Hades scanned the ground before us with its mine sensors. We saw the entrance to the mire-land on screen before we saw it with our actual eyes. A dark spot on the side of the red rock of the mountain grew darker transforming into the black maw of a beast as we pulled to a stop in front of it. The ramp went down and the door to the cargo bay rolled open as we approached the entrance, rifles in hand. A rush of cold air flowed out of the tunnel, and we pulled down our helmets tapping the side to activate its night vision sensors.
You could tell the difference between all of us just based on our armor, two factions now united in purpose but our gear still dividing us visually and culturally. Head beams from out helmets cut through the darkness and we advanced down the tunnel.
“I hate these places,” Melor said. “Remember when high command thought the enemy had a military base down here and ordered us to go down and locate them.”
“How can I forget,” I said with a laugh. “You slipped down a cliff and would have died if your fall hadn’t been cushioned by the swamp of bat guano.”
“I just wished I died,” Melor agreed with a laugh as we all shared a chuckle. “Then that knife-tail killed Cook.”
That sobered us up.
“Here’s to Cook,” I said pulling out my flask. “The bastard who made the best illegal shine in the whole legion.”
I passed the flask around with some of the last of Cook’s last batch of shine everyone taking a shot of the most awful tasting pure booze I’d ever had. I placed the nearly empty flask back it its pouch and continued down the tunnel. Gradually the bare rock was replaced with white leafed plants, ghost-colored tendrils, and fluorescent fungi. The tunnel opened out into a massive cavern supported by thick pillars of rock. We had to be thousand feet underground by now the cool cave air had disappeared as the geothermal heat from the planet’s core turned these caverns into a jungle. I was sweating under my helmet and armor but pushed past the discomfort activating the toggles on the environ controls on my gear armor to regulate my temperature.
We fanned out searching the cavern for threats, it seemed peaceful, I could hear the hooting of lemurs in the vines and stalactites above us the rustling of shrews and other small critters in the flora around us. These weren’t the sounds we were listening for. We slowly moved forwards into undergrowth one step at a time waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“Maybe there’s nothing in here?” Private Venso said as we reached the other side of the cavern.
The ground heaved behind us and we whirled around dropping to one knee and firing. Plasma and bullets tore through the air impacting against a blue shield of energy.
“Shield bug!” I shouted. “Fan out don’t clump up!”
The shield-bug was a giant crab, the size of medium tank, capable of projecting energy shields from its two giant claws in front of it. On its back were bio-guns that spewed a pressurized acid mist. Its carapace was hard as steel and several inches thick capable of withstanding the blast of a cannon from a light tank.
Two people blasted away at the shield bug with their riffles, but the bullets bounced off the energy shields in front of the shield bug. Another burst of gunfire hit it from behind but didn’t even put a crack in its armored carapace.
I ducked behind a stalactite bending around and pulling the trigger of my riffle hitting a back leg blasting away bits of its carapace but unable to pierce deeper. The bio-guns on its back swiveled and a green miasma blasted out. Two Luminari and one of my crew screamed as the acid mist enveloped them. The cloth under their armor dissolved and the breathing components inside their helmet melted. They collapsed as the acid chewed away their lungs.
I dropped my riffle letting if fall on its strap against my chest as I drew my gladius and my shield snapped up. The plasma edge of my blade lit up, it could slice through two feet of solid steel or the carapace of some manufactured Luminari monsters. I charged forwards and the giant crab began turning towards me. Amara, Melor and others all charged it, the crab was suddenly paralyzed with indecision about which of us to target. I slid past it cutting off one of its legs on its right side. I was fully stimmed up, giving me superhuman speed and strength; even so it was hard to hack through the hardened carapace of the shield-bug. Melor took off another leg and it swayed and toppled set off balance by its mismatched remaining limbs.
Amara jumped on top of its back and slashed out cutting through the base of its two bio-guns with her cutlass. Without those weapons the colossal bug was a much weaker threat, we surrounded and hacked into it. A minute later we breathed out heavily looking at the corpse of the massive monster.
“Do you think this is edible?” Karsen asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “But I don’t think it tastes good. You four,” I pointed to four of my men. “Go back to Hades and bring down four grav-carriers we’ll butcher and carry this back up in chunks to put in the freezer. The rest of you start hunting anything as big as a rabbit you bag and pile up for skinning and storage.”
“What’s a rabbit?” Amara asked.
I sighed. Lumara wasn’t a planet like the colonies that had been terraformed and inhabited with old earth animals. While many creatures looked almost identical to those we were familiar with from out planets most weren’t related in the slightest.
“A rabbit is a rodent about this size,” I said holding my hands about a foot apart from each other. “Those of you not hunting start foraging, check the plants with your scanners to see if their toxicity. If scans show its edible, you grab it no matter what it looks like.”
We spread out clearing the ground of mushrooms, plucking vines clear of berries and nuts. The flora was wild in its scope and several white grass stalks were identified as safe for consumption. I tried a bit of it wincing at its acrid taste but drew my gladius and cut it down at the base and bundling it up with string stacking it in sheaves.
We kept our weapons on us at all times and a lookout on all the tunnels leading deeper underground. This cavern wasn’t even a percentage of the amount of space in the mire lands. No one had ever mapped them all, even before the war. Now mapping them would be impossible, the bio-weapons of the Luminari had escaped during the war and turned invasive spreading throughout its tunnels created for war they had wiped out natural native species and could rip apart a fully stimmed centurion in power armor. The tunnels extended miles underground turning from jungle to swamp and then oceans teaming with life that fed on the volcanic vents and kept alive by the geothermal heat.
Soon we were all drenched in sweat. We loaded up the grav-containers and pushed them in front of us as they hovered a foot off the ground laden with animal corpses of lemurs, giant moles, snakes and a large breed of rodent that looked like some type of mutant rat to me. We had crates filled with various species of mushrooms, buckets of berries and other fruits. Luckily as part of the MACC’s design to be self sufficient it had an auto-rationer or the Chef as we called it. You shoved bio-mass into the machine and it produced ration cakes in just a few minutes. They tasted awful but would last for months. Just one ration-cake could feed a person for an entire week, part of the reason for that was because you wouldn’t want to eat anymore after taking one bite.
We got back and I divided people into shifts letting the women go and shower first. I wasn’t used to having women aboard Hades and had divided off one of the barracks for their private use. The Luminari had some women in their military but in the imperial ranks the only role women were allowed in was piloting and nav control in the star-fleet. Even stimmed up a woman couldn’t produce the raw force a man could.
We started skinning the animals and dumping them into the Chef. You didn’t need to prepare or clean them it wasn’t like it would make anything taste better if you did. The Chef would divide the food up based on its nutritional type and make sure every ration cake contained the proper amount of vitamins, carbs, protein, and minerals to keep you alive and healthy, just not happy. Ration cakes rolled out its underside and we set them in the freezer. Hades had ample storage rooms, it had been designed to be a mobile fortress for command on the ground and could withstand a siege if it had too.
Karsen started cooking one of the rodents we’d shot into a stew with some mushrooms and a few plants that didn’t taste to bad. “It’ll taste just like food from back home,” he assured me.
This did not fill me with much confidence. Karsen was from Casuran, the native home of the Kotura, an alien race subjugated by the empire a millennia ago and long since integrated into the population of the empire. You couldn’t even find a pure blood Kotura anymore, Karsen was part Kotura and apart from his double eyelid and the spots along his neck you couldn’t even tell he wasn’t human. The way you could really tell he was part Koturan was how quickly he healed from injuries; last year he taken three shots to the chest and been brought back to the MACC. After three days in bed and some blood injected into his system, he was walking around like nothing had even happened. The other way you could tell someone was part Koturan was by their sense of taste, they liked food sour and bitter probably because most of the stuff that grew on their swamp planet tasted that way.
When half the work was done, I switched out people sending another group to take showers. The sun was starting to set but we still had work to do. Melor took out an actual book, its pages stained from use and opened it up. It had been written with ink and had all of Cook’s old recipes he’d invented with us over the years. He took out our still and started mixing some bitter plants and mushrooms into a mash pouring distilled water and starting them to boil to make the mash for the booze.
Finally, I went up to my personal rooms in the officer quarters, I had the largest space of all three rooms in total. One was my office, the second a bedroom a luxurious twelve-foot square room to myself and small personal bathroom with my own shower and waste disposal. We didn’t have many luxuries on Hades but one of them was hot water heated by pipes running around the Balor Reactors and running through the whole ship.
I let the water run off my shoulder washing my body with our own soap we’d made from animal fats, ash, and some good smelling plant oils we’d collected. We’d have to find new plants underground now to replace the ones we used to use that grew on the surface.
Flipping the switch to turn off the shower I hit the dryer blasting my body with warm dry air and I stepped out of the shower putting on my second under-suit tossing my spare suit into the laundry shoot to go down to the first level of Hades to be tossed in with the wash at the end of the day.
I strapped my armor back on after giving it a quick wipe down and polish to its steel parts with oil to keep it from rusting. I went back down to the mess hall and sat down. Melor handed me a bowl of Karsen’s soup I took a bite and winced at the sour and bitter flavor, still food was food.
“Never going to taste fine imperial cooking again,” Melor sighed. “You know I miss paprika a little bit of heat and spice, maybe some onions and garlic.”
“Unless they start dropping supplies from orbit, we aren’t going to have that for a long time,” I said. “Don’t remind me of things that taste better than this its ruining my appetite.”
“Hey!” Karsen said. “My mum would be proud of that dish right there.”
“Remind me not to come over for dinner then,” Melor said.
Amara sat down with us. She took a bowl of the soup and we all watched holding in a smile. She took a bite and nearly spat it out.
“What is this?” she asked disgusted.
We all burst out laughing at Karsen’s indignant expression. “You’ve never had Kotura cooking, they like their food bitter and sour,” I said. “Try to swallow without tasting we’ve gotten use to having to make do with our food since Cook died.”
“Don’t expect me to be able to do any better,” Melor said. “I’m part Aphiren, my mother barely even cooked our meat growing up.”
“What’s an Aphiren?” Amara asked.
“You’ve never heard of them?” I asked. “I guess they wouldn’t be important to you, they were a race of humanoids native to the planets in the gas belt in the Aishen system. They had hollow bones and lighter muscle structure then us.”
“Had?” Amara asked. “Did your empire wipe them out?”
“The emperor doesn’t wipe out people,” Melor said. “He integrates them and breeds them into the population until they’ve hybridized with the population. The royal’s all got Aphiren, Kotura and Casara blood in their veins.”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“I thought you were all human,” Amara admitted. “What about you Enil what’s your ancestry?”
I shrugged. “I’m a pure-bred mutt. My folks are from the colonies on Balan 4, they’re descendants of people from all over the empire I got a bit of everything in me, mostly human and not enough of the other stuff to give me any markings.”
“How come you don’t know this stuff?” Melor asked Amara. “You’ve been at war with the Kyshen Empire for fifty years don’t they teach you anything about them?”
“Not really,” Amara admitted. “Mostly they taught us about your weapons and equipment, their weak points and how to destroy them, I was sixteen when I joined the war, I didn’t have a chance for a longer education.”
“Well, if you want to know more ask Enil,” Sergeant Orphus said. “He actually went to officer’s academy and is always reading. He studied your people’s history and culture before he even touched down here.”
“You studied us?” Amara asked.
I shrugged. “Just the basics, they were shortening the amount of training for everyone when I was in the academy not enough time to go through the usual process with the number of soldiers dying in the war and the need to replace them.”
“So, what do you know about us?” Amara quizzed me.
“The Luminari are not the original natives of Luminara,” I said. “You’re a lot like the rest of us actually a hybrid race, from what we understand about five-thousand years ago a Generation-ship from Old Earth landed on Luminara, we don’t know if this was even their original destination, or they just landed on it since it was already inhabitable. Their contact with the natives wasn’t like the one between the empire and your people, they actually made peace and mixed their cultures. They altered their genetics to become compatible and eventually all the original humans died off and eventually their genetics spread across the entire planet. Just like with the Kotura and Aphiren there are no pure Luminari left just like there are no pure humans left either.”
“I’ve heard of the ancestors,” Amara said. “I didn’t know where they were from though.”
“They would have gone into space soon after we developed the warp drive,” I said. “That was before even the Kyshen Empire, and we don’t have many records from before then.”
“You said there are no pure humans left,” Amara said. “What about the Cyberhumans.”
I snorted. “That’s just propaganda, sure they’re genetics might be eighty percent human still, but they’ve got mixed blood just like the rest of us. All that stuff they say about the pure human race and ascending through technology is just drivel.”
There was silence as we all sat in thought for a bit, finishing the awful stew Karsen and a few others with Kotura blood, the only ones enjoying it. I put my bowl in the auto-cleaner letting it be blasted clean with super-heated steam and air to be stacked later in the MACC’s kitchen. We all hit our bunks exhausted from the day’s work. After counting the ration-cakes we’d made it would take another day and a half to reach the number Governor Sarkis had asked for.
----------------------------------------
I got up the next day and did quick inspection of my troops making sure everyone was fit for service. We’d asked the Luminari how they handled their dead, they used to scatter their ashes over the rivers to rejoin the land. There were no more rivers on the service, so we just incinerated their dead with ours in Hade’s furnace and kept the ashes to give to any relatives back in Andromeda.
We never buried our dead anymore, I heard we used to in first decade of the war but then they started getting dug up by the ghouls that lived in the cavern’s underground, so we just incinerated them now. I had all their names engraved onto the bulkhead of the mess hall, some day we’d run out of our room and have to move to a different wall already the list was longer with names before my time aboard.
We marched back down the tunnel, despite having cleared this cavern yesterday we were still on guard. Who knew what might have moved into the cavern since we’d been there. We stepped into the nearly bare cavern. With the majority of the flora removed we were able to scan for bio-signs easier. There were just a few small animals and we breathed out a sigh of relief. Now came the more difficult decision which tunnel to go down next.
Anyone could lead to a nest of monsters, or we could get flanked with something coming from behind us from one of the other tunnels. Ultimately, we had to be lucky. I set up sensors alarms to give us some warning if something were to come up from the other tunnels. We took tunnel number three as the readings from our helmets detected a higher oxygen to carbon ratio down this tunnel meaning more plants.
I took point my shield ready to activate at any moment. It took about ten minutes of marching to get to the next cavern and we looked about. Stuff like bark grew on the stalactites creating a ghostly forest as vine tendrils and leaves hung from the ceiling and a thick mess of tall grasses, fungi, bushes, and something analogous to bamboo filled the ground. There were animal trails, but you could barely see five meters ahead of you clearly.
“Fan out like before, start hacking down this undergrowth I want a clear field of view,” I ordered my voice transferring from my helmet to every other linked helm within sixty meters of my location.
I drew my gladius and began hacking through the jungle as we advanced. We made if fifty meters into the jungle before the first attack. It happened in the back ranks I heard a chocking sound and the sound of a weapon dropping to the ground. I whirled around and saw one of my centurions with their hands around their neck trying to pull a long pale worm off it.
I activated my shield putting it above my head just in time to deflect the stryker worm before it could land on me. The meter long insect/reptile fried as it hit the shield and I flung it off to the ground and cut its head off with my sword.
“Stryker worms watch the ceiling!” I called out over coms.
I moved forward towards the suffocating man. He’d been quick enough to grab its tail and was holding back its stinger. I couldn’t cut or shoot the thing off or the caustic blood would burn right through his neck. I reached to my belt and pulled out my stun-baton. The prongs along the baton crackled with electricity and I pressed it to the stryker worm’s body. It writhed and hissed its pincers digging deeper into the centurion’s neck.
It was a race to see which would give out first the monster or the man. The stryker worm went limp first and I pulled it off cutting off its head blocking the spray of blood with my shield. The man was bleeding severely from his neck. My fellow Kyshen centurions had gathered around and formed a shield wall around us. The beams from our guns and helmet scanned the ceiling but with all the white vines it was impossible to pick out the alabaster worms. Our combat medic, Doctor Prowse pushed forwards and slapped a compression bandage against the soldier’s neck. Needles bit into skin holding the med pack in place as it pumped him full of pain relievers and cooled the blood flow.
“Get a stretcher,” Doctor Prowse said. “We need to get him back on Hades and into the med bay.”
“Private Haslow, Private Olson,” I said the two soldiers snapping to attention. “Go with Doctor Prowse back to Hades.”
“We’re not all going?” Melor asked.
“We’re on a time limit,” I said. “We all knew the risks when we came down here. Get back to fanning out and keep an eye on the ceiling this time. Stryker worms aren’t smart, but they’re programmed to target isolated targets so stick together and keep an eye on each other. If you get stung… we’ll make it quick.”
The stryker worm was not feared for its ability to strangle a stimmed-up soldier or its pincers which could check through ceramic plate but instead for the poison in its stinger. The poison wasn’t technically lethal, but it would course through your system for a week and attack your nervous system putting you in so much pain your mind broke because of it. The worm had been created for use in space actually, a nest of the worms would be fired inside a hollow missile to pierce into the hull of a star-ship once there the worms would spread out killing and laying their eggs in their victims hatching little worms in just a day.
We pressed forwards hacking through the jungle when another worm dropped down, but we were on the lookout for it this time. The Luminari soldier stepped back and it fell to the ground missing its target before it could disappear into the underbrush it was ripped apart by a burst of plasma fire its acid blood burning away on contact. Another worm dropped down its pincers snapping on the back of a man’s spine. It was over for him in a second, his armor held although the pincers compressed it down and cut through the mesh and steel, but he didn’t grab its tail in time its stinger stabbing into his jugular vein.
The man fell to the ground screaming in agony. Everyone just stared in stunned silence, I stepped forward drawing the heavy caliber pistol from my belt and blasted the worm on his neck. Its blood sprayed out killing its victim. Another worm dropped down on me. I struck with the side of my shield using it to pin it against the ground. I slashed down and its blood spayed out but impacted my shield evaporating into black smoke.
“Keep going,” I said. “A nest of stryker worms numbers around twenty to thirty, lure them out, don’t get hit, and kill them.”
One by one the rest of the nest dropped from the ceiling and after half an hour with no new drops I felt reasonably confident we’d killed the last of them. We began gathering up the flora we’d cut, packing it into the grav-containers. There was still some animals to hunt, stryker worms preferred humanoid targets to hunt and lay their eggs in. They were about the only things keeping the ghoul population in check. That made me nervous, we wouldn’t be going any deeper after today; a nest of stryker worms meant there was probably a nest of ghouls in a nearby cavern and I didn’t like the thought of fighting with those things in close quarters like this.
We shot some lemurs and large blue rodents with a split rat tail. I winced when I saw them, vent-rats, not deadly like stryker worms but with a similar purpose. They were saboteurs, they had the ability to survive on just electricity and would seek out machinery with reactors and dig into the components to chew and feed on the wires inside. We’d have to check Hades for them, this close to the surface a few had probably smelled the MACC and snuck their way onboard.
Sweat soaked my under-suit by the end of the day and we left another bare cavern and marched back up to the surface pushing them in front of us. We retrieved our sensor alarms and boarded back on Hades, the air getting colder as night fell. We shut the doors of cargo bay behind us. I sent the women off to shower while we began loading up the Chef. The machine hummed as its innerworkings blended and pureed the plants and animals into unrecognizable biomass that would be as safe to consume as it was terrible to eat. It didn’t matter about your taste preferences, there was always something off about the ration cakes, they would be simultaneous to sweet and bitter, to bland and sour. In all my years in the military I’d yet to meet one man who liked the taste of them.
It was my tame to cook, I took three of the lemur like creatures and skinned them dividing them into sections and marinating them in a sauce. I’d gathered some grass seeds and steamed them as a rice substitute. I went up to shower while the seeds cooked, and the meat marinated. My other suit had come back from the wash already and I switched out of it tossing my spare down the laundry chute.
I returned to the kitchen and started frying up the meat in a pan. The food was finished and passed around; I wouldn’t say I was a good cook, and I wasn’t working with the correct ingredients either, but it was filling. I sat down and ate, the mood was somber, in just two days we’d lost five people out the seventy-five crew we had.
“What’s the status on our mission?” I asked Melor.
“After counting all the ration bars, we have around ninety-thousand,” he said.
“That’s more than we need,” I said. “That will give the governor about a week of food if he stretches it. I want a skeleton crew on the bridge tonight we’re not sticking around here. We’ll drive through the night and should be back at Andromeda around tomorrow morning.”
I passed Amara in the hall nodding to her as I returned to my quarters. “Goodnight,” I said.
I fell into my bunk but couldn’t sleep. After a few restless hours I got up and went to the bridge, Melor was sitting in the captain’s chair as he steered us back towards Andromeda. He snapped to attention when he saw me the bleary expression on his face disappearing as he saluted.
“Stop that Melor we aren’t soldiers anymore,” I said. “Go to bed you look exhausted I’ll take over.”
“Yes sir,” he said.
I sighed but didn’t bother trying to correct him again. I sat down and put my hands on the controls keeping my eyes on the screens around me and looking out the window at the desolate red sand and the backdrop of the mountains on our right. I heard light footfalls and turned to see Amara come into the bridge, she wasn’t wearing her armor just the black synthetic-weave of her under-suit.
“Couldn’t sleep either?” I asked.
“No,” she said her hand running up to her neck. “I keep thinking of one of those things dropping on me.”
“I had nightmares about them getting loose on Hades for months after I first saw them,” I said. “I’m still not sure why your people kept creating those monsters.”
“We had to defend ourselves,” Amara said her voice turning hard and defensive.
“With weapons you couldn’t control?” I asked. “You kept losing control of them again and again, I’ve read reports of the ecological disasters caused by the invasive species your leaders created again and again. Styker worms, shield-bugs, knife-tails, ghouls, vent rats, star-eels the list goes on; the only thing they stopped short of was viral warfare.”
“My people didn’t burn down the surface of our planet,” Amara said. “They didn’t invade another world for nearly three generations out of greed.”
“No, they just withheld a metal capable of allowing for the creation of infinite energy,” I said. “Then they destroyed the bio-diversity of their world bit by bit, the empire might have made the surface uninhabitable, but your leaders made it impossible to live underground.”
“We did what we had to try and push back a superior force,” Amara said.
“Maybe,” I admitted. “It doesn’t matter now, neither you nor I made any of those decisions. I’m not going to defend the reasons for invading your planet its not my war anymore.”
Amara’s shoulders sagged the fight going out of her. “We’re all just left to deal with the fallout.” She looked out over the barren landscape sitting down in one of the empty crew chairs.
“What will you do when the war ends, and you can go back home?” she asked.
“I’m a deserter,” I said. “They’ll never let me leave this planet other than in a body bag. My fate’s tied with your peoples now.”
“Do you think there is hope for us?” Amara asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Is this the type of life you’d want for your children? We’re surviving day to day right now what kind of life is that to pass on to others?”
“That’s been the way it’s been my entire life,” Amara said. “Every day lived in fear my home would be destroyed by orbital bombardment. I don’t think my life isn’t worth living just because of the suffering I was born into.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But your parents had hope that the war would end, and life would return to what it was before, now… This world is turning into a desert and those iron winds will prevent terraforming attempts to reclaim it.”
“If the Order of Priestess were still here, they might be able to do so,” Amara said. “They did create all those monster but before than they were keepers of the natural order they could radically change and accelerate the growth of plants. If they were still here, they might be able to reclaim the world from the storms, I heard rumors they were trying to regrow the forests we had before…”
“They were all killed,” I said finishing her sentence. “It seems every faction in this war destroyed the planet in their own way. Kyshen, Luminara, Cyberhumans we’ve all left scars on this planet.”
“I do still have hope,” Amara said after a moment of silence between us. “Even if life is hard, even if never returns to how it was, and this planet is a barren desert until our sun dies, I think we’ll find a way to survive and we’ll find joy in the moments between our quest for survival.”
“I’ll have to rely on you for my hope then,” I said with a sigh. “Because I’m not sure yet.”
Amara stood up and rested her hand on my shoulder for a moment. “Goodnight Enil,” she said.
“Goodnight,” I said turning my chair to watch her as she left the bridge and disappeared down the stairs.