The hall up ahead glowed from his suit lights as they traveled further and further away from the airlock. A check of his cam showed just enough for him to know that Elliott and the corporal had activated their thrusters too. But in the distance, he made out a cloud of objects flowing out of the airlock. Whatever those things were, they were following them. He was out of fuel. The rest of the marines had to be nearly out too. At a speed of 6 m/s, he was heading into the darkness with no way to slow down, no way to change direction, and no way to stop.
Chapter Forty
Taulbee took a position off Mira’s port-side and well away from S&R Black. The marine vessel slowly rose from the spindle after a few puffs from the bottom thrusters. S&R Black hovered above Mira’s hull like a welcome dream. Compared to the monstrous and damaged Mira, it more resembled a work of art than a military vessel. He grinned. Not everyone would agree with that assessment. But right now, S&R Black was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
Just the thought of finally being free of this ship and the nightmares it had brought back with it was enough to make any escape craft seem heavenly. Taulbee wasn’t sure he’d find a mineral freighter ugly under these circumstances. “As long as it has a fucking ion drive.”
“Sorry, sir. I didn’t hear that?” Copenhaver said.
“Nothing, Private,” Taulbee said. For the moment, he was too damned happy to be embarrassed. S&R Black rose twenty meters above the hull before another set of thrusters activated. The gas pushed the ship further away from Mira’s surface and into space. Taulbee watched her for a few more seconds before returning his attention to the spindle.
Even from this height and distance away from where S&R Black had been moored, he could see fractures in Mira’s hull plates. Taulbee frowned. The hull hadn’t looked like that earlier. It was far from pristine, no question of that, but he didn’t remember the Atmo-steel looking so fragile. It was almost as though since their arrival, Mira had begun to disintegrate. The entire void-damned ship was getting ready to fall apart.
If that was happening to the hull, what about the ship’s interior? Were Kalimura and her squad walking through crumbling decks and hatches? Were they slowly disintegrating as well?
“Sir?” Copenhaver said. “The area around the spindle. Did it—?”
“I see the same thing, Private,” he said. “I don’t know. And to be honest, I’m not sure I want to know.”
“Aye, sir,” Copenhaver said. She sounded somewhat concerned.
He knew how she felt.
“Taulbee,” the captain said over the comms. “You’re clear.”
“Aye, sir,” he responded. “Beginning our run.”
“Acknowledged. Good hunting.”
Taulbee nodded to himself and checked the four views on his HUD. Nothing in space around them. For now.
“Copenhaver? You ready?”
“Aye, sir,” she said.
Taulbee smiled as the cannon cams came to life in his HUD’s lower left corner. He could switch to that view and watch her scan the sky around them with the 360° cameras. Assuming the footage survived, he’d make sure to look at it later in case he had any pointers for her. But more importantly, he wanted to examine every frame captured of Mira’s hull both before they installed the spindle and after. Copenhaver had seen what he had seen, sure, but that didn’t mean they weren’t both crazy.
Void-damned ship is getting to us, he thought.
He activated the thrusters and the SV-52 slowly accelerated from the midships toward the aft. The support craft rose higher above the hull until Mira all but disappeared from the bow camera.
The plan was to fly over her aft and really assess the damage. There might be nothing radioactive down there anymore, save for the beacon, but that didn’t mean there weren’t other hazards waiting to fry them. The vision of dozens of large starfish crawling out of the missing and fractured deck plates before launching themselves at him entered his mind. He tried to ignore the goose pimples that rose on his arms.
He accelerated to 20m/s and the SV-52 quickly ate the distance between Mira’s midships and the giant ship’s aft. Although he did his best to focus on the forward cam, his eyes kept drifting to the SV-52’s belly cam. Each second, more and more pinecone clumps appeared. After another few seconds, the Atmo-steel hull might as well have been made of pinecones rather than the strongest metal composite humankind had ever manufactured.
“Must be millions of them,” Copenhaver said.
Taulbee thought the wonder in her voice held a tinge of terror. It was like hearing a small child seeing a jellyfish for the first time. First came the wide ‘O’ of an open mouth followed by the “wow.” But the child would still scream themselves hoarse when the creature appeared in their nightmares. For us, Taulbee thought, the nightmare is still happening.
“I don’t know about millions,” he said, “but there are a shitload of them.”
“They’ve been multiplying. How have they been doing that, sir?”
He felt a sudden rush of frustration. Why the fuck was she asking him things he obviously didn’t know? Yet he wanted to ask Black exactly the same question. “I don’t know, Private,” he said. “Not even sure I want to. We just need to find the beacon and then we can annihilate this fucking ship.”
“Copy that, sir,” Copenhaver said.
The SV-52 blew past the rest of the hull and into open space. With nothing in front of him, Taulbee brought the rear cam and the cannon cams up on his HUD. The rest of the windows coalesced into a small group of rectangles on the lower right side. Just like that hypothetical child seeing its first jellyfish, Taulbee’s mouth opened in awe as his mind made sense of what he was seeing.
Mira’s aft was a tangle of broken and shattered deck plates. The supports and beams speared through the metal debris, holding it in place. Through great jagged rips and holes in the surviving deck plates, strange eldritch lights pulsed slowly in yellows and reds.
“What the fuck?” he asked no one.
“Sir?” Copenhaver said a moment later. “There’s enough room for us to enter the aft section. I count four holes more than large enough for us to explore.”
“But do we want to,” he breathed.
“Sorry, sir. Didn’t copy that?”
“Nothing. Mark the areas on my HUD. I’m turning us around.”
“Aye, sir,” she said.
Taulbee cut their forward momentum with several quick fore-thruster bursts. Once the SV-52 slowed to less than .5m/s, he activated the attitude thrusters and spun the craft until it pointed directly at Mira. A few puffs from another set, and the SV-52 descended relative to the giant ship’s hull. As they moved at a negative vector, the damage became both more pronounced and detailed.
The expansive, nearly 400-meter-tall aft section had very little left intact. The deck plates that protected the engineering section from space were essentially gone. The remaining hull plate fragments resembled a wide mouth of jagged, broken teeth.
“Void wept,” Taulbee said.
When the craft reached the aft’s midpoint, he stabilized its momentum and they hung there like a spider at the end of a gossamer silk thread. “Copenhaver? I want you to pan from the top port-side to the bottom starboard. Zoom in to 5x magnification before you give me the sweep. Once you’re finished, invert and do it again.”
“Copy, sir.”
He pushed away the other windows on the HUD and watched the cannon camera exclusively. The view took his breath away.
The shadows behind the wrecked superstructure had to be pinecones. Didn’t they? He thought he saw a few limb-like appendages waving in the z-g vacuum, but they could have been pinecones too. Or something else, a voice muttered in his mind. He shivered despite the warm combat suit.
Through the magnified view, the pulsing lights looked less uniform and smaller than he’d originally thought. Instead of a large, single source, they were composed of dozens, if not hundreds, of individual lights. Clumps, he thought. Whatever creatu
res were responsible for the light, they must be huddled together like oysters.
But the pinecones didn’t produce light and neither did the starfish. Well, he thought, that’s not quite right. They produced something that affected light, but neither had produced yellows or reds. Whatever was in there was something they hadn’t seen before.
Taulbee minimized the cannon cam and brought his normal cams back into focus. “When you’re finished with that, make sure Black has it,” he said.
“Aye, sir. Had already connected her in.”
Taulbee grinned. The private may have sounded a little frightened, but it didn’t seem to be affecting her concentration. Another good sign. Yup, if she made it through this, well, if any of them made it through this, he’d make sure she got a promotion.
“Black?”
“Yes, Lieutenant,” the AI responded. “I’m analyzing the cam feeds.” There was a momentary pause before the computer spoke again. “May I suggest another, slower sweep at 20x magnification? I can take control of the cannon cams,” Black offered.
Taulbee shook his head. “That won’t be necessary, Black. Copenhaver?”
“On it, sir,” she said.
“What do you make of this, Black?”
“I am unable to hypothesize at this time,” the AI said. “However, due to the perceived density of the lifeforms, Earth analogs suggest this might be a nest of some kind.”
“A nest?” Taulbee asked. “What do you mean nest?”
“Some insects and aquatic lifeforms create nests to hold their eggs or larvae. The nest usually connects to a nursery of sorts where the larvae are then nourished and protected until maturity. The nursery is also usually protected by a soldier caste of the creatures. It’s possible we are seeing the first example of such behavior in exo-solar lifeforms.”
He shivered again. The New Boston dome where he grew up, located nearly 100km from the original city’s location, had had a number of connecting domes where terrestrial lifeforms were kept. He remembered several trans-aluminum cases, each 10 meters tall and dozens of meters wide, standing in rows. Each contained a large ant colony. The structure of the hive, the individual chambers, and the massive queens and their attendants were easily visible. The creatures tended their hive, brought food to the bloated, disgusting queen, and cared for those about to hatch.
If he remembered correctly, the ant hives weren’t just a relic of a bygone age, but rather used for testing environmental pollutants on the insects to see how they’d react. In addition, they were used in the arboretum as part of its natural lifecycle. But what had they eaten?
“Aphids,” he said.
“Lieutenant?” Black said. “Did you say something?”
“Aphids,” he said again, more strength in his voice. “Ants eat aphids.”
“Yes,” Black said. “They feed on the smaller insects as part of a functional biome.”
His mind filled with an image of the pinecone clusters, the strange-looking creatures huddled together like a crustacean horde. The starfish creatures fed upon them like predators. Like ants eating aphids.
“Oh, shit,” Taulbee said. “The starfish eat the pinecones,” he said.
“Yes, Lieutenant,” Black said.
He felt as though everything was snapping into place. The phrase “the tide is coming in” echoed in his mind and seemed to draw the loose mental connections into a web of understanding. “Black? What eats the starfish?”
Black sounded pleased to hear him ask the question. “I don’t know,” Black said. “Something we haven’t seen yet.”
“Excuse me, sir,” Copenhaver said. “May I ask what you two are talking about?”
“Life,” Taulbee said. “These things may not be from Earth, and hell, they may be made of something other than carbon, but they’re exhibiting some of the same base behaviors. Everything has to eat. Predators must have prey. And most lifeforms are a predator to another. If the pinecones are the base of the exo-solar food chain, then it follows that their predator, the starfish, would also have a predator. And so on.”
“Oh,” Copenhaver said. She paused for a moment. “I don’t like where this is leading, sir.”
“Me, neither,” Taulbee said. “Black? You think we can get close without—” He broke off in mid-sentence, somehow unsure to put his fears into words. “I don’t know, without waking them up? Or getting their attention?”
“Impossible to know, sir,” the AI said. “Our previous encounters suggest that the creatures are capable of seeing movement. They may even be able to detect chemical emissions from your suits, as well as energy patterns. Might I suggest a nanoprobe instead?”
Taulbee grinned. Nanoprobe. He felt like smacking a palm to his forehead. “Of course,” he said. “Copenhaver?”
“On it, sir,” she said.
A second later, a new status appeared on his HUD. She had a nanoprobe ready for deployment. He scanned the broken aft section, looking for an ingress point furthest from the clusters. There. Far starboard-side, a little more than 1/4 from the bottom of the hull and nearly half-way across the hull’s width. He placed a waypoint for the probe, connected his block, and waited for a confirmation. The probe immediately responded to his ping, received the information, and replied with a movement plan. His grin transformed into a hard smile. “Okay, Copenhaver. Launch it.”
“Aye, sir.”
There was no sound or vibration through the ship as a small pneumatic launcher pushed the nanoprobe through a tube the diameter of two human fingers. The nanoprobe, black and nearly impossible to see in the Kuiper Belt’s shadows, shot forward from the SV-52 at 10m/s.
While he wanted to watch every frame from the nanoprobe, possible threats approaching from Mira were much more important. With the SV-52 a mere two hundred meters from Mira, he had to keep his wits. If something inside the wreckage decided they were an appetizing morsel, he needed to get them the hell away as quickly as possible. But that didn’t mean he was going to ignore it.
He brought up the probe’s feed and shuffled it to the HUD’s lower left corner. “Keep an eye on it, Copenhaver,” he said. “And let me know if you see anything interesting.”
“Aye, sir,” she said.
Maintaining his focus on the forward view was more difficult than he’d thought possible. The urge to ignore potential threats and instead focus on the probe’s camera view kept tugging at him. No. He’d have to keep flicking back and forth until Copenhaver told him there was something interesting. Still…
He managed fifteen seconds or so before enlarging the probe’s feed. What he saw did more than make his mouth open in surprise; the view made him feel as though he’d been dropped in ice.
The nanoprobe, still some distance away from the interior of the heavily damaged aft hull plates, captured the edge of something shimmering and waving in the vacuum. Taulbee at first wasn’t certain what he was seeing, and finally realized it was a large appendage. Very large. The probe continued forward, its cameras picking up the glare of the pulsing light sources deeper within the ship.
The different colors blended together for a moment, coalescing into bright white before returning to their separate oscillations. The light sources weren’t uniform. Rather than appearing as regular, easily recognizable geometric shapes, they seemed more like organic amoebas constantly shifting and redefining themselves. They were so incongruous that Taulbee could barely make sense of any of them.
The nanoprobe continued floating through the latticework of broken and shattered metal, composites, and humanity’s once-heady dreams of deep space exploration. As it did, he saw more shapes moving in the shadows, their forms briefly recognizable as oblong pinecone or starfish shapes before melting into a morass of tangled darkness.
“Sir?” Copenhaver asked. She sounded like a small child either waking from a nightmare, or still in the grips of one.
“Yes, Private?”
“What the fuck are we looking at?”
He shook his head without even
knowing he was doing it. “I don’t know, Private. I really don’t have a void-damned clue.”
They continued watching in silence, Taulbee half-expecting the boogeyman that hid under his bed when he was young to fly into the camera view, its face a mask of a melting skin and glittering red-dwarf eyes. He shook the thought away. Now is not the time to lose your mind, he told himself. It didn’t help.
The probe was more than twenty meters inside what used to be Mira’s aft section. Its tiny lights barely provided enough illumination to see more than bright spots on distant metal, but it was enough for him to catch the view of what looked like the occasional frozen human limb or torso. Flash-fried, flash-frozen. And even that didn’t make sense.
If Black was right and Mira’s reactors suffered some kind of nuclear meltdown or a bonafide fusion explosion, there should have been nothing left aside from wrecked and twisted metal. But the plas-steel still intact on some of the girders and supports nixed that theory. Hell, there was a control panel dangling by a thick strand of wires still attached to a bulkhead.
“No,” he said softly. “It wasn’t a nuke.”
The probe continued further. The probe’s lights dimmed, the focused ring of illumination no longer as powerful, or as cohesive. The thick nestle of shadowy forms began knitting themselves together into a massive wall of darkness. A moment later, he could see nothing. An alert flashed on his HUD.
“Holy shit,” he breathed. “Copenhaver?”
“Here too, sir.”
“Black?”
“Yes, Lieutenant?”
“Our probe just received a massive radiation spike. Way beyond what I saw on the SV-52. I mean powerful stuff.”
The AI paused for a second. “I concur,” Black said. “Interesting. Might I suggest you retreat from your current vantage point? It’s very possible the beacon is preparing for another emission.”
“Shit,” Taulbee said.
He punched the attitude thrusters and the SV-52 rose from its current position at more than 5m/s. That still wasn’t fast enough. He used more fuel until they popped up above Mira’s hull, still some hundred meters away from her, and began accelerating back to the safety of her remaining hull plates. They passed the remains of the aft and were two hundred meters closer to the midships when the probe screamed alerts before going silent.
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