Authors: Chris J. Randolph
"That might just work," Jack said as he watched. He turned away from the prayer circle and started looking a place to stage an ambush, and he found it. A thin gouge in the land ran within ten meters of the circle, possibly a creek. "Let's consider this a top priority. I want eyes on the circle around the clock."
They observed as a group until the sun dipped below the horizon, then two stayed behind while the rest left for the camp.
The alien monks' unchanging patterns made them easy targets. During daylight, they came out every three hours to perform their ceremony, which lasted for twenty-two minutes and thirty seconds. Their movements and positions were always precisely the same.
Long distance observation revealed more of their kind in the city, dressed in identical robes and always traveling in groups of eight. Jack decided the robes would make ideal disguises, and he set his sights on acquiring a set.
After a week of watching, the team moved into the nearby ravine, waited for the right moment and then struck in the middle of the monks' prayer session. They did it with knives, their work intentionally messy in order to make it look like a wild animal attack, then dragged the corpses back into the wilderness. The bodies left a trail of amber blood that glimmered in the sun.
In the forest, the team stripped the monks and left them for the scavengers to dispose of. The corpses belonged to yet another new species, not particularly humanoid but close enough for the robes to fit.
The monks were bipedal with backwards hinged knees. Each arm split into two forearms at the elbow, both ending in identical four fingered hands. The head was just a bulb at the top of two thin stalks, carrying a pair of eyes and nothing else. Their mouth and ears were instead located on their slender torso, which was also where their brains were housed.
The fact none of this shocked Jack revealed that his threshold for weird shit had jumped up a few notches.
A squad of jackrabbits came out to investigate the disappearance, and they sniffed around and chattered over the evidence for hours before returning to the city. A new choir of monks replaced the originals the very next day, but were now protected by pairs of bored looking jackrabbits who stood off to the side and kept watch.
Back at the base camp, couriers arrived from Al Saif carrying new and more detailed orbital scans. Most were focused on five hot spots arranged in a wide circle around the city's center. Command assumed them to be generators, and they were each marked as high priority targets. There was no info about how the generators worked, but their destruction would surely deal a significant blow, and maybe even cause a chain reaction that could take down the entire colony.
Orders were orders.
There wasn't any opportunity for a test run. Jack didn't know how well the disguises would hold up under scrutiny, and if they were spotted, they'd have the enemy actively searching for them, making any further operations in the region significantly more difficult. It would all have to happen in one fell swoop.
On the day of the mission, all forty Bravos gathered at the edge of the wilderness and waited for nightfall. Only eight were going in, while the others secured the escape route and waited to provide cover fire.
The infiltrators were broken into two teams. Jack led the fire-support team, which included Charlie, Nikitin, and Albright, each armed with an assault rifle and frag grenades, while Trash headed up the demolitions team, who carted around bricks of plastic explosive and detonators. They had enough to blow a dam from what Jack understood, and he hoped it was enough.
Night fell and it was time. They painted their faces and arms black, put on their graphite robes and took off across the half-klick between the forest and the city. They made good use of cover, keeping hedge lines and storage containers between themselves and their goal. No sense being seen in the open if they could help it.
Then they came to the great blue city itself, which sat on a bed of roots that held it above the ground. There were gaps between the roots creating natural crawlspaces, and Jack wondered what lived down below... but in a purely academic sort of way. He wasn't in any mood to actually find out. The last thing he wanted to meet was the alien version of a rattlesnake.
They made their way around the perimeter and then headed up one of the wide ramps that connected the inner city to the fields outside. The ramp was much bigger than Jack had originally thought. Logically, he knew how large it was after weeks of careful observation, but that didn't prepare him for the staggering hugeness of it, looking less like machinery and more like a sloping hillside.
Charlie gave him a nudge. "You ready for this?"
"Ready as I'll ever be."
"I can take the lead if you want."
"No. Let's do this," Jack said.
With that, they marched up the ramp single file, and after an uphill hike that felt like an eternity, they were inside. It was instant culture shock. "Keep your heads down," Jack said, but even he was having a hard time of it.
They moved along, and while everything remained foreign and unbelievable in its own way, Jack thought he was starting to understand what he was looking at. The area was an industrial district, complete with big bulbous buildings that could be warehouses. Another kind of walker lined the streets here, longer and lower to the ground than the ones they knew, with dozens of short, stubby legs supporting multiple pod-compartments. Unless Jack missed his guess, they were tractor-trailers.
Flyers filled the air overhead in patterns that mimicked the streets of any large city, but expanded upward. The fine details of each flyer were slightly different but they were all smaller, open-topped versions of the cuttlefish, zooming through the throng of stalagmite-like buildings, and the sprawling network of catwalks which connected them.
The false monks journeyed on, and the industrial setting gave way to a business district full of brightly lit store fronts and street vendors loudly hawking their wares. Every alley led to another market overflowing with foot traffic and wafting out strangely delicious smells. They were the smells of fried vegetables and roasted meats.
A residential area came next, filled with terraced buildings that appeared to be apartment complexes, and interspersed with parks of oddly complex shapes, where adolescent jackrabbits played a game like football. One rabbit would fling a weighted stick to another, who would then grip it with the claw on his back and dash across the obstacle-laden field.
Each district was dense in a way that would make even Manhattan in its prime feel jealous, and the traffic grew thicker the deeper they went.
All the while, the infiltrators kept their heads down and did their best to avoid attention. Jack threaded a route that avoided crowds, and even managed to avoid the many street markets. Every now and again, they passed another coven of hooded monks, and they silently waited to be discovered, but the real monks never paid them any attention.
Too many of Jack's prayers were being answered, and it was starting to make him nervous.
There were many more types of aliens than they'd seen outside. Jackrabbits were plentiful, but the city dwellers were less muscular and sinewy than soldiers, and none wore the black gas-masks. The creatures were playful and lively, and could often be seen talking excitedly and singing in the streets, in brightly colored clothes and jewelry that jingled.
More surprising were the rhinos, who were so different from the soldiers that Jack didn't recognize them at first. Civilian rhinos were much closer to humans in size and proportion, with four average-sized arms, faintly striped beige skin, and no armor to speak of. Not a single one had an insect attached to its back either, and their clothes always left their blowholes uncovered.
Even after Jack had decided that these striped creatures were the rhinos, he still had trouble connecting the two. The idea they could grow five times their original weight and sprout bulletproof armor was simply too fantastic to believe.
There were other species, but none in numbers approaching the rhinos or jackrabbits. There were great tall aliens that stalked through the crowds as a giraffe walks through tall grass, and other hunched-over, skulking creatures that kept to the shadows, but could occasionally be seen darting from one to the next. The strangest thing the Bravos saw was a floating animal with a gelatinous sack for a body, which appeared to be filled with smaller creatures swimming around inside of it. He was like a living aquarium, and it was anyone's guess if either he or his inhabitants were intelligent.
They never saw a pilot anywhere, but with the number of vehicles flitting about, their numbers were obviously healthy. It also occurred to Jack after a couple kilometers that he'd seen several groups of monks, but had yet to see any of that species outside of their robes. He filed that away as another mystery he would likely never answer.
Then they came to the generator complex, which was simply impossible to miss. The massive column of twisting fibers extended from the floor to the canopy above, thinner in the middle like a sticky bridge of fluid slowly pulled apart. Glowing amber cables sprouted everywhere on its surface, and extended out toward the rest of the city like creeping ivy.
The Bravos huddled in the neighborhood at the base of the generator, where foot traffic had grown thin. It wasn't obvious how to get into the facility, or if there even was an entrance. From the looks of things, they might as well have been looking for a door on a tree trunk.
In a hushed voice, Nikitin said, "I don't see a damn doorway, Jack."
Trash groaned. "If there's no way in, the mission's a bust, chief. Our charges wouldn't even dent that thing." He wasn't a problem solver. He got jobs done when directed, but any deviation from the plan stopped him dead in his tracks. Where he picked up demolition skills before joining the Corps was a total mystery, as was his terrible nickname.
Jack tilted his head back and looked up the great height of the thing. He didn't even want to guess at how tall it was, because it dwarfed every skyscraper he'd ever seen. Still, the glowing cables made for interesting terrain, and there appeared to be plenty of hand-holds and ledges. Did he just think what he thought he'd been thinking?
As Jack second guessed his fleeting idea, one of the flyers in the air above slowed and entered a tunnel in the facility's side. The angle from the floor made the entrance itself invisible.
"Who's got some climbing experience?"
"You didn't just ask that," Nikitin said.
Albright, Trash, and one of other demo men raised their hands.
"Good," Jack said. "Looks like there's a docking port for flyers up there. That's where we're getting in. There isn't another option. The rest of you stick to the shadows, and be ready to get the out. Clear?"
"Clear," they all said.
Just then, Jack noticed a pair of rhinos walking in their direction and he motioned for his team to shut up. The two creatures, an adult and child, walked right past the circle of false monks and stopped at the street corner a couple paces away. The adult pulled out a small crystal and looked deep into it, while the child stared up at the mess of traffic above them.
Then the young rhino turned and looked right at Jack, and he knew it saw his face. Its big, bright eyes showed surprise, and then it smiled and waved to him. It tugged its mother's hand, but Jack raised his finger to his mouth in a silent hush. To his amazement, the motion was understood.
The small rhino giggled and waved again, as its mother put the crystal away and started walking, pulling her child along behind her.
Jack heard Albright's voice in his memory, from the day she dissected the alien specimens. "I haven't identified everything yet, but most of it's more like us than not."
Right at that moment, Jack realized what sort of demon he'd become, and he couldn't shake the thought from his head no matter how hard he tried.
The climbers stripped off their robes and left them folded up on the ground. The disguises wouldn't matter, since a group of monks climbing the generator would probably be as suspicious as anything else.
Fortunately, the generator complex was of little interest to the citizens of the blue city and there was no traffic nearby, flying or on foot. Their chances of being seen were small, and if they were lucky, that'd be enough.
Jack didn't like trusting too much in luck.
All four were former corpsmen with their jumpsuits dyed darker colors. Each also wore the standard corps duty pack, with its climbing-harness and built-in rappelling cable. The hooks allowed corpsmen to latch onto each other and form a human chain, great for climbing but also useful in strong winds and flood waters. A large section of Emergency Response training was devoted to the harness' effective use.
Albright was the most confident climber and she volunteered to take lead. They all hooked up to her, then off they went up the side of the massive twisting structure. It felt like they were making quick work of it, but the entry ports remained a long way off, and they seemed only inches closer after a half-hour.
Thankfully, the surface was covered in handles and was as difficult to climb as a good ladder. Albright supposed the handles were for use in zero-g, and her theory made a lot of sense... but things that made too much sense were often wrong in Jack's experience. Jack's experience was surprisingly cynical.
They fell into a comfortable rhythm, ascent interspersed with short rests in shallow alcoves they found, and thanks to the many hand-holds, they never had to backtrack.
At each new rest stop, they could see more of the city stretching out beneath them, and Jack was beginning to admire the view. What was foreign and deformed at first was becoming familiar, reminding him not only of Manhattan, but also of Hong Kong and Mumbai. It was a rainbow of brightly colored clothes, spicy smells and strange produce.
They reached the entry port in less than two hours, a tunnel just barely large enough for one of the flyers to squeeze through, located half-way between the colony's floor and ceiling.