My eyes skittered about here, there, everywhere. The blue-grey structures melded into one fearful place. What might have been cupboards of some sort, with large stencilled numbers painted across their faces, stood out in bass relief. As we walked their shadows got longer and longer until it got real dark and they were swallowed into a void of nothingness. I was startled when my spacesuit, abruptly, without warning, activated a cone of light that flooded the area ahead of me. I thought it must have identified an enemy and lifted the flamethrower accordingly, ready to engage the trigger. I’d already turned it on some way back. Clem must have heard my breathing change as I got spooked and her voice entered my helmet. “It’s OK, the rig has an auto setting. If you don’t want light, just say, ‘lights off.’”
I did want light!
The murk of this strange world deepened and the rim of light around my helmet grew stronger, as did everybody’s, so that we looked collectively like some sort of slow, crazy truck, meandering in a thick fog.
We’d travelled a mere thirty metres or so through the second pressure hull. There was no sign of any eggs. Up till now, spotting them had been relatively easy due to the straight lines and no corners; then there was a huge machine ahead - and I mean huge. I guessed it must be part of the atmospheric processor, but the scale of the thing was eye watering. I smirked, despite my fear, at the thought of Bram’s eyes on storks, peering at the behemoth, trying to make sense of it. The structure wouldn’t allow you to make out a mental picture of the whole and seemed to go into the ground forever. There were dark shadows, pock-marking every visible surface. We couldn’t possibly check everywhere for eggs, and Clem reading our thoughts broke across the silence. “The suits will withstand a barbed pronged attack, so long as we keep moving.” Back in the safety of the hub, this assumption had seemed easy to believe, but now, here, in the half-dark, we’d have to take her word for it.
Neil spent ten precious minutes melting the weld on the next door after we’d quickly skirted the processor. The green luminescent writing that ran across the top of my visor told me that mission time was twenty-two minutes, oxygen level was fifty-nine percent and temperature was sixteen degrees C. The temperature in my suit had dropped from twenty degrees as my body heat and perspiration had increased. Using the jack more efficiently this time, Neil sprang the door without our help. LEVEL 2, with a forward pointing arrow, all the same rusty yellow. It showed the way to go, although I couldn’t see beyond two massive columns, flanked by some scaffolding. Was the scaffolding supposed to be there?
After tentatively pacing forward, past Neil’s cumbersome frame, I stepped back again in fright, mistaking the grill pattern on the metal walkway for eggs. They were nothing like the Sporo eggs as described by Lilly; “White, elongated, six inches long like an erect penis.” Get a fucking grip! I admonished myself. I was setting mine and everybody else’s nerves on edge and feeling strung out. I needed another shot of booze. I also wanted to scratch my nose too, it had that dread induced, dew-drop of sweat hanging off the end again. It was itching like mad. “You alright man?” Neil yipped over the comms “Yeah, sorry,” I replied.
Clem took the front again. I was glad to be moving, behind her. Standing about whilst the doors were opened had just about unmanned me.
We merged beyond the grill walkway, to a metal grey staircase with yellow railings and another arrow with LEVEL 1 painted next to it; unsurprisingly it pointed upward. Level 2 continued further on.
“They could be anywhere,” Neil remarked to nobody in particular, whilst his head zoned the surround like a deranged lighthouse. Neil was not the most reassuring person to bring along. False bravado it seems, can take you a long way in the Vanguard army, but not so far in the alien infested off-world.
We began a tense climb up the stairs. I allowed Clem to continue in front, she being the professional soldier and all that. She was good though, and kept up a reassuring running commentary on what we should be looking out for, keeping us alert to blind corners, snaking pipes etc.; “Safe and steady, watch those corners, keep coming, pipes ahead,” and so on.
At the top of the stairs there was a small galley. We bunched together before deciding to move off onto the next landing, then to the next stairwell and some more stairs. Lilly came in over the comms unexpectedly. There was a crackle; “We have you on screen, there is still power to the monitors and sensors up there. You are doing fine. Half a level to go.” I felt slightly reassured. Although she didn’t have P.O.V., Lilly now knew exactly where we were, related to the blueprint she monitored. As if to confirm my thought she interrupted; “You are just passing the secondary heater interchange, it is massive, you can probably see one small edge of it.” There was more crackling. “Beyond this was where the major firefight occurred… go careful.”
All I could see of the heat exchanger was part of a curve. It was covered in pipes like a veiny piece of liver. Any, or all of it, might harbour a nest of deadly eggs. We ran past it, jumping over a loose hose the width of a tree trunk, which is pretty good going in a heavy space suit and the added gravitational effect. Rounding the bend of the top landing, things looked dire. Coming as we were, from the opposite direction of the kitchen from whence we’d entered the service conduit, we hadn’t been prepared for the scene of utter devastation that was strewn before our eyes and about our feet. Great holes were ripped in the roof and down the sides of the wall – in some places pared and peeled to the last defensive skin. There were no leaks evident, which was all fine and dandy when you thought about it, because if there had been, we’d all be dead right now. Not exactly a comfort in the circumstances.
There were no working lights, all the low-level lighting had been cut by the destruction. Circuit breakers had blown out like grenades, high velocity shrapnel embedded in what was left of the composite foam padding that would normally protect the crew from… well, from whatever! At least their annihilation had prevented the electrical surge from spreading around the base. The damage was massive, but isolated. I heard Clem say, “Stay calm, let’s work our way around.” I took my eyes off the twisted walls and broke to a series of alarming thoughts. Something, something fucking big, with immense strength, had caused all this. I wasn’t sure I needed to see what else was up ahead.
There was no stopping Clem though, she was moving off from standing, leading the way around a precipice of what was left of the floor. It was just a sill of metal clinging to the wall, quite as deadly as a cliff ledge around the side of a mountain. I walked up to the black hole where the floor was ripped away. There was no telling how far you would fall if you slipped. I couldn’t see the level below.
I slung the flamethrower over one shoulder and followed Clem. Luckily there was plenty of busted pipework to grab onto as you made your way across the abyss.
I became aware of a slight variation in the air temperature, brought to my attention by shifting visor telemetry. It told me that it had risen to twenty-six degrees, a few centigrade warmer than had been the norm, till now. It might be that hot air rises and the heat generated by the acetylene torch had climbed to this level. “Clem,” I queried, “I don’t suppose eggs give off heat, do they?” She didn’t answer.
We stopped, fidgeted and watched, whilst Neil, Jenner and Bram scaled the dizzy height we’d just negotiated. Jenna even took my proffered hand of support as she jumped the last bit of shelf and onto terra firma. She didn’t say ‘thank-you’ though.
Clem kept us tip-toe tight, moving forward – when given the circumstance the rest of us might have turned and run home. Her slow tactically awareness brought us up-short. A charred body, half reared up a twisted section of panelling made her strong-arm my chest to an abrupt stop. At first I was bemused, I couldn’t tell what I was looking at because the body appeared melted with everything else. It was only when you were inches away, and shining the helmet torch right at it, that you could see a burnt and partially digested torso and head. What was left of the face was like that of a stroke victim, sagging to one s
ide, skin in loose flaps where it hadn’t been stripped to the skull.
“The Sporo,” I hissed.
We couldn’t make out whether the body was male or female. A hand had somehow survived the engagement and like a white crab had crawled away from the rest of the incinerated jelly mess. It was definitely the remains of a human though, but you might have been forgiven for thinking otherwise. It was fuck awful. Parts of the creature had also been hit by flame and lay all around the chaos like piles of burnt dog shit.
“Take it easy,” Clem cautioned, breathing more rapidly than she had been. More disarray lay ahead. The grated floor had collapsed again and there was a bridge of metal across the middle that straddled the two sides of safety. I began wondering whether we would get back with the supplies - if we managed to get any - across such a treacherous retreat.
We were back into a lighted area and my helmet dimmed. Some Sporo eggs – the first we’d seen had been fried and some still dripped the contents of what had lain within. “Don’t touch nothing,” wheezed Bram. It was reassuring to hear his tar damaged vocal cords, and strangely it got me wondering how he’d managed to cope; without his mandatory forty a day habit.
My spacesuit upped the coolant again. I felt hotter than the hinges of hell. I wanted to run. “Everybody okay?” I asked in the frightened voice of a boy whistling in the dark, more to reassure myself than any real concern for my colleagues. Nobody answered.
Clem, sensing something, stopped. If she’d been a cat she would have bristled and hissed. “Is your flamethrower activated Paul?”
It was so I replied, “Yeah.”
“Keep it ready.”
We moved off again, slowly.
“Geez, nothing but twisted metal everywhere,” Jenna breathed. “This can’t be just from a firefight… look, things are too clean. Look! This structure, it’s been pulled to bits like a dolls house. That melt-fucker was searching for something.”
“Or someone!”
Even though the construction was man-made, it appeared unfamiliar. There were no neat straight lines, everything seemed corrugated, crushed or dissolved. Lilly picked us up again on her monitor. She probably felt as scared as we did. “Not much further now folks,” she encouraged, “you are about to enter the area you will recognise from a few hours ago. If you can remember where the kitchen is then great, if not let me know and I’ll direct you.”
Another dead body; this one with full protective clothing, and still punctured with snares and barbs from egg projectiles. “Thought you said they couldn’t get through the clothing,” Jenna whined, rising the pitch to her voice. It was the first time I’d ever heard her voice so animated. I turned the body over with my foot and we found the reason that the female had died but not been completely consumed. Whatever was left of her face, her waxy sallow mouth held in perpetual terror and her hair, matted with blood, was covered in salt. In her last moments she must have poured pounds of the stuff into her suit via the helmet. My innards lurched out a watery – and I’m sure if I could have smelt it – egg smelling fart.
More remnants of burnt blob further ahead and then swiss-swiss-swiss, Sporo eggs, or something alive, were firing off elasticated barbs from directions as yet unknown. They were hitting our suits with ever-increasing force. Under such an onslaught it was impossible to pinpoint the origin of attack. I clutched at my visor, translucent and sticky with prongs and grasping slugs. I could just about make out thousands of the fuckers, attached to a well in the floor, where a cave-in had concealed their presence.
I let rip with the flamethrower, downward into the chasm, creating an even more frenzied onslaught. “Fall back,” somebody screamed, probably Clem. I stepped backward and tripped over something solid. My flamethrower in the process of working off my adrenaline, arced upward and blasted Neil’s shoulder. More eggs were falling from the ceiling from another crack in the structure. Neil was on fire, but if only he’d have waited, he would have realized the suit he wore was more than flame proof. Instead he panicked and let rip with his own carbine, which in the circumstance would make little difference to the eggs, but quite a lot of difference to the rest of us.
As I lay on my back, I saw Jenna’s arm explode as she was hit by a bullet and her suit, under positive pressure, blew outward. Somebody was shouting incoherent words, or were they screaming. Who could tell? I could hardly see anything, covered as I was by a squirming mass of murderous snake-like attachments.
A carbine cracked off another salvo; probably Neil’s. I got to my feet and began blindly heading back the way we’d just come. I’d forgotten all about the holes in the floor. Neil fired up again. This time I heard Clem shouting something rambled, and then there was a blast from the weapon she carried. Through my waxy screen I saw Neil taken off his feet and hit the wall beyond the passageway. He slid down like a puppet with its strings cut. I realized Neil had been blasted and was probably dead; I felt glad.
In a voice colder than a bucket of ice, Clem refined her words carefully and said, “Ignore the little bastards… follow me if you want to live.”
I couldn’t argue with that. I zoned in on where Clem, already scrambling over the previous dead bodies, was hurriedly withdrawing. I attached a hand to her back-pack and followed. Jenna stumbled into my path and taking hold of her empty sleeve, I half dragged, half pulled her after me.
We reached the point where the floor parted into the flimsy bridge. I was about to try a crossing with Jenna, when Clem screeched, “Against that wall, NOW.” I thought at first, she was going to kill us. She screeched again, “Over there and then standstill, don’t pay attention to the flames.” Bram came up upon us and seemed to know what was about to happen. He took me by the belt toward the far wall. He stood next to me and Jenna, as Clem let rip a spray of fire that coursed across our bodies. It was hard not to react, not to think that Clem was executing us and then… the gnawing suckers of the spawn of Sporo began to weaken and fall to the floor. “Turn around… hands up… legs apart,” Clem ordered. We did as we were told. Squirming eels of dying alien lay at our feet. The flames stopped and drizzled downward into a petrol-blue haze. I saw Clem standing opposite, like she was enjoying the view by a tranquil lakeside. “Now do me!” she said. I fumbled with my controls, unable to see properly and then found what I was feeling for. I watched with morbid glee as the little suckers that adorned her suit fell from her and fizzled onto the floor. The fire was intense, and it must have been my imagination, that had me thinking Clem was dancing in the flames.
Chapter Fifteen. Drinking Helps.
Banging and crashing above indicated that mother Sporo had sensed her progeny being fried, and wasn’t much pleased. How she knew, I have no idea. Perhaps she has something more sophisticated by way of communication than radio waves.
We stumbled on through the wreckage, bundling along Jenna in turns by her good right arm and shoulder. We navigated her across the thin metal bridge of doom, but when we got to the second ledge, blood was dripping from her sleeve in a steady flow and she was barely conscious. We all stopped. The monstrous banging of the Sporo continued outside and added to the thumping cacophony that was in my head. Clem surveyed the scene, thinking out a plan with physicality. She shimmied the shelf first and beckoned Bram to stand firm in the centre. Once he had a grip on a housing duct and had one foot on solid ground, I scrunched up a fistful of Jenna’s space suit at the base of her spine, above the utility belt, and pushed her face towards the wall. Then I inched her towards Bram. Clem took hold of Bram’s arm and in relay they pulled her to safety. The telemetry crossing my visor had turned from a green fluorescent line to an amber one. The pulsating diagrams to the left-hand side would have told a small kiddie that the atmosphere outside was becoming poisonous with CO2 and other nasty stuff; you didn’t need to be a chemist.
We were across the precipitous bridge and staggered onward, to where the staircase led from level one, down to level two. Jenna was getting too heavy for one person to carry. Bram allowed her to sa
g onto the metal grilling. I picked her up as best I could, wondering, as my hand slipped across the blood on her damaged sleeve, if she might have become infected. It was most unlikely I decided. The usual green neon light in her helmet had changed, and was blinking red, indicative of the broken nature of her suit. I was in two minds as to whether to lift her visor when the banging from above went into overdrive. I got her to her feet sharpish and ran for a bit, before dropping her at the head of the stairs.
“Get the legs,” Clem ordered, “Bram, you take the good arm, I’ll get the sleeve.”
In this fashion we bundled Jenna down one flight, swung her round the landing and down the next. Straight through the first airlock without bothering to close it behind us and we were onto the next. Through that one, again without stopping and as we reached the last door, San and Lilly were waiting, their faces lit up like jack-a-lanterns. They took Jenna’s weight and she was laid gently on the floor just inside the hub. The monstrous noises had lessened with the distance we had travelled. I rather hoped this was because the Sporo was getting tired, but that was wishful thinking, we were just further away.
San, Pernio and Lilly hadn’t been idle, and had prepared for our return. Whilst those of us who’d been on our foolish recce, collected our breath and our thoughts, San got busy locking the bulk-head door. He must have had a stash of oxyacetylene blow lamps in a cupboard someplace, because we’d left the last one behind somewhere on deck level 1, or whatever the hell it was called. When the door was shut air tight, blue smoke lazily rising, Lilly verbally commanded the main computer, “BB, clean air!” It was the first time I’d heard her talk direct to the base’s brains, but then I’d only been inside less than five hours. She was close to breaking down, and dry heaved a couple of times before her red swollen face reanimated. The air remained heavy. BB, after several attempts to start the air cleaning process, by way of stop/start, clicks and whirs, reported verbally: “Command incomplete. Imminent S.C. failure!”
Beyond the Rubicon Page 11
