Free Cold War by Adam Christopher

 
    “This is bullshit.”
    First Sergeant Furusawa’s voice came back over the comms. “I don’t like your attitude, Marine.”
    “Sorry,” said Anderson. “This is bullshit, Sergeant. ”
    The sergeant laughed. “Better.”
    It was there again: the pulse, the tick; something echoing across the comms, weaving around in the empty space behind the voices. It sounded like interference, the rhythmic tap of something electrical shorting, but that was impossible.
    Then the comms clicked off and Private Grec was left with nothing but the sound of the blood in her ears and the schtomp schtomp schtomp of seven pairs of boots wading through the snow.
    Corporal Anderson was right, Grec thought. It was bullshit. Icy, covered-in-six-feet-of-snow, a hundred light years from anywhere bullshit .
    What the Special Operations team had been doing here was a mystery—at least, a mystery to those who really needed to know, which at the current moment included Sergeant Furusawa and her two three-person fireteams trudging onwards from the drop zone. The planet had a name, a real one, according to the brief—Hrostar—but to the Fleet it was just Warworld 3663. A lump of ice, big enough for Earth-type gravity, but slightly too far out of its sun’s Goldilocks Zone to comfortably support much life worth writing home about. And since contact with the Spec Ops team had been lost five cycles ago, the Fleet war catalog had been updated, changing the planet’s entry to Warworld 3663Ω—Omega for “danger unspecified.” The Spec Ops team had apparently met that danger, and now Furusawa’s search and rescue ground team was here to find them.
    Of course, Grec and the others—Anderson and Alonso in her team, Bowen, Palladio and Khouri in the Psi-team—all knew what “unspecified danger” really meant.
    The Spiders were here.
    Relentless, implacable, totally alien; the Spiders were a machine gestalt swarming across the galaxy, consuming—literally—whole planets, even stars. The eight-legged war machines ranged in size from just a few meters across to the giant Mother Spiders, as big as a moon, with legs long enough, powerful enough to crack the crust of a planet.
    But if Warworld 3663Ω really was a mostly lifeless lump of rock, then there was no reason for the Spiders to have paid it any heed. The machines seemed only to target inhabited planets, preferably those under the control of the Fleet. The Spiders were less an enemy, more a plague, a contagion . And after decades of conflict, the Fleet were becoming more and more desperate as the Spiders kept coming, and coming, and—
    Hey.
    Grec snapped out of her thoughts, and smiled. As the SAR team walked on through the snow, Grec spun on her heel, keeping pace but walking backwards through the tracks of the marine in front. Psi-Marine Maryam Khouri was on rear point, Grec in the center of the line. Grec gave a thumbs-up and Khouri did the same, signaling that all was well, then Grec turned back around without missing a step. Behind the opaque visor of her helmet, she smiled to herself and focused with her mind, pushing the feeling out, hoping that Khouri, three places behind, would be able to sense it. Grec had no psi-ability, and the Psi-Marines weren’t supposed to communicate with the regular forces like that, officially. But it was common. Sometimes the quickest way to get a message across without anyone else knowing—enemy included—was to use your mind. On the long tour aboard the Union Starship Hit and Run , the two of them had worked at it, Maryam insisting that everyone, even Kat, had the power buried up there somewhere in their cerebrum. With a little effort, you could make yourself heard.
    “Back to work, Marine.”
    Grec glanced up. The Sergeant’s voice was loud and clear in her helmet—the private two-way channel—unlike the message Khouri had planted in Grec’s mind.
    “Always at work, Sergeant.”
    Grec dragged her legs through the snow. The others remained