by B. V. Larson
Looking down at Galina’s dead body, I couldn’t help but wonder. Could she have the key on her?
“Oh for God’s sake, McGill,” Kivi said with her hands planted on her hips. “Don’t tell me you’re losing it over this woman’s dead body. You’ve seen me dead often enough.”
Carlos chuckled. “Kivi’s right. I’ve never seen you look this broken-up over her corpse. Not even when it was fresh.”
Kivi slapped at him, and then she glared at me.
“Uh…” I said, trying to think.
The trouble was I couldn’t tell them about the key. They didn’t know it existed. It was a secret that only Claver, Turov and I shared. The fact that Turov possessed something so powerful was a secret.
Had Galina died with it on her person? Had she sent me here, hoping I’d find it for her? If that was the case, why hadn’t she told me that was the nature of my mission?
Uncertainly, I leaned over and began to search her pockets.
“This is disgusting,” Kivi said, misinterpreting my actions.
“Shut up, Specialist,” I said. “I’m trying to see if she has the activator for the dragon on her.”
“You don’t need that,” she snapped. “The dragon will recognize you. It’s got a computer inside, you know.”
Then I found it. A bulge in her left hip pocket. Fishing in there, I tried to pull it out while hunkering over her body to hide what I was doing. The damn thing was stuck in her pocket.
“McGill, you’re mental,” Kivi said.
She stalked away, but Carlos hung around.
“You want me to get you two a room?” he asked.
“Shut up, man,” I said. “I’ve got special orders.”
“I bet you do.”
“Give me your knife,” I said.
“Sick puppy,” he said, but he handed me his belt knife anyway.
I slashed Galina’s hip pocket open and immediately saw the problem. The key was a small device, but she’d secured it in her pocket in a pouch of some kind. It was tied down so she couldn’t lose it accidentally. I cut the cords, and then I stood up, thinking hard.
“What is that thing?” Carlos asked.
“Nothing. Shut up.”
“That’s like the third time you’ve told me to shut up in the last minute. I think you’re trying for a record.”
“Why aren’t you shutting up, then?”
Frowning at me, he watched suspiciously as I climbed into the dragon and closed it up behind me. Sure enough, Turov had turned on every piece of security the vehicle had. I was forced to provide voice samples, a password and badge identifications. Even then, the engine wouldn’t turn over. She’d set the dragon up to operate only for her.
Cursing, I looked out the front visor at my troops. If I climbed out now in defeat, I’d have to face even more probing questions. My squaddies weren’t very obedient outside of a battle, and they weren’t dumb, either. They knew something odd was going on.
Then I remembered the key. Making doubly sure the tiny cockpit was sealed, I took the key out of its pouch and touched it to the console.
I wasn’t sure it would work. I knew that the dragons were Dust World’s product, and they were trying to sell them to other planets, but they hadn’t gotten a full patent on them yet. Still, if they wanted to get approval at all, they would have to have—
The big, hydrogen-burning engine thrummed into life. Smiling, I knew I was in business.
My troops had been standing around outside the dragon, looking up at me sourly. But now that the machine had come to life, they retreated rapidly. That was a good thing for them, because I had some walking to do.
Not three minutes later, I was in the primary passages on my way down to Blue Deck. In my wake trotted a dozen soldiers like baby ducks following mama.
“McGill?” Graves called, his signal weak and crackling, “Toro is still requesting assistance. Get to Blue Deck immediately.”
“We’re on our way, sir,” I said. “We’ve got a dragon with us, too.”
“A dragon? Oh right, Turov keeps one up there. Paranoid woman. Well, you may have to use it. Toro made some kind of strange report about finding a lot of bodies. Now she’s not responding to my calls.”
My good mood evaporated. Graves had a way of making that happen. We hadn’t seen a body except for Turov’s and she’d been sealed up in a dragon. Why would there be a lot of them on Blue Deck? I couldn’t think of a pleasant reason.
“On it, Centurion,” I said. “Proceeding to the first hatch.”
To control a starship, there were really only two zones that were critical. Engineering was one since you couldn’t fly the ship without controlling the drives. Gold Deck contained all the piloting and navigational equipment, not to mention sensors, making it the second most important target.
There were, however, two other regions that any sane commander wanted to capture before he tried to fly a ship anywhere. These were the tactical control room, which operated the broadsides—and Blue Deck.
One might think that possessing what amounted to an advanced medical facility wouldn’t be at the top of the priority list—but it was. The revival machines were there, and they were most valuable equipment aboard any legion ship.
To begin with, they cost almost as much as the starship itself, but that wasn’t the only reason they were prized. They also decided who lived and who died, literally. In any struggle to capture a ship, they had to be secured.
Hatches led deeper and deeper into Blue Deck, and they were all blown and hanging wide. The deck was pressurized and heated, but we didn’t feel like removing our helmets, even though our instruments said the air was safe enough to breathe. In fact, it registered as warm and radiation-free.
That was probably because the entire deck’s air volume was exchanged, heated and filtered every three minutes during normal operations for safety’s sake. But I didn’t trust the atmosphere. Just because the lights were on didn’t mean they were going to stay on. We kept our helmets sealed just in case.
The first sign of trouble came in the form of three floating bodies. There was no gravity here active on Blue Deck, and we’d seen lots of empty suits—but these three weren’t empty.
“Am I seeing this?” Carlos asked. “The limbs on those suits—where are they?”
He was right. They’d been torn off, plucked free. They were floating torsos with helmets attached, but no arms or legs.
“Squad at alert,” I said. “Toro? Adjunct Toro, are you here? Veteran McGill here. I’ve brought a squad to render assistance. Come back, please.”
There was nothing but a gentle hiss in my headphones. The bodies were freshly killed, that much was obvious. Red blood ran from the missing limbs and pooled on the walls, ceiling and floor in the odd way that liquids spread out in zero G.
“McGill to Graves,” I said, but I didn’t hear a response. “McGill to Graves—I don’t seem to have you on my active contacts list anymore, sir.”
Nothing came back from him, either.
“We’re in some kind of communications blackout zone, McGill,” Kivi said. “Nothing is working on my kit either. This smells like a trap to me.”
“Roger that. Circle up tightly on my tail, people. Toro didn’t have a dragon. We might—”
That was as far as I got before we were attacked.
I’ll be the first to admit that I was surprised when our foes finally showed themselves. In fact, I gave a shout of horror and dismay that was almost as high-pitched as the noises made by the rest of my squad.
We’d been expecting plants. Maybe those walking tree-things we’d seen before on the ship and later down on Death World. But that wasn’t what came at us.
Instead of acid-spitting trees, we were assailed by the bodies of our own dead. They didn’t look exactly like our people anymore, but we could tell that there was human flesh and bone mixed in with the horrific things that launched out of every door, every closet and every alcove of Blue Deck to overwhelm us.
/> These things were strange. As they flew toward us I could clearly see they had vegetation sprouting out of them every which-way. Orange, floating sensory bulbs drifted around them like flowers. Tubers had lengthened the feet, turning them into gnarled root-like masses. Twisting vines came out of their mouths and eye-sockets—sometimes they even stuck out in-between exposed gray-white ribs.
It was disgusting and dangerous all at the same time. Some of these monsters were armed. They carried our own rifles, randomly folded into shotguns or automatic carbines. These weapons sprayed explosive bullets at an alarming rate. They shot their own kind as often as they hit us, but they outnumbered us in the extreme.
My squad opened fire in return. The carnage was terrific. We were all clenching our teeth and squeezing triggers. I lofted two grenades from my dragon’s chest-cannons straight down the corridor ahead of me. These flashed and blasted apart the reconfigured bodies—but more kept coming.
We shouted until we were hoarse. We fired until our magazines ran dry. In the end, I let my last surviving troops fall back and run for the exit to contact Graves and tell him what we were up against.
But my dragon didn’t retreat. I marched it forward, breathing in hissing gasps between my teeth, as I squelched through hundreds of floating dead things.
Using grippers, I kept tearing their flesh apart until they were all destroyed. Every last one of them.
Then, when it was over, I climbed out of my dragon and opened my visor just long enough to barf on the floor. I told myself the stink had overwhelmed me—but I knew better.
-45-
I thought that after I’d been so critical in the retaking of Blue Deck, I’d be hailed as a hero—but I’d thought wrong.
“McGill, are you still screwing around on Blue Deck?” Graves asked me not two minutes after the last infected corpse stopped flopping around.
“Yes sir,” I said. “You can sound the all-clear. I’m flirting with the bio girls right now.”
“Very funny. Turov wants a status report on the revival machines.”
“Did you say Imperator Turov is aboard this ship, sir?”
“Yes. We’ve taken Red Deck. She brought in the rest of our troops from the outer hull using the holes they burned into the warp core. There were some strange abominations down there—half human and half plant. Now she’s up on Gold Deck trying to get Minotaur operational again.”
“Strange abominations, huh?” I said. “I’ve seen lots of those. Blue Deck was full of them when we got here.”
“That’s great, McGill. Turov wants information about the revival machines, and she wants it yesterday.”
“Uh…” I said, squinting through my canopy and rotating the dragon’s upper body from side to side. I spotted a revival chamber a hundred meters off. “Just a second.”
I marched with a heavy, clanking tread toward a hatch. The metal hinges were melted and fused, and the door was hanging askew—not a good sign.
Inside, I found a mess that was worse than what I’d imagined. In my mind, I’d conjured up a burned, stabbed and generally slaughtered revival machine with its guts spread all over the deck. That would have been a pretty sight compared to what I actually did discover.
The revival machine was in the chamber, all right, and it looked like it was still alive. The maw was steamy and hung open like the jaws of a prehistoric beast. The strange part was it had tendrils growing right out of it. These tendrils led to a string of pods lying on the floor, pods of a nature I’d never seen before.
These bulbous shapes weren’t like cucumbers or peppers. Instead, they looked like hairy, orange-colored kiwis. The skin of these pods was thin as if they’d over ripened. Many had split open in spots. I had no idea what these freaky growths were, but they were obviously linked by vines to the human bodies all over the floor and to the revival machine itself.
There were at least thirty of these pods. They also grew into the dead, shrunken corpses of our bio people. This pissed me off. It was obvious that the specialists and orderlies had fought to the death to defend their equipment, and now they were being used as fertilizer to grow fresh enemies.
As I watched, the revival machine’s maw sagged open a little wider. A round pod, coated in slime, rolled out and plopped onto the deck. A fresh green strand led to the stem, connecting it to the chain of the pods and corpses.
Could this be how the aliens had been reproducing? By using our bodies for fuel and corrupting revival machines to create fresh pods? It was weird, and it was beyond disgusting.
My grippers came up automatically. I didn’t have any ammo left for the chest-cannons—but I did have the power to tear these things apart.
“McGill?” Graves asked sharply.
I’d often thought Graves had some kind of ESP. He seemed to know when I was about to do something unsanctioned.
“Bad news, Centurion,” I said. “The revival machines seem to be corrupted, converted over to alien production. There were at least a thousand human corpses on Blue Deck altogether, and those that were capable of attacking us have been destroyed. There are more, however. Let me link you to the vid.”
I set up a stream and piped it to wherever Graves was on ship. That’s when I realized that our transmissions were working as they should again. Could I have accidentally killed whatever it was that was providing radio interference? I didn’t know, but what I did know was that these aliens were easily the weirdest I’d yet to encounter.
“Shit,” Graves said heavily as I panned the room, giving him a good look at the scene. “What a mess. Where’s your squad, McGill?”
“I sent the survivors to the exit. Do you want me to destroy this enemy infestation, sir? We can’t possibly—”
There was a buzzing sound as someone cut into our private channel.
“McGill?” demanded Turov’s voice. I could tell she was pissed from her tone.
“I read you, sir. Go ahead.”
“You’re not to touch any of those pods under any circumstances. I’ve been monitoring your vid stream. They’ve become symbiotic with the revival machines. If you cut them off from the human raw resources, the shock could kill our machines.”
“Hmm,” I said thoughtfully. “If you say so, sir. What do you want me to do?”
“Stand guard until I can get to your position with techs and bio people who know what they’re doing.”
In my heart, I seriously doubted any of our specialists had experience with an infection like this one, but I did as I was told. I withdrew to the main corridor and shoved deformed bodies out of the way to make a path. I would’ve started disposing of them, but I had my orders.
When Turov and her team finally arrived some minutes later, I could tell that none of them were happy. They were horrified and disgusted.
“A vid stream just can’t do this justice, can it?” I asked them, trying not to look too smug. “If you people would like to get to work, the first corrupted machine is in chamber six. It’s still making new pods, even now.”
Turov ordered her team into the chamber, but she didn’t follow them inside.
“Get that revival machine back into operating condition,” she ordered. “I don’t want to hear any excuses.”
Watching them go in there, I mentally gave them no more than ninety seconds before the first one barfed. Sure enough, it happened in just under a minute.
All that time, Turov stood with her hands on her hips next to me. She had her lips curled back to show her fine, white teeth. I figured she was grossed out by the guts that were glued onto the chassis of my dragon.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said. “We have things to discuss.”
I marched down the passageway behind her, and we exited Blue Deck. Getting out of that slice of alien hell relieved my mind and spirit. Watching Galina’s posterior all the way down the corridor didn’t hurt, either. That woman could walk like she had high heels on, even in combat boots.
It wasn’t until I came out into the central corridor th
at ran along the spine of the ship that I finally got an inkling that something was wrong. Perhaps I’d been lulled by the view. Or maybe I was still too mentally stunned by my ordeal on Blue Deck to think clearly.
Whatever the case, when I walked out into a ringed formation of some thirty armed heavy infantry, several of them weaponeers, I was surprised when they leveled their weapons at me in unison.
Even better, Winslade was leading them. He had a nasty grin on his face, and I figured it was meant for me.
“Primus Winslade?” I asked. “I thought you were babysitting the bio people down on the planet.”
“I’m overjoyed to see you, too,” he replied. “The lifter is bringing everyone up now.”
“James McGill,” Turov said loudly. “I’m placing you under arrest. Now, get the hell out of my dragon this instant!”
-46-
I’m by no means inexperienced when it comes to being arrested. I’d go so far as to say I’ve deserved most of my many arrests, punishments and even a few of my executions. But usually, I knew damned well what the charges were when arrests happened.
Today, I was baffled and a little pissed off.
“Hold on,” I said, rotating the dragon to survey the group. I noticed about then that none of their faces were familiar. Turov had made sure to utilize troops who weren’t from my own unit.
“What’s this about?” I asked. “I just got done clearing Blue Deck following your orders, sir. Did I do it incorrectly?”
“Yes you did,” she said. “I never instructed you to rob my body. You’ve stolen valuable technology and used it without authorization. I have witnesses to that effect and supporting vid files.”
“Oh,” I said, catching on. “You’re talking about the key, aren’t you?”
“Shut up,” she hissed.
“Why?” I asked. “Seems to me that I’ll be needing some witnesses and vid-streams of my own today.”
I rotated the upper chassis of the dragon to address the crowd. The group tensed, aiming their rifles at me. Apparently, they’d been briefed about the power of a dragon up close—and probably about my reputation as a mean dragon-rider as well.
