Dominant Species

by Michael E. Marks

  Stitch must have noted the strain etched on Jenner's face because the discussion down-shifted abruptly. "Think of the table as a camera. It takes a photo of you, well, more like an X-ray. That tells it what shape you're in. Then it looks at your DNA; that tells it what you should look like if you were healthy."

  The concept wasn't all that tough, Jenner thought as he watched the needle slide into his arm. He listened quietly as the clear syringe filled with a ruddy red fluid, noting what looked like tiny silver flecks in his own blood.

  "The nanites can move stuff from one place to the next and weld it back together. If you get a whole bunch of ‘em working together you can patch up a lot of damage." The medic placed a small adhesive gauze disk over the puncture wound and pressed firmly. "What the little suckers can't do is make living tissue from nothing. You lost whole pieces of meat--"

  "Like fingersh." Jenner interjected, once more flexing a maimed hand in the air.

  "Yeah," Stitch said with a short nod that might have held a trace of sympathy. "The nanites could only pull so much from the rest of your body before the salvage op started to compromise other systems. You got back maybe ten, twelve percent of what you lost, but that's all the surplus material your scrawny ass had to spare."

  "Shoulda eaten a shteak for my last meal," Jenner muttered sourly, "maybe a gutful of meat woulda got me another finger or two."

  Stitch paused in the midst of transferring the blood sample to a small stainless steel device. "Huh," he muttered as his eyes tracked back toward the table. "There's a thought."

  A furrow creased Jenner's disfigured face, as close to a scowl as he could manage. "Shitloada good that doesh me now," he spat, left hand raised to his face. He fought back a rising sense of dispair as finger stubs gently brushed across cratered nostrils.

  Stitch didn't appear to notice. The glass vial in his hand tapped slowly on the stainless steel tray. "Might work," he said aloud. "Hit of midazolam would put you under." He looked down at the vial in his hand, absently tumbling the cylinder. "Yeah..."

  As though he snapped out of a trance, Stitch blinked and looked up at Jenner. "Course we're kinda short on steak dinners and I don't think anybody delivers down here." The medic gave another short shrug, "Bummer luck."

  "Only luck I got." The comment escaped Jenner's lips without a hint of exaggeration. The question that followed slipped out before he had a chance to reconsider. "You guysh gonna kill me?"

  The medic's eyes snapped around, dark eyes that softened as he stood quietly wiping the syringe with a piece of cloth. "Look, we may be hardasses, but we don't kill people for no reason."

  "Yeah, shombody oughta tell that ashole Taz."

  The medic's eyes hardened. "If I were you," he growled, voice low, "I'd keep my mouth shut around Taz."

  "Why? What the hell did I ever do to him?"

  "We've all lost friends to Rimmers, some take it more personally than others. When you put on the uniform, you put on the history."

  "That'sh bullshit, I never hurt any--"

  Stitch cut him off, a stiff index finger snapping up to the gap formerly occupied by Jenner's nose. "Look, stupid, read my lips: no-body-cares." The medic emphasized the syllable as though talking to a small child. "If you've got any brains left, you'll keep your yap shut and ride this out. As far as I'm concerned you're an injured POW. That means you get my best treatment until you do something to jeopardize our safety."

  Like what, slap you to death? Jenner felt weak and pitiful as he looked down at his ruined hands. Choosing only to nod his head, he remained silent.

  "Good. So here's how it plays. If we don't find a way out of here we're all gonna die, you included. If you know anything about this boat or how it got down here, it could go a long way towards getting all of our asses back to the surface."

  "Boat?" Jenner's head swung up and cocked over to one side. He blinked hard, trying not to appear lost as he groped for something intelligent to say. "Ish that why everything ish leaning?"

  Stitch looked him squarely in the eyes as if trying to divine truth in a swirl of tea-leaves. Then the lanky Marine looked down at the instrument in his hands and sighed quietly. "Yeah, something like that."

  Jenner gave a sudden start as the Sickbay door opened with a hiss. Four armored figures lumbered into the room, their feet clinging to the angled floor with reptilian surety. A sense of urgency crawled up Jenner's spine as his gaze settled on the word TAZ emblazoned on an armored breastplate.

  Survival instinct gnawed at the back of Jenner's thinking. His ability to avoid contact was limited, and at some point he be stuck alone with the surly Aussie. Getting away from the Marines became increasingly critical in Jenner's mind.

  He looked across the Sickbay to the table. As the medic's words played back through his mind, a glimmer of distant hope began to form.

  CHAPTER 21

  Razor-sharp crosshairs tracked slowly along the heavy chain, each link a flattened oval of grey steel nearly a foot long. Ice coated its length, the hazy crystalline surface clearly visible through the telescopic sight.

  Small digits in the top center of Darcy's vision read 467m, the precise distance to the chain. A laser rangefinder served as just one piece of the complex weaponsight package. As range to target changed, the visible image area shifted to maintain a point of impact in the center of the reticle. Gone were the days of dialing in range and windage on scope turrets, or calculating holdover using black three-quarter mil dots spaced evenly along the crosshairs. Technology had given the mainstream sniper a tremendous edge in point-and-shoot engagement.

  Anything but mainstream, Darcy relied on skill and knowledge over the infinite layers of gadgetry that forced its way onto the battlefield. "Gimmicks fail," she muttered with a faint smile, "trust your training." The axiom had been hammered into her brain throughout sniper school and remained a centerpoint of Darcy's existence.

  Sliding her view down the massive hydraulic claw, Darcy absorbed and categorized details great and small. Although a solid-state drive stored digital reference images, retrieving a specific file could take time. Things in her mind were instantly available.

  Size, shape, color, she ticked through the well-ingrained set of questions as she focused on the claw. Roughly four meters in diameter, shaped like a metal starfish, dark grey in color. A flash of red caught her eye, the triangular shape stenciled along the base of a heavy pulley.

  Condition? The claw looked serviceable, no outward signs of damage.

  Appears to be? Darcy zoomed in closer, the massive steel grapple filling her vision. "It appears to be one heavy sonofabitch." Opting for a more technical description, she tagged the marker as CRANE, HEAVY. The designation joined the numerous features scattered across the electronic range card.

  Wedged in a narrow crevice near the Lobby ceiling, Darcy remained deathly still. From her vantage point she commanded a wide view that included Papa-Six, the Tower and most of the catwalks. She had committed the entire layout of the Lobby to memory, with a focus on points of entry. To the best of Darcy's limited knowledge, the gargantuan engineering bay still represented the easiest way in and out of the ship. Her hunter's mind told her that keeping an eye on the front door was a prudent idea. The path of any forseeable attack would lead through the cavernous metal expanse that stretched out below the sniper's railgun.

  The exercise proved far easier said than done. The Lobby amounted to a steel canyon whose walls were littered with balconies and windows. Darcy's very organized brain was stressed to the point of numbness as she tried to collate the boundless volume of information. If bad guys started popping up, she could be facing a world-class Hogan's Alley.

  "Draw a bead and make ‘em bleed," Darcy drawled with a measure of malicious anticipation, confident that she could make this particular shooting gallery decidedly inhospitable.

  In retrospect, Darcy acknowledged, the odds of a shooting scenario seemed awfully slim. Whether fifty years old or fifty thousand, the ship struck her as little mor
e than a dramatic, frozen tomb. Whatever brought the vessel down here, nobody survives for long in sub-zero cold with no light and no food. Darcy wasn't lost on the double-edged irony.

  On the other hand, Monster's encounter was a disturbing anomaly. No matter how implausible, the possibility of survivors could not be entirely discounted. The ship was certainly big enough to hide another energy source deep in it's bowels. Beyond the ship itself lay an untold expanse of caverns with who-knows-how-many sources of geothermal energy. In Darcy's military experience, the only constant was uncertainty. She prepared as if for war.

  The familiar routine felt good and offered a welcome point of focus. Despite long hours crammed in the aerie-like hide, Darcy suffered no aching muscles, no cramps. In point of fact, she felt pretty damn good.

  What the fuck was that?

  Darcy jerked back out of the scope, her attention snapping to the torn balcony hanging askew just overhead. On reflex her mind engaged the chameleon and the tangled hues of her surrounding spread across her like a rapid-growing mold.

  Darcy's mind struggled to categorize the unexpected sound. Not a footstep or the tell-tale creak of a stalker's weight, the tone was more like a murmur. With a falcon's eye she swept the line of torn railing. Not even air moved between the broken bars of steel.

  Sound warbled once more, dull and distorted, from somewhere near the ceiling. Fighting the urge to sit upright for a better view, Darcy slid backward in the crevice and drew the railgun close to her chest. Rolling slowly to one side, she rocked the heavy weapon skyward; the barrel a scant few inches from the wall. As the stock snugged into her shoulder, the scope engaged.

  The ceiling was a chaotic mass of ductwork and pipes. Thick corrugated conduits snaked between angled girders of structural steel that measured meters across. Immense air vents dotted the ceiling in a regular, grid-like pattern. Each circular air handler measured roughly four meters in diameter, the louvered grates edge-on like the maw of a turbine engine.

  Darcy eyed the network of composite fiber tubes. The immense air ducts criss-crossed the ceiling like an enclosed highway, a possible explanation of how something could have crossed the Lobby unseen. She tracked along the largest one in search of a missing grate.

  An odd sensation tugged at her mind, a glimmer of déjà vu. She had not yet conducted a detailed sweep of the ceiling but the inverted field of equipment oozed an eerie familiarity. Through the scouring optronic eye, Darcy could make out patterns of corrosion running along metal plates, the crust of ice clinging to every crevice.

  "Open grate," she muttered under her breath, "just behind a busted compressor." She screwed her eyes shut, focusing on the image that hung clear in her memory. The compressor's torn drive chain hanging loose from cracked pulleys. The number 41.

  Another sound broke her concentration, now level with her and to the left. Darcy flattened into the wall, trying desperately to zero the source.

  More than one, she recognized, her teeth grinding. Bastards are talking to each other, coordinating.

  The eroding situation demanded a tactical change. Whatever moved through the Lobby walls did so invisibly and Darcy wasn't going to wait for them to pop up in her face. With great deliberation, her fingers slid down to her hip and closed on a familiar curved slab. As she positioned the device near the rim of the ledge, she felt the words FRONT TOWARDS ENEMY embossed faintly along the curved outer shell.

  Sneak up on this, motherfucker.

  Darcy quietly pulled a fistfull of dirty fiber insulation from a breach in the wall and placed the cottony pink wad in front of the antipersonnel mine. Wriggling methodically backward, Darcy slithered feet-first through several feet of torn wall and emerged in a dark hallway on the far side, her original point of entry.

  To her right the hall led back to the turbolift, but the view from that angle was sure to be limited. Darcy looked aft as she quickly stowed the rifle, her mind trying to picture the layout of the Lobby cut into single floors. She had seen a wide section of catwalk extending from somewhere aft, angling up in a series of staircase landings to the ceiling. The vantage point should give her high ground and a flanking position. Pivoting to her left, she bolted downslope, her concern over slipping lost in the urgent need to move.

  The metal rungs barely caught her eye as she bolted past a half-open hatch. She braked hard, dielectric actuators causing the polymeric gel in her soles to deform in a high-grip tread pattern. Cursing the sneaker-like squeal, Darcy ducked through the hatch and launched herself up the ladder.

  Reaching the top, she pushed up on the circular hatch that sat over the ladder-tube like a hinged manhole cover. It lifted with barely a creak. The scant crescent gap allowed Darcy to peer out at floor-level from the highest balcony in the Lobby. The ceiling hung just overhead and a set of tiered landings rose to meet the roofline. Motionless, Darcy strained to listen. The silence told her nothing; her flanking maneuver might have put her out of earshot as intended.

  Or not, she snarled, and the bastards are just waiting for me.

  Taking a deep breath, Darcy raised the hatch enough to slither through. Arms outstretched, she dragged herself forward with only fingers and toes, her progress measured in inches between intermittent pauses.

  The sniper edged her way to a pile of mechanical debris, where she looked for a gap that would allow her to use the heap as a screen. An overhanging flap of crumpled sheet metal proved the best she could find. Keeping the muzzle behind the improvised blind, Darcy gazed out through the scope.

  Rapidly quartering the room, Darcy tore through a hasty search that would pick up only the most obvious tells-- motion, shine, striking difference in color. She hadn't expected to catch someone out in the open but couldn't pass up the chance for a lucky break. Finishing the wide z-pattern, Darcy reluctantly accepted that her allotment of good karma had been burned on the table. If she was going to get an edge now, she'd have to earn it herself.

  A scrape, metal on metal, short but distinct. The image in the scope streaked up to the landing closest to the ceiling. Slowly now, the crosshairs crawled right to left across a battery of air handlers. Condensation chambers rose two abreast from each compressor. Even through the grime that encrusted the blue-painted unit, the number 43 was visible in yellow.

  A full heartbeat late Darcy registered the familiarity and the scope centered the numerals once more. She slid her view to the right where condensor 44 appeared to be intact. Reversing her track, the sniper swept left across three units, coming to a halt on a cracked pulley, the split chain hanging motionless on one side. Her breath quickened.

  The darkness beyond was blurred by the depth of field but she could still make out the dark louvered circle. Darcy pushed the zoom forward with delicate care until she drew the grate into sharp clarity. A shattered lock dangled limp on the mangled frame. Beyond, the entire grate hung askew.

  The skin rippled along Darcy's spine. Pulling off the riflescope she craned over the balcony lip and struggled to spot her first hide.

  "No chance," she muttered, knowing full well that the huge structure that blocked her view down would have blocked her view up just as well. It would have been impossible to see any of the compressors from below, and yet 41 stood before her, and the open grate beyond, precisely as she--

  Imagined? Remembered? She struggled to frame an impossible event in some logical rationale, but nothing fit. She could not have known the grate was there, any more than she could know what was beyond. And yet somehow, she did know. She remembered.

  Darcy drew the rifle back to her shoulder and peered at the grate. Darkness beckoned beyond, where the curved sides of the duct ran straight and true to a four-way junction some thirty meters in. She knew the way the metal groaned under great weight, how the seams snagged more going in than coming out. The picture grew sharper in her mind, details of sound and feel resolving to unnatural clarity. The sensations became immersive, absorbing her.

  Her mind moved quickly through the ductwork, advancing in im
probably long strides. One leg after another reached forward, clawed talons biting into the curved walls. A metallic clatter filled her ears, sounds that were at once alien and yet somehow perfectly in place. Voices murmured, slurred voices she could feel more than hear.

  Emerging from one section of duct, Darcy reached out with a metallic claw that should have been her hand; at least it felt like her own hand as it clamped down on a length of pipe. The metal tube crumpled in her grasp. Her immense weight swung effortlessly between two heavy columns, a fan of arms to either side of her body snatching at every conceivable foothold. Just as quickly, she plunged headlong into another tube, this one smaller than the first.

  Blue light wavered at the end of the dark tunnel. Lake light, Darcy recognized as she scuttled closer. The disk of blue expanded quickly to reveal details beyond. She was lower in the Lobby, perhaps halfway down to the lake surface. Gazing from within the tube, she could see some of the catwalks that angled towards the Tower.

  Motion on one of the suspended walkways caught her attention and she felt her wide body hunker down between a pair of vent frames. Tension gathered in her numerous arms and legs as she made out two shapes that moved slowly along the steel bridge. One of the grey figures was decidedly larger that the other, a Gatling gun unmistakable beneath his right arm.

  Her perspective edged closer.

  CHAPTER 22

  "You're fucking dead, Rimmer."

  Jenner tried to twist away from the armored hand that pinned his throat against the wall. The Marine's other hand, clenched in a fist, hovered just off the tip of Jenner's nose. Crumpled bits of foil and vacuseal sprouted between the carbon-clad fingers.

  The fist cocked back and Jenner yelped, eyes clamped shut as he turned his face from the blow. Thunder echoed in his ear, a tooth-rattling vibration that proved remarkably painless. Somehow he thought having his skull caved in would hurt more. Jenner opened one eye in a fearful squint.