One Dark Future

by Michael Anderle

  Osei nodded to another of his troops. He jogged toward the hole.

  “This is a good place for our first set of explosives,” Erik mentioned to Captain Osei.

  The captain nodded. “Agreed. I also think we should have someone guard our exit.”

  “Yeah.” Erik slowly surveyed the room, disgust all over his face. “That’s a good idea.”

  Jia peered at a web. “I’ll never think a space raptor is strange again. Compared to this stuff, the Leems seem human.”

  There had been so many firsts in the last couple of days. She’d jumped across the Solar System and was now aboard an alien ship. She only hoped she didn’t have to experience alien security firsthand.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Erik convened quietly with Jia and Captain Osei at the edge of the room while two of the soldiers prepared the explosive. They looked so unassuming, the black cylinders, but they’d make a nice light show.

  “I think we should stay together as one team,” Erik explained. “It’s too much of a risk with the repeaters and interference that we’ll lose contact otherwise.”

  Captain Osei nodded. “I’ve already instructed Gamma Squad to stay here to guard our backs. How far are we going to go through this freak factory?”

  “Not sure,” Erik admitted. “I think we need to make a basic sweep, then we need to figure out what to do. I’m not ready to leave this ship until we’ve found those conspiracy bastards. For all we know, they’ve got some gadget and are beaming info to their bosses.”

  Erik didn’t care if it was an intact Navigator ship. It’d possibly driven men to kill each other, and he suspected that wasn’t the worst it was capable of.

  If he’d found the rest of the bodies, he would have been happy for a quick explosive delivery run, followed by a nice remote explosion.

  Although he doubted any human could control the vessel, the worry lingered. Everything about the ship defied what he’d heard about the Navigators, but it wasn’t as if anyone was an expert on the long-dead race. When a culture could only be judged by what had survived through the eons, it provided a skewed view of the truth.

  That’d been proven over and over by Earth archaeology. There was no reason to suspect it wouldn’t apply to xenoarchaeology.

  Besides, he was less interested in the truth than in making sure the conspiracy didn’t gain any advantages.

  “Package set up, sir,” one of the soldiers called to Captain Osei.

  The officer nodded at the now-blinking cylinder. “Your show, Blackwell.”

  “At the least, we need to verify the death of the other team before we make our final call,” Erik replied. He inclined his head toward one of the open doors, unsure if that was what the circular holes represented. “We keep it up, keep sweeping, set up repeaters, and set up explosives. If we get enough repeaters going, Emma might be able to do a halfway-decent drone sweep, but we still need boots on the ground to set up the explosives.”

  “What I’ve already seen is fascinating,” Emma transmitted. “I don’t know if you fleshbags fully appreciate the historical importance of your mission.”

  “I’ll worry about the history once we make sure the conspiracy doesn’t find a jump drive in the back of this thing and pop over to Earth to lay waste to it with some ultimate alien death ray,” Erik replied. “I wonder how they even knew about this thing.”

  “They paid close attention to astronomy journals?” Jia offered with a slight shrug.

  “But no one else noticed, and if what we were told was true, people have been watching this comet for a while.”

  “It’s been bothering me, too.” Jia furrowed her brow. “It’s almost like they knew where to look, but I can’t figure out how they would. Being powerful assholes doesn’t mean they’re psychic.”

  Erik frowned. “Maybe they got lucky. When we track the rest of them down, we can ask.”

  The team proceeded in a staggered formation through the closest exit. The tunnels leading to the ship might not have been big enough to accommodate the exos, but they would have been easy to use in the huge rooms and wide passageways.

  Erik quashed a brief thought about going back for the exos. His team would have the same problem as the conspiracy team; they’d have to drill into the comet, and making a tunnel that would accommodate the exos would take a long time with the equipment they had on board. They needed to secure the ship as quickly as possible.

  The exit led to a wide, curving passage lined on all surfaces, including the roof, with the same rod-like structures as in the chamber. The team quickly arrived at another chamber with towering veined mounds in the center. Thick droplets of orange fluid dripped from the mounds into a small pool surrounding them. The pool slowly drained into vents in the floor.

  Had it been doing that for thousands of years?

  Erik was glad he had the helmet on. Something told him the stench would have been unbearable.

  “What the hell is that?” Captain Osei asked, matching Erik’s next thought.

  “I don’t think I want to know the answer,” Erik answered. “For all we know, we’re in their bathroom.”

  Jia shook her head. “This isn’t right. None of this resembles what we’ve seen from Navigator tech. I keep trying to tell myself that maybe they went off in a different direction, but what little hints of ergonomics information we can glean from their artifacts suggests a form larger than humans, somewhere in the neighborhood of our shape.”

  “You’re thinking too much like a human,” Emma commented, her voice thick with amusement. “I’m sure the Zitark version of you would make the same mistake.”

  Uninterested in the xenoarchaeology, Captain Osei circled his finger in the air and pointed near the mound to indicate where he wanted the explosives set up. Two soldiers jogged that way to perform that task while Corporal Milton set up a repeater.

  Jia frowned. “I’m just saying this ship doesn’t match what we’ve seen of the Navigators.”

  “And perhaps the Navigators didn’t have Purists,” Emma replied. “They might have decided they were tired of their evolutionary form.”

  “I suppose. Scientists could spend a hundred years studying this thing and probably learn something new every day.” Jia eyed the explosives. “Assuming it’s still around.”

  “We’re taking this ship out unless we’re dead certain we’ve secured it from both asshole humans and ancient security systems,” Erik replied. “Though I don’t know what they plan to do. We’d have to ferry scientists out here. I doubt we’re going to figure out how to fly this thing anytime soon. For now, we’ll record what we see and figure out what to do once we’ve explored the entire ship.”

  Jia let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding as they stepped into a new corridor.

  An hour had passed as they explored the ship, moving from chamber to chamber and laying down more repeaters and explosives. Despite the inherent oddness of the biological technology underlying its design, a vague sense of familiarity began to grow.

  Structures repeated themselves in different rooms.

  There was a pattern to the disgusting madness. The ship was strange, but it had obviously been designed by intelligent beings.

  Jia made her own mental designations of different rooms: control rooms, storage, processing, and resource collection. She had no idea if her labels were correct, but they felt right.

  It wasn’t an outlandish idea. If a sailor from the fifteen century were dropped aboard the Argo, he would quickly understand the layout despite the technological differences, though the differences between humans centuries ago and in the current age were far smaller than the differences between humans and the Navigators.

  Was Emma right about Jia being presumptuous? Perhaps, but the only way to know was if they studied the ship.

  The lack of solid doors nagged Jia. She could imagine a ship built around advanced biological technology manned by a race with a radically different body plan that most in the Local Neighborhood,
but something about the lack of sealed doors poked at the suspicious and paranoid part of her brain that had served her so well for the last couple of years.

  Jia needed more data for a better understanding, but that was a fanciful desire aboard the ancient ship of an extinct race.

  It was obvious Erik and Osei wanted to blow the thing up, and she couldn’t say she thought their instincts were wrong. There were many days she was convinced humanity would have been better off sticking to the Solar System.

  Part of her wanted to argue Erik and Captain Osei out of setting up the explosives, but they were right. If the vessel fell into the wrong hands, it had the potential to be apocalyptic.

  It’d become obvious that the ship was roughly circular and huge, around two kilometers in diameter, and they’d explored a good chunk of one quadrant and were making their way toward the center. If there was another level, they didn’t know how to get to it, and no one was keen on trying to blow a hole in the floor.

  Emma had sent drones into the areas with repeaters to keep an eye on things and explore. The team had all the repeaters, so she couldn’t lay down any more. The mysterious signal was still transmitting, but otherwise, the ship appeared inactive. Gamma squad, led by Lieutenant Zhang, hadn’t reported anything unusual at the tunnel’s entrance.

  They passed into an empty circular chamber that had exits on every side. It was the first room on the ship that didn’t contain at least one ground-floor structure.

  It didn’t lack the ubiquitous stalactite-like ceiling formations, and unlike in the other rooms, a web of coiled vine-like ropes connected them. The vines were thicker than the ones connecting the ground shapes in the previous room.

  “This must be the center of the ship,” Jia commented. “But it’s kind of a big room just to be a glorified hallway.”

  Erik craned his neck upward. “For all we know, they built it based on alien feng shui principles.”

  Jia chuckled. “That’s very much true.”

  Captain Osei pointed at different sections of the room. “I want quadruple explosive and repeater coverage near the exits.”

  Soldiers scurried to complete their orders.

  “There is an issue,” Emma transmitted, her tone worried. She restricted the communication to Erik, Captain Osei, and Jia.

  Jia frowned. “What’s going on? You spot the other team?”

  “No, they haven’t traveled through any of the rooms where I’m maintaining drone coverage,” Emma explained. “But I’m now detecting changes with both the Argo’s sensors and the drones. Thermal differences and x-ray spikes, among others. Considerable increases across the spectrum.”

  Jia’s stomach tightened and she rubbed the bracelet. “Will our defenses hold?”

  “These aren’t related to the brain-affecting field if that’s what you’re asking. I’ve never encountered a Navigator ship, so I can’t say for certain, but my best guess is that it’s powering up. If your hypothesis is correct that the mind-control field is part of a security system, it’s not unreasonable to assume that more direct defenses might be employed.”

  Captain Osei gritted his teeth. “Damn it.” He motioned for his people to come to him. “Everyone not setting something that goes boom on me. We might have trouble soon.”

  “Why would it suddenly turn on?” Erik flipped off his rifle safety. “Those conspiracy bastards must have found the bridge, and we have no idea where it is. Shit, we don’t even know if they have a hidden elevator we missed.”

  Jia checked her weapons as she replied, “We don’t even know if this ship has a bridge.”

  “What we do know is that we’ve got a quarter of this freak factory rigged with L-48.” Captain Osei nodded toward a sergeant who was priming one of the cylinders. “I doubt this thing is so strong from the inside that losing a quarter of it won’t be enough to finish it off, and those conspiracy assholes with it.”

  “You’re saying we bug out and remote-blow it?” Erik asked.

  “Yes.” Captain Osei frowned. “Even if the L-48 doesn’t end them, we can finish them off with the Argo and the Bifröst. A couple of salvos will open up that tunnel wide enough that we can pound whatever’s left.”

  Erik shook his head. “We need to account for every single one of those bastards, and we need to be sure, and that means having L-48 coverage over the entire ship. I don’t mind sending this thing to hell if we’re sure, but we don’t know. It could be modular and drop pieces, or have shields that bounce our best weapons off.” He traced a long shape with his hand. “We’ve both seen plenty of Fleet ships take a huge pounding and still limp home. If we take out the conspiracy bastards, we’ll have more time to make sure this thing is done. If they fly away with it, we’re screwed. This might be our only chance, so we have to do it right.”

  “What if it’s a self-destruct system?” Corporal Milton asked.

  “Stow that shit, Corporal,” barked Captain Osei. “This ship didn’t sit around for thousands of years just to blow itself up now.”

  Emma chuckled. “There is a certain logic to that. It’s not un-persuasive.”

  “It is for me.” Erik turned slowly, surveying the room for any changes. “But something’s different now, and we need to—”

  “Contact!” bellowed a sergeant. “Eight o’clock!”

  The team spun in that direction, their weapons at the ready. The shadowy outline of five human forms walked with an uneven gait from an exit across the room. The new arrivals emerged from the darkness and elicited gasps from some of the soldiers and curses from the others.

  The new arrivals’ pressure suit design and general body plan suggested they belonged to the crew of the captured conspiracy ship, but they lacked helmets, and strange bulbous growths covered most of their heads. They now had a second pair of dark arms ending in four-fingered claws.

  Swollen stomachs pressed against the suits. Their gloves had been torn through on their original limbs by claws. Their now-green teeth were fused together and glistening with some unknown fluid.

  Jia hissed in disgust. “I think we know what happened to the team.”

  “That’s only half of them,” Erik commented as he selected burst fire. “But maybe they meant to do that.”

  Corporal Milton gagged. “You’re saying they purposely came and turned themselves into that?”

  “We don’t know. Just throwing it out there.” Erik pointed his rifle at one of the mutants. “Surrender!”

  The mutants stopped their advance.

  Jia blinked. “Is that going to work?”

  “I doubt they expected squads of soldiers to show up.” Erik grinned.

  A mutant turned toward Erik and opened his mouth. The words that came out were unintelligible. There was something vaguely familiar about the speech, but it didn’t come close to English or Mandarin.

  “Anyone have any idea what he’s saying?” Erik asked.

  The soldiers all shook their heads but kept their rifles trained on the immobile mutants.

  “Emma?” Jia asked. “What are they saying?”

  “I don’t know.” Emma sounded surprised. “My initial analysis suggests they aren’t speaking any known human language, but the phonemes are within the range of human capability and match sounds in extant human languages.”

  The mutant continued speaking, his claws twitching, his tone becoming more animated.

  “On your knees and puts all your claws above your heads,” Erik barked and gestured with his rifle. “I don’t know if this was part of your master plan, or you just drank out of the wrong fountain that hadn’t been cleaned in ten thousand years, but we’re taking control of this ship. If you don’t want to die, you will surrender. Any hostile action will be met by us putting a bunch of bullets in you. Now, are you going to be reasonable, or are you going to force us to kill you?”

  The mutant gave a short, curt response in his unknown language before the whole group charged, screeching.

  “Of course that’d be too easy,” Jia mumbl
ed.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  “Take them down,” Erik shouted.

  He fired a burst into the chatty mutant, strangely satisfied by the spray of red blood that erupted from the target’s chest. The enemy weren’t Navigators.

  They were the twisted humans his team had traveled across the Solar System to find. He could beat anything that was mostly human.

  If it bled, it would eventually die.

  Jia and the other soldiers opened fire, and their massive barrage cut through the advancing mutants. The enemies staggered back, now covered in wounds. Unlike Erik’s team, it was obvious from the bloody holes that the enemy pressure suits weren’t designed to take small arms fire.

  That made sense. They’d likely never expected to have to deal with other humans, but it also meant the fight had been over for them before it’d even started. The enemy must have been relying on shock value.

  Their claws looked nasty. If they’d ambushed Erik’s team, they might have been able to damage their pressure suits past the point of self-sealing, but their arrogance had cost them.

  The five mutants collapsed to the ground, twitching and bleeding. One rolled onto his back, gurgling and coughing up blood. The original speaker continued talking in the same unknown language, seemingly not bothered despite the half-dozen new and large holes in his body.

  Erik didn’t need to understand the words to understand the tone. The bastard was mocking him. He’d credit the man for having balls, but the mutation had probably taken them away.

  A mutant jumped to his feet. The concentrated team barrage blew his leg off, but he continued forward, masterfully and ridiculously hopping on one foot despite his wounds. Another barrage sent him back to the ground.

  Erik’s nostrils flared. No matter how tough the mutants were, they were massively outnumbered. If they could talk, they’d obviously kept their intelligence, and the smart thing to do was stay on the ground.

  Facing death bravely was one thing, but charging into a fight they couldn’t win was pointless. The mutation might have messed up their self-preservation instincts.