by Diane Carey
Trying to be clear, Ned asked, “So there could be more, but they’re just not moving.”
“Or some of the twelve could be some of the smugglers that aren’t dead yet. We only know three of Detroit’s crew are dead for sure. There were a lot more on their ship. We only saw seven.”
“How many are there on his ship?”
“He doesn’t report to me, sport.”
“So we could be dealing with twelve monsters, or only eight.”
“Only?” Mary repeated sarcastically. “Deal with them? How can you deal with them?”
“We could kill eight of them, and not know there are four more,” Chris pointed out.
“Do they breathe?” Leigh asked, her quick mind reeling.
“If we hang one by the throat, will it die?”
“What about a vacuum?” Steward asked. “No air?”
Dan snapped his fingers. “Or high pressure!”
“High pressure would kill us too,” Adam told him.
Pangborn snickered. “You’ll never be able to kill eight of them. You’ll never be able to kill one of them.”
“Are you saying no one’s ever won against these animals?” Ned challenged. “Are you flat-out saying that? Because that’s the same as giving up and I don’t think I’ll have that!”
Maybe the captain was thinking about lying, about inventing some story that put him in charge, but he was still leg-ironed and shackled at the wrists, and he measured that in, too.
“No, there’ve been wins,” he admitted, “usually at great cost. One or two survivors in colonies of hundreds of people. One or two survivors on overrun ships. They can be blown apart, we know that, with high-powered weaponry. They don’t like fire, so they can be burned. They act different when there are a lot of them than when there’s only one. We also know they’re abnormally strong for their size. They’re fast. They don’t care about self-preservation because individuals don’t matter. They have a hiving pattern. Everything for the hive. For the queen and the young.”
“But there’s no queen here.”
“You don’t know that. Any one of their young could be a queen. Nobody knows till she grows up. They could be forming a whole new hive right here on this ship.”
“How would that change their behavior?”
“Nobody knows.”
The desolate facts were an abomination, but not much help.
Adam took a grip on Ned’s arm and squeezed it, and didn’t let go. “How do we fight by animal rules?”
* * *
Nature’s bounty flowered in the steel halls of the ship Umiak. Blending with the supreme technology, humanity’s greatest creation, nature put forth its own greatest creation—itself.
From the bosun’s observation deck, with its great sprawling slanted windows that allowed viewing of the gigantic port and starboard flank bay holds, Ned Menzie and Captain Thomas Scott Pangborn cooperated for the first time as yet this voyage. For Captain Pangborn it was a minor matter of some small interest. For Ned, it was the hour’s victory.
The cadets, the cook, and the captain huddled in the bay after a harrowing sneak through the forward compartments, engulfed in the dread of which had almost peeled their very skins off. They couldn’t stay in the galley—there was no way to engage their futures there, and only the hopelessness of waiting for some other twist to dictate their fates. And doing something seemed so much better than hiding.
Now they were here, locked in, betting on luck.
Well, a bit more than luck.
Below in the enormous starboard flank bay, white fog was rising. This was the steamy effect caused by dozens and dozens of cryo-containers suddenly being released from their seals. Inside, as they were programmed and engineered to do, the containers were medically inflicting consciousness upon their residents. Within twenty minutes, there was movement inside the fog.
The cadets and the captain strained to see, looking down from above. The foggy steam filled the hold, except for the top layer. The stacked containers showed like tops of skyscrapers through clouds. The remote bosun’s controls could open up selected containers, and indeed that was what they were doing—picking and choosing, mostly containers on the lower levels, and there were hundreds of those.
As the steam began to be drawn out by the automatic filtration system, sucked by the fans into a processing area that would turn it into healthy atmosphere for the ship, the fog began to lower. And there was movement.
Ned pressed his fingers to the cool window. His own breath fogged the unbreakable transparency, seeming to call to its mother, the great fog in the bay.
The fog near the main deck began to stir from inside itself, puffing outward in gouts of action and disturbance. Ned almost stopped breathing.
Then, there was a face—a hint of a triangular shape. Another white puff—a tail—then more triangular faces flashing in and out of the fog.
Suddenly, there was a burst of movement. He recognized it—the herding instinct! Sheep!
He laughed in relief as an entire herd of bulky woolbearers pushed and shoved their way between the containers, desperate to follow the leader, any leader. Sheep were like that!
Hundreds of sheep poured out from the fog as it withdrew.
“Quick!” Ned called. “Open all the entry hatches to the bays so they can move through the ship!”
He had barely said it when there was another movement below.
“Oh—look! Look!” Mary gasped at his side. “Look!”
The cadets pressed to the window.
Even three stories above the deck, they were intimidated by the sight of a giant white curl of bone, as tall as one of the containers—and a second looming near it. Brown bristly fur ruffled the fog and parted it, and what rose through the shroud was enough to shock a rock. A massive blocky head and a long twisting trunk led the way of a gargantuan humped back that sloped downward to powerful hindquarters.
“It’s a… it’s a… mmmmm… ma… mammm…” Dylan’s mouth kept moving after the first attempt, but no more sound came out.
The animal spotted them. The huge trunk rose, the animal came up on one foreleg, and let blare a trumpet that would’ve leveled the walls of Jericho. The great Northern Hemisphere woolly mammoth had proclaimed its rise from prehistory.
The sheep bolted and scattered, giving way to the impossibly huge beast coming after them. Behind the mammoth came another surprise—an African elephant placidly tracking behind it, and with the elephant an even more poignant sight—another mammoth, this one but a newborn, with a tiny twist of a trunk and quick little furry legs.
Beside Ned on the other side, Robin was bouncing on her toes with joy as she held her own little baby foundling. “Oh, a baby! A baby one!”
“A baby mammoth,” Ned murmured. “Who would ever imagine such a thing? Y’just don’t think of it!”
Indeed the parade of towering elegant beasts was like something in a museum or a nature special, and rare was the thought that such enormous historic creatures could ever have just been babies.
“Is the elephant its mother?” Robin squeaked, choked by excitement.
Captain Pangborn twisted his hands in their wrist-irons. “They cloned mammoths by using elephant mothers. Once they figured it out, it was easy. The animals don’t care. They’ve got all sorts of mothers raising their own ancestors. Hell of a project.”
The mammoth and its clan, including two more African elephants of teenaged years, trod groggily under the viewing area. How far would they get in the ship? No one could tell, but sooner or later the chamber hatches would be too big for them.
Not so the deer that followed—American whitetails and two bull elk! And—
“Monkeys!” Mary exclaimed, hammering the glass with her finger at a troupe of what seemed to be spider monkeys or some other long-tailed type, stumbling about comically among the deer. One was even riding an elk, another hanging from its antlers. The elk, nosing around its new surroundings, didn’t care or particularly notice.
>
Ned choked down his amazement and said, “Now open containers of grain and hay. You said there were food sources for all the animals.”
“Yeah, all right. Sure,” Pangborn said, using his manacled hand to encode the right releases into the bosun’s console. “There it is… one beastly banquet.”
They looked down as more and more animals poured out of the containers, and other containers opened their doors to reveal packaged stacks of grain. The monkeys charged in and immediately began pulling at the containers.
“They can’t get the bags open,” Robin uttered in empathy.
“They’ll get them open eventually,” Ned said. “Then the other animals will find the food too.”
“Sweet of you to feed them, Mankie.” Pangborn cast him a frigid glower. “You’re such a soft-hearted shepherd. That’ll help a lot.”
“If they eat,” Ned explained, “they’ll be alert. We need them moving about. Dan—”
“Huh? Oh—yeah, mate?”
“That sound they make… can you replicate it? Talk to them?”
Dan shrugged one shoulder. “We can make the noise, but there’s no way to talk, like make sense or all.”
“Might it change their behavior?”
“Shor, I guess, but ’ho’s to say their behavior wouldn’t get worse? It’s a to’al risk.”
“Could we… call them?”
“Why,” Adam interrupted, “would you ever want to call them!”
Ned paused. “Seems daft, I guess…”
“Daft twice!”
They paused to watch a muscular brace of glossy racehorses trotting past the mammoth, shying sideways as the bigger beast shifted its head to one side to look at them, bringing with it the legendary C-shaped tusks. A half-dozen Canada geese flew past the window in a perfect panic. Gazelles followed by mountain goats flooded the bay decks, dazed, and bolting. From the container opposite came a very skittish pair of mountain lions.
American mountain cats, too confused to hunt, slunk out of the hold, spread flat, eyes wide and shoulders up, ignoring a dozen Texas longhorns that came plodding and thumping out toward them.
Chris followed the movements of a skittering flock of fowl, of various breeds and colors, seeking the barnyard. “Look… chickens.”
“Are those… cows?” Dylan asked, craning down at a strange-looking queue of large animals with heavy bristle-wool coats in a bright white-yellow color. They had no horns, but were built almost like buffalo without the hump.
“Arctic cattle,” Pangborn explained. “Years of crossbreeding, husbandry—they’re bred for lighter gravity, harsher conditions, as a product source for the people living at the poles on Emerald. Genetic forcing has caused completely new breeds. Even some new species.”
Ned glanced at him. Why was he being so… was it ‘friendly’?
Peering down at a new flock of animals emerging from a container almost under him, Adam asked. “What are those?”
Ned looked down. “Welsh mountain sheep! Robin, we’re almost home, girl!”
She gave him a sad smile, for reality was only an inch away.
Adam threw him a grin. “Ned’s ark.”
A surge of—was it hope?—ran through the mismatched team of cadets.
Perhaps the captain sensed it.
“Not bad,” Captain Pangborn said. “I have to admit, this is a not-bad idea at all. Might buy some time. If there are ten killer whales in the water, it’s better to be one of ten thousand penguins. Nice going, Mank. Now, unshackle me and let’s start working together.”
But Adam’s tone changed as he warned, “He’s lying. He doesn’t work with others. That’s why most of the crew abandoned him at the first chance. The minute they weren’t being paid, they left. Crews don’t do that when they know their captains care about them. It’s not human nature.”
“What do you know about being human, you prick?” Pangborn spoke with cold confidence. “You’re just a bag of potential that hasn’t grown into itself. You think being smart can replace twenty years of adult life? Even Spiderlegs here is better at fighting those things than you. Know why? Because he has experience. He’s just been alive longer than you and he paid attention, and that counts for something more than just brain cells. So if he’s smarter than you, what do you think I am?”
Adam’s jaw tightened. Something in that speech hit home. At once he was uncharacteristically silent, and the captain’s words rang.
“Oh, look! Oh, God! God!”
Mary’s shriek split their ears. She was bouncing in fear, pointing down to the far side of the bay, as far as they could see.
Everyone crowded all the way to her side, just as the sound of high-powered weapon fire erupted so loudly that they could clearly hear it even through the sound-dampening glass.
At the far end of the bay, four of the malevolent creatures were dragging humans along the deck, while other humans opened fire on them with flame-throwers and big rifles. At least one alien was blasted into a mash, and another scorched until it dropped the person it was dragging.
Chris pressed to the glass. “Who are those people?!”
“Must be more of Detroit’s crew,” Pangborn said. “They’ve got plasma pulse rifles and—who knows what else they’ve picked up in their ‘dealings.’”
Ned shivered at the sight of aliens and humans engaged against each other, each working with withering efficiency. How many people, how many aliens, he could no longer tell, for the end of the bay was still foggy and now also gray with smoke from the flame-throwers. But the scene was atrocious, splayed red with blood and green with acid as the two forces engaged in their personal apocalypse.
But he knew something else. It was time to move, now—now that the aliens were engaged and distracted, and there would be the slimmest chance to get through.
Torn in two directions, he took his own fate in his hands and knew he must ask for more. He turned not to the captain, but to Leigh.
“Leigh,” he began. “I’m deeply sorry. I’ve no right to ask… but I don’t know the ship well enough.”
Fear broke again across her face. But also there was something else. She knew what he was asking. After but a second or two, the fear gave way to determination.
She cleared her throat. “Yeah… okay.”
And with that she moved to him as if there were two teams being picked.
“I’ll go too!” Dylan bravely said. “I’ve got an idea!”
Ned thought about rejecting the offer, but what could he give the brave fourteen-year-old in its place? Stay here and wait until the dragons come? That was his only offering to his sister and the others, who would have no other or better fate. They might feel safe here, but it was an illusion that would thin with time.
He put his hand on Dylan’s shoulder for a moment and with that gesture accepted the help.
Then he looked at Pangborn. “Are there weapons aboard? Have you any guns?”
“No, of course not,” the captain said.
“Again, he’s lying,” Adam insisted. “Nobody does business with those kinds of people without being able to defend himself. They’re pirates too, not just smugglers. He’d have to be able to stop them from killing the crew and taking the whole ship.”
“You just know everything, don’t you?” Pangborn sneered. “Did you also know that if I’m ever caught with heavy weaponry, I could lose my license? It’s a line we walk. Yes, I have a few small hand weapons back in my cabin, but that’s all the way back through the ship, past the salons, past the guest quarters, past the crew quarters, past the bosun’s bay, past the flank bays, past the engine room, past the engines—do you really think you can make it that far? And if you do, you’ll find yourselves holding two tiny pistols not powerful enough to give those tough hides a bee sting. So you go ahead and waste your lives trying to break out an arsenal of pop guns. That’s about your speed. You think you’re dealing with a couple of hyenas here?”
Ned just sighed. “Dan, check the hallway, can you?”
Dan moved to the hatch, while Chris stood by with a heavy pot he’d brought from the galley, as if that would work. Slowly Dan opened the hatch and looked out, then nodded. “Coast is clear, mate.”
But now they could clearly hear the ratcheting sound of weapons firing away, the shriek of angry aliens, and the discordant noise of animals.
“Thanks,” he said. There was nothing to do but go.
“Wait! Nedmenzie, Nedmenzie! I got it!” Spiderlegs yanked opened the sack he had insisted on bringing and pulled out another cleaver, slightly more gracile but just as heavy as the one he had thrown at the monster. Its curved back and perfectly balanced handle looked serious about its business. Nobody knew what he’d been packing back in the galley, but no one wanted to deprive him of whatever he thought was precious. Now they knew—he was thinking ahead, just like the captain said.
“Take this! And this!” And out he pulled another can of baking soda, waddled down the viewing bay, and pushed the cleaver into Ned’s hand and the baking soda at Leigh.
“Thanks, Mr. Follo,” Ned told him sincerely. “We’ll remember your example.”
The stumpy man nodded and smiled and nodded again, swinging his arms to display his humility.
Before a thought could invade his head about how foolish, how dither-headed he was about to be, Ned stepped out the hatch.
He turned to see if Leigh and Dylan were following, but instead found himself toe to toe with not Leigh, but Adam.
“What’s this?”
Adam tipped his head. “I’m going with you.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think?”
“I’m sure I’ve no thought.”
“You’ll figure it out.” He started to move forward.
With a firm hand, Ned halted him. “I don’t care to be pushed about at this bend in the road. If this is a way to make yourself up in the world, I’ve no need of you.”
