Zombie Starship

by Rok Chillah

  Ridge examined the young leader and the others. "None of them do. Maybe they have a few molecules of Lantz or Mahaffey or Tomson, but they are unique."

  She sat holding her brush tightly in her hands on the table, shoulders squeezed narrowly together with the tension of her thoughts. "Each a unique life, engineered to be disposed like a lab rat after 30, 40, 50 hours."

  Ridge put a hand over her two hands and brush. "We have to focus. We can't do anything for these people, but we might be able to stop Venable once and for all. I think he's called me out for battle."

  "Oh darling," she said with tears in her eyes. She pulled her hands out and caressed his hands in hers. "Please be careful."

  "Ready?" said the young leader. Team members crowded around. They looked relaxed, self-assured, courageous.

  Captain Venable's image smiled and spoke in the view screen as before. "You have an important mission. A stray space object has hit the ship, and there is considerable damage. Yesterday's workpod team managed to get an important milestone under control, and you can bring us a step closer to ultimate success today."

  Ridge whispered to Brenna: "Just another load of food for the mudmen. Watch your step." Brenna put her arm around his back. Her hand squeezed his side with near-painful force, in silent agreement.

  "Thank you and God speed!" said Venable with that wide, pleasant grin. The view screen went blank. The light atop the portal winked red-red-red-red...

  No bleeding man pounding on the window this time, Ridge thought. Not even a warning for this crew. Venable has made sure of that.

  A man and woman with hand-held electronic box controls pushed the sliding doors apart. The work crew walked out onto the platform. The young leader signaled, and the man and woman walked the door shut. As the door slipped closed, and sealed itself with a click and a sigh, the red light stopped winking. A green light started winking in its place. "We are on our way," the young man said proudly. "Let's see what we can do to make the Corporation feel we earn our pay." He raised one arm and signaled to the woman at the controls: "Start us rolling."

  Ridge and Brenna both tensed as they noticed what none of the others had any reason to be suspicious of. In the darkness, just beyond the circle of light shining on wet, drippy surfaces, faint red dots moved. Barely visible smudges of gray light-mudmen heads-moved this way and that. Now they heard the first of those low fluting sounds. One mudman uttered a long, soft breath, and another elsewhere replied in the same wistful, melancholy timber.

  As the platform gave its first little jerk, and the bicycle chain stretched between pulleys started a greasy rattle, Ridge heard a series of clicking sounds he recognized from some past life. "Down!" he said, and pushed Brenna onto the platform. She did not fight him, but buckled at the knees and fell onto her palms with her terrified face to one side on the dirty steel grating. He threw himself over her, just as the first bullet started to strike the team members clustered helplessly and naively on the platform. Several powerful machine guns opened up, and bullets spattered and ricocheted off the steel walls. White cobwebs marked smashed spots on the heavy windows above, though for the moment the windows and the walls appeared to be holding. The six other work team members did not remain standing long. In seconds their riddled, bleeding bodies lay sprawled in a heap on the grating. Ridge closed his eyes and held Brenna tightly. He could feel the dead bodies around him bucking as more bullets struck them. Ridge did not feel any pain or numbness or ripping impact that suggested he'd been hit. He pressed his face close to Brenna's and felt her regular though terrified breathing. The firing stopped.

  "Oh God," Brenna whispered as a pale shadow flitted beneath the platform on the curving, bumpy, wet inside of the hull.

  "We've got to run for it," Ridge said. "On my signal, go." He waited for a moment, gathering his energy and staring through the holes in the grating for the best direction to take.

  Already, the platform rocked once, twice, three times and more, as mudmen dropped down to finish off the kill. He could smell their mushroom, earthy sweat. He heard the chorus of satisfied breaths as they contemplated how full their stomachs would soon be.

  Hearing the first rip of claws through cloth, Ridge wrapped his arm around Brenna. Together, they rolled once, twice, and fell off the platform. He grasped a vertical stanchion as they dropped. He broke their fall and caused them to swing like a pendulum away from the platform first outward then toward the hull. They let go and fell, crashing in a daze, rolled down heaps of sliding slag, and ended up in a soft mound of black stuff like coal dust about 100 feet below. On the platform, mudmen chorused greedily and appeared not to notice.

  Ridge and Brenna ran as best they could. They held hands and alternately fell, clambered, and slid on the slippery mass. They could hear the piles of slag groaning softly as the ship turned. Much of the ship's cargo structure had apparently been shattered and then had spent centuries rusting. The ship turned like the body of a concrete mixer, and piles of rusty debris made grinding noises as they slipped along the inner surface an inch at a time.

  "There!" Brenna said. She pointed upward. Ridge saw the platform slowly following them. From it hung the arms and torsos of dead team members, and the shadowy bodies of mudmen were hard at work with slashing claws and bloody chewing mouths. Along the forward railing were several figures with machineguns. Ridge exclaimed as he recognized what was at work there. The mudmen-like figures wore black jumpsuits and masks. The masks were tied behind the head with soiled linen ties, like surgical masks, and the faces were all identical: Venable's luminously greedy face and crazed eyes. "Those are a cut above your ordinary mudmen," he told Brenna. "Venable had the ship make those, using uniforms from the officers I saw in the CP that time. They are all mummies, but the ship has their memory soup. Apparently Venable has enough control to be able to tap into the heart of the ship and make it do whatever he wants."

  Several weak brownish spotlights now shone down on Ridge and Brenna from the platform. They heard a voice, Venable's. He sounded angry and desperate. "Brenna! You weren't supposed to be on this iteration. Come, and I'll save you!"

  Brenna hugged Ridge's arm with both of hers, and pressed against him. "I wanted to come with you. I waited until he was gone, and then I came out of the shower room. I don't ever want to leave you. I love you."

  "I love you and that's how it will always be," Ridge said. He squeezed her, then let her go again, just holding her hand. He looked up at the platform. The speaker was one of the black-suited mudmen. The others carried machineguns, but this one did not. Instead, the lead Venable-clone did not even have hands, but instead had twisted bunches of white tubing about a foot long that wiggled like nests of pale snakes when he raised his arms. "Must be something that grew like a tumor on those tubing connections I whipped together," Ridge told Brenna, meaning the speaker above in his entirety. "Somehow, the seams must have leaked and cells got out there, and gene code, and that thing grew slowly over the years. It formed the other mudmen in its image."

  "That means Venable creates the mudmen," Brenna said.

  "Brenna!" Venable cried in a wailing voice that drifted over the wet slag heaps in that bronzed, doom-ridden light.

  Ridge pulled Brenna along all the more forcefully. The platform above made greasy rattling noises as its pulleys turned and the chain propelled it along after them. "What do we do?" Brenna asked as they ran on strong new legs, with fresh lungs and factory-fresh bodies.

  "We have to get to Largo," Ridge said. "It's the only place we might be safe." He thought of the police station there, and what was left of its armaments. "We might stand a chance at holding them off."

  "And then? We spend our last hours in a hotel room, afraid they'll come bursting in on us?"

  Ridge could not answer. He merely pulled her along, and she readily came, holding his hand. Even now, they could not see the lights yet of the nose area, nor the glow of that trolley station into which the platform must inevitably travel. "Let me think a bit."


  More machinegun fire punctuated the air. The echoes were deafening. Rusty water splashed up, as did stinging particles. Ridge and Brenna ducked left and right.

  "There is the bow section," Brenna said pointing at dim coppery light ahead.

  "They're desperate now," Ridge said. One by one, he saw the Venable clones drop down from the platform with their machineguns and clamber down the slag heaps. He said: "They can't catch us quite so easily once we're in the labyrinth of the bow area with all those levels and rooms."

  "But it's infested with regular baseball-heads," she said.

  They reached the base of the wall separating the bow from the cargo holds. The wall was of riveted steel. It had many odd sections welded on top of one another-circles, squares, oblongs, triangles. Some looked like doors with barlike handles and locks. Steel ladders stretched precipitously up the wall. Here and there glowed indirect light from lanterns hooded by weeping reddish iron casques aimed inward toward the wall. Ridge and Brenna started climbing without a clear goal-anything to escape for yet another minute or another half hour of life.

  The Venable clones were running across the dark hills, firing their machineguns. Ridge winced several times as the metal surface near his head rang with an impact. Once or twice, dust kicked up and stung his face. "You okay?" he asked. She replied from directly under him: "So far, so good."

  He found a handrail and pulled himself up on a narrow ledge. He leaned down to pull her up. They were dizzyingly high, at least 100 meters. "I see a doorway!" she cried. At that moment, more weak spotlights cut in. Light roved over the tramp-steamer surfaces around them. Shots popped far below, and bullets whizzed and twanged through the air by their heads. The platform blocked most of the shooting. Ridge glanced down and saw small figures climbing while others watched. "I think they may be afraid to climb."

  Brenna ran forward and pushed a door open. "We're in!" He followed her into a dimly lit room full of huge pipes and sighing steam. "Some sort of boiler room, maybe for the climate control," she guessed. They clambered among shadows, across girders, and up higher into more shadows. The place smelled of oil and steam, of coal and dead rats, of decay and flowering mushrooms.

  They climbed through a less unpleasant warren of dry concrete pens that smelled of potatoes or rags or soured wax. The wan light here came from metal-covered biolumes shaped like eggs. They emerged into a marbled corridor that smelled of fresh wax and glowed with indirect lighting from gilded wall sconces. Nougat-creamy gargoyles and putti and lightly draped nymphs floated in the shadows under the ceiling amid Art Nouveau stained glass oculi and long, narrow windows. The walls themselves were of fine dark woods. Statues of mythological men and women stood frozen in alcoves. The statues were draped in flowing garments that exposed rippling muscle (the men) or smooth skin (the women) and bore Homeric helmets pushed back over elaborate hair tumbling from under ribbon-ties. "It's a museum," Brenna said. "I remember some of these statues from my childhood. We lived in Buenos Aires and my parents used to visit your parents at the Palacio Colfiriano."

  "That's right!" Ridge said. The memories, once a small trickle came loose like wheat in sacks, grew into floods. "Colfirio was my uncle. He adopted both me and Venable, cousins to one another, after our families died in a plane crash. It was a ski trip in the Italian Alps."

  Now the paintings, all around as they ran down the corridors, made sense. Some canvases stretched from floor to ceiling. One showed Napoleon on a horse, leading a charge as thousands of heroic Guards overcame impossible odds during the early glory years when the world trembled in the Napoleonic wars.

  A sound traveled over the marbled floors: fluting. The mudmen were close! Ridge and Brenna came to a lobby of gilt panels and dimly silvery mirrors. They saw a bank of elevators and pressed all the buttons. "They are closing in on us!" Brenna cried as the fluting tones trembled in the air around them on all sides.

  "They are surrounding us," Ridge said. "Seems to be their style. Surround and devour." The doors rumbled open, and they ducked quickly inside a carpeted elevator car. Its gleaming brass doors slid smoothly shut. At the last moment, something slammed against the outer wooden door in the lobby, a mudman claw probably, but they were safe for the moment and on their way up. Ridge remembered the buttons and pressed the one for the executive boardroom at the very nose.

  For a moment, they thought they were safe. Brenna looked up and wrinkled her nose. "I smell mushrooms and soil and worms wiggling under damp rocks."

  "Mudmen," Ridge said. "They will be waiting for us up there." He pressed the red Stop button. The elevator ground to a halt and hung swaying. Now they heard the frustrated, disappointed wind of the mudmen. They heard the rasp of eager chitinous claws on soft marble. It was a sound that traveled up and down the spine like chalk on a blackboard. Ridge shivered involuntarily and held his palms over his ears. What to do? They were stuck between floors.

  "We cannot afford to stay in any one place," Brenna said.

  "I know. Let's try this." Ridge stood on a brass rail separating top and bottom of the interior décor. He pushed away the ceiling panel designed for workmen, and pulled himself up. His head emerged in elevator shaft, which appeared to be made of steel beams held together in crisscross patterns by huge bolts. "Wow," he said as his eyes became accustomed to the weak amber light. Brenna clambered up and they both stood on the roof of the elevator beside a bluish greasy coil of cabling around a pulley. Thick cables above and below apparently connected the car to opposite ends of the shaft, in the oddly adapted artificial gravity.

  "We are in the structural guts of the bow section," he said.

  She added, "this must be how the whole ship looked before the space debris took out the central cargo areas."

  The former Neptune Express, now called the Nebula Express, consisted of a slightly ovoid cylinder with blunted pointy ends. The insides got their structural integrity from a crisscross of riveted steel, like the guts of some spaceborne Eiffel Tower. Now that they were in the heart of the bow section, they saw that everything else was bolted on to that inner structural steel. The floors themselves were steel boxes stacked on top of each other like in a child's toy construction set, for all that the boxes contained all the world's surviving treasures of marble and gold and all sorts of precious materials. It was a giant steel construction set whose cubes, boxes, domes, spheres, pyramids, and polyhedrons contained the history of mankind. Inside were stored the accumulated remnants of Colfirio's avid lifetime collecting: friezes of Mesopotamian kinds hunting lions from chariots; pharaohs wearing the combined crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt; Roman wall paintings from the House of the Mysteries in Pompeii; Chinese vases and Japanese prints; African ceremonial masks; Inca mummies and Aztec gold; greenish-pink Mogul inlays and Hindu elephant gods sitting among Buddha statues; combined warrior and priestly vestments of Crusader priests complete with chain mail and swords; a thousand artifacts, a million texts and images, all stored in this construction resembling Victorian ironware department stores.

  "Mudmen," Brenna said, pointing to the mounds and piles of dead husks all around. Ridge nodded. "They breed like moths, apparently, like insects, from larvae. This looks like one enormous hive."

  "That means there is a queen somewhere," she said. They walked cautiously among the piled bundles that looked just big enough for each to hatch one mudman. Most had torn sides, where the newly hatched cleaners had chewed their way out. "Cleaners, Venable called them." Ridge scoffed. "It's a long way from creating drones to keep the ship clean, to their getting out of control and evolving into clawed killers."

  They saw some larvae with cottony surfaces under which infant mudmen slept. Their eyes were closed in mudmen dreams, and their claws were open and defenseless over their faces. Soon enough, they would emerge from their cocoons as full-sized adult mudmen ready to hunt and kill, to remove corpses from hotel swimming pools, to polish marble corridors until they gleamed, and to eat anything that moved.

  Ridge and Brenna found a small doo
r, a small passageway, and crawled through it into a service elevator. They rode this grim, hard metal box upward as far as it would go. The ride ended in a gleaming gallery of blue and white tiled kitchens, whose walls were narrow all around, giving a familiar claustrophobic impression. "The executive suites must be right above us," Brenna whispered. Ridge nodded and held a finger over his lips for her to be quiet. They listened for mudmen songs, but heard only the faint whisper of climate control ducts, and air in elevator shafts. They wandered hand-in-hand through the kitchens, which looked as though crews could come in and start cooking at any moment. By now, Ridge knew who kept everything so sparkling clean. He and Brenna walked through one galley after another. A bar cabinet was stocked with gleaming bottles of white and brown liquors as well as red and yellow wines. The wines had spoiled, Ridge was sure, but the liquor looked pristine. Pots and pans hung from the ceilings. Dishes and cutlery stood at attention in plastic trays. Carving knives, prongs, and soup spoons sat in crocks. Ladles of all sizes and shapes hung among the pots overhead. Rows of mugs hung from hooks. There were tiny points of dissonance, if one looked closely: moths flew in and out of drain pipes in stainless steel sinks that had not seen flowing water in centuries. Refrigerators stood a quarter inch open because their rubber seals had disintegrated and made a pile of gray dust on the floor. Pretty soon, Brenna and Ridge had completed a circle around the entire deck. There wasn't a view screen or porthole anywhere (or what passed for a porthole; likely a viewing surface that transmitted images from outside the hull as if there were a window).

  "Look here," Brenna said, pointing to a small ladder leading up to a trapdoor. She said: "Looks like there might have been a way to pass trays of food up that way."

  Ridge climbed up the ladder and shook the door. It wouldn't budge. There was a complicated lever with sliding arms, and he pushed that aside. He felt the door pop loose a millimeter or two. He caught a glimpse of the lobby where they had once stood speaking with an image of Venable over the secretarial desk. "We could go up another level," he said. "We want to get to that executive level and see if we can negotiate with Venable, maybe. What else can we do?"