Spoiler
“I hear you were at Crick,” the new lieutenant said.
“A bunch of people were at Crick,” the bronzed, muscular Marine on the other side of the table said. She was paying scarcely any attention to him, instead concentrating on her ice cream sundae. “Some of them are even still alive today. It's not exactly something special.”
“I was wondering what really happened," he went on, either failing to or choosing not to notice her expression of disinterest. "The Corps doesn't talk about it much.”
“No surprise there." She grunted. "It was a total cluster ***, even if they said it was ultimately a small setback in the grand scheme of things. That's also why I'm not talking about it, by the way.”
“Come on…”
"No."
“You know, Sergeant, I could order you to tell me.”
She looked up sharply from her snack, glaring at the impudent butterbar for a few seconds. Then she sighed, shrugging her sturdy shoulders. “Fine, but don’t blame me if you can’t sleep tonight.” She took another spoonful of strawberry ice cream, then set the spoon down in the glass.
“It happened in cycle 203. We were hunting the mad scientist Dr. Monette Santos, and eventually tracked her down to the planet Crick. The decision was made to deploy half a platoon of Marines to raid her compound and capture her.”
“Santos,” he said. “She’s the one who made those humans with four arms and tadpole tails, right?”
“Honestly, that’s the least of what she did.” She took another spoonful of sundae. “She was one of the biggest bigshots in the Tri-Tachyon Science Corps, but her methods got too extreme even for them. After they kicked her out, she wandered the Sector for a bit, offering the kind of gene mods everyone wants to have but no-one wants to admit to.”
“Anyway, she’d set up her lab into the end of a gorge in some nameless desert; only way in was through the front. It was a deceptively uninteresting place aside from its location; a bunch of dull grey rectangular plasticrete structures build into the rock faces, surrounding an open central square, with no visible defenses. The only unusual thing about it was the bacon trees.”
“Bacon trees?”
“Yeah. She’d took a bunch of Domain species - fir, oak, orange, palm, even banana - and modified them. Instead of fruits or acorns, they grew these long strips of bacon. Tastes just like the real thing too, by all accounts. She’d planted them around the place as a decoration or something. Pretty kitschy, if you ask me.”
“In any case, we dropped at the mouth of the canyon and moved two kilometers up as stealthily as we could. We couldn’t find any sensors or traps as we moved up, so we figured we were pretty safe. Got to within fifty meters of the main underground access, but there was no cover between us and the compound except those damn trees, so the lieutenant decided to have a squad-level leapfrog, with the First Squad leading.”
“First’s leader was a close friend of mine. Staff Sergeant Leone Franconi. Not a superhero by any means, but a good, capable leader, always an example to his men. A bit of a comedian, too, which is kind of an odd thing for a NCO to be, but it made us love him even more.”
“Anyway, he took Alpha advancing slowly up the pass while I waited behind with Second Squad.” She paused, inhaling sharply. “Young Ferguson was on point for Fireteam Alpha. He’d made it to within three meters of the nearest tree when the ground under him exploded.
“Sentry guns popped out from all over and started cutting loose. Sharif, Carrington and Lee all went down in the first four seconds. Then the security bots emerged, spilling from out of every building - there were at least three dozen of them. We dropped to the ground, let them have everything we had, but there were so many of them. For every three we took out, they took one of us with them.”
“Then the mortars landed - not just on First, but on Second as well. I lost Sergeant Mendez and three quarters of Charlie in the blink of an eye, and almost all of us were stunned for a few lethal moments - during which three more of Leone’s squad died. And when we tried to get in a strike craft to help, this SAM launcher popped out of nowhere and blasted it out of the sky.”
She took a deep breath again, taking a moment to get her pulse under control. “I think my heart just about stopped when the light tank drove out from the central ramp. Luckily, Ramirez managed to knock it out with his plasma lance - but not before it got its own shot off. The explosion threw up a huge cloud of dust and rock fragments, and when it cleared First Squad was gone. Everyone was dead or incapacitated except Leone - and he was in no shape to fight.”
“The HE round had blown large chunks off him across the landscape, and he was desperately trying to crawl to safety with one working leg and half an arm.” Hands shaking, she stared down at the ice cream, jabbing at it halfheartedly with the spoon. “Despite all our efforts, we could never hope to cover him all the way back to us - not with the volume of fire they were still putting out. All we could do was watch painfully as he moved inch by agonizing inch across the sand, trailing blood all the way, the bots moving up behind a withering hail of bullets to apply the coup de grace.”
She looked up again, her eyes glistening. “I still remember the last thing he said to me.”
“What did he say?”
““Don’t come, Cory,” he cried out. “It’s a trap. It’s not a bacon tree… it’s a ham bush.””
