ALIEN THE COLD FORGE

by Alex White

  “There’s a trail of accesses here that aren’t just core functions,” Javier continues, leaning in to look more closely. He starts muttering about pointers, and Dorian slowly backs away. He’s thankful for the loss of his shoes, and he stays on the balls of his toes so he doesn’t make sucking noises with sweaty feet on the metal deck. Taking long, quiet strides, he creeps to one of the empty server racks. It’s warm, but not unbearable. There’s a small mesh plate on the front through which he can see—and be seen. It doesn’t matter—he’s going inside or he’s going to die.

  Dorian hooks a finger into the rack’s latch and pulls up as gently as he can, pressing his shoulder into the door to aid the mechanical action. If Javier sees him, he might accidentally draw the creature’s attention. But the sysadmin is still nattering away about access pathways and interoperability as Dorian slips into the server rack and quietly closes the door behind him.

  A moment later something passes in front of the bright work lights of the central strut, throwing a shadow across the doorway. Javier bolts upright, the change in lighting breaking through to him. Like any prey animal, he immediately looks around for his herd, and discovers that he’s been abandoned.

  The reaction is instantaneous and marvelous. His cheeks redden, his eyes swell with tears and his hands begin to shake. He’s ripening like a strawberry, sweet and juicy.

  “Sudler? Not cool, man.” He pleads for it to be some kind of prank, but there’s dark knowledge on his face.

  Through the mesh, Dorian watches Javier duck low to reach the processor maintenance access hatch. They say a rat can get into any space through which it can fit its head. Dorian leans closer to watch this miraculous contortion. Javier isn’t fat—there’s just a little too much of him to make a comfortable fit. He fiddles with the latches, trying to puzzle out the quietest way to open them.

  The creature crests the doorway, and Dorian is thankful for his height. He can stand comfortably back in shadow, almost completely obscured, while the scene plays out through the mesh frame. It’s like a movie. It might make a nice painting—the devil looming on the horizon line while the sinner struggles to avoid capture.

  Caravaggio would’ve done it justice.

  The thing Dorian likes the most about the Cold Forge is its intense quality construction. So many parts of it result from the finest manufacturing processes. In the now-bright lights of the server room, he recognizes the machined steel that was used for the processor maintenance access latch. Unlike molded or hammered steel, machined steel is precise, strong…

  And it makes a musical clink when it unlatches.

  Javier freezes in place. The beast snaps its long, gleaming skull toward the source of the sound, and it hisses like an unlit blowtorch, furious malice waiting for a spark. Dorian feels its exhilaration, watches its tightening muscles, and he wishes so desperately to record this moment so that he could watch it again and again in the darkness of his room.

  The beast crouches so low as to be supine, stalking the short chasms between the worktables, navigating its way toward its soft, fleshy prey. Dorian’s gaze darts back to Javier to find his lips working furiously. He’s praying. His finger rests on the catch of the second latch. Maybe he’s imagining the story of Daniel and the lion’s den. But there is no god here. There is only the devil, the all-consuming fire of a raging star, and the infinite blackness.

  The second clink drives a squeal from the creature and it clambers over tables, flowing past them in a deadly ballet. It surges to a perch over Javier, tail poised to strike, lips curling, and it pauses.

  Javier lies shivering, curled into a ball, breath coming in heaving sobs. It’s waiting for him to look. It wants him to know its glory, to see the exact moment of his transmutation from man into meat. Dorian sidles closer to the front of the locker, trying to peer around the creature for a better view of its prey. Dorian imagines himself within that armored exoskeleton, feeling its steely muscles, and lets out a quiet, hot sigh.

  Javier parts his fingers and weeps something in Portuguese.

  Then the beast snatches him up and sweeps away through the door, leaving only screams and blood in its wake.

  19

  LINES OF COMMUNICATION

  Blue is so happy to find a backup chair in the med bay that she forgives the vehicle all of its faults. It has no stand for an oxygen tank. She can’t hang an IV bag, or run a line for her G-tube. But it has a fully charged motor, and it carries her toward her bedroom at a marvelous rate of speed.

  At least the med bay wasn’t like the Earth hospitals, where she had to wait an hour for the discharge nurse. The painkillers have worn off, though. The pure oxygen the bed administered helps somewhat, but now that she’s away from the salubrious influence of medicine, the bends come back in waves.

  She mentally maps what’s left of the Cold Forge. The crash of the Athenian has effectively divided the station into two long halves, though a few ventilation access tubes may remain unobstructed. As she turns the corner onto her half of the central strut, she hazards a glance back at where the docking bay lies, sealed to the harsh vacuum of space. If her vision were better, she’d see Kambili’s hands resting at the door in small puddles of blood.

  Blue turns away toward the crew quarters. The alarms have stopped going off, and the lights have stopped strobing, which helps with Blue’s visual sensitivity.

  She needs to get her meds again. It’s been too long without an infusion of the various cocktails that keep the antibodies from stripping her nerves bare. It won’t be pretty, but Blue can use the intellijectors instead of her IV. She’d never be able to thread a vein right now. It’ll become trickier when she needs to eat. She touches the small cap of her feeding tube appliance to find the site swollen and hot. Dragging her belly across several hundred yards of deck did her no favors.

  When she crosses into the crew quarters, she finds one of the doors half open—one she could’ve sworn was closed when she came this way before. The crew had all fled, though. Kambili was the only survivor, right?

  The chair’s motor whines softly as she slows, inching toward the open door. She sees boots and blood, and her heart thunders in her chest, making her head swim. What if the snatchers have crossed onto her side of the station? She’ll be dead in seconds. It should’ve already happened, in fact.

  With a slight turn of her chair, she nudges the door the rest of the way. She finds Merrimack, one of the station maintenance crew, pistol in hand, brains splattered over the ceiling. It’s amazing that in the back-and-forth of the evacuation, they may have missed each other. Or did he not even leave his room?

  Blue had a coworker at Johns Hopkins who killed himself—a perfectly healthy, rich white man in the prime of his life, working a prestigious job. This coworker had every kind of privilege: money, power, political connections, and yet one day Blue showed up to work to find everyone crying and learned he’d offed himself. He had some minor debts, and his girlfriend broke up with him, and that was all it took.

  Maybe Merrimack never tried to evacuate. Maybe he gave up.

  He looks up at her with one eye, the other fixed on some far-off point, his ocular muscles scrambled by a large bullet passing through his brain. His waxy expression strikes Blue as accusatory, with one eye half-lidded. She kind of expects him to ask her if she thinks she’s too good for this fate.

  Perhaps there are other reasons he didn’t want to survive, and the containment failure was just the catalyst. It doesn’t matter. Her heart settles at the sight of him. He’s proof that there are no snatchers on her side of the station. There are no bite marks on his corpse, no scratches across the walls. She knows she should do something solemn, like close his eyes or feel guilt, but it’s the furthest thing from her mind right now.

  She has decided to live, and he has decided to die. That’s that.

  Blue turns her chair to head further into the crew quarters, and she’s pleased to find the corridor free of obstructions. Aside from the station’s core system
s being scrambled by a malevolent, intelligent supervirus, the place appears relatively clean.

  The door to her room opens, and she feels a weight upon her that she hadn’t expected. The journey from her room to the docking bay and back has been so long, and she’s right back where she started. Maybe she’s worse off, actually. She wonders if her portable terminal was connected to Titus when Silversmile took over. Being mobility-restricted, Blue is very battery-conscious, and usually turns it off when she’s not using it, but she evacuated in such a hurry. If her portable is compromised, Marcus might be, too.

  That would be game over.

  Seeing her room again, the place where she’s spent so many of her closing days, makes her want to weep. She retrieves her portable terminal from the workspace. It’s been charging on her induction desk, so the battery looks good, and when she unfolds it, it boots up.

  Next comes the hard part. She motors to the bed and prepares to climb back into it. She can’t attempt her connection to Marcus while sitting in the chair. She’ll lose track of time and suffer spinal compression. With a lot of hoisting and grunting, she’s able to get herself onto her sheets.

  She thanks her lucky stars that she was so paranoid and kept everything locked down on her terminal. After all, she was misappropriating Company funds, and she couldn’t have other machines on the network shuffling through her personal files. Most of the time, her portable was isolated. If she hadn’t had something to hide, she would’ve lost everything to Silversmile.

  Blue won’t trust Titus to route her signals to Marcus anymore. She’ll have to patch into one of the short-range inter-station antennae used to interface with docking ships. Even though the docking area was destroyed, there are plenty of repeaters station-wide, and she should be able to bootstrap a small network together. She used to do that sort of thing all the time, back in school, so she could co-opt data farms for her experiments when IT wasn’t looking. There was a time when scientists did more science and less system administration. That went the way of government funding years ago.

  Finding herself within radio range of the nearest repeater, she sets up the various alignments to maximize signal blast to the far end of the SCIF. She checks the network traffic. It’s all dead, aside from the occasional lighting grid or climate control, checking in.

  One of the signal towers jumps with a short spike. Then another. Blue checks the logs. Titus was reset twenty minutes ago, but since then, this tower has repeatedly had something beamed at it. Inspecting the packets, she finds a data stream.

  >>WE CAN SEE YOU

  DO YOU HAVE SAMPLE

  The protocol is primitive and unencrypted, with a short-range transmission, the sort of thing a high-school kid might rig up. It takes her no time to create a response.

  //HELP

  She watches the screen and waits. The tower pings again.

  >>NO SAMPLE NO HELP

  “Fuck you!” The words scrape past her lips before she remembers the Cold Forge is crawling with murder bugs. Even though there shouldn’t be any in the crew quarters, she still wants to take precautions. She grits her teeth and types a response.

  //COME GET THE SAMPLE

  NO ONE TO STOP YOU

  The reply is quick.

  >>60 KMPH OFF AXIS SPIN

  CANNOT DOCK

  YOU COME TO US

  ALONE

  That explains why the gravity feels a little strange. She hasn’t had time to look out a window, but she knows what she’ll find—a nauseating, oscillating starscape. She remembers Titus’s alert regarding orbital dynamics. That means two things: the system cannot correct the spin, and the station is likely sinking into Kaufmann’s gravity well. An escape pod could get off-station, but the Athenian struck the pod cluster. She can’t be sure if any of them still exist.

  //IM BRINGING MY CREW

  DO YOU HAVE SUPPLIES

  The cursor flashes patiently as it awaits their response.

  >>YOU MAY BRING 1 CREW WITH SAMPLE

  DO NOT TEST US

  If these people are willing to let everyone die, she’ll need any reassurance she can find.

  //HOW CAN I TRUST YOU

  The response is as swift as a slap.

  >>TRY OR DIE/YOUR CHOICE

  WE WANT YOUR RESEARCH

  WE WANT YOU

  Blue licks her lips. If she could get to the escape pod, maybe she wouldn’t have to deal with these people at all.

  //WHAT IF I JUST LEAVE

  But their intentions are clear.

  >>BRING SAMPLE

  2 SURVIVORS

  NO SAMPLE NO SURVIVORS

  Blue swallows and sets her terminal aside. The plan hasn’t necessarily changed. Use Marcus to get the sample. Bring it to her in his stomach. Have Marcus crawl through the maintenance shafts connecting the two halves of the Cold Forge—they should still have pressure. Get herself into a space suit and then the escape pod. If she can do that, she can get off the station.

  A wave of weariness sweeps over her. She’d love to drift off to sleep, but there’s too much to do. Luckily, she’s become an expert in staving off rest in the name of research. It’s the only part of her disease she’s found to be manageable.

  Blue connects her brain-direct interface gear to the terminal, then changes a few parameters to use the lashed- together network she’s created. She places the helmet over her scalp and folds down the blinders, the familiar cold of the gold contacts settling over her bare skin.

  “Let’s see what you’ve been up to, Marcus.”

  20

  DISTRACTIONS

  There’s relief at the rising sensation of Marcus’s powerful muscles. After dragging herself across the central strut, she’s more than happy to be able to walk ten easy paces, if she wishes. The green walls of the kennels are the only things that stop her from doing a victory lap.

  She’s hunkered down behind one of the legs of the humanoid power loader. Through shatterproof glass along the far wall she sees a trove of armored crates, each the size of a grown man curled into a fetal position. This is next to the egg-storage facility. How the fuck did Marcus get down here? How did he get past the snatchers?

  Peering around the corner, she sees molten shadows dancing in the work lights. She can’t tell exactly where the beasts are, but there are more than two, and there will be others nearby. In the experiments, the snatchers exhibited distinct social traits, even if she never discerned the method of communication.

  If they see her, they’ll rip her to shreds.

  Yet synthetics will go places no one else will— underwater, into claustrophobic ducts and tubes, cold storage, airless vacuums. They can crawl for hours in a tiny shaft, making them ideal repair personnel.

  There’s a grating loose along the wall—that must be how he got in here. He would’ve wound his way through the circuitous passageways with no trouble, homing in on his destination. She shouldn’t have taken Marcus over without messaging him. This environment requires advanced survival techniques, and she’s barely coordinated enough to tie her shoes.

  It also puts her close to the sample she so desperately needs. If she can get past the snatchers into the egg storage, she can disarm one and infect herself. She works her fingers, and that’s when she discovers Marcus was holding something: a portable flash tool and a flare.

  The flash tool isn’t one of the standard data port interfaces like she might find on the mainframe, or the Silversmile computers. It has a different plug interface; one she doesn’t recognize. She racks her brain, trying to conjure the memory of the pin shapes and place them in context, but she can’t think of anything, so she jams the tool into one of her cargo pockets. The flare, on the other hand, is something she can use. It’s one of the civilian ones, thankfully, not a Colonial Marines striker-type, so she doesn’t have to worry about finding a rough surface with which to light it.

  The cap is rigid in her hand. All she has to do is yank it off with enough force to get the party started. She glances across to somew
here she might throw it to distract them from the entrance to the warehouse. It’ll have to go far, and she thinks she sees a good spot at the landing of a winding stairwell. If she can bounce it just right, it’ll tumble down the stairs and lead them on a short chase.

  Now or never.

  She yanks the cap free. The flare sputters to life with entirely too much noise and light. It’s impossible to tell, but she thinks there might be a second hiss lurking under that of the flame. She has to get it out of her hand before she attracts attention.

  Her android arm gives it a mighty hurl, mustering so much more force and speed than any human ever could— and it’s probably because of this that her flare comes loose early in the arc, sailing high to bounce off the top of the wall and come rolling back toward her in a flurry of sparks, resting two yards away.

  One of the creatures screams.

  If she didn’t have their undivided attention before, she has it now.

  Blue launches from her crouched position like a sprinter off the blocks, hurtling toward the open vent shaft. More metallic screams of rage join the first ones, rising in pitch with each of her footfalls. If she’d been going too slow in the central strut, she was going too fast now. Marcus’s powerful, limber body is difficult for any mere mortal to control. She’s never gone full-tilt inside him before.

  Three yards to the open duct. There’s a loud bang behind her as one of them hits the floor. Did it leap or drop from the ceiling? She ducks her head as the creature’s skeletal tail snaps in the air above her.

  Two yards to the open duct. She sinks lower, preparing to leap. They’re closing in on her, and they’re impossibly fast. She expects to feel their cold claws sink into her back, to rend her asunder.

  One yard. She leaps, hoping she’s judged Marcus’s balance better than his throw.