by M. R. Forbes
“Hold your fire!” Riley screamed. “Damn it, stop shooting!”
They didn’t hear her. Or they didn’t listen. She was trying to help him, but they didn’t listen. He stumbled away, diving for the room, desperate to escape.
“David! Stop!”
He threw himself down on the floor behind the wall, finally escaping the gunfire, which stopped as suddenly as it had started. He reached up to the control panel, closing the door and cutting them off. They would have to get close to open it, and if they did, he would do to them what they had tried to do to him.
He looked down at his body. He couldn’t believe how bloody it was. He couldn’t believe how torn his clothes were. They had tried to kill him. He couldn’t believe he was still alive. He pulled his shirt off, looking down at his chest. He was still skinny, but muscles were bulging out from his stomach, rippling across his torso. The same was true of his arms. He stared at his body as he watched torn skin wither and die and fall away, replaced by fresh skin that blossomed and replaced it, all within seconds. His body was still on fire, still burning with anger, hate and joy, and love and lust.
They had made him unstoppable. Invincible. Riley had lied to him.
He was a god.
He smiled at the idea. Maybe not an actual god, but he had power no other human possessed. He was more perfect than they could ever be, and he could tell he was getting stronger by the minute.
He remained against the wall, listening. He could hear Riley yelling at her underlings through the door. She was on his side after all. She was trying to help him. They were the enemy. Her enemy too. They didn’t listen to her. He would show them in just a minute. He wanted to make sure he was healed first.
He looked around him. The room he was in resembled the lab, but it was smaller and had fewer machines in it. There was something in the center of the room however, held up by a pedestal jutting up out from the floor. It had a dark tarp over it, though he could see it was folded up on the other side. What was it? Curious, he got up, walked over to it and around to the other side, still listening for the scientists to make sure they weren’t near the door.
There was a machine of some kind under the tarp. He couldn’t see much of it, but the scientists had opened up a panel on it, revealing a dark sphere inside. It wasn’t all that interesting or impressive, except for the fact the sphere was floating.
“What the heck?” David said, leaning down to get a closer look at it. He started reaching out, intending to run his hand around the sphere, to prove it was actually floating and wasn’t some optical illusion. He had no idea what the machine was or what it did. He didn’t even care. But it fascinated him. How did it float?
His hand came within a few inches of the sphere when it started to react, glowing blue lines activating across its surface. He yanked his hand back, momentarily afraid as the sphere began to spin.
The door slid open. He had forgotten about it, mesmerized by the floating sphere. Riley stood in the doorway with Harry and Doctor Gu.
“David,” she said calmly. “I’m sorry for the misunderstanding. Please, come back to the lab with me. I’ll take the CRISPR. I’ll be with you. Everything will be okay.”
“Really?” he said. “You aren’t trying to trick me?”
“No. I don’t want to trick you. I need you. All of humanity needs you. You’re the key to our future.”
“Yes I am, aren’t I? You made me special. You made me important. That’s why I love you.”
“I love you too, David,” Riley said.
His whole body tingled at the words. “What is this thing?”
“It’s another of my projects. I’ll tell you more about it later, okay? I need you to come back to the lab with me. I need you to watch over me after I take the CRISPR. It’s going to knock me out, and I want to be safe.”
“Oh.” He smiled. “Okay. Sure. Did you know your project is turned on? The sphere thing is spinning.”
Her face changed. “What?”
“It’s spinning. And glowing.”
She seemed very interested in that. “Can I come around to see it?”
“Of course.”
Harry and Doctor Gu didn’t look happy when Riley entered the room and went around the machine. David realized they must be jealous because she was choosing him over them. He liked the way that felt, to have them envious of him. He had spent his whole life wishing he was someone else. Someone special, healthy and strong. Now he was all that and maybe more.
“It’s active,” she confirmed, glancing at the scientists. They seemed nervously excited by the prospect. “David, how did you activate it?”
“I just put my hand near it,” he said. “Like this.”
He reached out the way he had before, putting his hand close to the sphere. A bolt like lightning shot out into his fingers. He tried to pull his hand away again in response. It hurt.
His hand didn’t move. More bolts lashed out from the sphere to his hand, and he tried harder to pull it away. “Riley, help,” he said, suddenly fearful.
“What’s happening?” she said, eyes fixed on the sphere.
David continued pulling, but he couldn’t get free. “I can’t get my hand out. I’m stuck, and it hurts.”
The energy was swallowing his entire hand, and he couldn’t free it. Riley grabbed his arm and tried pulling with him, but it was no use.
“What is it doing to me?” David asked.
“I don’t know,” Riley replied. “It’s never done this before.”
“But it’s your project.” He froze. “You tricked me, didn’t you? You said you weren’t going to trick me, and then you lied to me to get me to touch it. You knew it would do this.”
“I didn’t. I swear.”
“Aahhhhh. It hurts.”
David felt his pain turning to rage. He lashed out at Riley, slapping her in the face with enough force to knock her down. She turned away and then looked up at him accusingly.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry. It hurts so bad.”
“I’m sorry too, David,” Riley said. She produced a gun from behind her back and stood up.
“You can’t kill me with that.”
“Don’t be too sure.”
She stepped forward, putting the barrel to his temple and pulling the trigger. He heard the round fire. He felt the heat of it on his scalp. He was aware of it shattering his skull and piercing his brain, and of the machine suddenly releasing him.
He fell to the floor, and everything went dark.
Chapter 10
“Only David wasn’t dead,” Riley told Caleb and his team. “Blowing his brains out didn’t kill him. We thought it had. We took his body and put it in storage so we could do an autopsy later. The alien craft released him, but it stayed powered up. We had never gotten it to turn on before, so we wanted to study it first.”
“Haven’t you seen like, any horror movie ever?” Flores asked. “You don’t leave the bad guy alone like that. You toss him out the airlock.”
“We had no reason to believe destroying his brain wouldn’t kill him, and I wanted to study the effect of the gene alterations on the rest of his system. Every failure is a learning experience.”
“I’m learning a lot,” Sho said. “Thank you for that.”
“Settle down,” Caleb said. “Riley, what happened to the other Reapers?”
“It took about an hour. I was running tests on the sphere, using sensors to collect data. Harry and Bo took Paul and Gina to sickbay to get them patched up. They were both bruised and lacerated from the event. I heard a commotion in the lab, and I went running out there. David was awake and alive. Only he wasn’t the same. He didn’t speak to me at all, even when I tried to get his attention. He ignored me and went right for the sickbay. I shot him in the back. He still didn’t pay me any mind. The other Reapers heard him, and they came back to fight. He killed them, one after another like it was nothing. No effort at all. Harry was with me, and we ran. We got out of Research and into
the ship. We realized there was a problem and we had to figure out a way to manage it.”
“ Why didn’t you wake us up,” Caleb said.
“So you could die too? I saw how easily he went through my team. They were Marines, Caleb. As well-trained as you and I. We decided to go to the bridge. We called Governor Lyle, and I explained what had happened. I told him he needed to seal off Metro as tight as he could, so nobody could get in or out. At the same time, I had Harry hack into the stasis pods and erase the thaw dates. We decided to wake you first, and we set the pod to thaw you either when the ship was clean or when the power started to reach critical levels.”
“When it was too late to do anything about the problem? Why didn’t you go to Shiro and Ning?”
“I did. I left Harry alone on the bridge. I went down to the Marine module. Shiro and Ning weren’t there. I tried to find them. I used the ship’s sensors. I used the cameras. At first, it was like they had disappeared. Then I got a hit on one of the corridors, and when I switched to the closest camera, I got a shot of David carrying Shiro back toward Research. His neck was broken.”
“David killed him?”
“That’s what I said before. He killed all of them.”
“So where did the monsters come from?” Sho asked. “The mutant trife.”
“Harry and I hid on the ship. We managed to stay out of sight for weeks. David got close to us a few times. We could hear his footsteps in the corridors. And sometimes he would shout out for me. Riley, come out. I love you. He went to the bridge. He knew we had been there. He didn’t know what we had done. Then a month went by, and there was no sign of him. We thought maybe the alterations had burned him out. There was a precedent for that. It had happened to a lot of the earlier subjects. We went down to Research.
“Let me guess,” Flores said. “He wasn’t dead.”
“No. He knew we were coming. He unleashed his hounds on us. It was the first time we saw what he had done to the others.”
“To the others?” Caleb said. “You’re saying the trife are the Reapers?”
“And Shiro. And Ning. He took our research and used it to combine trife DNA with human DNA. He created hybrids, and somehow he brought them back to life. I think the alien spacecraft has something to do with that. We had enough time to put a fallback plan in place. We ran for the Marine module, for the stasis chamber. I made it, barely. Harry didn’t. I went into the pod with the hybrid still pounding on the blast door. Part of me was hoping I would never wake up.”
“But I woke up, and I woke you up, and here we are,” Caleb said.
“Here we are,” Riley said. “Two hundred thirty-five years later. Two thirty-six for you. The Reapers are still alive. It stands to reason that David is still alive too. And since you weren’t thawed because the ship’s sensors registered the ship as clean, it means the power levels are reaching critical.”
“And we have no idea where we are in space. We don’t know if we’re near Proxima. We don’t know if we’re close to anything. Even if we somehow manage to deal with the Reapers, there’s a good chance we’re going to run out of power and die anyway. Is that right?”
“Not completely right. The tests I was running with the alien craft suggest that its power source has enough energy to replace the Deliverance’s multiple reactors and then some. That was part of the reason we set up the thaw the way we did. We hoped that David and the Reapers would die, we would wake up, and then we could connect the alien ship to the interchange and keep the lights on, so to speak. Failing that, wake up the Guardians and hope they can fix my mistake.”
“I’m honored that you thought of us, Doctor,” Sho said. “Really.”
Caleb glared at her. She smirked and looked at the floor.
“What makes you think we can fix this when your team couldn’t?” Caleb asked. “Like you already said, they were trained Marines too. Better trained than we are, according to you.”
“They were caught off-guard, and pinned in the Research module. You have the entire ship outside of Metro, and you were smart and quick enough to grab the P-50s.”
“We weren’t smart or quick enough to grab our helmets,” Flores said. “The ATCS would come in handy right now. So would the comms.”
“The rifles are more useful than the headgear,” Sho said. “You can’t kill a mutant Reaper-trife with a hat.”
Flores smiled. “True enough.”
“So you think the plasma rifles can do better against the Reapers?” Caleb asked. “Why didn’t you try to use them?”
“One of them was always guarding the armory. I barely got past it, and it cost me Harry. You saw the door to the stasis chamber. Anyway, the Reapers can recover from most damage. You can destroy their brain, and it’ll regenerate. I don’t think they can come back from being burned to ash.”
“You don’t think?”
“I haven’t had a chance to prove it. The mechanism behind the accelerated healing factor is complex. It’s based on studies done on lizards. Caudal autotomy. They can intentionally shed their tails when threatened, and then grow them back again. We used our splicing technique to introduce the related gene pairs into human DNA. Obviously, something like that takes a bit of trial and error, and we failed multiple times.”
“With human subjects?” Sho said.
“Yes.”
“Where did you get them?”
Riley glared at her as if she was mad Sho had asked the question. “There’s no law left on Earth, Private. There are no rules. No civilization.”
“What about morals?”
“There weren’t many morals left even before the trife came. We took people off the streets. Scavengers. Survivors. If we had been successful, we would have turned them into superhumans. Forced evolution. Even David Nash understood the value of what we were trying to accomplish.”
“I don’t believe you can stand there and justify any of what you were doing.”
“Okay,” Caleb said, interrupting. “Sho, enough. We’re about two hundred years past the expiration date on judgment. Riley, go on.”
“My hope is that if we destroy enough connective tissue the target won’t be able to restore it all. It takes time and energy to heal. Like the trife, a Reaper’s energy comes from radiation. In this case probably the alien power source. We corner it, wound it, cut it off from escaping and keep putting the pressure on, and we can take it down. Alternately, we can try to blow it to pieces or get it out of one of the airlocks, but the first is extremely dangerous depending on where we are in the ship. The second is incredibly difficult.”
“And you’re sure there are only six left?” Caleb asked.
“As long as David hasn’t been able to get into Metro, he wouldn’t have the bodies to make more. He created them to hunt Harry and me down. Up until an hour ago, he might have even thought I was dead.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” Caleb said. “Guardians, fall in.” The rest of his Marines lined up and came to attention. Caleb was surprised when Riley joined them at the end of the line next to Washington. “You heard Doctor Valentine’s account of our situation. Our primary mission is to take out the Reapers. Secondary is to locate and neutralize David Nash. Tertiary is to capture the alien power source. Riley, how much effort will it be to connect the alien reactor to the interchange?”
“Impossible to say, Alpha,” she replied, staying at attention. “We will probably need to unseal Metro and enlist their engineers to assist.”
“Understood. Then that’s step four.”
“Alpha, if I may?” Riley said.
“Go ahead.”
“David Nash has had over two hundred years alone on this ship. There’s no telling what he’s spent the time doing, if he’s been doing anything at all, or if he’s even still alive. It isn’t safe to assume the Reapers are the only threat on the Deliverance.”
“Good point,” Caleb said. “We need to be careful with every move we make from here on out.”
“Yes, Alpha,” the Guardians repli
ed.
“Also, I just want to apologize to all of you,” Riley said. “My successes made me arrogant. My orders made me cold. This is my fault, and I take full responsibility for it.”
“Thank you, Riley,” Caleb said. “If you’re integrating into this unit, then your problem becomes our problem. The Vultures are family, and that makes the Guardians family too. It doesn’t mean we don’t have our disputes, but we come together when it counts. If any of you don’t agree with that statement, speak up now.”
Caleb’s eyes shifted to Sho. She didn’t flinch, staying at attention, her eyes forward. He knew she didn’t like Riley. He didn’t blame her for that. She would accept her into the fold regardless because this affected all of them and their sworn duty to protect Metro from the outside.
“Good. First order of business. I want to get up to the bridge to review the sensor data and the camera feeds. Ideally, I’d like to set up operations there, but I don’t know that we’ll get the chance. Riley, is it safe to assume a Reaper is watching that area?”
“Yes, Alpha,” she said. “But Harry and I managed to sneak past it on multiple occasions. I can help guide you there.”
“Excellent. Guardians, let’s move out.”
Chapter 11
Caleb raised his hand, bringing the Guardians to a stop at the intersection. He motioned with two fingers, directing Sho across the corridor. She moved across before whirling around and aiming her P-50 down the passage. She signaled it was clear, and the Guardians moved into formation again, silently covering the corridor.
It had taken an hour to get from the head on Deck Nine to their current location, closing on the bridge. They had used the central lift to get from Deck Nine to Deck Six, at which point they had navigated the interlocking passageways in the same manner. There had been no sign of Reapers save for occasional deposits of excrement along the corridors, most of it so old it had hardened into near-stone sprawls against the sides of the walls. Caleb didn’t know if trife had to go the same way. He had never seen trife piss or shit, and he had always assumed either they kept it neat like a cat or their biological process dealt with waste some other way.
