Chapter 6: Bug Hunt

Walker stopped on the hill that overlooked the base, so small in the distance now that he could have covered it with his thumb. Kaz leaned against one of the massive trees beside him, the morning sun bleeding through its branches, watching as he brought up a holographic map on his wrist computer.

“Do they have any idea where the attack came from?” she asked.

“Vaguely, the first sensor was tripped ... here,” he said as he pointed to a location marked with a red dot on the terrain. “The entrance to their hive has to be somewhere close, otherwise they would have tripped some of the other seismic sensors. It’s a pretty big area, scout teams three and four will be searching to the North East and to the West, we’ll be coming up from the South. If we find something, we report it and haul ass out of there. No shooting, this is observation only. Got it?”

“Yeah, I got it. Just as long as we get to take the fight to them later.”

“Don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll be paying them a house call once we have their address.”

“At least we’re out in the bush again,” Kaz said as she took in a lungful of fresh air, “couldn’t get away from the stink of that cleaning fluid.”

“Yeah, it’s not very pleasant. It smelled like they’d dumped about ten gallons of bleach into the compound.”

“If you found it unpleasant, just imagine how it smelled to me,” she said as she tapped her pink nose with a curved claw. “Your kind has five million olfactory receptors, mine has a hundred and fifty million.”

He chuckled, starting off through the rough terrain, hopping over exposed roots and wading through coniferous shrubs.

“Come on Kaz, let’s put that nose to use.”

Kaz and Walker crept through the undergrowth as they made their way between the towering trees, like gigantic pillars of wood that held up the sky, the velvet darkness above the canopy punctuated by the flickering of stars arranged in unfamiliar constellations. They had been walking all day, and now night had fallen, Walker viewing the world in shades of glowing green through his night vision visor. Kaz could see fine with her feline eyes, but right now she was following her sensitive nose, on the trail of something.

“We’ve not seen any local fauna for miles,” Walker whispered, “have you smelled any?”

“Some, yes, but the scents were old and fading. It’s weird Walker, almost as if the whole valley is being slowly stripped of animal life. I can’t be sure if they’re fleeing the Bugs, or if the Bugs are killing them.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Bugs gotta eat too,” she replied with a shrug. “They can’t have brought enough food with them on their ship to feed that many of them for so long.”

“Do we even know what Bugs eat?” Walker mused.

“Nope, and I don’t care. All I need to know is how much tungsten it takes to kill them.”

They stopped near a particularly large tree, Kaz crouching to brush the bare dirt with her furry hand.

“The trail stops here,” she said, “it’s too weak to follow any further.”

“You’re sure it was Bugs?” Walker asked as he took a seat on a nearby root.

“No doubt, and it was strong too. I think I know why that winged Drone followed us for so long without attacking. He wasn’t intending to report our location, he was dropping a pheromone trail. That’s why he smelled so bad, the little bastard was leading his buddies directly to us from the moment he first saw us. Even if we had managed to kill him, it wouldn’t have prevented the attack on Charlie. If he had escaped or not, there would still be a roadmap that would have attracted every Bug in the valley. This is about where we first encountered him,” she said as she sank her nails into the bark of the tree, looking up into its branches. “It’s no coincidence that the trail ends here.”

“Good work, Kaz.”

Walker explored the area around the tree, searching for any signs of footprints or disturbed soil, but he found none. There were no animal calls, no rustling of branches, only the gentle sound of the nearby stream as it trickled over the rocks. They had expected to be able to follow the tracks from the fleeing Bugs back to their source, but once clear of the base they had mysteriously vanished. Kaz had posited that perhaps the Drones had taken to the trees, much like their flying cousins, hopping between the branches like squirrels so as not to leave any footprints that might betray the location of their hive.

Their behavior confused Walker. Sometimes they seemed as smart as a human, and at other times they behaved like mindless insects. There was no logic to it, no pattern. He might have been a soldier first and foremost, but his interest in zoology and natural history compelled him to find answers. If first contact with the Bugs had gone better, perhaps he could have been studying them rather than fighting them.

It was so many years ago now, but he remembered it like it was yesterday, the newsreels flashing in his mind as if he had downloaded them into his brain.

A human colony ship had reached the Betelgeuse star system after astronomers had detected a habitable planet there, a prime candidate for a new settlement. Humanity had been expanding under the banner of the UNN for quite some time, never encountering any sapient species. The eager colonists had found the world already occupied, but when they had attempted to make peaceful contact with this new and undiscovered race, they had been mercilessly attacked. Forty thousand people had been lost to space, their civilian vessel defenseless against the Bugs. It wasn’t clear if that system was even the home of the Betelgeusians and that was increasingly unlikely, but the name had stuck. At the time it was not known why they had attacked, but as more worlds occupied by their species were discovered and humanity had more altercations with their ships, it became apparent that their default response was violence.

Not long after, a Broker ship had shown up in UNN space, the first encounter with an alien race that hadn’t ended in bloodshed. The enigmatic creatures had invited Earth and her colonies to join their Coalition, a collaborative effort between the Brokers and the Krell to ward off Betelgeusian incursions. The UN had accepted, and thus humanity became the third member of the alliance, followed later by the Borealans. It turned out that the Bugs were a problem for everyone, a belligerent race that targeted any planet even remotely capable of supporting them, seeking to take territory by force if it was already claimed.

Walker pulled up his map and switched off his night vision, the amber glow illuminating the tree trunks around him as he checked the three-dimensional representation of the valley.

“We’re about a mile from the first sensor that was tripped. Let’s stay on our toes, the tunnel entrance has to be nearby.”

“Keep one eye on the trees,” Kaz muttered, “we don’t want a scout taking us by surprise again.”

They had been searching for ten hours so far, and they hadn’t found a single trace of the Bugs. Walker was starting to get worried, and Kaz was becoming frustrated.

“Let’s just make camp,” she complained, “blow off some steam. We’re clearly missing something, and going over the same patches of ground another ten times won’t make a Bug hole magically appear where there was none before.”

“Cool it, Kaz,” Walker replied. While the prospect of blowing off steam was attractive, he wasn’t about to let his libido get in the way of his mission. “They have to be here, keep a lookout for disturbed soil.”

“I know what a Bug hole looks like,” she snapped, “and I’m telling you that I don’t smell a damned thing. There are no Bugs here, and there haven’t been any here recently.”

“Have any of the other teams checked in?” Walked asked, gesturing to her heavy pack and the comms equipment within.

“No, not so far.”

“That’s weird,” Walker muttered, his brow furrowing with concern. “Get on the horn to Fleetcom and see if they’ve heard from the other scouts. We’re a little early on our report, but I can’t believe that not one team has found traces of the Bugs yet.”

She sat on a raised root, tapping at the touchscreen on her wrist with her padded fingers. Her expression changed, first confusion, then alarm.

“What’s wrong?” Walker asked.

“I got nothin’, can’t send or receive. The line is dead.”

“What do you mean the line is dead?”

He walked over to her and brought up his own display, examining the connection status bar. It showed nothing, no signal.

“The fucking equipment has probably gone out of sync again,” he grumbled as he opened the pocket on her massive rucksack, flipping open the protective cover on the blocky device and messing with the dials. “I swear to God, if this piece of junk keeps losing connection then I’m...”

No, it was properly synced. Walker turned up the volume on his computer and set it to speaker mode so that Kaz could hear it, playing back the radio channel. A series of bizarre bleeps and pops came through, it was interference of some kind.

“That’s EMI,” Walker explained, “something is jamming us.”

“There’s no storm,” Kaz said as she rose to her feet, her hand hovering near the rifle that was slung across her chest. “The planet is uninhabited, there’s no way that this could be accidental.”