Hybrid (Tales of the Acheron Book 2)

by Rick Partlow

“Dr. Nagle,” Busick went on, “you need to get your people evacuated to the surface just as quickly as possible. Take them to the cartel shuttle and wait for us there. You should be safe travelling out there, with the hybrid here inside, and you’ll be out of the weather.”

  “I’ll go see to it myself,” the man offered, turning and heading out of the room.

  “What do you want me to do, Commander?” Ash asked her as Weaver and Kamara ran off to their assignments.

  “Get on the horn with your friends, Carpenter, and find out how soon they can take off.” Her expression was grim. “Before we blow the shit out of this installation, it would be nice to know we had a way out.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Okay, I think that’s got it,” Sandi yelled into her ‘link’s pickup over the whine of the turbines. She felt the rush of hot air begin to subside from the portside stern vectored thrust nozzle, and she saw the pool of meltwater it had created beneath the belly of the Acheron immediately start to freeze over again.

  It was getting dark again, and with the dusk came bitter, nearly unsurvivable cold. The test run of the third nozzle they’d repaired had warmed her up briefly, but even her cold weather gear couldn’t keep out the slashing, icy knives of the north wind.

  “That was only a quarter thrust,” Kan-Ten reminded her from the ship’s cockpit. “Are you confident the replacements will hold at full power?”

  “If they don’t, we’re stuck here,” she pointed out, “so we may as well find out as soon as possible.” She eyed the setting primary doubtfully. “No use pushing it, though. We’re losing the light; we’ll install the last one in the morning.”

  She circled around the quickly-solidifying oval of ice and scrambled up the ramp, letting out a relieved breath as the warmth of the ship’s interior enveloped her again. She’d been outside for over three hours, most of that with Kan-Ten helping her install the nozzle before she’d sent him to the cockpit for a low-power test.

  “Sandi, it’s Ash.” She heard his voice in her ‘link, relayed over the ship’s intercom from the main communications board. “Can you read me?”

  “Go ahead, Ash,” she responded, unwrapping her scarf from around her face as she headed up to the cockpit.

  “How close are you to getting the Acheron in the air?” he asked, and she could tell by his tone that it wasn’t just idle impatience.

  “We just finished installing the third of the four replacements. I was planning on waiting till tomorrow to try the last one and do full power testing. Why? What’s going on?”

  There was a hesitation, long enough that she thought he might be talking to someone there with him at the base.

  “Any chance you might be able to get the last one in tonight, Sandi?”

  The question was strained, like he knew what he was asking of her and hated the words even as he said them. She frowned, leaning against the back of the pilot’s acceleration couch. Kan-Ten had spun the copilot’s seat around to face her and was watching her end of the conversation with an unreadable visage.

  “It’s getting pretty damned chilly outside, but I guess I can try. What’s the situation?”

  “The thing is down here,” he admitted and she felt her stomach sink out from underneath her. “It rode the shuttle down with Singh’s pilot, then killed him. It’s inside the installation, down in the emergency access tunnels, and we think it’s heading for the pod…the hive, whatever you want to call it. The artifact. It wants to use it to reproduce, maybe even to build a ship. Commander Busick is going to evacuate everyone and plant charges to bring the roof down, but we can’t all fit in the cartel shuttle. We need the Acheron or we won’t last a night outside.”

  “I got you. We’ll get it installed as quick as we can. I’ll let you know when we’re prepped for takeoff.”

  “Thanks. And be careful…once you get the ship over here, you need to keep it sealed, weapons armed until we get on board. There’s only one thing the hybrid wants more than the artifact: it wants to get back to Earth, and the Acheron is the only way off this rock.”

  ***

  Gunnery Sergeant Alvin Kamara felt incredibly exposed standing in the center of the corridor intersection; it ran counter to every bit of tactical training he’d ever received. But that training was for fighting Tahni, or maybe humans, against an enemy that struck from a distance and worked in teams. This was less of an enemy soldier that he faced and more a predatory animal, though with human-level intelligence. It probably did have the capacity to use a gun, he decided, but it didn’t want to. It had never picked up any of the loose weapons on the Metaurus, hadn’t bothered.

  It’s taunting us, he realized. It knows it can kill us with its claws and its teeth. It knows that will make us more afraid.

  This formation made sense. He had a squad and a half, twelve men and women, to cover this intersection and the stairway door at the end of the hallway; he’d thought about just layering everyone down at the door, but they’d be effectively blind if they did that. The thing could shield itself from cameras, somehow, so they couldn’t count on the security monitors to give them a warning. His half-dozen here at the intersection would spot it first, he was sure, and they’d engage it first. If they needed to, they could fall back to the stairway door.

  They were in a circle, Gauss rifles pointed outward, with him in the center to be the spotter, to scan for it and direct fire. Where they stood, they didn’t have a direct shot at the stairway entrance, so every direction was a free-fire zone. It was perfect.

  “We’re in place, Commander,” he called to Busick. “We’ll hold it off until the Chief gets the charges set.”

  “Roger that, Gunny.” Her voice wavered slightly. She was scared. He knew it because he was, too. “If you can’t hold it, if it…”

  “Kate,” he interrupted her gently, “we will hold it. We’ll give you the time you need.”

  He thought she’d signed off, but then he realized he could still hear her breathing.

  “I’m sorry it didn’t work out, Alvin.”

  He felt a brief, intense pain somewhere in his chest. He hadn’t thought about their relationship in months, had managed to put it behind him as something short and ill-advised, something brought on by stress and isolation, but the words brought it back full force. Maybe he shouldn’t have been such a prick about the difference in their ranks; it wasn’t as if it was going to matter now.

  “Make sure you get out of here,” he said, his voice soft, almost wistful. “If you don’t, I’ll feel like I didn’t do my job.”

  “Aye-aye, Gunny.”

  And she was gone. He breathed out, long and emptying, imagining himself expelling distractions and regrets and memories and focusing all his attention on the present. It was a technique he’d learned in martial arts classes on Aphrodite, long before he’d enlisted in the Marines, long before the war. He’d been in trouble with the local cops, in trouble with his family, heading down the wrong road, when he’d found the Way. It had been more than just learning to fight; he’d already known how to fight. No, the Way had taught him how to focus, how to concentrate, how to rid himself of the extraneous.

  The corridor was silent, motionless, his Marines as still as statues, waiting. He wished he could have said with confidence that it was their iron discipline that kept them frozen, but he suspected it was just as much abject terror. Seconds crawled by, stretching out into minutes, and he heard the scrape of a combat boot on cement floor, the rasp of a weapons sling against an armored vest as men and women scanned back and forth.

  The thing had to come this way, he knew it. There was no other way down; the ventilation ducts were too narrow for something that big, so it was the stairs or the elevator. When it came up the corridor, they could pump it with tungsten slugs, and Kamara couldn’t believe that even this thing would be able to survive that sort of punishment. They just had to keep their eyes open.

  The lights went out.

  The infrared lamps in Kamara’s helmet snapped
on automatically, and the on-board computer enhanced the image with a rendering based on thermal, infrared and sonic sensors, but the view in his visor went from the crisp, three-dimensional delineation of visible light hitting the human eyes to something softer and less real. Kamara leaned back instinctively to look up at the light panels in the ceiling but they were still intact, just darkened and dead.

  “What the hell’s going on?” someone asked over the platoon band, echoed by a chorus of confusion and the slight motion of IFF transponders on his display as Marines began to shift from their positions.

  “Shut up and hold your stations,” Kamara snapped. Their chatter died to nervous silence and he listened intently. It was hard to notice the low, humming hiss of the ventilators when they were running, but the absence of them was painfully obvious. It wasn’t just the lights. He hit the control at his wrist to change frequencies. “Commander, we’ve lost power down here. Do you read?”

  Nothing. He cursed inside the privacy of his helmet. It made sense. Their ‘links wouldn’t be able to penetrate the walls of the base without signal repeaters, and without power…

  “It’s coming,” he warned the others. His voice was steady, confident, professional. “It must have hit a power junction or the reactor itself, somehow. It’s not as smart as it thinks, though; we don’t need the lights.”

  Except the hybrid doesn’t need them either…

  There was a dark blur, something out of the edge of his field of view, something he wasn’t quite sure was there. But he knew, he was sure. He spun on his heel and swung his rifle around, firing at the vaguely defined shape despite the fact that his helmet targeting systems didn’t seem to register it. Tungsten slugs smacked into the far wall, propelled at 2,500 meters per second, sending splinters of volcanic rock erupting outward in clouds of dust, but the thing had moved; it was already meters away and running too fast for him to react.

  “Shoot it!” he bellowed, voice finally betraying him, showing his panic.

  But the words trailed the motion and the motion was blindingly quick. The Marine next to him was Sergeant Shan, the First Squad leader, a good man who’d left behind a wife and child on Inferno six years ago. In the time it took for Kamara to look to his right, Shan was gone, jerked backwards without as much as a scream and slammed into the wall behind them. Red-black liquid that defied clarification by his helmet’s optics splashed away from Shan’s body and his head rolled loose of his torso with a clatter of metal and plastic.

  Gauss rifle muzzles swung around recklessly and Kamara could hear the snap-crack of the rounds breaking the sound barrier just ahead of the explosions of floor and ceiling material, and two Marines died in the time it took him to turn his head, their bodies ripped apart with a wrenching of jagged talons that seemed to take the barest effort. But there was another sound, something that pierced through the rending of metal and flesh and the screams and the discharge of Gauss rifles. It was a smack, a solid thump of a hyperaccelerated tungsten slug into a material qualitatively different than anything man had made, and Kamara saw a hesitation in the creature’s fluid movements, thought just maybe he saw a ragged, fibrous rip in the thing’s chest.

  And then it was gone, blurring back around the corner, but perhaps just a bit more slowly than it had come, and Kamara’s gunfire chased it along the wall in pockmarked ruptures of the rock.

  “Back to the lift station!” the Gunny yelled, grabbing the rescue handle on the back of one of the downed Marines and hauling him along as he retreated. Not that the man could be saved, but he knew he’d need the weapons and ammo and this was the easiest way to bring it along.

  “Gunny, what the hell’s going on?” That was Sgt. Longley, Second Squad leader, just spotting the remaining three Marines backing toward them at a double-time pace from the intersection.

  The five others there arrayed with him around the lift banks and the emergency stairwell entrance shuffled side to side, their Gauss rifle muzzles scanning back and forth in a hemispherical pattern as if they expected the hybrid to be crawling across the ceiling. He dragged the dead Marine over against the wall about two meters from them, trying not to look at the wreckage where the man’s chest had been. A trail of dark crimson blood marked his passage around the curve of the hall and he tried not to look at that too much, either.

  “Get set in your positions,” Kamara ordered, trying to make his tone harsh enough to not be questioned. “The thing is here and it already attacked us once. I want you aiming for a spot two meters closer than the farthest you can see with your infrared illuminators, but keep your eyes on the curve in the corridor. The minute you notice anything there, even if it looks like a shadow or a trick of the light, open fire.” He ducked down between the ranks of the six Marines Longley had been commanding, motioning the other two survivors with him to take up spots there, down on one knee among the others who were standing straight.

  “I think I hit it, Gunny,” Private Caminero said breathlessly. “I think I hit the fucking thing.”

  “I think you did, too,” he agreed with her, trying to sound encouraging. “And I’m pretty sure that’s why it took off. It’ll be back, but now we know we can hurt it. We just have to keep our heads and hold our ground. Are all of you with me?”

  “Hoo-rah, Gunny,’ Longley enthused, along with a murmuring of agreement from the others. Caminero and Maathai, the two who’d been with him, just waited in subdued silence.

  I don’t really blame them, he thought.

  They’d seen the thing…they knew better.

  ***

  “How far is this place?” Fontenot wondered, eyeing the narrow walls of the corridor doubtfully. They seemed to get closer to her shoulders with each curve in the hallway and she was pretty sure they’d walked two kilometers around the perimeter tunnels that ringed the installation.

  “They didn’t exactly want to store HyperExplosives near the workspace,” Chief Weaver told her, not bothering to look back.

  Weaver was walking quickly, purposefully, knowing exactly where he was going, but the two former docking bay technicians with him were struggling to keep up. Jandreau and Ashef, she remembered their names were, a skinny, elfin woman who looked as if she’d grown up on a low-grav world, and a shorter man with bushy hair well beyond regulation after so many years away from anyone who cared. Their utility fatigues were patched and worn, not as well-kept as the Marines’ or Busick’s or Weaver’s, and Fontenot had the sense that they wouldn’t have been the first choice to bring along.

  “It’s just right of the next intersection,” Weaver told him a moment later, and she had the sense that he hadn’t remembered exactly himself until he’d seen it.

  The lighting out at this level was old and sparse and had never been that extensive from what she could tell, but over the reinforced bare metal of the storage room door a single panel glowed brightly. It shone down on a sign with the universal symbol for danger and the words “NO ADMITTANCE” in capital letters ten centimeters tall stenciled across it. Weaver yanked open a security seal and touched an old-fashioned magnetic key card to the pad beneath it, and a green light blinked to life together with the unmistakable clunk of a magnetic door lock releasing.

  “Okay, be careful in here,” the old Chief of Boat cautioned, hauling the heavy door open with a grunt of effort. “There’s a lot of shit lying around, and most of it isn’t safe.”

  As the door swung open with a creak of decades-old hinges, an automatic switch set the interior lighting panels flickering to life. They were as dim and past their replacement dates as everything else out here, and the room inside was gloomy with the shadows of tall metal lockers and squat plastic storage crates, turning the construction equipment scattered around the concrete floor into looming monsters.

  Jandreau and Ashef hung back, and Fontenot scowled as she passed them by, following the Chief. She was only a couple steps behind him when the lights faded and the storage room and the corridors outside were plunged into total darkness.

>   “Oh, what the fuck?” Jandreau exclaimed. “How the hell are we going to get back out of here now?”

  Fontenot had infrared lensing in her cybernetic eye, but even that needed ambient light to show her anything, and down here there simply was none. She stood stock still, not wanting to knock anything over by accident, and wished she still had her vacuum suit with its equipment belt; there’d been a flashlight on that belt.

  “Calm down, everyone,” Weaver sighed. A small light flared to life, impossibly bright after the absolute darkness, waving with the movements of the Chief’s hand. “Some of us weren’t stupid enough to wander around without a flashlight. Just stay still and I’ll get the blasting charges.”

  He turned away and darkness blanketed the others as the light turned with him, but now there was at least enough ambient glow from his flashlight that Fontenot could see. The image was flat, and two-dimensional and tinted green; her vision processors were older and lacked the sort of computer enhancement that modern helmet systems included. But she could see well enough to make out the bulky, massive lines of the storage locker, again marked with skull and crossbones and a prominent red circle with a slash through it.

  Weaver used the same magnetic card on the security pad placed at chest level on the two-meter-wide locker and pulled it open, revealing mostly empty shelves, except for three large, polymer cases. Each also sported the ubiquitous danger warnings and a government inventory label that stated they contained ten kilograms of HyperExplosives.

  Which was, Fontenot reflected, a shitload of HyperExplosives.

  Yeah, she thought, swallowing hard, that’d be enough to bring this whole place down if you plant it just right.

  It was funny how living this long made a girl appreciate not dying. She hoped Weaver knew what he was doing, because she sure didn’t trust Jandreau and Ashef to handle it. The thought of them messing around with that that much destructive material made her glance back askance at the two of them, which was why she was looking their way when a swathe of coruscating laser pulses sliced through both of them in a spray of vaporized blood.