ALIEN THE COLD FORGE

by Alex White

  “Great,” Javier says.

  “I should go, too,” Anne says, but Dorian stops her.

  “No way. There are a lot of hurt people here, and as head of security you’ve got the most medical training. You can’t just abandon them.”

  “While you two are geared for combat ops?” She crosses her arms. “Come on. An out-of-shape sysadmin and an exec in a cheap suit.”

  “Hey, it used to be a nice suit,” Dorian counters with a wink. “We’re not going into combat. If something happens, we’re just going to run—and in zero G, that’ll be pretty easy.”

  Anne shakes her head, but doesn’t say anything.

  “Look,” he says, lowering his voice. “In management, you have to learn how to make these kinds of tough decisions. Decisions by the numbers. I’ve got essentially no skills, but your group has backup programmers, techs, and you—you’re the only remaining soldier on board. I’m comparatively expendable.”

  “You can’t think about things like that.”

  “That’s my job.”

  It’s cute how worried she is for him. When he thinks back to the fierce warrior who subdued him and fucked him senseless, he can’t help but grin. She’s thinking of these people as her family, and it’s clouding her judgment. It’s hard to know exactly how he’ll exploit that, but he feels certain he can manipulate her when the time comes.

  “Okay,” she says, “but if you’re going out, so are we. We have to get to somewhere better than this airlock— somewhere we can call for help.”

  “Our comms are probably fried,” Lucy says. “Silversmile will have burned out the alignment motors.” She sucks her lower lip. “I, uh, wrote the code to make it do that, so if it’s working—”

  “What about Rose Eagle?” Dorian asks. “It has all of the equipment to create entangled comms.” Some of the techs murmur in agreement. Even if Silversmile has gutted that project beyond all repair, he has offered them a moment of hope. They’ll be even more amenable to following his orders.

  “There might be some uncorrupted images of the project,” Javier says. “I mean, it’s not likely, but it’s possible.”

  “Okay,” Dorian says. “Marcus will run distractions, Javier and I will reinitialize Titus, and Anne will take her team to Rose Eagle.”

  Anne claps him on the shoulder and gives him a brief squeeze. It’s hard not to retch from her sentimental bullshit.

  “Don’t die,” she says.

  Dorian nods. “Count on me, babe.”

  * * *

  Their trek through the corridors is silent, both Dorian and Javier steady in their purpose. Dorian can do this because he knows the score, that forward is the only direction— that if death comes, he’s on the most sensible course. His head is clear and his eyes are sharp. He doesn’t know how Javier has decided to process their journey.

  They kick off the walls with bare feet, carefully planning their landings at each support pylon. It’s tempting to simply make a single leap, aimed straight at Titus’s server farm, but they might want to change course if they see some hazard—a snatcher, for example. Unlike the crew quarters and the project decks of the SCIF, the central strut is unpolished and industrialized, the sort of place with lots of exposed ducts and conduits. The handholds are easy to find, and controlling their vectors is simple, as long as they don’t over-commit.

  A sudden hiss erupts to his right, and Dorian slams into the hull, expecting claws to seize his flesh. Instead, he finds one of the atmospheric pumps churning away, trying and failing to keep the ship’s gasses balanced. Without help from the centralized climate systems, the survivors will eventually run out of oxygen. The good news is that the number of people still breathing is rapidly diminishing.

  He glances back. Javier stares at him, trembling.

  Dorian checks to make sure the man isn’t looking at something behind him. When there’s nothing there, he mouths the words “Let’s go,” and takes off again.

  Even at their slow pace, they reach Titus’s server farm within five minutes. When they open the doors, Dorian is shocked by the gust of hot air that greets him. Fans roar ineffectually, drowning out any noises inside. Uneven lights flicker overhead, driving shadows across the open spaces and workstations. The place stinks of hot wiring and melted plastic, and the beginnings of an electrical fire. He scans the scene, searching in corners and under tables for a telltale flicker of oily chitin and bone.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” Javier mutters, muscling past. “It shut down the thermal controls.” The sysadmin swims through the room, bouncing off server racks and pulling up to one of the consoles. Purpose seems to give him new energy. Dorian goes to follow him, but burns his hand on one of the metal racks.

  “Don’t touch that,” Javier says. “It’s where most of Titus’s heavy lifting is done, so it’ll be the hottest.”

  “How did it get this bad?”

  “The virus didn’t have to fight its way through the fringe systems. Someone must’ve installed it with full rights.”

  Dorian nods, his hand smarting, and wants to slap Javier for failing to warn him. Heat waves radiate through the air around him, making his head swim.

  “Where is it safe to stand?”

  “Got some empty rack mounts over there by the monitors,” Javier says. “Should be good.”

  Dorian nods. “Anything you need from me?” “Just keep an eye out.”

  Dorian pushes off to the front door and pokes his head out. To his left is the long passageway to the SCIF. To his right, the emergency partition to the decompressed docking area and the last remaining escape pod. If he had the code to activate it, he could bump off Javier, don a spacesuit from the airlock, decompress the central strut, and get the fuck out of the Cold Forge.

  But he doesn’t have the code, and so he must make himself useful. He returns to Javier’s side, looking over his progress. A thick binder drifts through the air, a pen hanging from it by a chain. Dorian idly pushes it aside, looking for any good news from his companion. The screen flickers, and the Weyland-Yutani logo animates into life, but the loading progress is slow. It’s less responsive than Dorian has ever seen a station computer, and he leans over to speak into Javier’s ear.

  “How bad is it?”

  Javier ignores the question and types his password, which looks like “Rash501!” but it’s wrong. Javier types it again, and Dorian gets a better look.

  Thrash3501!

  The sysadmin accesses Titus’s core functions to get a readout. Only sixteen percent of the servers are still operational. Then, the readout vanishes.

  “What happened?”

  “Silversmile,” Javier says. “Because we pulled up the readouts, it targeted them. The only things it can’t touch are the CoreOP and the connection logs. This is going to suck.” He points to a junction box in the boiling-hot part of the room. “Kill the power over there.”

  Dorian complies, pushing off in that direction. Because there’s no gravity to pull down the denser gasses, pockets of hot and cold air intermingle randomly, passing over his sweaty face to nauseating effect. The metal of the junction box is scalding hot, and the lever locking the door in place obstinately refuses to be pushed. Dorian wraps his suit jacket around the lever and shoves it until it locks upward. The door opens, revealing a reboot procedure outlined in pictograms and iconography.

  “If we’re lucky,” Javier says, “we’re going to get back thermals, power, access control, and maybe life support. Titus is fighting pretty hard. Orbitals are fucked.”

  Dorian scans the warnings, then engages the master cutoff switch. The server room goes black, becoming a smoldering steel box. Sweat pours from his face, and for a moment he can see nothing. Then an orange star appears in the darkness—an amber LED diffracted through the fresnel lens of a switch housing. Dorian reaches up and presses it.

  The room thrums back to life, and once-dim lights overhead click on with full intensity. Squinting, Dorian peers around, half expecting to find the place looking loote
d, but it’s surprisingly clean. External vents blast in frosty air, a balm upon his moist skin.

  Monitors all across the room come alive with the olive- drab background of Weyland-Yutani’s logos, though half of the server racks still blare warning lights across their housings. Those computers are probably burnt to a crisp.

  “Hang on to something,” Javier says. “I think I can get gravity back online.”

  There’s a tremendous clatter throughout the bay, as all of the loose objects fall to the ground. Though Dorian believes himself stable, it’s like invisible hands tug him from his feet onto the hard steel deck. It’s pleasant down there, and Dorian rests his face against the cooling floor plates for a moment as he acclimates to the returned force.

  Tense minutes pass as Javier lashes together the remaining computers into a network capable of caring for the station.

  “How long does this normally take you?” Dorian asks, glancing at the door.

  “Three fucking weeks, man.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Javier shakes his head. “It ain’t going to be a Rolls Royce, but I can get this baby running in a nominal state.”

  “Enough to keep us alive?”

  The sysadmin glares at him before returning to his keyboard. “Back off and go watch for trouble, man. You’re distracting me.” He points to a monitor on the far wall, which tiles over in a pattern like a chessboard. “Got the security feeds online. Check them.”

  Dorian’s eyes travel to the binder on the ground, with its chained pen. He kicks it closed and picks it up. It’s Titus’s physical access log, though he doubts the saboteur would’ve signed in. He pages through it, and finds about eighty signatures, the last one from two weeks ago. Most likely there have been accesses beyond that point, and the organization around here is a shitshow. No wonder the station is compromised.

  Dorian can’t let this opportunity pass him by. When is he going to be in here again? He needs to know the name of the saboteur. It’ll be someone who has the codes for that last escape pod, someone who’s gunning for it just as much as him. Everyone is a threat on some level, but the saboteur would do anything to leave.

  He hunkers down next to the monitors and puzzles through the timeline. Silversmile infected Titus at almost exactly the same time the kennels were opened. According to Dick Mackie, the cell doors were manual operation only. There were no network controls, so someone had to free the beasts by hand.

  But infecting Titus required the saboteur to be physically outside of the SCIF, away from Juno control. Those were two exclusive actions, taken simultaneously. Blue could be in two places at once, but that was a best-case scenario. Her frail body would never be able to get to the last escape pod—not with the docking bay exposed to the vacuum of space. He doubted she could even don a suit.

  Moreover, Marcus could never open the kennels without her piloting him. A synthetic would do everything it could to prevent harm to humans, and the synths that lacked that programming tended to have spectacular emotional breakdowns. If Marcus had opened the cages, Dorian would’ve seen some evidence in his behaviors.

  There had to be two saboteurs. Were they working together? No one had escaped the Cold Forge to Dorian’s knowledge. Yet surely the person who destroyed Titus had a plan to flee. Why let the beasts out of their cages? It couldn’t have been Javier. He was helping Dorian decode Blue’s research when the attack hit.

  “Javier, check the connection logs,” Dorian says, creeping back over. “I want to know the last access that wasn’t you.”

  “Buddy, I don’t think you heard me. I’ve got a network to reconstruct with duct tape and cardboard, and precious little time to do it. I’m trying to get the scrubbers reconnected and—”

  Dorian places a gentle hand on Javier’s shoulder. “I asked you nicely. I want to know who’s fucking us over. Now.”

  Javier stops and turns to him, eyes wide in disbelief. “Are you seriously questioning my priorities right now?”

  Dorian holds the man’s gaze, calmly yanking free the ballpoint pen and placing his binder on the nearby workspace. He clutches the pen in his hand, its rubberized grip flexing under his fingers, and draws up to his full height, looming over Javier.

  “I’m not questioning your priorities. I heard them, and I gave you an order. There’s enough air on this station for us to survive for weeks. There’s a traitor who will kill us all—a lot faster. And that’s not even your biggest problem.”

  Dorian waits for the other man to speak, but Javier says nothing.

  “Right now,” Dorian continues, “you need to worry about what’s going to happen the next time you tell me no.”

  “You’re crazy,” Javier says.

  Dorian takes away his hand, nostrils flaring. It feels good to be able to speak so plainly, all pretenses scrubbed away by necessity.

  “My first girlfriend said that,” he replies, “but these days, she’s in an institution, and I’m pulling down seven figures. I prefer to think of it as focused. Can we get focused up, Javier?”

  He’s grown accustomed to threatening people’s jobs, but that’s like playing a video game. There are always extra lives. Dorian’s victims will find work, or become wards of the state until some unaffordable disease kills them, but they won’t starve. People are scared of him, but they rarely ever commit suicide. Worst of all are the ones near retirement, the folk who know they’ll land on their feet, and have run out of fucks to give.

  The look on Javier’s face is addictive. It’s better than the designer drugs passed around at executive retreats. It’s better than all of the orgasms at Anne’s merciless hands. It’s like peeling away a hard shell to get at the quivering meat of the oyster and rake through its flesh for a pearl. Javier has no idea how to react. He’s been so focused on the unseen existential threats that he’s never even considered battle of wills. One little threat, and Dorian can have anything he wants.

  Qui audet adipiscitur—who dares, wins.

  “Tell me who the last connection is,” Dorian says. “Who could’ve gotten Silversmile into Titus?”

  Javier nods, and begins typing in the commands to bring up the CoreOP. A sudden concern wells within Dorian. What if he’s overplayed his hand? What if Javier rallies the other survivors against him, and damages his late plays in this game?

  The connection logs pop up, but they’re full of junk.

  “Fuck,” Javier says. “The virus dumped a bunch of shit into here.”

  All that posturing for nothing.

  “So they can’t be read?” Dorian asks. “Your cybersecurity is shit.”

  “I didn’t say that.” Javier types frantically. “The logs are stored on archival single-write media. The records are still there. I’ve just got to find the pointers.” After another tense minute, he says, “There. That’s the beginning of this year’s records. There’s so much shit in the index, I’m going to have to sort it manually.”

  For all of his protestations, Javier is quick to comply. Maybe he wants to know the identity of the saboteur, too. Maybe he’s more comfortable with someone giving orders. Or maybe, he’s going to undermine Dorian the second he gets a chance.

  More of the monitors come online. Titus’s barebones, bootstrapped image is taking effect, handling the easiest systems first—admin rights, physical access control, basic emergency electrical. A tiling of security monitors flickers to life behind them, but Javier doesn’t notice.

  Dorian has always wondered what he would do if given the opportunity to hurt someone—to sink his teeth into their raw pathos and look into that dark mirror to find something totally absent in himself. To be secure in the knowledge that a person can be shattered when the reflection is no longer entertaining. But to murder someone—

  Would that make Dorian better, or would Javier simply cease to exist? The pain would be so brief that Dorian could scarcely call it reaffirming. Murder is so cheap, the failure to exert the will by any other means. It’s intellectually lazy.
/>   “Holy shit,” Javier says, interrupting Dorian’s train of thought. “What time was the alarm? Do you remember?”

  “Had to be about five hours. Maybe six. What have you got?”

  “There’s a shared setup ID that accessed this workstation right before the records got smeared over with junk from the virus. It’s from back during the station’s commissioning, when we were setting stuff up for Doctor Marsalis.”

  “Shared IDs are against Company security policy.”

  “When we get back to Earth, feel free to fire me.”

  Dorian crosses his arms, peering over Javier’s shoulder. “So that credential is… three years old?”

  “Yeah,” Javier says. Despite the air conditioning, his face glistens with sweat. “There were only five of us on the Cold Forge when that ID was commissioned. Lucy helped me set everything up. That’s why we worked so closely on Silversmile.”

  “So you’re saying…”

  “It has to be her, man.” Javier gulps once and returns to his scanning of records. “There might be something else we can get from her tracks. Maybe she wasn’t trying to kill everyone. What if this is just a cover to do something else?” Out of the corner of Dorian’s eye, a black shape moves across one of the security cameras. At first, he’s not sure he saw it, but the shadow moves again, and its skeletal tail uncoils. His heart slams in his chest. Dorian checks the label on the security feed.

  CENTRAL 104 A

  Four modular spots from the SCIF. It’s headed in their direction.

  Dorian scans across the server racks for any exits, but the only ways out are through the door to the central strut or into the processor core through a skinny maintenance access. He’d probably fit inside, though Javier never would. That might be why Javier had tiny Lucy helping him with mainframe setup.

  “You’re feeling me on this, right?” Javier says. “Like, Lucy isn’t a bad person, you know.”

  Dorian makes a quiet, acknowledging grunt.

  If it doesn’t find anyone, the creature will search the room. It’s too obvious that something is happening inside. Javier is clumsy and loud—he might want to share a hiding spot. Dorian quickly calculates the odds, and he doesn’t like them. Then, he remembers the empty server racks. Cool and quiet, like standing coffins.