But there had been that small room at the nose that she and Vaughn had entered through upon camouflaging the ship. That little space, right at the nose. That’s where the Scipios would breach the hull. Had to be. She couldn’t know for sure, but it made sense. It probably looked more easily penetrable to their probes.
So she raced there, propelled by plumes of vectored thrust her suit emitted from minuscule vents in the back, elbows, knees, and feet. An addition made after the awkward jumping on the world they’d visited. Moving this way, so awkward at first, had become second nature. She didn’t have to think about it at all, she just wanted to go somewhere and the suit went. At any other time, this would have pissed her off, this invasion of her mental privacy, but now…damn, it kicked ass. The suit knew her.
The spaces before her began to taper, drawing in to a point.
She slowed, if only a little, feeling the familiar rush of adrenaline in her temples. Battle sense, Vaughn called it. As intrinsic to her and him as smell or sight or taste.
Or hearing.
The sound had vanished.
Whoever—whatever—had been drilling on the hull had just finished their work.
Sam stopped herself and moved to a natural barricade formed by a series of pipes that snaked like tentacles throughout these hidden places of the Builder ship. The portions Eve normally kept hidden from them, opened before she shut down in case a need arose to visit. Vaughn took up a position roughly opposite her, tucked in shadow, only a red glow from his helmet to mark his position.
From somewhere farther ahead came a mad scrambling sound, like a wet dog trying to get its footing on a tiled floor. The noise went away almost as quickly as it had started, plunging the ship once again into total silence.
Sam glanced at Vaughn. When their eyes met he gave a shrug. She held her hand up, willing him to stay put, and then leaned out to look down the hall.
Something shifted in the darkness. On instinct Sam lurched back to her hiding spot, trying to process what she’d seen. The view had been brief, the darkness near absolute, but in that glimpse a memory had been triggered. A feeling, like déjà vu. Slippery and just beyond reach, flooding her with a sense of terror she’d only experienced a few times before in her life.
She was about to glance again when the movement came to her. In the space between herself and Vaughn the air seemed to shimmer. A smoke filled the air. A sort of strange fractured mist. Shapes slithered within the haze. Little spiny branches, thin as hair yet solid as ice. Perhaps they were ice, as if the smoke was freezing. As she watched the spines grew, longer and thicker, becoming as wide as finger bones in places.
Sam shuddered, remembering now. I’ve seen this before, she thought. The fog in old downtown Darwin, and the crystalline forest she’d experienced within its murk. It had shredded one of her companions to nothing more than a few bloodied strips of yellow environment suit in seconds, simply by vibrating. It self-healed when she’d tried to smash it. Eventually she’d destroyed it with fire.
Fire.
She had to tell Vaughn. Screw the radio silence. The Scipios were here, so what difference would it make? Sam willed the communication channel, but nothing happened. She tried the manual approach, an interface Prumble had helped Eve add, but it did not react at all. Eve had locked them out, the bitch. She’d kept Alex Warthen alive for some reason, and now she proved that she had zero trust in her supposed saviors. Sam wanted to spit.
Vaughn knew, didn’t he? The way she’d beaten it? What it had done when they’d tried brute force? She’d told all of them, but how much attention had he paid?
God, if he tried to hack his way through that to reach her he’d be mulched. She had to show him. Sam found she could access the suit’s tools and weaponry, so at least Eve hadn’t left them totally defenseless. The exotic armor had no flamethrower, but it did have a small torch to be used in the case of cutting through a sealed door or other barrier.
She selected it, and glanced up. Vaughn was almost invisible to her now, so thick the fog and forest of spiny branches had grown. Please don’t swing at it, Vaughn. Wait for my lead. Please. Please!
Crystalline structures formed before her eyes, like ice in fast-motion footage. She fired up her torch and hoped he could see it.
Keeping herself on the wall, Sam held the flame at the nearest spike and watched it shrink back, like a living thing. The blue-white color glowed red for a second, then diminished to something yellow-brown. It stopped growing.
She moved her flame to the next, and the next. It would take too long, she quickly realized. Meanwhile the crystalline forest continued to flow right down the hallway, toward the biomes. Could the whole thing be severed? Did it work like that?
Vaughn first, before he took a swing at the stuff. Sam waved her arm more aggressively now, not bothering to hold the tip of the fire to each tendril but instead letting it kiss them as she raised and lowered her armored hand. But the little branches only glowed at the touch of the flame, then continued on their unrelenting march to fill the interior spaces of the ship.
A warm light emerged in the fog and dark. Vaughn had ignited his torch, too, and appeared to be mimicking her efforts. You marvelous son of a bitch, she thought. And here she’d been about to tell him to stop shadowing her every goddamn move.
Sam began to work her way toward him, burning the crystal fingers at their thickest points and then shattering the resulting dead portion with a swift, controlled tap from the edge of her flattened hand. With this approach whole branches would die off, losing the blue luster in their coloration and drifting free, despite being tens of meters in length in places. One separated chunk she touched accidentally and it disintegrated along its length, becoming a fine powder, like sand.
The flame that marked Vaughn’s location faded and vanished, and Sam’s heart raced. She’d find him wrapped in the bony, segmented shards, their tips puncturing every last bit of him. The vision of it filled her with an all-consuming dread, and she wanted to scream at the dozens of branches that still snaked around her, almost instantly replacing any she destroyed. Vertigo gripped her—the sudden feeling that these branches were not snaking horizontally along the hall, but were vines dangling from some distant, unseen ceiling. She groped reflexively for something to stop the fall her body said was coming, her hand smacking against several of the long, thin crystals. And she knew she’d doomed herself.
The vibration she’d put into their segmented lines seemed to echo, not only reverberating but amplifying. The branches began to twitch, then sway, then swing like living things seeking to eviscerate whatever had disturbed them. She saw them as the long, hardened tentacles of some deep ocean jellyfish, slicing randomly through the dark depths to poison a threat only sensed.
Something sharp bit into her leg. Sam pulled away, looking down at the same time to see one branch had grown in a spiral around her calf and then somehow plunged through the Builder armor. She thrust her torch at it without thinking and cried out in pain at the sudden heat that met her skin. But the spine of the alien growth melted and broke away, part of it probably still under her suit and skin. The flame, painful as it was, had hopefully cauterized the puncture. She lifted her leg to look closer and watched in mild fascination as her suit filled in the small hole and visibly hardened back into its original form. Like it had never happened, except for the white-hot agony just below, the tip of the crystalline spike inside her flesh.
Could it grow on its own? The idea made her nauseous. A voice in the back of her mind screamed the more obvious concern: The Scipios were masters of tailored viruses. Did her immunity to the subhuman plague imply immunity to whatever else they made? A naïve concept, and a dangerous one.
Four new lights erupted in front of her, just meters away but almost totally obscured in the waving lines of the tendrils. The lights flared and stretched, yellow-white in color and almost a meter long each. In a second she understood. Thrusters. Far better than the damn torch! She pulled her own arms and legs i
n front of her and willed the suit to reverse. Instantly the small engines roared to life and sent her flying back the way she’d come. Too fast. She hit the wall hard, bounced off. Her legs and arms were still out before her, spraying gouts of superheated exhaust that kept her pressed against the wall and the spines before her crumbling into glassy sand.
As coherent thought returned Sam tried aiming more strategically, cutting a little sphere of empty air around her, as she’d done with the road flare back in Darwin, years ago.
Across the hall she could make out the vague form of Vaughn doing the same thing as she. It was working. Then his pattern changed, and it took a moment for her to realize he was coming closer. His legs were back, thrusting him forward, compensating for the fact that his hands were waving about wildly in front of him, battling back the spiky branches. Whether he intended it or not, by the time Sam could see Vaughn’s determined face behind his visor, he’d cut the forest of tendrils in half, leaving the hallway in the direction they’d come an odd mixture of fog and glassy powder. On the other side all she could see were the charred tips of the severed branches, still waving as if angered.
He came to her, cutting the few remaining chunks away, then taking his place next to her. Despite everything he managed a grin and she returned it, wishing nothing more than to kiss him right then, right there.
They positioned themselves side by side, ready for another onslaught. None came. Instead, the remaining crystalline branches turned to dust, exploding in a shower of tiny shards that whirled into dazzling small vortices.
She looked at Vaughn, who only shrugged. The hall, while thick with the powder left behind, had otherwise returned to its original state.
The thought had just formed in her mind—we won—when everything changed again.
That fine glassy powder suddenly, forcefully withdrew as if sucked out into space through a gaping rend in Eve’s hull. Which, Sam realized with a cold terror, may be exactly what had happened. Only, she felt no such pull on herself. She and Vaughn remained in place, unperturbed.
Which meant the powder had moved on its own, like billions of little self-propelled entities. The ramifications of that were only beginning to settle when a dozen light beams winked on and flooded the hall.
The cones of light seemed to span every color in the rainbow, assembling into dazzling white when their sweeping forms met in the center. And it wasn’t just cones. Sam saw the flawless straight lines of lasers, too. Red, green, and even yellow beams began to pan along the surfaces of the irregular hall, searching.
All of this light emanated from points roughly marking a circular shape, about twenty-five meters away and still obscured in the haze.
One laser, green, swept across Sam’s eyes. She barely had time to blink at the terrible brightness when her visor adjusted to compensate, becoming so dark she could see nothing except a green flare in the center of her vision. It held on her for several seconds before she felt Vaughn’s hands grab her by the shoulders and push her aside.
The afterglow from the laser danced in front of her eyes no matter where she looked. Sam tucked in behind some piping and waited for her vision to clear. Finally, she leaned out. Whatever the thing was, it was creeping closer. The core portion seemed to be a spherical bulb, studded with socketed lights and little articulated limbs tipped with the scanning lasers. Perhaps other weapons, too.
A Scipio scout. A member of what Captain Tsandi had called the Swarm Blockade. Had to be. And that growth that had pushed into the ship only to disintegrate into powder, had been somehow related to SUBS. An engineered virus, grown and spread here, and that spherical pod was the factory that had made it.
And it had touched her. Tasted her.
The question was, had it retrieved the sample, or had she destroyed the limb quickly enough? Was the collector, if that was indeed the purpose of the crystal structure, still inside her leg? Her bloodstream?
She was immune to the subhuman virus. She didn’t know what that meant, nor did Eve, except that it was not only important but of great interest to the Builder machine. Sam had to kill this creature before it could figure her out.
Battle instinct, so long her driving force, took hold once again. Sam pushed out into the hall, ignoring the beams that quickly found and converged on her. She willed her suit to action and felt the beam weapons on her arms come to life. She held both hands out before her, fingers curled into fists, and let loose twin rails of sizzling blue-white hell. The columns made the air dance with electric force. Where they struck home a shower of smoke and sparks erupted from the Scipio. Be it a living creature or just a ship, Sam had no idea, but it reacted as if alive. The thing thrashed wildly, bouncing into one wall and then rocketing across to the next, like a balloon venting its air. The enemy sought respite from the dual columns of superheated air, but Sam’s aim was true, her focus absolute, and she kept the lines more or less on the center of the strange ball-shaped opponent.
Blue flames began to gout from the impact sites, and the Scipio began to wiggle and vibrate with astonishing speed. The death throes, Sam thought, but this idea quickly fled. Somehow this vibration seemed to reduce the effect of the beams. And its own dozen lights and lasers began to coordinate again, swinging back to find Sam.
Her visor dimmed once more, making it all but impossible to see. She felt warm, a sensation that grew to dangerously hot within seconds.
She’d be cooked alive in the damn Builder armor. Sam turned to flee, looking frantically for Vaughn, and saw the mortar launch from his back. The explosion shook everything.
The shock wave hit her and sent her spinning back down the hallway. The brief impact of the blast had ended the growing heat of the Scipio’s beam weapons. Sam struggled to stabilize herself, the thrusters on her suit firing erratically.
Something grabbed her arm. Sam swung, her punch deflected easily. It was Vaughn, drifting beside her. His grip nullified her spin and she found herself staring at his red-lit face as clumps of debris and glassy powder careened through the air around them, rattling against her visor. Her heart swelled and she placed one hand against his face mask. Thank you, she mouthed, understanding now that he’d fired a mortar at almost point-blank range to destroy the enemy scout. Distantly she knew there would be more, though.
“No problem,” Vaughn’s voice said in her helmet.
Sam glanced up at him, confused. “Comms are back on?” she asked.
He focused, reading her lips, then nodded. “Found a buried option for very short range.” He explained to her how to find it. “Are you hurt?”
“Singed a bit. You?”
“A little dazed. I’m worried more about the ship. I couldn’t figure out a way to stop that thing without the cannon. It’s going to get fucking messy in here if that’s our only option.”
Sam grinned at him. She’d have done the same thing. “There’ll be more of them. We need to get to the others. Barricade the hallways that lead to the biome. My beams were hurting it. If we focus fire…”
He nodded, but a shadow fell across his features. The shade of a deeper concern only now understood, and Sam realized she felt it, too. The mission had failed. The ruse had not worked, no doubt due to the arrival of the ship from Earth.
Fine, she thought. Scuttle this bullshit sneaky approach and come at the bastards head-on. They could be beaten; she knew that now. With a jerk of her chin, Sam urged Vaughn into motion, back to the biomes.
—
Behind her, in the haze and the darkness, the watchers crept forward. They studied the newcomer with total awe. They watched, and they analyzed the material fed back into them from the trillions of virus scouts flooded into the frigid atmosphere of the disguised ship. From the sampling they had learned precisely nothing. And that, in and of itself, was the most important thing they had ever learned.
The Chameleon
6.AUG.3911 (Earth Actual)
GLORIA POSITIONED HERSELF just out of sight of the Wildflower’s umbilical, with Xavi right b
ehind her. She’d turned off her lamp the moment she’d left the others back at the forest sphere, using a rudimentary night vision mode in their helmets to navigate the strange, oddly luxurious maze of the slumbering Builder ship. Xavi had followed her example, keeping a hand on her back to reassure her of his presence.
“No one in the tube or at the airlock,” she said on the private channel. “Any ideas on how to go about this?”
“That bit’s easy,” Xavi said. “We make the trade, then I start cracking skulls.”
A distant vibration rolled through the ship, like a softly struck bass drum. It was the first thing she’d heard other than her own breathing since moving toward the tail end of the ship, away from the humming noise that had put Skyler and his crew on alert. Gloria froze as the rumbling ebbed, then died. “What was that?”
“Explosion,” Xavi said. “I’d bet on it.”
The bone-induction speaker behind Gloria’s ear chimed, alerting her to conversation on the normal channel. She held up a finger to her companion, then switched. The suit automatically replayed the last communication. “You’d better make this fast, Captain. Your engineer tells me the Swarm has arrived.”
“If that’s true,” Gloria replied, “we’ve already lost. You’re sentencing us to death by leaving us here, so the exchange is pointless.”
“I still need your navigator,” Alex Warthen replied.
“Then take all of us. Keep Beth, and bring me as well. The ship can support ten, plenty of room.”
Xavi elbowed her. She glanced at him and he proceeded to wave his middle fingers at the umbilical. Gloria put her gloved hand on his suited arm and eased him back, glaring at him. I’ve got this, she mouthed.
He pointed urgently at his wrist, an ancient gesture from when people kept time on wrist-worn displays. His point was valid. If the scouts were here, time was now their worst enemy. More would arrive every minute, cutting their way into both craft until any threats were identified and neutralized. If what Commander Blake had told her was true, hell would follow. Experiments and dissections on both craft and crew.
Injection Burn Page 19
