Dominant Species

by Michael E. Marks

  Ridgeway's gaze followed the girder all the way to the ceiling. Torn apart at the seams, the disembowled overhead plane hemorrhaged a torrent of cable and equipment. Electricity crackled throughout, raining sparks from a hundred locations. The hiss of pressurized gas whistled clearly now from somewhere deep in the wreckage. A thick haze hung in the air, steam mixed with the smoke of charred plastics. Water dripped from every surface.

  "Well this sure as hell wasn't on the bloody tourist guide."

  Ridgeway ignored the comment, his brow knit as he began the impossible task of picking a route through the chaos.

  He turned to the sniper. "C'mon Darce, this guy couldn't have made it through this shit." Ridgeway gestured towards the helical tube of wreckage.

  Darcy stood quietly as her head ticked left and right in short increments. Her hand rose to the side of her helmet, palm pressed firmly as her fingers splayed out over the curved upper dome. She sighed and looked back in the direction they had come, then forward once more. "I'm tellin' you Major, he's trying to get to something, a sphere..." she jabbed a finger toward the girder, "and it's that way."

  Ridgeway stared at Darcy for a long moment, trying to make up his mind how much stock he could afford to put in her newly-found psychic powers. She had described several items along the path that once discovered had proved undeniably accurate, enough to convince Ridgeway that some connection existed. His concern was the level of confidence he could place on a nebulous link between Darcy and a suddenly mobile Rimmer. If she was somehow being fed bad data, the Marines could be marching into a trap.

  He glanced forward, hard pressed to imagine a better environment for an ambush. The floor buckled upward and rolled to the right before it dumped into the gaping wound left by the girder. That very destructive piece of steel, sixty to eighty tons by best guess, sat squarely in their path. It bisected the corridor at a forty-degree angle, rising from the rightmost floor edge and extending through the ceiling high and left. A knotted shawl of cable draped along its length like seaweed from the prow of a shipwreck.

  Darcy's voice echoed in his ear. "I'm sure of it Major."

  Ridgeway grunted. He didn't like the choice but saw no other. "I'll take point. You keep everyone tight here, watch your six." His faceplate swiveled to hers as a curled index finger tapped his own temple. "You get anything, anything at all, you let me know."

  Darcy nodded, extending her fist. Ridgeway rapped it solidly, then stepped through the open door. The floor groaned uneasily beneath his weight.

  Ducking under a loop of cable, Ridgeway edged forward towards the jagged rip in the floor. Ahead and to the left he could see into the next room where the fissure continued fully across and beyond. The ceiling had been badly warped where the rising girder passed through it and into levels above.

  Darcy's voice floated across the comm, "That took a helluva push."

  Ridgeway glanced back to see the sniper stretched prone atop a pile of wreckage where the unblinking orb of a riflescope tracked his every move. The rifle represented the only support he could expect to safely thread the maze in the event of a sudden threat. The company brought a shred of comfort to a very uncomfortable world.

  "Yeah," he replied as he stepped over a buckled floor plate and braced his right foot against a section of exposed bulkhead. "This damage isn't like anything I've ever seen." He leaned over a folded steel rod roughly the diameter of his arm. "I can't find any trace of scorching."

  "Roger that," Darcy concurred. "I've got no explosive signature at all, no energy weapon residue. It's like something with really big hands just grabbed the boat and squeezed."

  Ridgeway leaned on a twisted crossbrace as he clambered up onto the girder. A crevasse yawned below that passed through a couple of decks. He leaned forward to assess the depth.

  Shit, that's some hole. The thought had barely crossed his mind when the duct crumpled with a short high-pitched squeal. Ridgeway pitched forward as a dark blur whistled up from below.

  "Duck!" Darcy's warning cut sharply through the noise.

  Ridgeway dropped to his knee as a snakelike tendril whipped over his skull, vomiting a cloud of white vapor. The Marine swung fiercely with the back of his fist but struck only air. His boot lost traction and he skidded hard on the metal beam. Off balance, Ridgeway's gauntlet flashed again and snapped on the bullwhip trace as it darted into range. Braided steel crushed flat in his grip, stifling the release of pneumatic gas.

  Clutching the girder fiercely with his free hand, Ridgeway looked at the hose in his grasp. A silky voice chuckled in his ear. "Good thing it wasn't a snake."

  "Har har," he replied slowly as he knotted the severed line. "I don't suppose you have anything useful to add?"

  "Not unless you plan on wrestling something bigger than an air hose," Darcy chided, "If you do, you let me know."

  Wobbling slightly, Ridgeway paused before rising once more to a low kneel. "Good to know you're backing me up."

  "Always there for ya."

  Ridgeway smiled in spite of himself as he shifted back to the immediate problem. A gap of some seven meters separated him from the far side of the metal canyon. Given the extent of the damage, he figured he'd need to cover another meter or two to reach solid floor.

  Nine meters, Ridgeway considered, a tough jump from a narrow perch, but not impossible.

  The twisted corridor beyond did not appear to harbor additional fissures like the one below him. Ridgeway's mind played out the crossing; a long dive into a forward roll would carry him beyond the bulwark of wreckage and back onto solid deck.

  Hunkering down, Ridgeway coiled his body, hands clamped on the edge of the girder. Loose cables hung off to the left along the rise of the beam, tangled amid the tundra of floor plates and heavy grid panels. To the right, the gap beckoned.

  Ridgeway's hands snapped open, his legs driving hard as Darcy's voice barked "Hold it!"

  The words came too late as Ridgeway's powerful legs pistoned out, driving his armored form across the divide. He sailed over the mangled floor, over the huge elliptical coil torn from it's moorings. The gravitic coil for the floor ahead.

  In mid-leap the Marine felt a sickening lurch of equilibrium as the direction of gravity shifted unexpectedly. His trajectory changed just as abruptly. Body twisting, he slammed shoulder-first off the side wall and down into the crevasse. Without so much as a curse, Dan Ridgeway tumbled out of sight in a blur of snapping cables and banging metal.

  CHAPTER 27

  Footsteps crossed the metal floor above Jenner's head, the slow tread of a predator. Though he longed to breathe, he didn't dare, and his lungs screamed for the air just beyond his clenched teeth. Instead he inched backward, wedging his body even further beneath the angled girder.

  Jenner's belly growled, the sound of a disgruntled animal that moaned fitfully. He clutched at his gut, hoping to stifle the gastric tremor. Overhead, the footsteps suddenly paused.

  ohshit. ohshit. ohshit.

  A vibration ran down the girder, noticed only because his spine was plastered against the cold metal surface. One step, followed by a second. Someone was climbing onto the beam just a few feet overhead. A tremor radiated from Jenner's core and he bit down on his new lip, eyes screwed shut as a third footfall carried down the beam's length.

  He almost cried out when the squeal of friction matched the sudden hiss of venting gas. Something heavy banged into the girder. Hidden in the darkness Jenner could feel the flurry of motion before the angry hiss sputtered into silence. Only then did he hear the voice, faint and muffled. Too deep for the girl, not deep enough for Monster. Ridgeway maybe, not that it mattered. Whoever found him, Jenner was sure he'd end up dead all the same.

  At least it wouldn't hurt, he noted with resignation. Not much of anything seemed to hurt anymore.

  Jenner glanced down at the ragged flap of meat stretched across his right forearm. Only a few hours had elapsed since the Sickbay ceiling collapsed without warning. A piece of falling metal had cut h
is arm open to the bone. Now it didn't even bleed.

  Jenner's leg pressed against the warmth of a thick insulated cable. Reflexively edging toward the heat, Jenner felt the onset of sluggishness. He huddled quietly and drew his arms tight across his chest. Warmth was important, somehow it helped the healing. More a dawning conviction than a fact he could state with certainty, Jenner chalked the notion up as one of the many new instincts he had developed lately.

  Maybe the voices told me, Jenner thought dully. Certain at first that the sounds in his head marked the erosion of sanity, Jenner had since come to accept the guttural noises as real. Voices, he concluded, growing louder.

  They spoke in no discernible language, yet Jenner found himself able to divine their meaning with increasing clarity. For one thing they were hungry, ravenously so. They were also very, very angry.

  Jenner's head bobbed and his eyelids drooped. Dim images flickered unbidden into his mind, visions blurred beneath the weight of time. He remembered the ship long ago, brightly lit, people crowding her corridors. He could recall the terrible violence that left her a crushed and twisted wreck. The darkness. The cold. The screams.

  Struggling to think clearly, he wondered if this was all not just some horrible dream from which he would soon awaken. Maybe he was still in that dumpster on Los Gatos, strung out on Rage and having the hallucination of a lifetime. Jenner focused on the pinpoints of ember-glow burning brightly beneath the tattered skin of his right arm.

  This shit's way too real to have crawled out of my imagination.

  He prodded the wound with a fingertip. Very little blood seeped from beneath the clotted seam.

  Quick little fuckers, Jenner mused, watching the dim incandescence of a microscopic repair crew hard at work. The question of raw material seemed less a sticking point since his second run on the table. Like the syntheskin bandage, patches of his shirt had been... eaten? Absorbed at least, and put to use in the repair process. A strip of living skin on his arm carried the shirt's pattern and color, even its fabric feel.

  Tracking down the arm, Jenner looked at the new fingers that extended from his hand. He didn't need the medic to tell him that they weren't made of normal flesh and bone. Smears of plastic and fiber melded seamlessly with skin and nail. Apparently the bugs in his system had shed any reluctance about non-human materials. Jenner quietly imagined himself one day as a shambling heap of scrap plastics and textile fibers. The image drove a chill up his spine.

  A train-wreck of sound erupted from above, plummeting quickly. Before Jenner could grasp the origin, it passed by, a grey blur that crashed down into the decks below. Shouts and the heavy tread of rushing boots stormed in, making no pretense of stealth. The activity centered on whatever, or more likely whoever, just fell through the torn floor.

  Adrenaline surged in Jenner's veins. Under the concealing blanket of chaos he slithered forward and pulled himself quickly into an open crawlspace. Heading to starboard, he scrabbled through the wreckage, gathering speed as he moved.

  Just gotta dodge the Marines a little longer, he thought with a sardonic smile. The others are almost here.

  CHAPTER 28

  "Major! You all right?" the voice echoed down the metal crevasse. "Looks like you hit a gap in the AG."

  "No shit." Ridgeway cursed under his breath as he twisted his body in a hammock of rubber-clad cables. With every motion, water dripped in shifting streams. A loud pop cut the air just above his head and sparks showered down through the darkness like dying fireflies.

  Caught your ass by surprise, didn't it? Ridgeway's lip pulled back in a sneer of self-reproach. In space, hitting an AG void would have extended his leap until he hit a wall or another source of gravity. But when the ship's AG failed here, the planet's gravity took over. Ridgeway had felt the sudden shift in mid-jump when the invisible force pulled his body abruptly off-course. The rest was just inertia; six hundred pounds of armored Marine didn't stop on a dime.

  Sheer luck alone kept him from plowing into something lethal. As he tumbled down the gaping fissure, Ridgeway ping-ponged off the walls like a crash test dummy. Hitting an open source of high voltage could have ruined his day.

  Then again, he reminded himself, hitting nothing at all could have been worse. Punching down through the ceiling of the Lobby would have really sucked. Ridgeway's brief thought took on a grimly prophetic air when he realized that he had no real idea what, if anything, was beneath him.

  Another violent pop of electricity flashed somewhere to Ridgeway's left. White-orange sparks skipped like burning pachinko balls through the tangle of wires.

  "Yeah, yeah, I'm moving," Ridgeway snarled as he pushed through a veil of cables. He peered out from the web and realized that he hung inverted, perhaps five meters above a curved metal ledge. The room beyond was too large to estimate from his current position.

  With a powerful heave Ridgeway expanded the gap between the cables. A metal junction box, roughly the size of his helmet, tumbled free from the knotted mass. It dropped straight to the floor below with a loud bang, bounding once before it came to rest.

  "Looks like the AG is all right down here," Ridgeway reported dryly, grunting as he twisted his upper body against the confining loops. Still another crack of voltage jumped just to the right of his head, the arc a vivid blue-white in color.

  OK. That's enough of this shit.

  With his left hand, Ridgeway grabbed a fistful of thick, rubbery cable. Drawing right hand to his chest the Marine snapped out a climbing blade and swiped viciously. The strands parted in a blur and Ridgeway felt himself slide free. His firm grasp arrested his upper body's descent and allowed his feet to swing beneath him. In a fluid motion, Ridgeway opened his left hand and dropped into a cautious kneel on the balcony floor below.

  With a harsh electric crunk, hundreds of lights came on as one. Ridgeway's right hand instinctively swept back where his fingers closed on a familiar grip. The carbine swung up in his grasp as he quickly backed against the nearest wall.

  "You coming back up, Major?"

  "Negative," Ridgeway's voice held an odd note of awe. "We've got something here."

  But I'll be damned if I know what the hell it is.

  The walls of the room formed the curved inner surface of a huge sphere, easily a hundred meters in diameter. Ridgeway stood on the topmost of several balconies that wrapped fully around the room. The railed ledges, three in all, were evenly spaced along the vertical height.

  Much of the sweeping wall was composed of hexagonal plates, each with what appeared to be a small window set in its center. Judging from the wide hinges and heavy lock-handles, the plates were pressure-seal doors. A rectangular LCD panel was affixed above each door, some glowing brightly while others flickered or remained dark. A number of the doors hung open and many oozed a soft white vapor that crept down the sphere's inner surface with ethereal deliberation.

  In the middle of the room, a pair of heavy rails ran up to the centerline, pole to pole on the sphere. Ridgeway could see streaks of lubricant gleaming black against the steely silver. The rails passed through a heavy crane parked near the roof. The orange and black boom ended in an articulated forklift of some sort, but the appendage sported three heavy forklift blades instead of the traditional two. The opposing boom carried a sizable counterweight, presumably to balance the crane-arm at full extension. A coil of thick pneumatic line hung from the ceiling and looped lazily into the crane's motor housing.

  Reversing direction, Ridgeway followed the lift rails all the way down to the floor. From his vantage point, the bottom of the sphere was a Sargasso of tangled wires thick enough to daunt the most aspiring engineer. Vapor seeping down the walls coalesced amid the cables, adding to the oceanic illusion.

  An island rose from this sea, a mass of electronics roughly ten meters in diameter. CRT screens grew like barnacles in haphazard clusters, plastered atop the dead parts of older equipment. Even here, cables snaked through every gap, black rubber eels in an artificial reef. Ridgeway g
uessed that parts of the haphazard construct were held together with little more than baling wire and duct tape.

  "Merlin's just gonna love this," Ridgeway drawled, gazing at the abstract sculpture of electronics.

  As if invoking an ancient spirit by speaking its name, a resounding metal clang marked Merlin's arrival.

  "Damn," the engineer grumbled absent-mindedly as he rose to his feet, "that's one hell of a way to--" He paused, voice dropping in tone as he scanned the sphere. "What the hell is this?"

  "Damn good question," Ridgeway replied casually, still looking down at the floor far below. "I'm counting on you to figure it out."

  Ridgeway pointed down to the hummock of machinery rising from the fog. "The Island," he stated firmly, indicating the new callsign. As he uttered the words, a matching reference appeared on the TAC. "Darcy thinks someone is inbound to evac the Rimmer from someplace called the sphere. Unless there's two of these, I'd say this is a good candidate. If they have a way in, we have a way out."

  He turned to Merlin. "The Island looks like a command center of some sort. We need eyes Merlin, as many as we can get. These bastards may try to slip in and out on us. If they pull it off, we're screwed."

  A much larger bang marked Monster's none-too-delicate arrival. Stitch and Taz followed suit and spaced out along the balcony. Noting a distinct absence, Ridgeway turned to Monster. "Where's Darcy?"

  "Perimeter sweep," he replied, drawing a short circle in the air with his left hand. "Got one of her voodoo feelings and went to check it out."

  A curse formed, then faded, on Ridgeway's lips. He thought for a moment of calling her back, reconsidered, then dismissed the thought entirely. Unable to comprehend her expanded senses, he had little choice but to trust her judgment. Time to work with what he did understand.