“There,” said Cassandra, pointing.
They had been passing massive metal doors every thirty meters, doors that led to the cargo holds. March doubted there would be anyone in there since the holds were usually stacked full of luggage and supplies. But about three hundred meters down the corridor from the airlock stood a smaller door, one designed for personnel access. A sign next to the door read DRONE REPAIR SHOP in blocky letters.
“Let me go first,” said March.
Cassandra offered no argument.
March adjusted his grip on his pistol, hit the door control, and stepped back, weapon raised.
The door hissed open, and no immediate threats appeared. March glimpsed half-assembled flatbed cargo drones, the bright safety yellow arms of cargo-handling robots, and a workbench and cases of tools, but no sign of any living things.
He stepped through the door, sweeping his pistol before him, but nothing moved.
“It’s clear,” said March.
Cassandra followed him into the repair shop. “It looks like the robotics lab at the University, but better organized.”
March nodded and examined the room. Half-dissembled drones and robots filled most of the floor space, and workbenches and metal cabinets lined the walls. A massive double door stood on the far wall, no doubt leading to the cargo bays. March spotted a computer terminal at one of the workbenches, and he started towards it, but then something caught his attention.
There was a table in the corner, with some folding chairs around it. Likely the technicians used it for breaks and lunches. There were plastic trays sitting on the table, along with ceramic cups half-full of dark liquid.
“Coffee,” said March.
“Coffee?” said Cassandra.
“Come look at this,” said March.
He crossed to the table, Cassandra trailing after him.
Three plastic trays sat on the table, plastic forks and knives resting on either side. The trays were half-full of yellow noodles and white chunks of vat-grown chicken, all of it doused in sauce. They were the sort of prepackaged meals common on commercial starliners.
“Lunch,” said Cassandra. “They were eating lunch. It’s like they just got up and left.”
March shifted his gun to his left hand and ran a finger of his right hand alongside the side of one of the trays. It was cold, but the sauce hadn’t congealed yet. Those meals hadn’t been sitting there for very long.
“And it wasn’t all that long ago,” said March. “A few hours, maybe.” He stepped back. “Let’s have a look at the computer terminal.”
They crossed to the workbench and March reached for the keyboard.
“Wait,” he said, changing his mind. “You look at the computer. See what you can get out of it. I want to keep watch in case something is trying to sneak up on us.”
Cassandra frowned. “You think something might?”
March shrugged, watching the workshop. “Have you ever known a repair technician to skip lunch without a very good reason?”
“No.” Cassandra moved to the keyboard and started typing. “Okay. Uh...it won’t let me see anything important without network credentials.”
“Staff would have one level of access, passengers another,” said March. The crawling feeling that something was watching him made the back of his neck itch. “But there might be guest access.”
“Yeah,” said Cassandra, and she typed another command. The screen lit up with the Royal Calaskaran Starlines logo. “Okay. Uh...it’s just general information. The RCS Alpine, captained by Manuel Torrence, making the run from Oradrea to Constantinople Station with stops along the way...oh, wait. It says there is a shipboard emergency and it advises all passengers to remain in their cabins or staterooms until otherwise notified. It was posted about two and a half hours ago.”
“Is there any other information?” said March.
“No,” said Cassandra. “Wait. Nineteen minutes after that, it said the ship was going on lockdown. All passengers were restricted to their cabins for the duration of the emergency. And after that...”
She flinched.
“What is it?” said March.
“One message,” said Cassandra in a faint voice. “From the engineering section, posted to the entire ship.”
She pointed at the screen. March wondered why she didn’t just summarize it for him, and then he saw the reason.
The message was quite simple, only a dozen words:
BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD MAIM MAIM MAIM RIP RIP RIP KILL KILL KILL.
“What the hell?” said March.
“Maybe someone in engineering went crazy and poisoned the entire ship’s air supply or something,” said Cassandra.
March checked the message’s timestamp. “In an hour and forty minutes? That’s unlikely. No, something else is going on.”
“Maybe we should just leave,” said Cassandra.
“If we do, we’re stuck in system JX2278C,” said March. “And if there any survivors on the ship, we have an obligation to help them. We...”
The cargo doors on the far side of the room slid open.
March whirled, his pistol snapping up, and Cassandra took a hasty step back, her hand falling on the butt of her gun. The doors slid all the way open, revealing another cargo corridor. An idle flatbed drone sat in the corridor, but otherwise, March could see nothing through the doors.
Nothing moved, and after a moment the doors slid closed again with a clang.
“Aren’t those doors motion controlled?” said Cassandra.
“Yeah,” said March. He spotted the motion sensor mounted on the top of the frame.
The doors slid open again and then shut once more. Nothing had changed in the corridor beyond.
“Maybe they’re malfunctioning,” said Cassandra. She looked at her phone.
“Maybe,” said March. “Or maybe something that we can’t see is triggering them.”
“Uh,” said Cassandra. “Um.” She pointed at the numbers on her phone’s screen. “If I’m reading this right...there’s a quantum distortion effect right on top of us.”
“Or in the cargo corridor,” said March.
The things they had seen aboard the Alpine so far started to click together in his mind. The complete radio silence, the lack of visible damage, the abandoned meals, the ship-wide announcement, the strange message from the engineering section. Two and a half hours ago? If the timetable added up, the Alpine would still have been in hyperspace then, with an hour or so to go until it returned to normal space.
And if something had gone wrong in that last hour of hyperspace…
“Shit,” said March.
“What is it?” said Cassandra.
“Stay right here,” said March. “I’m going to try something.”
“What...what are you doing?” said Cassandra.
“I just want a look at the cargo corridor,” said March. He paused. “If any more of those quantum distortions approach, tell me right away.”
Cassandra swallowed. “Do you know what they are?”
“I really hope I’m wrong,” said March.
He shifted his gun to his right hand, the weight of the heavy plasma pistol solid and reassuring in his fingers. Step by step he approached the cargo doors. His approach triggered the motion detector, and the doors slid open. Nothing had changed in the corridor. March grasped the door frame with his left hand, his cybernetic fingers grasping the metal, and inch by inch he eased himself forward, pistol ready.
Nothing happened, and nothing moved. March looked up and down the corridor and saw nothing but idle drones and double doors leading to cargo bays.
Then something caught March’s eye.
The deck was metal, and in places it gave off a faint blue gleam. But that didn’t make any sense. All the lights in the corridor were harsh and white, standard utility lighting for the service and maintenance areas of a starship. But where was blue light coming from? Why…
The realization struck him.
Goddamn it, he
was an idiot.
March looked at the ceiling.
He caught a glimpse of something huge and gray and misshapen, blue light shining in patches on a dull carapace.
Then it moved, falling from the ceiling like a thunderbolt.
Only reflex and March’s careful preparations saved his life. His left hand was still on the door frame, and his cybernetic arm heaved, throwing him backward with inhuman force an instant before a massive pincer sliced through the space his neck had occupied a heartbeat earlier. March hit the floor, rolled, and sprang back to his feet. Cassandra let out a stunned scream and stepped back as March leveled his pistol at the cargo door.
“Oh, God,” said Cassandra. “Oh, Jesus. What is that thing?”
“You know what it is,” said March.
A thing from a nightmare scuttled into the repair shop, ducking a little to fit its misshapen bulk through the doors.
It looked like a twisted hybrid of spider, scorpion, slug, and human. Eight jagged legs propelled the armored, glistening bulk of its abdomen forward, clicking against the metal deck. A scorpion’s tail rose from the back of the creature, its end adorned with multiple barbs. A pair of massive pincers jutted from the creature’s front, each one large enough to slice March in half without much trouble. Dozens of lumpy tumor-like growths covered the creature, and each one glowed with a strange blue light.
It didn’t look alien. March had spoken with dozens of alien races in his travels, and some of them had been frankly hideous to human eyes. But there was always a reason for their appearance, and their physiologies suited their environments. The creature standing at the other end of the repair shop had no such harmony in its physiology. It was a thing of nightmares, of chaos and madness and lunacy.
The human torso jutting from the front of the creature rather reinforced that impression.
Instead of a head, the torso of a human man jutted from the front of the creature. The skin had turned a sickly corpse-like gray, more of those glowing tumors dotting the flesh. The expression was twisted into a mask of hunger and glee, the eyes shining with blue light. The torso wore the shredded remnants of a technician’s jumpsuit, the patch of Royal Calaskaran Starlines still visible on the shoulders.
March suspected that two and a half hours ago, the creature had been a man eating his lunch at the table.
The creature skittered forward a meter, its barbed tail waving, and looked at them.
“Metal arm,” it said. The voice sounded normal, conversational. “You have a metal arm.”
“That’s right,” said March. The creature would be violent, but it would also be insane. Perhaps it would let them go without a fight. “I see we’re interrupting your lunch break. We’ll come back later.”
The glowing eyes turned towards Cassandra. “You’re pretty.”
Cassandra didn’t say anything. She looked frozen with horror.
“I want to rip off all your clothes,” said the creature. “Then I want to slice you open from throat to groin and eat all the meat inside. I didn’t get to finish my lunch. But you two will do.”
The creature stepped forward, and March raised his pistol and fired. His first shot slammed into the abdomen, but the glowing tumors seemed to drink the plasma energy. The creature snarled in fury and surged towards March with terrifying speed. But it stumbled into a half-dismantled cargo drone, and that slowed its charge long enough for March to adjust his aim and fire again. His plasma bolt burned off the top third of the creature’s human head. The hulking thing went into a jerking, spastic dance, and its flailing legs sent robot parts clanging across the shop. March put two more shots through the creature’s head, and at last, it slumped and went motionless, the blue glow fading from the tumorous growths.
March let out a long breath, his mind working through what to do next.
They were in a lot of trouble.
“Oh my God,” whispered Cassandra, shaking so violently that her voice warbled. “That was...that was…”
“Tell me,” said March. “Tell me what that was.” He knew perfectly well what the creature was, of course, but Cassandra looked like she was about to come unglued. Hopefully, a lecture would give her something to think about other than her terror.
“A...a macrobe,” said Cassandra.
“Go on,” said March, crossing the room. The dead creature smelled hideous. “Pretend you’re lecturing a room full of undergraduates.”
The cargo doors hissed open again, and March looked into the corridor. He made sure to check the ceiling as well this time. There was no sign of any other macrobes, or anyone else, for that matter.
“Okay,” said Cassandra. She took a deep breath and started lecturing. “Microbes are what we call living creatures too small to be seen with the naked eye. Macrobes are creatures that exist in modes of life that human senses cannot detect at all. Hyperspace is filled with alien creatures that consist of dark energy the way we consist of flesh and blood and biological processes. Most of them have no interest in humans or other forms of corporeal life. But some kinds of macrobes are attracted to human minds the way that moths are drawn to flame. It might be an instinctual reaction, or it might be a deliberate predation.”
Her voice was getting steadier.
“Go on,” said March, stepping back into the repair shop and heading towards the computer terminal. “Keep talking.”
“If an unprotected mind is in hyperspace for too long,” said Cassandra, “it will draw a macrobe, and the macrobe will possess the human. The possession process induces a surge of dark energy, which causes profound physical mutations through a process that is not yet understood despite millennia of research.” Her voice wavered as she glanced at the dead creature, but she rallied and kept lecturing. “The resultant hybrid is always insane, murderously so, and will kill anything it can find. Its thought processes are almost always totally non-rational, and it is extremely dangerous to anything around it. There is no known way to reverse the process.”
“Yeah,” said March, tapping at the computer. He brought up the public access menu and scrolled through it. “Keep going.”
“Humanity’s first experiments with hyperspace failed for that reason,” said Cassandra. “It was only with the invention of the dark energy resonator that long-term hyperspace travel became possible. The dark energy resonator generates a field inimical to macrobes, preventing them from approaching a ship. Um...you’re Calaskaran, right? If I remember right, the Royal Calaskaran Church originally thought that hyperspace was a level of hell and that the macrobes were a form of demons. When I read that, I thought it superstitious nonsense.” She blinked a few times. “But now that I’ve seen one...I understand. Oh, God, I think I understand.”
“We can guess what happened,” said March. “The Alpine experienced a resonator coil failure in its last hour in hyperspace. There are supposed to be safeguards to prevent that from happening, but things go wrong. The crew responded with normal emergency procedures, told the passengers to get to their cabins. But the coils must have had a cascade failure. The macrobes started possessing people, they transformed...and here we are.”
“That’s horrible,” said Cassandra in a small voice. “All those people. They must have realized what was happening, that they were going to transform or get ripped apart by the macrobes...oh my God. It’s just awful.”
March nodded. There was a way, he knew, to survive the transformation process. The Navigators of the Royal Calaskaran Navy, the Navy’s elite starship pilots, were each bonded to a macrobe in a form of symbiosis, and somehow both the Navigators and the macrobes survived the process with their sanity intact and without physical mutations. Yet March didn’t know how that worked. It was one of the most closely guarded secrets of the Kingdom of Calaskar.
He was pretty sure that no one on the Alpine had known the secret as well.
Which meant there could be hundreds, even thousands, of those creatures on the ship right now.
“What are we going to do?” said Cassandr
a.
March didn’t know. They needed to get off the Alpine as soon as possible, but they also needed a surge regulator for the hyperdrive. The Alpine was the only place to get one, but it was now filled with dangerous creatures. For that matter, there was a chance there were survivors, and if there were March was obliged to help them.
Then a thought occurred to him.
“You detected a quantum distortion in the corridor,” said March. “Is it still there?”
Cassandra blinked, frowned, and tapped her phone a few times. “No. It vanished.”
March nodded. “I think it vanished because I killed the creature. The macrobe possession must generate the quantum distortion effect that the Eclipse is detecting.”
“But that’s impossible,” said Cassandra, her face taking the dreamy expression it did when she was thinking hard. “But...the macrobes are dark energy based creatures, and when they possess a human, they’re pulled into our universe, what we call normal space. But they’re still dark energy based, which means they must have a continuing link to hyperspace, which would generate...oh, a level of quantum turbulence, for lack of a better word.” Her eyes widened. “I’ll have to try and work out the equations. It would be a fascinating project!” She looked at the dead creature and blanched. “But what a horrible thing to study.”
“People study horrible things all the time,” said March. “Sometimes good things come of it. And congratulations.”
“What on earth is there to congratulate me for?” said Cassandra.
“You just built the first known device for detecting the presence of macrobe-possessed humans,” said March.
“I suppose I did,” said Cassandra. “God! All this trouble just because I wanted to build more efficient tachyon relays.” Her expression got distant again. “That must be why the life sign readings were so strange. That many macrobe-possessed humans in a relatively small space must generate a large quantum distortion effect...”
“We can figure it out later,” said March, tapping a key. A map of the Alpine appeared on the screen. “Right now, we’re going to get to the engineering room, borrow a dark energy surge regulator, and then get the hell out of here.” For want of any better options, he used his phone to take a picture of the map.
Silent Order: Eclipse Hand Page 7
