by JCH Rigby
“Hang on.” Richter forced himself to ignore the prone body of Krause instead intently examining the rim of the tunnel section through which the sergeant had fallen. The plating it passed through seemed like just another unremarkable bulkhead. The weapon, or cutting machine or whatever it had been, left a superbly smooth surface. The plate work plainly hadn’t been designed to be cut at this point, but there were no ragged faces. Some cables, or maybe pipes, neatly severed, picking up again equally smoothly on the far side. The intervening material vanished, with no burn marks, melt runs, or spoil. Nothing marked it as any different from the tunnels he had already traversed to get here.
Look at it later. Every fiber of his being straining, calling on him to propel himself toward the sergeant. The man’s down. You must go for him. You’d want him to come for you.
But something here had flung the man off—he’d fallen around twenty meters, straight forward. But he’s dead.
That’s what the machinery says. You can’t leave a man down!
And I don’t know why it happened. What if it happens again? To me.
Get the man!
Richter ran the events he had witnessed immediately prior to Krause falling through his head searching for any anomaly. Any hint that could reveal the cause of the fall. The floating tether had struck him as odd at the time, but he had dismissed it. Not now though. “Was this where you were, right here?” He asked Lisl
She nodded inside her helmet. “Right here. I haven’t dared to move since it happened.”
“Don’t.” Richter ran his hand across the smooth surface. “There’s nothing different about this point I can see. It’s just a neat round hole in a bulkhead.” Another leap of faith. “I’m going for him.”
Lisl grabbed at his arm. “Don’t leave us here!” she wailed.
Max broke his silence. “Come on, Lisl. Let’s you and me get the hell out of here now. You were right, and I was wrong. This place is lethal. Let’s go.”
Richter held up his hand. “No, you don’t. I’m not leaving him, and I’m not leaving you. Stay here while I go to him.”
Max wasn’t having it. “Screw that, Richter. We’re out of here. Come on , Lisl. He’s called for the lander; let’s go and get on it. Leave action man to it, if he wants to stay here and get himself killed as well.”
Anger boiled in Richter but a new voice cut in before he could vent. “You’ll be wasting your time if you do.” Said Pedersen. “If Richter’s not with you when I get there, you can try walking back to the Amaterasu . I won’t be picking you up. Stay with Richter.”
“You wouldn’t leave us here!” Max said disbelievingly.
Pedersen’s reply was edged in cold steel. “Try me. You say you’d leave Richter and Krause? Stay there and stay together. I’m coming.”
RICHTER CHECKED HIS TETHER once more, before copying Lisl using his EVA jets to push himself lightly against the tunnel floor. From the way Krause had gone, there must be something like Earth-normal gravity from this point on, but horizontal. He inched his feet forward slightly.
Up to the bulkhead; zero-g. Beyond, gravity. Maybe the gravity would gradually build up, or maybe there was an abrupt cut-off. Where was the transition point? The far rim of the bulkhead? He tugged his tether, so it took up a little slack, then stretched his hand out in front of him. Nothing felt different. Well, how would you feel if the direction of gravity changed, but just on your hand?
Richter needed something that would give him some sort of indication. He thrust his rifle into Max’s inexperienced arms, the rifle would make the plan which was beginning to form in his head too difficult, and began fiddling in his utility belt until he found what he was looking for. An extra length of smart tether cord, an ammunition block for a weight, and he had a crude plumb line. Pulling his arm behind him, he gently swung the line forward. The sudden weight snapped the line taut, yanking at his arm, and the ammunition block hung a meter away in the center of the tunnel, straining to go further.
Lisl and Max were staring at the ammunition block fighting a gravity they both knew should not be possible like some ancient witchcraft. Richter drew the line slowly back, and it felt like he was pulling up . Without warning the line went slack and the block floated serenely toward him in a tangle of tether cord.
Richter repeated his experiment, pushing the block slowly away, until he felt the cord tighten again. Pull the cord back toward him, and the tug on his hand vanished. There. Richter visually marked the spot on the tunnel floor where the immediate switch over to gravity took place. Just there. Gotcha .
Now, let’s see. Richter zoomed his helmet view in on the motionless Krause. The man lay halfway up the wall or, from this new perspective, right in the middle of the floor. Despite the lack of any signs of life, he knew he had to go for him.
Richter judged the floor/wall with the professional eye of the climber he was. He’d faced worst descents, surely. Check the tether again. A firm grip on the wall, and swing his feet up, one at a time. Sure enough, as his legs passed the gravity threshold, their weight came back and his whole perception tilted. The pull on his legs increased, making it easier to swing his chest and arms in against the tunnel face. Okay. He could do this.
Slithering cautiously down the wall for a meter or two, reeling the tether out behind him, he spared a glance back at the others. Max waving the rifle around inexpertly, while Lisl clutched desperately at her own tether line. They stretched horizontally across the tunnel, feet to his right, heads to the left. Bad idea Richter he thought, looking up in this weird environment. A man could get dizzy doing that.
Onward. There’s a man down. The super-smooth face of the cut offered him no grip, and the nano-boots were useless now, but the tether line fed out steadily enough. The motor purring away smoothly in its housing, and he let the line slide slowly through his hands. He looked down. There seemed to be about another fifteen meters or so to go. Plenty of line. In the mountains of home, this height was nothing to get excited about.
Oof. He slammed against the bulkhead edge, bouncing his head off the inside of his helmet and nearly losing his controlling grip on the tether. His legs flailed for grip, and found none. The safety brake compensated for the change in weight, and tightened up to bring him to a halt. Except he didn’t quite. He slid sideways across the wall, coming to rest about twenty degrees around the aperture from where he’d started out.
What the hell? Briefly, he felt sick again, like in those bloody planes.
Oh . Got it. That must have been like whatever happened to Krause. Gravity had changed direction again. The tunnel, instead of being a shaft pointing straight down, was now a steeply-inclined slope, and he had been lucky to be pressed against the edge which became the down side. If he’d chosen the far side, he’d have smacked into this one a lot harder risking injury or worse still, damage to his suit which could easily prove fatal.
Richter looked down, he was about to enter the faintly-seen chamber through its ceiling. From here to the floor would be a straight descent on the line. If nothing else weird happened, he ought to be able to reach Krause and make some connection onto his backpack straps or his combat equipment. Then he could use the tether winch to pull them both up.
He glanced back up toward Lisl and Max, ensuring he moved his head more slowly this time to control the nausea. To his perspective they looked like their feet were glued to the wall and they protruded into the tunnel at an acute angle.
“Are you all right, Richter?” Asked Max. Before he could reassure the scientist that he was fine, Pedersen’s voice cut in from the lander.
“Richter? Are you guys okay? Listen, you’ve got to get out of there, now. You’ll have to leave Krause. I know why you’re doing it, and I reckon you’ve got balls of steel, but you need to get out right now!”
Richter didn’t understand. “Pedersen, I was a bit winded. It’s nothing. I can do this fine.” He heard himself say it, but he wasn’t quite that confident.
>
“No, that’s not why.” Said Pedersen. “You’ve got to get out. The ship has started moving!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Redacted
From the debrief of Piet Roorback: I didn’t believe it, at first. Everything said those vessels were dead, just husks. I mean, there’d been no emissions, no heat, no nothing. We’d been playing games with the numbers, trying to make estimates of mass and work out if their orbits were stable or not. You know, when would they dive into the gas giant? So, nobody expected them to fire up. But that’s just what they did. They just started to move all together, slowly at first but gathering speed, like a flock of birds or something.
Straightaway we knew we couldn’t go after Max and Lisl and the troopers. You should remember: we were two hours out, which put us a long way from the ship they were surveying, because that’s one hell of a fast hull we’ve got there, even before we fitted the Psycho Drive. Yeah, that’s what people called it, the Psycho Drive, because it messed with your head. Didn’t you know that?
Anyway, the Amaterasu was our route home, and it’s fabulously valuable. We shouldn’t have been there anyway. That’s what I told Captain Wiedemann, but I was overruled. I mean, we went there to do a test flight, and we were already exceeding our remit by going over to the alien ships to a ridiculous extent.
Look, nobody wanted to abandon them. I’d worked with Lisl and Max for a while. But we weren’t going to rush in like the cavalry coming over the hill. That’s what the lander and the little EVA sled were for. If anything was going to get hit, it might as well be something that didn’t stop us from making it home.
The soldiers were only there in case ARTOK or someone wanted to have a crack at attacking the Amaterasu back at the launch facility. I mean, that told you all you needed to know about how valuable she is. We didn’t need the squaddies out on the mission. I mean, what for? I said so all along. They certainly weren’t there to fight a battle with killer aliens, if that’s what was on board those things. We should have left straightaway. The sergeant was already dead, wasn’t he? I mean, soldiers sort of expect to get killed or wounded in battle. Don’t they?
Besides, we had some serious news to take home with us. So, while we wanted to pick up those people and get them back on board, if the lander couldn’t reach them they weren’t coming back. It was going to take another half hour or so for the lander to get in and pick them up, and then another five hours to get back to the Amaterasu . We weren’t going to try to meet them halfway or anything. I didn’t want to risk the ship. At least Commander Wiedemann went along with that.
Why did we prepare to go right then? Isn’t it obvious? I mean, we had to. First off, the ships might have been robotically operated, or they might have been crewed and hostile. We didn’t know, and we’d already been wrong once.
As soon as we realized the alien ships were moving, we ran the numbers. One possible vector showed that if they kept accelerating, using the gas giant for a gravity assist slingshot, it would take them right out of the system. Not a problem. But another vector showed us if they stopped accelerating, they could break clear of the giant’s orbit at a point giving them an intercept course with the Amaterasu in thirty hours or so.
The Amaterasu’s fast, but we knew its upper limit, and we didn’t know theirs. So, they might be able to reach us before we could engage the FTL drive. Well, Wiedemann finally agreed.
She said we’d pull out in six hours whether the lander was with us or not, I felt we needed to tell them. We couldn’t abandon them, could we? That wouldn’t have been right.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The Instincts of Prey
Richter’s feet touched down lightly on the deck plate alongside Krause’s body. Time was now of the essence with the alien ship beginning to move so he wasted no time bending over the man, rolling the body over knowing immediately it was a wasted effort. The sergeant’s helmet was smashed. Frozen blood covered his lifeless face.
Shit. I’m sorry, Gerhard. We weren’t friends, but oh, shit. What a place for it to happen, in an alien junkyard. Dying in this treacherous empty wreck, tens of billions of kilometers from anything remotely like home, smacked in the face by a floor which should have been a wall. It comes for us all sooner or later, and then we’re on our own, but this must be the remotest death any human ever suffered.
Richter was well aware that the clock was ticking and they all needed to get out of here and meet up with the lander, but he couldn’t make himself leave Krause behind. Okay. How to lift the body?
Take off the tether, put a karabiner onto the front of Krause’s harness, thread the tether through it, then reattach the tether to himself, and use the winch to lift himself and the body up to the others. Then they’d get the hell out of here.
Richter retrieved the little connector from his pack ready to attach it, when he was violently thrown sideways, the karabiner flying out of his hand. The tether swinging out of reach. Richter landed hard on his hands and knees as the whole chamber tilted to one side and Krause’s body began to slip across the floor. Catching hold of it by the backpack they both slithered along for a couple of meters until, with another lurch, the deck leveled out again.
This is mad. Scheisse! Where the hell had the karabiner gone? Richter began to search frantically for the small piece of metal.
“Richter? How are you guys doing?” Called Pedersen. The clock in Richter’s HUD showed forty-three minutes gone. “I’m fifteen minutes out.”
“We’ll be there.” Replied Richter. “How much has the ship moved?” And where’s that blasted tether cable?
“Not a lot. It’s got about ten meters a second velocity now. But now the rest of them are moving, too. Same vector. It’s weird, but there are still no detectable emissions from any of them. The aliens’ drives must be pretty strange.” Pedersen’s voice growing clearer over the comm as he closed in.
“Not the moment for this, Pedersen. We’ve just had another of those gravity flips. Lisl, Max—are you okay?” He looked all around for the karabiner, trying not to panic. If he started to lose it, the scientists would flip. A glint in his helmet lights. There. He spotted the karabiner a few meters away.
With cold dread in the pit of his stomach, he saw his suit lights were not only shining on the missing karabiner. They illumined something else and it was very dead, and very alien.
A SKINNY, SIX-FINGERED HAND attached to a long spindly arm looking as if it could reach right around behind the aliens back. Heartbeat thudding in his ears, Richter studied the corpse. Estimating it would be about a meter tall if it stood up.
“Richter. I’m eight minutes out, and the ships’ rate of acceleration is increasing. It’s still not much, but at this rate I won’t be able to match velocities if you’re not ready to go the second I get there. Are you out yet?” Asked Pedersen.
Richter was frozen in place, gazing at the alien corpse. Mouth open, breathing coming raggedly, aware he was starting to lose control.
“Richter. Acknowledge.” Asked a concerned Pedersen.
The body, monkey-like, with a long tail and those skinny arms, a leathery face with a strange beak and a vertically-slit mouth. The eyes said insect , multiple tiny lenses forming a composite whole.
“Richter! What’s happening?” Demanded Lisl.
Richter turned his head, the suit lights tracking his gaze. The furred body slender, and—
—nearly disemboweled. Something had torn at the alien, almost severing the torso. Black pools of frozen blood filled the chest cavity and smeared the floor. Regaining his feet, Richter backed slowly away, unable to argue with every primeval muscle propelling him backwards. The instincts of a prey animal turned his head from side to side, keeping the kill scene centrally in his vision but broadening his perception, looking for the hunter.
“Max, how do I bring up the cam views?” Asked Lisl before finding the right command before Max had a chance to answer. Her HUD sprung to life fill
ing with the scene confronting Richter. “Oh shit! What the hell is that?”
The concerned voices eventually filtered through to Richter’s numbed brain and he managed to force out a reply. “I’m okay. Are you seeing this?”
Pedersen must have been monitoring the images. “Richter, that thing’s got to be dead. Are you in contact? Is anything moving in there?”
Richter’s combat instincts eventually kicked in and he coldly assessed the alien in front of him. This one wasn’t going to do him any harm. It had no suit on, or breathing apparatus, and no matter what it might use for air, the chamber was in hard vacuum. So, the environment must have been destroyed, meaning anything else in here would be long dead. He made himself turn around, widened the lamps’ focus, and for the first time scanned the room doing a slow 360-degree turn.
He saw a massacre, and the perpetrator.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The Wrong Threat
Tuesday, September 6th
"Are you people stupid? Who made the decision to let him off Charon? If you had held onto him there, he couldn’t have gone anywhere. But you took him out of one of the most secure places in the solar system and brought him all the way back to Earth for a debrief. You didn’t even block or seize his slate. Now, surprise, surprise—he’s gone missing. You simply don’t have the faintest conception of operational security.” Sepp Fuchs made no attempt to hide his anger. He was weary of military thinking.
“That was an error, I grant you. But we’ll find him. Trooper Richter will be back in military custody shortly.” Responded Colonel Meier in an attempt to placate the state security service officer. Fuchs was not a man who tolerated incompetence and bringing Richter back to Earth instead of leaving him in one of the NipponDeutsch companies most secure locations was, to Fuchs, an example of incompetence at the highest level. Perhaps this Colonel Meier thought military decisions could exist independently of the realities of security. Well he was about to find out he was wrong about that assumption.
