by R. M. Meluch
A wind from below fluttered her hair. Oh, skat, they got the lift working again and they’re opening the deck to the vacuum!
Screamed, “Don’t open it! Don’t open it!”
But the cables to which she clung were not moving down to launch her Swift, and the wind was not the kind of gale that would signal her imminent death by vacuum. This was just a hull tear somewhere making the air circulate oddly.
She leaned her face against the cable, breathed relief, “Oh, frag. Oh, hell.”
An odd sound came from below, a clattering scritching, something like dog toenails on metal, but moving vertically. The sound was nearing.
Kerry leaned way back on the cables to look down around her Swift.
A black shape filled the shaft. Lots of whippy legs. Rising fast.
Colonel Steele stalked down the ramp tunnel to the starboard hangar deck to see what had become of his fighters. He met an alien in the corridor. An amazing, nightmare thing in this familiar, orderly place. It had pried up one of the deck grates, and several of its many tentacles fished underneath for something dropped there.
The sight threw him not an instant. Steele drew his standard issue sidearm—the splinter gun, not the sword. The gunsights bracketing his eyes triangulated the direction and read the distance from the constriction of pupils to the focal point of his gaze. Vibration in his hand signaled target acquired.
The splinter gun fired true. The sliver penetrated the black body, which gave a violent jerk as Steele immediately depressed the second stage trigger to explode the sliver inside the target.
The alien ruptured nicely. Its punctured remains deflated to the deck. Seemed to be melting through the grate.
Steele did not stay to observe it. He had to burst open another one he saw clinging to the overhead, and another chewing through the bulk.
He took aim down the ramp tunnel to another thing galloping up from the hangar deck, its tentacles madly slapping. The sliver hit home, but the second stage detonation failed.
Steele fired again.
Detonation failed again, winning Steele only a thrashing mad alien, with two slivers in its belly, rolling up the ramp tunnel.
From elsewhere in the ship, other shouts reported weapons’ failure.
The snaky mass left the deck, sprang at Steele. Steele saw it coming at him like a giant jumping spider, but with many mouths at the ends of many tentacles.
And he opened it up with his sword.
The blue-black mess spilled a brown stinging gush as it hit his torso. It shrank to the deck, sloshing its innards out.
Steele hadn’t even thought about doing that. Didn’t even know how the sword got into his hand. After all the drills, it was reflex now.
As the tentacles stopped their spasms and the thing went still at his feet, Steele vowed he would never, ever, question any dumb idea of Farragut’s ever again.
Kerry Blue in a nightmare chase. Climbing for her life in this dark shaft from the most enormous of spiders. Could not move fast enough. Tentacles gained on her up the shaft.
She climbed as fast as she could, hand over hand, on the cables. Tendons straining, muscles burning, her own fierce grunts urging her on.
Near to the top. Almost there.
Glove touched deck as something touched her boot, bit a chunk out of it. She screeched.
With a sudden tightness in her collar, she was rising—fast—without effort, like puppy lifted by its scruff.
Colonel Steele. Hauled her up and threw her aside.
She rolled, pushed her hair out of her face to look up from the deck. Colonel Steele with a sword. Brought a Herculean downstroke to land on the black swarm of tentacled hideousness that emerged from the shaft.
The thing fell back down the hole.
A sharp yelp sounded from below. Inchoate cursing. Cries of more disgust than pain. Something loathsome had fallen on Cowboy’s head.
A tentacle, severed from the monster, still lashed on the deck. Steele kicked it down the shaft.
Cowboy’s gagging outcry echoed up the shaft.
From farther below, came other voices. “Shoot ’em! Shoot ’em! Shooooot!”
And the scritching of many many legs.
Colonel Steele cupped his hand to the side of his mouth to call down to them. “Splinter guns are inoperative!”
A shout returned up the shaft, “Then we’re frogged, sir!”
With someone else crying, “It’s over. It’s all over!”
And closer, from Cowboy, who had to be climbing the cables, “It ain’t over till the Cowboy’s dead!”
Colonel Steele flipped his sword in the air a half turn endwise, caught it, so that he now held the blade between fingers and thumb, wary of the sharp edge. He called down the shaft. “Carver! Yo!”
Cowboy wiped brown slime off his face, squinted up. Saw what Steele held. He freed up a hand to receive it. “Ho!”
Steele let the blade drop.
Cowboy caught the sword deftly by the hilt. He swung down the cables to battle the monsters that threatened the rest of his squad.
Kerry sprang up from the deck. “Any more where that came from, sir?”
Kerry Blue had her flaws—lots of them—but indecision in battle was not one of them.
Steele signaled her go. Did not have to tell her where to go or how many swords to come back with as fast as she could. In a fight for your life, you want to be beside Kerry Blue.
26
THEY WERE GETTING HARDER, the gorgons, develop ing shells, making it tougher to slice through them.
Observations of the enemy passed quickly through the ship by shouts:
They dissolve when they die.
Close your eyes when you open them up. That brown slop that squirts out of them is caustic.
Hacking off their legs does NOT kill them.
Those suckers at the ends of their legs can take a chaw out of you right quick.
They’re really ugly.
Thank you, Einstein.
You can’t squash them.
So who tried to squash something that can squeeze through a force field?
Same idiot who tried a fire extinguisher on them.
As if something that came in from the vacuum would mind cold or oxygen deprivation.
But the swords still worked, even against the hard ones.
Kerry Blue hacked at flailing mouth-legs until her muscles were laced with fire, and she kept hacking. I will not be eaten alive. She was not even afraid anymore. Tired, in pain, angry, her stinging eyes watering. She had no room for fear.
At some point the main lights went back on. The air came in cooler through the vents. Kerry heard a splinter gun detonate. A lift running. Jubilant hoots. “We’re back in this!”
They were guessing these gorgons got their strength in numbers. The company and crew had apparently hacked them down to critical unmass, and the monsters couldn’t do their jamming tricks anymore.
With that, the bone-weary inner numbness lifted. The prey became the exterminator. Merrimack’s crew and company fought with strength they didn’t know they had left. It became sport to hunt down and kill these tentacled rats trying to leave the ship.
When she could find nothing left to kill, Kerry dragged herself into a lab, sat on the deck, and pulled the chain for the sprinkler that was there in case of chemical spills. She let the water wash over her face. Carly Delgado crawled in to sit back to back with her under the cool stream. A dog joined them.
Other Marines staggered in, pressed in with Kerry, Carly, and the dog, in a wet knot.
Kerry passed the chain around, too exhausted even to keep it pulled.
A tippy tappy skitter rushed past the lab—a stray gorgon down to a dozen legs, with Cowboy in hot pursuit with raised sword, wailing like Tarzan.
Carly cracked an eye, but Cowboy and the thing were already past. “What the hell was that?”
“Just one damn thing after another,” said Kerry.
Colonel Steele found them there. No
one stood up, and Steele didn’t make them.
Steele stripped to boxers and T-shirt, his uniform sopping with brown slime and shredded from tentacle bites. Kerry and Carly scooted over to make room for him under their sprinkler.
Steele sat heavily, a mess, his white skin blotched with red chemical burns, his eyelids so swollen you couldn’t tell his eyes were blue. The water rinsed brown filth from his white-blond crewcut, from the gold thatch on his chest. Blood from a gash on his arm thinned and swirled down the drain.
Kerry leaned against him. “Thanks, Colonel.” She meant for saving her life in the lift shaft.
Steele grunted.
In a moment, “Sir?”
Steele snarled, “What?”
“Can I stay?”
A whole string of foul words. There was a yes in there among them.
“Hoo ra,” said Kerry Blue.
Farragut strode through the corridors, talking to his crew, his Marines, thanking them for a job well done, asking them to account for all their mates, checking all decks for stragglers or wounded.
Returning to the command deck, he looked about for one not here. “Where’s Hamster?”
Commander Gray said, “You mean our diminutive, redheaded lieutenant? I have not seen her.”
No one had seen her.
And Farragut realized he had not seen anyone from the Fury.
He hailed the displacement deck. When he finally got someone on the com, it was a maintenance tech who had to check the displacement log in the computer.
“Negative, Captain. No displacements at all the last three watches.”
Farragut had ordered the Fury crew to displace back to Merrimack when the gorgons first attacked.
That was about the time the ship’s controls started to go down. Displacement required precise readings and confirmation from three discrete sources—the LD, the collar, and the displacement chamber. They must not have acquired a signal lock.
Farragut got on the com. “Fury. Farragut. Respond.” And to the com tech. “Did they receive that?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Keep hailing them.”
“Aye, sir.”
Into the intercom, “Mo! What are your insects doing?”
The ship’s medical officer was up to his elbows in wounded. An orderly checked on the captain’s question, reported, “They haven’t calmed down any.”
To Tactical: “Get a scanner on the Fury. Put it on the display.”
Farragut prowled the command deck end to end, fretting the thirty seconds it took to get an image of the Fury up. Asked anyone, “Did they take swords aboard the Fury?”
“I don’t think so, Captain,” said Commander Gray.
The image of the Fury appeared on the tac screen, still riding alongside Merrimack.
Riddled with holes chewed through its hull.
The com tech reported before Farragut could demand, “No one is responding.”
“Hamster? Hamster!” Farragut called into his wrist com, shouting, as if that would help. “Glenn!”
Captain Farragut displaced aboard the Fury with a troop of his least exhausted Marines in space suits, armed with swords.
The Fury’s command and control was choked with smoke. Farragut could not see his glove in front of his visor. He switched over to scanner mode, which threw an instrument reading onto his visor, giving him a weird sort of vision.
He left a team of technicians in C and C to try to restore the ship’s atmosphere, while he and the Marines set out in search of the crew, wading through brown sludge, which they now knew to be dead gorgons. That was a good sign. Maybe.
If the crew survived whatever had killed the gorgons.
He came to a sealed hatch, locked from this side, hot to the touch. Had to be fire on the other side.
Farragut signaled his techs at C and C. “Dix. Farragut. Do we have fire suppression?”
“Negative, Captain. Controls are operative. And the fire suppression system is spent.”
“Roger that.” Farragut hailed Merrimack. “Gray. Can you withdraw the force field at the Fury’s midships for a minute?”
“At the hot spot? Yes, sir.”
In moments, the smoky air inside the Fury began to stir. Midships had depressurized entirely, while the thick air from the rest of the Fury whistled toward the vacuum in a muddy swirl through many jagged holes in the decks, the partitions, the vents.
It was a long minute before the force field was restored. Farragut could see dimly now by the minimal light of emergency lamps.
He unlocked the hatch—it was still warm—and opened it.
A charred chamber lay utterly black on the other side. There was no smoke, but he could not see because there was no light. Had to watch the display on his visors to keep from falling through the holes. There was very little left of the deck.
Farragut and the Marines passed through several more hatches until they came to one sealed and locked from the far side. Farragut tapped out shave-and-a-haircut with his sword hilt.
The hatch unlocked and opened at once.
A lot of helmets clustered at the opening. Faces behind the visors broke into elated smiles.
One crewman rashly popped his helmet seal. Farragut guessed the Fury’s atmospherics had been restored because the man was still breathing, still smiling, without his helmet. “Glory, glory, are we glad to see you, Captain!”
The rescued crewmen told Farragut that they had started the fire.
“Figured whatever wiggles at two point seven degrees Kelvin might have a problem with heat.”
And they had been right. Problem was, the amount of heat it took to kill the gorgons was enough to destroy everything else and use up all the available oxygen.
“I thought we’d cooked ourselves,” said the crewman. “And when you let the vacuum in, I thought that was hell freezing over.” Proudly showed his space suit’s air gauge, reading dead empty. “I was down to my last sniff.”
Farragut was counting up present company. Counted short. Five short. Throat tight, he asked, “Who did you lose?”
“Ximeno, Faqry, Williams—big Williams, not little Williams—and Brownie. Oh, Brownie bought it ugly.”
“Where’s Hamster?”
“She’s not in here. We led the suckers this way and she stayed out that way to throw in the toaster and lock ’em in.”
Here was the engine compartment. The crew had taken refuge behind the thickest bulk in the entire ship.
Farragut took off his helmet. “Did she find a place to hide?”
“She was going down to the magazine to jettison the bombs in case the fire got out of control, so we wouldn’t blow up the Merrimack with us.”
Farragut glanced up at the sound of scratching. “You’ve still got gorgons alive in here.”
The Marines had brought over extra swords, passed them out to the Fury’s crew.
Farragut pointed up toward the scraping noise. “Kill all of those.” And he ran back the way he’d come toward the ship’s munitions store.
He came to a hatch, locked from the far side. He hailed the techs in C and C to override the lock. The lock spun, and Farragut tore the hatch open.
And jumped back as a jet of flame shot from the opening, taking his eyebrows off.
A muffled gasp from behind the flame: “Omigod!” The blowtorch abruptly pointed up and shut off. Hamster’s shocked face behind a visor looked to be all eyes. “Captain!”
“Oh, for Jesus, Glenn!” Farragut took off his glove with his teeth, brought his fingers gingerly to his naked brow.
Lieutenant Hamilton yanked off her helmet, her red-brown hair matted against her head. “I’m so sorry. Please say my guys are still alive!”
“Most of them.”
She shrank at the sound of scratching from above. “They’re still here!”
“Not for long. Dogs are hunting down the last of them. Guns are working again. But these work all the time.” He brandished his sword. “Lordy, Hamster, I give y
ou a ship and look what you do. Couldn’t you have made a bigger mess?”
What might have started as a laugh ended in a sudden scream of pain.
Tentacles from beneath a jump cart had lashed out and taken a bite from Glenn’s thigh.
Farragut kicked over the cart. Brought his sword down on the gorgon so hard the blade stuck in the deck between the dying halves.
He caught Glenn to him as she buckled. Held her close, her head tucked under his chin, his ungloved hand holding the back of her head, his lips on her hair.
When she was standing steadier he had to let her go. She wobbled a little, her weight on one leg. A lively stream of blood trickled from her thigh. Her face went very white, a shocky glaze coming over her eyes. “I’m sorry I trashed the ship.”
Farragut gathered her up like a bride, carried her back to the LDs.
“Put me down, John, I’m gonna ralf.”
He let Glenn get her good leg under her, and lent her balance as she threw up. Then he snapped a displacement collar on her. She felt limp and quaking as he lifted her again and displaced back to Merrimack.
He meant to carry her to sick bay himself, but met Dr. Hamilton on the way—looking frantic but whole, healthy, and unblooded. Xenolinguists were not on board for their fighting skills.
Farragut brusquely bundled little Glenn Hamilton into her husband’s arms and went about his duties.
After both ships were pronounced secure, the lab ants gone back to their holes, and the crew fed, the relief tactical specialist called Captain Farragut to the command deck to observe a fragment of a gorgon swarm still out there, floundering in space, disintegrating into debris. As if they needed a certain number in their swarm to maintain viability.
Farragut thanked the specialist and went in search of Dr. Cordillera to run that idea past him.
Jose Maria was not in his quarters. He was not in sick bay.
People had seen him. He had been in the thick of the battle. “He was magnificent,” an awestruck crewwoman assured him. Jose Maria was picturesque with a sword, and apparently devastating as well, because even the crewmen were impressed.
But no one could tell the captain where Don Cordillera was now.
