilding.” She shot him a picture of a drystone byre roofed with solar panels. Two Marine corpses sprawled across the doorsill. Anger heated Smythe’s voice. “Looks like our guys died hard.”

  They were in battlesuits. They shouldn’t have died at all. “Smythe, come back to the ship.”

  “I can’t raise Vike. Or anyone. I’m going inside—” Smythe’s transmission broke up.

  “Smythe!”

  Static.

  “Smythe!”

  Silence.

  Oh, Christ on a bloody bike.

  Moving fast, Colm grabbed his sidearm. Got a couple of spare mags from the ammo locker. Bekkelund had taken all the armor-piercing rounds, damn him. Well, Ghosts didn’t wear armor, anyway.

  Colm swung down to the ground. Charred wheat puffed into carbon dust under his boots. He folded the airlock steps up behind him with a thought, sealing the ship. He was not concerned about leaving it, since esthesia would allow him to operate it from anywhere within radio range. He set the external sensors to maximum sensitivity. Now it would let him know if it saw so much as a bunny rabbit, or whatever the Majriti IV analogue of a bunny rabbit was.

  He loped across the field, into the darkness of the finger-leaf forest.

  CHAPTER 3

  MEG CLEARED THE OUTBUILDINGS one by one. She wasn’t a farm girl. Grew up in Tokyo, thinking that produce grew on supermarket shelves. She didn’t know what all these sheds and barns were for. What they had become was abattoirs. Sheep and goats lay dead, gunned down in an orgy of thoughtless slaughter.

  Her breath rasped fast inside her helmet. She had the bleed valves of her suit open, exchanging suit air for local air. It carried the smell of manure, mingled with the stomach-turning reek of death. Blood glistened black on the cobbles in the light of the gas giant. She kept thinking she saw movement in the shadows. She had never been this close to the action before; had seen plenty of carnage, but always from the shelter of a gunship, or after it was all over. It was the Marines who went hand-to-hand with the enemy.

  And where were they?

  At last she found two of them. She radioed Colm, showed him the battlesuited corpses. “But I can’t raise Vike. Or anyone.”

  As she spoke, she looked up at the limestone cliff towering over the farmyard. Several caverns yawned at the cliff’s foot, partially shuttered by slat doors like garages. Inside this massif, she knew, the colonists had made their dwellings in a network of caves and tunnels, some carved out by water seeping down from the cliff top, some shaped by human machinery. It made sense to live pueblo style on Majriti IV, given the sweltering summers here, and also the risk of predators. Apparently this moon had some really choice wildlife. Flightless birds as mean as hippos. Turtles that climbed trees and spat poison.

  But now something worse had come to Majriti IV.

  The same thing that had come to Ross 458 c ... and before that, Mu Arae d ... and before that, Monoceros f.

  The Ghosts.

  She shuddered, and took a fortifying sip of sweet, gritty juice from her battlesuit’s hydration nipple. She knew what she had to do, little as she liked it.

  “I’m going inside to look for survivors.” She didn’t give Lt. Mackenzie time to talk her out of it. She ducked under the nearest garage door, popping upright with her combi levelled, swinging to cover a wide arc.

  Dark.

  But not to her, not with every kind of sensor known to man embedded in her helmet.

  Night vision showed tractors and other farm machinery, haphazardly parked. Everything lurid green.

  Workbenches, a mechanic’s pit.

  Infrared revealed several spots of warmth in the cab of an enormous tractor.

  She climbed up.

  OK, so that was three more of the missing Marines.

  “Hey, Collie Mack ...”

  Shit, of course, she was inside a mountain. The rock was blocking her signals. He wouldn’t be able to hear her.

  Swallowing, she inspected the corpses. The Marines had died in their suits, but with their visors open, which was weird. Why would they have opened their visors? Because what had happened after that was they’d got shot in the face. Boom, strawberry jam. Still warm.

  Meg’s gorge rose, and on the point of throwing up inside her helmet, she crossed over into detachment. This always happened. The tipping point was different every time, the result the same: shit stopped affecting her emotionally. She wasn’t sure if this made her a horrible human being, or a good soldier, or both. Anyway, it was convenient. Dead Marines stopped being people who’d signed on the dotted line like her, gone through basic training like her, believed in loyalty and justice like there. They became facts to analyze and react to.

  These Marines had died in the cab of the tractor because they’d been planning to drive it out of here. But the Ghosts had got to them first.

  What a bunch of numbskulls. Rule number one when engaging Ghosts: do not operate powered equipment. That made modern warfare pretty fucking difficult, and obviously you had to make exceptions for your personal equipment and weapons, but there it was. Everyone, even civilians, knew that if there were Ghosts around, electricity would draw them like flies to shit. Why? Who the fuck knows. Just one of the charming traits of our enemy.

  Meg took the rule about powered equipment seriously, but all the same she now broke it. She leaned across a dead Marine’s lap and switched on the tractor’s engine, just long enough to see the fuel cell’s charge indicator rise up and then sink back to zero.

  Yup. Totally drained.

  Meg jumped down to the floor with a clang. She looked around the cavern and shivered. All these big, powerful vehicles. A feast. The Marines must’ve brought them inside to try to keep them out of the Ghosts’ clutches, but that obviously hadn’t worked.

  Was there anyone left alive here? Hiding, maybe? Once bitten twice shy, gone off-grid, scared to operate so much as a radio?

  “Vike?”

  Her suit was sending out an auto-ping every ten seconds, so anyone with a radio would know help had arrived. Now she added her voice, boosting it through her radio as well as her suit’s external speaker.

  “Vike, where are you?”

  No answer.

  “If you get yourself killed, I’m gonna be really pissed,�
� she mumbled.

  She headed for the back of the cavern, where night vision showed doors leading to the rest of the pueblo.

  Despite her emotional detachment, she felt cold. Her teeth were chattering.

  CHAPTER 4

  COLM SLID INTO THE shadow of the byre. Lacking a battlesuit, he was vulnerable to enemy fire, so careful, careful, and remember that when you’re away from your ship you haven’t got eyes in the back of your head.

  With a hurried glance, he took in the other buildings huddled at the cliff’s foot. He had grown up around farms, although his father was a children’s entertainer and his mother a nurse. They had crofters for neighbors, so he was familiar with the workings of mixed crop and livestock operations. Drumlin Farm was just a big croft on a distant moon. Cows here, chickens over there, that’d be the hay barn where they also kept the horses if they had any. But he couldn’t hear any animal noises. It was dead silent. Sad little heaps of feathers lay on the cobbles. A gut-shot dog had dragged its own intestines halfway across the farmyard before dying. Colm’s heart twisted at the sight. What a desperate fucking waste.

  Movement beyond the hay barn. He flattened his back against the wall of the byre, gripping his machine pistol. But it was just plastic rippling in the night breeze: a row of polytunnels shredded by bullets. A truly ferocious battle had raged here.

  “Vike?” he whispered. “Smythe?”

  She’d said, I’m going inside.

  Cursing under his breath, Colm skittered from shadow to shadow until he reached the cliff.

  He knew exactly what he should do, having seen this shambles of a battlefield.

  The same thing Smythe and Bekkelund should’ve done.

  Return to the gunship and call for reinforcements.

  But he also knew that they were the reinforcements.

  The Unsinkable had been the only ship the Fleet could spare for Majriti IV’s defense. And it just wasn’t enough. Attrition had decimated the Navy and Marine Corps elements alike, while the local militia was worse than useless.

  Oh, sure, the Rat would scare up another gunship to come to his aid eventually. Maybe at first light, three sols from now. But by that time, the two half-baked kids Colm had the pleasure of calling his crew might be dead.

  He ducked under a garage door into, surprise, a garage. It was as dark as the devil’s arsehole but the smell of machine oil and biodiesel fumes gave it away. He stumbled against a tractor and got his back against a wheel taller than he was. Let his mouth hang open, listening.

  There were certain advantages to operating without a battlesuit, apart from the obvious one that you didn’t need a fuel cell to move your arms and legs. For instance, you could hear better without a tangle of electronics in the way. It made no sense, but you just could.

  Now Colm heard a faint rumbling noise from deeper within the pueblo.

  Survivors?

  Or just machinery?

  Survivors operating machinery?

  Surely not even colonists could be that dumb.

  The Ghosts had been probing Majriti IV for years before the Unsinkable finally arrived to succor the beleaguered planet. By the time the carrier got here, the threat had progressed from Stage One—containable—to Stage Two—critical. When Ghosts were Stage One, you just had to be vigilant: stamp them out before they could get a foothold, and for Christ’s sake don’t leave the battery in your car overnight. All powered equipment had to be carefully protected when Ghosts were about. But time and again that simple directive proved to be too much for civilians. They forgot, they slipped up, they left a combine harvester sitting out in the back field with half a kilowatt of juice in it, and that was what must’ve happened here. Hello, Stage Two Ghosts, with rifles and shotguns and a strong enough grasp of guerrilla tactics to capture another power source, and another one, multiplying their numbers every time. What had happened at Drumlin Farm was happening all over the planet. The Ghosts had progressed from opportunistic assaults to a full-scale siege. At that point the colonists would have swallowed their pride and begged the Marines to come save them.

  Two platoons of Marines could hold off any number of Ghosts ... but only until they ran out of ammo.

  Ritualistically, Colm cursed the duty officer who had denied the first medevac request from Drumlin Farm, and the OIC who had not appreciated how much danger his troopers were in, and everyone in the whole chain of command stretching all the way back to Earth. They’d all failed. Now it was up to him to not fail, too.

  Sweating, he thumbed off the safety of his machine pistol. Twelve rounds in the magazine, another twelve in the spare. What a joke. He’d seen a couple of Ghost rifles lying in the farmyard. He should’ve taken one of those, but like everyone, he instinctively loathed the idea of touching Ghost stuff. Who knew where it came from?

  He edged away from the tractor, only to bump into something else. Tines stuck up at thigh level. A rotary tiller. Without having to check, he knew it would be out of juice. The very fact that the lights were off proved that Ghosts had got in here and drained the power out of the whole farm.

  So where were they now?

  And where were Smythe and Bekkelund?

  He fumbled his way to a door in the back of the garage. Following the rumbling noise, he tiptoed down a narrow passage. His boots kept meeting soft obstacles. The floor felt tacky. He was almost grateful for the darkness.

  Outside, the night had been warm, but in here it was cold. Gooseflesh-cold. See-your-breath cold, if it weren’t so dark.

  The cold and the dark and the smell of death combined into a poisonous brew of fear. His recurring nightmare set its teeth into the edges of his mind. He stopped walking, slumped on the wall, eyes straining wide in the darkness.

  I don’t want to die.

  Smythe. Bekkelund.

  He flogged himself with the names of his crew, but fear dulled his concern for them, made him selfish.

  He’d have turned around and made a dash for safety if he had not, at that moment, seen dim light seeping through the hinges of a door further along the corridor.

  He ventured up to the door. The noise was coming from in there.

  Maybe someone was alive on the other side of this door.

  He did not give himself any more time to be afraid. Stupid bloody swing door had no handle, so he couldn’t pull it towards himself. He mule-kicked the door open and flinched back to the side of the doorway—

  —just in time.

  A shot pulverized the silence. The bullet ricocheted off the far wall of the passage. Stone chips flew in the dim light from the door, which was swinging shut again.

  “Stay the fuck back!” roared a voice from inside the room.

  “Vike?”

  “S-sir?” Bekkelund’s voice shifted from furious defiance to childlike hope.

  “I’m coming in.” Colm slid around the door as it closed.

  In here, the noise was factory-floor loud. It came from machinery mounted atop a concrete platform. LEDs gleamed red and green on control panels, reflected by the side of an enormous steel tank, and by the belt buckles and buttons of Ghost corpses littering the floor.

  Colm had rarely seen the enemy this close up, even dead. Marines burned the bodies of the Ghosts they killed, a hygiene pollicy that provided cover for superstitious revulsion. The same revulsion warred with fascination as Colm glanced at the pale, dead, ordinary-looking faces, all with a same-y kind of look, all in ragged khaki uniforms. Pudding-bowl helmets. And, yes, boots. Leather boots, red with the dirt of Majriti IV.

  Despite his curiosity, he spared them only a glance before hurrying to Bekkelund, who sat at the bottom of the platform, legs sticking out in front of him, pistol in his lap. “All right, Vike?”

  “Nope.” Bekkelund gave a strained smile. A hand fluttered to his hip. Blood glistened on his leathers. “Fucking Ghosts. Know what they were doing?”

  “What?”

  “Feeding the grinder—” Bekkelund jerked a thumb at the big tank— “with bodies.
Their own dead. And ours.”

  “Bastards! I’ve heard of dropping in the odd sheep, if you don’t want the health inspectors to get a look at it.”

  Colm knew what this towering cluster of pipes and tanks was. On Majriti IV as on Earth, a farm like this got most or all of its power from biowaste. The juice in the fuel cells of the tractors, rotary tillers, and so on? Generated by the vehicles’ biodiesel engines, which fed front-end reforming hydrogen cells. The lights, the fridges, the computers, air conditioning, dairy processing machinery, whatever else the colonists had? Same deal. They’d either be powered by a biodiesel generator, or by process heat from biodiesel production.

  And how do you make biodiesel?

  With a thermal depolymerization plant.

  Like this one.

  In goes biowaste, out comes green gold.

  Dead bodies, though.

  Fucking Ghosts.

  “Was this all of them?”

  “I think so,” Bekkelund said. “Turn it off, sir. I can’t reach.” Meaning that he was too hurt to move.

  Colm was already climbing the steps onto the platform. He wanted to have a look at Bekkelund’s wound, but shutting down the TDP plant came first. He had no idea how long it would take for it to draw more Ghosts. If the eggheads had theories about why Ghosts were drawn to electricity, and what they did with it, they didn’t share their thoughts with lowly first lieutenants. All Colm knew was—turn off the power. He frowned at the displays, threw switches. The intake tank stopped grinding. The vibrations lessened.

  But did not stop.

  The generator was still running. Some quantity of biodiesel had already been produced, and it was fueling the genny, which had to be around here somewhere.

  He ducked under pipes, said to Bekkelund, “Didn’t know you were a farm boy,” less because he cared than to hear Bekkelund’s voice, keep him talking.

  “Not,” Bekkelund said, from the far side of the platform. “Forestry management. My parents. In Norway, they clear-cut the forest on a rotation. Put the unusable wood into massive TDP plants. We used to follow the clear-cutters all spring and summer, making sure that no rare plants get shredded. I was home-schooled.”