Strange Company

by Nick Cole

  I took a deep breath and studied our position. Scanning up-hull back toward the engines. Going up-hull would be like going uphill all day long. Down-hull, toward the bow, once we were inside, would be like running down a steep hill real fast and probably braining yourself. Our muscles were already at the edge. They’d turn to jelly in just a few decks of humping uphill with plates, weapons, and a combat load. Plus whatever she’d sent us in to recover.

  But of course, that’s how an NCO thinks. He thinks about his knees.

  “The ship’s reactor, it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen, and still burning mass,” she said calmly in our ears as we studied the next bit of hull we needed to navigate. Clinging where we were clinging like our lives depended on it. Because they did. “It boils out of the main fissure. The science team tunneled in from a few kilometers away just under the surface. Then they set up the base alongside the fissure and established a rail line into the ship under the engineering decks behind the engines. We’ll exit there once we retrieve what I came for.”

  I made the lip of the port bay and peeked over, hanging upside down as I did. I didn’t know what I was expecting to see in there. But what I saw I wasn’t prepared for. The bay was dark. And with a ship, hull down at this inclination within atmo, or on a world, everything not secured would be clumped into a corner forward in the space. Smashed and destroyed by such an impact. Gravity was unforgiving to anything inside starships once the grav-decking had failed.

  What I saw was a normal human starship-looking docking bay with most everything where it should be. Though much of it looked pretty rough and broken. Mounts had broken loose and some things hung at odd angles from the impact. There was even some kind of shuttlecraft anchored into the docking slots. The anchors had warped as they tried to maintain hold long ago during the crash. They’d held. But the shuttle was ruined.

  “Here goes nothing,” I grunted and heaved myself down and over, and then in. Keeping my core tight and preparing to land on the canted tilt of the deck. But then something wonderful and comforting washed over me as I got that momentary disorientation and stomach drop of being under the influence of grav-decking.

  I landed on the bay floor.

  Though the ship was tilted bow down at the steep angle of fifteen degrees, I was standing straight up. My thighs and leg muscles rejoiced that we wouldn’t have to climb out of here if we did get the chance to make it through. The grav-decking was still on. In whatever form this ship operated such technology, it was still working. That would make life a lot easier.

  Then I saw the writing on the wall.

  I could read it all. It was in Old Numerican, the original of what we all spoke, but I’d seen enough of it to get by. In rough strokes of dried blood, written across the back wall of the docking port, were three words.

  “We rule now.”

  And underneath was a crude cave art painting of an ape, like the ones who had attacked us, holding a torch in one hand. And a rifle in the other.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Things started to happen fast from there. The clock was on fire, as they say. We began to get everyone across the gap from canyon wall to wreck of the alien starship. I checked my watch, going over the timetable of events. In three hours Dog and Ghost Platoons would start their hit on the bank. In three and thirty we’d pop out of the tube station and try to take our ship.

  Margin for error: none.

  Systems were smashed here inside the dark docking bay aboard the Crash. Even though it was alien, I was getting a very bad feeling about all of this. This felt…

  “Sarge…” It was Punch, who’d been working with Jacks as we took a brief ten to get everyone ready to go deeper into the ship. They were working on a computer terminal that seemed to handle the maintenance for the bay. Pulling it apart and looking at its guts. Like I said, something about this was tickling the back of my scalp. Like it was familiar in some taunting memory of a song kind of way. But I’d never been on any kind of starship even remotely approaching this level of tech. Or size.

  “System don’t work. But look at this…”

  I crossed the bay, feeling and hearing the crunch of eons-old grit. Sand from the world. Broken glass and plastic fragments done to death by an unimaginable stellar impact. Like I said. Starships never survive crashes.

  Why had this one?

  Punch was pointing toward something near the terminal. Something that looked a lot like the battle boards we used. Except older and clunkier. A tablet of some kind. Like any starship crewman would use to perform duties.

  “It don’t work. But look at what’s on the cover.”

  He handed it over to me. I studied the cover and saw the outline of a ship that didn’t look anything like the one we were on. This was the silhouette of one of the old ring-drive warp ships that had been early colonization explorers. Fast ships using quantum destabilization to reach incredible speeds. Even by today’s standards. But that was the ship history nerd in me talking. Still, holding it was like holding a historical relic that had no place being where it was.

  “That’s an old…” I was just about to say as the ancient Numerican printed across the back of the tablet organized itself in my mind and I was able to translate.

  U.S.S. Enterprise.

  Then…

  Engineering something something protocols. Some of the old words had no modern translation.

  I turned to the Monarch and held this out.

  “What’s this mean?” As in, Why is this here?

  The Enterprise was one of the most famous explorer ships from those early days of stellar exploration. I didn’t know much about it. Hadn’t interested me for some reason I couldn’t quite remember. But here it was. On board the most infamous wreck of alien origin in the galaxy.

  There’re others. The Malkinar Hull on Hobart. The debris fields of Gnay. Others… Starships from undiscovered cultures that ruined themselves all over the face of some distant world during their arc of final descent. Often there was so little left of the ships as to be unrecognizable. But in the case of the Malkinar Hull you can still see much of it rising out of the stormy waves of that world. The sea and the salt have gutted the rest and carried it off into ocean canyons.

  And we’ve never found the origin civilizations that built those ships. They must have come from far away across the galactic lens. Or even farther.

  The Monarch crossed and took the battle board thing from me. Ran one of her slender hands over it like it was some sacred object. Some memory of a thing she hadn’t touched in years. An old photograph. A lost book found again. A memory. Yeah, I had those thoughts then as I watched her response to it.

  She looked up and around, studying the structure of the ship.

  “It’s starting to come together,” she said to herself. Almost a whispered mumble to no one else.

  “What?” I asked her. “What’s starting to come together? Why is this important?”

  She seemed to want to say something. Then didn’t. Then remembered who she was dealing with and decided it was best to give us something. Give me something.

  She cleared her throat in the silence of the wreck.

  “Enterprise was lost early on during the First Expansion. The official story is… she disappeared somewhere in the Orion Nebula. But knowing how we Monarchs do things, that was probably just the ‘truth’ we wanted known. I had suspected back then it was another ship that ultimately got used for the experiment, but… this pretty much confirms the Enterprise was the ship they used to go forward for Operation Zephyr. So…”

  She stopped. I could see her eyes roving over data none of us could see. She must’ve had some kind of cloud operating system. She shifted her hand around like she was gesture-sifting through the data.

  “None of that means anything to us,” I said. “So, from the top. Why is this important?”

  I was tired of this. I wan
ted answers. Monarch or not, I was tired of the games. Even though I had a feeling this was everything but.

  I felt the captain step close.

  Over her shoulder, behind her and in my direct line of sight, Chief Cook raised his eyes. They had a mischievous glint to them. Like he was suggesting he could make her talk. Just say the word. No one had ever interrogated a Monarch before. This was his big chance.

  She read the room. I could tell as her eyes came back to me. Like she was suddenly figuring out she was dangerously close to some edge with us. I watched the realization dawn in her pretty face.

  A face I could have lived lifetimes with and still not gotten tired of.

  “The official story about this whole thing is a bigger lie than the one I’ve already uncovered for you. This wreck, the Crash, is not alien. Not totally. There’s definitely some alien technology at play here. This ship went faster and farther than any ship ever will. Trust me on that one. What you’re looking at is a ship, manufactured by us, but about ten thousand years in the future from now. As near as I can estimate. That’s where we were sending the Enterprise. That was what Operation Zephyr was looking to accomplish. So… this must be it. This ship… is what they found.”

  No one said anything. Then we heard the horns and the drums. Tribal. Erupting and ululating outside along the hull. Uroooooo UrUrUrooooo.

  It froze your blood to hear them shrieking alarm. You knew it wasn’t good. Knew they were coming for you.

  Choker swore. He was near the edge of the docking port we’d come through, staring out into its vastness like some kind of psychopath endlessly fascinated with all the oblivion it implied. And yes, the record notes he’s a sociopath and there’s a difference.

  “Orion, we got big problems.”

  I raced over, my battle rattle feeling heavier than usual. Heavier than it should. Already tired that some new thing was about to ruin my already no-room-to-be-ruined schedule. I was wondering how much more one man could take.

  Choker was looking down-hull, toward the black gaping chasm the starship, or lifeboat, had plowed itself into long ago. Down into the crust of the dark subterranean world. The hull down there was alive and moving. Alive with movement sweeping up along its ancient and fantastic cylinder. Like a sea of dark locusts swarming up the hull. Suddenly torches, hundreds if not thousands of them, sprang to life as the locusts surged up along the hull toward us.

  Except they weren’t locusts.

  I irised in with my combat lens and tagged incoming monkey soldiers. Apes too. But smaller and faster than the ones that had gone up and down the cliffs during our first encounter. They had weapons. Some even had firearms.

  But it didn’t matter whether they did or didn’t. We didn’t have enough ammunition for the numbers coming at us even if they were unarmed. This was at least brigade-sized. Making the word outnumbered a laughable representation of our current situation.

  The captain got us busy doing the survival game.

  “Time to move, Sergeant. Let’s go. Now.”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Hustling and moving deeper into the ship revealed two things to us as we scrambled to put distance between us and the apes. Maybe we could find some kind of chokepoint to fight them off for as long as we could. Regardless of the lack of ammunition we had left. But as we moved, yeah, once you saw it… saw it was a human-designed ship in its basic DNA of design, you couldn’t unsee it. Even though there were fantastic differences, there were similarities that must be the music of all ships of the stars made by humans. All the things you’d expect in a starship of this size. Things you’d only seen in spectacuthrillers, of course, about ships no non-Monarch citizen of the galaxy would ever have the privilege of riding on. But human at first light and the more you looked. Scanning the darkness for exactly the way conduits and piping would be laid out. Where the interface panels were. How the hatches operated. The feel of the floor in this section. Different because of usage type than it would be in another section.

  The second thing revealed was that the wreck had become a madhouse. Everything had been rage-ruined. Walls scrawled and gouged with nonsense writing like we’d seen in the docking bay. Except more often some kind of ape/monkey hieroglyph system had taken over in long and more orderly strings. Here and there splash pages of pidgin Numerican slogans proclaimed ape supremacy and never-ending death to “hooma” which seemed to indicate humanity.

  Man. Mankind. Hooma.

  Only good hooma is dead hooma!

  “Sergeant Orion,” ordered the Old Man as we moved fast into what looked to be a quarters section of the vast ship. Lifeboat, she called it. “Take the lead element. I’ll take Team Two. Get her to take us toward the Node. We’re still on mission. Things just got more interesting. That’s all.”

  “Copy that, sir.” I slithered along the column in the darkness of the madhouse tight corridor and linked up with the Monarch.

  “How far to target?”

  “We can be there in twenty minutes if the way is clear, according to my map.”

  I nodded, hearing my own ragged breathing. “Show Punch the way. I’ll keep up the rear of Team One and stay in visual of the captain. Let’s move.”

  “On it, Sarge,” said Punch, and we were off.

  Eighty meters later, the apes hit our rear at a T-intersection. I could hear the successive booms of the Old Man’s combat shotgun working to keep them back as we moved forward as fast as possible. Then Hauser picked up the fire support to our rear, both men talking their guns to keep the dark shapes down-corridor from overrunning us as we moved fast along our new course track. The staccato ring of gunfire reverberated across the dark passages as we hustled forward.

  The comm was chaos.

  “Two from the left.” Jacks.

  “Engaging.” Hauser.

  “Got one!” shouted the Kid. “More coming in!”

  “Fall back by twos. Hauser, you’re with me.” The captain.

  “Watch out!” Jacks.

  Suddenly my combat lens got an airdrop and I could see the route into the ship. It was an incomplete map. But it was fascinating. The ship, as we already knew, was huge, but it seemed even more so from the inside. There were many strange and interesting things on the map I didn’t have time to study.

  “Ever been here before?” I asked the Monarch in a sub-channel over the comm.

  “No. Believe it or not I’m learning and developing as much as you are right now, Orion. I gathered data, as much as I could during my incarceration. Then what I could while I was rogue from the Monarchy. Accessing the Library was difficult with my restricted status. But not impossible.”

  Okay, so that’s new information. She was in Monarch jail. Oh and there’s such a thing as Monarch jail.

  “So what happened? Why are we here?”

  We broke out of quarters and entered some kind of giant tube.

  “Hang on…” said the Monarch. “Picking up a signal.”

  I told everyone to halt and ran back into the darkness. The captain hustled up out of it, flipping around to walk backward as he thumbed more shells into his shotgun. Hauser and Jacks behind him. The Kid just behind the captain.

  I tapped the Kid as he passed.

  He looked at me and I could see the fear was gone. He was on point. He was Company now. Grim. Determined. And willing to do just about anything to make sure we all got through.

  “Doing good?” I asked him.

  He smiled. “Good enough, Sar’nt.” Then… “Where ya want me?”

  “Go forward and link up with Chief Cook.”

  The captain turned toward me in the darkness. Suddenly light went on forward of us in the tube we’d just encountered. Bright white light.

  “There’s a lot of them back there, Sergeant,” said the Old Man. “Give ’em enough room and they’d break out. We’re down to half on ammunition. If so
, we’ll switch Pigs and leave the cyborg to hold our rear. Copy?”

  I didn’t like it. But I did copy.

  It wasn’t quiet to our rear. You could hear animal screeching. Howls. More rude drums and those horns echoing off distant and unseen corridors throughout the corpse of a ship. I could only imagine horror-show dark passages with torches and the strange hieroglyphs that told the madhouse stories of the apes. And of course, their propaganda that didn’t bode too well for us hooma.

  Comm from the Monarch.

  “I have access to systems deeper in. The science team was able to tap in and jury-rig some access. There are a couple of defendable science stations this far forward. The Node is one. My Monarch credentials get recognized instantly. Should we move now, Orion?”

  I told her to start out. I waited and then led Team Two toward the big tube. Suppressive fire from Hauser was able to keep the ape-monkey swarms back despite stray incoming that whistled past us and slapped interior hull.

  The giant tube that ran through this section was now illuminated. And it was empty. A seamless hatch, molded to the curve of the wall, had been opened inward on the opposite side of the tube. The Kid popped out there, signaling that Team One went that way.

  Another thing I hadn’t spotted on the first visual recon of the big tube was now apparent in the brilliant white light. Someone in a spacesuit. Someone giant. At least nine feet tall. He was lying in the center of tube, near the hatch. His upper torso leaning against the rising curve of the tube wall.

  I led Team Two forward and into the hatch. Passing the skeleton looking out from the shattered mask of the spacesuit. It was an old spacesuit. Something from the early days of extra-solar exploration. The first systems. Alpha Centauri. All the usual safety seals and breathing gear. But we don’t have nine-foot-tall humans now, and we didn’t have them then.

  I only had a moment to glance at it. The skeleton inside the spacesuit behind the smashed faceplate. The horns and drums behind us had switched to down-tube by the time we reached the hatch. The apes and monkeys had decided to come at us from a new direction and the tube was telegraphing their move. The captain went past me, barrel of the shotgun leading the way. Then Hauser who was linking another belt effortlessly to the big Pig he carried. Then Jacks with his ruck full of claymores.