Ambassadors and Scorpions (Apocalypse Paused Book 4) Read online

  The young soldier swallowed, took a deep breath, and aimed his gun.

  “Fire,” Wallace said.

  Gunfire burst and crackled and the sonic, as well as physical violence of it, shattered the deceptive peace of the lush jungle around them. The first few locusts went down with shrieks and chittering as they emerged from behind the trees. Sparks and black blood flew. Rifle fire and shotgun blasts chipped wood from trees and shattered branches.

  “Grenade!” Wallace said. Their first barrage had herded most of the locusts into the same general area. PFC Wizniewski, who had the best throwing arm, tossed an armed grenade into the writhing mass. The locusts actually seemed to pause for a second as if they knew what it was. Even if they did know, they weren’t fast enough.

  The explosion knocked two men to the ground but the rest held. Fire and smoke bloomed upward and fragments of trees and giant insects churned the air. Before they could draw breath, the chimeras were upon them. The six men in the back had managed to eliminate about half of the creatures, but even the last four could be extremely dangerous. They were a strange hybrid of bird, mammal, and reptile, and they flew on half-wings, half-tentacles which doubled as weapons, much like bladed whips.

  “Everyone left, locusts. Right, chimeras,” Wallace barked. Men pivoted accordingly.

  The new concentration of fire on the chimeras reduced three of them, screaming and yowling, to piles of chunks and feathers. The fourth leapt and glided across the river where it pivoted to lash out with one of its wing tentacles at Private Falstaff.

  “Down!” Wallace grabbed the man by the shoulder and threw him bodily aside. In the same motion, he raised his right leg. The tentacle’s barb crashed against the armor of his exoskeleton. It left a few dents and chips but otherwise, deflected off the metal. Wallace grabbed the tentacle and genuine alarm showed on the creature’s face as it struggled to remain airborne. Someone had the presence of mind to blow its head off. Wallace released the tentacle and the chimera splashed into the river.

  To the left, the troops had killed most of the remaining locusts but had fallen back, and three of the insects had diverted to attack and destroy the JLTV.

  Wallace pounced. Aided in both speed and strength by his exoskeleton, he seized the edge of the vehicle and tipped it to crush two of the locusts and drive the third directly into his men’s line of fire.

  As suddenly as it had begun, it was over. The humans had lost no one. The Zoo had lost its entire force save two or three locusts that had retreated and vanished amidst the greenery. The only casualty was the slight damage to Wallace’s leg-plate.

  The breathless silence was broken by the sounds of twenty men exhaling their breaths at once, followed by a collective deep breath. A couple laughed, glad to be alive. Several rookies were among them. Wallace knelt briefly and examined his leg. It would need some minor repair, but it should still be functional. When he stood once again, everyone looked at him as if waiting for something.

  “You have all had a good minute or so to recover from our victory,” he told them. “Now stop staring at me and get back to work so we can finish by nightfall.” He immediately obeyed his own order and turned back to the drawbridge.

  Chapter Two

  It took them until half an hour past nightfall, actually, but they finished it. Thankfully, the Zoo declined to attack again. Exhausted but victorious, they dragged themselves back to the base, looking forward to food and rest, and wondered in the backs of their minds if the bridge would hold if the Zoo’s creatures decided to assault it. It was made of strong, heavy stuff, but locusts, chimeras, and kangarats had all demonstrated the ability to damage metal. There was nothing more they could do today.

  Food, rest, and even a shower would have to be delayed for Sergeant Wallace, however. He had completed the mission itself, as he always did, but that wasn’t the end of it. Several new duties awaited him which Director Hall had introduced. Paperwork, mostly—accounting-based shit, tying up loose ends, and making sure they could keep track of every single thing that happened there. Hall’s leadership was defined, it seemed to Wallace, by his need to know everything instantly.

  The sergeant sat at a small table in the corner of a large office where other officers were engaged in similar tasks, all their faces grim with tedium. He wrote some things on papers and plunked other things out on tablets. Hall wanted to know everything from the number of rounds fired—Wallace had to estimate this, of course—to casualties and major damage sustained to base tech.

  Speaking of which, he had been wrong. His leg was not functioning as well as it ought to. About two hours before they’d finished the drawbridge, it had begun to lag slightly, which meant more mental and physical effort were required to move his right leg in time with his left. Typical of advanced technology, he thought morosely. He didn’t seem to recall having that problem with the original leg, but a giant kangarat had all but paralyzed him a few months ago. He was lucky to be able to walk at all.

  “Dammit,” he muttered under his breath. He really needed a proper night’s sleep and a day off. He left his paperwork on the table, stood wearily, and forced himself, with his now-halting and irregular, mechanical gait, in the direction of the research lab. He had no other choice.

  Wallace limped down brightly-lit halls of white plasteel and soon arrived at Research, where a bevy of whitecoats was hard at work, doing whatever it was they did lately. He had stopped paying as much attention to the scientific element at the base ever since the former head researcher, Dr. Christopher Lin, had left—deserted, really—in disgust.

  To Wallace’s chagrin, half of the floor space in the main lab had been given over to tests run on captive Zoo creatures. He tried to ignore it. Scientists looked at him—and at his exoskeleton, which never failed to draw stares—as he proceeded past them.

  “Heyy, how’s that thing working?” a younger whitecoat, possibly an intern, asked.

  “Fine,” Wallace replied, “it’s just…accumulating mileage.”

  Soon, he stood before the executive lab in the back corner. Dr. Marla Kessler, the new Director of Research, had insisted on having her own private room within the larger one used by those who’d work under her. A crew was brought in to install walls and everything else required. Wallace knocked on the door.

  “I’m busy,” said a woman’s voice, slightly singsong but heavily sarcastic.

  “It’s Sergeant Wallace,” he replied. “I have some problems with my suit.”

  It sounded like she muttered something under her breath but she walked over and opened the door. She was a short, slim woman with dark hair in a sort of beehive who would have been attractive but for the fact that her face only had two expressions, both of them unpleasant—a frown of condescending irritation and a smirk of triumph.

  “What?” she asked. “Oh, it’s you. Your suit. I thought you were one of the radiation guys and needed help to tighten the groin on your hazmat suit.” She turned and went back to what she was doing, leaving the door open. Wallace followed her in.

  “The right leg is damaged and will need to be repaired,” he stated. “It’s gradually become harder to move the leg over the course of the last few hours.” He looked up and instinctively tensed for a second.

  Kessler had been running tests of some sort on a catshark in a cage. He had heard that more of those things had been sighted, but the last time he had personally seen one, it had been the only one. And it had damn near killed him.

  This one was considerably smaller, about the size of a large dog like the older type of locusts. It must have been a juvenile. The one Wallace had fought to the death had been almost three times the size of a man. Still, even this smaller one looked every bit the dangerous, sleek, and intelligent predator it was. Its body was long and muscular and covered with bristly fur, the color of which seemed to alternate between deep-brown and deep-purple. The pointed ears were alert to everything. Its paws ended in knife-like talons and its glassy eyes were more like a shark’s than a feline�
��s. Wallace knew that its mouth would be filled with multiple rows of shark-like teeth—this species’ maw was almost like an organic garbage disposal.

  “I’m busy,” Dr. Kessler said again. “And you told me that you can, in fact, still walk. Might this wait till tomorrow, or could your therapist or one of the grease monkeys handle it? I have a lot of important work to do learning to pacify these creatures.” She did not look at him as she spoke but instead, moved to a table and picked up a nasty-looking handheld device. The catshark watched her, trembling with tension and barely-suppressed rage.

  “At the rate I’m losing function,” Wallace explained, “the leg might be dead weight by morning.”

  Kessler, still looking at her prisoner rather than her guest, tapped something on the device in her hand and blue electricity crackled at its end. “Oh,” she said. “Well, then…” She aimed the thing at the catshark and fired.

  The tip detached itself, dart-like, and a long, thin, black cord spiraled out behind it. The animal tensed and hissed as soon as she aimed it, and the tip struck it full in the breast. Sparks crackled, and the creature yowled horribly. It thrashed and clawed at the air. The paws reached through the bars of its cage as its muscles spasmed. It fell into a heap, still half-conscious and with the fur on its breast smoking a little.

  “Better…” Kessler said and made a few notes on her tablet. “More power needed, though. These things have been very naughty and need to be punished.”

  The catshark recovered after a few moments and flung itself against its bars as it tried frantically to force its way out solely through the power of rage and will. It failed. Kessler watched it, and her face had now switched from the irritated frown to the nasty smirk.

  Wallace observed all this with a face of stone, although he doubted that he completely succeeded in hiding his distaste. “Is that really necessary?” he asked.

  Her head snapped toward him, frown mode engaged once again. “It is if you guys doing all the macho shit want to survive out there,” she said as if speaking to a small child. “Especially since we’ll need even more test subjects to be captured alive. We can’t learn much by having you simply kill everything right away.”

  As opposed, Wallace thought, to killing them slowly in captivity. All the Zoo creatures that had been brought back to the base alive had ended up dead within two or three days. They went crazy and became increasingly agitated and feral. The animals threw themselves against their own walls and tried to attack anything that came close until they either mortally injured themselves in their desperation or grew so dangerous that they had to be put down. These weren’t domesticated animals. Putting them in cages was torment enough, even before Kessler prodded them or tried weapons out on them. It all struck Wallace as needless cruelty—as sick, somehow.

  There was, of course, such a thing as necessary cruelty. Wallace had no illusions whatsoever about how dangerous the Zoo was and what measures human beings had to take to fight its denizens. When he and Chris had been cornered by one of these things—the personal pet of Queen Kemp, which Chris had nicknamed Bruce—Wallace had been forced to become feral himself. He had viciously maimed and dismembered the creature until it was dead. But that had been pure survival and the giant catshark had had a fighting chance. It was an approximately equal contest, as Nature had intended.

  And at least Wallace, no matter how savage he could be, was civilized.

  “It looks like you have many very important things to catch up on, then,” Wallace said. “I’ll visit some other time.”

  “Thank you,” Kessler said and again, looked at her test subject instead of at him. “If I give you any new weapons soon, please try not to break them.” The catshark continued to yowl as it tried and failed to burst out and maul her. At least her cages worked well.

  Wallace nodded, turned, and left. He didn’t know if the woman had any children, but if she did, he somehow found himself imagining how things would go when the kids demanded a kitten or a puppy. She might cave in eventually, but the day would come when the animal pissed or shitted on a carpet that she happened to like, and she would take her revenge by having the animal put to sleep at the animal shelter while the kids were away at school. And when they got home, she’d pretend to be sad and tell them that Fluffy had been hit by a car.

  “I hope you’re happy out there, Chris,” Wallace said to himself as he left the lab. “We could use you back here.” Over the course of the few months they’d worked together, he and Chris had become good friends. They were almost nothing alike and had argued about their last mission. And yet, they worked well together, talked easily, and had grown to respect one another. Wallace knew that not everyone was a fighter. Chris wasn’t one by nature, but he had put up a fight when necessary—they’d been in and out of the Zoo together twice. Back in a civilian environment, he did good things. The kinds of things that fighters fought to protect. His dream was to unlock the Zoo’s potential for advances in medicine, agriculture, and stuff like that. The powers that be, unfortunately, kept getting in his way.

  Hence, his departure.

  On his way back toward the communal office to finish his red tape, Wallace passed the doorway leading to the garage. He almost literally bumped into Audrey James, the mechanic he’d sent for this afternoon in the hope that she could help them finish the drawbridge quicker.

  “Whoa—ha, sorry.” She laughed as she emerged from the doorway and pivoted on one foot to avoid getting run over.

  Wallace paused. “Hi, Audrey,” he said.

  “Call me Jimmy. Hey, what’s wrong?”

  She had, in the space of about one second, determined that there was a problem with his exoskeleton. The woman had to be a prodigy or something. She was only in her mid-twenties, by his guess, but was probably better with technology than some of the engineers they’d brought in. Wallace was glad someone had the talent for it. He had never been much of a tech person. He learned to use it when he had to, but he felt like the most important things in life were the ones that stayed the same over the course of years, centuries, or epochs. Machines and gadgets changed constantly, which suggested something was always wrong with them.

  “I took a hit and dented it,” he said as he gestured to his lower right leg. “I haven’t pulled it apart to examine it yet, but—”

  Jimmy was already examining it herself. She’d dropped to her knees, probably getting motor oil from her jeans on the floor, and brushed a loose strand of red hair behind her ear with a grease-stained hand. “Hmm…” she said and poked at the leg with a wrench.

  “I already talked to Dr. Kessler—” Wallace started to say.

  “Marla?” Jimmy replied. She looked up for a moment and wrinkled her freckled nose. “Oh, she’s a douche. She thinks having a doctorate makes her God’s gift to other women or something. Don’t bother with her. If you have a tech problem, come to me.” She had already, without asking or receiving permission, opened the panel and begun to tinker with it.

  Wallace stood there in the hallway, aware of a touch of embarrassment as people in suits and uniforms walked back and forth. They glanced with open curiosity at the sight of a college-aged tomboy grease monkey performing impromptu surgery on a cyborg.

  “Are you sure you’re rated to work on this class of machine?” he asked.

  Jimmy stood and brushed her hands off. “I’m positive that I’m not. But that doesn’t matter, because I’m already done. Well, the dent’s still there. But the mechanism under the dent should be good to go.” She smiled and looked rather like a dog that had just fetched a brightly-colored ball.

  Wallace allowed his face to lengthen in surprise. He looked down, tried to raise and wiggle his right leg, and found that he could do so perfectly. “Well,” he said, “that wasn’t so hard. Thanks, Aud—I mean, Jimmy.”

  “Don’t mention it,” she responded. “I have something else for you guys, too, by the way. I’ve worked on it for a while and it should help since A-hole soldiers keep losing all my trucks to a
frickin’ vine. I’m reasonably sure that won’t be a problem anymore.”

  “Is that so?” Wallace was curious. Anything that would help them overcome the car-killer vines would be a godsend.

  “It is so,” said Jimmy. “I won’t unveil it just yet, though. Maybe in another day or two.”

  “Sounds good, but I have to finish my paperwork. Thanks again.”

  “No problem,” she replied and headed off toward the mess hall.

  Wallace would have liked to have followed her—to sit down, relax, maybe talk to her and actually eat something. But there were pens, papers, and e-forms that awaited him. He sighed and went off to do his duty.

  Chapter Three

  The sergeant finally finished his paperwork, stood, and exhaled with relief. As if on cue, a sentry appeared at the door to the big communal office. Perhaps today would be a good day and he’d be there for someone else. He wouldn’t hold his breath, though.

  “Sergeant Erik Wallace?” the sentry, a pimply younger guy, asked.

  “Yes?” He couldn’t keep the tiredness out of his voice.

  “Director Hall wants to see you,” the young man reported, “as soon as you’re done with that.”

  Wallace almost sighed and part of him wanted to kick a chair against the wall. He did neither, though, as he didn’t want to set a bad example for this kid. “I just finished,” he said. “You can escort me back now or move on to other duties if you have them.”

  “Yes, sir,” the sentry replied. He left, presumably to other duties.

  Wallace didn’t much feel like conversion anyway. He walked to Hall’s office alone. Technically, he was due for a break. Technically. For almost a month straight since Chris’s departure, Hall had kept him moving and fighting, working and accounting, planning and reporting, almost nonstop. Over the years, people had told him that he could never be fazed, that his reserve of inner strength was inexhaustible, and that he was almost like a machine. Even before half of him was controlled by an actual, literal machine, that is. It wasn’t true, though. He was a man of flesh and bone and was close to exhaustion.