Fan Fiction ❯ Aliens: Genocide ❯ Babysitters ( Chapter 2 )

Aliens: Genocide

By: bsmart

 

Disclaimer: Why the hell am I writing this? Nobody reads them and they have no legal weight. It's a complete waste of time and bandwidth and yet I'm still typing. I'm going to take a shot in the dark and rate this fic R, violence and language, the good stuff.

 

“…” Normal Speech

`…' Thought

 

Chapter Two: Babysitters

 

Colonel Marco Ramiz bounced up in down in his seat as his driver drove their purloined ground car up the red clay hill to where his battalion had camped out. Someone of his rank would normally have his own VTOL to use for transportation but like many who'd come up through the ranks of the Pathfinders he had an intense dislike of being disconnected from the ground. He might have been able to make a more dignified ascent but he was busy looking off to his right at the view of the former Dral base.

 

Black smoke still rose from a dozen fires large and small all over the base. Since very little to none of it was usable for the Ankari it was most likely that they'd just let it burn rather than waste time saving something worthless. All over the base buildings were reduced to rubble, anything over three stories high was rare and some of the three story high structures were just the remains of much larger buildings, one had even crumpled in on itself leaving the top two stories virtually intact and sitting on a pile of rubble that used to be the lower five floors. Not even the skyhook's tether had escaped the destruction and the first few kilometers of it laying in a tangle near the base of the old elevator. For something that had stretched all the way to geo-sync orbit it had fallen surprisingly lightly. Marco had grown up in a city that had a skyhook base in it and he still couldn't wrap his mind around the fact that something that enormous fell like a feather to the ground. He'd grown carbon nanotubes for a science competition and they still amazed him, even if it was technology that was ancient.

 

Throughout the general destruction that had been the Dral base several points of near absolute destruction existed. Where other parts of the complex had been reduced to rubble by the rest of the Legion in many of these areas there was simply nothing.

 

Marco smiled. He had expected to see this when he'd been told his boys and girls would be totally weapons free in this engagement but it still pleased him to see it. Kilo for kilo a Pathfinder was the most heavily armed unit in the Ankari military, bar none. Hellbores, plasma rifles, and thermal detonators had turned bunkers into craters, tanks into glass, and Dral into vapor.

 

The former fighter base and garrison epitomized all of this. The only way to spot it was the two landing pads that were still there and then go north to find where the garrison had bee, aside from that everything else was simply gone. Bravo Company was nothing if not exuberant.

 

He frowned, Bravo company, specifically Zombie's platoon was on his mind. Normally Marco didn't mind working with the Legion's Operation's Command, the Big Red One was one of the tightest run outfits in all of the military but it still came down to people running it, and people were generally assholes. The Pathfinders were the elite of the Marines, there were none better and everyone knew this and everyone treated them as such. He was only a colonel in charge of a battalion but his opinions often carried weight similar to that of any of the three division commanders of the Legion, which is why things like this pissed him off.

 

Every once in a while some little shit in the ops department got it in his head to teach the "High and Mighty" Pathfinders a lesson by giving them some crap assignment. Most would be shot down by someone with some sense of decency but every so often one would make it through. He supposed he could go up the chain and find someone to bitch at to get it retasked but that wasn't his style, that wasn't the style of a Pathfinder, he'd do as he was told like it or not.

 

As the ground car finished its climb up to the top it emerged into a land of brightly colored giants and drab dwarves. Nearly four score of riotously colored metal monsters stood silent watch at the top of the hill, some kneeling, some standing, and around their legs buzzed the hundreds of people who made them kill.

 

Almost every one of the battalion's gears was in some state of disrepair; you don't challenge a planetary garrison without getting some scars to show for it. Techs had panels removed from almost every single one of the gears, some were simply replacing circuit boards or mynomer bundles, and one gear was supported in a stand like some five meter high paraplegic while a leg was reattached. Almost every one of the gears was being loaded back with ammunition, fuel and other consumables.

 

Even in this sea of activity second platoon Bravo company was easy to find. While all the pathfinders painted their machines in some obscenely garish colors, forgoing camouflage for psychological impact, second Platoon was easy to find, mostly because sergeant Langley had painted her gear a uniformly eye searing red. A few touches of orange and white provided accent but it was still a red gear.

 

He found the company the way he always did, with all four gears in a small circle kneeling facing inward. A big blue tarp was strung between the gear's heads and shoulders while their arms held onto a huge sheet of cloth making the world's, this one's, largest shaded hammock.

 

Zombie yawned and rolled over, pushing an empty ration pack over the edge of the "nest". He was barely conscious and would have soon been back in a deep slumber if not for the loud honking of a ground car horn. He peered up over the edge of the hammock, his sleep addled brain hoping that it wasn't directed at them so he could get some more rest. It took him a moment to process what he saw but as soon as his brain processed the imaged of the Colonel standing beside their gear's he snapped awake and started trying to get the rest of his platoon up.

 

Colonel Ramiz watched in amusement as the makeshift hammock started to rattle and snap and muffled curses were heard as the people asleep on it woke up. He couldn't blame them for sleeping, they'd fought for almost two days straight and he'd soon be looking for an opportunity to get a solid four hours free so that he could get a good night's rest, even if it was in the middle of the day.

 

Master Sergeant Delaat and his platoon quickly tumbled from their resting place and scrambled down the side of the nearest gear so that they could line up in front of him. All four of them looked like they'd been run through the ringer then drug a click behind a hovercraft, for normal Marines they looked like they'd just got out of two days hard fighting, for Pathfinders they looked fresh as cvit flowers.

 

Colonel Ramiz decided to let them stew and took a moment to look them over. Zombie, Master Sergeant Delaat, was unremarkable as Ankari went, a little on the short side with green hair and blue eyes but totally unremarkable. He was perpetually trying to grow a goatee, regulations be damned, but it never seemed to get passed the scruffy stage. He was too young and too low in rank to really be running a platoon but Pathfinders tended to advance quickly in their commands if not their ranks, not that rank really counted for anything in the Pathfinders, only command really did. In another decade or so he'd have enough time in grade to get his promotion but by then he'd probably be running Bravo Company. He was a rising star and like all rising stars his rank never caught up to his ability. Zombie had wound up with his moniker from his love of tri-D non-interactive movies that featured the undead. After he'd commandeered the holodeck for the fifth time in his first week as a Pathfinder to watch them he'd been christened with his handle. The gear they'd all climbed down was Zombie's and like most Pathfinders he'd taken his inspiration for its paint job from his handle. The gear looked like some matt black undead creature and like always he'd painted some phrase on its chest in the native language of whoever they were fighting.

 

Where Sergeant Langley's handle came from was painfully obvious, the curly red hair that adorned her head had gotten her the callsign Red in five seconds flat. She normally kept the tight little ringlets in a bun on the back of her head but she'd let them down to sleep. She was a little tall and skinny for an Ankari, a species that tended to be shorter and stouter than the other "human" races. The colonel snorted at that, how those little colony brats had gotten their species name to be used to describe all five of the sister spices he didn't know, especially since they all agreed, even the Juraians, that the Ankari were the oldest and probably ancestor of all their races. Red had a mouth on her but she always managed to stay just this side of a court martial, stopping just before someone would write her up. Marco thought her handle and gear suited her perfectly.

 

Tingirl, Staff Sergeant Ito, was short even by Ankari standards but that had more to do with her body's maker than genetics. Exactly what percentage of her was original and what was aftermarket he didn't know but just by looking at her you knew that she hadn't been born with the arms and legs that were on her now. She kept her dark violet hair short and she smiled a lot which made her seem like she was only fifty or sixty instead of an adult. She'd taken an airbrush to her gear and contrary to the spirit of her handle, she insisted that the only tin in her body was as an alloying compound for her high pressure blood lines, she coated it in a patch work of obnoxious orange, purple, and red shapes making it look like the machine had been camouflaged by a colorblind idiot. It was unanimously agreed to be the most hideous paint job in the battalion, and everyone loved her for it.

 

Snakes, she claimed it wasn't worth her time to try and teach everyone how to pronounce her actual name and Marco agreed after seeing her file, wasn't even an Ankari at all but a Twi'lek, one of the Confederation's member races. She was every bit as tall as Zombie but her skin was light blue with the sheen of wet vinyl. She was completely bald but at the crown of her head a pair of thick, fleshy, and surprisingly prehensile appendages emerged. Commonly called head tails, properly called leeku, Snakes normally kept them hanging over one shoulder and across her chest but she could really do anything she please with the seventy centimeter long appendages and when she got excited they began to get into the act when it came to talking. Pathfinders tend to bond quickly and permanently and in Snakes case the trial to determine if she could be one of them had been brutally simple. He had been informed of her handle by an overactive JAG lieutenant who had told him that that could get everyone in a lot of trouble. Rather than ride in and force a change on them, and possibly alienating her from her unit permanently, Marco had let it slide. Snakes rose to the challenge in perfect Pathfinder form, she'd painted her gear in a dizzying pattern of interlocking Snakes, making it look like the machine was covered in a slithering mass or reptiles that seemed to move anytime you weren't looking directly at it.

 

Deciding that he'd let them fester long enough Marco finally spoke up. "I trust I wasn't disturbing anything."

 

"No sir Colonel sir," Zombie answered.

 

The colonel smirked. "Uh huh. I have an assignment for you; this came down from Legion Ops so pay attention." He walked over to Zombie's gear and sat his datapad in the knee joint so that everyone could see it when he called up the first image. "This is a research station way up north on the edge of the polar desert on the side of a mountain." On the screen a satellite image of a large building with several outlying structures came up. "When the fleet came roaring in a small shuttle blasted out of here and made it out before the spacers were in a position to stop it. Ops and Intel want to know what's going on up there."

 

"One shuttle sir?" Snakes asked.

 

"Just one, and it wasn't even that big, which is why we're so curious about this, that's just one item in a long list of strange things about this place. The central building there," he pointed at the screen, "is large enough to comfortably house several hundred people even if most of it's unoccupied, the shuttle that left could house maybe ten, if they packed in. Also the station has a pair of power generators, but not just any gens, they're hypermatter reactors with a combined output somewhere north of nine terawatts."

 

"Holy hell..." Zombie whispered.

 

"There are fleet frigates that don't have that much juice," Tingirl said.

 

"Precisely, and the biggest strangeness is the fact that this isn't a Dral building but it's been operating since the first recon drone came whipping through the system about a couple of months ago, it wasn't here when the survey drones mapped this place a decade ago."

 

"So what are we supposed to do about this?" Zombie asked.

 

"Ops is sending in a platoon of light Marines along with couple of analysts to do a preliminary sweep. The past three sensor sweeps haven't detected any life forms but your platoon is being chopped to them to provide fire support..."

 

A chorus of groans erupted from the four Pathfinders.

 

"...if they run into anything."

 

"We're playing babysitter," Red grumbled.

 

"Hey," snapped the colonel, "I'm not thrilled with sending ya'll to go nursemaid a bunch of Marines either but these are orders from Legion Ops, we will do it. Zombie, how long before you can be ready to move out?"

 

********************

 

"Fifteen minutes!" the dropship's loadmaster yelled out as Zombie strode past him and climbed the ladder up to the ship's command deck. Inside the cockpit the howl of the engines that pervaded the cargo deck dropped off to an angry whisper. While the pilot and co-pilot watched their controls Zombie turned to the jumpseat behind them where Lieutenant LevKil was sitting watching his monitors intently with his Master Sergeant looking over his shoulder.

 

The Lieutenant had annoyed him just as soon as he'd shown up at the landing field with the platoon. LevKil had started right in on them, attempting to dress them down for not saluting him, haranguing them for their slovenly dress, the dirt, grease and soot on their gears, even the paint jobs on their gears. Zombie was about to say something to the Lieutenant which would undoubtedly send the little martinet into a tizzy and probably get them out of this mission, since they'd be awaiting their court-martials when LevKil's Master Sergeant cut in.

 

"How many combat drops have you been on son?"

 

Zombie smiled at the Sergeant's ploy. "Ninety eight as a Pathfinder, thirty three before that," he said with a grin. "How about you?"

 

"Sixty seven."

 

The Lieutenant who just a second before had been winding up for another tirade deflated like a balloon. Zombie knew exactly what was going on, undoubtedly the Lieutenant had learned to rely on his sergeant and look to him for advice and now in one fell swoop the man he thought of as an all knowing titan had been shown to be only half as experienced a soldier as the man he was trying to berate. Whatever nit he had been about to pick fled his mind and he simply said, "Get your people stowed away and meet me on the flight deck when you get the chance.

 

That had been the last thing that LevKil had said to him before now and the Lieutenant's inelegant attempt to establish a pecking order still left a foul taste in his mouth, of course you needed to know unequivocally who was in charge in a military operation but dressing them down for their gear's paint jobs was not the way to go about it. "You wanted to see me sir?"

 

LevKil spun his seat around and immediately frowned when he saw that Zombie wasn't saluting him but he didn't press the issue. "Yes, I wanted to discuss the mission with you."

 

The Lieutenant turned around and started to work at his terminal so Zombie and the Master Sergeant peered over his shoulders at the image that was on the screen. He'd just realized that the image was moving slightly when the Lieutenant spoke.

 

"Regimental Ops hacked a drone to us so we'll have coverage for the entire operation, it arrived on station a few minutes ago and this is the feed." The computer shifted the feed through the drone's various sensors but none showed anything of any real interest aside from the magscan. "As you can see aside from the main compound and the pair of generators to the north there isn't much of interest save this underground power conduit." On the screen a thick purplish blue line connected the two generators and then headed off directly west. A much smaller line branched off the main heading south but after a few hundred meters is grew dim and disappeared. "The main power conduits for the generators head off to some underground installation to the west but whatever it's powering doesn't show up on the scans, it might be too deep. The smaller line is probably the tap to the compound, for some reason it's terminated here and the rest of the line is de-energized, which is consistent with what we're seeing in the compound. It's cooled to almost ambient, minimal activity on the elecscan, looks deserted."

 

"We'll probably want to check what's going on with that feeder line," Zombie offered.

 

"Yes we will but for the moment I want to worry about the landing and security. There's a landing pad here to the east of the compound, but we're going to avoid it. I want to drop your Pathfinders at the northeast and southwest corners of the compound, a pair each."

 

"Sounds good sir, we can sweep around the perimeter and make sure everything looks tight."

 

"Exactly, and while you're doing that Sergeant Frost and myself will land with the platoon on top of the main building and clear it."

 

"Ten minutes!"

 

"That sounds like a plan sir," Zombie said.

 

"There is one more thing. To the south of the mountains this place is in there's a deciduous forest but to the north is the polar desert, sats show that there's a big dust storm rolling it, it'll probably hit us a few hours after we land. Since we don't have any hypercomms on your suits or the dropship we'll have to rely on the drone for a comm relay outside since we're on the opposite side of the planet from the main landing force."

 

"Yes sir."

 

"You'll probably want to go get in your suit now."

 

"Yes sir."

 

******************************

 

After a quick pulse of his jumpjets Zombie let himself drop the last fifteen meters to the ground. A swirl of parched grayish brown dust swirled around his feet for a moment before being swept away by the wind that was blowing steadily through the pass to their north.

 

"When the storm gets here that pass will sandblast this whole area," Zombie said over the Pathfinder's private channel. "Why the hell would you build a research station here?"

 

"Maybe they got a deal on the land," Snakes said as the dropship whirled above them and scooted off to drop off Red and Tingirl on the other side of the compound.

 

"Musta been a damn big discount."

 

"Red and Tingirl down," Red reported. "Looks quiet."

 

"Yeah, alright, you know the drill. Let's go for a walk," Zombie said. The plan was very simple, the pairs of gears had been dropped off at opposite corners of the compound, they'd both circle the compound once in the same direction stopping when they got back to where they'd started. It would make sure that every square centimeter of the area would be observed by four sets of eyes.

 

The whole plateau they were standing on was coated in the grayish brown dust, but every sentient made surface was clean, there was enough wind whipping across the plateau to keep everything blown off but not enough to start a sandstorm. As they trudged east across what was considered the front of the compound, the north side that faced the rest of the mountain, they came across the communications pad, a low slung bunker with a collection of dishes and antennas adorning its crown like a stand of weeds. "Comm shed's cold," Snakes reported, "No thermal, no elec, nothing."

 

"Must have taken a feed off the branch line that powers the main building."

 

"Must have, I can see termination of the line way off there but I don't see any damage."

 

Zombie turned his attention to where the power tap for the compound ran, increasing the priority of the elec scanner in his display as he did. He could easily see the power conduits running from the mostly buried generators to wherever the headed and the tap that was supposed to supply the buildings with power, but the line went dark two thirds of the way along it. A quick mag scan check confirmed that the line was still present under them but for some reason it was de-energized. "We'll have to check that out, let's get moving."

 

The north side was bare of any sentient construction aside from the comm bunker and the power generator off in the distance, but the generators were low slung with only a few meters of ferrocrete peeking up out of the dusty ground and against the back drop of the dark grey mountain they disappeared if you weren't looking right at them. The mountains themselves started back towards the heavens three kilometers away, the plateau shelf itself was covered in crags and boulders, good cover if you wanted to assault the area. The pass between the mountains and out towards the polar desert was a vertical gash that divided the mountain closest to them from the rest of the chain. The mountain whose plateau this station had been built on stretched around the west side a bit but soon its slope blended together with that of the plateau. The backside of the compound was busier; numerous low sitting bunkers dotted the area between the back of the main building and the edge of the plateau. Off to the south the plateau rapidly dropped off down a not very gentle slope to the forest eight hundred meters below.

 

"Third Platoon, dropping," LevKil's voice was calm and emotionless, just the way Zombie thought it should be and his opinion of the young lieutenant went up, young being quite relative.

 

Zombie glanced up just in time to see the winged brick shaped transport blast away from the top of the three story building. From the time LevKil announced his platoon's drop to the time the ship had blasted clear not even a twenty seconds had passed.

 

"Starting to clear the building."

 

"Blue six this is Zombie, sweep seventy percent complete, all clear so far."

 

A double click on comm was the only acknowledgement to Zombie's report.

 

As they started up the west side of the main building Zombie and Snakes passed by the landing pad that had served the station. The pad was devoid of any ships but a mobile crane and refueling bowser still sat in the middle of the pad. They had avoided the pad for landing because it was the most obvious place to set down and therefore if anything was booby trapped that would be it. A few moments later they were back where they'd started. "Spread out, four corners."

 

"Command center clear," and unfamiliar voice of one of LevKil's squad leaders said.

 

"Exterior clear," Zombie answered back. The trip around the place hadn't taken long, even at two hundred meters on a side the gears could have circled the main building in less than a minute, their slow walk had let them make a more thorough inspection but had still only taken five.

 

In the distance the dropship circled, waiting for the all clear.

 

"Med bay, I think, clear."

 

"Third floor clear."

 

Zombie absent mindedly scanned his sensors but he was paying a lot more attention to what was going on inside. Close quarters drills were the thing he'd enjoyed most about his Marine training and probably the only thing he missed about the old Marines. His gear was simply too big to go fight indoors, unlike the Marines in their Helot exo-skeletons.

 

"Second floor clear," Sergeant Frost confirmed.

 

"Garage clear."

 

Zombie checked his crono, the building was damn big for just a platoon to clear but it looked like LevKil's boys had done it in less than fifteen minutes, pretty damn impressive, for Marines.

 

"Zombie, Blue six, bring your platoon into the garage on the north side of the building and meet me in the command center."

 

"Roger."

 

The garage was easy to find, a two story high door had opened on the front of the building exposing a large enclosed garage on the front of the building. As the four metal giants walked inside Zombie noted a good dozen ground cars and crawlers in the stalls on either side of the central concourse. All of them looked like they were ready to go at a moments notice. Towards the back were six large stalls but only one was occupied, by a large long distance crawler.

 

"Where the hell is everyone?" Red asked.

 

"That's what we want to find out. Everybody pick a stable and park it."

 

Zombie walked his gear into one of the large stalls and kneeled down before putting the suit in standby and cracking the chest plate. The thick armored plate slid forward a few centimeters before starting to swing up and open on silent hydraulics. Satisfied that everything was powered down Zombie disconnected from the neural interface and put up with the momentary nausea that always accompanied separation from his metal body. Satisfied that his lunch was going to stay where it should he leaned forward and grabbed the bar that was attached to the inside of the chest plate of the gear, using it and his upper body to pull his legs out of the leg sleeves of his suit and then set them down on the thighs of his mount. He turned back and retrieved his pants, boots, hat, and a pulse carbine from the locker tucked away inside his gear so that he'd be presentable to the lieutenant. The occasional intense heat of operating a gear along with the need for the neuroreceptors in his suit to have a clean interface with his nervous system meant that gear pilots rarely wore more than a pair of shorts and a tank top.

 

When he and the rest of the platoon were presentable and armed they all met up with the trooper who was standing beside the doorway into the rest of the facility. The Marine was wearing his exoskeleton and consequently stood more than two meters high. The gray and black armor's camo system had been shut down or else it would have been trying to blend in with the surrounds. The exoskeleton completely encased the trooper and they wouldn't even have been able to tell it was a he if the boy hadn't had his visor raised.

 

"I'll show you to the command center."

 

"Lead the way private."

 

The hallways of the building were a little higher than would have been normal in an Ankari building, but their inverted truncated pyramidal shape made them seem much smaller than they were. Their guide was constantly ducking light fixtures and pieces of debris hanging from the ceiling. His armor had been optimized for fighting outdoors, it made him faster, stronger, tougher, and better informed than an unarmored infantry but it had not been designed to make it easier to get around indoors.

 

'At least they didn't send Elementals,' Zombie thought. The Ankari heavy infantry used three ton armored suits and would have filled the entire hallway top to bottom, side to side.

 

"All the levels are like this," the trooper said indicating the mess around them. Pieces of filmplast littered the hallways like somebody had dumped a notebook out in front of a fan. All around them the walls were covered in gouges, even the ceiling, looking for the world like somebody had just beat the hell out of the walls with a pick, and every once in a while they could see some blood spatter. "The command center is the only place that looks normal, there's some major damage to its doors but that's about it," he said as he shoved a piece of fallen conduit out of his face.

 

All five of them walked up a flight of stairs to the third floor. When they opened the doors they saw the battered doors of the command center just a few meters down the hall in front of them flanked by a pair of Marines. "Here you go," the trooper said with a wave of his hand. The Pathfinders all piled out into the short hallway to the center but the Marine headed back down.

 

"What happened here?" Red asked as they neared the dark blue doors.

 

The seam of the doors was chipped and pitted and in the corner a portable drill and reciprocating hammer lay discarded, the bit of the hammer ruined and the bit of the drill was deformed like a wax sculpture held to close to a flame. All across the door were splashes of dried blood, some of it blue but most of it was red and the entire surface was covered in those pick marks they had seen in the hallway on the way up.

 

"I think somebody wanted in," Snakes said.

 

As they approached the Marines on either side of the door paused their conversation to observe them and then started back. To everyone's surprise the doors parted easily when they pushed them back into their pockets, the sheet metal seemingly oblivious to the morbid tableau on them. In contrast to the dark and wrecked gray and blue corridors that led up to the command center the center itself was remarkably clean. Notebooks and manuals sat open in front of consoles while cups of liquid sat nearby like they expected their owners to return at any moment. Displays and screens sat blank and lifeless but the whole room looked like it everyone had simply dropped whatever they were doing and had left. Around the perimeter of the room was a raised platform with more work stations that had a view out some huge picture windows that gave a three hundred and sixty degree view of the surroundings from atop the building. Through the west side windows he saw the dropship hovering over the roof while the analysts hopped down from the landing ramp with their bags in tow. A couple of Marines gathered up their charges and ushered them towards an open door on the roof.

 

The Lieutenant was standing next to a large blank display table and his comm tech had set up shop on top of it. LevKil was busy talking to one of his subordinates but as they approached he dismissed them and set the handset down on the table.

 

"Reporting as ordered...sir," Zombie said.

 

"Anything worth noting outside?"

 

"No sir, nothing we didn't see on the recon. Do we know what happened here?"

 

"Not at the moment. So far we haven't found anyone here, dead or alive. One of the techs already scanned the blood that seems to have been tossed all over the place, some Dral, a lot of Haurduran and Kizikan, and even a little Vaygr."

 

"Sir?!" Red stammered.

 

"I have no idea what any of those are doing here besides the Dral but this building is a Vaygr design, and the weapons in the armor are Vaygr phasers."

 

"The Dral hate the Vaygr, you'd get a Falcon and Wolf to say something nice to each other before you could get a Dral and a Vaygr to do anything besides try to kill each other," Snakes said.

 

"That may be true sergeant but the blood doesn't lie."

 

"How old is the blood sir?"

 

"Looks like it's about a week old, whatever happened happend right before we showed up in orbit. Power's out to the whole facility but my troopers found an auxiliary generator down on the second sublevel, they're working on get..."

 

The overhead lights snapped on above them dispelling the darkened gloom in the center with their own fluorescent glow.

 

"...ting it turned on."

 

"We've got it running sir," a small voice said from the handset, "it still had a charge on the capacitors."

 

While LevKil thanked his men Zombie watched as all around the center computers started to boot up and one by one bright red flashing error messages started to pop up.

 

"The hell, it's all in basic!" Red said.

 

Sure enough all the machines were reading out in standard Galactic basic, a language that had been settled upon millennia ago as the common language of the Galaxy. While everyone still had their own native languages most sentients knew at least a smattering of basic, either written or spoken, whichever one they could handle.

 

"Maybe they were all working together," Tingirl said as she sat down at the nearest console and started to try and work it.

 

"What? Repeat last," LevKil said before hitting the speaker on comm pack.

 

"Our sensors are screwed up sir, when the power came back up they went all to hell!" one of the squad sergeants reported. "There are big blind spots all over the place now; we can't get any good readings."

 

"Where are they sir?" Zombie asked the Lieutenant as he slid up beside him.

 

"West end of the floor, some kind of labs."

 

"I can't get a clear reading at all," the annoyed platoon leader said.

 

Suddenly in the background someone yelled, "What the hell was that?"

 

"Hold on sir," the sergeant on the comm said and then his voice sounded distant, "Whatta ya got Bargaa?!"

 

"I dunno, thought I heard something sir," the trooper said.

 

The sergeant got back on the comm. "Sorry sir, just a false al..."

 

With a sudden squelch of static another voice cut into the line and in a high pitched panicky voice someone yelled, "I've got movement Sarge!"

 

============================================================

 

Author's Notes

 

Acknowledgements:

 

Notes:

 

1) From zero Aliens to total rip off in one chapter flat, how do I do it?

 

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