Doom

by John Shirley

  Now, looking around in this ghostly archaeological workroom on a faraway world, he thought: Along comes Destroyer—then there goes Destroyer. He’s dead…

  Tears welled in the Kid’s eyes. He was glad he was alone, now. If they saw him crying—even for a combat brother—he’d never hear the end of it.

  But Destroyer had been the closest thing to a big brother he’d ever had…best combat teacher anyone could want.

  He let out one last shuddering sob, wiped his eyes, and decided that Destroyer wouldn’t want him bawling like this. So he cussed himself out for a minute, squared his shoulders, and went to check out the dead guys.

  Wondering, as he went, if he’d ever see his woman again. Millie—a nurse back home. Nice girl. What would she think of all this?

  Crossing the room he walked past a neat row of heavy-duty chain saws, numbered sequentially, “9, 8, 7…5…4…3…”

  What’d they needed chain saws here for? Weren’t chain saws for wood?

  He went to where Sarge had told him, on the comm, he’d find the bodies of Clay and Thurman. He found the blood, all right, and plenty of it. But there was a problem about the bodies.

  He touched the headset transfer. “Sarge? We got a problem…”

  It was a simple little problem. He’d been sent there to find some bodies.

  The bodies were gone. Some other place, you’d think: They’re dead bodies, they couldn’t just get up and walk away.

  But here—they could do exactly that.

  In the wormhole chamber, Pinky was fumbling with the med-remote on his wristband, trying to adjust the antidepressant and analgesic feed on his cyberchair. He was running short of the pharms—should’ve checked the implant panel that morning. He needed a little something extra to get through this.

  If he could just see Samantha, see her walk through the door and into the Ark. See her get safely home. She was like an adopted sister to him.

  He’d never let himself fall for her, of course. He didn’t have a lower half. You proved your love, for the most part, with your lower half. Intimacy started in your lower half and traveled upward—he remembered it, from other women, before the accident. Now he’d never feel it again.

  Still, it tormented him thinking that Samantha was probably going to die in this interplanetary limbo. Some nightmare from Carmack’s lab was likely to get to her. Tear her to pieces. Or worse—from what he’d been gleaning, over the comm—it could make her into a monster.

  He almost threw up, at that thought, and tapped the remote again, squeezing another few drops of trank into his system.

  The meds weren’t working today.

  He ached to get out of here, detach from his cyberchair, hook up into his life-support recliner, go to sleep for a day or two. But he was needed. And anyway, he was afraid of the nightmares that would come if he slept. He knew the nightmares were there, stored up in his head, waiting to spring at him the way the imps were waiting to kill the others.

  It bothered him that he was safe here while they were all at risk. He went to the computer console, thinking that it was bad enough being handicapped, trapped the way he was in this machine, without facing the same dangers the others faced…

  That’s when he heard the sound outside the big, locked metal door. Sounded like an engine starting up. Then another sound, a squealing of metal on metal: something grinding against the thick steel of the door.

  Okay. So maybe he wasn’t safe here after all.

  “Sarge?” Pinky said into the comm. “Something’s outside the Ark door—is that you guys?”

  “Negative,” Sarge responded immediately. “We’re still in the lab.”

  If it wasn’t them…and everyone else was dead…

  “I was afraid you’d say that,” Pinky said, as something on the other side of the door began to cut its way into the wormhole chamber.

  Thirteen

  IN CARMACK’S LAB, nothing was really resolved between Sarge and Reaper—but the new crisis, a possible assault on the Ark itself, superseded everything else.

  “Reaper, let’s go,” Sarge said, slapping a fresh clip into his rifle.

  Reaper read him to mean they were going to check out whatever was trying to get at Pinky. Which meant only the squadron was going.

  “She’s coming with us,” Reaper said, nodding toward his sister.

  Sarge shook his head, just once. “Negative.”

  “We’re gonna leave her here alone?”

  “She’s got a job to do, Reaper. Just like you have.”

  Reaper could tell that Duke clearly didn’t like the idea of leaving Sam either. But he only shrugged at Reaper. He wasn’t going to argue with Sarge.

  Sam was engrossed in a computer file, trying to reach some deeper understanding of the phenomena of the imps and the Hell Knight. “Carmack’s happy little elves,” Duke had called them.

  “Sam…” Reaper began. Not sure what he wanted to say.

  “I’ll be okay, John,” she said distractedly. “Go.” She was leaning close to the monitor, fascinated by some DNA signature, some nuance of the chromosomes that was all cryptic code to Reaper and an open book to her. Sam had come a long way as a scientist, he thought. And once more he felt a rush of admiration for his sister…

  Sarge looked at him. Almost expressionless—but it was a warning. Reaper couldn’t shake his bad feeling about leaving Sam. But it was hard for him to let his squadron go into a probable firefight situation without him.

  He tossed his sister his comm headset. “Keep the door locked,” he told her. “Don’t open it to anyone. Use this if you need help…”

  She glanced up, nodding. For a moment their eyes locked. She looked as if she wanted to say something…something that bridged the gulf of years, reached back to their childhood together. To the times when they’d made their own action figures out of bits of old cleaning robots; when they’d watched old movies on the digital feed; when they’d toyed with being musicians together, him playing his crude guitar, she banging on a cheap little electric piano, laughing when she hit a sour chord…

  That laughing little girl. And he was leaving her alone in here.

  Sarge was heading for the door. Duke hesitating—looking between Reaper and his sister. Reaper sighed and nodded to Duke.

  They followed Sarge into the corridor. Sarge signaled them to double-time it, and they began to run.

  Pinky stared in fascination at the rock-saw blade pushing its whirring snout into the wormhole chamber, roaring and squealing as it cut through the door. Sparks rooster-tailed into the room, metal grit accumulated on the floor under the diamond-tipped chain saw as it cut out a good-sized, jagged-edged circle. It was obviously cutting an entry into the room—a doorway, big enough for something large to climb through.

  “Pinky?” came Sarge’s voice, over the comm almost lost in the screech of the chain saw gnawing at the metal. “Do you have a visual?”

  “Oh, I got a visual all right,” Pinky said, in chilling understatement.

  He had a pistol already on the computer table beside him. Doubted it would be of much use.

  Staring at the growing, smoking breach in the door, Pinky reached down to the bag of ST grenades Mac had given him, having to strain to reach it from the cyberchair. Picturing himself popping from the chair like a cork from a bottle if he went too far…just caught the edge of the bag with two fingers, worked it up to a better grip, pulled the sack of grenades onto his synthetic lap.

  He pulled one out, and got it ready in his right hand, held the pistol in his left…

  Heard Sarge shouting in the comm as he and Reaper and Duke ran down the corridors to the atrium:

  “Don’t let it get into the Ark!”

  Amen to that, Pinky thought. But it’s just about too late for that, too…probably too late for all of us…

  The saw finished its circular cut. The metal from the hole vibrated like a dull gong, then fell into the chamber, clattering. The rough edges of the hole smoked.

  Pinky
waited, staring at the hole, sweat making the grip of the gun slippery in his hands.

  Then the thing showed itself.

  Pinky screamed—and fired.

  “Use the grenade!” Sarge shouted into the comm as he and Reaper and Duke ran into the atrium. The Kid came running from the dig tunnel as Sarge again urged Pinky, “Use the goddamn grenade!”

  Ahead was the door into the Ark chamber. There was a hole cut in the enormous metal door—from the look of it, Reaper figured they’d used a diamond-frosted chain saw. The chain saws were used by archaeological engineers to saw through the metal walls of some of the ancient Olduvaian structures, and to free things trapped in stone, Reaper remembered. He’d noticed them in the mudroom. Hadn’t thought for a moment they’d ever be applied here.

  If those things had gotten to the Ark—to the wormhole that leapt through space, to Earth—then they’d gotten to the UAC compound at Papoose Lake.

  And there was a whole planetful of people to infect, to transform, waiting there. Most of them without a clue that they were about to be invaded by a kind of vicious genetic aberration, a thinking infection from a distant world.

  Only—the horror didn’t come from an alien world, not entirely. It had been created by a fusion of human science and the lore of the long-dead savants of Olduvai.

  Pistol fire cracked from beyond the hole cut in the metal door. Then two flashes of color-challenged light…the weird light, all colors and none, that they remembered from the Ark.

  Sarge got there first, fairly diving through the hole. The other three followed—and found the wormhole chamber deserted.

  No Pinky, no chain saw, no crazed scientists, no imps, no Hell Knight. Just a grenade, twirling slowly on the floor, where it’d been dropped—unused.

  They stared…Duke was the one who said it for all of them. “Jesus. It’s home. It got through.”

  Sarge took a deep breath. His voice was almost a monotone. “We gotta stop it before it gets out of the home-side compound.” He looked at Duke and Reaper and the Kid, one after the other. “Are we ready?”

  But Reaper was thinking about his sister. “Sam?” he called into the headset comm. “Sam—do you read me? Over.” Nothing. Just static in his ears. He felt a wave of desperation. A sinking feeling of defeat. First this planet had gotten his parents…now maybe his sister. “Sam? Do you read me? Over!”

  Sarge was reloading his gun. Acting like he didn’t hear Reaper, like it was not his concern.

  Reaper licked his lips, watching Sarge as he waited for a reply on the comm. Was he going to have to choose between protecting his world—and his sister? “She’s not answering…Sam? Do you read me? Sam!”

  Sarge started for the Ark. “Lock and load.”

  Reaper knew what that meant. It was Sarge’s succinct way of saying that Sam was a lost cause. They had a bigger mission to think about, responsibilities that went way beyond the personal.

  Reaper knew he should go along with that decision. But he wasn’t sure he was capable of it. Maybe she was dead—but maybe not. He just couldn’t leave her behind, no matter what the stakes. It just wasn’t in him to do that.

  That’s when the lights around the wormhole went dim. Flickered. Came back on…

  And then switched off. They were left in near-complete darkness.

  “What the fuck is that?” Duke demanded. As if anyone there had the answer.

  A soothing female voice issued from the PA system:

  “System reboot…”

  And the lights came back on.

  “Quarantine is breached,” Sarge declared. “This mission is no longer containment. Double in, gather up all the weapons and ammo you can find.”

  “Sam!” Reaper yelled into the comm. “Do you read me? Over!”

  Only static replied.

  The soothing digital lady intoned, “…Time required to begin renewed operation. Five minutes…”

  Reaper looked at Sarge, waiting.

  Sarge said, “You got three.”

  Reaper thought about arguing, but there would be none with Sarge. He had three minutes to find Sam and get her back to the Ark.

  He ran to the door, climbed through, and sprinted across the empty atrium—half-expecting, in this wide open, shadowy space, that something was going to rush him, rip at him with claws of razor-sharp hardened bone, pierce his throat with a lancing barbed tongue.

  But he made it to the air lock, sprinted through it, found himself in the corridor leading to Carmack’s lab.

  Seemed to take a lot longer to get there than he remembered—and he was running full tilt, his weapon heavy in his hands, breath burning in his lungs, heart pounding in his ears. Long time since he ran track as a kid.

  He remembered when he was a boy, before they’d gone to Mars, he and Samantha had been back home, without their parents, staying with an older cousin. He’d won a ribbon in track. He’d hoped his dad would hear of it, say something. Transmit his pride to his son. Nothing. He’d been pretty bummed out—hadn’t heard from Mom or Dad in a while. Hadn’t said anything about it to anyone, but his sister had watched him, and saw how he felt.

  Then he’d gotten an interworld e-mail from Dad. “Heard about your triumph in track. Doesn’t surprise me when you do well at anything—always been proud of you. Congratulations. Love, Dad…”

  He felt better. It was several years before he realized that his sister—clever with computers—had faked it up, managed to send it to him as if from Dad.

  Christ. Sam…

  And the worst thing was what had happened to their relationship when their parents had died. He had retreated into himself, going morose and silent. He hadn’t been much comfort to her. She’d buried herself in science—as if to reclaim her parents that way—and he’d run from science into the military. First the Army, then the Privatized Marines…

  “Sam!” he shouted, running into Carmack’s genetics laboratory, gasping for breath. He skidded to a stop, again expecting an attack as he swept the room with his gunlight, ready to fire—aware that he was on edge and hair-trigger right now, and if he wasn’t careful, he’d shoot his sister, thinking it was one of them, in the dimness. No attack came—and no Sam, either.

  He searched the room, sweat stinging his eyes, even looking in the wrecked bathroom.

  She was nowhere to be found. Not her and not her body.

  They might have gotten her—dragged her up into the crawl spaces, chewing on her as they went. Tearing her to pieces.

  No. He had a strong feeling Sam was still alive. But where?

  The seconds were passing. Think…

  If she’d finished here in the lab, where would she have gone?

  Of course! The infirmary. Finish the research there. Should have gone there first, he was wasting precious time…

  “I’m an idiot,” he muttered, turning to run back the way he’d come.

  He ran back through the corridor, into the air lock, racing across the atrium…down the hall, pressed through the nanowall…there were several corpses and pieces of corpses on tables and gurneys. And Sam…

  She was there, bending over a cadaver. Sam’s face was rapt with concentration, her hands operating a scanner as she ran it slowly over the battered chest.

  That was Destroyer’s body, some part of his mind noted, and veered immediately away—he didn’t want to deal with Destroyer’s death yet. He had to put all grieving off till the mission was over. His pain over losing his buddies was like a child weeping in a detention cell—it wasn’t time for that child to be let out yet.

  “What the fuck are you doing, Sam?” he rasped, between gasps for air, as he stalked up to her. “Didn’t you hear me over the radio?”

  The question didn’t register. She kept frowning into that scanner—and asked a question of her own. “Why did they take Goat but not Destroyer? Why Carmack but not Dr. Thurman?”

  He slapped the butt of his machine gun with impatience. “Sam—you’ve got to come with me. Now! We got, like, a minute to e
vacuate—”

  She was still caught up in her stream of thought—seemed about to be swept over some inward verge. “Lucy had the twenty-fourth chromosome…but she wasn’t a monster—she died protecting her child, not devouring it. Why did the same chromosome that made her superhuman turn Stahl into a monster? Just give me one minute to show—”

  He glanced at the door. Were the others already going through the Ark? He had to be with them when they went through. They could be facing the enemy instantly, on getting home. He couldn’t let the squadron down—they’d need all the help they could get. The whole world would need it.

  She bit at the tip of her tongue, looking again at Destroyer, that detached scientist’s state of mind, narrowing her eyes again. “John—give me just one minute to show you…”

  “We don’t have one minute!”

  “Then give me ten seconds!”

  He looked at her. There was something in her expression.

  It was as if she were saying, You didn’t trust me when our parents died. You wouldn’t talk to me. To anyone. And you sealed yourself off, inside, from people. This time…trust me.

  He looked away—a kind of acquiescence.

  But he turned back to watch as she snatched up a biopsy needle, sank it into the base of Destroyer’s skull—sucked out the gray matter with a practiced motion of her thumb.