"Aftermath" by Chris A Jackson

Aftermath

By Chris A. Jackson & James K Bowers

Dannel ached.  The pounding, all-over ache assaulted his senses with shrieks from every muscle and nerve in his battered frame.  Blood?  No, he decided, not his own but sticky on his skin and clothes just the same.  “How long?” his groggy mind asked.

The floor was hard and cold beneath him and a dim light – Marrik’s? -- shone at an eerie angle, rising from the floor a few feet to his left to cast surreal shadows on the walls.  Why so dark in here?  His weapon lay on the floor to his right and instinctively his hand groped for it.  Gaining purchase, he dragged it closer with a rasping sound that echoed in the silence.  The feel of the stark, cool metal offered him some primal comfort.

He struggled to a sitting position and bone-jarring pain surged up Dannel’s spine dashing itself like a wave on the back of his skull.  He winced and sardonically acknowledged to himself that the battle must have gone well if he could accomplish so much.  The surrounding carnage and the fact that he seemed intact told him it could easily have been much worse.  “How much worse?” he thought with a start.

There were bodies and parts of bodies everywhere.  His eyes sought familiar shapes among the dead.  The light – Marrik’s!  The dim light escaping from beneath his crumpled body shone an ugly red.  Dead.  Very much so.  No doubts -- torn nearly in half.

There… some ten feet away… Lirra.  Slumped against the wall, bloody, a gash in her face running from her forehead down her right cheek nearly to her chin.  Her weapon was still in her hand.  Well, she never was one to retreat.

Dannel revised his initial assumption.  The battle had not gone well at all.  He crawled across the gore-strewn floor to Lirra.  Maybe, just maybe…

Yes!

His blood-slicked fingers fumbled at the satchel slung over the dead woman’s cooling corpse.  He knew she was dead without checking.  Wounds like that bled if there was any blood left and any heart beat to push it.  Lirra wasn’t bleeding.

There was nerve damage in his hand; two fingers were dead and the others felt on fire.  He rummaged through the contents of the medkit until he found the long cylinder that was the syringe of Morphotrex.  He twisted the binder clip off with his teeth, ripped off the protective needle cover and slammed the stainless steel hypodermic into his leg.  The drug injected automatically.

There was enough stimulant and pain killer in that syringe to have his whole platoon doing handsprings; it cut through the haze of pain, nausea and fatigue admirably.  He managed to get to his feet.

There was a grinding sensation from the broken bones in his hip and leg, but no pain.  Yeah, that Morphotrex was great stuff.  He’d used it before, but only during down-time for the best buzz of his life.  Now it was just barely keeping him alive.  He took stock of his injuries and figured that it would keep him going for maybe an hour.

That might be enough.

He hefted his weapon, checking the charge and the counter on the grenade launcher.  It surprised him to find the feeder empty and the power pack down by half.  He didn’t remember firing twelve grenades, but he didn’t remember much of the rest of the fight either.  He started jamming fresh rounds into the feeder as he worked his way over to Marrik.

“Jeez, Rik, wha’d they hit you with, a mass driver?”

He toed the carnage that had been his sergeant and recovered the lamp.  A few swipes with his sleeve wiped off enough of the liquefied NCO to give him a better view of just how bad this screw-up mission had gone.

It was bad.

Nineteen of his squad lay all around the domed chamber where they had stumbled into a full battalion of Grell.  Twelve men and seven women - people he’d eaten with, slept with, lived with and now died with - all gone.  His upper lip twitched twice in succession as a thousand memories of a hundred fire fights raged behind his eyes.

“Well, at least the bastards paid cash for it.”  The piles of Grell dead were testimony to the fact that his team had made the enemy pay for their victory.  If it was a victory.  He was alive, and if any Grell had survived, he wouldn’t have been.

He reached down and retrieved the power magazine from the Sergeant’s weapon.  It was only half full, but better than nothing.  If he was lucky he would need the extra firepower.

“Thanks, Sarge,” Dannel said, stuffing the mag into his pocket.  “Now to find the El-Tee.”

It took a while; there wasn’t much left, and the satchel that had been strapped to his back was torn open, its contents strewn about among pieces of Lieutenant. The weapons the Grell used were utterly alien and did to human tissue what a fork did to eggs in a hot skillet. There were only two things he needed from his former commander, the thick cylinder with the black-on-yellow propeller symbol, and the key.  It took longer than he liked to find the latter, long enough for Dannel to start feeling his leg again.

“Damn!” he swore through gritted teeth as he jammed the cylinder and key into the medkit.  There were more painkillers in there, but no more Morphotrex, and he didn’t trust himself with anything that would blunt his reflexes.  With almost a kilometer to climb he was doubtful about his chances.

“Well, mates,” he told his dead companions, “there ain’t nothin’ for it.  Sorry to leave you all in this stinkin’ hole, but you know, mission first and all that.”

Dannel began working his way over the heaps of Grell dead toward the chamber’s upper exit.  This was what the Grell were defending, what the humans who had been driven underground by the dreadful Grell bioweapons must never again reach.  This was the tunnel to the surface.

“Sunlight, here I come,” Dannel said to no one in particular, unless the ghosts of his dead mates lurked somewhere in the shadows.   He hoped secretly that they did; a spirit escort to the world above, the world of the Grell, the world that had been taken from them.  The world that Dannel had never seen.

His boots scraped against the dry blue-white flesh of the dead Grell, flesh shattered and torn by fragmentation grenades and phased energy beams.  The Sci-Corps said the Grell were silicon-based; Dannel didn’t know about that.  He didn’t know that every poison, toxin and radioactive isotope the Sci-Corps had tried on them had been totally ineffectual.   He did know they were hard to kill, harder than people, since they had no real internal organs or central nervous systems.  He also knew that enough heat or kinetic energy cooked them or broke them into enough pieces to kill them.  Standard rounds, bullets, that is, didn’t do much to Grell except get their attention.  It was a lesson that humanity had taken too long to learn.  The learning curve had cost them a world.

Dannel worked his way past the last of the dead, pausing only once to make sure one of the enemy was going to stay dead.  He didn’t want to waste any of his weapon’s dwindling charge, but the last thing he wanted was a not-quite-dead enemy to kill him before he could deliver the package.  That was all that mattered at this point, not him, not his friends, not honor or duty or all those other things that they spouted at you to get you to spend your life for them...  just the package...

The Sci-Corps eggheads said that this was their last hope, the one weapon left to mankind that could possibly defeat the Grell.  Dannel didn’t know what it was, and he didn’t much care so long as it worked.  He’d been fighting the Grell all his life, hiding in the deep tunnels, digging deeper for safety, setting traps to keep the enemy from rooting them out...  It had become an endless cycle to him, the only reason to live was to fight, and the only reason to fight was to live.  That was why he’d volunteered for this cockeyed mission, a chance to break the cycle, one way or another.

He hadn’t expected to survive the mission, but then, he was a soldier, it wasn’t his job to survive.

Dannel kept climbing, watching for Grell as he struggled up the broken rock of the ancient mine shaft.  Finally, he found evidence that he was getting close.  All the old machinery was rusted and broken, but it was human machinery, not the slick-looking gray ceramic stuff that the Grell made.  He ran his hand over an old piece of steel something-or-other and smiled.  They weren’t beaten yet.

He’d never been this high, this near the surface, and he struggled a little in the thin air.  They’d all been briefed on what to expect on the surface, but no one really knew what was up there any more.  They’d been shown an old map of the mine shafts and been told to memorize it, and the elevator shaft was right were it should have been.  Here, however, all the old human machinery had been ripped out, and a shiny slick pad of slate gray sat there instead.  There were no cables, rails or anything, and Dannel didn’t know how the thing worked.  There weren’t any controls that he could see, but there weren’t any controls on any of the Grell weapons they’d captured either.  Not even the Sci-Corps knew how the enemy made their tools do what their tools did, and they’d never been able to make any of them work.

“Well, there’s nothing for it, I guess,” he said to himself, or his ghostly escort, as he stepped gingerly up onto the platform.

Nothing happened.

He looked up the shaft and thought he could see a spot of light somewhere up there, way up there, but there was no way to reach it.  He could feel the shock of his injuries creeping up from his legs.  He was probably bleeding internally, and walking on a broken leg hadn’t done him any good.

“Maybe... if I just sit down... for a bit.”

He didn’t as much sit as collapse, but the floor of the platform was cool against his hands and face.  He let that cool seep into his bones, knowing he shouldn’t, but wanting nothing else right at that moment than to lie down and sleep.  His eyes sagged shut, but there was more than blackness behind them; all he could see were his dead comrades.  He knew he was dreaming when he saw their dead faces speaking to him, Marrik’s pulped visage, Lirra’s torn one, telling him something, something important.  What was it?  What did they have to say?  He couldn’t hear them.  His body felt strange, like it was floating, and his ears popped.

*Wake up, Dannel!*

“Wha...?”

It was Lirra.  She was in his head, and he could finally hear her.  His ears popped again.

*Wake up!*

“Why?”

*Because if you don’t, they’ll win!*

“Win?  Win what?”  He knew there was something...  something important he had to do.

*Everything!* her tattered face screamed in his mind. 

Maybe it was her ghost, and maybe it was Dannel’s own mind fighting through the shock and blood loss.  Dannel really didn’t believe in ghosts, but...

Light stabbed through his closed lids, invading his thoughts, or dreams.  His head hurt with it, and he knew it would hurt worse if he opened his eyes.  He felt a jolt just as his ears popped once more, and he heard some sounds that weren’t familiar.

He opened his eyes.

Sunlight...  It hurt, but it showed him the squad of Grell who were standing staring at him in what he though must be surprise.  They weren’t aiming their weapons at him, they were just staring.  Maybe they thought he was dead.  Maybe he was dead.

“Not yet,” he mumbled, shifting the muzzle of his weapon to bring it into line with those astonished alien faces before pressing the firing stud.  The weapon jumped in his weak grasp, and he relished the deafening CRUMP as the grenade detonated in the middle of the group of enemy soldiers.

He rolled off the platform and fired again, this time burning down two of the Grell who had managed to escape the grenade reasonably unscathed.  Something crackled over his head, and he fired another grenade blindly in that direction, rolling again in hopes of evading the next barrage of enemy fire.

But there wasn’t any.

Dannel peered over the edge of the hovering platform.  All of the enemy were down.  There had been five or six, he thought, though it was hard to be sure how many in their current state.

He looked around.

To his surprise, he was outside, nothing overhead but blue dotted with white fluffy things.  It was something he had never experienced, and it made his head swim.  The landscape was utterly bare, of course; the aftermath of the Grell bioweapons that had scoured the planet of all plant life.  They’d never understood why the Grell killed all the plants, other than the fact that they didn’t need them; not until recently.  The Grell ecology was based on chemosynthesis, not photosynthesis, and they were in the process of converting Earth to their ecology, sowing the soil with chemosynthetic organisms that were the Grell equivalent of bacteria.

Dannel didn’t know it yet, but he was here to change all that.

He left his weapon behind as he crawled over to the remnants of the Grell squad.  This would be just as good a spot as any to plant the device.

It took some time and effort to reach the spot, since the Morphotrex was long gone and pain and blood loss were taking their toll.  He shrugged out of the pack and retrieved the big cylinder, then the key.

“Okay, boys,” he said, addressing the absent Sci-Corps specialists who had designed the package, “let’s see what you’ve got.”

He jammed the pointed end of the cylinder into the ground, inserted the key in the top and turned it without hesitation.  If it was a bomb of some kind, the end would have been quick, but it wasn’t a bomb, and Dannel stared in wonder as the thing cracked open.

It split open in sections, a dark brown substance crumbling from around an inner cylinder.  Then that cylinder split and fell away, and the curious green thing that sat inside was unfurled to the wind, air and sunlight.  He stared curiously at the thing for a while, wondering what manner of life form it was, for it was obvious that the thing was alive.  It just sat there, wiggling in the faint breeze, soaking up the sun, its little rootlets fixed firmly in the fertile soil at its base.

“Well do something, for cripes sake,” he told the thing, doubting for the first time the sanity of the Sci-Corps geniuses who had thought up this plan that had cost them so dearly.  “If all my friends died for you, you little green piece of crap, you better do something.”

It was doubtful that the little thing heard Dannel and even less likely that it responded to his threat, but he did notice that the little creature was indeed having an effect on the bodies of the Grell that surrounded it.  Slowly, very slowly, the blue-white flesh of the Grell bodies was crumbling, disintegrating down to dust.  Something in this little creature, some faint biochemical given off by the tiny leaflets, was destroying the Grell bodies.

“Well, that’s something alright,” Dannel admitted, leaning back on the medkit and watching the little thing as it swayed in the breeze.  For some reason, despite his injuries, Dannel felt like smiling, and he did.  Some deeply hidden part of his humanity responded to the little green thing, and it made him happy.

“Think I’ll just take a nap here, little green thing,” he said, pillowing his head on the satchel.  “You just keep doin’ what you’re doin’.”

And he did.

And it did.

And the little tree took root and started to grow.