Derelict_Destruction

by Paul E. Cooley

  “Fuck,” Carb said. “He get a quickie before dying?”

  “Shut up, Carb,” Dickerson said. Kalimura refocused the camera through the porthole edges. There were other tables inside and several shapes on the far wall, the light too dim to make out much more than their shadows. “Do we go in?”

  Kalimura retreated a step from the inner hatch, seemingly lost in thought. Just when Dickerson was about to interrupt her, she nodded to herself. “I think we do. Carb? Stay out here. Dickerson? Move up and join me at the hatch.”

  “On it.” Dickerson moved past Carb. She backed up to the wall, her flechette rifle facing the direction they’d entered the science section. When he reached the inner hatch tunnel, Kalimura crouched and faced the hatch. “I’ve got the door,” he said.

  “You open, I’ll clear.”

  “Aye, Corporal,” he said and pulled the inset hatch lever.

  “Ready?” Kalimura asked.

  “Aye, Corporal,” Dickerson said.

  She crouch-walked forward, her helmet lights panning sharp left and then sharp right. “No bogeys on the inner walls.”

  “How large is the room?” he asked.

  “Can’t tell, but the schematics say it’s about 30x10.”

  Shit, Dickerson thought. They wouldn’t be able to see the length of the room. Not if the gloom kept eating their lights like a gluttonous—He stopped in mid-thought and blinked. “What the hell?”

  “Yeah,” Kalimura said. Her suit lights illuminated the far end of the wall more than fifteen meters away. “Our lights work. For once.”

  “That doesn’t make much sense,” Dickerson said.

  “Don’t care,” Kalimura said. “I’m just glad we can finally see more than five meters.”

  Dickerson said nothing as he unfocused his lights to provide a wide arc of illumination. The shadows he’d managed to see through the porthole in the inner hatch door were more decontamination suits hanging from the wall. Nozzles jutted from a row of sinks, some with attached hoses, others simply naked. “Okay,” he said. “Looks like a lab to me.”

  “Aye,” Kalimura said.

  Dickerson checked his cams and saw the corporal had moved further into the room, heading for the far wall. She had changed the focus of her suit lights just as he had. Several more tables filled with holo displays, scientific equipment, and the occasional mag-mug filled the back of the room. Strangely enough, the corpse sitting at the first table was alone.

  “I’m going to check the back,” Kalimura said. “See if there are some data drives we can steal.”

  “Aye, Corporal. I’m going to have a conversation with this corpsicle.”

  “If he starts talking,” Carb said, “I’m jetting the hell out of here.”

  “Copy that,” Dickerson said.

  “Carb? Got an eye on the corridor?”

  “Aye, Boss,” Carb said. “We’re still clear.”

  Dickerson ignored the chatter and headed to the first lab table. As he approached, he made out the corpse’s decon suit. The helmet sat on the floor next to the chair. A spiderweb of fissures marred the visor and a lightning bolt of cracks covered the helmet’s casing. Something hit that helmet hard. He drew his attention back to the table and raised an eyebrow. The aluminum table had deep dents and slivers of plas-steel embedded in it. “Christ,” Dickerson said. “Somebody smashed this asshole’s helmet into the table.”

  “Can everyone agree that the people here went insane?” Carb asked.

  “Some of them, yeah,” Kalimura said. “Not Kovacs. Sounds like Dr. TR Reed died sane too, not to mention the command crew.”

  “Shit, Corporal,” Dickerson said, “we only have Kovacs’ word for that.”

  “True,” she said. “But I believed her.”

  Carb sighed. “So did I.”

  Dickerson focused his lights on the man’s suit, searching for an ID, but didn’t find one. The corpse’s hands were folded in his lap as if in prayer. The holo display in front of him was blemish free, as though it had been carefully maintained and cleaned on a regular basis. Despite the layer of frost coating the controls, the console appeared new and unused. But the scientist had obviously been looking at it when he died.

  Instead of head wounds, chest wounds, or other signs of foul play, the corpse was untouched, the suit intact. Did you just die here, calmly letting yourself freeze to death? he wondered. From the man’s wide eyes and the smile on his face, he could have perished in a state of pure ecstasy. Dickerson shook his head. Had to be drugs, he thought. Just had to be. Nobody lets themselves die looking like that.

  Dickerson crouched and peered beneath the table. A small control panel hung from the bottom. Without the inset display power, it was impossible to know what the panel was for, much less what it controlled.

  “Think there’s emergency power in here?” Dickerson asked.

  A flash of light struck the room, whiting out his cam view for a second. Another flash followed and then the room was lit with bright, glorious light. Dickerson grinned. “Guess that answers that question,” he said.

  “Found it at the back,” Kalimura said.

  The inset display came to life before his eyes. Dickerson scanned it quickly, found the switch he was looking for, and pressed it. The holo display flickered three times and then settled into a logo that simply said Mira Science Expeditionary Section.

  “And now we hit pay dirt,” Dickerson said.

  “What is it?” Carb asked.

  “Check my feed,” he said.

  Carb said nothing in response. The hologram shifted into an image he didn’t quite understand at first. It appeared as little more than completely black with a few less black shadows near its center. As he watched, the darkness seemed to fade slightly, the shadows turning into actual concrete shapes. Dickerson gaped at the display. “Holy shit,” he breathed. A label appeared at the bottom: “First Planetoid Survey.”

  The message Captain Kovacs had left returned to his mind. She had mentioned the planetary surveys and the fact there were 11 of the celestial objects. A few more labels appeared beneath the roughly spherical shapes. 8XJ, the one referenced in the captain’s final message, sat at the bottom of the image. The display zoomed in on 8XJ and the image flicked between several different filters. The first filter showed cold blue surrounding the planetoid, its center glowing bright red. Has to be infrared, he thought. It switched again to a green filter. The object only glowed slightly more than the rest of the display view. He’d no idea what that filter could be.

  The image switched again, this time painting the rest of the image white with the planetoid rendered in shades of grey. A spiderweb of lines and fissures covered the object’s surface in dark grey, the rest of the black surface marred by small, light-grey oblong shapes. If they lived through this, Black would have a fantastic time analyzing this feed dump. Bet the AI will be able to figure out what it all means too, he thought.

  The display faded to black and then a face dissolved in. The man who sat dead in the chair next to him stared at him from the image. The man’s mouth moved, but Dickerson had no way to hear the sound. He cursed and tried to make a block connection. The connection was denied. “Damnit,” he said. “I’ve got video, but no audio,” he said. “Won’t let me connect.”

  “I have another one back here too,” Kalimura said. “But it’s not showing me anything but a login screen.”

  “Figures,” Carb said. “We come for answers and get nothing but a big tease.”

  Dickerson kept his cam pointed at the image as the face continued babbling silently on the display. The man gesticulated wildly as a set of images appeared to his left. He was obviously explaining something about the filter views of the planetoids, but it was impossible to tell. Dickerson watched impatiently, caught between wanting the video to end and not wanting it to. This could be damned important. If they couldn’t save the original data feed, then this was all they had as evidence of whatever the scientist had discovered.

  The pla
netoid images disappeared, replaced by renderings of what he assumed to be atoms. Proton, electron, and neutron counts appeared next to each one. Dickerson blinked. H-234. O-133. Fe-720. C-227. Si-185. ?-5901. ?-8051. ?-1382.

  “Shit,” he said. “That can’t be right.”

  “What?” Kalimura asked.

  He pointed at the display. “According to this, they found some wild isotopes of common elements. I mean, like off-the-chart wild. I’ve never read about anything like this. And some of the elements just have question marks. No period assignment.”

  “Can’t wait to know what the Trio will make of this,” Kalimura said.

  “If they don’t already know,” Dickerson said to himself. He continued staring at the display as it dissolved again, the man’s face disappearing. The image of a large pod appeared on the screen. It was similar to those they’d seen in the slip-point, but illuminated with bright white light. A mathematical equation appeared beneath it. He imagined the scientist was still talking, explaining what all this meant, but his face was absent from the screen. Shit. They’d never know what he’d said. Unless…

  He crouched again and searched for a backup stick. Considering Mira had been designed some 70 years ago and finished construction nearly 52 years ago, if any of the public records were accurate, that meant the tech was way out of date. He’d no idea what a backup stick would look like, much less if this setup even had them.

  A small button protruded from the control panel. He hesitantly moved a finger to press it and paused. There was no telling what this would do. Self-destruct? Emergency purge? Impossible to know. “Fuck it,” he said to no one and pressed it. A tiny chip slid from the control panel’s side. Dickerson pulled it out and stuffed it into his pouch. “Guess I have a data stick,” he said. “Or something.”

  “Me too,” Kalimura said. “Nothing on the display, but at least we have a hard backup. I think Black can read these. Guess we’ll find out when the time comes.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Corporal? You see anything else in here? Anything important?”

  “No,” she said. “But at least we have a pressure-safe area to return to if we need it.”

  “Is there still an atmospheric generator in here?”

  “Aye.” The corporal paused for a moment. “Looks like it’s in decent condition. Though I’m not sure how long it would provide air and temp. Your guess is as good as mine on that score.”

  Well, he thought, at least we have a place to fallback to. Dickerson scanned the room looking for oddities, but couldn’t find any besides the corpse at the lab table. And, he thought, there are no baddies in here.

  “Okay,” Kalimura said, “marked the room on the schematics as a safe area. This will be our redoubt if we get separated or blocked off.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Carb said. “So you guys done looting the place?”

  Dickerson smiled. “Not sure there’s much more to loot.”

  “Not sure about that,” Kalimura said. “Dickerson. Over here.”

  Raising an eyebrow, he turned and mag-walked to the rear of the room. The corporal stood in front of a lab table with several containers mag-locked to its metal surface. Beakers, test tubes, and what looked like a specimen box, sat upon the table with a layer of frost coating the trans-aluminum glass. Each of the containers had a stopper to keep their contents from floating out in z-g.

  The test tubes contained frozen liquid of various colors. The beaker? Something like sludge filled the bottom third of the liter container. The sludge may once have been liquid, but it was difficult to tell. Without lifting the beaker and shaking it, it was impossible to know if it was even frozen. But to Dickerson, it didn’t look frozen at all.

  That was strange, sure, but the contents of the specimen box is what stopped his heart for a second. What may have once been a human ear sat in the transparent box, purple and black splotches bubbled out of the flesh. “The hell?”

  “Yeah,” Kalimura said. “My thoughts exactly.”

  “You guys find something we can use?” Carb asked.

  Dickerson grunted. “Not exactly.”

  “What do you make of it?” Kalimura asked.

  He sighed. “That the science section was up to some nasty shit.”

  Kalimura raised her helmet to his. “They were experimenting, maybe?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Although I imagine that’s exactly what they were doing. When Black analyzes the data stick, maybe we’ll know for sure.”

  “Right.” Kalimura paused for a moment and panned her helmet from one end of the table to the other. “Okay. Recorded and marked.”

  “Black is going to have a lot of data to mine,” Dickerson said. “Bet it’s going to take her a while to put all this together for us.”

  “Probably right.” Kalimura took one last look at the table. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  “Copy that,” Dickerson said. “Carb? We’re coming out.”

  “Copy. I’ll try not to shoot you.”

  Dickerson rolled his eyes and followed Kalimura out of the room. He felt a pang of regret as they crossed the inner airlock hatch and closed it behind them. The room, no matter the corpse and the strange shit on the lab table, provided a modicum of safety. Yes, it would be a good fallback. Yes, it would be a place to hole up if they were pursued by some nasties. It was creepy, sure, but he’d rather stay in the room than travel the corridors again.

  Carb stood a meter from the bulkhead, Elliott still strapped to her back. “Which way, Boss?”

  Kalimura pointed down the hall. “Well, first try netted us a pressure safe room. Let’s keep going and see what’s next.”

  Dickerson smirked. Yes, let’s see what new horrors are behind door number 2! This, he thought, was one shitty mission.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Another vibration rocked the SV-52. The craft slid sideways through space as though something had pushed it. Taulbee’s HUD flashed with more alerts, but the radiation warning had turned from red to yellow. Had the creature left?

  He touched the thrusters again after checking the cam feeds. It had left. Gunny had managed to get the damned thing off him. “Shit,” Taulbee said. “Where is it going?”

  After a few more seconds, he managed to stabilize the SV-52 and point it back toward Mira. Then he saw what was about to happen.

  The giant starfish-like creature had changed its trajectory and its focus. It was heading straight for the skiff at a terrifying speed. Flechette rounds exploded in front of it, around it, hell, everywhere. The skiff blinked again and again as the cannon fired volley after volley. Several of the rounds detonated directly on the monster, but it either didn’t feel any pain or didn’t care.

  “You pissed it off good and proper,” Taulbee muttered. He checked his weapons. All green, locked and loaded. Sneering, he pushed the damaged SV-52’s throttle and headed toward the creature. It was closing in on the skiff. Gunny had maybe five seconds before the thing was on top of them. The constant cannon fire had slowed it down and now it was dodging from side to side with impossible grace.

  “I’m on its six,” Taulbee said through the comms. “Wendt, try not to hit me.”

  No response. Either the creature’s radiation field scrambled the signal, or Wendt just didn’t have time to talk. He did, however, adjust the cannon’s aim, the rounds exploding slightly higher or lower than his position.

  Taulbee lined up the SV-52’s cannons and closed within twenty meters of the creature. “Taking the shot,” Taulbee said and activated the cannons.

  Tritium flechette rounds streaked from the cannons like comets, their rocket engines burning bright in the Kuiper Belt’s shadowy twilight. The creature, shimmering with a haze of radiation, either didn’t know he was behind it or didn’t consider him a threat. Regardless, it should have paid more attention.

  The rounds struck its body dead center. The space around the thing glittered with heavy water instantly freezing in the near absolute zero, but not before most of the
liquid hit its back. The radiation haze sparkled before seeming to disperse in a lick of eldritch color. Its arms, pointed at the skiff mere meters in front of it, spread like flower petals. The thing tried to change direction, but with his fire on its back and Wendt’s rounds punching into its front, it could do little to avoid the multiple fusillades.

  The starfish, apparently out of options, changed its trajectory and slammed into the hull some 10 meters from the skiff. Black debris scattered from its wounded shell, the flecks of strange material floating in space like lumps of coal. Wendt changed the cannon’s aim and fired more rounds at the thing. The creature’s arms rose before smashing into the hull as it tried to get inside the safety of Mira’s deserted decks. Taulbee wasn’t going to let that happen.

  He shifted the SV-52 until he was a mere eight meters from the creature. He fired two more shots, aiming directly at its flank where the arms met its center. The first round obliterated the joint, sending the amputated limb tumbling through space just above the hull. The second round impacted half a meter from the same spot, but on the creature’s shell. The weakened carapace exploded into black debris and shining, silvery liquid.

  Ropes of the substance whipped upward from its pulverized body back toward him. Taulbee punched the fore thrusters and the support craft flew backward and up away from the acidic entrails. “Gunny!” he yelled. “Get out of there!”

  *****

  When the creature turned toward the skiff, Gunny’s balls turned to little more than hard, frozen marbles. It moved like something out of a horror holo, its arms slithering through space as it lined itself up to eat them. Wendt was still firing at it, but even he was caught off guard when the thing opened its blacker than black maw.

  A long stream of silver liquid erupted from the creature’s center and shot down at the skiff. Lyke screamed over the comms as the alien venom hit the gunwale and splattered into fine droplets. Gunny turned toward Lyke and opened his mouth in horror. Drops of silver, so small they were barely visible, collected on Lyke’s suit like beads of rain on waxed metal. Vapor rose from Lyke’s suit, condensing in frozen clouds.