The thought of leaving Max and the other team members behind sickened his conscience. You never leave a man behind. Traitor, Judas, buddy fucker. The last two words hurt the most. No insult in the military lexicon was more damning than being branded a buddy fucker. Had he strayed so far from his roots that he was now working for just a paycheck instead of serving his country? Sad what things have come to.
Johnny glanced past the survivors back to Sugar. He nodded confidently, assured in his mind that they were doing the right thing. Sugar refused to meet his gaze. He tried to concentrate on checking their rear every few seconds.
Sweat streamed down his face and into his eyes. The dew rag he wore beneath his helmet soaked through with sweat. This had to be the hottest portion of the ship they’d visited so far.
The survivors trudged along in silence dead ahead of him. We could have done worse there, anyway. Max shouldered the burden known as Dr. Kumar. Should have popped that motherfucker when I had the chance. He created a distraction that would likely get someone killed. He’s probably dead by now. Sugar forced himself to forget about the old man, though Max and the team continued to plague his thoughts.
From the front of the column, LT asked, “You sure we’re going in the right direction?”
“Pretty sure,” Ruddiman responded.
“You best be damn sure,” Sugar informed him. If we’re gonna flee like a flock of chickens, we’d best be running out of the slaughterhouse.
Ruddiman spoke over his shoulder, “Well, it’s really impossible to say. The ship’s so big—”
Sugar growled, “Don’t gimme no fuckin’ excuses, kid.”
Ruddiman chose not to respond.
Johnny grumbled, “We better find some signs soon.”
“Secure it,” LT ordered.
Silence reigned. They marched on.
Six hallways converged in a small hexagonal chamber. Greytech had placed a directory kiosk in the room; it now lay on the floor blocking one of the hallways. Each hallway had a number posted above its entrance.
“Flip that thing upright, Gable,” LT barked.
The old Johnny would have grudgingly obeyed, bitching and tossing smart-assed comments all the while. The current Johnny carried out the order quickly and without comment. He got what he wanted, now he just wants out of here. If that meant bowing from the ankles at LT’s every command, then so be it. Sugar pondered Johnny as he watched him right the kiosk. How could a man come up with the most correct and logical course of action and still be wrong?
Man, fuck it, just stop already.
LT and Johnny searched the kiosk directory for the exit while Sugar patrolled the room’s perimeter, gazing as far into each empty hallway as he could. No creatures that he could see; no creatures at all since the encounter where they’d lost Max. Maybe this run of good fortune would hold.
“Here we are,” Johnny announced, sounding pleased. “Elevator to A-deck and the exit, down hallway four.”
“Fine, let’s go.” LT set out.
Sugar knew LT still wrestled with the same perfidious demons as he did. LT had made it apparent from the start, and it still showed in the dead-flat tone of his commands.
They formed up again: LT up front, then Johnny, Ruddiman, Ball, and Sugar. After ten minutes and a couple hundred yards, they came upon a cage-style lift of the sort used in skyscrapers under construction, installed by Greytech to replace one of the alien elevators. Fine mesh fencing comprised the four walls; a gate in the front wall granted access to the cage. There was no ceiling. It made sense enough, as no one had ever fallen upward from an elevator.
“Our ship has come in!” Johnny unbolted the latch on the gate and boarded the lift.
“You might wanna look up,” Sugar warned. “You’re in an open shaft.”
Johnny realized he’d let his guard down. He’s already back in Vegas. He brought his rifle upward and searched the shaft through his sight.
Sugar shook his head. Distractions—the decimation of discipline.
“Clear,” Johnny called out a few seconds later. “Least as far as I can see.”
Without a word, LT boarded the lift, the survivors following him. Sugar boarded last. The platform ran about eight feet on a side, a tight fit for the five men. Sugar pulled the gate shut and latched it; he then hefted his machine gun and trained it upward into the black elevator shaft.
It all felt wrong. Sugar knew all about vulnerability and how to avoid it, a knowledge possessed by every street kid who survived.
This lift was not the place to be.
“Going up,” Ruddiman announced in his best imitation of an old-time elevator operator. He moved his hand over the controls and selected the prompt for A-deck. The elevator eased into motion with nary a jolt and began rising slowly, glacially slower than the enclosed elevators they’d ridden earlier.
The touch-screen control panel provided the only light. Sugar pulled out a green chem light, snapped it, and shoved it into the cage mesh. The illuminated faces around him registered weariness, fear, and apprehension.
Sugar noted an approaching opening in the shaft wall through the green glow. He put his red dot sight on the deck opening as they pulled even with the deck. The hallway leading from the shaft gaped pitch black, only lit for the first couple of feet by the glow from the lift.
Sugar didn’t see any creatures as the car pulled slowly past the floor. Then a clicking noise jerked him to full alert. Two massive claws the size of shovel blades punched through the mesh and ripped the fencing from the front of the lift.
Sugar cut loose on the thing. It scuttled into the lift on thick, muscular legs and bowled him over. He fell directly beneath the thing. It had more arms and legs than he could count, and each ended in knifelike claws.
Bellows, curses, screams. The elevator continued its slow ascent.
Someone was shooting, but it wasn’t Sugar. He’d lost his window on the creature when it knocked him down. His machine gun now pointed uselessly to the side.
Before he could find his feet, he came face to face with a screaming Ruddiman, his taped-together glasses hanging askew. His scream abruptly cut off an instant later in a gout of blood that erupted from his mouth as the creature decapitated him with one downward thrust of a razor-edged claw. Ruddiman’s head landed beside Sugar, his mouth still froze open in scream.
Sugar drew his knees into his chest and then kicked his feet upward into the creature’s underside. The blow moved the beast just enough to where he might be able to gain his feet. Instead, Sugar took the opportunity to right his machine gun and fire upward into the creature, which hopped off him immediately as the first bullet struck.
More gunfire, the crack of small arms.
Sugar struggled to stand in the packed elevator. The creature thrashed about and slammed him into the mesh cage as it engaged LT and Johnny, who fought back with pistols. Sugar tried to get a bead on the creature again but found he couldn’t risk shooting with three other men in such close proximity. A hornet sting in his leg announced someone had shot him, but he knew from experience that it was a graze.
He finally stood, drew his combat knife, and sank it deep into the beast’s back between two appendages that reminded him of large, crooked fingers. The squelching sound the blade made, the spurt of blood as it pierced black flesh—Sugar felt satisfaction. He raised the knife and brought it down again and again, three, four, five times. The creature probed behind itself for him with another of its appendages, smaller but still sporting a claw that could easily eviscerate him. Sugar buried the knife one more time, then grabbed the probing finger-arm in his bone-crushing grip. He found a joint and applied tremendous pressure until it snapped.
The creature forgot all about the others. It spun around at blinding speed, tiptoeing nimbly on its claws despite the chaos and cramped conditions.
Sugar raised his knife for another attack.
This time three arms came at him. He fended off the first with his knife and shoved aside another with
his arm. The third arm slashed crosswise and ensnared his exposed bicep with a serrated ridge like a chainsaw. He’d never known such pain, not even the one time he’d been gut-shot in Afghanistan and not expected to survive. It felt as though a train had crushed his right arm just above the elbow, and he let out a bellow that drowned out every other sound in the shaft.
Johnny slashed at the creature with his knife. LT emptied his pistol into the thing. Ball clubbed at it with his rifle. Sugar saw all of it as if he floated underwater, everything wavy and indistinct.
He tumbled backward out of the lift, onto one of the deck levels.
No. He wiggled his fingers—he was certain of it—but they were nowhere to be seen. The blood coursing from the stump of his right arm was tangible enough, however.
Sugar blacked out for an instant and then came to, unbelievably dizzy now. Ball jumped from the moving elevator and landed next to him. LT had exited the lift, which continued rising slowly. Johnny’s head poked through the creature’s legs. A moment later he slipped out of the elevator and dropped to the deck. The beast barely missed decapitating him with a swipe of one of its claws. Lusting for blood, it unwittingly tried to follow him out of the elevator.
The lift passed the deck. The creature got stuck with half of its body still in the lift and half dangling above the floor, legs and claws slicing the air as it hung suspended. The elevator stopped, began to jerk as the cables strained to lift. Johnny, LT, and Ball cut loose on the dangling creature with shotgun and rifles. The elevator jerked back into full motion, cutting the creature in two in an eruption of black blood and bone fragments.
In a heartbeat, Johnny and LT were on the half that fell into the hallway. It was starting to morph into something else, but it never got the chance. They blasted the thing until their magazines ran out of ammunition. Portions of it still moved, so they finished it off with rifle butts to save ammo. All that remained was a thin black puddle of goo. Taking no chances, they used their boots to swipe the remainder down the dark shaft.
Ball paled at the sight of Sugar’s severed, bleeding stump. He took off his belt.
Be sure...Sugar tried to say. Be sure to draw a bloody T on my forehead. He’d learned that a long time ago in basic training, to always mark a tourniquet casualty with a T so the medics would know at a glance.
“Shit!” Johnny yelped as Sugar heard slaps, felt his face sting. “Wake up!”
Sugar opened his eyes.
Johnny hung right in his face, so close he could make out the tobacco stains on his teeth. “We gotcha, gonna take care of you, don’t worry.”
“Yeah.” Sugar closed his eyes again. He was missing his combat knife and machine gun in addition to his right arm. “You might as well plant me right here.”
“No fucking way,” LT said.
“Nah, really,” Sugar gasped. He knew he’d morphed as surely as the creature they’d battled, only he’d transformed into a burden far heavier than Dr. Kumar. He glared at Johnny. “Just fuckin’ leave me. You know how it’s done.”
He passed out from pain and blood loss.
Commanders in the field weren’t supposed to mourn their dead. Taking the objective was all that mattered; the deeds of the fallen would be remembered after the battle. Max always stuck to that rule. Whether a hard charger or a shitbag, every man who ever served under him had known the risks and volunteered of his own free will. Coach had known he might never see his ex-wife or his girlfriend again. Diaz had known that he might never see his wife or tuck in his daughters. Irish had known that his wife and kids were one day likely to get a phone call to hear that he was never coming home. Commanders weren’t supposed to mourn their dead but Max acutely felt the loss of all these men, losses piled onto losses from the past. All he could do was march ahead.
Yet Max couldn’t stop envisioning Irish as he climbed an interminable flight of stairs, headed for the ship’s bridge. One of the team’s original members, a rock-steady man of impeccable bearing and intrepid character. He always had the backs of his brother warriors. Max would have been able to push him to the back of his mind, had he died in anything resembling a fair fight. Cooked to death in a buried alien spaceship. Try telling that to his family. Not that Max had any intention of revealing the cause of death. He doubted he’d have the chance to tell them anything. At the rate we’re losing men, we’re all likely to be MIA.
The elevator they encountered couldn’t be summoned according to Dr. Rogers, so they took the adjacent stairwell. Despite the alien nature of the ship, Max decided the race that designed this thing must have possessed some human characteristics, though he suspected they were slightly smaller. The cramped stairwell kept going up and up.
Max figured they’d gone up about twelve flights already. He’d stationed Red as rear guard and was now on point, with Dr. Rogers following just behind him. Their pace was annoyingly slow thanks to Dr. Kumar, who demanded a rest after every flight. Max indulged him every five.
Around a corner, Max probed the next flight with his reflex sight and saw nothing. He proceeded. “How many flights more to the command center, Doctor?”
“Only a few more, I believe. I’ve only visited it a couple of times since access was highly restricted. And never via this route.”
Dr. Kumar wheezed, “This being the steepest and most tortuous route, apparently.”
“Shut up already.” Max had grown tired of him hours ago. “Three good men died so you could live. The least you could do is stop complaining about it.”
“Yeah, really,” Red muttered. “Secure your whining tongue, or I’ll toss you to the next creature we see.”
Kumar gulped, panted, and kept climbing.
A few more flights turned out to be eight. The stairs brought them to a narrow hallway with a grated floor running its entire length of thirty feet or so. Electronics and holographic computer monitors covered the walls; most of them dark at the moment. The functioning few glowed the ubiquitous orange.
“Keep your eyes peeled in here, all of you,” Max instructed. “We could be attacked from any angle.” The beasts possessed both the malleability and camouflage necessary to blend in seamlessly with the computer equipment.
Max stepped into the hall. Looking down through the floor grating he saw at least two more hallways identical to the one they were in. The electronics formed solid walls going down deep into the bowels of the ship.
“Maintenance access hallways,” Red muttered.
Good thing we only have to cross one. They made it through without incident, emerging on another stair landing. The flight going up was wide and well lit; the down flight a tenebrous spiral staircase that reminded Max of the ladder wells on naval ships. An open door straight ahead revealed a straight-running hallway. A Greytech directory sign over the door advised that the command center was up the wide staircase, and the computer science laboratory down the hall somewhere. The sign made no mention of the spiral staircase.
Max got his first view of a starship’s bridge as he emerged from the staircase into a large antechamber of computers and workstations that opened onto the command center. Functioning computers illuminated portions of the room in sporadic pools of orange. A round elevator yawned open on the right wall, the car lit and ready for the trip down. They’d reached the topmost deck of the ship. Windows of many geometric shapes comprised the ceiling and parts of the walls in an artful puzzle of glass. Unfortunately, only pitch blackness shone through the windows. Must have been an awesome view when this ship was in space. How many worlds have been viewed through these windows? Impossible to say, but one thing was certain: one of those worlds had produced the substance.
“I need to see if I can interact with the controls on the main bridge,” Dr. Rogers said.
“Lead the way,” Max urged.
She headed left at too brisk a pace for his liking.
“Can’t wait to see this,” Red admitted. “Fuck, I wish I had a camera!”
The glass ceiling vaulted higher, forming a caver
nous dome of blacked-out glass. The antechamber floor ended. Two flights of narrow stairs, one to the left and one to the right, led down to the bridge floor, a circular area made up of the usual workstations and computer terminals. Practically all the computers were in operation, their holographic screens flooding the floor in an array of hues. Straight ahead lay the command center, situated atop a round tower that thrust upward from the center of the floor. A circular bank of computers ringed the command tower to a height of four feet and projected upward. The shimmering holographic images formed a round wall of amber light.
The command center was only accessible via a retractable bridge, extended at the moment to allow access. An imposing chair reserved for the captain of the vessel occupied the center of the platform. It faced front for now, but Max figured it swiveled about. He squinted closer and saw a shadow that might have been the top of someone’s head poking above the chair back.
Max stopped at the end of the extended bridge. No, not just a head. Shoulders too. The man occupying the chair appeared quite large indeed.
With his rifle trained on the back of the chair, Max commanded, “Show yourself! We’re Greytech security contractors here to get you off this ship.”
The chair swiveled around slowly.
Dr. Rogers gasped.
“I’ll leave when I’m good and ready,” said the man—no, the thing—in the chair.
It wasn’t fully a creature. Still bipedal, it possessed a human countenance, bloated and distorted, wrinkled and mottled black in places. Its silver eyes shone through the amber light, catlike, too large and glassy to be human. Jung’s body hung suspended, head to toe, in a translucent black skin, a mutated version of the substance that had dissolved his human flesh, exposing the decaying organs exposed. His brain appeared healthy, however—it had grown too large to fit inside any human skull. He’d grown an extra pair of arms just below his original ones. His spidery fingers ended in curling silver, scalpel-like claws, two inches in length. He stood up on lithe alien legs that ended in reptilian feet. The beastly thing towered a good eight feet tall.
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