“I think I have found something,” said Burner. “It may be a hatch.”
“Any way to open it?”
“This is what looks like a control panel, but I do not understand it.”
“Show me the edges.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Take my hand and move it around the edges of the hatch.”
“Oh.”
Bruiser bent down, took hold of Caden’s wrist, and moved his hand across the hull. Caden reached out his fingers, and even through his glove he felt the distinctive raised lip of a panel in the hull.
“Okay. Not a problem.”
Caden fished in the pouches on his armour until he found a tube of explosive gel.
He stopped. Ren would have stashed that for him.
“What is that?”
“Explosive,” he said. “We’ll blow the hatch. Shouldn’t be a problem.”
“What if this whole splinter comes down?”
“Look around, Bruiser,” said Caden. “Plenty more to choose from.”
It was tricky, sliding one hand along the rim as a guide, and squeezing out a thick line of gel with the other, but as far as he could tell he managed it. Just as long as I’m not covered in it, he thought, and pressed a detonator into the goo.
“I suggest we move,” he told Bruiser.
The Rodori guided him to the far side of the next splinter, and Caden triggered the detonator. The bang was short and sudden, followed by the short-lived pattering of debris landing somewhere farther away.
When they returned, Bruiser seemed pleased.
“That explosive worked well,” he said. “We have an entrance.”
“I have IR switched on,” said Caden, “but I don’t know how effective it’s going to be.”
“I will take the lead.”
Bruiser made as if to climb through the hole in the splinter’s hull, hefting the Kodiak hatch on his left arm and reaching for the hull with his right. He was close enough now for Caden to get a good look at it: a trapezoidal metal panel, with the words ‘K/GTV 5-3-60: EVAC’ stencilled on it in white paint. Beneath that were the words ‘Keep Clear’.
Keep clear indeed.
“Bruiser, wait.”
“What is it, Caden?”
“That… thing you have there…”
“My shield?”
“Yes. Is that all you’re armed with?”
“It was enough before.”
“That is true I guess. I’d be happier though if you had something with a bit more… range.”
He pulled the pistol from his thigh holster and handed it to the Rodori, then used his holo to authorise Bruiser as a user.
“This is a toy,” said Bruiser. “My weapons are custom.”
“Just keep hold of it, alright? I don’t want either of us dying just because you couldn’t shoot at something.”
Bruiser stashed the pistol and climbed into the splinter. He reached out, found Caden’s hand, and pulled him in.
Mist was diffusing already into the atmosphere inside the splinter, but Caden could at least now see something with the visor’s vision enhancements. They were in a short access tunnel which appeared to connect to a larger passageway up ahead. He wondered why there was no airlock.
“I see no hotspots,” said Bruiser.
“Me neither. Let’s move.”
Bruiser took the lead, his shield held in front of his chest, and Caden followed. The Rodori had to bend over to fit through the access tunnel, and it was not until he had checked both ways and crept out into the larger passageway that he was able to stand upright.
“I think we’re standing on a wall,” said Caden. “This thing must be loaded when it’s horizontal.”
“That means this passageway usually runs vertically?”
“Not exactly. It’s curved like the hull; it’s a ring.”
“Then how would you normally walk around it?”
“Zero gee maybe?” Caden said. “Which way do you think? We’re going to end up back here eventually, either way.”
Bruiser looked this way and that. “I do not know.”
“Let’s think this through,” said Caden. “Rearmost compartments will be power, engines, and whatever reaction system this thing uses. Probably life support systems next to that. They could take up a quarter of the full length between them. Frontmost compartment will be some kind of armour, uninhabitable, because this thing is designed to hit the ground. Probably another smaller reaction control system behind that—”
“How do you know all of this?”
“It just makes sense. There are certain engineering conventions for spacecraft and landers which are pretty much unavoidable.”
“But this splinter is alien.”
“So? Physics is universal.”
Bruiser went quiet.
“We entered around about the middle, if it’s the same size as the ones we saw at Meccrace. So all the interesting stuff will probably be in the compartments above and below us.”
“Then it does not matter which way we go.”
“True.”
“It took a lot of talking to work that out.”
“Up?”
“Up.”
They walked around the ring passageway until they saw the mouth of a side-tunnel disappearing into darkness above them. Bruiser boosted Caden up until he could wedge himself in the gap, directly beneath a closed pressure hatch.
Caden felt around until his fingers closed on a protrusion, and he pulled on it this way and that until it moved. The hatch slid soundlessly open above him, and he lifted his head cautiously through the gap. As far as he could tell, there was nothing moving and no sound.
“Clear,” he said through his link. “I think.”
He pulled himself up through the hatch, sitting beside it on what he considered to be the wall of the next compartment, and waited for Bruiser to haul his body up through the gap. It took some doing for the Rodori to gain enough purchase to reach the hatch.
“That was not easy,” said Bruiser.
“Look at it this way,” said Caden. “If we have to leave in a hurry, you won’t need to do that again. You can just fall through.”
“Winner.”
Caden suspected he had picked that up from Bro.
“What is this place?” Bruiser asked.
“Well, if the ship were horizontal we’d now be in a longitudinal passageway just aft of that ring. Only this one has hatches to the interior.”
He shone his rifle’s torch along the convex inner bulkhead, up into the darkness, letting the pool of light linger on one hatch after the other.
“They are not marked.”
“No, no they are not. Which to me suggests they are not crew facilities. Wanna go in?”
“Of course.”
• • •
The air inside the inner chamber had changed drastically, Bruiser noticed. His visor threw up some environmental information for him, highlighting the huge increase in humidity and the shift in temperature. It also registered several organic compounds, but before he had the time to read them off—
“Caden,” he said, quietly. “Company.”
“Where?”
“Up high.”
“I’m not seeing anything…”
Bruiser reached for the pistol Caden had given him, pulled it from his holster with his entire hand wrapped around the barrel and grip. He tried to squeeze a digit between the trigger and the guard, to no avail. The trigger creaked; had the safety not been engaged he would have fired a round into the bulkhead.
“This gun is no good,” he said.
He jammed the weapon back into Caden’s holster, placed his shield by his feet, then grabbed the Shard’s arms and pointed Caden’s rifle for him.
“They are up there.”
“Bruiser, I don’t see anything… not even in the infrared.”
“I can see them. Trust me.”
“I do, but—”
“Short burst now.”
> Caden squeezed the trigger, and Bruiser felt the shots.
The whole chamber felt as though it were vibrating with the haunting, resonant howl of the damned.
“Shaeld?” Caden shouted.
Bruiser pulled Caden’s arms to the left, yanked them up, settled, and told him to fire again.
“That was a miss.”
“Bruiser, how many? Talk to me!”
The Rodori moved again, swinging farther left and telling Caden when to fire.
“These three were waiting— fire,” he said. Another burst, another baleful, soul-wrenching sound. “I think they were sleeping. These creatures could indeed be your Shaeld Hratha.”
“Kills?”
“I think one. Two more still moving. Fire!”
Caden shot off another burst, gave it a second for good measure.
“This one is the last one… too late!”
Bruiser shoved Caden to one side, pushing him against the bulkhead, and grabbed his shield from the deck. He swung it upwards, straight into the face of the creature that leapt for him.
What he saw just before that moment was unlike anything he had encountered before.
The Shaeld propelled itself from the bulkhead on Bruiser’s right, launching off the wall with its two rearmost pairs of limbs. The two front limbs were already reaching for Bruiser, talons curving inwards, and as the creature became airborne its middle pair of limbs angled forwards to also reach for him.
The size of it was surprising. Moving around on the overhead and bulkheads it had not seemed so large, but now he guessed it was perhaps even longer than he was tall.
And that face. A tiny-mouthed, skin-webbed face, crested with what looked like an air sac, with two fathomless, featureless black eyes in which he could see his own reflection. A face only a mother could love, into which the Kodiak hatch ploughed with a satisfying scrunch.
Bruiser felt the weight of the creature ram against the shield, tensed his arms and moved one foot behind him, but was shoved backwards all the same. He heaved on the shield with both arms, diverted the mass to one side.
The Shaeld Hratha landed on the deck next to him, tried to get up. He smashed its skull in.
“This one is dead too.”
“Any others?”
Bruiser looked around, peering into the darkness. The Shaeld had been easy for him to see against the environment; he saw no signs at all that any others were nearby.
“I do not think so.”
Caden moved closer, edged around Bruiser, and put his hands out in front of him.
“Where is it?”
“You can still not see it?”
“No.”
Bruiser guided him forwards until Caden’s boot nudged against the flank of the dead Shaeld Hratha. The Shard reached down and touched it.
“It’s so weird,” said Caden. “I can feel it right there, but my eyes are telling my brain there’s an air gap and then deck plates.”
He shoved hard with both hands, and Bruiser could plainly see the creature’s muscles bending under the pressure.
“Weirder still! I saw the deck plates distorting, then they returned to normal even though I was still pressing. It must be some kind of adaptive camouflage. That’s utterly incredible. I wonder how this thing even evolved?”
“Perhaps this thing did not evolve,” Bruiser suggested.
“Maybe not, but it would be more interesting if it did. Puts our skinprinting tech to shame, and that’s not half bad at all in a fight.”
“These Shaeld Hratha will be difficult to fight if they do not show up on your visor.”
“You said it Biggun. Wait… I can see something.”
Bruiser watched, but saw nothing happen. Caden, on the other hand, was beginning to hop from one foot to the other like an excited child.
“It’s appearing right in front of me! The cells must be dying. Bruiser, I think it’s a bit like an octopus. Cells in the skin, pigments. I wonder how it reads the environment? Hexapod; don’t see that too often. Oh my worlds, check out that colouration. It looks like an amphibian.”
Bruiser wondered at which point it was exactly that Caden had forgotten why there were there.
“What is an octopus?”
“Oh, we are having this,” said the Shard.
“We will come back for it,” Bruiser said. “This chamber is tall.”
Caden looked at Bruiser for a split-second, as if he wondered what the Rodori was talking about, then shone his rifle’s light in the direction Bruiser was looking.
“Oh… yeah.”
The compartment was enormous. Roughly cylindrical, with half-platforms positioned at offset angles throughout its height, Bruiser guessed it must extend up all the way to the drive section. The half-platforms, he imagined, would aid safe movement through the chamber.
And it was not empty.
“What in the worlds are those?”
“I do not know, Caden.”
Bruiser followed the Shard across the deck, climbed up onto the first of the half-platforms, and into what he could only describe as an open, moulded container. The entire thing was honeycombed, padded with a gel-like material, and inside each honeycomb…
“Bruiser, these are eggs.”
“Eggs?”
“Eggs. Presumably Shaeld Hrathan offspring.”
Caden left him there, staring at the rows and rows of pearlescent, white-orange orbs, and hurriedly climbed between some of the other half-platforms.
“They’re everywhere,” Caden’s voice came through the link. “This is some kind of hatchery.”
“Why would they drop hatcheries onto our planets?”
“No idea,” Caden said. He came back to where Bruiser was still standing, slapped the Rodori’s hand away as he reached for one of the eggs.
“Why—?”
“Just a feeling,” Caden said. He looked thoughtful. “Eggs… eggs. I doubt these are soldiers; everything we’ve seen so far suggests the Shaeld are risk-averse. We’ve barely even had contact with them. I think they’re using Thralls as cannon fodder, to preserve their own lives.”
“Perhaps their numbers are few.”
“I don’t think so. What about the giant ships? How many of them does it take to keep things like that running?”
“I do not know.”
“There’s a lot we don’t know. Far too much.”
Caden turned a full circle, sending a bright white beam around the compartment. He angled it up, and the beam was lost in the darkness.
“Okay Bruiser, we’re taking samples. We’ll have all three of those Shaeld you wasted, and as many eggs as the chumps outside can carry.”
“This is what you came for?”
“Not really what I was expecting, but yes. I would definitely call this ‘mission accomplished’. Once we get these things to a lab we might start getting some answers.”
• • •
Eilentes waited patiently for Caden to return, trying her hardest not to let the surreal surroundings get to her.
Behind her, the trunk of a grounding splinter rose from the cratered ground like the technological beanstalk of some twisted dream. The larger rocks around it were scorched, shattered; the smaller ones scattered around the impact site. Withered, blackened grasses ringed each impact.
All around her waited Tankers and what soldiers remained from the column. Only those closest to her were even visible; the others were either dark phantoms swaying in the thick fog, or too far away for her to see them through the pall.
She did not know the dead. She wondered if anyone had actually gathered names yet.
Dyne, she knew, was one of the ghostly shapes. She had seen him get close, then — after they made eye contact — he had slunk off again. There would have been awkward questions, after all: he knew it, she knew it, and he knew that she knew it. Where were you, Dyne? Didn’t see you going loco out there, Dyne. Why was it up to Bruiser to save Caden’s skin, Dyne?
He could wait.
Her li
nk chirruped, and her holo passed the information card to her visor display. Feior… the Tanker sergeant. What did he want?
“Sergeant?”
“You okay, Ma’am?”
“Yes, thank you. Um… are you?”
“Couldn’t be better. Get a load of this mist though.”
Given their situation, she could not quite believe this conversation was actually happening. Ham-fisted, weather-based flirting from a Tanker.
“Yes, it’s… really something.”
“I know something else that’s really something.”
The corniness made her squeeze her eyes shut. She struggled not to burst out laughing over the link.
“Really, what’s that?”
She braced herself for the inevitable.
“You.”
Even though Eilentes had known that was coming, she still struggled to think of a suitable answer. Several crushing retorts floated to the surface, but she might yet need Feior’s good will to help her get off the planet alive.
“Err…”
“When this is over, wanna hook up?”
“I’m not so sure that’s a good—”
“I’ll show you why they call me The Fist.”
Worlds!
“I really don’t think this is the time, Sergeant.”
She killed the call.
“—lentes, you listening?”
Caden.
“Sorry, was in a different call. Go on.”
“We’re on our way back out. Gonna need some help in here.”
“Help with what?”
“Spoils. Come see.”
She stumbled towards the splinter, circled it until she found the wound Caden’s explosives had inflicted, and climbed in. What greeted her could have come from the darkest abyssal depths of her worst nightmares.
She fell out of the aperture, onto her backside, and heard Caden’s laughter over the link, all but drowned out by a throaty, resonant hoot which — even in her shocked state — she realised must have been Bruiser.
They appeared in the mouth of the opening, hauling the body of a dead creature between them.
“You utter fucks,” she said.
“Your face,” Caden gasped.
Bruiser heaved the creature forwards, and it slid out of the hatchway and onto the ground. Its head, already deeply wounded by a blunt impact, hit the rock with a wet crunch.
Books One to Three Omnibus (Armada Wars) Page 76
