The Belt Loop _Book One

by Robert B. Jones

  He looked at the prone body of Commander Yorn. He had to attack now before he lost all chances. He decided to give his baby a test shot first, just to see if his alterations to the weapon merited any further adjustments.

  Rich pulled back the tarp and punched in the codes. The sound of high energy filled his ears. By the time the bridge detected the burst, it would be over and done.

  He watched the indicators run up to the green and rubbed his hands together. Next he hit the motor-drive that would winch the muzzle of his weapon out into the shielded firing blister and seal the business end from the rest of the ship. Then he hit the firing stud. The first burst from his baby, less than a second of power, rocked the worm. Hah! He swiveled the gun on its mount and held the stud down for five seconds. A huge hole tore through the worm and he could see a silent gout of flame erupt from its flank. The thing worked just as he knew it would!

  Suddenly alarms began to sound all around him and battle shields started to crank down. He only had minutes to get off one more shot. He made it count.

  * * *

  The sudden noise all around roused Harold. He shook himself and sat up too quickly, bumping his head against the top of the duct. The quick pain meant that he was alive! He thought surely that by now he would be a rotting corpse, a dry-stick skeleton rattling away in the ductworks. He looked around and was surprised to see the thin light coming from the direction of the laundry vent opening. The alarms were building in intensity and he heard the battle stations commands being broadcast throughout the entire ship. Something was definitely wrong. Had the aliens launched their attack? he wondered. Har twisted his body and heard a heavy metallic thump below him. His gun.

  The pale light reaching past his tired eyes also showed him the other end of the duct had also opened. For whatever reason, the shifting around of the circulating air by some unseen villianous soul had finished its sinister actions and he was free to move again. He grabbed his UAW and his backpack and wriggled away.

  Chapter 28

  “Captain on the bridge!” the boatswain’s mate shouted.

  Uri Haad rushed in and Griffin quickly relinquished the command console chair.

  “We’ve had unauthorized fire from battery four, sir!” Griffin said smartly.

  “Get down there and secure that weapon. Get the master-at-arms and a team down there right away,” Haad ordered.

  “Already ordered, sir.”

  “Lock down this ship; I will have no one hazard my boat. Is that clear Mister Griffin?”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Commander Griffin said and stepped away to the communications console. He shouted orders at the ensign there and promptly told the young officer to exit the seat.

  “Give me a sit-rep, Lieutenant Hoge. Helm are we holding our station?”

  “Helm steady, captain.”

  “Sir, situation secure on deck eight. Chief reports Commander Yorn at the scene.”

  Yorn? What the hell? Haad had been in his ready room waiting for Yorn to report. Yorn’s nose always seemed to lead him to the right spot at the right time.

  At just that spot in his thoughts, Haad felt the Christi rock hard to starboard and a huge shudder worked its way to the bridge from below. Sirens wailed, klaxons could be heard from every open comm stack topside. “Mister Griffin, what the hell was that?”

  “Sir, I’ve got damage controlmen reporting from decks seven, eight and nine! Something in the weapons bay just blew a gasket!”

  “Quartermaster reports lifeboat two safe in hand, sir. Three casualties.”

  “Senior Chief Mann missing down on deck eight.”

  “Sir, there’s a problem down in the exo lab.”

  “Commander Yorn on his way to sick bay, captain.”

  “That derelict ship is splitting apart, sir!”

  Haad was bombarded with situations from all over the ship. His experience kicked in at the right time and he began barking orders. “Mister Washoe, clear the weapons bay and seal the compartment. Mister Hoge get me an update on casualties. Commander Griffin, secure the bridge against all intruders and get me a marine contingent up here on the double. Mister Gant, steady as she goes at the helm and kick that worm out of the Higgs. Ensign Corman make yourself useful and get down to sick bay and put Commander Yorn on my private channel. Mister Diggs, give me a report on that weapons discharge. Was it accidental, a malfunction, or deliberate? Get your asses in gear, gentlemen, and get me some answers!”

  A flurry of activity. Reports streaming in. Haad punched up as many visuals as he could on his console. The one image he saw of the worm, flames pouring forth from all of the pores on the side of the ship, brought back memories of the Varson campaign. His hand stroked the left side of his face.

  “Get the chief of the boat up here,” Haad ordered to no one in particular. “Find out about that lifeboat and I need to know exactly what’s going on with that thing in the exobiology lab.”

  Haad thumbed on the recorder and simultaneously slid out the reader he used as a pass-down log. He made several entries and date/time stamped them. He sat back in his chair and waited for answers. “Stand down from battle stations. Go to general quarters, Mister Griffin.”

  Some of the answers he got a few minutes later would forever haunt him.

  * * *

  Silvie Tan put her face down close to the sarcophagus and stared. Was that movement in there? She rubbed the top of the container with her gloved hand thinking that she could clear some of the ice and mist away even though she knew the frozen condensation was on the other side of the plastic. The rest of the medtechs around her were walking between the capsules making notes and scanning mechanisms for investigation when the doctor returned. Silvie wondered what the big fuss was all about over in the exo lab and she hoped Milli was okay.

  That’s when the explosion rocked the ship. She reached out and grabbed the nearest thing she could. Her hand slid down the curved side of the sarcophagus and inadvertently contacted a small control stud. During the forty-five-second shipquake the medtechs were concerned with their personal safety. Some caught falling equipment, others steadied the capsules. Silvie Tan felt the deck beneath her feet buckle slightly and the sudden change in underfoot geometry caused her to fall away from the capsule she had been steadying herself against. Her head hit the metal deck with a resounding thud. Lucky for her she hit it with the back of her helmet and the comm gear in the back absorbed most of the impact. While she was on her back she saw that two more of her tech companions had suffered similar fates and were now prone on the floor.

  It’s no wonder that with all of the chaos going on around her Silvie failed to see the lid of the sarcophagus ease open.

  After the bulk of the shaking stopped she righted herself and got to one knee. A thin almost transparent shadow crept across the deck in front of her face. She turned and looked up. Standing before her was a two-meter tall worm wearing an ice-blue chain-mail garment. Two of its four eyes were open and they didn’t look happy at all. Tan scrabbled back from the creature but her getaway was hampered when she bumped into the base of the next capsule in the line. She turned her head and pulled herself up.

  All of the capsules were opening! She turned back around just in time to see the maw of the worm open wide enough to reveal three rows of small serrated teeth on top and bottom.

  Silvie Tan screamed. It was the last thing she ever did.

  * * *

  About a minute before the explosion in the weapons bay Doctor Isaacs reached the containment locker in the exo lab. He was listening to reports from the lifeboat and shaking his head when he heard about the three dead men. For a simple patrol voyage, this trip was slowly turning into a nightmare. None of this horror would have happened if the captain had just blown that worm to bits at first sighting. Isaacs knew that wasn’t the proper way to handle a first contact situation but it was the way he personally would have dealt with it. He did a quick count in his head as he waited for the inner lock on the locker to open. Ryon, that kid Sing
h, Gilroy and Ensign Volta. Now at least three more.

  When the indicators showed green he pushed the locker inner hatch open, the negative pressure in the compartment almost suctioned him into the chamber. He looked at the dissected bird first then scanned the rest of the containment locker. No sign of Gertz. Then he saw the closet door. Was that someone in there? He took two steps toward the door to the closet when suddenly the floor tilted wickedly to the right, then back to the left. He grabbed onto a nearby table and kept himself upright. The steel table holding the dead alien bird rocked but did not tip over. Then he heard the angry sounding rumble in the bowels of the ship.

  Geez. His orderly little world was coming apart in a hurry, he thought. Hell, he could have been back on Elber doing facial reconstructions at exorbitant fees if he had retired when he’d first planned. But noooo! He had to make one more trip out, one more jaunt to the Belt Loop. Then retirement and a pension that would last him the rest of his natural life and, if some of the rumors were true, his natural life could be augmented and extended almost indefinitely. Such was the fortune of a medical man.

  He cleared the wayward thoughts with a wave of his hand, as if he was batting away flying insects. The grumbling below him echoed away and the violent shaking stopped just as quickly as it had began. He stood still for a few seconds and allowed his heart rate to drop to a comfortable seventy-five beats per minute before he pulled the closet hatch open all the way. Splayed out before him was a half-naked Milli Gertz. Her evo suit was in a pile in the corner. Her body suit had been pulled off her shoulders and both of her arms were out. The injured arm was tucked neatly beneath her.

  Isaacs gently turned her over. The first thing he saw was the flapping bandage he had so carefully attached to her arm just hours before. But something was not right. Instead of seeing a neat line of sutures, instead of seeing a healthy, normal forearm, he saw nothing below the elbow but the row of sutures. Floating. He quickly turned on his suit lights and looked again, working his way through the ten optical filters on his faceplate with voice commands.

  When he activated one of the UV filters he saw it. Her arm.

  It was like looking at a living x-ray. He could see the rest of her arm, shimmering transparent bones covered with translucent flesh and tendons, arteries and veins pulsating with life-giving blood. Her forearm was there. It was just not visible in normal light.

  He felt for a pulse. Thready and thin. Was it the result of the obvious alien “infection” that had caused her to wind up prone on the closet floor? Why had she removed her evo suit? Was she feeling something wasn’t right with her injured arm? Speculation would not suffice. He had to get her back into her suit and trundle her over to his sick bay. He called for help on his suit mike.

  His calls for help were not answered.

  PART FIVE: Help Is On The Way

  Chapter 29

  The explosion in the weapons bay had caused some damage to the Corpus Christi that only a major stint in dry dock would cure. But there were no safe ports within sub-fold distances and that presented a problem. Even though the triple-hulled ship had not lost any real structural integrity due to the mishap, some of the electrical components destroyed by the conflagration that ensued caused damage to circuits that were needed to control the Dyson Drive. A thorough evaluation had been done by damage controlmen, electrician’s mates, enginemen, hull maintenance techs, machinery repairmen and the like. Fully thirty ratings and rankings had poured over the appropriate tech manuals and what they told Captain Haad was agreed upon by consensus.

  While the ship could still make flank speeds, its fold capabilities were off-line.

  The captain was not pleased. He was in the crew mess with most of his senior officers, two master chiefs, the chief of the boat and a throng of techs.

  Things had rapidly come apart around the Christi in a big hurry. The catastrophe had caused another seven fatalities and a score of related injuries. His XO was in sick bay getting his head sewn up; his chief exobiologist was suffering through some kind of alien infection; two medtechs were dead and six alien worms were loose somewhere on the ship; CPO Eddie Rich had blown the worm ship apart and his improvised weapon had overloaded and killed him and two other fire control technicians; three members of his away team incinerated trying to escape the derelict. All of these things happened in the course of thirty minutes. Almost as if mischievious gremlins were suddenly loosed upon his unsuspecting crew.

  Haad was in a state. His first priority as captain was the safety of his crew and the wise caretaking of his ship. Mission parameters were secondary. He expected to take a lot of heat on the incident down the road. He really didn’t fear losing his command but the board of inquiry would probably last him the rest of his career and affect any further advancement potential he might have had.

  He had a few of the culinary specialists — cooks — set up a large table in the front part of the mess and they not only rearranged the furniture for the captain, they also provided his impromptu Officer’s Call with coffee and light snacks.

  One of those light snacks, a freshly-baked Danish pastry to be exact, was comfortably sliding down the throat of Doctor Anson Isaacs when the captain shot him a pointed question.

  “So what can you tell me about those worms that got loose, doctor? And don’t try to worm your way out of a direct answer.”

  The captain’s quip was met with polite laughter, unusual considering the seriousness of the question.

  Isaacs gulped his pastry down with a flourish and bought a little time with his coffee mouthwash. Finally he said, “Not much. It seems that the explosion triggered some kind of release mechanism on the containers. Just on the worms. Those things woke up and were pissed. I lost two of my techs to them. The marines are following their trail as best as they can. The things tunneled out of the containment field, or it went down with the explosion. I can’t be sure about that.” He wiped his mouth with a napkin and resumed his pronounced lean, acting as a buttress for one of the mess tables.

  “Goddammit! How could that have happened? We lost containment just when we needed it most. Make a recommendation to engineering that those containment field generators must be shielded from any and all malfunctions,” he said over his shoulder to a yeoman dutifully keeping the log notes for the captain.

  “Sir, we have a systems integration problem here, with a lot of the ships’ systems depending on some of the same circuitry to operate. The designers thought they were saving on components and reducing redundancy,” one of the ET lieutenants said.

  “Yeoman Crane, note to the file attention Naval Ship Systems Command,” Haad said, and repeated his bitch about the poorly designed containment circuits.

  “And, doc, what about Lieutenant Commander Gertz? What’s her condition?”

  Isaacs shrugged. “Unknown. I mean, long-term prognosis unknown. Actually, she’s awake, alert, and showing no signs of distress. Her arm has healed but the transparency of her skin is still extant. I think her problems are going to be more psychological in the future than physical. We’re still running tests, of course, but it seems that bird claw was hollow, almost like a viper’s fangs. When it tore into her suit a variety of venom, poison if you will, got into her system. I can’t tell you what it is, it’s something we’ve never seen before. I’ve had one of the venom sacs drained for analysis, but, that’s all I’ve had time to do.” He pushed himself upright and added as an afterthought, “What with the damage we sustained down there.”

  “Since you have the floor, doc, what’s the word on Commander Yorn?”

  “Stable. Undergoing observation. He took quite a blow to the back of his head. It took nineteen stitches to close the wound. If some of you guys ever decided to wear hair again, many of you would have some protection for those hard heads you have.”

  A small smattering of laughter rippled through the room.

  “How long are you going to keep him, doc?” someone else queried.

  Isaacs shrugged again. “Until h
e’s fit for duty, Commander Griffin.”

  “I’m as fit as I’ll ever be,” a loud voice blared from the back of the mess near the kitchen. Davi Yorn came to the front of the room carrying a steaming cup of coffee. “If this rot-gut coffee doesn’t kill me, I’ll probably live forever,” he said.

  A few of the men laughed at that statement and a few others walked up to the commander and patted him on his broad shoulders. Captain Haad welcomed him back.

  “So, what did I miss?” Yorn said.

  Haad slid over his log tablet and called for a break in the briefing while his XO caught up on current events.

  Once the proceedings got underway again, Haad asked Yorn for a brief summary of what had transpired in the weapons bay. He felt that single act was responsible for much of the distress on the ship right now.

  Yorn told the group how he had been on a routine readiness inspection patrol and how he had braced Chief Eddie Ross. As he was walking towards the troubling gun emplacement, his lights were put out from behind. “So, I guess it was the noise from that first shot he took with that thing that brought me around. I staggered to my feet and felt the back of my head. Blood and plenty of it. By that time Rich had fired off a second or third volley. Two fire controllers rushed into the bay from the forward hatch and tried to get him off the control stack. He shot them both with his M2-A2, fried them right on the spot. By now I was on the move toward the big gun and he was getting ready to fire the damned thing again. He had done something to it, it wasn’t the same as the rest of the guns in the magazine. Anyway, I managed to pull him away from the switch but not before he had pressed another control. Then he shoved me away and turned the UAW on me. I could see a small counter reading backwards from ten over his shoulder. Bomb, my feeble brain said.”

  “You mean he had rigged the thing?” one of the staff officers said.