by Rick Partlow
She ran.
She wasn’t sure if the thing would catch her, if it would ignore Singh and the cartel soldiers and chase after her, if she’d take a mini-rocket in the head the second she stepped out into the open; but she knew for certain that if she stayed where she was, she was worse than dead. She was a lot harder to rip apart than a Norm, and it would hurt so much more…
So, she gave into the terror and ran, ran so fast that everything around her was a blur, ran so fast that she could feel her cybernetics abrading the flesh that had grown around them over the decades, so fast that the servomotors in the joints began to heat up. Time slowed, the thirty meters across from the power trunk to the Engineering hatchway stretching out to a dozen kilometers, twenty, a freaking marathon. Each mini-rocket munition from the cartel carbines seemed to crawl by at a pace sedate enough that she could count the stabilizing fins, the sound of their engines lost in the audio exclusion of tachypsychia.
And the thing was still moving too fast to get a good look at it, just a vague sense of a bipedal, bilaterally symmetrical humanoid shape. She thought it was looking at her, thought she had the impression of black, shark-like eyes staring through her, but then a mini-rocket actually struck it and it turned toward the shooter and she was through the Engineering hatchway. Time caught up with her in a cacophony of sound and a blinding flash of light so bright it threw shadows a hundred meters up and down the central passageway, and she could smell the smoke though she didn’t dare look back to see it.
“Ash,” she gasped into her ‘link pickup, out of breath for the first time in nearly as long as she could remember. “Ash, are you there?”
“Korri, thank God! Are you out of there? Are you okay? I lost visual...”
“That thing,” she said, “it’s got to be what killed the Metaurus’ crew…it’s still alive. And there was some kind of explosion…”
“I know,” he interrupted. “I was watching. And whatever blew up, it’s fried the bridge controls. The ship is locked into our current course and acceleration and I can’t control her. We’re going to de-orbit in less than thirty minutes.”
He sounded amazingly calm about it, she thought; but of course, he was a pilot and they always tried to sound calm.
“Can you contact Sandi?” She hoped she didn’t sound desperate. She would have been damned embarrassed if the pretty-boy pilot was calmer than she was.
She’d reached the lift station, but she ignored the lift cars; there was no way in hell she was getting into one of those when the ship was out of control and the power trunk was damaged. Next to the cars, though, was the Central Access Tube, a padded, vertical passageway used when the ship was in microgravity…with ladder rungs down one side, in case of power failure. She’d used it to reach Engineering in the first place, but it wouldn’t be so easy with her full one hundred and twenty kilograms weighing her down.
“She went into the atmosphere to try to lose the missiles. There’s no way she could get here in time even if I could contact her.” He paused and she slung her carbine over her shoulder and grabbed the safety rail, swinging her legs out onto the ladder rungs.
“We need to get to the life pods in the docking bay,” she said, grunting more from the feeling of her considerable mass hanging over the stories-tall drop than from any physical effort.
“There’ll be more La Sombra troops down there,” he warned, and she could tell from the effort in his voice that he was running. “Their shuttle’s docked at the service lock.”
“You got any better ideas, I’m all ears.”
“I’ll be there as quick as I can,” he told her. She was sure if she could afford to look up, she’d see him somewhere far above her, getting ready to climb down from the bridge level.
“Take your time,” she muttered, concentrating on descending the narrow rungs. “You got the rest of your life to get there.”
***
About ten meters down the Access Tube, Ash was wishing he’d taken off his suit’s helmet. It wasn’t just the sweat that was pouring down his face and his inability to wipe it off, and it wasn’t just the increasingly intolerable sound of his own, labored breath loud in his ears. It was that it was damn near impossible to look down at his own feet, and when you were climbing down a ladder hundreds of meters long, you really wanted to be able to see your feet once in a while. He blinked, thinking his helmet filters were going out until he realized that it was the Access Tube lighting flickering as the power fluctuated from the shorts in the main trunk.
After another fifty meters, he fell into a rhythm, hitting every other rung; that seemed to work well until his forearms and fingers started to cramp. He was in fairly good shape, at least as good as he could be when he spent half the time on a small starship, but the vacuum suit was really designed for microgravity and it was way too heavy to be crawling down an Access Tube with the full weight of Earth pulling down on him. He kept going, knowing time was running out, but every step downward was torture and he knew it was only a matter of time before his grip gave out, and at one gravity acceleration, he’d wind up at the bottom of the vertical tunnel with a shattered spine.
Maybe it hadn’t been the smartest thing to try to maneuver this ship when the biggest thing he’d ever flown was a hundred-meter-long cutter.
Now you tell me, he griped at himself.
“Korri,” he called, his voice a dry rasp. He took a second to suck water from the nipple inside the helmet and tried again. “Korri, are you still in the Tube?”
Nothing. He was hoping Fontenot might be able to tell him how much farther he had to go, since he couldn’t look down. He saw that he was passing the purple markings of the main crew quarters, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember what level they were on or how far past the docking bay they were located. Was it level three? Four? There were markings there, and maybe they gave the distance, but the lights were dim and even though his helmet had IR capability, the lettering seemed blurry and indistinct.
Shit, he thought. I should have paid more attention in those Academy familiarization classes.
But he’d wanted to be an assault shuttle pilot, and after that a missile cutter pilot, and serving on one of the massive cruisers had seemed to be just about the most boring thing in the galaxy.
Not as boring as I’d hoped for.
His forearms were screaming at him by the time he made it past Engineering. He told himself that this was it, that the docking bay was the next level, but unfortunately it wasn’t a straight-line difference; there was a big gap between the two, a gap filled by the Teller-Fox warp unit.
How big was one of those things on a cruiser? He couldn’t even come close to remembering. Maybe the size of his whole starship? Bigger?
“Korri,” he called again, this time louder. Damn it, answer me!
“Shut up,” she hissed so softly he barely heard her. “There’s ten of them down here patrolling.”
And she wasn’t wearing a helmet, which meant there was a chance they could hear his transmission over her ear bud if he was loud enough.
A spasm went through his right arm and he had to let off the ladder rung, putting all his weight on his feet and swinging to the side with just his left hand holding on. He swayed back and for just a moment, he was able to look up, back to the Engineering entrance maybe twenty meters above him.
Something crouched curled up above him, hanging off the side of that entrance, something big and vaguely humanoid, something so black that it seemed to absorb all the light around it and change shadows to gloomy midnight. Black eyes glinted and blood dripped fitfully off of flat black claws, spattering off Ash’s chest.
He screamed and let go, dropping off the ladder, surrendering himself to the fall, to broken bones and certain death just to get away from the thing…and hit the bottom of the Tube one second later, his feet going out from under him and his butt slapping into the padded surface there, jarring him painfully up and down his spine, but far from fatal. He had, he realized dully, been le
ss than two meters from the end.
The thing, the creature, the whatever-the-hell-it-was began to uncoil on its perch and Ash moved. Gathering his legs beneath him, he bolted out the hatchway into the corridor by the docking bay lift station, forgetting his carbine, forgetting his sidearm, forgetting Fontenot…and forgetting the ten La Sombra soldiers she’d told him about.
He saw them the second he sprinted into the docking bay; they were scattered around with the look of restless boredom troops anywhere had when they were left to guard the rear while someone else gets to head into combat. There was no decision to be made, he never even considered stopping; what was behind him was inhuman terror and these were just some guys with guns. The only concession he made to their presence was to adjust his split-second search for a hiding place to include good cover from gunfire.
That narrowed things down and he headed straight across the docking bay to the heavy gantry of a cargo crane. Designed to unload heavy cargo shuttles, the gantry of the crane was anchored to a gearbox of solid metal molecularly sealed to the surface of the deck and it was the most bulletproof thing he could find on short notice, with the only downside being that it was twenty meters away and they were shooting at him.
Ash ignored the hail of wild gunfire, ignored the flare of vaporized metal splashing off the deck around him and spalling off the far bulkhead, but he couldn’t ignore the round that hit him high in the right side of his back. There was a spear of white-hot pain that knocked him forward off balance, tumbling off his feet and hitting hard, face-first. His forehead bounced off the inside of his helmet, and even with the padding there, he still hit hard enough to see stars swimming across his vision.
There was no way he was going to be able to get up before they finished him off, but then he was moving, sliding across the deck on his side, and it took his fogged brain a moment to realize he was being dragged. He pushed himself up, crying out as the motion caused intense pain in his back, and followed the pull forward to cover, behind the body of the crane motor.
His vision cleared enough to see that it was Fontenot, and she was leaning out, returning fire with her laser carbine. He felt a rush of fear and grabbed at her shoulder.
“No, stop!” he yelled, and was dimly aware that she wouldn’t be able to hear him through his helmet. Impatient, he reached up and yanked the yoke seal levers on either side and twisted the helmet off of him, feeling a cold rush of air against his sweat-soaked face. “Stop!” he shouted over the crackle-snap of the laser weapon. “Don’t shoot!”
“Why the fuck not?” she snapped, glaring at him with her natural eye.
“Because it’s coming!” he insisted, and he realized with a start just how desperate and panicked he sounded. “It was in the Tube!”
He actually thought he could see her face pale and she pulled back around, bringing the muzzle of her carbine up to a high ready. This close, he could feel the heat radiating off its cooling vanes, could see the emitter glowing red and hear the popping of the cooling metal in surreal detail. He could hear the mini-rocket warheads smacking into the metal plating on the other side of the crane motor with a ringing squeal that seemed to set his teeth on edge.
Then, abruptly, the incoming fire ceased and the screaming started. Ash squeezed his eyes shut instinctively, feeling as if the sound was reverberating through the metal and into the wound on his back, then he nearly yelled himself when he felt Fontenot grabbing him and yanking him away from the crane motor.
“Come on!” she urged him, keeping hold of his arm as she began trotting across the compartment. “We have to get to the life pods.”
It seemed crazy to him, rushing out into the chaotic nightmare of the docking bay, but he knew she was right; they had minutes before the cruiser hit atmosphere and burned up quite spectacularly. He tried to run as fast as he could, tried not to look at what was going on only twenty or thirty meters away; but it drew his gaze like the wreckage of a crashed shuttle, and he couldn’t turn away.
Three of the cartel troopers were dead already, ripped apart like the cattle carcasses they still processed on Periphery colonies or the Pirate Worlds. He remembered the first time he’d seen it, the meat packing shops out at Grenada and Loki and Sylvanus, how horrified he’d been; it had seemed barbarous and bloody. Later, he’d come to appreciate the honesty of it, the way it seemed closer to his roots as a human, but this…this went even further down the chain, back to when humans were prey, when night was the enemy and early man huddled around the fire in fear of creatures that would drag people out of their bedrolls.
The cartel troops were shooting again, at the creature this time, but their rocket rounds were zipping back and forth all over the compartment, and Ash wasn’t sure if they were just missing or if the rounds simply had no effect; he could believe it either way. The lights in the docking bay were flickering as the power fluctuated, and it seemed with every wink of darkness, another of the La Sombra crew died. After the fifth of them fell, the situation seemed to reach some sort of critical mass and the others ran.
Unfortunately, they ran towards the same place that Ash and Fontenot were heading, the service bay, where their shuttle was docked, and where the life pods were located. Fontenot must have seen it, too, because she sped up and he could barely match her servo-powered pace; he stumbled but she kept him upright with a hand under his left arm, and kept him moving. He risked falling again to look to the side as they approached the hatchway to the service bay, and he could see the terror in the eyes of the two women and three men left alive, sprinting their way.
He was looking straight at the creature when it caught the last one in line, could see the glint of purpose in its black, soulless eyes and could see when the desperate hope left the woman’s face and was replaced by the horrifying certainty of death.
Then he and Fontenot were through the hatchway and he was spared having to see the end. Fontenot skidded to a halt and he stumbled into her back, crying out as the impact wrenched at his wound. The airlock to the La Sombra shuttle was yawning open, but a young man dressed like a pilot was blocking the way, sweeping a carbine back and forth nervously, a look of uncertainty beneath his patchy, blond beard.
He was a criminal, part of a group who’d come here to capture or kill them, but at third and last, he was a human and the thing coming behind them was the other.
“Get inside!” Ash told him. “Get that shuttle ready to launch!” He took a step toward the airlock, but Fontenot stopped him, urging him the other direction, toward the life pod banks.
“It’ll take too long,” she threw tersely over her shoulder, tipping up the cover for the flashing red button located over the nearest pod, then mashing it down with her fist.
A siren filled the compartment, warbling plaintively, and the thick, metal hatch covering the pod swung outward with a pneumatic hiss. Fontenot pushed it wider, then turned toward him, one hand grabbing hold of the carry handle on the back of his suit like she was about to throw him inside. Her head snapped around as two of the cartel soldiers rounded the corner into the service bay, with the creature right on their heels.
He could see it more clearly now, could see the chitinous texture of the armor plates that seemed like natural growth more than technology, could see the flat, featureless expanse of a face that looked, by contrast, more like a helmet if not for the eyes set in it, if not for the oversized jaws filled with matte-black metallic teeth. They clacked together as he watched, almost too fast to see, an unending castanet chittering.
Ash got the distinct feeling that it could have caught them faster, could have killed them all in a moment without even being seen, but it was toying with them, drawing things out, enjoying their fear. An arm that seemed too long for its torso flashed out and a head flew clear of a body, trailing double braids that whipped around like rotor blades. The corpse fell to its knees and collapsed forward, splashing red across the deck in front of it, leaving just one of them still standing.
It was a woman, her face lean
and horsey, a puckered scar running down from her forehead to her chin on the left side. Her hair was long and curled and wild, rainbow colors woven into it, and she wore a look of intense determination to live. She was only steps from the airlock when the thing grabbed her by an arm. Ash clutched at his holstered pistol, knowing he’d never be able to get his carbine unslung in time, and also knowing either was probably about as useful as spitting and harsh language.
Something smacked into the creature’s head, actually causing a reaction, a flinch as if it might have hurt, and Ash’s eyes went to the bay’s main hatch. Standing there, backlit by the flickering overhead illumination of the docking bay, was Singh. His black body armor was shredded across the left side of his chest and his left arm, exposing the black metal of his bionics, scored white by the impact of the thing’s claws. Deep cuts went across his chest just past those score-marks and blood was seeping out to soak what was left of his clothes. The natural portion of his face was as much of a mask as the cybernetic half, not afraid of this creature, not afraid of death. His Gauss machine pistol was stretched out, unwavering, laying down a spray of tantalum needles at the head and neck of the creature.
Ash hoped against hope that the weapon could penetrate its armor, but apparently Fontenot wasn’t going to wait around to find out. With a massive strength anchored through spinal reinforcements into her mechanical legs, powered by servomotors in every joint and energized from an isotope reactor buried inside her thigh, she tossed a hundred and forty kilograms of Ash and his weapons and vacuum suit bodily through the elevated hatch of the life pod.
Ash felt nausea and agony course through him as the brief flight ended with his shoulder fetching up against the bulkhead of the escape boat, but he clenched his teeth and forced himself to move clear and let Fontenot climb in beside him. There was room for six inside the capsule, and she leapt through the hatch without touching it, landing with a weighty thump on the opposite side from him, grabbing the edge of the hatch to arrest her motion.
