by Stargate
The creature had been breeding tissue for hours, ever since it had devoured Deacon. It had used him as a template, an incubator, a biofactory as it had spread and grown into the ship, and now it had copied his senses to find out what was happening directly below it.
It was using Deacon’s eyes to look everywhere at once. And it didn’t like what it saw.
The tech Ellis had shouted at gave a hoarse scream as the thing lunged at him, and batted it away. As he scrambled along the rack a thin tendril dropped down alongside the sensory cluster, hung for a second, and then cracked like a whip. It was so fast that Ellis didn’t even see where the last couple of meters of it had gone, but when it recoiled it had the man in its grasp.
Instantly, the bay was a chorus of screams. The techs that were already on the deck scrambled for the exits; those that weren’t jumped for their lives. Ellis heard bones break as some of them hit, and then he was in the midst of them, dragging the injured onto their feet.
Above his head, the tendril snapped again, and the tech’s body crashed with shattering force into a sensor.
Ellis drew his pistol and snapped off a series of shots into the bundle of eyes. He saw three of them burst wetly before the thing snaked back into the ceiling, squealing and hissing. He kept firing, shots caroming off racks and the roof panels, before the slide locked back and he threw the weapon down. “Spencer! We’re done here!”
Spencer was still over at the controller, aiming at the tendril with his P90 and squeezing off tightly controlled bursts at its root. As Ellis shouted he snatched up the remote and tossed it over to him. “Catch.”
Ellis grabbed it out of the air, purely on reflex. “Get over here!”
“Can’t…” Spencer emptied his weapon, dropped the mag and slammed in a new one. “If it gets this we’re all done for.”
Another sensor came apart in a rain of sparks and broken metal. Ellis took one more look at Spencer, cursed, and went for the hatch. Behind him, the tendril snapped, and Spencer’s P90 fired and kept firing, emptying itself into the ceiling.
Ellis keyed the hatch closed without looking back. When it was shut he sprinted past the shocked and injured techs, heading for the stairs. “Get out of here!” he yelled back. “Now!”
He hit the stairs at a run, triggering his headset as he began to climb them three at a time. “Meyers?”
“One minute fifty, sir. And we’ve got a problem.”
“Another one?”
“I think that last burn was too hot. Three Wraith cruisers just entered the ammonia layer.”
“Nothing we can do about that now. Get ready.” He was at the top of the stairs. He grabbed a rail, using his own forward momentum to haul himself into the corridor. Around the corner from him, the creature was screaming like a burning zoo.
Ellis rounded the corner and stopped. He waited until the thing looked around at him again, that metallic copy of Kyle Deacon’s agonized face lolling towards him with a look of deranged malevolence in its glittering eyes.
It saw him. The mouth opened, and it hissed.
“Got something for you,” said Ellis quietly. He raised the remote, just long enough for the creature to notice it, and then thumbed the trigger.
Somehow, while he was putting the plan together, he had managed to convince himself that the communications lasers would be silent. He had probably been imagining them in normal operation, sending pulses of coherent light across thousands of kilometers, allowing the sensors to talk to each other, stay in formation without giving themselves away. In space, of course, the lasers would be soundless and invisible.
Inside Apollo, all firing at maximum power through the roof of the bomb bay and into corridor nine, they were unimaginably loud.
The noise that almost deafened him permanently was, he would learn later, that of air exploding in the path of the laser beams. He didn’t hear the floor of the corridor flash apart, or the creature erupt in a whirling cloud of fluid and spinning fragments; it was all part of the same gigantic noise, and after that his eardrums were frozen in shock.
The final part of the plan was for him to call Meyers, tell her to trigger the bay doors, but that was beyond him. Luckily, the noise and the impact of the lasers had been enough for her to hear all the way up in the bridge. She opened the bomb bay without waiting to be told.
There was no vacuum outside Apollo. The atmosphere around the ship was only a little thinner than that inside, although its composition was very different.
No, what sealed the creature’s fate was not differential pressure, but simple gravity.
With the bay doors closed, the ship’s artificial gravity was kept at a constant Earth normal. Even when they were open, the corridor above maintained its own 1G field. Or it would have done, had it not just been blown open by several high-energy communications lasers.
The jovian was a very big planet. Its surface gravity was at least four times that of Earth.
Burned, pulverized, and bleeding, the creature suddenly found itself being dragged downwards by its own mass. Ellis saw it peel off the wall, the tendrils and roots that anchored it ripped away as it was hauled towards the floor. Had he not been temporarily deafened, he thought, he would have heard it screaming as it was torn free, but he heard nothing. He didn’t hear the groan of the corridor floor beginning to give way, either.
He felt it, though, through the soles of his boots. A frightening bass rumble of stressed metal tearing, shearing through its fixings, and then a sudden springing impact as an entire section of it surrendered to gravity and dropped away, rushing down into the darkness. A moment later the creature went too, a last few tentacles hanging on for an agonizing second before they split apart under the stress.
Even through his deafness, Ellis heard it crashing through the launch racks.
Apart from a few squirming fragments of meat, the thing was gone, spiraling away into the hydrogen layer. Its fall would take it into areas of the jovian no ship, no probe had ever explored, into regions of gas so massively compressed by gravity that it became fluid, then solid, then something even beyond those states. By the time the creature with Kyle Deacon’s face had gone a thousand kilometers it would be hammered into nothing.
Ellis was alone in the corridor, and Meyers was yelling at him though his headset.
By the time he got back to the bridge he could hear a little, although sounds came to him as though he was listening through layers of thick cloth. “Okay people, listen up. Things got pretty loud back there, so if you could face me when you’re talking to me for the next few minutes, I’d appreciate it.”
He dropped into the command throne, suddenly aware that he was spattered with fluids. Large areas of his green uniform had been turned an oily black. When Meyers turned around to him she saw it too, and grimaced. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Did you get it?”
“It’s gone. Good work, people.” There was a muted cheer from the bridge crew, but Ellis ignored it for now. There was still a long way to go before they were out of this. “Meyers, get the bay doors closed. Once we’re back online send a team to the corridor. There may be some scraps of that thing left lying around.”
She nodded, and turned back to her console. As she did so, Ellis glanced upwards on reflex, waiting for the power drain. That dip in the lights, the groan of the air systems winding down and then spinning up again, the flickering of computer screens as they lost voltage was so much a part of him now that he could have set his watch by it.
When it didn’t happen, he didn’t quite know what to feel. “Sharpe, what’s our status? Where are we?”
She answered, then stopped herself, turned around in her seat. “Sorry sir. We’re almost out of the water layer. Main power’s still offline. Unless we can get restarted we’ll be past bingo in about two minutes.”
“The Wraith?”
“Not far behind us,” Meyers told him. “I’m not picking up any weapons fire yet, but as soon as they get close
enough to realize what we are, things are going to get bad.”
“I hear that.” He switched his headset to ship-wide communications. “All decks, brace for an increase in gravity. We’ll be pulling about four gees, so you have roughly ten seconds to not be standing up any more.”
He glanced around the bridge. “That means you too, people. This is out of our hands, so get ready.”
Behind the tactical map, the technical crew got down onto the deck. Meyers and Sharpe settled themselves back in their seats, and Ellis followed suit, trying to relax into the contours of the command throne. Then he turned the volume on his headset up as loud as it would go. “Copper?”
“Right here, sir.”
Ellis took a deep breath. He’d been secretly dreading this part. “Lieutenant, you have permission to disengage the power system. Shut her down.”
“Yes sir,” Copper replied, and even though his hearing was still muzzy Elllis could tell he didn’t really like the idea either. “Shutting down in five, four —”
“Just do it.”
The bridge lights went out.
Ellis didn’t hear the air system shut down; his hearing was still too affected. But he could feel a sudden stillness in the air, a deadness in the structure of the deck and the command throne and the very walls surrounding him. Within a few short moments, all energy and motion leached out of the bridge, leaving it dark and almost completely silent.
There was no light, barring a few laptops and PDA screens. No sound loud enough for him to hear. Only his own breathing and the thump of his heart as he waited for the jovian to reach out and grab him.
It took a few seconds for the artificial gravity to die, but when it did the increase was frighteningly abrupt. Ellis had been expecting a slow rise in his own weight, but instead he found himself being crushed into the throne mid-breath. He sucked in a lungful of air, and it was hard, four times harder than it should have been. His limbs felt as though they were full of wet sand.
He clamped his stomach muscles down hard, just as he would do in a high-gee flight maneuver. It kept the air in his lungs, the blood in his head. Everyone on the ship would be doing the same thing. Basic Air Force training.
No light, no sound, hard to breathe. It was like being buried alive, thought Ellis grimly. Copper, just as planned, had not only shut down all output from the reactor, but all the emergency power circuits and auxiliaries too. Even the capacitor banks had been taken offline.
Apollo was dead metal, plunging through the water layer on the downward slide of its arc, unassisted, uncontrolled, heading for the hydrogen and certain destruction. And there wasn’t a damn thing Ellis could do about it. His life, everyone’s life, rested in the hands of a slender technician who, just a few hours before, had suffered a serious head wound and almost passed out.
Ellis blinked into the darkness, his eyelids heavy. He hadn’t thought of that. What if Copper blacked out under the high gee? “Meyers?”
“Here sir.” He heard her, this time. His hearing must have been improving, because there was no way she could turn around right now. Her words came out from between clenched teeth.
“Time.”
“Twenty… Seconds.”
Had it only been that long? Ellis dragged in another breath. In aircraft, high-gee turns seldom lasted this long. Still, he’d endured more than this in the centrifuge, hadn’t he? Unless he’d gotten old flying the battlecruiser, gotten weak. He should be able to do this…
There was an odd feeling. He was being dragged backwards, not just down. “Sharpe… What’s that?”
“We’re ass-heavy,” she grated. “Tilting.”
Apollo’s prow was rising, the weight of the engines and the reactor and the 302 bays pulling the rear of the ship down faster. That would rob them of even more speed. At this rate, the ship would hit the hydrogen layer too fast. Apollo would shear in two.
As he thought that, the bridge came alive.
In an instant, he was balloon-light, almost out of the throne with the sudden loss of weight. The lights around him came up to full brightness, a painful glare after all those hours in the gloom, and every panel chirruped with start-up routines.
Copper had done it. The reactor was back online, the generators pumping out power. Now, if they could only keep doing so for more than forty-one seconds Ellis would be a happy man.
“Sharpe, what’s our status?”
“One second, I’m just re-booting…” She got up from her seat, ripped the laptops free from her console and dumped them onto the deck. “Main drives are in warm-up. Thrusters are online. Capacitors beginning charge cycle.”
“Get us level. Meyers?”
“Most systems are still in calibration, sir. Passive sensors indicate the Wraith are accelerating to within weapons range. We’ve got nothing to hit them with, and no shields. Comms and active sensors are down.”
“How long until the main drives are back up?”
“At least a few minutes, sir —”
The ship jolted, a sledgehammer blow from behind. “Wraith are in weapons range, sir. They’re firing.”
“I gathered.” Ellis thought fast. There was no way to outrun the three cruisers, not on thrusters. Apollo could maneuver now, even leave the ammonia layer and climb into empty space, but doing so would simply get them closer to the rest of the Wraith fleet. Without weapons or shields the battlecruiser was an easy kill. He couldn’t even use the 302s — their launch racks wouldn’t be fired up yet either.
So all he could do was fly. But where? The Wraith ships were bigger than Apollo, fast, armed with multiple weapons and protected by energy shields and the bone-like armor of their hull carapaces. There was no contest.
Something nagged at him, a moment in the past, before the creature in corridor nine had taken up all his thoughts. What had Apollo got, even now, that the Wraith did not?
A stream of energy bolts hosed past the bridge, lighting up the viewport as it lanced away into the water layer. Ellis saw it illuminate the jovian from the inside for a few seconds before it faded.
In the far distance, blue-white light fluttered and was gone. The storm.
“Sharpe, full evasive. Give it everything you’ve got. Meyers, what’s the status on that storm front?”
“About a five hundred kilometers dead ahead. We can avoid it now that we’ve got the thrusters fully online, though.”
“I don’t want to avoid it. Sharpe, get us in there.”
“Damn it,” muttered Sharpe, tapping frantically at her board. “I knew I should have gone home when I had the chance.”
“Sir?” Meyers turned to face him. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to tell you your business, but flying this ship into the storm is nothing less than suicide.” She grabbed at her console as Apollo slewed violently to port, one of Sharpe’s evasive maneuvers. “Without shields we’ll be a kite in a hurricane.”
“I appreciate your concern, Major. And believe me, I’m aware of the risks.”
The ship dropped several hundred meters. Energy bolts screeched overhead, audible in the jovian’s atmosphere. “Sir, I don’t understand.”
“Faraday,” Ellis told her. “Now give me the best course you can through that storm front. All we have to do is survive until the main drives fire up.”
Meyers went back to her console. Ellis wasn’t sure if she understood the reference, but right now it wasn’t necessary that she did. As long as she could fly Apollo into the storm without getting the ship torn apart between the convection cells, then they had a chance.
The storm was approaching fast, now: Ellis could see flashes of lightning ahead, a continuous series of sparks snapping between the ammonia sky and the hydrogen layer. Each of those sparks, tiny in the far darkness, was a hundred kilometers long. The energy contained in them made the Wraith blasts seem small, attenuated.
Ellis got up, went to stand by Meyers. “Where are the cruisers?”
She tapped out a command, and on his side of the console a screen flipped f
rom data readout to a tactical view. The cruisers were still in formation behind Apollo; one slightly ahead, the others further back and to either side. Pulsing red indicators showed which were charging weapons and which were unleashing streams of lethal energy towards the battlecruiser. So far, their aim had been appalling, their sensors possibly confused by the conditions inside the jovian. Ellis was surprised by that, but relieved. The cruisers should have had an advantage, at least in terms of maneuverability. Despite their size, they were almost aerodynamic.
Lightning snapped down to Apollo’s starboard. Ellis felt the ship judder as the atmosphere around the bolt exploded with heat. They were in the outer edges of the storm, now, and the going was starting to get rough.
It was going to get rougher. “Hold onto something, people.”
“Sir?” Meyers didn’t look up from her board, but her voice was urgent. “Shields are coming online. Should I raise them?”
“No.” The Wraith would have their shields up. And with all this electricity flowing around, pouring more energy into the mix might not be the best idea.
The Replicator weapon, the one they had tried to kill Angelus with, had been mostly lightning. It had carved through Apollo’s shields without trying, but the damage had been minimal. And that, plus the biomechanical nature of the Wraith ships, was exactly what Ellis was betting on.
It was a sizeable gamble, he knew, maybe the biggest of his life. But what else could he have done? If he failed, if he died, at least it would be in a blaze of glory.
There were worse ways to fall.
Lightning lit the bridge again. It was close, close enough for a fork to lick Apollo’s hull. Again the ship rocked as the atmosphere around it roiled, and again as another bolt came close, and another… The shuddering was constant, as were Sharpe’s course corrections. She was flinging the ship around as hard as its structure would allow, following Meyers’ flightplan, adding violent evasive maneuvers of her own. So far she had avoided the worst of both the storm and the Wraith firepower, but it couldn’t last.
