Hybrid (Tales of the Acheron Book 2)

by Rick Partlow

  “Gunny Kamara told me,” she interrupted. She cocked her head to the side. “I don’t suppose you’d have any proof of your story, would you?”

  “Our contact in Fleet Intelligence didn’t exactly give us a work order,” Ash explained. “But if you think about it, we had to have had the security codes for the Metaurus in order to board her in the first place. And where else would we have gotten her life pod?” He brightened suddenly, pulling his ‘link off his belt. “But you can see my military ID on my ‘link. That’ll at least prove I’m telling you the truth about being Fleet.”

  He handed the device over and she looked at the screen, then held her issue ‘link next to it, synching them up and checking his credentials. She shrugged and handed his datalink back.

  “You are indeed Commander Ashton Carpenter, Attack Command.” She sniffed in amusement. “And if I’m reading your service record correctly, it seems the war ended less than a year after we arrived here. I assume we won.” She waved at one of the folding chairs on the other side of the cheap table. “Sit down and talk to me, Commander.”

  “Ash,” he supplied, lowering himself cautiously, not trusting the look of the old, beat-up plastic chair to hold him and the heavy vacc suit. It creaked under him until he got his weight distributed. The woman fell into her own seat carelessly, used to its limitations, he guessed.

  “Ash,” she repeated, as if testing the word. “I’d very much like for you tell me where your ship is, why you came to be in one of our life pods, and what you saw up there.”

  “You want to know about the creature,” Ash surmised, leaning back and crossing his arms over his chest. Her eyes widened just slightly and Ash felt rather than saw Kamara shifting his position behind him as if he was about to meet an attack.

  “It was still alive,” he told her, deciding not to bury the lede. “Six years in a vacuum hadn’t killed it.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Kamara murmured fervently, and Ash saw him rock backwards as if he’d been struck.

  “Tell me,” Busick ordered, her palms flat on the table, her voice neutral and tightly controlled. “Start from the beginning and tell me everything.”

  ***

  Ash tugged at the collar of his borrowed shirt. It was a size too small, and the fatigue trousers were a size too large, and even the self-fitting combat boots pinched his little toes, but it was all they’d had available and it was definitely better than walking around in the damned vacc suit, or in the burned-through T-shirt and sweat-soaked shorts that were all he was wearing underneath the thing. Kamara had even slapped a bandage over the burn on his shoulder and promised they’d take him to the medical bay to get it treated later. The Gunny had assured him it wasn’t serious, and he could take that for all it was worth.

  He glanced at the floor display next to the door of the lift car and saw that they were still moving downward, even after what seemed like five minutes.

  “How far down does this place go?” he asked, not expecting either Kamara or Busick to respond.

  Neither of them had said much since he got through telling them the story of how he and Fontenot and Singh had come to be there. Well, the carefully edited story. He knew that Chief Weaver would be busy asking the same questions of Fontenot and he hoped she would be smart enough to leave off the part where they were all technically wanted criminals.

  After he’d brought the story to the present, Busick had shared a long look with Kamara and then said simply, “There’s someone you need to talk to.”

  Then they’d thrown fresh clothes at him, sent him into a bathroom to change and rushed him to the elevator. He still hadn’t seen any other crew from the ship or from the base, and he had to think that Fontenot had been right, that they were keeping this under wraps.

  “Three hundred meters,” Busick unexpectedly answered his question. He glanced over at the woman, but she didn’t meet his eyes. Her voice was distant, thoughtful. “That’s how deep the crater was.”

  “What crater?” he wondered. “I didn’t see any crater around here when we flew over.”

  “It’s been filled in by tectonic activity,” she told him.

  “That would take a long time,” he mused.

  “Hundreds of thousands of years,” she agreed, still looking straight ahead at the elevator doors.

  “Hey, you know, we should really be trying to contact my ship,” he told her, hoping to take advantage of the fact she was talking to him again. “I don’t know if she touched down or she’s in orbit looking for us or what. If you guys want to get out off this rock, we need to get the word back to the Fleet that you’re still alive.”

  “Not my decision to make.”

  He frowned at her in confusion.

  “You’re the ranking military officer, aren’t you?”

  “This isn’t a military base,” she pointed out.

  No, he realized, it wasn’t.

  Oh, shit.

  The elevator jolted to a sudden halt and the doors slid aside with a sibilant hiss. Ash felt Kamara’s hand on his shoulder, guiding him out, and he shot the Marine a dirty look. The man had his helmet off, tucked under his arm, and that recruiting-poster face glared back at him challengingly. Since he was unarmed, and wounded, and would have gotten his ass kicked by the Gunny even if he was armed and unwounded, he moved out of the elevator.

  The elevator let them out into an enclosed half-oval of volcanic rock, most of that space taken up by the passenger elevator they’d ridden down and a much larger freight lift station. The curved walls terminated in a hallway that led twenty meters or so down a corridor of unlined rock to a hatchway at least ten centimeters thick, fabricated from what looked like solid BiPhase Carbide. The security seal hung above it, a massive, motorized Sword of Damocles just as thick as the doorway and probably airtight.

  “Damn,” Ash muttered, looking at the size of the thing. Once it was sealed, he didn’t think a nuclear warhead could breach it.

  Waiting just inside that intimidating doorway was an equally intimidating woman. She wasn’t tall, not more than a meter-six or so, nor was she physically imposing, skinny and slight enough that she made her rumpled and stained civilian casual clothes look baggy. But the face attached to that body had an expression severe enough that Ash wouldn’t have wanted to be the first one to talk back to her. She reminded him of one of his Academy instructors, the teacher every cadet was afraid to get.

  Her eyes were dark and swirling with what looked to Ash like barely suppressed fury, her stance was confrontational and her severely-bobbed brown hair only added to the whole strict-teacher image he’d built for her. He slowed his pace, forcing Kamara to push him forward as they closed with the woman.

  “Commander,” the woman said, her accent putting her from somewhere on Earth, probably North America if he was any judge. “Who is this man and why have you brought him to a top-secret lab?”

  “Dr. Sanchez, this is Commander Carpenter.” He nearly barked an involuntary laugh at how deferential Busick sounded to the civilian. Apparently, he wasn’t the only one intimidated by her. “He’s part of an investigation team sent here by Fleet Intelligence.”

  “I don’t work for Fleet Intelligence,” she interrupted, her voice louder and more strident as she went on. “No one assigned to this installation is under the military at all, as I’m sure you’re aware. Whether or not he’s from Fleet Intelligence, neither he nor you are allowed in this portion of the base.”

  “He saw the hybrid,” Busick told her. “It was still alive.”

  That shut her up. Ash expected horror, fear, maybe a bit of awe…but the expression on her face was closer to excitement. He found that profoundly disturbing, along with the blasé attitude she had about the fact that someone had come to rescue them. Like she didn’t care about ever leaving.

  “Very well,” she said after a moment. “He can enter. Dr. Nagle will want to question him. You two will have to wait here.”

  Kamara rolled his eyes, but Busick nodded assent, raising
her hands palms up.

  “Fine. We’ll be right out here.”

  Sanchez looked Ash up and down skeptically, then motioned for him to follow her, turning and heading back through the hatch without waiting to see if he did. Ash had to jog a few steps to catch up to her, trying to fall into step with her deliberate strides.

  Through the hatchway, the featureless volcanic rock gave way to walls lined with white, antiseptic polymer, and each door was heavy, solid and sealed with what looked like DNA-coded security plates. Ash saw a ruddy, round-faced man with curly red hair emerge from one of the rooms, glance at him curiously, then move on down an intersecting hallway to the right without saying a word.

  He wanted to ask Sanchez how many people they had working in this place, but he doubted she’d tell him and he knew it would piss her off. He guessed it wouldn’t be that many, not on an outpost this remote. With a minimum six-week transit time even from the Periphery and probably twice that to the Core worlds or Earth, you wouldn’t want to be hauling replacements in all the time or rotating shifts. A place like this, you’d have to gather a handful of people so dedicated that they wouldn’t care about going on leave or visiting family. They passed a single open area near the center of the complex of hallways, a small break room with a food processing unit, three tables and about nine chairs. He nodded to himself, the number of chairs confirming his suspicions.

  Finally, the meandering fast-walk through the installation came to a terminus of the circuitous hallways, ending in yet another security hatch, just as big and solid as the first one but sealed shut. Ash’s eyes went wide. Just one of the hatches would have cost a fortune to transport out here and install, but two? Sanchez went to a small communications panel set in the wall next to the hatch and pushed a button.

  “Yes?” The voice was male, a bit on the squeaky side and also with an accent, possibly European.

  “It’s Susan. You need to come out.”

  “Be right there.”

  Thirty seconds later, the hatch exhaled a hiss of air and began climbing up into the ceiling with the hum of powerful motors. On the other side, the light seemed dimmer and of a different shade than the normal office lighting in the rest of the place, as if it were being filtered. A tall, gangly man stepped through once the hatch had risen to its full height, regarding Ash with obvious suspicion mixed with a curiosity that shone through his fevered blue eyes.

  His head was depilated bald, and Ash thought it had to be a style choice. No one who ran an installation like this would be from any colony so far from the Core worlds that they hadn’t genetically engineered baldness out of the population. The only hair on his head was a well-trimmed mustache, and his pale, china-white face seemed mild and oddly placid; he reminded Ash of nothing so much as a middle manager in some unimportant Corporate Council office.

  “Dr. Nagle,” Sanchez addressed the tall man, “this is Commander Carpenter. He works for the Fleet and came here to investigate the Metaurus. He was up there earlier today and saw the hybrid.” Her voice intensified, that same excitement creeping back into it, her face practically glowing with it. “It was still alive, Adam.”

  Nagle’s gaze sharpened and he took a step toward Ash, which nearly made the pilot take a step backwards instinctively.

  “Was it active? Had the prolonged exposure to vacuum and freezing temperatures damaged it? Had it changed forms?”

  The questions came rapid fire and Ash had to put a hand up to slow them down.

  “I don’t know if it’s changed,” he admitted. “I don’t know what it looked like before, or how active it used to be.”

  “Of course not,” Nagle realized, running a hand over his brow. “Come here, come with me.”

  Ash was hesitant to step through the security seal; they obviously kept it closed, and he didn’t like the idea of being trapped on the other side of it. Nagle turned back to him, brow furling with obvious impatience.

  “Come on, then, hurry up!”

  “Adam,” Sanchez said stringently, raising a hand to block Ash’s way, “you can’t take him back there. It’s against protocol.”

  “To hell with protocol,” Nagle snapped, eyes flaring with anger. “Do you really think I care about the DSI after all these years?” He motioned to Ash again, and this time the pilot followed him, worried that if he dawdled any more, Sanchez would grab him and drag him back out.

  There was an open platform on the other side of the security seal, its floor a pattern of metal grillwork supporting an array of elaborate machinery that Ash thought might be sensors of some kind, feeding into multiple holographic displays and stacks of quantum computers. A younger man with his hair braided into dreadlocks sat at a simple, metal desk, staring at the displays, feet propped up on the railing that separated the platform from the pit beneath. Ash ignored the man, his eyes fixed on the pit.

  Unlike the rest of the facility, the pit wasn’t lined with volcanic rock walls; beyond the BiPhase Carbide struts that stabilized the whole structure, the edges of the pit were crumbling sedimentary rock mixed with the blackened remains of the impact which had formed the crater originally, eons ago. Sitting in the center of it all, connected to the sensors with cables, surrounded by scientific equipment Ash couldn’t hope to put a name or purpose to, was something big, something broken, something…alien.

  He didn’t know how he knew, he just knew. There was something about the shape of the thing that made it obvious it was designed. No natural object would have the mind-bending curves or the purposefulness that was evident in its form. And that form, that shape…it was indescribable. It didn’t seem to have any analog in anything Ash had ever seen. Something, some small part of him that whispered notions into his conscious mind from sources much further down, labelled it a “seed pod.” It didn’t look more like any seed pod he’d ever seen than it did anything else, but it was just the idea that the shape of the thing planted in his head.

  “Breathtaking, isn’t it?” Nagle asked, noticing his reaction and smiling in appreciation. “I remember well the first time we saw it…” The tall man trailed off, shaking his head to disperse the memory.

  “How long ago did…” Ash trailed off, closed his mouth and then tried again. “How old is it?”

  “It’s difficult to date exactly, but the rock around it is from 300,000 years ago, minimum.” That was the man with the dreadlocks. He didn’t turn around, just kept his eyes on the display screens, tracing with a stylus on a pad and watching the motions control lines of numbers filing down from the top of the displays. “It could have drifted through space for hundreds of thousands of years before that, though.”

  “Dr. Mercier is our resident geologist and physicist,” Nagle introduced. “Commander Carpenter is here from the Fleet, David. It seems they’ve found us, after all this time.”

  Mercier grunted, actually sparing Ash a glance.

  “I hope you brought some real food,” he said. “I haven’t had real meat in so long, I probably don’t even like it anymore, but I’d kill my mother for fresh vegetables.”

  “He’s been aboard the Metaurus, David,” Nagle said sternly. “He’s seen the hybrid.”

  David’s feet came down from the railing and he set his stylus and pad down on the desk, his dark eyes wide.

  “You keep calling it ‘the hybrid.’” Ash shook his head. “A hybrid of what? Where did it come from?”

  “David, bring up the last images we have of her…it.” Nagle had corrected himself quickly, but the slip didn’t escape Ash’s notice. “From just before we loaded the stasis pod on the shuttle.”

  “Yeah, okay.” Mercier sounded subdued as he turned back to the displays and swiped one of the holographic projections clear of the data streams. With his stylus, he tapped one control after another until he found an archived folder filled with still images and videos; then he scrolled through those until he found the date he was searching for.

  When the video coalesced on the holotank’s projection, Ash nearly jumped back at th
e sight of it. It was the creature, the one from the ship, except much clearer, its form seemingly more delineated than he remembered. It was humanoid in shape, more human at the joints than a Tahni, he thought, with the regular two arms and two legs and a torso between them, and a head in the right place.

  But the head…the face wasn’t a face so much as a featureless mask, angled backwards like the front of a helmet. There were protuberances from the crown of the thing, just above the eyes, what he might have called antennae for lack of a better description. They gave the face an almost insectoid appearance, though the mouth spoiled that. The mouth spoiled all sorts of things, including his lunch. It split the thing’s face nearly in half, and clacked up and down constantly with a chattering that threatened his sanity, and then there were the damned teeth. They were more like knives than the teeth of any animal that had ever lived, more like some threshing machine for flesh, built to do damage rather than to feed.

  The thing’s skin looked like a cross between an insect’s carapace, a lizard’s scales and Recon Marine body armor, again looking more designed than grown, and its color was a flat black that also seemed to shimmer somehow, something not quite visible to the human eye but oh, so close. The arms were long for its torso, longer than a human’s would be by proportion, and heavily muscled, and they ended in five-fingered claws, long and razor-sharp, not made for fine manipulation, just for ripping through anything in their way. The feet were five-toed as well, and the talons extending centimeters from each toe looked just as deadly as the ones on the fingers.

  In the projected video, the thing was trapped in a small enclosure, somewhere brightly-lit, with flat grey walls of BiPhase Carbide. It didn’t seem to like the lights; it swiped at them repeatedly, leaping high enough and hitting hard enough that the picture shook from the impact. It didn’t make any sound though, nothing but the endless chattering of its mouth opening and closing, its teeth clacking together.

  Mercier touched a control and the clip froze on an image of the thing staring at the video intake, the glint of the light in its beady, black eyes.