Nothing. The usually garrulous Haslip was quiet and reserved, leaving Max alone with her heartbeat and rapid breathing to mark her steady cadence. She tried to stay focused on the woman in front of her but no matter how hard she tried her gaze wandered to the massive cages she passed on both sides. There must have been thousands of them, stacked high and wide; many were empty, but some had things inside, things reminiscent of fruit rotting on the vine. She shuddered and turned her head back to the front.
There had been talk of setting up atmosphere in this huge hold. Now really, Max thought, would she be willing to take off her helmet, breathe this air that had to be putrid beyond putrid? No matter what the bio readouts told her, she would be the last person in line for a sip of this air.
Bringing up the rear of their little column were six MA ratings of various stripes. She couldn’t recall any of their names and when she was introduced to these men at the airlock to hangar bay two, she smiled politely at them and refused to absorb any details about their faces. To her, these men were along for the ride, here to protect her in what she had to do, here to make sure she could do her job effectively and return safely to the Christi and Har. Nothing more, nothing less.
Since Jerr died, she refused to entertain even the most casual contact with other men. Maybe today, if she completed her mission and got this beast talking to the ship, got her helmet off and didn’t die a horrible, choking death, she would find out who these men really were. Maybe.
Chapter 13
Feeling completely sure of himself Eddie Rich smiled and pushed away from the workbench in his weapons locker. Satisfied that all of the necessary splicing and cross-wiring had been done, he was certain that his “baby” would function properly when he set its electrical furnace ablaze at that fucking worm.
Back in 2775 Rich was an FT Seaman Apprentice and fresh off the boat from Earth. He had served in the Merchant Marines, sailing mainly between Jupiter and Uranus for several years before he’d enlisted in the Colonial Navy, just beating the cut-off age of thirty-six. On the nine-month journey from Earth to Elber Prime — with a brief stop on Canno along the way — he had attended the Fire Control Technician school and earned his rating in transit. All he needed after getting to Elber was to get picked up by an outbound ship and he was assured of getting quickly to E-3 and possibly E-4 way ahead of the strikers doing on-the-job training out of Elber. But then the brief war with the Varson Imperial Navy erupted and he was caught up in the conflict while serving on the CNS Imperial Beach the very next year.
He had often thought of those days: sitting in his Fire Control Bubble on the starboard side of the Imperial Beach, powering up his lasers and arming his torpedoes and watching as his volleys stitched fiery patterns of death and destruction along the fuselages of Varsonian battle cruisers. Those were the days, he mused. Easy advancements, easy assignments, easy women when the ships made port.
In the eighteen-month war with the Varson Empire and the negotiated truce that followed, Rich was as content as a sailor could be. Casualties in the Second Navy Fleet of Elber were minimal and just about all of the officers and ratings came out of the war with numerous medals and citations, choice of assignments, and ultimately, quick career-paths to Master or Senior Chief for the enlisted men.
But, Rich thought, something went wrong. Peace was catching. The Navy was now quiescent and instead of “ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion” like that old Bladerunner quote he remembered from the streaming 800-year-old transmissions he had seen after the war, he had to content himself with watching and waiting. The battle-ready Navy he wanted to serve was listing precariously to port.
The Varson Empire, no longer a threat, had faded into relative obscurity with most of the Fringe fanaticism of the last decade. Ships out in the regions a thousand light-years past ancient Betelguese and the roiling star-forming dust clouds beyond — the “Fringes” of Human exploration — rarely got a mention at Commander’s Call these days.
“Sheesh,” Rich said out loud, “the Navy is going to shit.”
* * *
Popping a hand-held flare and waving it over her head got Haslip noticed in a hurry. She held up a fist and her little band stopped and she voiced her comm pickup to command freq. “Commander Yorn! Commander Yorn. I need you up here on the double, sir.”
Yorn was still at the bottom of the original rope ladder setting up his men and securing their equipment. “Yorn here. What’ve you got, Haslip?”
“I found them, sir. They’re. . . all three are dead.”
“Where are you, commander? Is that your flare I see forward?”
Gena Haslip waved the bright light in a wide arc over her head. She was some distance away but Yorn saw the signal and told her he was on the way.
“They’ve been cut in half, sir. From about mid-thigh. Decompressed and bled out, I imagine,” she said in a raspy voice. “Looks like they walked into a cutting beam of some kind.”
“Roger, that. Stand fast, commander. Have your men stationary; nobody moves until I get there.” Yorn ordered.
“Aye, aye, sir. Maybe bring that photographer with you. Some medtechs, too.”
“Yorn underway. You just stay put.”
Haslip grunted. “No need to tell me that twice.”
It took ten minutes for Yorn and six of his men to reach the stunned Gena Haslip. Her feet were slightly apart and, just as ordered, she hadn’t moved a single millimeter since her last transmission.
“Light this area up, Mister Tate,” he instructed one of his ET — Electronic Technician — ratings. The tech dropped his gear to the deck and worked out a series of klieg lights from his carry-all and attached them to an extendable stanchion. Another tech rushed forward and connected the lights to a portable generator and hit the switch.
The portable generator coughed silently to life, sucking oxygen from a small tank on its side. The lights sputtered on and winked for a second then stabilized. Yorn took a step back. A natural, instinctive, reaction to what he saw. Three men down, legs splayed in various directions, hardening blood covering a wide swath. The torsos were several meters away and were devoid of anything that remotely looked human. The three evo suits were slack and disheveled like a pile of dirty laundry blown around by a high wind. Only the helmets seemed intact.
“Mister Bone, get pictures of these bodies in situ. Stay behind the commander and venture not a single step forward. Mister Olson, go through the prism series and see if you can find the tripwire,” Yorn said, pointing to another of his ratings.
Olson stepped forward and started cycling through the filters on his suit mask. Bone unslung his camera gear and started clicking through images of the grisly scene. He rotated through all three of the lenses on the digital camera and at one point stooped low to get a wide-angle series.
“Okay, sir, I got it,” Olson said. “About sixty centimenters off the deck. Coming out of that little pucker to your right. See it?”
“What’re we looking for, commander,” Haslip asked.
“What’s the filter, Mister Olson?” Yorn wanted to know.
“Number four UVx2a,” he replied.
Yorn voiced his suit comm override. “Now hear this! All personnel. Switch your faceplate filter to UVx2a immediately. It seems that the ship has some crude but deadly defenses. Look for trip wire cutting beams before you make any movements forward. Do it now.”
Lieutenant Hansen adjusted her faceplate and moved aft a few meters. The rest of the detail followed suit. Haslip was still fixed in place like a lawn statue in front of a decrepit high-tech mansion.
“Get a graves detail up here Ensign Tan. Bring three body bags with you,” Yorn said into his suit mike.
“Aye, sir,” Silvie Tan replied. “On the way forward.”
“Mister Olson, get that beam squelched and be careful. It cuts through anything that crosses it. It must have been set up to keep whatever was in those cages from approaching the control center. That looks like a ladder of some sort at my three
. Haslip, you see that?”
Gena Haslip finally relaxed from her freeze position. “Affirm that, sir. Strange, though, that ‘ladder’ only has one side rail. Look at the distance between those rungs. You would have to be three meters tall to climb that.”
“Commander Yorn, Captain Haad.”
“Standby one, sir. I have a situation going on over here.”
“So I heard. Three more men down, Davi?”
Yorn took a deep breath. “Confirm. Three dead.” Yorn could imagine the captain bolting out of his chair and stalking around the bridge, rubbing the side of his face and puffing his cheeks out in dismay. “I’ll keep you patched in, captain, but for now, I’ve got work to do. This ship has operating defense mechanisms, sir.”
“Understood. Bridge out.”
“It’s electrical, sir,” Olson said. “Ultra thin electron beam, probably rudimentary laser or maser excitement crystals behind that bulkhead.”
“Disable that damned thing, mister. Blow the bulkhead if you have to, or find something that beam won’t cut and block it. I want it off at your soonest.”
“Aye, commander,” the tech said and turned towards the bulkhead with his gear.
“Mister Whit, disperse your men. I want a sentry posted every fifty meters, from the original hatch to this point. Nobody else enters this ship without my authority, is that understood? I’m sending the dead men back to the Christi and have Lieutenant Gregg come back with a full complement from the MA detail. Armed as necessary.”
Petty Officer Whit, who had been disbursing men and equipment at the original rope ladder location, acknowledged the command and then passed the instructions to his men.
Yorn said, “Assemble your remaining men and bring them up, Mister Whit. Leave one rating every fifty meters and make sure those lights are strung out properly.”
“Aye, aye, sir. On the move back here.”
“Fire in the hole,” from Olson.
The little group took a few steps away from the bulkhead. Olson had rigged a small grenade just below the puckered spot on the curved wall identified as the emission source. Silently the little explosion lit up the area for a brief moment. Small shards of extruded mucus shot away from the bulkhead and peppered a two-meter cone of crystals in front of the group. A thin puff of gray smoke chuffed noiselessly from the resulting hole in the wall and Yorn could see flashes of electrical sparking behind the bulkhead. Another man stepped forward and hosed the area down with foam from a little fire-suppression canister.
Lieutenant Maxine Hansen had retreated as far away from the action as was physically possible. She walked backwards and finally her back hit one of the barred cages on the wall opposite all of the activity. She stopped. She was just about to step away from the bars when something in the cage reached out and grabbed her shoulder.
She screamed.
* * *
Thinking he had just heard his mother scream Har Hansen crawled a few more feet and stopped. Somewhere below him someone had a comm stack open, receiving direct feeds from the away teams. He heard the back-and-forth between the captain and that tall officer he knew as Yorn. Not that he had actually met the man, but his mom was always talking about him. I guess he was the boss of her watch team. Commander Yorn. That’s what she had called him. Now, to his surprise, his mom was somewhere on that alien ship and he didn’t like the sounds of it. The captain must have been insane to send women over there. Surely he must have known what aliens do to our women!
He listened further. From the sounds of things, the Christi crew wasn’t doing too hot. Three more dead sailors. Man, that was tough, Har thought. Then he had to ask himself, What can I do to help?
He decided to eat one of his energy bars and weigh his possibilities. He could work his way back to his hidey-hole down on the cargo deck; he could press forward and see if he could get an eyeball on that alien ship that was causing all of the trouble; he could get into one of the labs and find some poison or something to defend himself from those wormy creatures who surely must be plotting a takeover of the ship right at this moment; or, maybe, he could shimmy on down to the armory and try to get one of those guns, those electric discharge hand guns he saw the MA ratings carry. Yeah, he concluded, that’s what he needed. A gun.
Har tossed away the wrapper from his snack behind him and crawled to the nearest vent opening. Seeing the greenery of the hydroponics bay down below, he oriented himself. He would have to crawl back tens of meters to that last vertical shaft he had passed almost an hour ago.
Then two more decks up, one compartment aft. The MA armory.
He looked around the airshaft and nodded to himself. His mission now had a higher purpose.
Har was crawling on his belly past the vent where he had just paused to listen to the comm from the worm.
That’s when he heard his mother’s modulated blood-curdling scream again.
* * *
In sick bay Doctor Isaacs prepared for three more fatalities. He walked holes in the deck as he waited for the lifeboat to return. Hell, there hasn’t been this much action on the Christi since he boarded three years ago. Ahh, he mused, the vagaries of space. Here one moment, gone the next. He found it difficult to think past what he had to do and he could dredge up thousands of images of men twisted and torn from his memory banks.
He estimated that he had seen over 2,000 men dead on his tables. Most were burn-throughs, men hollowed out by energy weapons or fried from electrical discharge shots.
But, most of that had been back on the Norfolk Sound and those men were at war. This action here sounded like well-trained men killed by their lack of personal concerns and their total lack of situational awareness. The alien ship was proving to be a steady supplier of bodies for him, none of them alive to tell him what had happened. Only their shells, only his intuition and instruments to ferret out the truth.
“Doc Isaacs, you there?” It was Silvie Tan on his comm link.
He stopped pacing and went to the nearest bulkhead. “Right here,” he said. Isaacs very seldom used the proper annunciation protocols when he talked with the junior officers, reserving that formal naval speak for his talks with the captain or the XO.
“ETA twenty minutes, sir,” she said. “At the boat now. Send me some help down to hangar bay two.”
“Okay, I can do that. How many men do you need?”
Silvie Tan hesitated before she said, “Just one. What I really need is an oversized hand cart. This load is pretty light.”
Isaacs nodded, then remembered that nods were not audible. “Okay. I’ll take care of it,” he said.
“Tan out.”
He looked at the comm stack and said nothing further.
Chapter 14
Three more dead. Eddie Rich shook his head. That information confirmed for him what he had to do. He would wait for the right moment and unleash his “baby” against that ship. He had been refining the firing system for his sweet surprise for a couple of years now and he was certain this alien nightmare would provide him the perfect opportunity to try it out.
He still had work to do, still had a few things left to complete before his plan was ready. First he had to make sure the Christi thought the alien was active and ready to fire at them, and second, he had to make sure his response was ready and appropriately deadly. He didn’t want any more of his mates to be harmed by that thing floating off the port flank. He refused to believe that the captain took the threat of that ship seriously enough to protect the 200-plus souls aboard the Christi. But he did believe the old man was playing favorites by giving all the choice assignments to the younger rates.
The time was fast approaching that Rich would put an end to this nonsense. He was determined to return the Navy to the guts and glory of bygone days, even if it meant committing a crime to do it.
He pressed a few panels on his console screen and brought up the operational frequencies of the drones. Perfect. Small mindless robotic ship-controlled flyers with rudimentary weapons, shields, and ima
ging equipment. The drones would do just fine for what he had in mind.
* * *
After her second scream Olson jerked Max away from the front of the cage with more force than was necessary. He quickly pushed her behind him and raised his weapon. As soon as his finger entered the trigger guard the EM-14A came to life and a series of LEDs winked at him from the back of the coil housing.
“What the fuck is that thing!” Olson shouted when he turned his gaze toward the cage.
Inside the cage, behind the solid metal bars, a slimy bird-like creature was writhing in apparent agony. It had oozed out of one of those cocoon things that were abundant in the lock-ups and it trailed dark orange ichor behind it. It was wearing some kind of mesh around its middle. Its head was lolling back and forth. Steel gray eyes were darting back and forth on each side of a narrow mouth-like beak. When it blinked, nictating membranes slid across the oversized eyes and mirrored the suit lights trained on them. Fine fluffy feathers covered the areas of exposed skin, and they were moist and silently dripping what looled like a bad yolk onto the deck. The thing would have been almost 180 centimeters tall if it had stood on its spindly legs.
“Don’t shoot it, don’t shoot it,” Commander Yorn said softly as he approached the cage.
“Shoot that fucking thing!” Maxine Hansen shouted. “That thing grabbed me!”
“Belay that, Mister Olson.” Yorn regarded the alien creature. It was struggling to regain its composure. It had small arms and taloned hands that reached continuously at its throat. The arms looked like they belonged to a tiny T-rex. The creature kept reaching for his neck but spasms were beginning to rock its body. It fell to the deck, its mouth opening and closing revealing upper and lower rows of small serrated teeth.
The Belt Loop _Book One Page 8
