Hybrid (Tales of the Acheron Book 2)

by Rick Partlow

  “C’mon, Bear,” Kamara muttered, looking at the IFF signals on the map screen. “Hurry up.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  John Ross tried to keep himself from looking back. It wasn’t necessary; the helmet had rear-facing cameras that projected a small image on the right side of his HUD, but it was deeply-ingrained instinct, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that they were being followed. Darkness had fallen, and even with the computer-enhanced night vision of his helmet trying to simulate full daylight, things looked artificial, like he wasn’t seeing the whole picture, like there was something missing.

  He tried to banish the atavistic fears and concentrate on the map. They were only a couple kilometers from the entrance; they just had to circle around a cluster of hills and then it would be a straight shot. Katya went over a rise that put her out of visual observation for a moment, but he could still follow her IFF transponder. He could have accessed her helmet cam feed, but there was just so much you could fit inside a HUD projection without tripping over your own feet.

  He noticed Wole spreading out a bit far to the left, nearly thirty meters out from the center front where Katya was walking point and he frowned.

  “Wole,” he transmitted, “tighten it up.”

  “Sorry, Bear,” the man responded. “Got too far out walking around a sinkhole.”

  Ross grunted acknowledgement. Those were a constant hazard out here near the thermals, and they’d had people injured before when the ground crumbled beneath them. He turned his attention back to Katya…and her IFF was gone.

  “Katya!” he called, trying to bring up the feed from her helmet cam. Nothing. He started to sprint forward to get her under visual observation, but forced himself to stop and think for a second, to go with his training. “Shit!” he hissed, going down on one knee, bringing his rifle to his shoulder. “Wole, Emil, bring it in, Ranger file behind me, now!” He switched frequencies. “Gunny, do you have contact with Katya?”

  Ross scanned the terrain ahead of him, gritting his teeth as he waited for a response. It was a lot of nothing. Crumbling soil, dotted here and there with ancient volcanic rock, and a slant of a hillside that just blocked off the route Katya had taken.

  “Negative, Ross,” Gunny Kamara answered. “I’m not picking up anything, no IFF, no health readings, no camera feed. Do you see anything?”

  “Give me a second,” Ross told him, switching frequencies. He saw Emil and Wole closing up behind him, only ten meters apart. “We’re moving. Stay close and do not get out of direct visual observation of me.”

  He felt his hands shaking as he got back to his feet and gripped his rifle’s stock tighter, trying to keep himself steady, trying to pretend this was just another training scenario. They were going to round that corner and Katya was going to be fine. It was just a helmet malfunction. Things like that happened; all their equipment was getting old.

  He’d almost convinced himself of that until he saw her forty meters ahead of him on the trail. Parts of her were forty meters ahead. The rest was strewn across the white and yellow mineral deposits that lined their route, staining it red. Bits of ribcage littered the ground around what was left of her body and her head was missing, along with the helmet. The attack couldn’t have taken more than two or three seconds, the time he’d spent talking to Wole, yet she looked as if she’d been through an industrial threshing machine.

  Ross dropped to a knee, mouth dry, barely able to breathe.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ!” He thought that was Emil. The other Marine was making retching sounds and the only reason Ross wasn’t nauseous was that he was numb with shock. Wole said nothing, but both of them had stopped when he had.

  They probably thought he was being tactically correct, staying put and assessing the situation; but the truth was, he couldn’t move. He was paralyzed by disbelief. This couldn’t be happening again, not down here. They’d got away from the thing; he remembered how guilty he’d felt that he’d survived and the others hadn’t, but over the years, the guilt had turned to a profound gratitude. Now, everything was being replaced by fear.

  They had to get back, that one thought penetrated the haze and terror. They had to get back and they had to stay together. He took several deep breaths before he was confident he could speak without gibbering.

  “Emil, Wole,” he said, amazed his voice could sound so calm and steady when he was on the edge of sheer, mindless panic, “we are going to stay within arm’s length of each other. No straggling. And we are going to run like hell. Don’t fall behind. Tell me you both understand.”

  “Got it,” Wole responded. His voice cracked slightly, but Ross thought he was going to be able to hold it together.

  Emil didn’t answer.

  “Emil,” Ross said sharply, turning on his knee to face the man. “Do you understand me?”

  Emil had been the last in line, only ten meters back from Wole. He was gone, without a trace.

  “Go!” Ross yelled, pushing himself to his feet and running.

  He didn’t remember dropping his rifle, but his hands were empty and he felt the weight shifting on his side as the retractable sling spooled the weapon in to its spot on his backpack. He’d never run this fast before, not on track back in school, not in Boot Camp, not even when he’d been in combat against the Tahni during the war. Even in combat, you held something back, kept from going at your absolute top speed, because you didn’t want to go out of control. You had to watch your foot placement and keep focused on your surroundings and look out for the enemy, and your brain never quite let your body go all-out. There was no reason for any of that now. There was no way to fight this, no safe cover to hide behind that would stop this thing; there was nothing to do but run.

  He felt himself go off-balance and threw his weight forward, stomping into the ground to keep his footing, feeling the jolt reverberating upward through his legs and lower back and knowing it would hurt like hell later. If there was a later.

  He didn’t bother trying to watch for the thing, because he knew he wouldn’t see it in time. Emil had been right there, only twenty meters away. He should have seen it…he should have at least noticed a hint of motion in his rear camera. He’d been focused on Katya’s body, swallowed up by fear for just a few seconds, and he hadn’t caught even a glimpse of when it had grabbed Emil. How could anything move that fast?

  “Ross, what the hell’s going on out there?” It was the Gunny. His voice was harsh, more with fear than anger. “Where are Kingsford and Dumont? I’m not seeing anything on your video feed but bare ground! What are you running from?”

  Ross didn’t attempt to respond. He couldn’t spare the breath or the attention, and there was nothing Kamara could do for him, anyway. He wouldn’t send troops out, not with that thing out here. He’d be killing them to save people who were already dead. Was Wole still behind him? He didn’t want to turn his eyes even a centimeter aside to check his HUD for the man’s transponder. Any distraction would mean death. He was convinced of it, convinced that his only hope was to get back inside.

  He was three hundred meters away. He could see it now, could see the twin bumps of the hills that were the landmark he always looked for. It was the closest entrance; not the main one, not the tunnel. That would take too long, using the ID plate and waiting for clearance. No, he had to get to the emergency hatch. He’d memorized the location even though they never used it; everyone had when it became clear they were going to be here for a long time.

  It had been magnetically sealed when they’d first arrived, meant to be used only in case of a cave-in or a fire, but the Gunny had taken Ross and Chief Weaver one night and rigged it so that it would open manually from the outside, but the base’s systems would still show it as locked. He wanted a way in if the Frankensteins got too pushy and tried to lock them out. And Ross figured that this would be as good an excuse as any to try to lock him out.

  “Bear!” Wole screamed. The word was full of terror and agony and despair and Ross forced himself to s
hut it out, to not look back.

  It had got him. It had taken down Wole and he was next. His breath was deafening inside his helmet, his chest burning, his legs dragged down by lead weights, but he ran faster, ignoring fatigue and pain and everything but that juncture of the two hills drawing nearer and nearer. Just another hundred meters, but it might as well be on the far side of the gas giant. He was never going to make it…

  And then he was there, and the hatch was there, barely big enough for a full-grown male, sheltered from view under the overhang of a calcite deposit, tendrils of moss-like fungus drooping down over it. He lunged at it, yanking the manual locking lever downward, and then throwing it open. It was a twenty meter drop inside, with a narrow, metal ladder the only way down, but Ross plunged in headfirst, grabbing at the ladder with one hand and trying to slam the hatch closed behind him with the other.

  His legs swung down behind him and he was sure he was going to fall and break his neck, but he managed to catch himself, fingers cramping as his full weight yanked down on them. He scrabbled wildly, his legs flailing, and felt his right foot bang against one of the rungs. He got it into place just as it felt that his fingers were about to fail him, felt his weight shift to his legs as he found a resting spot for his left boot, then he hugged the ladder, hyperventilating and exhausted.

  “Oh God…” he moaned, resting his helmet against the side of the ladder. “Oh, dear God.”

  There was a wrenching, scraping sound from above and light began to filter downward from the opening as the hatch five meters above him began to creak slowly open.

  Oh Jesus, it’s coming…

  Ross looked down. He was five meters down the ladder, and below him all was inky blackness, illuminated only by the infrared lamp on his helmet. In the green-tinted haze of the IR filters, he saw nothing but volcanic rock stretching downward in a narrow cylinder until it dropped out on a tunnel so far down that the lamp couldn’t reach it.

  He heard a sound deep in his throat, something inhuman, something a trapped animal might make just before it began to gnaw off its own foot. He kicked free of the rungs of the ladder and began sliding downward, gloved hands lightly grasping the sides. Hazy, green-tinted darkness blurred by him and his stomach crawled into his throat as he realized how fast he was falling. He tried to tighten his grip just slightly, to slow himself, but he was too exhausted and too insane with fear for that sort of precision.

  His arms were jerked upward as his palms grabbed far too tightly, and pure, raging agony blossomed in his shoulders as both of them dislocated, and he fell.

  The fall seemed to take forever, took longer than senses and instincts evolved for one gravity expected, and that lighter gravity was the only reason the impact didn’t kill him. His back bounced off the volcanic rock tube of the tunnel and his faceplate cracked and splintered as it impacted the ladder, and then he hit right-leg first and felt pain that made his separated shoulders seem pleasant by comparison. There was a crack that sounded like a tree snapping in a high wind, and the only reason Ross didn’t scream was that the breath was driven from his lungs when the rest of him slammed down hard on the tunnel floor.

  His vision swam in schools of dancing lights as he was swallowed up in the utter darkness at the bottom of the ladder. He was in an unlit, unused corridor, narrow and barely two meters tall and couldn’t have seen a damn thing even if his sight wasn’t clouded with agony. His helmet’s visor was broken and useless, the HUD and night vision filters gone.

  “Help…” He tried to yell the word, but it came out as a barely-audible gasp. No one else heard. Even if his helmet comms were working, he was too deep underground and there were no signal repeaters out in this isolated part of the installation.

  Something heavy thudded into the stone floor beside him. He tried to move, despite the pain and the shock and the injuries, tried to scoot away from the vibration and the scraping, scratching sound, but he couldn’t. His strength was gone, burned away in his desperate flight to die here, alone, in the dark. He managed to roll over onto his side, and there was just a hint of light filtering down from the hatch, enough to notice when it was blocked out by something big and black.

  Death stared him in the face, its jaws parting to show rows of scimitar-shaped teeth.

  ***

  “They’re gone,” Kamara murmured, staring at the display in shock. “They’re all gone.”

  Ash was on his feet, glancing around the room uncertainly, waiting for Busick to say something. She pushed herself up from the table, putting a hand on Kamara’s arm. He looked over at her sharply, as if he had forgotten where he was.

  “Corporal Ross…he was trying to get in the emergency hatch, I think. That’s the area he was in when his transponder went dead. Do you think he made it?”

  “If your man led the hybrid to the hatch, then it’s in here with us now.”

  Ash turned at the voice and saw Nagle looming in the doorway, looking strangely out of place here away from his lab. He was surprisingly calm, not seeming at all alarmed or dismayed, but instead intrigued. Ash almost thought he was being unfair, attributing clichés about mad scientists to the man; but no, his flaccid, puffy face seemed alive now, filled in and lightened up by keen interest.

  “Why is it coming in here?” Fontenot demanded. She was shuffling back and forth, fingers clenching and unclenching, and Ash saw something in her eyes that he hadn’t ever seen before: fear. “You said it was intelligent. It has to know we don’t have a starship here, assuming it hasn’t found the Acheron. What does it want from this place? Revenge?”

  “It is intelligent,” Nagle agreed, stepping inside, looking at the map display. “But it’s not an entirely human intelligence. It has conflicting needs, from the different sides of itself.” He raised his right hand and turned it over demonstratively. “The human side wants to go home, wants to return to Earth.” The left hand balanced the right, parallel to it. “The side that is a hive mind from an alien race that was probably extinct hundreds of thousands of years before the pod crashed here wants to perform its purpose: to kill and destroy any technical civilization it comes across…and to reproduce.”

  “Oh, shit,” Ash blurted, and his eyes widened. “It wants to get back to the pod. It thinks it can reproduce there.”

  “And more than reproduce,” Nagle agreed. “It thinks it can repair it, if it provides enough raw material…maybe even instruct the pod’s nanite factories how to make its own starship.”

  “Why are you telling us this?” Busick wondered. The question was almost rude in tone, skeptical. She stepped closer to the researcher, almost nose-to-nose. “We’ve been here six years and you haven’t said a damn thing. Why now?”

  “I don’t want to see any more people hurt,” Nagle said, and Ash thought he meant it. “You can’t stop the hybrid; it will kill all of you if you get in its way.” He cocked an eyebrow. “So, get out of its way. Evacuate the installation, go take that shuttle that landed and find Commander Carpenter’s ship. Let the hybrid have what it wants.”

  “You just said it could reproduce!” Kamara snapped, shoulders hunched as if he was about to lunge at the older man. “You said it could build a fucking starship and take it to Earth! And you want us to let it?”

  “I said it thinks it can do all that,” Nagle corrected him, calm and unaffected, either by Busick’s skepticism or Kamara’s outrage. “I’ve learned a few things about the pod in the years I’ve studied it. I’m confident that if I get the hybrid back into the lab, I can reverse the process that blended the human volunteer with the alien organism.”

  “The human volunteer?” Ash repeated, slowly, enunciating each word. “Someone…a person volunteered to do that to themselves?” He had been backing up unconsciously, stepping away from Nagle like he was afraid he’d catch something from the man, and he didn’t realize it until he felt the edge of the table bump against the back of his legs and he put a hand back to steady himself.

  “It was wartime,” Nagle said. His v
oice lost some of the confident detachment it had displayed earlier. This part wasn’t as impersonal to him, Ash guessed. “We were being pressured for results and…” He shrugged. “We had already been here a long time, working on a black budget, with no results. The DSI agent in charge of the project was insistent that we produce a weapon, or we would be shut down.”

  “Whatever it is now,” Busick said, “it’s not human anymore. It’ll kill you.”

  “I’m willing to take that chance.”

  “I’m not.” Her tone was flat and decisive. “This is a military emergency and I’m taking control of this base. Gunny, this thing won’t take the elevators. It’s going to try for the emergency stairwell on level six, at the end of the ramp. I need you to hold it off there as long as you can.”

  “Aye, ma’am.” He nodded and took off at a sprint, and Ash could hear his voice as he called to the rest of his troops over his ‘link as he ran. He looked relieved to have something to do, Ash thought.

  “Chief.” The XO turned to Weaver. “Take Jandreau and Ashef and get to the old construction storage locker down on level eight. Remember the inventory we did two years ago?”

  “The blasting charges left over from boring the tunnels,” Weaver said, nodding.

  “You’re going to take that down to the Pit and bring the whole place down on top of that thing when it comes for the pod.”

  Nagle’s mouth opened, and Ash could tell he wanted to object…but instead, he closed it and said nothing.

  Maybe he’s not as crazy as I thought, Ash considered grudgingly.

  “I could help with that,” Fontenot offered. “I have experience with combat engineering.” She sniffed. “Among other things.”

  “Happy to have you along, Ms. Fontenot,” Weaver accepted, motioning to the door. She preceded him out and Ash could hear their steps turn to a jog out in the corridor.