She climbed on, her eyes searching for Xavi, lost in the confusion. For a gut-wrenching second she thought maybe he’d been sucked right through the wound Alex Warthen now plugged, but then his foot caught her eye. He was up at the bridge.
“Xavi?” she called out.
No reply. His foot remained utterly still.
God, no, she thought. Not him. I need him. I can’t do this without him.
The umbilical. The ship’s order. Sever…umbilical…
Gloria glanced back at Vanessa. Forty-one seconds left on the big timer splashed across her visor. Her eyes flicked down to her own timer, the one that marked the ship’s self-destruct. Forty-four seconds. Jesus.
Gloria whirled and climbed on, ignoring the slight stir of limbs from Alex Warthen. He must be in utter agony, held so. She sensed a certain goodness in him, buried deep under all that he’d endured.
Why sever the umbilical? she wondered. To free the larger ship of the Wildflower’s burden. Had to be. Gloria couldn’t think of any other reason why the much larger craft would care, one way or the other. It must need to shed weight in order to outrun the Scipios. The circular explanation, linking back with the Wildflower’s own diet before starting this mission, bewildered her.
The timing, though…the timing bothered her. It was as if the Builder AI could puzzle out the utterly chaotic swing and twist the Wildflower now thrashed in and knew the perfect moment to let go. Perhaps true. It was only math, after all, not accounting for the actions of the Scipios now crawling over the hull. Maybe it understood them well enough, too.
Thirty-four seconds left when she reached the central hub of the ship, and the inner airlock door. Gloria glanced out, half-expecting to see a Scipio’s lens peering back at her.
Instead she saw the twisted remains of the tube. A Scipio had sliced it open. She remembered Alex Warthen firing that white-hot beam at it. The ship now held on to the hull of the larger Builder vessel by a thin reinforced filament that housed electrical and data cables. That one little thread, thankfully made from materials developed after researching the Builder space elevator in Darwin, held strong despite carrying the Wildflower’s entire weight.
She grabbed hold of the manual release and almost turned it. The ship’s words stilled her hand. Precisely zero.
Gloria glanced down to the tail end of the ship, where Vanessa lay. She couldn’t see the numbers from here, across this distance and through her own cracked visor.
Her visor. She had her own timer, three seconds longer. She’d sever the link at three seconds.
Twenty-seven remained. Twenty-four until she’d turn the handle.
The ship vibrated. There was a deafening thud from somewhere nearby. Gloria grabbed hold of a stabilizer rung as her body was buffeted by a shock wave. Only the pressure went on. She glanced down and almost cried out. A silvery tentacle had wrapped around her midsection. Horrified, she followed its length back to a new hull puncture, coming in through the medical deck.
“It’s over,” she whispered, as the limb tightened around her and began to pull. The needle tip twisted, turning toward her like a snake preparing to strike.
Gloria tried to hold on. Tightened her hand with all the strength left in her, but it was not enough. One hand slid off the umbilical disengage, the other held on a moment longer before those tired fingers betrayed her as well. She flew from the airlock door, across the ship, and slammed into the curved inner hull with a teeth-rattling clang. Stars filled her vision. The hairline crack on her visor widened, spidered, then the entirety of its surface became a mosaic of chaotic squares.
The needle-tipped Scipio arm plunged into her calf. Gloria screamed, and screamed, and screamed.
The needle came out. Gloria Tsandi, breathing hard, tried to ignore the white-hot agony coming from her leg. She blinked tears away and threw all her mental capacity toward the one task she had. Sever the umbilical. Let the Builder ship go before the self-destruct comes.
But how? She was pinned. There couldn’t be more than fifteen seconds left.
She glanced up, fighting to see through the web of cracked glass. Where Xavi’s foot had been she now saw only darkness. He’d moved. That was good. “Xavi? Talk to me.”
A crackle of static, the effect of a long hard exhale on the suit’s microphone. “Here,” he managed groggily.
“I need your help. I need you now.”
“I…”
“Can you climb to the airlock?”
“No,” he said, the word full of anguish, defeat.
Gloria opened her mouth, ready to plead, or say goodbye.
“I can,” a voice said. A woman’s voice. Beth Lee.
She climbed past Gloria.
—
The shells of at least a half-dozen Scipio ships lay in ruin.
Prumble kicked one, and watched with mild disgust as a chunk of the thing slid away. “Eww,” he said. “It’s like looking at the cross section of a rotten Scotch egg.”
Tania leaned in, nose wrinkled, studying the mess. The shell was thick, made of layer upon thin layer of various metals and other materials she did not recognize. Composites of various color and apparent hardness. Then came sections of what she had to assume were support systems. Air processing, fuel, computers, and all the tubing and cables required to link them all together.
In the larger chunk she could see the dead body of the Scipio within. Part of it, anyway. This was not a “ship” in the sense that a being could roam around inside, but rather an extension of the pilot’s body. More like a space suit, now that she thought about it, though that was also not quite right. Something symbiotic.
“Hard to tell where the machine stops and the body begins,” she said.
The limbs did not end in digits but in segmented, metallic tubes that extended out and merged into the support structures within the interior “wall.” The face was hidden behind a similar, though much larger, contraption. Smaller tubes, or perhaps merely electrical or data cables, poked into the pale flesh at various points all along the folded body.
“Nasty little creature,” Prumble replied.
A soup of gray goop coated the smooth skin. Tania leaned closer and saw flecks of white, blue, and black swimming around within the fluid. Whether insects or nanites, she had no idea. Then the answer came to her. “Engineered virus,” she said to her companion, who had come to stand beside her.
He knelt and reached out.
“Don’t,” she said, “touch it.”
“I won’t. I didn’t!” Still, he did not lean away. “It looks like it’s lived its whole life in here. Like this vessel is the real body. I wonder if it even knew it had hands and feet. A face.”
“It’s fascinating,” she said, then at his exasperated expression added, “in a way.”
Prumble stood abruptly. “We need to keep moving,” he said, an edge to his voice that raised the hair on Tania’s arms. “Not the time to study them.”
“Agreed,” she said immediately, standing.
He looked at her, surprised.
“We’re well past the scientific analysis phase of this mission,” she said, gesturing to the violence and gore all around them.
“Well said. Right, then, shall we?”
“Lead on,” Tania said.
He powered ahead, following the path. Tania forced herself to keep up. Her throat was dry, her stomach empty. The buzz of adrenaline had faded, leaving her jittery and tired. She glanced at the timer that seemed to float before her.
Forty seconds remained.
She pushed harder, momentum bolstered by a sudden drop in gravity. The ship, easing back on its relentless pace. On purpose, or had the engines been hit? Tania forced herself to focus. She had to trust Eve. They all did. This place was her body, these tubes and cables her veins. She knew what was happening around them, and how best to fend off this infection of Scipios.
Tania hoped so, at any rate. Trusting the ship had become a lot harder since Alex Warthen had risen from the dead.
>
Prumble built up a lead on her. They were running—hopping, more like—down one of Eve’s ubiquitous spiral hallways. Signs of battle were everywhere now. Twice Tania passed gaping holes in the wall that looked right out into empty space. The void. She saw nothing out there. It was simply too vast. But they were out there, somewhere, in the dark. Gathering. In thirty-four seconds they would come again, tactics revised, goals reevaluated.
Movement ahead pulled her attention back to the task. Prumble had skidded to a stop. She pulled up beside him.
On the wall nearby was the airlock the other human crew had evidently entered through. Just a circular white door, currently open, surrounded by a hardened foam. Crude but effective.
She glanced through.
The umbilical tube was a shredded mess. Something, and it didn’t take much imagination to picture what, had tried to slice the thing in half. And it had almost succeeded, if not for the spine conduit of support cables that ran the length of the thing. Useless as an umbilical now. In fact, all it seemed to be doing was keeping the other ship from floating away. Amazing that it could hold the weight. The impressively sleek Earth vessel dangled from the opposite end, shifting and rotating chaotically as it played out the motion imparted by half a dozen Scipios crawling around on its hull.
“Do we help them?” Prumble asked.
She wanted to, but there was no way to predict how to approach it. One miscalculated leap and it might twist or lurch and slam into her, sending her cartwheeling out into space. And then there were the Scipios to worry about. Tania glanced at Prumble, then at the glowing path. It did not lead out of the ship and along the umbilical, but continued on down the spiral hallway. Wherever Eve needed them, it wasn’t here. She tugged at Prumble’s arm, nodding toward the path. “I guess not,” she said, answering his question.
“Time’s almost out,” he observed, still staring at the ship and its dire circumstance.
She could see the frustration in his face. The annoyance at being only a chess piece, unable to comprehend the meta-game being played.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”
He nodded absently, and they were off again.
Twenty-four seconds left.
The hall led around only one more curve before ending abruptly at a chamber barely tall enough for her to stand in. Prumble had to stoop. Dark gray walls were angled from a wide ceiling down to a floor barely two meters in diameter. Two iris doors were the only adornments, on adjacent walls, with even smaller spherical chambers inside each. The glowing path ended right between the two doors.
Something about the space, and the position of the doors, bothered Tania. She felt uneasy, off-kilter, as if gravity were once again shifting unpredictably to some new vector. But the gravity had faded entirely now. The Chameleon was once again coasting.
“Eve?” Tania asked. “What now?”
No reply.
Tania glanced inside one of the iris doors. Within was a small spherical chamber, deeply cushioned in some kind of reddish material that reminded her of suede. At the center, a waist-high black pedestal stood, cold and ominous. Carved into its surface were familiar geometric patterns. A miniature version of the aura towers that had protected Belém from the plague on Earth.
Tania’s path changed again. The glowing line led into the small sphere-shaped room.
“Inside,” Eve said, “quickly now.”
She glanced behind and saw Prumble moving to the other door. He gripped the edge of the chamber’s entrance and hauled himself inside, squirming around his own small aura tower and settling into the cushions as naturally as if it were his own ground car.
Tania remained in the larger chamber, staring at the two iris doors, not happy that they were being split between the two rooms but finding no energy to question Eve’s plan. The timer, at sixteen seconds, left little room for debate. Still, she hesitated.
It was then she spotted the problem with the room. The angles were all wrong. Not by much, but once she’d come to the realization the differences added up. The two iris doors were at different heights—one almost flush with the floor, the other six or seven centimeters up. The wall her door graced was sloped slightly, where Prumble’s was perfectly vertical.
Why? For the life of her, she could see no purpose to the differences. Yet they must be for a reason.
Ten seconds.
Nine.
“What’s this room for, Eve?” she asked.
“Pl-pl-please…—inside, Tania,” she replied, ignoring the query.
Tania pushed into the small sphere and saw that a portion of it had reshaped itself, bulged outward on two sides and pinched inward in the center to form a kind of seat. Reluctantly, she floated into the molded cushions, turning as she went.
Four seconds.
Secured, she glanced up, hoping for a reassuring smile from Prumble in his chamber across the tiny hallway that connected them.
What she saw instead was the iris door pressing closed. The parts met in the center noiselessly.
“Prumble!” she shouted, but it was no use.
There was a sharp hiss and a dozen red orbs appeared across the door’s surface and began to inflate. More cushions, totally surrounding her now. Pressing in, pressing all the way in to fill the emptiness in the volume.
She knew, then, what this place was.
—
The glowing path led to a spot Sam knew well. The very tip of the Chameleon, where she and Vaughn had crawled back inside as the strange, beetlelike creatures had scurried after them, coating the ship’s exterior. For all the good that had done them.
“It’s quiet,” Vaughn said.
Sam rolled her eyes. “Don’t say it—”
“Too quiet.”
“Damn you.”
He shot her a half-grin. It faded only a second later. “I’ll go first? For once? Please?”
“Fine,” she said.
The timer on her visor ticked down. Twelve seconds.
Vaughn advanced to the iris door that led into the tiny chamber at Eve’s nose. Sam fell in behind, ready for battle, hoping Eve’s plan was to let them outside. Give them all the space they needed to fight. Take the battle to the enemy for once.
Her companion leaned inside. When nothing happened, he put one hand out to steady himself. The sensation of gravity had dwindled and then vanished moments earlier, without explanation. For some reason, Eve was no longer trying to outrun the enemy. Vaughn hovered before the circular door. And waited. Three precious seconds ticked away, feeling like much more than that. It was too quiet, Sam thought. “Eve—” she started.
“One moment,” the ship replied.
“We don’t have—”
Sam heard a sound behind her. She glanced back in time to see the hallway they’d climbed to get here was now barricaded by a flat, gray panel. She turned to point this out to Vaughn. Eve must have repaired her ability to modify her interior, and not a moment too soon.
The panels of the hatch before Vaughn slid silently away, revealing the semi-conical chamber at the very tip of the vessel. A hole had been torn or cut away from the ceiling, revealing the naked vacuum of space beyond. Sam could see the brilliant star of Kepler-22, blinding for an instant until her helmet compensated. Much closer was a cloud of debris.
No, she realized. Not a cloud. A swarm.
“Vaughn—” she said. The name died on her lips.
Out there, in the void, the counterattack had begun.
Three…
Two…
One…
The Chameleon
6.AUG.3911 (Earth Actual)
ZERO.
Each Scipio ship turned into a blazing star, lighting up the blackness of space like fireworks. Their engines flared in hues of white and yellow, dazzling, even painful, to look at. But Sam kept watching. She wanted to count them, but gave up as the lights became a galactic band stretching across the field of view afforded her by the hole in Eve’s hull.
Hundreds, easil
y, and all riding plumes of nuclear fire as they raced toward the Chameleon with some new tactic in mind.
“Now it gets fun,” she said, a bit annoyed at the trepidation in her voice.
“What the hell are we supposed to do?” Vaughn asked. “Jump out there?”
As if in answer, the room around them began to change. Little bubbles of orange appeared in a grid pattern all across the walls, floor, and even the damaged ceiling. The blobs began to spread outward, flattening. Joining with one another. Sam took a chance and poked one section. Despite the spongy appearance, the material was quite firm. Like a life vest. The thought of it took her back to riding in a small boat, surrounded by problem children at the summer camp, taking them to see the crocs, making sure they had their safety gear on.
Yes. A life vest. Pretty much exactly like that, in fact. Sam looked at Vaughn, but he was still staring out at the fleet of Scipio vessels bearing down on them. “They’re starting to spread out. Uncanny how they move like that. So coordinated.”
“Vaughn…”
He glanced at her, then at the space around them. “The hell?”
The orange material had smeared across everything now, and had started to even out and form ergonomic contours. Seats, shaped not unlike the dropship couches on the Melville.
“Please prepare for a high-velocity maneuver,” Eve said in her more mechanical tone. The words repeated a few seconds later.
A new timer had begun, replacing the old one.
“What the hell is this, Eve?” Vaughn asked.
The answer was no answer at all, save repetition. “Please prepare for a high-velocity maneuver.”
A nod passed between Sam and Vaughn. She took the couch to her left, while he pulled into the other.
“No straps,” Vaughn observed. He started to say more, but his voice abruptly vanished.
Sam’s heart lurched. She half-expected to see him impaled by some round fired through the opening in the ceiling. A sniper shot from far away. But he looked fine. In fact, he was still speaking, she just couldn’t hear him.
“Eve? Something is wrong with our suits, I can’t hear Vaughn.”
Injection Burn Page 26
