With a shaking hand, he activated the scanner and passed it over the fin. A burst of X-rays bombarded the Atmo-steel, a video of real-time images flowing across his HUD. The interior welds looked good on the fin itself. He passed the scanner to the side without the pinecones and then stopped. There it was. Just beneath the scratches and gouges. Whatever had caused the damage to the hull had gone deep enough to nick the shielding interface.
A sense of relief dispelled most of the fear. It would be a deep patch, requiring him to cut away a small portion of the exterior hull plate to reach the shield. It would take time, time the captain said he didn’t have. But at least he wasn’t going to be hunting for the leak with those pinecone things at his feet. Only one was close enough to worry him. No, he thought, that’s a lie. They all worry me.
Nobel pulled at the pack on his back and it locked to his glove. He brought it down in front of him and mag-locked it to the hull. After sending a block command, the pack opened in the middle, and he pushed each end down to secure it.
As he planned the steps in his mind for how much hull to cut away, how to secure the missing piece, and then perform the patch, the pinecone near his foot twitched.
Chapter Thirty-Two
With the cracked-open pinecone in his hand, the glistening acid staring back at him like a malevolent creature, he didn’t dare break eye contact with it. Kalimura breathed heavy over the comms.
“The shit that ate Niro is inside that pinecone?” she asked.
“Yes, Corporal,” he said. “Not much. But enough.”
Carb cursed. “And the pinecone didn’t dissolve? How’s that possible?”
Dickerson shook his head. “I don’t know. I only know what I’m looking at.”
“Well,” Carb yelled, “get rid of it!”
He continued staring at the liquid substance, watching the way his suit lights made it dazzle like diamonds or sunlight on ice. “It hasn’t done anything,” he said. “Although I sure as hell don’t trust it.”
“No, shit,” Carb said. “You’d be an idiot if you did.”
“Dickerson,” Kalimura said, “lower it to the deck and leave it there.”
“Aye, Corporal,” he said. But he didn’t want to. It was like the small cylinder he’d found on the hull before the skiff marooned them on Mira. That strange find had called to him in some way, as if the indentations on its surface were an alien script, the first message from lifeforms beyond Sol System. It was important. He knew it.
And the pinecone? Something told him that was important too. The liquid in the shell, the acid, it was from something. Whatever had cracked open the--
His body shook with fear and dawning realization. “Oh, shit,” Dickerson said. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“What?” Carb asked. “Did it move?”
“No,” he said and placed the pinecone upside down so its exposed inner shell faced the deck. If the acid shit was going to bleed out, at least it would do so on the Atmo-steel instead of his squad mates.
“What’s wrong, Dickerson?” Kalimura asked. “You get some on you?”
He looked up at her. “I think I know what the acid is.”
Not being able to see her expression was driving him mad. “So, okay, what is it?”
He rose from his crouch and shined his suit lights at the other two objects floating near Kalimura. The two pinecones were split down the center just as the one at his feet had been.
“The acid,” he said. “I think it’s used to crack open the pinecone things.”
“Used?” Carb asked. “By what? I mean, what would--?” Her sentence died in her throat replaced by a groan. “You telling me you think something’s eating these things?”
He nodded. “Yeah. I do.”
“You have got to be kidding me,” Kalimura said.
“I’m not.” Dickerson gestured to the other two. “Something cracked these guys open. And something left the acid. I can’t imagine the two things aren’t related.”
“I’m quitting the marines after this shit,” Elliot said in a dazed, groggy voice. Still mag-locked to Carb, he might have been floating in and out of consciousness for all Dickerson knew.
“What do we do now?” Carb asked.
Dickerson opened his mouth to reply, but Kalimura responded instantly. “We get our asses to the bridge. If there’s a way to contact S&R Black, it has to be there, or on the way.”
Carb sighed. “Aye, Corporal.”
“And stay the hell away from any pinecones,” Kalimura said.
“Copy that,” Dickerson said, drawing out the words in a thick Texas drawl.
“Watch our six, Dickerson.”
“Aye, Corporal.”
He hung back and waited for Kalimura to continue down the hallway. Carb stepped ahead of him, dragging Elliott above the deck plate as easily as a mother with a newborn.
With Kalimura’s suit lights cutting the darkness five meters ahead, he felt as though he were walking through a tunnel. No matter how bright their lights seemed, the darkness was simply too complete, too suffocating to permit all but the barest illumination. It didn’t help that Mira’s metal walls reflected almost no light. The ship’s interior might as well have been deep space.
The pinecones. The damned pinecones. The cargo bay was filled with them, they’d come across well over a dozen living and dead ones, been attacked by several, and they still didn’t have much of a clue as to what they were. Except they were alive. He knew that much.
When they’d first seen the things pursue them through the medical bay, he’d thought it possible they were machines. Perhaps created by aliens deep in the galaxy, or shit, one system over. But after seeing the dead ones cracked open like metal walnuts, he no longer believed it.
If they were machines, the dead ones would at least have some remnant of their non-biological origin. Instead, their shells were more like a carapace surrounding something that had, at the very least, instincts and habits. To him, that indicated life, even if they didn’t understand how that life worked or the materials from which the creatures were made.
They knew electricity hurt the things, practically made them explode. Couple that with the CO2 leaks, or maybe oxygen from the humans wandering their new home, it implied something. He just wasn’t sure what. Not only that, but how did the buggers move?
They’d reminded him of the cephalopods he’d seen at the Dallas aquarium, the way the creatures ingested water before squirting it out of an orifice to give them thrust against the deep ocean currents. But in space, what could they possibly be ingesting to then transform its energy into movement?
“Has to be gas,” he said to himself.
“What did you say, Dickerson?”
“Nothing, Corporal,” he said. He checked his HUD’s rearview camera. The suit lights on his back cast the same baleful glow as his helmet light. Against the darkness, they managed only to create shadows. But at least he didn’t see insubstantial shades following them. They were clear for the moment.
They crossed another set of intersections, Kalimura calling a halt and clearing both starboard and port before continuing forward. After the corporal and Carb continued down the long, seemingly endless hallway, he trained his light to starboard and scanned the hall. There were doors down there. One on each side. He flipped to check port and found the same.
Curious, he quickly mag-walked out of formation and shined his light on the first door. A bright green label said “R. Michaels.” Dickerson blinked at it and then grinned. “Corporal?”
“Go,” Kalimura said. She sounded tense.
He braced himself for a disciplinary tirade. “That last intersection? One of the doors on the starboard side had a crew member label on it. I’m guessing these are the quarters.”
“Dammit, Dickerson! Get back in formation. Now.”
“Aye, Corporal,” he said. He quickly moved out of the starboard hall and hurried to catch up with his squad. He brought up the schematics to confirm his hunch, but the majority of the
areas were without labels. They were on the second level of the foredecks. That’s all he knew.
After resuming formation, he tried to concentrate on making sure nothing was creeping up behind them as well as providing cover fire for Kalimura if something jumped at her. Constantly switching between the two views was exhausting. Either that or the ever-present fear of the dark was finally getting to him. He didn’t want to know which one it was.
Another intersection. They were ten meters from the next slip-point. Once they reached it, he knew Kalimura’s plan was to take them to the bridge. If, that was, they could get there.
He didn’t step out of formation, but he did pause to shine the light down the adjoining corridors, looking for hatches. Once again, he found at least one. It was wide and just off the hall. What he wouldn’t give for Mira to have her power back on so he could explore. Then again, he wasn’t sure he’d like what he’d find.
No trailing pinecones. No insidious shapes floating and bobbing like ocean buoys in the z-g. They had made it to the slip-point without a problem.
Kalimura halted for a moment and scanned the three-meter-wide hole in the wall. She crouch walked to the edge and shined her light first down into the bowels of the ship and then upward. “Okay, squad. We’re clear. For the moment.”
“Rest for a sec?” Dickerson asked. His headache was on the verge of coming back. He knew his nannies must be struggling to repair all the damage done when the skiff lost control. His back and shoulders hurt as though wrenched by an invisible, malevolent hand.
“Yeah,” Carb said. “I wasn’t planning on mag-walking this many kilos today.”
Kalimura seemed to crumple slightly. “Okay. Good idea.” She walked to the wall and mag-locked herself to it standing as straight as she could. “We’ll take a couple.”
Carb gently led Elliott to the wall and secured him before pulling herself to the floor. She sat cross-legged and locked herself next to him, rifle cradled in her lap.
Dickerson bent at the waist and tried to touch his toes. The suit was pliant enough to get him most of the way there, but balked a few millimeters from making contact with the boots. Still, his back thanked him. He stifled a groan of pleasure, stood, and raised his arms as high as they would go. “Well, that’s better,” he said aloud.
Kalimura chuckled. “Too much crouch-walking, big guy.”
“No, shit,” Dickerson said. “How are you holding up, Corporal?”
“Fine,” she said. “Not exactly the longest mag-walk I’ve ever done.”
“Really?” Carb asked. “What was the longest?”
“Seven km in one day,” she said.
Carb whistled. “That’s quite a hike.”
Dickerson shook his head. “Where the hell did you walk that distance?”
“Titan Station,” Kalimura said. “SFMC search and rescue had to help the engineers perform a walk to check for damage on the hull. That was after a tower blew out.”
“That sounds fun,” Elliott said in a drowsy voice. “How did you get that duty?”
Duty. Elliott had said the word as though Kalimura had been sworn to do someone else’s job.
“You know how it is,” Kalimura said, “boots do what boots do,” she said.
“You were a recruit?” Carb asked.
Kalimura grunted. “Aye. Fresh out. Four of us escorting engineers in our combat suits while they floated around on z-g waldos and portable scanning arrays.” She let out something that might have been a curse. “Bastards wouldn’t even skiff us.”
Dickerson said nothing. He couldn’t imagine mag-walking seven kilometers. During the Satellite War and his S&R missions, the most he’d clocked in was two km at best. That didn’t mean he hadn’t racked up a ton of distance in his years in the corps, just not all at once.
The squad fell silent for a moment leaving Dickerson alone with his thoughts, and the sound of his breathing and heartbeat. He peered at the slip-point opening. It yawned like the mouth of a great black beast. If they had enough light, they’d be able to see all the way down to the lowest deck as well as to the highest. But he knew Kalimura’s lights had only penetrated a few meters of darkness before petering out into a useless glow.
“Seven decks,” Dickerson said after consulting the schematics.
“Yes,” Kalimura agreed with a yawn. “Seven decks before we reach the bridge.”
“At least we won’t need to fool a biometric scanner to get in,” Carb said.
Dickerson smiled. “Small favors,” he said with a laugh. “No idea what Mira’s AI would do if it was still functional. 43 years without human contact? Damned thing might go insane.”
“Very well might,” Kalimura said. “Doesn’t matter. The ship has been without power for a very long time. I’m willing to bet the AI folded shortly after the human crew did.”
But did it? Dickerson wondered about that. The records he’d found in the medical bay indicated the ship had at least been functional long after SF Gov claimed it had been lost. So what had happened here? Another moment of silence. He closed his eyes and let himself float within his own personal darkness.
“Saddle up, squad,” Kalimura said.
Dickerson blinked. His chronometer showed five minutes had passed. He wondered briefly if he had fallen asleep. He guessed he had. Stifling a yawn, he checked his rifle, and walked to stand in front of Carb. Her helmet looked up at him. Smiling, he offered her a hand. Carb took it and he raised her off the floor with ease, letting go just as she reoriented her feet and mag-locked to the deck.
“Elliott?” Carb asked. “How are ya?”
The injured marine loosed a long, loud yawn. “Was fine until your voice hurt my ears.”
“Fuck you,” she said, but she was laughing. “I should make you walk. We all know you’re just slacking.”
Elliott raised his arm with the missing hand. “Yeah. Just slacking.”
No one said a word. Carb detached him from the wall and once again hoisted his body over her shoulder, his legs floating behind her. Kalimura was already standing at the slip-point’s threshold. She cleared both directions again.
“Six decks,” she said. “Thrust slow. Be careful of obstacles. And if you see anything moving, and I mean anything, you let the entire squad know. Understood?”
“Aye,” Dickerson said, unsurprised when both Elliott and Carb echoed his response.
Once they formed up behind Kalimura, she walked through the entryway and floated into nothing. Her suit jets burned for an instant, and she was flying upward. Dickerson waited his turn, hoping like hell there was a functional comm array somewhere above them.
Chapter Thirty-Three
The skiff moved starboard and aft at three meters per second. It was as fast as Gunny dared to travel. The memory of the obstacle course on Mira’s belly kept intruding on his mind. The thoughts made him weary and ready for a well-deserved, long-assed nap.
Taulbee had called in. Somewhere above them, the SV-52 circled the hull so the lieutenant could keep an eye on Gunny and the marines he’d left behind at the spindle.
With Wendt in the gunner’s chair, Gunny was reasonably sure he’d get a shout out before he reached anything too obvious. Then again, this was Wendt. The marine was experienced, but frequently seemed to overlook the most obvious things in the world.
Gunny frowned. He shouldn’t think that way. The man’s attitude had definitely changed since Niro died. The fact his squad was missing probably didn’t hurt either.
A field of pinecones lay further aft, but the last mount-point was more than a dozen meters away from it. Gunny was glad they weren’t going that way. He didn’t like the things, didn’t trust them. Something about them was way off. And after that acid shit ate Niro, he’d never trust anything on Mira again.
“Gunny to Taulbee.”
“Go ahead,” the lieutenant said.
“On approach. I’m slowing the skiff and should be there in less than two minutes.”
“Understood,” Taulbee
said. “Take your time, do it right.”
“Aye, sir,” Gunny said. Once again, the “take your time” phrase irked him. Both the captain and Taulbee had said those words, implying “make sure you don’t get anyone killed.” He knew better and they knew it too. Must be the stress of losing Niro. That wasn’t much comfort.
After cutting thrust to a 1/3 meter per second, the skiff moved like a lazy fish toward the mount-point target, its lights illuminating the empty zone Taulbee had talked about. The barren area was little more than a ten meter circle with a deep crack bisecting it. The mount-point lay just a few meters away from the circle’s center and the trench.
Gunny adjusted the skiff’s attitude so he could approach the target from the aft side. Shit, he thought, guess I have to fly over the pinecones after all.
“Lyke. Wendt. We have to go over a bunch of those pinecone things to get to the LZ. Keep a lookout for me.”
“Aye, Gunny,” Wendt said. “Might want to increase the hover.”
“Good idea,” Gunny said, scowling at the fact he hadn’t thought of it himself. He lowered the magnetic force and the skiff rose in altitude to a meter above the hull. It was only twice what they’d normally travel at, but it would have to do. Any more than that and the skiff might fly free of the hull and carry them into space.
Space. Right. He looked past the hull and to the debris field floating further and further away from Mira. And Taulbee flew through that shit? He shook his head. He’d known the LT a long time and liked him, but he could be reckless with his own life. Never with the lives of his squads, mind you, but everything else just seemed to be another adventure for him.
He returned his focus to the hull and guided the skiff into the massive field of pinecones. If he had his way, he’d fly over this shit as fast as he could. But if they were going to make the LZ, he didn’t have that option. Maybe going slow was the right call anyway--he wouldn’t have to worry about the thrusters disturbing the objects.
Kalimura’s skiff had been covered with the things, probably from the magnetics. For all Gunny knew, that’s why her skiff crashed. “Lyke. Keep an eye on the skiff’s hull,” Gunny said.
Derelict: Tomb (Derelict Saga Book 2) Page 22
