by Rick Partlow
Fontenot was fairly certain she was going to die in that moment. The thing was too fast for her to get in another blow before it recoiled and lashed out at her. Then Singh lunged in from just a meter away and crashed his huge, metal left fist into the other side of the hybrid’s head. His punch slowed it down long enough for Fontenot to jam the muzzle of her Gauss rifle against the thing’s massive shoulder and pull the trigger.
At this range, the round punched right through even the heavy, segmented armor of the shoulder, and a spray of black ichor exploded out the back of it. Then the thing was running again, still too incredibly fast to get a bead on with human reflexes, and in a second, it was around the corner and gone. Fontenot gasped in a lungful of air, suddenly realizing she’d been holding her breath. Kamara was down on a knee, checking the vitals of the eviscerated Marine, but Fontenot knew the man was as good as dead. If they could have thrown him directly into an auto-doc, he might have been saved, but the nearest one was a ten-minute walk away right past the hybrid, and it didn’t have power.
There were only four of them left: her, Singh, Kamara and a short, stocky female Marine with a wounded leg. They’d hurt the thing, maybe hurt it bad, but Fontenot wasn’t sure if they’d be able to finish it. She glanced up at Singh. On infrared, he looked like half a man, his bionics dark and fuzzy.
“Thanks.”
“You are as dangerous as I imagined you might be, Fontenot,” he responded. “It has been a memorable experience to fight beside you instead of against you.”
“You sure know how to sweet-talk a girl,” she cracked, grinning lopsidedly.
The door to the stairwell banged open behind them with a flare of a flashlight that washed out her night vision, and she nearly shot Ashton Carpenter in the face before she realized who he was.
“Jesus, Ash,” she hissed. “You could have knocked.”
“Get downstairs now,” he said, not bothering to apologize. “All of you, hurry.”
Kamara looked up from the dying Marine, his face invisible behind his visor. Fontenot didn’t have to see it; she knew that pain from past lives. He detached the man’s rifle from his retention sling and handed it to her.
“Cover our backs,” he told her. Then he grabbed the woman with the wounded leg under her arm and began helping her back through the stairway door.
Fontenot saw Ash eyeing Singh carefully. The bounty hunter grunted a hoarse laugh, then stepped past the pilot to head down the stairs in front of him.
“Go,” Fontenot said, nodding toward the door. “I’ll be right behind you.”
Going down the narrow stairwell backwards and in the dark was challenging, but her cybernetic legs came complete with internal gyroscopes to help her maintain balance, and though there had been plenty of instances when she’d regretted the injuries that had forced her bionics onto her, this was not one of them.
Maybe that’s why I’ve lived my life out on the edge, she thought, her eyes fixed on the top of the stairs as she edged back down them, so I keep getting into situations where I appreciate what I have.
“Where are we going, Ash?” she shouted back to the pilot, hunching her shoulders to avoid scraping them on the rock walls.
“There’s a tunnel to the emergency exit down on the lab level,” Ash explained, his voice muffled and echoing through the narrow stairwell, sounding a hundred meters away. “We’re heading up…after we head down.”
“Are the charges planted in the Pit already?” she wondered, confused.
“No,” he admitted. “There’s been a slight change in plans…”
***
Adam Nagle leaned against the control panel and watched on the security monitors as the last of the Metaurus group disappeared into the entrance to the emergency evacuation tunnel, led by Mercier.
He was alone. The Pit loomed behind him, the alien hive calling to him as it had since the first time he’d seen it. This time, he wouldn’t answer. He stepped away from the security station and went to the engineering control panel, finding the sequence to reverse the shutdown Susan had programmed earlier. Power from the reactor surged back through circuits she’d bypassed and the lights began to flicker back to life outside the lab.
Nagle strode quickly and purposefully through the security seal, feeling a chill pass down his back as he stepped into the dimly-lit, claustrophobic corridor outside. A touch on the lock plate sent the hatch lumbering downward, faster than its upward journey and yet still tortuously slow. Nagle watched its descent, hands shaking, mouth dry. He hadn’t been lying to Busick; he had no intention of allowing the hybrid to reach the hive unless she agreed to let him help her. Susan was a fanatic, and undoubtedly a dead one at this point; but he had no more emotional investment in this place, not since the DSI had forced Ophelia into giving herself up to the hive.
The only reason he’d kept working was for what he’d thought was a vain hope of bringing her back. But now he just might actually get the chance.
And I’m scared shitless, he admitted to himself.
Was he scared that she would kill him, or was he scared that he’d let her down again?
The hatch sealed shut with an ominous, weighty finality. The sound of metal on metal was still echoing down the corridor when he saw her. She moved slowly, slower than he’d ever seen her since the transformation, and he could tell she’d been damaged. He wouldn’t have believed that even the Gauss rifles the Marines carried could penetrate her chitinous armor, but he could see the jagged holes the slugs had punched. The black ichor was bubbling up inside the wounds, repairing her even as he watched; but for now, she was limping, in pain.
She paused as she came within a few meters of him, and now he could see the twisted ruin of the side of her face. The reflexive chittering of her jaws was conspicuous by its absence, the repair gel freezing them in place while it did its work. He felt a stab of sympathetic pain, feeling an urge to reach out and touch the wound but restraining himself.
“Ophelia,” he said softly. “It’s me, Adam. Do you remember me?”
***
It was the man, the one called Adam. After all this time, yet still he was here, still he looked the same. He spoke to her, but the words seemed to run together, beyond her comprehension, all except one.
“Ophelia,” he called to her. It was her name. It had been her name, that part of her that had been human.
The name brought back images and thoughts of places the human Ophelia had been: of clear, blue ocean and scrub grass and hardy little trees sprinkled over hills and ancient buildings and a city called Elounda, as ancient as those stone structures. The thoughts brought back memories of the language Ophelia had once spoken, and the jumble of sounds Adam made began to unscramble in the shared neural network that had once been a human brain.
“Ophelia,” the man repeated. “I can reverse the transformation. I can bring you back. If you’ll agree to wait here with me until the others can leave, I can heal you.”
The words made no sense. She understood them each individually, but strung together, the concepts they represented seemed totally alien to her.
Why would she want to reverse the rebirth? Why would she want to change what she was? She wanted to ask the man these things, but her body wasn’t suited to human speech and even if it were, she would be unable to move her mouth until the damage was repaired. She could manage a gesture though, and she made one towards the hatch. She wanted it open, and she hoped he was smart enough to understand.
“Before I bring you inside,” the man said, raising both hands palms outward, “I need to know you’re going to let me help you. I can’t let you into the hive, Ophelia, not the way you are now. Please tell me you’ll let me bring you back.”
The words were irritating, and with the pathways that brought her understanding came a greater experience of the pain. It hadn’t been so bad before, filtered through the consciousness she shared with the systems that regulated this hybrid body; but now the arrangement of thoughts and concepts which had o
nce made her human began to feel the pain in the manner a mortal being might, as an individual. And with that experience came fear, for the humans associated the pain with death, and they seemed to fear death more than anything else.
She motioned again, more urgently this time, wanting inside. Inside, she could reconnect with the womb, and it could soothe her fear, make her less this human thing and more what she longed to be, a Skrela warrior drone. Drones felt no fear, felt no pain, knew no limitations.
More irritating words, words that made her feel pain, and fear, and anger.
“I can’t, Ophelia. Let me help you, please.” The man’s face twisted in some emotion she might once have been able to read. “I love you.”
That word, it made the pain spike in her face, in her chest, everywhere, and she felt herself jerk back, claws curling.
“What is it, Ophelia? I do still love you, I swear!”
The word again, causing pain and a cloudy confusion in her neural network. She struck out at the pain, just a casual swipe of her claws. The man named Adam vanished in a spray of arterial red, his body slumping forward while his head bounced against the closed hatch and rolled across the floor.
She watched the body fall, and the pain and confusion in her thoughts seemed to fade with the human’s life. Things were clearer now. There was only the need. The need conquered all other thought. He’d said the others were trying to leave. One of them would be able to open the hatch. And if not, they might have a ship. A ship could take her home.
Her sensors tasted the air and picked up the scent of humans leading through a doorway across the chamber. She turned away from the thing that had once been Adam Nagle and followed their trail.
Chapter Seventeen
Sandrine Hollande tried to make her hands work despite the tingling numbness of her fingers and the nearly uncontrollable shaking. She wondered how Kan-Ten was able to show so little reaction to the cold; she knew Tahn-Skyyiah, his homeworld, was, on average, hotter and wetter than Earth, and that the major Tahni cities were clustered in tropical areas. He was swaddled in layers of clothing, topped by a cold-weather jacket with warming coils, just like she was, but she knew that it wasn’t enough to keep the savage, bitter wind from slicing through her and she knew it would be even worse for him.
He soldiered on, though, which was enough to keep her from complaining about it, except inside her own head. At least it wasn’t completely dark. It never really got dark on this moon from what she could tell. The arc of the gas giant filled the night sky, reflecting enough of the system primary’s glow to create a constant twilight, bathing the rolling hills in an otherworldly purple glow; but the temperature difference was significant.
I should have just put on the damned vacuum suit, she thought, gritting her teeth to keep them from chattering.
But she’d spent the last two hours with her head tilted backwards, standing on a folding ladder as the two of them worked the replacement nozzle into place and bonded it with the engine assembly, and trying to do that in a suit would have been nearly impossible. Doing it in the cold without a suit was only highly improbable and utter agony.
“God damn it,” she muttered, transferring the bonder from her right hand to her left and trying to shake some feeling back into her arm. The hose connecting the bonding tool to the tank resting in the snow under the belly of the ship was already coated with a thin layer of ice.
“Just another ten centimeters,” Kan-Ten comforted her, conspicuously not taking advantage of the opportunity to stretch out his shoulders, despite having held the housing in place for nearly an hour. Maybe his shoulder joints worked differently than a human’s, she thought sourly.
“Yeah, yeah,” she replied, flexing her fingers a few more times before she took the bonding tool back into her right hand.
I can always pop into the auto-doc later if I wind up with frost-bite…
“Sandi, we’re on the surface.”
The voice on her ‘link’s ear bud sounded so much clearer and more distinct than Kan-Ten’s, since it didn’t have to make its way through layers of hood and scarf, and she easily recognized it as Ash. Sandi remembered to pull her scarf away from her mouth before she replied.
“We’re still a few minutes from being done here,” she told him, feeling her lips dry out and crack under the assault of the wind. “Did you get the charges planted?”
“Nagle shut us out of the Pit,” Ash explained, and she could hear the frustration in his tone. “We’re going with another idea. The Pit is built into the original crater the hive made when it impacted the moon, and they had to do a shitload of reinforcement to keep it open down there. I talked it over with Commander Busick and Korri, and we’re pretty sure if we plant the charges at the right places up on top, directly over the Pit, that we can cause a cave-in that’ll bury it permanently. That way, even if Nagle lets the thing inside, it won’t be able to get back out.”
“I’m finding that idea highly dubious, lover,” she admitted. “Stay warm, I’m on my way.”
She pulled her scarf back up and reactivated the bonding tool, holding it carefully in place over the seam of the nozzle.
“I can hold it from here, Kan-Ten,” she said to the Tahni, placing a hand near where his had been supporting the assembly. “Go on inside and get the reactor warmed up and get ready for a thrust test. We’re running out of time.”
***
“I’m beginning to believe I didn’t think this through.”
Ash stared down at the bowl-shaped depression between the hills, buried under ten or twelve centimeters of snow, suffuse with the muted glow reflecting from the face of the gas giant, and wondered how they were supposed to find the stress points to set the charges on that blank white slate. It had been a three-kilometer hike from the emergency egress hatch, and the only cold-weather gear they’d been able to grab were some all-purpose jackets kept in a locker next to the tunnel entrance back in the lab, and those weren’t nearly enough.
He glanced back at the others, feeling a twinge of guilt at dragging them out here. Fontenot and Singh stood apart, while Kamara and the Fleet corpsman leaned over the wounded Marine, checking her condition on the readouts from her armor. The scientist, Mercier, paced back and forth, hands tucked into his armpits for warmth. The cold didn’t seem to bother either of the cyborgs, and the Marines body armor had heating systems, but Kenner, the medic, was visibly shivering, and Mercier looked like he wanted to crawl into a hole and die.
“It’s okay, son,” Chief Weaver assured him, blowing a warm breath into his hands before he picked the polymer tote with the blasting charge back off the ground. “I’ve been here six years and there hasn’t been a hell of a lot else to do but dream about blowing this place up.” He waved a hand. “Follow me, both of you, and I’ll show you where to plant the bombs.” He nodded deferentially to Busick. “If you please, ma’am.”
“At this point,” she said, shaking her head as they trudged down the hillside, digging their boot soles into the frozen ground, “I’m ready to let you take command, Chief.”
“Ma’am,” Weaver spoke up above the whistle of the wind, “I don’t know anyone else who could have kept us all sane and reasonably well-organized this long. Anyone else in charge, we all would have killed each other, or sure as shit killed those damned scientists long before now.”
“One thing I don’t get,” Ash admitted, “is why the DSI never came back out here. I understand that the Fleet probably didn’t know anything about this place, but Nagle said there was a DSI agent in charge of this operation.”
Busick and Weaver shared a look.
“His name was Atumi, and he was on the Metaurus,” she explained. “If I know the DSI, this whole thing was compartmentalized enough that there might have been two other people in the whole agency that knew about this, and even they might not have known everything.”
“You don’t know how many times we had that conversation,” Weaver said with a chuckle. “How many nights we spent wond
ering if one of these days, the DSI might come out here to check on the installation and whether or not they’d kill all of us for seeing too much.”
“Chief, not even the DSI…,” Busick began, but the Chief of Boat waved her off and pointed to a patch of snow that looked just like the others to Ash.
“Put one of them right here,” he directed. He scowled. “Ideally, we’d want to dig maybe two meters down, but this ground is pretty frozen…”
“Let me try something,” Ash offered. He handed his case of explosives off to Weaver and waved him and Busick away, then unslung his laser carbine.
“Is that a good idea, sir?” Weaver wondered.
“Probably not.”
He aimed the laser’s emitter straight down, covered his face with his left arm, and pulled the trigger. An almost overwhelming heat washed back over him, like leaning into a sauce pot full of boiling water, and he closed his eyes against the stinging, burning hail of superheated bits of soil as the laser pulses vaporized the snow and dug into the ground beneath. A warning vibration in the grip let him know the magazine was empty and he lowered his arm, realizing with a start that his jacket sleeve was smoldering.
“Shit,” he murmured, patting at it until the spark died.
He blinked away afterimages and saw that the magazine-draining burst had dug a cavity about ten centimeters across and half again as deep. He shrugged and swapped out the empty from the shoulder bag Fontenot had given him and was about to try again when a gloved hand closed over the receiver of the carbine and pulled it gently away from him. Ash looked from the hand to the visored helmet of Gunny Kamara; he realized, with a flush of embarrassment, that the Marine must have run over immediately when he saw a Fleet pilot doing his best to get himself killed.
