by Alex White
The creature loosens its grip and Dick twists free, collapsing to the ground on his side. He lands on his right eye, finishing the job. He knows he won’t be able to run, that his internal bleeding is probably going to kill him if he doesn’t get to a doctor within the hour. He’ll be dead before then when the creature finishes lamenting the fiery crate.
That’s when a miracle happens.
It tries to rescue the egg.
Like the anguished parent of an endangered baby, it reaches inside the boiling thermite and catches the splash of distilled lye and molten metal across the front of its body. The egg is doomed, its deadly payload leaking from the sides of the collapsing crate, foaming white. The creature’s rage manifests in a bright, piercing shriek, and its tail whips about like a spear, striking anything it can find.
Dick swallows his torment and begins crawling for the door. If he can just get to a terminal, he can call for help. He knows he’ll never be the same again, but he’s alive and determined to make that count for something. Lesser men have survived greater wounds, after all.
He’s almost at the door when he spies another set of black talons. A blow like a baseball bat comes down in the dead center of his spine. Dick cannot scream because he cannot breathe. Through his one good eye, he watches the gush of blood, knowing it comes from his own lips. His legs are gone, or at least he can’t feel them.
And then he is weightless, every last inch of his being in unimaginable pain, the strength of his mangled arms failing. He looks down at his chest to see the glittering black spine of a long tail protruding from his ribcage.
Oh, he thinks, the world growing dim, the big fucker impaled me.
Shock spares him the feeling of the creature’s tongue digging into the back of his head as if he’s an overripe melon.
15
ESCAPE CLAUSE
“Oh, my god, they’re opening the door! Do you hear it?” Anne whispers in the darkened maintenance bay. “We’re going to get rescued.”
He hears it as well, the distinct thunk of the twelve-pin vault door leading into the kennels. The motors will soon swing it wide, allowing all of the creatures to spill out into the SCIF. The only question that remains in his mind is, “Why?” What’s their plan?
As if in answer, the few lights inside the closet flicker, and the most awful grinding sound echoes through the station ventilation shafts.
“Alert,” Titus says, his nasal voice echoing through the corridors. “Scrubbers offline. Life support systems critical. All crew to evac stations.”
Dorian’s eyes lock with Anne’s.
“Alert,” Titus says, and Dorian thinks it will be a repeat of the same warning. He’s wrong. “Orbital dynamics and navigation critical. All crew to evac stations.”
The two of them hunker down as the banging of talons sounds through the corridor. The creatures stampede through the hallways like a herd, skittering past the closed door of Dorian and Anne’s hiding spot.
“Alert,” Juno says, her voice a breathy contrast to Titus’s, “Access control systems critical—”
“Alert,” Titus interrupts, “Security and quarantine systems offline. Killbox offline. All crew report to evac stations.”
“What the everloving fuck?” Anne whispers.
“Silversmile,” Dorian replies. “That’s the only thing that could pick apart station security like this.”
“It couldn’t jump the air gap. Those two networks aren’t connected.”
“That means we’ve got a saboteur, or an idiot,” Dorian says. “My money is on the—”
Deafening pulse rifle fire fills their ears. Anne throws Dorian to the ground, shoving his cheek against the rough deck. Before he can ask why, a shot ricochets through the bulkhead.
“Fucking Christ, Cardozo,” she says. “Okay, Dorian, we’re going to have to move perpendicular to the swarm. That’s caseless, armor-piercing ammo he’s firing.”
“He’s going to breach the hull,” Dorian slurs, and she lets him up.
“Not if he fires directly into the guts of the SCIF. Lots of layers between him and the outer hull.”
“He could’ve used the guns from the armory.”
Anne looks him over for a moment. “Those are just a placebo. They’ll kill a human just fine, but forget about a snatcher. We put them there so Blue’s lab assistants would go inside.”
On the one hand Dorian is enraged that no one shared this fact with him. On the other, it makes the creatures all the more perfect. They’re gods among men—or perhaps the children of the heavens—patient and cruel, and always capable of escape. He needs to continue where Blue left off. Some people devote their lives to ship design or architecture. He could be the champion of these majestic beasts.
“We have to get those data drives and get to the Athenian,” he says, and Anne balks.
“Are you stupid? An all-points crew evac means exactly that.”
He starts to protest, and she slaps him so hard he tastes blood. Then she puts up a finger, cutting off any response.
“Don’t you fuck around with our lives here, Dorian. We evac ASAP.”
No one has ever slapped him before, and the urge to retaliate is instantaneous. Heat rises in his breast, and he sucks in a breath. He wants to strike her back, to break her against the bulkhead and wrap his hands around her slender throat. He wants to crush her fucking skull—but then he remembers their wild sex and thinks better of it. He has muscle, but she’s so much tougher, with years of combat training. She’d overpower him without any real difficulty. Fighting is her second nature.
The screams of the creatures and the sound of rifle fire have died down, retreating toward the central strut.
“We’re going to discuss this when we get back to the ship,” he whispers.
“What, are you going to fire me some more?” She rises to a low crouch and grabs him by the wrist.
He smirks. “Maybe you can get your job back.”
She glances back at him, surprised at his pass, but not disgusted. She guides him out into the hallway and toward the kennels vault door, hunkering down as she moves. He follows, his bare feet sticking to the waxy floor. His suit trousers constrict his movements, and he desperately wishes for a set of fatigues like Anne’s. He’s dressed to impress, not circumnavigate rifle fire while hiding from unstoppable killing machines.
At the last armory, she stops to pick up a couple of smoke grenades and flashbangs. They’re surprisingly small, and she fits the bandolier around her waist. Dorian pulls out his pistol, and she touches his hand, shaking her head.
“Put that back. We’re only going to get people killed with it, and it’s loud.” She taps the grenades. “These, however, are useful.”
He considers arguing that those “people” might be his targets, and decides against it. He hates the way she talks down to him so confidently, as though he’s a child. He’ll make her regret hitting him. She’s wrong to underestimate him.
“Okay,” he says, nodding at the vault door. “You take point, soldier.”
Is she disgusted with his ungentlemanly suggestion? It doesn’t matter. She’s the one with the training, and chivalry be damned. She rushes from corner to corner and he mimics her movements, sidling up to each one, then glancing out before ducking back to cover. The hissing and rifle fire grow louder again. Dorian and Anne reach the vault door and sneak across the threshold.
What they see is nothing like the polished science center from before. Bullet holes snake through the walls. Warning strobes flash white between pulses of red. The clean light of Juno’s glass cage sputters like a dying candle. Broken bits of steel litter the deck, and blood drips from a catwalk onto a gory mess. Dorian hopes it’s Lucy—he doesn’t know the others well enough to care about their fates.
He smells it before he sees it—a melted hole in the deck plates, about the size of a human. It stinks of rotten eggs, with a piercing sour note as though someone is pushing a needle into his nose. Dorian gives it a wide berth as he ti
ptoes, barefoot, around it.
“What the fuck is that?” he whispers.
“Commander Cardozo must’ve gotten one of them. Remember the acid for blood?” She pulls one of the flashbangs from her bandolier. “Just make sure you steer clear when a snatcher goes down.”
“Yeah, no problem.” He peers over the edge into the hole, which descends two decks down. One of the beasts lies shattered at the bottom. Bilious yellow blood hisses on the floor, spreading from its corpse like drops of water on a hot frying pan. He remembers reading Mackie’s design report, about how the SCIF’s exterior decks were super hydrophobic, to stop the acid from breaking through.
When one of the snatchers is killed, it melts into the floor like a hell-bound dragon. Dorian has to admire that. It’s almost as if they want to return to the light of Kaufmann, to be consumed as thoroughly as they consume. There’s something sad about it, too, knowing they’re not immortal. He wonders if this is what humanity felt when it experienced the extinction of the wild lion.
All reverence aside, he hopes Daniel won’t shoot any of the beasts on the central strut. He isn’t sure the ship can take a flood of acid in the thinner parts.
The pulse rifle fire stops, and Anne rushes ahead. The Commander and crew are drawing close to the escape pods. Dorian is just glad that the crew of the Athenian haven’t been briefed on the snatcher threat. The classification level is higher than his crew possesses, and that’s a good thing. Otherwise, they’d probably leave without him.
He and Anne wind between the various electrical stations and cargo crates. It’s clear the crew of the Cold Forge used this open area as a staging ground. While Dorian begrudges them their mess, at least the obstructions provide him with a decent cover. Ahead of them, there’s another dark patch, and at first, Dorian thinks it’s the next acid crater.
Glancing toward Anne, he finds her frozen in place, eyes locked on the ceiling. Following her gaze, he finds one of the aliens wedged in between two coolant pipes, working with deliberate snaps of its jaw to take apart a corpse. The meal is a man, but describing the gender of the thoroughly mangled remains at all seems generous.
Past Anne, two long, smooth heads emerge from the darkness like a pair of players entering the theater stage. The three snatchers don’t react, so they must not yet see Dorian and Anne. He gestures toward the creatures, pointing to his eyes, then behind her. She signals for him to get down.
There’s a low worktable within easy reach, and they roll under it. They could try to go back the way they came, but the escape pods will launch without them. Ahead, there’s an unknown number of acid-blooded beasts ready to tear their heads open—yet it’s the only direction toward freedom.
Anne pops the compression cap on one of her smoke grenades and hurls it into the distance, toward the kennels. It clangs upon the deck before plunging into the melted hole. Only hissing stillness follows the echoing beat. For a moment, Dorian wonders if the creatures heard it.
The corpse bangs to the floor in front of him, yielding a splash of blood and a crunch of bone. Its features give nothing away of its former identity. Skin tone, face, and age are all obscured by the deathly slickness of crimson. It takes all of Dorian’s concentration not to cry out in surprise. He peers around the corner, just enough to see the outlines of the two exposed beasts.
Fluorescent illumination dances across their carapaces, like light shining down a blade. Their faces, such as the rows of teeth can be called, jut toward the yawning crater, patiently watching the yellow smoke as it rolls up from below decks. Dorian wonders if they view things in infrared, sonar, or visual light. A chill rolls down his spine as he considers the x-ray spectrum—maybe they can see through walls. Were that the case, however, they would’ve already been eating him.
Anne nervously eyes him from her shadowed corner in a stack of crates, the dim reflections of her wide sclera the only evidence of her presence. She probably wants to know if they’ve taken the bait. He looks meaningfully behind her to the open space full of deadly claws and teeth, and shakes his head no.
A heaving thud nearly buckles the table above him, folding its thick steel inward—a hit from another body-sized object. He rolls onto his back and pulls his limbs in tight, tucking all of himself against one side of the workbench. An inky, skeletal tail languidly drips over the side, vertebra by vertebra, until a heavy spine thumps into the deck. There is nothing between the man and the creature save for a thin layer of rolled steel… and hope. In the light of Juno’s cage, he can see the thick cord of muscle operating the whip, and he knows it could tear him asunder with a single hit.
This close, the physicality of the thing is intoxicating. In the cages, they looked as though they might be avian-boned, but out here, he senses the heft of its frame. Clawed fingertips wrap around the edges of the table, grasping the edge so the creature can launch itself at a target in the blink of an eye. The beast arranges itself silently on the work surface, passing over it as a ghost.
If Dorian grows to old age, he knows this will be the single greatest moment of his life.
Anne draws another grenade from her belt, and his heart skips a beat. They’re going to hear the rustle of her sleeve as she throws it. They’re going to see it bounce off the deck and figure out the direction from which it came. If she tosses that little metal cylinder, it will be the last moment they spend alive.
Gingerly removing the compression cap, she looses the grenade. It sails precisely into the acid-cut hole, clinking two decks below before going off with a flash of light and a deafening bang. Dorian’s ears ring, and the sound fades into the wild screams of the trio of aliens. They wail with such perfect hatred, such unending rage.
The worktable goes tumbling off of Dorian as the creature uses it for launch. The snatcher bounds away toward the hole, along with its two compatriots, oblivious to Dorian’s now exposed presence. Anne wastes no time and rises to bolt for the door that leads to the central strut. He rolls and gets his feet under him, darting clumsily upright. He’d always considered himself graceful, until he saw the biological murder machines.
Together, he and Anne plunge through the malfunctioning station toward the central docking bay and, hopefully, the Athenian.
* * *
Blue presses her face to the airlock door, peering into the glass to see if she can make out the reason for the pulse fire. She goes to open the interior door, but a flash of instinct changes her mind. She can’t simply rush in— she needs to know what’s happening.
Deep down, she already knows—the comms failure, the warning lights, the staccato blasts of gunfire—the snatchers have broken their containment.
She cranes her neck to get a better view of the SCIF door. From the airlock module, she can just barely make it out, and it’s wide open. In the shadows of the rafters, Marcus’s keen eyes decipher the shape of an alien, crawling along the duct work.
* * *
Blue pulls the brain-direct interface helmet from her head, its well-worn straps catching on the stubble of her scalp. Sweat coats every inch of her form, and she’s hyperventilating. She has to slow herself down, or she’ll choke on her own spit.
If they’re loose, then where are the alarms? Why didn’t the killbox destroy everyone? Her gut seizes as she hears a beep, followed by Titus’s computerized voice.
“Alert. Scrubbers offline. Life support systems critical. All crew to evac stations.”
“What?” Blue whispers aloud. Why the fuck is life support failing?
“Alert,” Titus says, and she steels herself. “Orbital dynamics and navigation critical. All crew to evac stations.”
Theoretically, their orbit shouldn’t need another injection for another month, but if the calculation systems are down, it might start to degrade immediately.
“Alert,” Titus says. “Security and quarantine systems offline. All crew to evac stations.”
There’s shouting in the halls—it’s two of the lab techs, ransacking the next room, and Blue calls out to th
em, her voice hoarse and dim. She takes a deeper breath and puts everything she has into it.
“Hey! I’m in he—” Then her larynx contracts, sending her into a fit of violent coughing. The banging in the next room stops for a brief moment, then several sets of footfalls take off. They’re moving away from Blue, away from the crew quarters—toward the lifeboats. She knows they heard her.
She knows she’s been abandoned.
Her eyes, already failing, go blurry and wet. She’s never been particularly close with the crew. They either dislike her, or they fear her, but they’ve felt that way since the day they laid eyes on her frail form. She depresses them, because they’re too cowardly to confront their own mortalities.
“God damn you!” she screams, not caring whether or not she chokes.
The shape of her motorized wheelchair resolves through the starbursts of tears. She shouldn’t put herself into it without assistance. She could fall. One hit to her chest could kill her. She might tear out her stomas. Her ligaments, weakened from vitamin deficiencies and attacks from her own immune system, might snap under the weight of her upright body. But if she doesn’t get the hell out of there, the snatchers are going to make a meal of her.
The sensible thing to do is to end it on her terms. There are enough painkillers in her cabinet for everyone on the station to overdose, but the intellijectors read her blood for potential conflicts and toxicology. The syringes would never administer her the dosage she needs. While the computer chips inside them are stupid, the tamper-resistant housings won’t let her in without a fight.
The oxygen canisters, on the other hand, are an old design, and can easily have their valves rigged with a standard-issue pen. Then she remembers Dorian’s matches and striker, conveniently tucked away under her mattress.
Her great grandfather burned to death in an oxygen fire on Luna, but before he had the privilege, he lived three days in total agony. They tried to freeze him and get him to a treatment center on Earth, but cold sleep was too much for him to bear. That shouldn’t be a risk for Blue, though. No one will come to extinguish her. It would take her about a minute to die, but if she seals up the room, she might knock herself out with the concussive force. She could pass her last agonizing moments in blissful ignorance.
