Selected Stories: Volume 1 Read online

  Schaeffer did think about the lives he might save, and he thought of all those who had died under his command, too—young soldiers with far too much faith in him and not enough faith in themselves. Under any normal circumstances, numerous other experts would have emerged over the years. Alliance Command relied on him far too much.

  “You’re never wrong, General,” said Darvi, as if Schaeffer needed encouragement. “Please help us. Look at these projections—you’ve got to have some insights.”

  Schaeffer sank into his pillow, feeling the vibrations of the equipment that kept him alive, the unwilling blood circulation, the stimulants, the medicines. Couldn’t Colonel Arlo even look for himself? On the star charts, there were only six potential planetary targets that the alien invasion force might attack, and he saw the obvious track, but by now the hive mind had learned some modicum of deception. He was sure the shipswarms would divert and attack Khuldur, a small settlement of no more than five hundred people. He couldn’t understand what the Agrec might want with the place, since it had few raw materials and no strategic value. Nevertheless, the aliens wanted it.

  “Study the projections,” he said weakly, knowing that they would keep coming to him every time he helped them, every time he gave them a correct answer. It had to stop. “They’ll hit Santiago 3,” he lied. “It’s a prize. They’ll try to take that.”

  The young officer was very excited. “Yes, Santiago 3! That’s what I thought, but we needed verification from you, sir.”

  “Thank you, General,” said Colonel Arlo, “and the human race thanks you for your service.”

  Schaeffer’s heart felt heavy at what he had done, the five hundred colonists he had just doomed, but he also thought of all those young soldiers who would die if they engaged in a full battle over Khuldur. Probably far more than five hundred.

  If he himself hadn’t been lucky, if he had been killed as a young soldier in that first engagement on Farvin, what would have happened with the war? And what would have happened to the human race? No doubt they would have found some other hero, some other genius … and they would have continued the fight, regardless. They saw him as a bastion, but they used him as a crutch.

  But if Schaeffer let himself be wrong, if he proved that he was no longer perfect, maybe they would not bother to keep him alive and keep torturing him for answers. Then they would have to learn how to walk on their own two feet—and win their own damned war.

  Schaeffer had already fought his.

  As the two officers gathered equipment and notes, prepared to rush off and spread the news that General Schaeffer had spoken, he just wanted to fall back into darkness, warm sleep, and then oblivion.

  But he opened his eyes again, needing to do one last thing. He couldn’t just leave it that way. When he tried to call out, his voice was just a weak whisper, but the nurse heard him, and she called the officers back.

  After watching the long-term and supposedly random course changes of the oncoming Agrec fleet, he had noticed something. Schaeffer didn’t know how long it would take the others to see for themselves.

  The colonel stepped to his bed, wrinkling his nose at the smell of chemicals, age, and death. “Yes, General, what is it?”

  “The paths of those shipswarms … not random. After this battle engagement, study the course changes carefully. You might see a pattern.”

  Colonel Arlo frowned. “After the engagement, what will it matter, sir?”

  Schaeffer exhaled a long slow sigh. “Maybe nothing at all … or maybe it will lead you to the Agrec home world and the primary hive mind. Find that, and you can end this war once and for all.”

  The colonel nodded briskly. “Thank you, General. We’ll look into it. But first we have to defend Santiago 3.”

  The two officers left as Schaeffer closed his eyes again, hoping the nurse would let the stimulants run out so that he could sleep, so that he could rest.

  Surely that was enough? Surely enough at last.

  Another military science fiction story, but this one is a little lighter. One day, the idea of “reserves” in the military struck me an odd way, and I thought of woefully inadequate recruits who were forced to sit in a room, only to be brought out in an absolute worst-case scenario. Then I wondered how battlefield commanders would act differently if they had a guaranteed rescue if a combat operation went south. The two ideas collided in this story, which I wrote in a one-week gap between finishing one novel and starting another.

  Escape Hatch

  I

  THE MASS of alien tentacles writhed over the side of the Earth Planetary Navy destroyer. When the Far Horizon’s Admiral Bruce Haldane saw the vicious things crash onto the deck and scatter in all directions, he knew the battle was lost. There was no stopping the swarm of Sluggos.

  Rough seas rocked the destroyer, but the grim crew who manned the guns against the worm-things were not worried about getting seasick.

  The enormous cluster of alien creatures also attacked from beneath the surface, hammering the Far Horizon’s armored hull. The thunderous clang was even louder than the explosive artillery. How could something so soft and squishy sound so loud? he wondered, then stalked along the deck, a weapon in each hand as he shot the swarming slugs. Each creature exploded with a disgusting splat of oozing protoplasm. The ship’s crew were running up and down the open deck, wading through smashed Sluggos, but the things kept coming from below.

  Unstoppable.

  Each alien was the length and thickness of Haldane’s forearm, looking like a beige banana slug with teeth. The Sluggos combined and moved in concert, wrapping their wormlike bodies together to form a larger organism. Thousands of Sluggos braided into a giant tentacle that rose up from the rough seas to wrap around the destroyer, and then dissolved into countless ravenous components again. The Sluggos squirmed forward, mouths chomping. They were blind, but they were hungry, and there were so many of them that the doomed crew had no place to hide.

  Admiral Haldane was grim, but he drove back his panic. As their leader, he had to focus on the fight. His crew was yelling, some clearly fearful because they had just begun to realize they were all going to die. They didn’t have an escape hatch. Knowing he could give his all and still live to fight another day let Haldane concentrate on the crisis and do what was necessary, without being crippled by fear of his own mortality.

  “Keep shooting! By God, there’s no shortage of targets!”

  The lower decks had been infested, and evacuating sailors had come out into the open. One of the nearby seamen, his dungarees splotched with yellow-green ichor and bright red blood, fired his sidearm until it was empty, then snatched another still-hot weapon from the hands of a dying seaman on the deck. The wounded seaman’s abdomen had been ripped open, and his guts spilled out like another swarm of Sluggos. Without pause, the desperate seaman continued firing, each bullet exploding one—or more—of the squirming aliens.

  “Aye, sir. It’s not a shortage of targets we’re worried about, Admiral,” he shouted over his shoulder. “It’s running out of ammo.”

  Haldane kept firing his own sidearm, not even making a dent in the invasion. He shouted back, hoping he sounded encouraging, “According to the weapons locker manifest, we should have ten thousand rounds aboard the Far Horizon.” The number sounded impressive, objectively, but not in comparison to the million hungry Sluggos swarming over the destroyer. He had opened the armory and distributed weapons as widely and as swiftly as possible, to the Marines as well as to any other sailor with fingers and thumbs.

  Everyone aboard would be alien food before long. Haldane felt sorry for them, but he’d make sure they got a nice memorial ceremony back in La Diego.

  After humanity had ventured away from Earth and set up fledgling colonies on the Moon, Mars, and the asteroid belt, nobody ever guessed that an alien invasion would target Earth’s oceans. The invaders had landed in the Pacific, emerged from their interstellar spaceships, and began swarming through the seas.

  The slim
y creatures moved like a gigantic school of fish, thousands of separate pieces that formed a sentient community organism—an incomprehensible alien creature that managed to build starships, travel across space, to plunge into Earth’s oceans, where they reproduced at a furious pace—whether by fission, or breeding, or eggs, no one knew—and swiftly became a terrible hazard.

  They attacked ships, sinking commercial freighters, cruise liners, fishing vessels. The Earth Planetary Navy was little more than a token force, peacekeepers and emergency responders. It had been a long time since battle fleets went on a full-scale war footing. Now, the EPN went on the hunt, combing the waters in search of the enemy.

  Sonar could detect the large clusters of Sluggos, which then vanished with each pulse and re-formed elsewhere. Admiral Haldane had already led two preliminary engagements, each one disastrous. He was about to make it three for three.

  Reaching this point in the South Pacific, the suspected location of the original Sluggo starships, the Far Horizon had dropped dozens of depth pulsers hoping to destroy the underwater alien base. The explosions had been wonderful, creating rooster-tails of water like massive geysers. The shock waves should have ruined any Sluggo structures on the ocean floor.

  The excitement was short-lived, though. The individual aliens had combined into a monstrous body, countless squirming components adding together like cells. Then the community organism rose up like the most twisted nightmare of any sailors’ legend and attacked the Far Horizon.

  The shapeless beast shifted and rearranged its bodily blueprint, first engulfing the destroyer with tentacles and then smashing onto the deck in a huge flat mass like a manta, which then dissolved into an overwhelming slimy army of individual Sluggos that could attack—and devour.

  Constant gunfire continued to ring out, and even ten thousand rounds didn’t last very long. When the crew ran out of ammo, they used metal pipes, tools, even small storage pods to smash the things. Someone had rigged a flamethrower and jetted fire that fried the wormlike aliens. When their protoplasm boiled, they exploded, but the Sluggos did not feel pain or fear, and more of them came forward. One young seaman thrashed as a dozen of the worm-things chewed into the meat of his thighs and calves, then tunneled through his chest. He kept screaming until one crawled down his throat.

  Other seamen had better luck with fire extinguishers, driving the Sluggos away, briefly, but there was no place to hide. Each extinguisher ran out within minutes, and the crew used the empty tanks to smash more Sluggos.

  “Turn the heavy-caliber guns down,” Haldane yelled. “Fire into the water!”

  “But, sir, that’ll do nothing!”

  “It’ll make some big explosions,” he shouted back. That was something at least.

  At central fire control, weapons officers tilted the large-bore guns down, and the guns roared, but even the heavy shells did little more than stir up the Sluggos in the water. In response, a huge pseudopod composed of braided Sluggos lurched up, wavered in the air just long enough for Haldane to estimate the tens of thousands of hungry creatures that comprised it, then it dissociated in midair, creating a rain of hungry Sluggos that fell onto the Far Horizon.

  Haldane had found shelter under the bridge wing, but he watched the crew get slaughtered. He had emptied both of his sidearms and he had no other defenses but his bare hands and his bootheels. The squirming aliens came at him like an unstoppable invertebrate tide.…

  No one in the EPN had had more direct experience with the Sluggos than Admiral Bruce Haldane. He had studied their movements firsthand in three engagements now, seen how they attacked. He made mental notes. Even though he didn’t understand what he saw, his knowledge was irreplaceable. If Earth was going to win this war against the undersea invasion, he had to survive.

  The overburdened destroyer was groaning, listing to starboard, clearly taking on water from belowdecks. The pounding Sluggos had chewed and torn through the lower hull and were even now swarming through the breach, infesting the ship even faster than seawater could fill it. Damage control crews had been devoured as they rushed to respond. The destroyer was going down.

  As he backed against the bulkhead, he watched hundreds of Sluggos burst through the hatches, huge maggots writhing up the ladders and spilling onto the deck. Even with the din of gunfire, explosions, and shouts, Haldane could hear them moving around in the compartments below, feasting.

  Then they came toward him.

  Most of the Far Horizon’s crew had been slaughtered already, but Haldane stood straight and proud, facing the alien enemy. He owed it to the brave men and women who perished here. He would stay until the very last as the hordes of fleshy bodies and chewing mouths squirmed toward him. He kicked at the Sluggos, but more and more came.

  The admiral raised his voice and announced to anyone left on deck who might be able to hear him, “I want to thank you all for your service. Your lives will not be lost in vain.”

  As the Sluggos swarmed over him, Haldane reached behind his head and hit the transfer pendant embedded at the base of his skull. His escape hatch.

  He was going to miss this body, which had served him well for the past six weeks, but he gave little thought to the volunteer seaman who would transfer with him at the last moment. If Admiral Haldane timed it right, the volunteer would feel only a few seconds of pain as the Sluggos devoured him.

  It was what the volunteer had signed up for. He was just cannon fodder, and he had played the odds. Haldane couldn’t even remember his name. Now it was time for the man to do his duty so that the valuable, experienced naval admiral could live to fight another day.

  Haldane felt the alien jaws rip into his flesh. The pain was horrific, and he was glad to be out of that body.

  II

  When Paulson Kenz picked up his mail, he expected to find bills, junk mailers, delinquent notices on his student loan, even another eviction threat because his low-paying job didn’t earn him enough to pay the rent and eat both in the same week.

  The urgent draft notice, however, was far worse than any stack of bills or legal notices.

  Paulson stared at the official envelope for a long time. Some of his friends in equally dire financial straits had talked about joining the military, but in the same distant way that they might talk about travelling to the Moon or signing up for a stint at one of the asteroid colonies.

  Paulson knew he wasn’t military material by any stretch of the imagination. A recruitment officer should take one look at his scrawny figure and muscles that could at best be described as “bookish,” and laugh out loud before telling him to find a job as an accountant or librarian.

  But libraries weren’t hiring these days, and Paulson had no aptitude for accounting. With the increasing attacks by the alien Sluggos, however, the Earth Planetary Navy wasn’t so picky.

  His dismissive parents always told Paulson he was going nowhere, and now he had arrived—at nowhere. But now, as he held the EPN summons in his hand, he felt a chill. He would much rather be going nowhere than into the planetary navy. Only the most desperate of military forces would take a bottom-of-the-barrel recruit like him, and if the EPN was that desperate then the human race was in dire straits indeed.

  Retreating into his small apartment, he thought about calling his friends or his parents, but he didn’t think his voice was stable enough for conversation. The draft notice allowed for no appeal. He needed to think about this, but the more Paulson considered his fate, the more terrified he became. He had been aware of the horrific alien invaders that attacked helpless vessels in the Pacific, but since he lived in a farming city in the Midwest, with little local industry, automated agriculture, nothing to attract tourists, and very few job prospects, Paulson hadn’t paid much attention to the Sluggos.

  The notice commanded him to report to the training facility at the La Diego Naval Yards within three days.

  The draft summons was legally binding and intimidating. The fine print said that any prior employment or contractual obligations we
re henceforth superseded. Payments and debts would be put on hold until the end of his EPN service.

  Paulson read pages of instructions, a list of what to pack, and a helpful pamphlet on ways to prepare for this “exciting new phase” of his life. He fixated on a paragraph that advised him in the strongest possible terms to prepare a detailed Last Will and Testament before departing for the training facility. “Don’t leave your family and loved ones with estate entanglements. Do the last brave thing in the event that you are unable to return home. A sailor in the Earth Planetary Navy must be prepared.”

  “I’ll be prepared to die at sea,” Paulson muttered. He didn’t even know how to swim, but he supposed that wouldn’t matter. If he fell overboard into a sea roiling with voracious Sluggos, treading water wasn’t going to be much help.

  Sitting alone in his apartment, glad that he had managed to get the power turned back on, he activated his entertainment and information screens to watch the news, which suddenly seemed relevant to him. A terrible nautical engagement and complete defeat had just occurred five hundred miles off the coast of Hawaii. Paulson felt physically ill as he saw the frantic jittery footage of creatures that seemed to be equal parts teeth and slime. The Sluggos swarmed across the deck of the destroyer that had engaged the alien infestation. Crewmen snarling, yelling in pain, sprays of blood, a tentacle the size of a redwood tree crashing down onto the Far Horizon, collapsing the bridge deck and communication mast and cutting off the transmission.

  On the report, a tall young man with haunted-looking eyes wore a pristine white officer’s uniform, his chest bedecked with so many medals and decorations that he had trouble standing up straight. He stood at a podium addressing hundreds of uniformed sailors who stood at attention. Hundreds of media reporters directed their imagers in the officer’s direction.

  “I am Admiral Bruce Haldane,” he said, “and I recently survived the Far Horizon engagement. I’ve faced the Sluggos three times now, and I’ve watched them destroy brave sailors, wreck civilian ships as well as military vessels. I am convinced there can be no negotiating with these creatures.”