Chapter Nine
SNAKE WALKER SNAPPED awake to the sound of a klaxon blaring. He blinked hard. His eyes burned. A light, green and diffuse though a liquid fog, flashed.
Where was he? What happened?
He brought his hands forward and he slammed them against something invisible.
The klaxon screamed.
His hands pressed against the unseen barrier. Then he realized what it was: the plasteen cover of his prison pod. The burning green fog, the embalming stasis fluid.
Snake should not have been awake. Not while still in the stasis pod. Had they already landed at the Telemachus-4? Had the journey passed so quickly? Was his end so near?
The pod fluid was cold and thick, a gelatin, and he struggled to move his arms through it. He wanted to tear off the mask that fed oxygen into his system.
This was all wrong. He shouldn't have been awake. He should have been deep in stasis.
Klaxons should not have been blaring.
The pod fluid burned his eyes. But he needed to see what was going on.
The fluid and his body vibrated with the muffled sound of the klaxon.
He squinted at the wall of prison pods across from him. Blurred rows. Trapped figures. Like insects in amber. But something was wrong. Several of the pods looked like they had been smashed open and bodies hung out of them.
What the hell was going on here?
He placed both hands against the glass of the pod. He felt along the smooth surface, then his hands ran over something rough, a crack ran down the face of the pod. He stared again at the broken pods.
Could he escape? But the bodies.
He braced his back against pod and pressed with his hands. He pressed until his arms ached and his back burned. The glass shifted a little but did not pop open. A small drop of stasis fluid ran down the outside of the plasteen.
Suddenly a dark shape flashed across his vision, something racing down the row of pods. Snake's breath caught. It looked like a man with a long trailing cape. He tried to see who it was. But the figure was unrecognizable, almost grotesque in the dim light and distortion of the stasis fluid.
Suddenly its cape cracked against one of the pods, shattering the plasteen cover. A body tumbled forward, a prisoner, a woman with pale, almost white, hair, suddenly awake, gasping, tearing at oxygen mask and feeding tubes.
Snake pounded on the cover, dull thudding sounds, trying to get the attention of the other prisoner. The woman looked up at him. She ripped the mask from her face and climbed out of the pod, falling to her hands and knees before gathering herself beneath her and rising. She had taken one step forward towards when an unearthly chittering scream erupted. She froze, turned in the direction that the dark figure had run. The woman did not move for a moment, then her hands raised in front of her chest, cupping her mouth as if it could contain her own scream, and then she turned and ran the opposite direction.
Snake pounded the glass. She had seen him. She could have freed him. And now she ran. His only hope.
He followed her with his gaze, and she was nearly out of his range of vision, when the shadow blurred in front of the pod and swept the woman up.
Snake pressed his face against the glass. Dark shapes swam and bent through the plasteen. He wiped his hands on the cover in a futile attempt to see more clearly. A high-pitched scream cut through the air and then just as quickly vanished.
Snake silently cursed.
Suddenly, the indicator lights along the top of his pod turned from green immediately to red. With that, Snake's oxygen was suddenly cut off. He tried to suck in a breath but there was nothing. A hollowness ate at his lungs. His chest tightened and his stomach convulsed.
He could not breathe. No air came through the tubes.
Across the hall, he saw other figures suddenly convulsing in their bodies. Hundreds of prisoners suddenly awake and unable to breathe.
Snake wanted to scream. He was going to die. Inside of the pod. Trapped. Smothered.
Snake pressed the sides of the pod with his hands, creating a cross-shape with his upper body, gathered his knees to his chest, and then kicked his feet against the plasteen. The cover shook. Pod fluid seeped out a crack. He kicked again. The cover shuddered but did not break. He did not have enough room to get proper kick. It was too short. He kicked again. Nothing.
His stomach convulsed desperate to draw in a breath. His eyes bulged. He wanted to open his mouth and suck in a breath of air but that would only invite death. He would drown in the foul liquid.
He tucked his legs higher and then pressed his legs against the cover as if he were squatting an immense weight. His knees trembled. His thighs burned. He felt as if daggers were thrust in his back. He pushed.
Nothing. His legs and backs needled with pain. Time was running out. But he refused to die this way. Not this way. He pushed as hard as he could.
The plasteen burst open, shards flying, and Snake tumbled out in a flood of viscous green fluid. He rolled onto his hands and knees, and sputtered, tearing the mask from his face, and gasping in deeply drawn breaths, focused only on the air racing through his body, sucking in air to clear the dark spots from his vision.
He glanced to his left, in the direction where the woman had been dragged. Nothing. Darkness. Flickering lights leading deeper into the prison barge. An open doorway. A dark hallway.
What was there? What had taken her? What waited for him?
A dull pounding interrupted. Pounding coming at him from all sides. He stood up, tore the feeding tubes from his arms, and looked around. In tier after tier of prison pods, prisoners banged against the covers, clawing, kicking, their stomachs convulsing as their bodies demanded air, but to breath in would be to drown. Hundreds of men and women trapped and dying.
The klaxon blared. The light stuttered.
Snake spun about quickly and then his gaze found Fifi, her face in a snarl, her tiny fists pounding against the cover. He sprinted to her pod. He ran his hands over the surface. Smooth. Where were the buttons?
He backed up and then leapt at the cover, both feet off the ground, flying forward, his entire weight behind him. He merely bounced off the plasteen and fell hard on the floor.
He picked himself up and ran his hands over the edges of the cover again. There had to be a way to open it but he could not find a latch.
Fifi's pounding slowed, her eyes widened. Her head drooped for a moment before she snapped it back up. Her small chest convulsed, her dark hair floating like ink above her head. Then she waved her hand against the plasteen, her eyes narrowing, and she pointed past Snake to the other side of the prison corridor.
He wheeled about.
A red fire axe hung on the wall.
He dashed forward, slipping in the slimy green pod fluid, picked himself up, and tore the axe from the wall. As fast as he could, he charged back to Fifi. She had stopped moving. Her arms hung by her sides, her eyelids flickered and she shook her head.
Snake sprung forward and smashed the axe head into the cover. The pod exploded in a spray of shards and fluid. Fifi tumbled out.
Snake dashed to the left smashing the glass pods, as fast as he could, a single hard blow, not noticing whether the occupants moved anymore.
He scanned and ran and smashed.
"Over here!" screamed Fifi.
She clawed and scratched at a pod. Crunch floated in the fluid, arms limp, head hanging.
Fifi barely ducked in time before Snake cut through the air with his axe. The big man exploded outwards.
Snake kept running, smashing, screaming, slipping on the fluid. He ran and smashed until his arms ached. Then he slipped and fell and the axe slid from his grip.
Snake pulled himself on his belly and dragged himself closer to the axe. A shape moved over him. His hand froze.
"It's over." Fifi stood between him and the axe.
"I gotta save them. They're drowning in there. Can't let anyone go out like that. Gotta save..."
"Snake ..."
"H
elp me up. Give me the axe."
"It's over. It's too late. You did what you could. But it's too late."
Snake pushed himself to sitting. He glanced down the hall. Green fluid coated the floor. A few figures had risen, wiping the gunk from themselves, spewing, coughing, gasping for air, but most of the prisoners that he had freed now lay dead on the floor, his axe arriving too late to save them.
He looked at the upper tiers of the prison barge. Scores of pods. Those in the upper pods no longer moved. Their bodies hung motionless behind the thick glass, the indicator lights along the edges of the pods a solid red.
His lips trembled. He wiped at his eyes with the back of his wrists. But the stasis fluid only got in there and it burned. "I messed up. I should have seen the axe earlier. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I could have saved dozens more."
"Too late, Snake. Let it go."
"Fiends, they left us here to die. Something happened to the prison system and they abandoned us. Devils. They're going to pay for what they did. Where are they?"
Crunch sat on the ground, rubbing his chest and spitting green fluid onto the ground. "You saved my life, boss. I owe you."
"Well I got you into this mess in the first place. SOBs should have taken the bribe. Should have done business like usual. Someone's going to pay for this."
"Snake..." said Crunch getting to his feet. His big hands suddenly clenching into fists.
Snake looked up, tears in the corners of his eyes.
"We ain't alone here."
Snake turned around. A handful of prisoners gathered behind him.
"Owe you a thanks," said a hulking dark-skinned man with dreadlocks. His voice was deep and gravelly as if he smoked too much. "I always pay back my debts. Especially when you pull me out of death." He extended a hand, easily three times as thick as Snake's. "You can call me Big T."
"And these others?" Snake asked looking at the remaining survivors.
"Don't know them for the life of me. Only thing I know about them is that we can call them lucky."
Fifi tugged Snake's elbow drawing him out of the conversation. "Time enough for a social call later. We need to get out of here. Whatever is going on here can only be trouble. Something's gone wrong here. One way or another the marines are coming and I don't want to be here when they do."
He stared down the hallway to the darkness, to where the figures had pulled the woman down. "We need to get out of here. We need to get off this prison barge and back to the Phaethon."
"And these?" She nodded back towards the other prisoners.
"I think we've got better odds with a small army at our back."
She lowered her voice. "More like a better chance of us getting caught. Plus we don't know anything about these men, other than that they had a one-way ticket to Telemachus-4, and people don't get sent there for jay walking or robbing an apartment. People get sent there for some serious crimes. Murder. Rape. I think we'd be better off on our own. These guys are liable to get us killed. Or worse, kill us."
"Not sure we have much of a choice."
Chapter Ten
SERGEANT ENGSTROM JOGGED down the hallway of the Poros, Ensign Harrison and the rest of Marine Team 6 at her heels. Behind her, the recruit gasped even though he was in his prime, ten years younger than Petros, even though they were moving at a moderate pace. The sergeant wanted to break out into a full sprint but she did not want to embarrass the young man nor did she want to raise an unnecessary alarm with the few support staff on the destroyer who poked their heads out of doorways at the sound the team running.
But at the same time, Engstrom's order from Admiral Kronos was direct. "Seal off Acheron. Weld the doors. Shut down the atmosphere to everything but the stasis pods. And do it yesterday."
Just like with her team's emergency mission to answer the distress call of the Galileo, Kronos had ordered them to respond to the emergency signal from the Acheron and the blubbering of the prison barge watchman. Engstrom wondered if this was the fate of her team for the remainder of their tour with the Poros.
She had seen the look on her team's eyes when she assembled them – the dropping of their shoulders, the shared glances – and she thought about saying something to Kronos but she knew she had to do this. She had to follow orders. It was what held the marines together.
A few short minutes later, Engstrom and her team reached the compression door for the corridor leading out of the Poros and connecting to the prison barge. She turned to wait for Harrison. The ensign had lost even more steps. His face was slick with sweat and he panted. "Here, ma'am."
"If you can't keep up, I leave you behind. Understood?"
The boy nodded, swallowing hard, and then followed the others into the compression chamber.
Engstrom looked at her team before stepping into the chamber. They were only eleven now, tightly packed, lips tight, a few of them blinking out the sleep from having just been awoken. She wished she had Gomes with them now. Despite his tendency to skirt the edges of the rules, he was solid on missions. He was the one she trusted the most to keep to task. Under pressure he was one of the best.
Engstrom closed the door behind her, spinning the handle shut. The indicator lights flashed green then yellow. She always expected something to go wrong and the light to suddenly turn red, indicating a breech from outer space, but it never happened.
When the light turned green again, she opened the far door, and floated off her feet. The rest of the team shot after her through the tube that connected the Poros with the Acheron.
It was decided long ago that the best way for the space convoys to function was for them to be held together by hitches and for access between ships to always be through tubes connected by compression chambers. That way if one of the vessels in the convoy suffered a catastrophic accident, it would not affect the atmosphere of the other ships.
While this set up provided a level of security that reassured Engstrom, traveling through the zero gravity connector tubes always bothered her. She did not like the loss of control when her feet lifted off the ground. It was too hard to control the direction that she was taking. It was too easy to be bumped or jostled and sent off path.
On top of that, the walls of the tubes with their long windows made Engstrom feel sick, exposed, as if at any moment, an object might strike the walls piercing them, or the metal would suddenly buckle, and Engstrom would be hurled to her cold death.
She grabbed the rungs set in the wall and pulled herself along quickly. The stars shined bright. But the blackness behind them seemed only deeper. She fought back a shiver wiggling up her spine.
After half a minute, she had traversed the tube and was at the opposite door. She grabbed the handle and spun the wheel. It did not move. A cold sweat broke over her brow. Her mouth suddenly got sticky.
"The door..." She turned to Harrison who had finally caught up with her, in this instance slightly ahead of the rest of the team.
"Don't worry. This one just sticks a bit." Harrison grabbed the handle with both hands, planted his feet against the door, and then executed a series of weird twisting motions.
Engstrom thought the boy looked like an idiot but the handle groaned and turned in the ensign's hand. Harrison shot her a wide toothy smile over his shoulder. He hauled the door open. "After you, ma'am."
By the time, the lights cycled from green to yellow and back to green again, Engstrom had run her fingers through her hair, adjusted her chest armor, and touched her trinity: her prod, her ceramic gun, and her earpiece.
The other door opened without a hitch and Engstrom was again jogging at a fast clip down the halls of the Acheron, her team behind her, their feet falling into a syncopated rhythm that comforted Engstrom.
Even though most people considered the Poros a spartan vessel with its white corridors and underlying white noise, the Acheron was even more spartan. Paint had not been wasted to cover up the walls. In fact, in many places, they had neglected even the walls. Instead the sides of the corridors were ventilati
on pipes, metallic tubes, and simple grates, just like the floor.
The Acheron reminded Engstrom of the abandoned industrial facilities on Luna where they had run trainings ops when she was first in the Space Marines. Cold dull metal. The hiss of steam. The grinding of unseen gears. Uneven static, and the reverberation of her feet clanging against the floor grates. The sporadic lights above did little to fight back the shadows that filled the hall.
If she did not know where she was going, she might have been scared. She might have pulled out her flashlight to check dark corners, to investigate bottomless cracks, to track the sound of escaped bug stock scuttling among the pipes.
But she knew where she was going and, several minutes later, she arrived at the control center for the prison barge, the small glassed in room with video feeds of all the hallways of pods, the screens that displayed the life statistics for each prisoner.
Roy stood behind the glass waving his hand for her to come into the control room. "What took you all so long?"
"We need to seal the doors to the prisoners." Engstrom scanned the room. Crumpled water bags. Dust on the upper monitors. A half finished portion of a bowl of bug paste surrounded by tattered cards. She would say something to Kronos about the lack of discipline.
"There's something going on down here." Roy flopped down in his chair and pointed at one of the screens, clouded in static and blurry, a dark room. "Able went down there. I lost him."
"Roy, this a code red, straight from the top. We need to seal the doors, cut off the atmosphere, and drop all the power functioning to the minimum. Admiral's orders."
Roy shook his head. "Abel's still down there. He went into that room. The room where you dropped off the cargo from the Galileo. Something's not right down there."
"Kronos wants us to weld the door shut."
"What the hell did you bring in there?"
Alien Infestation Page 5
