Best of British Science Fiction 2016

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Forget the shortcomings of the equipment Sergeant,” said Aldo, leaning in to read the scanner. “Were they engaged by Neophyte’s auto-defence system?”

  “Negative sir,” said O’Connor, a slight sneer on his face. “The auto-defence system malfunctioned before even taking a shot. We’re a sitting duck.”

  “They could sit out there and take pot shots at us,” said Eliot. “Destroy us piece by piece.”

  “I take it you’ve sent a distress signal to Command?” said Aldo, ignoring Eliot’s prediction of imminent doom and speaking to O’Connor.

  “Yes sir,” said O’Connor. “The moment after I hit the alarm.”

  “Any reply yet?” Aldo held on to what little hope he could find.

  “They’re scrambling a squadron sir,” said O’Connor. “But it won’t reach us for at least two days. There’s nothing closer. No patrols, no exercises. We’re at the back end of the galaxy here.”

  With the tiny spark of hope dying inside him, Aldo straightened from the scanner.

  “I don’t think they’ll stand off and destroy us,” he said. “Historically, every attack on this Lightship by the Fris has been an attempt to take her over, more or less in one piece.”

  “You think they’ll board us?” said Eliot.

  “Almost certainly.”

  “You know, if Command went back to giving us our own ships, instead of hiring express freighters to do a ‘drop and run’, we would have been able to escape. But I guess saving money is more important than saving lives.”

  Aldo said nothing, finding it difficult to fault Eliot’s cynicism. But they were professionals, and it was not for him to question those above him, only to lead those below as best he could.

  The rest of the seven-man decommissioning crew had reached the Control Room while he was examining the scanner. He noted, with some embarrassment, that all but him were in correct dress.

  “Make sure everyone is armed,” he said, talking to Eliot. “And deploy around the airlock.”

  He turned to O’Connor as Eliot moved off to check the crew.

  “How long before they reach us?”

  O’Connor checked the read-outs, hesitating as he translated the old-styled data into current meaning in his head. When he sighed, Aldo knew the news would not be good.

  “Thanks to this ancient scanner, they’ve already started docking procedures.”

  Aldo closed his eyes for a moment, fighting the despair. No time to dress properly. Barely time to grab a weapon from his cabin. When he opened his eyes, he displayed nothing but a resolve to defend the Lightship to the best of his and his crew’s ability.

  “If we can’t kill them, we need to hold out until help gets here,” he said.

  It was not impossible to hold out for two days, only highly improbable. Nevertheless, they had to try.

  5.

  Remembering made Aldo suddenly conscious of his inappropriate clothing. He still wore the t-shirt and trousers he had on when he rushed from his cabin. He had, at least, rescued his boots, but he had no socks, and the leather rubbed his feet when he moved. Blisters were a certainty, but he had no wish to look.

  The Fris soldier opposite was, of course, fully dressed in battle uniform. Even the prehensile tail was encased in protective material, supple enough to allow it full, and deadly, movement.

  The door to the Rec Room shook under a heavy impact, the sudden boom startling both Aldo and the Fris. Aldo part raised his Browning as another boom thundered around the room. The Fris had shouldered his energy weapon and aimed steadily at the door.

  Aldo waited, anxiously, for a third impact, or for the sealed door to break open. At Aldo’s suggestion, the Fris had used his energy weapon to fuse the door mechanism when they sought safety in the Rec Room. But the strength of the booming made him unsure whether that was enough.

  He waited, the only sound the slight hiss of the life support, and his and the Fris’s laboured breathing.

  No third impact came. The door did not break.

  After some minutes, the Fris lowered his weapon and growled across the room to Aldo.

  “It knows we are here.”

  Aldo nodded. And he remembered how he had not even known it existed before the Fris boarded Neophyte.

  6.

  The decommissioning team took cover in doorways and behind storage boxes dragged out of cabins. Even as they deployed, the sound of the outer airlock door sliding open echoed down the corridor.

  Aldo looked quickly around his men. He was sure they were nervous, but none of them showed any outward sign. Each of them came from other branches of the military, and all had served the mandatory five years before their redeployment. They were career soldiers, signing the standard open-ended contract rather than leaving after their five-year stint. They were weapon-trained, and several had served time in the frontline of the war with the Fris. Aldo himself had been a Marine before his promotion and sideways move. He had no doubts about his crew, but they were still hopelessly outnumbered and probably outgunned.

  The airlock hissed as the pressure and atmosphere inside synchronised with the Lightship. In seconds the doors at either end of the connecting tube would open, providing a clear pathway between the Lightship and the docked craft, and the vanguard of the Fris attack-force would be on board.

  He tightened his grip on the Browning and aimed at the inner door. The waiting was always the worst.

  The door opened, the Fris began to pour out into the corridor and the defenders opened fire.

  Aldo had hoped the airlock would provide a bottleneck they could utilise, but the first Fris to board carried heavy shields and deployed to form an effective protective barrier as the rest of the force exited the airlock behind them. He had fired several shots himself before he realised the explosions of his bullets were being safely absorbed by the shields. One or two of his crew with heavier armament were causing some damage and would, eventually, break through. But by then the whole enemy force would be on board.

  As yet, the Fris had not opened fire with their energy weapons. Aldo knew that once they did, he would not be able to stop the slaughter. He was about to call for a tactical retreat when the deck shuddered beneath his feet and a deafening creaking and wailing filled the corridor.

  Both Human and Fris were surprised by the noise, disproving Aldo’s first thought that it was some new Fris weapon. The sound grew louder, the creaking becoming a roar. The normal throb of the engines now pounded. Fris dropped their shields, weapons on both sides clattered to the deck, as the noise drove into heads, a throbbing, screaming cacophony.

  Aldo barely held on to his Browning as the noise pushed him to his knees. He managed to raise his head and was staring through watery eyes at the Fris when the bulkhead near the airlock punched inwards.

  It stretched at speed, a sharp fist of metal smashing into the Fris. Aldo saw alien bodies tumble, their suits ripped, blood pouring through the tears.

  Metal tentacles reached out from the opposite bulkhead and grabbed at the Fris, dragging them backwards, enveloping them until their struggling forms disappeared and nothing but smooth metal remained, along with a smear of blood and small gobs of flesh on the deck. The same horrific scene repeated, again and again.

  It was against all the science, all the logic Aldo knew. He wondered whether he was hallucinating, but could tell from the expressions of stunned horror on those around him that, if he was hallucinating, so were they. The throbbing of the engines continued, but the other noises had gone, except when the bulkheads deformed and attacked. Then the screams of the metal were matched only by the screams of the Fris.

  He heard Eliot say, “At least whatever it is seems to be on our side,” a moment before a circle of decking exploded upwards, tentacles of metal reaching and grabbing, pulling Eliot down, crushing him. Aldo could hear the breaking of bones before the deck closed in on itself and Eliot was gone. Nothing remained but a streak of blood and gore.

  Shock was replaced with panic. Human
and Fris alike stampeded away from the airlock, further into the ship. Aldo was with them, all thoughts of command structure gone from his head. They all needed to escape. They all needed to run!

  The terror followed them. Bulkheads and decking reaching, punching, grabbing as they ran. The screaming of metal, Human and Fris, and the clatter and explosion of sporadic gunfire, melded together into a wall of sickening noise. Aldo knew it was pure luck that, so far, nothing had caught him. He did not believe his luck would hold out for long.

  The run through the ship took a lifetime. He had no focus but to keep running. The number of people around him dwindled rapidly. Whatever was attacking, perhaps the ship itself, was indiscriminate, as were the methods of attack. Some crushed their victims, others sucked them in.

  Claws of decking grabbed for him, but Aldo sidestepped, almost stumbling. A fist of bulkhead barely missed him, crushing the life from a nearby Fris instead. There had to be somewhere to hide!

  He had no conscious idea why he chose the Rec Room, but the moment he saw its door he knew he needed to reach it. He was almost knocked aside by a Fris soldier, every bit as eager to get inside as he was himself. A quick look back showed no one else near enough to rescue. There were no Humans left at all, and only four Fris, all injured and all, as he watched, picked off, one by one, by the bulkheads and deck.

  He joined the Fris soldier inside and closed the Rec Room door. With sudden inspiration, he shouted at the Fris soldier to fuse the door controls with its energy weapon. With that done he felt only a little safer. He waited for the bulkheads and decking inside the room to attack. The Fris, too, was looking around, his tale swishing anxiously side to side.

  No attack came and, after a while, Aldo and the Fris looked at each other across the Rec Room. Neither spoke, but the question they shared was clear. How were they still alive?

  7.

  “Why do you look at that?”

  At the growl of the Fris’s voice, Aldo looked up from the data screen.

  “It’s the history of this Lightship,” he said. “I’m hoping I can find something to explain what happened out there.”

  “I have already told you,” said the Fris. “This place is haunted. It is cursed, just like my people have said for many years. I did not believe it, but I do now.”

  “Well I don’t,” said Aldo, turning back to the screen. “Ghosts don’t exist, and curses are for children and the superstitious. Whatever’s out there, it’s alive, just like you and me. And anything alive can be killed.”

  The Fris raised its energy weapon. “What use is this, or your gun, when we cannot see anything to shoot at?” The alien shrugged in that curiously human fashion again and lowered the weapon. “We cannot kill what we cannot see.”

  Aldo said nothing, preferring to study the scrolling words on the screen. Somewhere in this history there had to be a clue to what was happening. He had been trapped in the Rec Room with the Fris for almost two hours. The only reason he could think of that the creature, whatever it was, had not attacked them was that the Rec Room, like the Control Room, was a separate unit. It was not part of the Lightship main structure. These rooms sat in semi-permanent dock and, if all went well, would remain so. They could, however, detach and act as self-contained lifeboats in cases of critical emergency. The thing had attacked through the bulkheads and decks of the Lightship. Their narrow but defined isolation saved them. Perhaps that was why his subconscious had led him here.

  He would have detached the Rec Room long before now, if the data pad for doing so hadn’t been destroyed, along with the door controls, by the Fris’s energy weapon. Given that it was at Aldo’s direction, he was not in a position to complain.

  He almost missed the entry while his thoughts drifted over recent events. Quickly he scrolled the words back up onto the screen.

  “I’ve found something,” he said. “It might be nothing...”

  “If you believe it to be of possible importance,” interrupted the Fris. “Share it.”

  “I intend to,” said Aldo, a little irritably. He did not appreciate the suggestion that he was about to keep what he had found to himself. The Fris might be the enemy, but they were currently in a bad situation together. He hoped they could co-operate.

  As though reading his mind, the Fris nodded. “I did not mean to offend you. I was perhaps a little eager to hear of your discovery.”

  Aldo could not detect any eagerness in the Fris’s body language. The tip of its tail flicked gently side to side, but that could mean anything. Two-hundred years of war and humanity had learnt next to nothing about their enemy. Nevertheless, he decided that sarcasm was less likely than genuine interest where the Fris was concerned.

  “There was a collision, almost two-hundred years ago. A freighter called Deadbeat drifted into Neophyte despite all attempts to raise her crew. When a team boarded her they found out why. The crew were all dead.”

  “Unfortunate, but I do not see the relevance.”

  “They kept an open dock with this ship for two days while they did a thorough investigation. The only damage they found, other than the collision damage, was that the bulkheads were buckled and ripped apart in places. The decks too. Sound familiar?”

  The Fris was silent for a second, before growling its answer in as contemplative a manner as a growl could be.

  “There was something in that freighter.”

  “I believe so. I also believe it came aboard Neophyte while the two ships were in open dock.”

  “But why attack now?” said the Fris. “Why did it not attack you and your crew when you came aboard?”

  “Maybe it lies dormant, somehow hidden within the bulkheads and decks. It’s happy there until it feels threatened.”

  “And when we began to fight, we became a threat,” said the Fris in understanding.

  “This time and every other time you’ve attacked Neophyte,” said Aldo. “That’s your ghost, your curse. Some alien creature that gets pissed off when it thinks it’s under attack.”

  “It seems a reasonable extrapolation based on scant evidence,” said the Fris, nodding. “But it does not answer how we find it or how we kill it.”

  Aldo read further on the screen, but there was no more mention of the collision or of anything untoward happening after Deadbeat had been towed away. If the creature had come aboard during the dock, then it had hidden itself well, and for several years, until the first Fris attack occurred. Which raised another question in Aldo’s mind.

  “You’ve attacked this ship thirteen times.”

  “Strictly speaking, fourteen,” said the Fris. “If you count this one.”

  “My point is,” said Aldo, “that each time we’ve re-crewed her, and each time you’ve attacked her again, the Neophyte has shown no signs of the kind of damage we’re witnessing now. This thing attacks in a very destructive way. What happens to all that destruction after it’s won?”

  The Fris thought for a moment before answering.

  “We have seen that this creature can distort, even mould, metal. Perhaps, like many animals, it wishes to cover its tracks, to remain hidden once it has dealt with the intrusion?”

  “Bit of a difference between moving a few twigs and leaves to camouflage a nest, and the complete resetting of the Neophyte’s bulkheads.”

  “But the same principle.”

  Aldo nodded, admitting that it made as much sense as anything else at that moment.

  “I bet you wish you’d just stood off and destroyed this place now,” he said, hoping the Fris could appreciate that it was said with an attempt at light humour.

  “I had no choice,” said the Fris. “The orders from the Lgoblol... similar to your President I think... were clear, and have been for every mission he has ordered. Board and capture.”

  The Fris paused and Aldo almost thought he saw the grim, stiff mouth curl upwards in a small smile.

  “I believe he wants to add it to his collection,” the Fris continued. “Our Lgoblol collects war memorabil
ia. He does not yet have a Human Lightship.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” said Aldo in amazement. “Are you telling me all these raids over two hundred years have been to obtain a museum piece? How long has this... Lgoblol, been in power?”

  “Just over three-hundred of your years,” said the Fris, once again shrugging. “We live long lives.”

  “All those deaths because...”

  He was interrupted by a renewed hammering on the Rec Room door, the thick metal of which began to buckle inwards.

  Aldo held his breath, watching the door, waiting for it to crack. From the corner of his eye he could see the Fris was also intently studying the situation. If the door gave way there was little either of them could do, and they knew it. Their only hope lay in the fact that, so far, the thing outside had not been able to infiltrate the bulkheads and deck of the Rec Room. If the door broke under the beating, then that would change, with rapid and deadly consequences.

  “What if it does not need to actually break down the door?” said the Fris, shouting above the noise.

  Aldo, wincing at the deafening volume of the ongoing attack, turned and shouted back. “I don’t follow. What do you mean?”

  “Perhaps it only needs to weaken the structure of the metal to the point where it can.... enter it.”

  Aldo was silent. If the Fris was right, and the idea was as valid as any other, then their danger was more imminent than he had believed. He felt his chest tightening at the thought. If the thing was just weakening the reinforced door, then it could infiltrate the Rec Room at any moment. And once it was in the bulkheads... he shuddered and wiped cold sweat from his brow.

  “I did not mean to frighten you,” said the Fris, looking towards Aldo.

  “I was already frightened,” said Aldo. “You’ve just terrified me!”

  “Then I did not mean to terrify you,” said the Fris.

  A louder boom from the door made them both jump.

  Aldo suspected the Fris was joking, but there seemed no way of knowing for certain. The Fris’s face was almost completely immobile, or so it seemed. Expression had never been noted on the face of any Fris, even those captured and tortured under the harsh military law of the past two centuries. Nevertheless, there was something, perhaps in the inflection of the words, that convinced Aldo his alien companion was making a joke at his expense. He found he wished there was more time to get to know this alien, to understand the Fris better than humanity currently did. He had never believed torture was the way to communicate. He had not expected shared peril to be the way forward either, before now.