Lately, the war that would define the course of human history for several centuries at the least had become almost monotonous.
The Leopard’s engine purred as it rolled down the gravel roads that cut through the more forested regions of one of the Combine’s more overlooked planetary possessions. Johann watched idly as the camera atop its turret made a full rotation, then two, then three. “Clear?” Heinrich asked. “Still clear,” Johann nodded. Supposedly, the planet had no intelligent life before the Poslushi arrived; Johann was beginning to doubt if the place had any intelligent life at all. And yet...
Johann shivered. “What, somebody walk over your grave?” Hersch asked, smiling. “No, just...” Johann trailed off, then shook his head. There was no time for being superstitious, not while they were working. Johann calmed himself by checking his pistol, then making sure the utility knife on his belt was still hooked on right.
Humanity had entered the walk-on part of the Second Contact War. The Poslush Combine’s backs were broken, their soldiers demoralized and their fleets dispersing as planet after planet withdrew from the empire. Lately, a projection had made the rounds through the Bundeswehr that the more populated worlds of the Combine would soon face famine as food imports from other regions of their empire were cut off. The reception to this ranged from general unease to “we should have killed more of them.”
“Hold,” Johann put a hand up as he saw something on the camera, “settlement.”
“We see it too.” the commander of the tank behind him affirmed.
“Send out the infantry team,” Johann ordered. Soon, he watched through the camera as two infantry squads advanced into the small cluster of wood huts before them. One by one, the riflemen breached into the squat buildings, then emerged once more. “Clear,” the platoon leader called. Johann nudged Hersch with his foot and the Leopard kicked forward once more, moving into the village square with relative ease. Johann, confused, popped open the Leopard’s top hatch and turned out.
“Okay, this is getting ridiculous,” he pointed at the structures, “do they even have running water? What kind of empire is this?”
“Whaddaya expect from Pozzies? Don’t think they even can care about anybody but themselves.” Hiedrich spat. “Oh, for the love of God, Heidrich.” Johann facepalmed. “I get that you’ve had some... experiences... with the Poslushi, mostly because I was there, but we’re supposed to be–”
“Contact east!” one of the infantrymen called, shouldering his rifle and looking off frantically to the right of the Leopard. Stopped in his tracks, Johann dropped back down into the turret, shutting the hatch behind him. “Heidrich, bearing 85!” he called and, without the slightest pause, the turret swiveled east. Johann looked through the camera, scanning the woodlands that quickly enveloped the land. For a moment, there was almost pristine silence.
Then, a something bounded from the forest, not an animal, but not human or Poslushi either. Its bare skin was rosy and sun-kissed, its hair fair, its mouth pulled into a giddy smile. Yet, it was too tall and too thin to be human, the smile was far too wide, and the eyes...
Johann winced, pulling his gaze away from the creature’s face. The sight of those eyes disagreed with his very being, leaving his extremities tingling and his stomach sick. “Open fire!” he screamed into the radio, still trying to avoid looking directly at it. Even as the riflemen opened up, the creature was undeterred, leaping past raking gunfire with all the grace of a trained dancer, and then it fell on the first man, seizing him in both hands and pulling harder and harder until he came apart. Johann gasped in horror, then grabbed the joystick for the roof turret, swiveling its autocannon around, but the creature was a blur and he couldn’t get a bead on it.
Then, something thumped onto the Leopard. Johann didn’t have time to register what had just happened before, with a terrible screech of metal, yet another parody of the human form tore the hatch off the tank and grabbed him by the shirt, lifting him up to face it. Its stare, though just as painful as the other, had an almost innocent quality to it. “New toy!” the voice that came from its profane lips was clear, high, and joyous.
Then, a burst of gunfire cut through it as one of the tanks behind Johann’s opened up with its coaxial machine gun. The creature stumbled back, then fell off the Leopard, and then Johann was in the air too, tumbling head over heels as it let him go. With a scream, he put his hands out against the ground, and then felt the pointed gravel stones of the road dig into his exposed arms. He bounced once, twice, rolling off the path and a little ways into the forest. When he finally came to a stop, his arms were stinging like never before and he could feel blood oozing down towards his hands. Groaning, he tried to stand, to grab for the gun at his hip, but he was feeling dizzy and didn’t quite know which way was up.
Yet more gunfire cleared his senses and he pulled himself to his feet, panting. The first entity was still flitting from man to man, tearing through flesh and body armor like it wasn’t even there. Johann watched as the second, its body scored with bullet holes, stood as well, the bleeding coming to a sudden stop and the broken body parts knitting themselves back together. Turning to Johann once more, it began to stamp towards him, turning its painful, painful eyes in his direction. Shielding his face with his hand, Johann grabbed for the gun at his waist. “Stay back!” he called, pointing the pistol at the creature.
“Silence, plaything!” it called, breaking into a run. Johann only had time to squeeze one, two rounds off before it had grabbed him again, its grip so, so tight as it pressed him up against a tree. Johann’s breath seized in his throat as he saw its eyes, so pure and yet agonizing to even glance at. He felt like a gazelle staring into the eyes of a lion, but at least lions didn’t pretend to be gazelles.
Johann, with the last of his wits, pulled his knife from its sheath and plunged it down to the hilt in the creature’s torso, just below its sternum. Its eyes widened in surprise and it pulled back, which gave Johann just enough space to unload the remainder of his pistol’s ammunition into its chest, pulling the trigger over and over until the slide clicked back, and yet its grip didn’t weaken for a second. It didn’t seem to notice, but then its hand went to its cheek and–was it just Johann, or had it gotten even thinner? As the wounds in its body closed, he could see its cheeks becoming more defined, its ribs suddenly appearing in its chest. Apparently realizing just how hurt it had been, the creature dropped him, and in another second, it was gone, swinging through the trees like an ape.
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It took Johann a while to realize that the place had fallen silent. Then, Hiedrich and Hersch were on him, urgently helping him to his feet and back towards the tank. Its frontal armor was splattered with blood and gouged with nail marks. The one behind’s machine gun was still spitting smoke from the muzzle. As the two men dropped Johann back into the commander’s seat, the shock wore off partially, and then he had only one thing to say.
“What. The fuck. Was that?”
—
The Eidolons, as it turned out, were easy prey. Originally, the psychic spirits the Poslushi occasionally deployed were capable of turning the tide of entire offensives, but then, as Kaede was deployed, they stopped appearing at all. Eventually, the cause was determined; the Eidolons were as cowardly as they were powerful. They were only interested in fighting when those they fought had no ability to resist them. At first, this meant that Kaede and Sphinx never got any sleep, flitting from planet to planet turning the creatures, but eventually CAST captured a craft or two carrying Eidolons, and then, by replicating the conditions by which Kaede devoured her own Eidolon, they were able to create soldiers with similar abilities to her.
Unfortunately, they were too few in number to be used for anything but deterring Eidolons, but Paraweapons hoped to fix that in time for the next war.
“You like that video, don’t you?” Sphinx asked, sitting down beside the petite Japanese lady on the couch of their shared quarters. She was on her laptop, watching a puppy try to grab a ball too big for it and end up tumbling over. “It’s weird. I mean, I can feel people now.” Kaede said, shifting uncomfortably.
“And does that trouble you?” Sphinx cocked her head to the side.
“I mean, do you know how many times people lie daily? I do; I can’t not tell when someone’s lying to me,” Kaede looked down, “people lie about their days, they say they did better at work than they did, they say they’re happy when they’re really sad or they say they’re sad when they just want attention...”
Her shoulders sagged. “I can’t talk with people anymore. It’s all lies.”
“But you can’t tell with me,” Sphinx put her hand on Kaede’s shoulder.
“That’s why I talk to you, Sphinx,” Kaede nodded, “you’re my only friend anymore. But, uh,” she smiled weakly, “what’s your actual name?”
“It starts with an F,” Sphinx shrugged.
“Oh, come on,” Kaede smiled a little more earnestly this time.
“Okay, okay, but don’t tell my supervisor,” Sphinx leaned in, “it’s–”
Then, the phone in her pocket began to ring. Frowning, she pulled it out. “Yes, sir?” she asked. Then, her eyes widened and the color drained from her face. “Oh, no. I’ll be down with a team immediately.”
“Sphinx?” Kaede asked.
“Stay here,” Sphinx’s look was foreign to Kaede; she had never seen fear from her before.
“But...”
But she was already gone.
The Anathema, as Paraweapons named them, was supposed to be something only Paraweapons could name. The behavioral chip in their resident was checked and double-checked and triple-checked after each combat deployment, so how could he reproduce? How could he even get the idea that he should reproduce? It didn’t make any sense, and yet there another one was, walking idly through a clearing with yet another of her kind. The men escorting Sphinx were wearing armored exoskeletons and carrying M2s; they weren’t in any immediate danger, but Sphinx was to be unprotected as a sign of trust.
Nodding to her men, she urged them forward into the clearing. “Hey!” she said in a singsong voice, trying to remember what they told her to do in the briefing. The two turned around simultaneously, the male hanging back while the female took a few steps towards them, her eyes curious. Normally, its eyes would provide some measure of pain to look at, but Sphinx had always been a little different.
“Who are you?” the female asked, her eyebrows raising. The male blinked twice in apparent agreement with the question.
“A friend,” Sphinx replied, “I want to show you something.”
“Show me?”
“I have food and toys. You can have them if you come with me.” Sphinx gestured to the pair of Anathema containment vessels sitting on an armored truck a few hundred feet behind her.
“Toys?” the female perked up. “We haven’t had games to play in a while,” the male concurred, obviously lying judging by the blood staining his hands, then realized something. Turning to the female, he whispered into her ear.
“You look hungry.” Sphinx said, taking note of the female’s emaciated form. “If you can come with me, I’ll give you food.”
“Papa told us about you,” the female said, taking another step closer, “you’re from Paraweapons, right?”
“Why... why, yes,” Sphinx tried to stay on-track, “I hope he told you about how we had enough food for him, and plenty of toys to play with...” she trailed off wistfully.
“He told me you wanted him to hunt only when you said it was okay. He said he didn’t like that; that’s why he made me.” the Anathema kept slowly approaching. Still, Sphinx stood her ground; to step back or turn away was death when dealing with Anathemae.
“Well, you should understand that... well... he was hunting things he shouldn’t have hunted, so we had to stop him. You understand that, right?”
“Like what? Like you?” the female said, her voice taking on an accusatory tone. Sphinx started upright. “Now, we had to stop him from hunting us, so we did.”
“And you want to give us toys instead?”
“Why, of course!” Sphinx laughed. “There’ll be so many toys. You can play to your heart’s content.”
The female simply stared at her for a few seconds. The male soon joined her. Then, all the childlike demeanor dropped from its voice.
“Here’s what I think of your offer.”
Before Sphinx could think, the female was on top of her, and then she was blown off by half a dozen heavy machine guns unloading into her at once, leaving her a shattered, perforated wreck on the ground, in a pool of blood. For a moment, she stirred still, but another volley put her down for good. The male was gone, nowhere to be found, and Sphinx could feel a throbbing pain around her collarbone. Looking down, the cloth of her suit had been torn away there, and four identical bite wounds were on her chest.
Then, she was being hauled away by her cohorts, their iron grip chafing on her skin. Every limb was pinned and held as she was carried back towards the truck, and no one made a sound. “Wh-what?” Sphinx stammered, “this is absurd! You don’t know if...”
But she did know, and so did they as two men strapped her into one of the containment units and sealed the door. Trapped in the reinforced metal tube, with a funny-smelling gas hissing into the space that made her skin tingle, Sphinx found something almost funny, and then it was hilarious, as she laughed and laughed and laughed until the sedatives kicked in and sleep took her.
What a cruel, cruel joke.