by Rick Partlow
“Did it appear any different when you saw it?” Nagle asked.
“It was harder to see,” Ash told him. “On the ship’s security cameras, it was blurred. Even just looking at it, it didn’t seem as clear as it does in that video.”
“Yes, our cameras here are adjusted to account for the interference. And no, even after all this time, we still don’t know how it does that.”
“Dr. Nagle,” Ash asked him, slowly and carefully, trying not to sound like an idiot, “did that thing come out of there?” He pointed to the seed pod. “Is it an alien?”
Mercier looked at Nagle, almost as if he was curious how the older man would answer. Nagle rubbed thoughtfully at his chin, as if he was debating how to shape the words.
“Not...exactly.”
Chapter Eleven
Sandi wiped sweat out of her eyes, pausing to peel off her vest before she pulled the next section of thruster nozzle out of the fabricator. She was down to a tank top and shorts now, and it was still uncomfortably hot.
You’d think, she mused, taking a drink from a squeeze bulb, on a planet this damned cold, being too hot wouldn’t be a problem.
But the fabricator put out a lot of heat, and the hold was well-insulated. What it was not was well-ventilated, and she’d been down here for hours, ever since she’d managed to get the fabber programmed. Kan-Ten brought her water and food at intervals, but she hadn’t yet taken a break. She knew she should, but she was trying to get all the parts for one of the nozzles done before she quit for the day.
“Sandi, do you read?” The voice was coming over the ear bud of her ‘link, which was patched into the ship’s communications system. It was the most beautiful sound she’d heard in years.
“Ash?” She jumped up from the stool she’d pulled up beside the fabricator, moving quickly to the short ladder leading back up to the utility bay. Cool air washed over her from the vents and she felt her sweat beginning to dry as she jogged back to the cockpit. “Ash, is that you?”
“Thank God you’re all right.” She could hear the sigh in his voice. “The last we saw, you had a flight of missiles on your tail and you were heading down.”
“Well, we are down,” she told him, hands spinning the pilot’s acceleration couch around on its mount, “and it’s going to take a couple days of repairs before we can get back up. Where the hell are you two?”
He hesitated a moment before he replied. “There’s a research installation here,” he told her, finally. “I’m including the exact coordinates as an attachment to this signal. The survivors of the Metaurus are down here; they came down in the missing shuttle. Korri and I got off the ship on an escape capsule, and they found us after we landed. The ship’s XO is in charge of the crew, but the research team is all civilians and Commander Busick had to get the program chief’s okay to let me call you.”
“Well, what the hell are they researching all the way out here?”
There was a longer pause this time, and she heard muffled voices in the background, arguing maybe. Finally, she thought she heard a man’s voice say something like “What difference does it make now?” and then Ash returned to the line.
“There’s an…artifact here,” he related slowly, as if the words resisted being spoken aloud. “It’s some sort of weapon, they think, some kind of biotechnology and cybernetics combined into a…hive, maybe. It crashed here like hundreds of thousands of years ago, and it was damaged on impact, but from what they can tell, it was designed to use the natural resources of wherever it landed to make an army of some sort of bioengineered warrior drones.”
“Shit,” she hissed. “Damn good thing it was broken, then.”
“Damaged, not broken. They were sent here by the DSI during the war to see if they could use the technology from this thing to combine with some sort of human control to make a weapon against the Tahni.”
“Oh, sweet Jesus.” She fell into the pilot’s seat heavily, staring out the main screens at snow flurries twisting in the wind. “That’s what happened on the ship. That’s what killed the crew.”
“The damn thing was still alive, Sandi. It lived for six years in a vacuum, with no food, no heat, no air. It tore apart Singh’s crew, and we barely got out ahead of it. We think it was killed when the Metaurus burned up in the moon’s atmosphere.”
“You think?” she repeated, leaning forward against the control panel as if it could give her strength. “What do you mean you think?”
“Singh had a shuttle docked with the cruiser,” he reminded her. “It was still there when Korri and I ejected, and their sensors here at the base say it touched down a few kilometers past where our pod landed.”
“Shit.” The word was an exhaled breath, like she’d been punched in the gut. “You don’t think…”
“No,” he assured her quickly, “but they’re sending a team to check it out, anyway, just in case. The shuttle the crew took down six years ago was scavenged for parts, but if we can get hold of Singh’s bird…would extra help speed up the repairs?”
“Not really,” she admitted, groaning as esoteric fears gave way to the dread of all the mind-numbingly boring work ahead of her. “It’s more a matter of letting the fabricator do its job. Installing the parts won’t be that hard; Kan-Ten and I can handle it.”
“All right, if you’re sure.” Ash sounded disappointed and Sandi smiled fondly.
“Don’t worry about us.” She glanced at the coordinates he’d sent and compared them to her own position. “We’re pretty far from that installation; nothing out here but snow and rock.”
“Keep me up to date on the status of the repairs,” he insisted. “I’d really like to get out of here ASAP. The crew really wants to go home and the research staff could use a food resupply. And…honestly, this place gives me the creeps. We’re a long way from help.”
“Aren’t we always?” She was trying to keep things light and upbeat, but her own words sounded surprisingly bleak in her ears. “We’ll be okay,” she said, attempting a reassuring tone. “You and Korri watch your six and we’ll be there as soon as we can.”
“Right.” The word was a sigh of resignation. There was dead air for a moment, and she wondered if he’d signed off. “I love you, Sandi.” She wanted to be upset with him for being so mushy, but she couldn’t. The words still felt warm in her chest.
“I love you, too.” God, that was starting to sound natural. When had she gotten to be such a big softie? “I gotta’ get back to work. Call you when I’m done.”
The transmission ended, but she stayed in her seat, looking out at the snow but not seeing it. Just yesterday, she thought, I would have said being stalked by a psycho bounty hunter was the worst thing I’d ever have to worry about…
“I heard you speaking.” She nearly jumped out of her skin at the unexpected voice.
It was Kan-Ten, standing in the hatchway to the cockpit, hands resting on the rims of it, still dressed in heavy cold-weather gear.
“Jeez, how about clearing your throat or something,” she muttered. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“Apologies,” he offered---how sincerely, she wasn’t sure. “I was coming inside to tell you that I have completed the tear-down of the damaged nozzles, and I heard your side of the conversation,” he explained. “May I presume that Ash and Korri are safe?”
“They’re alive,” she corrected him, shaking her head. “I don’t know if any of us are safe.”
***
Ash let his hand fall from the control panel, slumping back in the chair. He could feel Nagle standing behind him, a tall, lanky shadow in the corner of the research base’s small communications room. It wasn’t much, just a wired connection to the radio transceiver and tight-beam laser setup on the surface. It would allow them to contact nearby patrols or ships overhead in orbit, but that was about it. This system didn’t have a wormhole jumpgate to send interstellar messages and they didn’t need a satellite network to talk to bases all over the moon or around the gas giant since t
here were none. Ash could have hooked up to it through his personal ‘link, but Sanchez had flatly refused it. She’d wanted to be present for his transmission, but Nagle had volunteered instead, and Ash wasn’t sure why.
“This Sandi,” the scientist said softly, barely carrying over the two meters between them. “You two are together?”
Ash looked back at the man, Nagle’s doughy face masked in the shadows of the dimly-lit room.
“Yeah,” he answered hesitantly, a bit reluctant to share personal information with the man. “We’ve known each other since the Academy.”
“Take the advice of an old and lonely man, Commander. Treasure the time you have together. I made the mistake of letting someone slip away, once, and…” He rubbed at the bridge of his nose, as if his head ached. “You think you will get another chance, but life makes no such guarantees.”
“Is that why you’re out here, away from anyone?” Ash wondered. “Trying to forget?”
Nagle emerged from the dark corner, his face twisting into an unpleasant grin.
“I am here because I’m a xenobiologist,” he corrected Ash, “and since the Predecessors left nothing behind but carvings, my only other recourse, if not for this, was to study the Tahni.” He scowled. “And the Tahni are boring as hell, from an evolutionary standpoint, since they were quite obviously genetically altered for sentience and tool-using.”
Ash blinked, thinking for a moment that he’d heard the man wrong. “They were? How come I never heard about it, then?”
“Well, it’s obviously not something that the Commonwealth government wanted spread around, before.” Nagle spread his hands expressively. “Would you want to tell the public that we were engaged in a war with a race engineered for sentience by the Predecessors?”
“Wait, you’re saying that the Predecessors created the Tahni?” Ash felt the room shifting beneath him as he tried to absorb another impossible thing before breakfast. “Even if you’re right about them being genetically engineered, how do you know the Predecessors did it?”
“Occaam’s Razor.” The researcher shrugged. “We know of one race technologically advanced enough to create the wormhole jumpgates. Would you have us postulate another equally as advanced at the same time who meddled in the evolutionary biology of Tahni hominids?”
“What about whoever made the thing downstairs?” Ash shrugged. “They must have been pretty advanced.”
“Undeniably so,” Nagle granted. “But they weren’t humanoid, and from the genetic makeup of their warrior drones, I very much doubt they evolved anywhere remotely like Earth or the Tahni homeworld. If they were to create intelligent life, it most assuredly would not be humanoid. Besides, we are fairly confident that creating life was not their purpose; their drones were programmed to kill whatever intelligent life they found, to infest and destroy any technological civilization in their way.”
“How the hell do you know that?” Ash demanded, hearing anger in his tone and not quite knowing why, other than that the whole thing strained his incredulity.
“Experimentation, of course.” Nagle sounded offended at the naiveté of the question. “Years and years of experimentation, long before I arrived. My job was not to determine the nature of the programming, it was to seize control of it, to make a weapon. The DSI, you see, wanted something that could be dropped onto Tahni worlds that would spread terror, would cause untold destruction with no risk of human life. I was led to believe that there was some competition with Fleet Intelligence on this matter, that they had their own project and we were behind.” He waved a hand dismissively. “I wasn’t interested.”
“Not the patriotic type?”
“Oh, I much prefer human domination of the Cluster to Tahni,” Nagle admitted. “Who wouldn’t? They’re the worst parts of human culture through history crystallized with a unifying religion and given star travel. But we were going to win that war regardless, and I knew this whole project was just a DSI dick-measuring contest with Fleet Intelligence. But this…” He leaned against the wall, crossing his arms. “This was the culmination of my career, and I wasn’t going to say no.”
“Dr. Nagle,” Ash felt compelled to ask, leaning forward in the chair to face the man, “why are you telling me all this? This must be some really top-secret shit, and I’m sure it wouldn’t make Dr. Sanchez happy you’re sharing it with me.”
“Susan takes the secrecy very seriously. She takes everything very seriously. But none of that matters. If the hybrid died when the Metaurus went down, it’s all meaningless, because they will not repeat the experiment.”
“Probably not,” Ash agreed. “Even in the middle of a war, combining human DNA with alien biotechnology is a pretty desperate gambit.” Nagle barked a laugh so harsh that it startled Ash.
“Is that what you think we did, Commander?” The man’s tone was bitter, scornful.
Ash was about to ask what he meant when there was a knock on the door to the commo center and Chief Weaver stuck his head through.
“Doctor,” he said, nodding politely to Nagle, then turned toward Ash. “Commander Carpenter, Commander Busick wanted me to collect you. That bounty hunter, Singh, he’s awake. She wanted you to be there when she talked to him.”
Ash thought that Nagle might have something more to say, but the scientist was still leaning against the wall, staring down at the slate-grey floor. The pilot followed the Chief of Boat out into the corridor, circumnavigating its switchback curves downward two more levels until they reached a large, open doorway leading into a well-lit and cheerily-colored chamber that served as the installation’s medical clinic. There weren’t any regular shipping runs back to the Core worlds here, so everything they could possibly need was included in its equipment, all the way up to a fully-functional and elaborately outfitted auto-doc that could grow organs, given enough time.
Singh had been plunged into its nanite-filled biotic fluid for hours to let the microscopic biomechanical organisms repair the damage the hybrid and the descent in the lifepod had done to him, and now he was lying partially propped up in a recovery bed. This recovery bed had been specially outfitted with a neural restraint web that would keep even the bounty hunter’s bionic parts motionless while it was activated, and he didn’t look too happy about it, or about the flimsy robe that was all he was wearing. He looked even less happy to see Ash enter the room.
Fontenot was already there, arms folded, an amused look on her face as she stood beside Commander Busick and Gunny Kamara. Two other Marines stood guard over Singh while a Fleet corpsman in white utility fatigues checked the readouts on the bed’s monitors.
“Are Sandi and Kan-Ten all right?” Fontenot asked him.
“Yeah, they have some repairs to make before the ship is flyable again,” he told her. “Sandi said it could take a couple days.” He nodded at Singh. “Where did you get the neural restraints?”
“The facility has a dozen sets,” Busick answered the question, shaking her head. “I didn’t ask why; I didn’t want to know.”
“You should be in the fucking restraints, Carpenter,” Singh said in almost a growl. He fixed Busick with an angry glare, the muscles in his neck straining as he tried to move and couldn’t. “You know this man and his crew are all wanted criminals? They have bounties on them from the Patrol for murder, grand theft and piracy and from the Fleet for desertion.”
“And I suppose you have proof of that?” Busick asked him.
“If I had my ‘link,” he said, settling his head back down. “It’s back on the Metaurus.”
“Then it’s burned to its component atoms by now,” Busick informed him. “The ship made atmospheric entry pretty violently. And you know what, Mr. Singh? Commander Carpenter here does have proof that he’s Fleet. It’s not your word against his, it’s your word against his evidence, and I have no reason at all to trust your word. As far as I know, you’re nothing but a cartel hitman.”
“Then why are you bothering to talk to me at all?” Singh demanded.
&nbs
p; “Your shuttle,” she explained. “Our sensors show that it landed not too far from here, but we can’t contact it. I need you to tell the pilot and any crew on board that we have a patrol heading in and it would be in their best interest to surrender to them. I’d rather avoid any unnecessary violence.”
Singh brooded on it for several seconds, and Ash thought he was going to tell Busick where she could stick it, but then he nodded curtly.
“Get me a ‘link and I’ll tell you the frequency and coding.”
It took all of thirty seconds to get the ‘link set to the right transmission coding, and then Chief Weaver held it up to Singh’s mouth…very carefully.
“Grant,” he snapped, “this is Singh. Come in.” Nothing but silence responded. “Grant, answer the damn transmission, this is Singh.” Another empty pause and Singh mouthed a curse. “Damn it, Del, answer me! Anyone from the Gitano, this is Singh, please respond.” They waited another minute, but no one returned the call.
“The ship landed,” Weaver pointed out, pocketing the ‘link. “Maybe whoever took it down was injured. They could be unconscious.”
“Yeah, they could be,” Busick muttered, eyes staring through the wall. She glanced over at Kamara. “How close is the patrol?”
“They should be in visual range of the shuttle in a half an hour or so,” the Gunny told her, checking his ‘link. Ash guessed he had a readout from their IFF transponders displayed there.
“Let me know when you hear from them.”
“Don’t kill them.” Singh’s voice was soft, almost inaudible. Ash looked at him in surprise. The bounty hunter was staring at his bionic arm for some reason, at the bare, black metal. “Don’t kill them,” he repeated. He looked over at Busick, his human eye softened slightly, a sharp contrast to the cold grey of its companion. “Del, the pilot…he’s just a kid.”
“I don’t want anyone to get hurt,” Busick said, and Ash thought she was telling the truth. “As long as he doesn’t do anything stupid, our Marines have orders to bring everyone they find back alive.”
