-15-
“Colonel? Colonel Riggs?”
I opened my eyes and shut them again. I was lying on my back on my bunk, half-dreaming. Being aboard a modern space craft wasn’t exactly an exercise in privacy. When you were command personnel, you were lucky if you didn’t have to take calls in the shower.
“What is it?”
“Something unusual, sir. On the surface—uh, I mean the ‘hull’ of Phobos.”
I recognized the voice now. It was none other than Captain Sarin herself, my newly appointed lead on ops. I vaulted myself off the bunk and groaned.
“On my way.”
I skipped a shower and headed up two decks, taking the tubes. Our tube system was a primitive way of moving around on a large ship that worked better than we’d expected. We didn’t have many elevators in our modern carriers. Using a tube was easier and more reliable, especially in battle. They were simply empty shafts with grav plates at the bottom. If you got into the one with the big arrow pointing up, it propelled you up. If you got into the other, you went shooting down.
They were a bit tricky to get used to. Getting off at the right floor required shooting out an arm and catching the edge of the opening when you passed it. Really, it was more like controlled falling than a proper elevator system. Without nanotized strength and speed, it would have been quite dangerous.
When I got to the top of the ship, I must have been blinking. Maybe I was napping, just for a fraction of a second. I rammed my head into a cushion at the top of the shaft and a red light came on, warning me I’d gone too far.
I hand-over-handed it back to the opening and crawled out onto the deck.
“Sleepy, sir?” Jasmine asked.
She was standing over me, smiling. I got to my feet, but couldn’t quite bring myself to smile back.
“I need coffee,” I said.
She didn’t hand me a cup—not that I’d expected her to.
“I’ll have a mug brought to the command table,” she said. She turned and walked that way.
I followed, rubbing at my eyes and sighing. I grabbed the coffee when it came and downed it. The stuff was too cold and tasted faintly of plastic.
“What have you got?” I asked when I could focus both my eyes at once.
“See this? At the north pole?”
“Dust? You got me out of my bunk after three and half hours for a puff of dust? It’s probably just a meteor strike. The thing is as big as a moon.”
“Let me back up the recorded vid, sir.”
She did so by gliding her finger over a slide bar on a virtual control panel. I was glad she was doing it. I had a hard time nudging those things just the way they liked it. Sometimes, I missed actual physical knobs and buttons.
I watched as the vid played forward again. Instead of a single puff, a dozen of them showed up in sequence.
“Not just one meteor, but a shower? How long has this been going on?”
“For about an hour. We thought it was some kind of shower too, but now we’re pretty sure it isn’t. Here’s why.”
She fast forwarded to something from a few minutes ago. Instead of an impact—it seemed like an explosion. An explosion on the surface of the ship.
I grinned. “I like the look of that. What is it? External venting? Maybe all that firepower did break something inside.”
“We just don’t know. But you left orders to alert you in case the situation changed.”
I took a hit off my coffee and winced. Then I nodded. “You did good, Sarin. Let’s keep a close eye on—”
Thud.
That was the only way I can describe the sound we all heard then. It was a thud, and it came from our hull. Everyone on the command deck looked around, frowning.
“External cameras!” I shouted, my mind leaping to conclusions I didn’t like. Not at all.
“Switching, sir.”
In sequence, the cameras came up and gave me a one second shot of the hull outside from a dozen different angles.
“Put them all up at once. And sound general quarters.”
Jasmine selected mosaic mode. Then she tapped a big red triangle near her hand. The lighting changed on the command deck and various noise-making devices began going off up and down the decks.
We didn’t even talk, nor did we answer the queries of baffled staffers who came to circle around. Jasmine and I both stared at each of those external views in turn.
“There it is, on camera fourteen. Select and expand.”
The image leapt up into full view. What had been an odd shadow became a much more sinister image. Our visual equipment was excellent, even in starlight.
“What the hell is that thing?” Miklos said.
I glanced at him, then back at the thing crawling over our hull. I felt like telling him he was away from his new post again, but I didn’t have the heart and I didn’t really care.
“That, Nicolai, is something new. It reminds me of the crawling marines the Macros made to attack our ships once. But it’s not Macro tech. It’s too humanoid.”
We watched it as we talked. It wasn’t like flesh, but it wasn’t like machine, either. I got the feeling it was some kind of hybrid. A man with robotic parts, maybe. Or a robot with long fingers and dark, ropy arms.
Whatever it was, it didn’t have a head. Instead, stalks pointed out from the ribcage—if it had a ribcage—and directed what looked like spherical optical pickups in every direction.
“Hmm,” I said, watching it still. I never took my eye off it for a second. “See how its prying at all the hatches? It’s looking for a way in.”
“Could there be some kind of alien race here in the Alpha Centauri System?” Miklos asked. “I don’t get it. We should have known if there was something here. We’ve been traveling through for years.”
“There are lots of possibilities, and pretty much none of them are good,” I said.
“Give me a few, Colonel.”
“It could be from Phobos. The Blues might have made themselves a new type of robot. When those puffs fired up, maybe they were launching these.”
“Disturbing, but unlikely. I’ve been reviewing the data. It looks like something was landing there, not taking off.”
“Right. Theory two: they’re Macros. They’ve gotten into this area—maybe they’ve wiped Earth, or are preparing to. This beast is something new they’ve only recently built to infiltrate our ships.”
“I guess it’s possible, but not without the appearance of another ring we don’t know about.”
“What is your third theory, Colonel?” Jasmine asked.
We glanced up at her. I realized I’d fallen into my old habit of talking things over with Miklos and leaving out everyone else. Maybe that bothered Jasmine, but it was hard to tell. She usually kept her face neutral. You had to guess what she was feeling unless she was really upset. Her style was very different from Sandra’s—I’d always known what that girl was thinking. She’d always made her feelings extremely clear.
“The third possibility is that this is from the Empire itself.”
Miklos scoffed at that. “I would be very surprised. It seems advanced and subtle. Neither term fits the Imperial forces I’ve seen so far.”
“Granted,” I said. “But we’re now passing on a direct route between the Helios ring and the ring to the Solar System. This is where I would lay a trap or a drone scout, if I had one. Note the timing. First, Phobos runs into a series of strange falling objects. Now, we’re encountering them.”
Miklos’ eyes widened. Jasmine’s fingers flew.
“The timing is about right, sir,” she said. “We are at about the same point in space that Phobos was when the bombardment began.”
I nodded. Theory number three was looking stronger all the time.
“Alert all the other ships. Everyone is to do a sweep of their hulls, looking for intruders.”
“Should we destroy them, sir?”
I had to think about that. “Yeah. Fire first and dissect later. I’m going down to the sally port to suit up.”
Jasmine opened her mouth as if to object. I knew she didn’t want me to personally take part in any dangerous missions. But instead of listing reasons I shouldn’t go, she stopped herself and relayed my warning to the rest of the fleet. That was something else I’d never seen Sandra manage to do. If Sandra didn’t like what you were doing, you were going to hear about it whether you wanted to or not. Come to think of it, Miklos had been the same way lately. I was glad to have Sarin back on tactical ops, and I thought to myself privately that it might be awhile before she got another command.
I headed back to the tubes. I’d already switched my smart-cloth suit into under-armor mode. That changed the formation, removing rank insignia, pleats and cuffs. The clothing needed to slide easily into the armor shell, like a pair of silk pajamas.
The truth was I was looking forward to taking a couple of marines with me out onto the hull and blasting whatever spy-bot we’d spotted out there. I hadn’t seen real action in quite a while.
I made it down two decks and was halfway to the third, the one where the sally ports were located, when something flickered just beyond my range of vision. I turned around, looking back up the tube behind me.
A nightmare glided silently toward me. I knew in an instant what it was—what it had to be. It was one of those things, the things I’d seen on the outside of Defiant. Only now, it was inside the hull and coming at me with pincher-like foreclaws fully extended.
I forgot about everything else when I saw the little monster. I didn’t worry about how it had gotten from outside the ship to inside, or what it could do to me with those snapping claws. All that was in my mind was turning around so I could grasp it hand-to-hand.
The tube was only about three feet across, which made it virtually impossible to turn around quickly. I gave it a try anyway. I formed a ball and did a summersault. All this happened in a split-second while the intruder and I fell toward the lower decks in tandem.
As I flipped around to face the thing, I realized I had a few options. With less than a second to go, you have to make what could be your last choices on this plane of existence count for something.
I could have gone for my com-link, summoning help with a touch. That would have been all I did, however. I chose instead to draw my beamer. I didn’t want to be dead in the tube with a few tsking emergency people scraping out what was left an hour from now. Fight first, sound the alarm second—that was my motto.
I brought the beamer up, but the invader was right in my face by that time. Damn, it was ugly. Up close, I saw a smooth black carapace with a metallic sheen. It was veiny and ridged in seemingly random patterns. I could see the optical stalks coming out of the torso, swiveling and tracking me. The two foreclaws extended with fantastic speed, opening wide like jaws. Inside those serrated claws I saw metal. Slivery-bright, like surgical steel. There were spines too, all over the thing. I winced even before we made contact; this was going to hurt.
I didn’t have time to fire before we were in close combat. There just wasn’t time to get the weapon up, aim and press the firing stud. The fact I didn’t have time to do whatever I wanted spoke to the monster’s speed. It was, if I had to judge, as fast as Sandra herself. That’s saying something, because she had been the fastest human I’d ever met.
As we closed, I reached up my left hand to grab one of those foreclaws. The alien—or whatever the hell it was—tried to snip off my hand but missed. I clamped down on what passed for its wrist, and felt an explosion of blood in my hand. I held on, but I’d just grabbed a load of spines that shot through my palm and out the back of my hand in six places.
My right hand, the one with the hand beamer, I played differently. I shoved the gun forward touching the spot where the head ought to be if it had had one. I squeezed the trigger instantly—but nothing happened.
I realized I’d heard a metallic crunch just as I applied pressure to the trigger. The thing had put its second claw around the gun and cut it in half. I guess I should have been glad that it hadn’t managed to cut my hand off at the wrist instead, but I knew the night was still young and this dance wasn’t over with yet.
What now? That was the thought I had, but my hands were way ahead of my cortex this time. I grabbed the claw that had just chopped my gun in half and shoved it toward the other claw, which was snapping at my face like a springtime turtle.
The move was a crazy one and it cost me another half-dozen puncture wounds, but it was all I had. I was fighting on instinct now. I think my strength surprised the critter. I heard metal squeal, as if ball-joints had been bent in directions planners had never foreseen.
One claw went into the other, and snap, there was a spark as something fell off. Fortunately, it was a piece of my dance partner rather than a finger.
It went into a frenzy then. It was as if I’d pained it, which I’d started thinking was impossible. Eye-stalks rolled and the remaining claw thrashed in my grip. I was forced to use both hands to control the one claw, and the monster began bludgeoning me with its stump. I saw stars that had no names each time it connected with my scalp.
Roaring and using my legs against the walls of the tube for leverage, I bent back the second claw. Back and back it went, all the way over into the zone with the eyestalks. It snapped off two of these, and shuddered in what I was sure now was agony.
Then the second arm broke at the shoulder. With a shout of victory, I wrenched it loose, pulling it right out of the socket.
I stared at what came with it. Bones. Metal bones. That’s the only way I can describe what I saw. I’d not really known what to expect, but I hadn’t expected this eclectic mix of red meat, tendons and shaped-steel bone.
The monster went limp in my arms. I let it go, and it fell all the way to the bottom of the tube system, tumbling and clattering as it went.
I took a few seconds to stare and frown down after it.
“What the f*ck was that thing?” I asked no one, breathing hard.
Blood poured from my hands and my scalp. I barely noticed or cared. I tapped my com link with numbed fingers.
“Kwon?” I asked, “could you come to tube eight.”
“I’m already at the sally port, sir.”
“Really? Is everything all right there?”
“Um, not exactly sir. When I got here, the port was open. Most strange.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I think I know why. Come to tube eight.”
“Right away, Colonel.”
I let myself drift down toward the monster which lay limp at the lowest deck level, the entrance to the hold. I moved warily. One never knew what a newly contacted life form was capable of.
When I got close, I became fairly certain it was dead. That presumed, of course, that it had been alive in the first place.
I sensed another gliding presence behind me, and whirled, bringing up my bloody hands defensively.
“What’s that you’ve got there, sir?” Kwon asked.
His hulking form filled the tube to the point where I couldn’t see beyond him.
I shook my head. “I don’t have a clue. Let’s take it to medical.”
On a modern Star Force ship, the people in medical had training no human beings in ships of the past had ever received. Healing the sick was only part of their jobs—and a rather small part since we rarely were injured so badly it took more than nanites to repair our bodies. But they had other missions which were just as critical. One of them was analysis and containment of newly discovered alien life.
Doctor Kate Swanson was in medical at the time. Her ship and her medical bay aboard Gatre had been abandoned, so she’d been backing up the staff on this ship. When Kwon and I arrived carrying the monstrosity from the tubes, I quickly pronounced her to be our new chief of xenology.
“Here Kate,” I said, tossing the remains on a table, “see what you can figure out about that thing.”
She didn’t move, but the table did. A dozen black tentacles extended from the base and probed the still form.
“Restraints!” Kate said.
The table instantly obeyed, clamping no less than six steel hands onto the thing.
“Was this the alien on the hull?” she asked.
“I believe so. It found a hatch and slipped inside. Not sure how it did that. Not sure how it even functions, or what it is. That’s why we brought it here.”
Dr. Swanson’s eyes were very serious. She walked around it, not getting too close. I approved of her caution. We’d had things like this self-destruct before. I frowned at that memory.
“You’d better do a complete scan. Maybe its mission is a suicidal one.”
She nodded and began the procedure. She kept her distance, and brought over more tentacles from a neighboring table to help clamp down everything that looked like it could move on the body.
I shook my hands and sent a splatter of blood flying.
“Sorry,” I said. “My hands are stinging and going numb at the same time. Like I slept on them or something.”
She glanced at me and Kwon appraisingly. She waved for a nurse, who came over to us nervously. I noticed that none of the other medical people had gathered enough courage to approach.
“Get on that table please, Colonel. We’ll do some quick patch-up work.”
“Not necessary,” I said.
Sure, my injuries burned, but I knew the nanites would fix me up within hours. She looked at me squarely in the eye. Her gaze was stern.
“Are we in a combat situation?” she asked.
“Not at the moment.”
“Then get on that table. Do you know your scalp is open and dangling? It will take a regrow if we don’t reattach that quickly.”
I lifted a torn-up hand and gingerly probed my head. Sure enough, a tatter piece of flesh was hanging there.
“I thought something was wrong,” I admitted. “It’s hanging by a thread, isn’t it? Keeps tickling my neck.”
“I thought you liked it like that, sir,” chuckled Kwon. “Other people have big earrings hanging down—you cut out the middle man!”
Kwon went off into a gale of laughter at his own joke. I politely joined in, fumbling to pat my scalp into place with damaged fingers.
“I’m experiencing some numbness,” I admitted. “Probably nerve damage.”
Dr. Swanson turned away from her alien monstrosity and came to me quickly. She probed my hands and face, frowning fiercely.
“Venom,” she pronounced. “On the table.”
I finally obeyed her. She went to work with quick hands. “Those spines—they’re wet, and not just with your blood. You took a grim chance tangling with that thing. What if it had been pumped full of chemical agents tailor-designed to take out our kind, like that girl and her tooth—what was her name?”
“Alexa?” I asked. “Is that what you’re talking about? And for the record, I didn’t have any choice about engaging the creature. It came after me in close quarters.”
“There’s always an excuse with you. Why didn’t you just shoot it?”
I felt like arguing, but my will to do so was fading. Lying down seemed to accelerate the progress of the venom.
“Did you drug me?” I asked. My voice sounded odd…weak.
“No, the intruder did. I need two personnel over here, now. Prep him for a full blood transfusion. Let’s go, people!”
“Shit,” I mumbled, then the numb sensation reached my vitals and I lost consciousness.