by Rick Partlow
Then they were past the intersection and approaching the lift station. There were more bodies scattered there, but there were also three Marines left standing. Ash couldn’t shine a light at them directly, not without pointing a gun at them, but the ambient glow of the weapon’s lights let him see enough.
One of them was leaning against the wall by the lift door, blood soaking her left leg from three deep gashes across her thigh, deep enough to penetrate the armor plates there. The armor’s medical systems had probably stopped the bleeding, but she wouldn’t be able to take much in the way of painkillers as long as she was still in combat. The man next to her looked basically untouched, but the muzzle of his rifle was jumping around nervously and Ash thought he must be pretty close to complete panic.
Kamara was steady, despite the ragged slices across his chest. They hadn’t quite penetrated the thicker armor there, but it had been a near thing.
“We’re going to set the charges,” Busick told him. “Keep it out long enough for us to get them in place.”
“I don’t know if we can take another attack,” Kamara admitted, speaking to her over his external speakers. “We’ve slowed it down a little, but it’s still pretty damned fast and hard to hit.”
“I’ll stay here and help.” Fontenot offered.
She looked around until she found an intact Gauss rifle on the floor, then retrieved it and a fresh mag, handing the laser carbine and the shoulder bag full of magazines to Ash. He holstered his pistol and accepted them, slinging the bag over his shoulder then tucking the carbine into his hip so he could hold it one-handed.
“Are you sure about this?” he asked her, shaking his head.
“I’m not suicidal,” Fontenot replied with a humorless chuckle. “I’ll still be here when you get back.” She turned and eyed Singh. “What about you, pretty boy?”
“By all means,” Singh assented, stepping over to join the three Marines. “This would certainly be an interesting way to die, if not the one I’d imagined.”
“Hurry,” Kamara urged Busick. “We’ll give you what time we can.”
She nodded and went to the stairwell door, waving Chief Weaver forward. The Chief of Boat pulled out a set of magnetic key cards and laid one against the door’s security plate. It apparently wasn’t on the main power circuit, because a green light flashed on the plate’s display and there was an audible, metallic scrape as the bolt withdrew into the door.
“Where’d you get the keys?” Ash asked as Busick pulled the door open. Inside it was the blackest dark he thought he’d ever seen, and stale cold air rushed out of it to send a chill down his back. “I can’t see Nagle or Sanchez handing them over.”
“Found them in a leftover tool locker from when they built the place,” Weaver told him, snorting a sharp laugh. “Didn’t think the eggheads needed to know.”
Busick brushed past Weaver and headed downward, the light from her pistol showing nothing but an endless row of stairs descending in a tight spiral. Ash followed Weaver and whispered a curse; the rock walls were close enough that a deep intake of breath could make his shoulders scrape against them, narrow enough that he thought Fontenot might have gotten stuck between them if she hadn’t stayed behind. He wasn’t claustrophobic---they didn’t let claustrophobes into Fleet pilot training---but he also wasn’t enamored of the idea of being buried in a stairwell hundreds of meters underground after they set off the charges.
Ash had always pictured himself dying in space, not collapsed under a pile of rubble in a cave. He didn’t know why it made a difference, but it did. He tried to banish the fear, tried to concentrate on finding each stair and keeping his footing. He had to point the carbine upward because to point it down would have meant sweeping Weaver with his muzzle and to sling it over his shoulder would have meant being completely in the dark. That meant he couldn’t see where his feet were going, and simply avoiding a neck-breaking fall should have been enough to keep his thoughts occupied, but it wasn’t.
Somehow, despite the distraction, and the weight of the case of explosives constantly trying to throw him off balance, and the corpsman running into him twice when Busick slowed down and nearly pushing him head-first down the stairs, he made it to the bottom without falling. Weaver and Busick stopped at the exit door on the final landing and Ash could hear them working the security plate and throwing the locking bolt, then heard the creak of hinges as it swung slowly open.
There was the slightest glimmer of light from somewhere on the other side, and Ash felt a surge of excitement that maybe the power wasn’t off down here. He ducked through the narrow doorway on the heels of Chief Weaver and followed the sweeping cone of Commander Busick’s light out of the cul-de-sac of the research level lift bank through the yawning gate of the first security seal. The glow he’d seen was coming from the battery-powered locking plate beside the hatchway, blinking yellow with a warning that main power was dead, and the lights were still out in the personnel sections of the research lab. The offices were dark, the magnetic seals on the doors ajar and there wasn’t even the cold comfort of a chemical striplight to show them the way. The chemical emergency lights were standard in military facilities, but there hadn’t been one to be found in the whole installation.
Ash couldn’t recall much of the layout of the place from his one, brief visit, but he knew they’d have to pass through the central break room. It took longer than he’d thought it would, but eventually the glare from the weapon’s lights reflecting off the white polymer of the hallway diffused into the larger space of the open chamber. Busick halted abruptly, in mid-step, and Ash nearly collided with Weaver when the Chief stopped just as short. The corpsman stumbled into his shoulder and Ash turned and glared back at him.
“Sorry man,” the medic said, raising his hands. “I can’t see shit back here.”
Ash sighed, then slung his carbine, yanked the pistol from his belt holster and shoved it back at the man. The medic took it gingerly, but with a hint of a smile.
“Keep the light on and keep your damned finger off the trigger,” Ash warned him.
He turned back to where Busick and Weaver were moving into the break room, looking at something he couldn’t see, blocked from his view by the bulk of the recycler. He stepped past it, keeping the light from his carbine pointed downward, and sucked in a breath when he saw the body. He’d seen the man before; it was the red-haired one who’d been coming out of one of the sealed rooms when Sanchez had been walking him through to meet Nagle. His face had been red and flushed the last time Ash had seen him, but now it was ghost-pale in death, his green eyes open and clouded. There was a hole through his chest the size of a fist, and his blood had pooled beneath him, soaking the floor around the tables.
Two more of the researchers were crumpled on the floor just past him, an older man with a head wreathed in bushy, dark curls and a look of horror frozen on his face forever, and a thick-shouldered woman with a matronly face and long, auburn hair. Both had multiple entry and exit wounds, their mingled blood staining the rest of the break room floor a dark red.
“That monster didn’t do this,” Weaver declared with clinical detachment. “Someone shot them.”
“Commander Busick?”
Four laser weapons snapped around at the words, and a tall, skinny man with brown dreadlocks raised his hands over his eyes at the sudden, blinding flare of light, cringing backwards. Ash thought he must have been hiding in one of the offices; he saw the door yawning open just off the break room.
“Don’t shoot, please!” he begged, palms up, head down. The lights shone on his white, long-sleeved shirt, illuminating a stylized cartoon image of a little, blond girl dressed in some sort of battle armor, holding a sword longer than she was tall.
“Mercier,” Ash remembered. “David Mercier, right?”
“Yeah, that’s me,” the geologist said, nodding desperately. “Please don’t hurt me.”
Ash lowered his carbine, then glanced back and pushed the medic’s pistol down with t
he palm of his hand. The corpsman nodded, abashed.
“What happened here, Dr. Mercier?” Busick wanted to know.
“It was Susan,” Mercier told her, looking back up now that the lights were out of his eyes. He kept his hands up, though, which was smart, Ash thought. Busick and Weaver held their handguns at low port, not pointed at him, but still ready. “Dr. Sanchez. She had a gun, I don’t know where she got it. She told us that you guys were going to blow the place up.” He eyed the cases with the blasting charges in them, blinking uncertainly, but then went on. “John…” He motioned towards the body of the red-head. “Dr. MacTaggart, he tried to talk her down, tried to argue with her that we weren’t soldiers, that we couldn’t fight anyone. She shot him down where he stood, and when Joiner and Muller tried to get her gun, she shot them, too.”
His voice wavered, and Ash thought he might be about to cry.
“Dr. Nagle was yelling at her, but she told him to go back to the Pit, that she would take care of everything” he concluded, wiping a sleeve across his nose.
“Kenner,” Busick said to the corpsman, “can you stay here and keep an eye on this guy?”
“Sure,” Kenner said with a nod, then corrected himself. “Sorry, I mean, aye, ma’am.”
“You two, with me,” Busick said to Ash and Weaver.
It wasn’t that much farther. If the rest of the walk had seemed almost endless, this was surprisingly abrupt. They reached the final security seal in less than a minute, even keeping an eye out for any more bodies or survivors. There were none; there was no sign anything was amiss other than the lack of power. But the seal was shut, locked down…and the security plate’s indicator light was a steady, glowing red. Whatever had cut the power to the rest of the installation hadn’t affected the Pit.
Commander Busick touched the call button on the intercom panel set in the hatch. She waited a moment, then cursed under her breath and jammed it down for about ten seconds before she let up again.
“Answer me, Nagle!” she shouted, leaning over the audio pickup. “I know you’re in there!”
“I’m very sorry, Commander.” Nagle’s reply was soft, distant, as if he was meters away from the microphone. “I know you think you’re doing the right thing, but I can’t allow you to destroy this lab. I’ve spent the last six years searching for a way to bring her back, and I know I can do it, given the chance.”
Busick gritted her teeth and was about to snap back a reply, but Ash stepped forward and spoke before she could.
“Who is she to you?” he asked. Busick glared at him, but he raised a hand to quell her. “You said someone volunteered for the procedure. Who was she to you?”
There was a pause, and Ash thought for a moment that he’d blown it, that Nagle had cut the connection, but he could still hear background noise, hear Nagle or someone else moving around, hear the rasp of shoes on the metal grating.
“Her name,” the response finally came in a voice wistful and close to breaking, “was Ophelia Dimas. She was responsible for the effort to decipher the language of the pod’s biological computer systems. And she was the only woman I have ever loved.”
“Shit,” Busick murmured, slumping against the hatch.
“She didn’t tell me what she intended to do,” Nagle went on as if he hadn’t heard her. “Susan Sanchez helped her; she told me that she knew Agent Atumi would force us to do it eventually, if Ophelia hadn’t volunteered. She was afraid I would be the one to do it, and she said the project couldn’t continue without me.” Another long pause. “I think, perhaps, Susan felt a jealousy at our relationship; but in the end, I was too late to stop it.”
“I’m very sorry for what happened to Ophelia,” Ash told him, and was surprised to find that he meant it. However batshit crazy they both were, Nagle had obviously loved the woman and blamed himself for what had happened to her. “But we can’t let her get to that hive. God only knows what she’ll be able to do with it if she can get it to work. You have to realize that.”
“I can bring her back,” Nagle insisted, stubbornness in his tone. “I’m sure of it. If I can get her here, I know I can. Just get out of her way and let her through. Get to your ship and get away.”
“I know you believe that, Doctor,” Busick interjected. “But what if you’re wrong? What if she just uses the hive to make more like her, then makes her own starship? You said it yourself: she wants to return to Earth, and she also wants to kill everyone and destroy every trace of a technological civilization. How can we let you take that chance with hundreds of billions of lives?”
“You don’t have any choice, Commander. I’m not letting you through that door, and if you stay, she’ll kill you.” He sighed heavily, a burst of static over the speaker. “If it comes to it, if I think she’s not going to let me help her, I have the codes to the fail-safes. I promise you, if need be, I will bring the whole facility down myself.”
The light showing the connection went dark. Nagle had cut it. Busick closed her eyes, still leaning against the cold metal of the hatch.
“What are we going to do, ma’am?” Weaver asked quietly. “Maybe we could use the charges on the hatch?”
“That hatch could survive a shot from a proton cannon.” Busick shook her head. “It’s stronger than the fucking rock around it…”
Ash felt the hair on the back of his neck rise as a thought flared to life like a supernova in the darkness and he felt a smile spread across his face.
“We need to get back to the others,” he declared. Busick and Weaver glanced at him curiously. “There’s a back way out of this place, and we need Mercier to show it to us.”
“Why?” Busick asked. “What do you have in mind?”
“Plan B, Commander,” he told her, casting a meaningful glance back at the intercom and shaking his head. “Plan B.”
Chapter Sixteen
She felt pain. For the first time in years, she felt what it was like to be hurt.
Had she ever felt it? Yes, she realized, part of her had. The part that had once been human, had once been a woman named Ophelia, she had felt it. She’d felt it during the transformation, when that human thing had combined with the form of a Skrela warrior to make something new, something that had never been seen before.
The hybrid, they called it. She remembered hearing them say it, remembered the fear in their voices, the fascination. The others had felt fascination, the ones in the lab…not the man, though. The man named Adam had felt only sadness and desperation, not for himself, but for her. She remembered being sorry, remembered the regret. There was none of that now, no feeling, no regret, only pain and an overwhelming need to get to the womb. The womb could fix everything, the womb could fill the need, could make her more than she was, could get her home.
All she felt was the need, and all these humans blocking her way felt was fear. They’d hurt her, even with their primitive weapons…pitiful things shooting bits of metal. If she could get to the womb, she’d show them the power of a Skrela plasma cannon; all she had now were her claws and her teeth and the strength of her body. That would be enough, she was confident. She’d been coming in faster than they could follow, picking them off one at a time. One more pass, maybe two, and nothing would be in her way.
She unfolded from the nook in the ceiling, where the air vent was set into the rock, and lowered herself silently to the floor. Already, the ragged holes in her side were filling with the viscous biomechanical sludge that would begin to repair her chitin, and in a few hours, she would be whole once more. She felt the claws on her feet dig into the rock floor as she ran, going faster than the human eyes could follow.
***
“It’s coming,” Kamara announced, his voice a murmur in Korri Fontenot’s audio receiver. It was built into the cybernetic ear replacement along with a transceiver that could work with her ‘link or on its own, a handy thing that had saved her life more than once.
She wasn’t sure if it was going to be enough this time.
She could
hear the thing, too. The scrape of its claws on the rock, faster and faster, coming from around the corner near the intersection. She trained her Gauss rifle on a section of wall just past the curve in the hallway and waited, slaving her trigger finger to her bionic eye; it would be faster that way than making the decision consciously.
It still managed to surprise her when the stock recoiled back into her shoulder. There was no discomfort, of course; her shoulders were both metal, though covered by synthskin now. But the pressure sensors embedded in the skin carried the feeling to her brain and she felt it as if someone had shoved her. The third tungsten slug out of the rifle smacked into the wall, but she knew the first two had hit, and she could see the dark green blur slow and solidify into something large and two-legged and menacing.
Hers were the first shots to hit, but not the last; Singh and Kamara and the two other Marines were firing now, taking advantage of the damage from her rounds slowing the hybrid down. She could see the impacts jerking the creature to the side as it ran, spalling bits of chitin off of its biomechanical armor, and spraying some sort of black goo out when the rounds pierced through. She dared to let herself hope for just a second that they’d done it, that they’d killed the thing.
But it didn’t stop, not even when a heavy metal slug shattered the right side of its nightmare jaw, sending fragments of its wickedly curved teeth flying through the air. Instead, it curved its run at the last second, ducking low and swiping its claws right through the armor over one of the Marines’ lower torso. The armor ripped apart, something she’d never seen happen before, and organs spilled out through the gap along with gouts of blood, and the man inside the armor sagged, dead on his feet and too shocked to realize it.
Fontenot knew instinctively that she couldn’t shoot the thing; it was too close, and there was too great a chance of hitting one of their own. The Gauss rifles were heavy and sturdy and useful for butt-stroking an enemy, but the thing was too fast for that. She swung her left fist in an almost convulsive backhand, connecting with the hybrid as it went for the next Marine in line. The blow shook her, vibrating down her fist all the way into the spinal reinforcements that anchored her bionics, but it slammed into the side of the creature’s head near the wound to its jaw and sent it reeling backwards.
