“Dean, don’t move. We’ll zoom in, capture an image, and do an analysis.” I did as Suma suggested, and she told me when they had a good enough shot.
“They’re going to find access from on our ship’s bridge? I don’t think…” Rulo was saying when Suma’s voice returned.
“We lightened and darkened the image, finding a straight line heading from the center,” Suma said, and I pointed, touching the exterior until she told me I was there.
I pressed up, and something clicked, releasing the door. It flung open, and I had to jump out of the way to avoid impact with the heavy, clunky slab of metal.
“The door’s probably controlled by the ship, and since it’s powerless, it’s become dead weight. Be careful, Dean,” Suma said, and I got up, dusting my suit off.
“Who’s first?” I asked.
Rulo didn’t pause. She leapt up, grabbing the inside of the opening into the ship, pulling herself up with ease. Seconds later, her armored glove stuck toward me, ready to pull us up. I went first, being easily lifted with the almost non-existent gravity.
We emerged in the middle of the round ship. The dome surrounded us, and we found ourselves in a wide-open space. There were two seats at the edge of the room, facing the lower half of the dome. That would be the viewscreen and the pilot’s chair, and potentially weapons control. Even though the ship was larger than ours, once inside, the living area was far smaller.
Everything was dead. I couldn’t see one active light anywhere, and I walked around the outer edge, seeing unfamiliar computers, mostly unwieldy in appearance. The place was clean, nothing out of place even now.
“How long have they been here?” I whispered.
“I don’t know, but… I don’t see any sign of them on board.” Slate was right.
“This isn’t a wall here,” Rulo shouted from across the room. “I thought it was, but when I took a closer look, it was only stacked containers. It’s as if they were…” She was hefting them away, and Slate and I assisted, moving the clunky boxes from the side of the ship’s interior.
“It was as if they were hiding… something,” I said as we spotted the last container. This one did have soft yellow lights glowing on a console near its bottom.
“Someone, boss. Someone, not something,” Slate said, wiping the top of it with his arm. A thin layer of dust was brushed away, revealing a body inside.
“What is that, Dean? We can’t see!” Suma’s excited voice echoed in my earpiece. I tried to give them a better vantage shot, but it was dark, and our flashlights reflected more light off the glass than penetrated. I wasn’t sure what we were looking at inside the container.
“It appears to be one of the Yuver,” I replied.
Fifteen
“You found one? Is it alive?” This time, it was Karo asking the questions.
I glanced at the glowing yellow console, tried to decipher it, and failed. “I can’t tell. None of this makes sense to me.”
“We have to bring that on board,” Suma urged.
“Suma, for all we know, this Yuver’s skin is poisonous to us, or maybe it’s carrying a virus that has the potential to wipe out all of Shimmal.”
I may have been overdoing it, but she got my point. “We can’t leave it. We can transport it home to Dr. Nick,” Suma said, and I nodded.
“Very well. We’ll bring it with us, but we’re not opening this on our ship. We wanted to discover what the distress call was all about, and now we know. Let’s progress out of here and focus on the task at hand.” I was about to open the portal when Slate tapped me on the shoulder.
“Check this out.” He’d picked up a flat tablet-sized device, and it activated as he pressed various buttons along its side.
“W, can you make any sense of this?” I asked the android through my earpiece.
“It appears to be a tracking map. Those two blinking lights are the transponders. One looks to be attached to your sleeping guest,” W said.
The other blinking light was a ways away from the ship. How far, I couldn’t tell by the alien tablet. “And the other transponder?”
“I would hypothesize it’s attached to another Yuver,” W said.
I was torn. There was another one somewhere under the surface of the asteroid, but what were the chances it lived? I didn’t even know if this one was alive. I leaned over the glass, waving my suit’s light away from the reflective surface. The Yuver inside had smooth dark-green skin and large eyes that were currently closed. The glass only framed its head, so I couldn’t see the rest of the body or know how tall or heavy the creature was.
“Do we go after it?” Slate asked.
“I vote we take this thing and leave,” Rulo said. The Keppe had become a star-hunting race, attempting to become more science-minded and exploratory than warrior, and she probably thought this discovery would be a good one for her people.
But what if there was another one? We knew nothing about them. It might be alive and trapped. Maybe they pupated or hibernated. “Damn it. Let’s go look for it. It shouldn’t take long.”
“You know how you always tell me not to say that, because…” Slate started.
“Because any time I say something’s going to be a quick detour, it inevitably winds up being a huge pain in the butt?” I finished for him.
“Yeah, that’s what I was going to say.” He tapped the blinking transponder signal on the tablet. “You really want to go after this?”
“I don’t want to, but let’s get this over with. First things first.” I waved the portal open, and we could see the cargo bay of our ship through the yellow energy barrier. “W, can you give us a hand?”
We cleared a path between the cryogenically-frozen Yuver and the yellow-energy doorway to our ship, and by the time we were done, W had stepped through.
He walked over to the elongated box, which had to be some variation of a cryo tube, and spent five minutes around it, checking to see if it was self-sufficient or attached to the ship. “It appears to be sustaining itself, though I do not understand the science behind it. It must be a precautionary function in case the entire ship drains of energy, as this one seems to have done.”
“Can we move it?” Slate asked, and W nodded.
“We can move it,” the robot answered. I was never sure how to take his tone. Sometimes it seemed like he wasn’t confident in his replies, but there was no way to tell.
I looked at the case containing the body. Did I trust bringing a potentially dead creature on the ship? This was part of what I’d signed up for with the Gatekeepers, and what the Keppe were doing with their exploration missions, so I resigned myself to adding the new guest on board.
“Slate, do you mind giving him a hand?” I asked, and Rulo stood beside me cross-armed as we witnessed W and Slate sliding the frozen Yuver through the portal doorway and onto our ship.
When they were done, W stood in the entrance, and I called out to him, “W, is there any way to collect data from this ship? Download their hard drive or something?” I said, knowing I wasn’t articulating myself properly.
“I believe there may be a way,” he said, heading onto our ship. In less than a minute, he was back, holding a box the size of a car battery; only this one was shiny silver and hummed with power.
He crossed the open space of the dark Yuver vessel and stopped near the front pilot’s seat. I went over and helped him pry open a panel under the main helm console.
W opened a pouch he’d carried aboard and cut a wire before adding a universal plug to it. From there, he stuck the new end into the battery pack he’d brought with him. The ship remained dark.
“Give it a moment,” he said, and as promised, the computer in front of us began to power up. Strange symbols filled the flat screen above an unfamiliar keyboard. It was along the same lines as the ones I’d used to build countless spreadsheets back home over the years, but the symbols were alien.
“Can we make this thing run again?” Slate asked behind us.
“Not at t
his time. We do not have the resources. The best I could do was power this particular processor.” W pressed a datastick into the silver battery pack, and it glowed blue as he keyed in commands on the keyboard. “This will only take a moment.”
I stood from my crouched position and wondered what secrets we’d find on the datastick later. There was something extremely exciting about it all: finding a new race, learning about them. It made me think of our time on Sterona, where we’d lived while Mary was pregnant after fighting the Iskios off. There was obviously so much we didn’t know about the ancient race.
There was something haunting about them leaving their wonderful city behind. Part of me had to know where they went, and why.
“All done.” W took the pack, disconnecting it from the ship. He linked the wire again, soldering it together, leaving everything as it was.
“We’re going to check on the other transponder beacon. With any luck, we’ll be done in no time,” I told W as he crossed the portal and turned to face us from the Kraski ship’s cargo bay.
“We will watch with you,” W said.
“And W?” My gaze drifted through the energy doorway to the body in the cryobox aboard our ship.
“Yes, Captain.”
“Don’t open that, whatever you do,” I warned.
“We will not open it,” he assured me, and I closed the portal with the hand-held device, shoving it into a front pocket where I could easily access it.
Rulo was already at the exit of the ship, hopping out. Slate went next, and I took one last look into the strange round ship’s interior, my flashlight casting unnerving shadows around the space before I joined them inside the cavern.
I called the light-drone to me and snapped it onto my hip. The whole cave was much darker without its beams shining on the ship, but our suits gave enough ambiance to see in the shadowy cavern.
Slate held the tablet with the blinking icon on it; the other icon now showed farther away, since the body was on our ship above the surface. He pointed to the edge of the cavity and that was where we went, guns raised and ready.
“You don’t really expect anything to be living in here, do you?” Rulo asked from her lead position. The cave was massive, and the wall loomed before us. The edge of the cavern flowed to a hole, funneling us into a tunnel.
“How far do you think that icon is in there?” I asked before we stepped foot any farther into the asteroid.
Slate shrugged as we watched the tablet, held firmly in his left hand. My suit’s lights shone down the corridor, which was at least twice our height, and I figured all three of us could easily walk side by side into the tunnels. If it had been any tighter, I would have turned around and rushed back to our ship.
“I’d say it’s no more than half a kilometer,” Rulo said. “The other one was here” – she pointed to the spot that had indicated the cryobox not long ago – “and that was about three hundred meters away.”
“You’re right. Let’s keep moving,” I said, taking the lead now. My pulse rifle had a light attached to it too, and I kept it aiming straight forward into the rocky tunnel.
The entire underpass was pocked rock; fissures and smooth pebble-sized holes ran over the entire surface, floors, walls, and ceiling. It was rounded like a tube, and thankfully, it widened as we went deeper.
Soon we were inside another open cave, about a tenth the size of the one we’d come from. It was darker in here somehow; the area had a feeling of compression, as if the walls were slowly but surely getting closer with each passing breath.
“What the hell is that?” Slate asked, pointing a light at the room’s far right corner. There was liquid on the floor; it reflected the light and rippled slightly as we walked toward it.
“Are you guys seeing this back on the ship?” I asked.
“Loud and clear,” Suma replied.
We stood above the blob of liquid, which was a lot more viscous than I’d originally thought.
“Slime?” Slate asked, about to tap it with his boot.
“Don’t touch it!” I warned, but it was too late. The toe dipped into the puddle of thick gooey mess, and Slate jumped away as if he’d been bitten.
“No one said you were smart. You remind me more of Hectal with each passing day,” Rulo said as she bent over to inspect the pile of slime. “There’s more here,” she said, motioning a few yards deeper into the cave.
“Great. Just great.” My mind was picturing all sorts of things that could leave a mucus like that behind, and none of them were small, furry, or friendly.
We walked toward the blinking icon, sure we were on the right path. “Let’s avoid bringing the alien gunk with us this time, Slate.” I stepped around another pile of it, and Slate stayed even farther from it, hugging the far wall.
The cave led us to another corridor, this one a tighter cylinder, like the old volcano lava tubes in Hawaii. I could touch the ceiling inside and stayed in the lead, my rifle pointing forward like I was a man on a mission to clear the asteroid of all infestation.
“Dean, did you see that?” Suma asked in my earpiece.
“See what?” I planted my feet firmly, swinging my rifle and light around to look for anything moving.
“Over to the left,” Suma said, and I moved my light to the left floor to find it empty.
“Nothing there.”
“Above. Look up.” Suma’s voice held an edge of panic that didn’t bode well for our situation.
I gradually moved my gun and flashlight up to the ceiling. There was nothing there. Then I saw the slime. It dripped from the exact spot where Suma had seen something moments ago. The warning from the Yuver had mentioned the ceiling. I hadn’t remembered that part until now.
“Suma, can you rewind the footage and pause it?” I asked.
Slate was already moving forward, and so was Rulo, so I followed them while Suma did her magic on board our ship. I needed to know if there were indeed living organisms responsible for the goop more than I needed to find this missing Yuver.
“The Yuver should be right here,” Slate said from inside a smaller cavern. He tapped the tablet where the icon blinked. He was right. This was it, only we didn’t see anything inside the room but dark rock.
“We should go. I don’t like this,” I suggested, moving for the portal device.
“Did you hear that?” Rulo asked, taking a step into the cave.
“What?” I strained my ears but didn’t hear anything but the soft plopping, like the kitchen tap dripping when it wasn’t fully shut off.
I peeked up at the same second Suma warned me. “Dean, it’s some sort of a slug on the ceiling!”
My voice caught in my throat as I stared at the cave’s smooth domed ceiling. Dozens of the creatures were up there, and as soon as my light hit them, they began moving frantically. Slate glanced up, following my gaze, and he shone a light on them at the same time.
Rulo was directly under them in the middle of the space, crouching amidst the giant slugs’ slime. She pulled something off the ground and turned to where I was shouting a warning to her. “I think I found the transponder.” She must have seen the looks on our faces, because she tilted her head up and scrambled backwards towards the far wall. It all happened so fast that I didn’t have time to react.
“Rulo, come now!” I finally shouted, but it was too late. The slugs began to drop from the ceiling one by one, landing with a disturbing squelching sound. One of the four-foot-long slugs landed on top of Rulo, and she shouted a primal sound as she batted at the soft creature with powerful armored hands.
Slate and I shot at them, pulse beams cutting through the dark cave. They screamed, a high-pitched wretched sound as we burned through them, sending pieces of slug all over the walls and floor. More were falling from the ceiling, slithering along the walls now, and before we knew it, there were at least fifty of them in the confined space, dozens moving in a pile between us and Rulo.
“Slate, we need to cut a path,” I yelled, aiming for the middle of th
e room with my rifle.
Slate efficiently ended a half dozen of them before they retaliated. We were only a few yards apart, but soon Slate was cornered to my right. I backed up, trying to think of a way to distract the slugs. They didn’t seem to like the light, and that gave me an idea.
I pulled the light-drone off my hip and activated it. The tiny drone rose in the air, heading for the ceiling, and it shot a bright beam toward the middle of the room. The slugs scurried away from the light, giving me the pathway I’d been hoping for.
“Rulo, now!” I yelled, and saw the Keppe warrior throw another slug off her. It hit the wall with a sickening splat, and she kicked at another. Now that her hands were free, she slung up her minigun and fired into the center mass of the slug horde.
She ran to me, spinning around and shooting more of them. Together we aimed at the slugs attacking Slate, and eventually, they were all a pile of guts. Slate was in the corner, his hands raised up in defense, and he was shuddering.
“Slate, they’re gone. We killed them all,” I said, stepping over a particularly large gray alien slug to get to him. I raised my hand and wiped guts off his helmet’s face-shield to reveal his wide, fearful eyes.
Slate patted his chest and legs before giving one of his patented grins. “And you were worried about me dipping my boot into some slime.”
I laughed, and so did Rulo. Among a cave full of carnage, we chuckled like you could only do after a near-death experience.
Rulo held her palm out. “I think we found out what happened to our Yuver friend.” A blinking transponder the size of a peanut was in her hand.
Suma was shouting in my ear, and I finally acknowledged her cries. “Suma, we’re okay. It’s over.”
“No it’s not, Dean.” Her voice was thick with fright. “Look to your right!”
My gaze looked up and right, where piles of slugs were entering the cave from a crevice in the rock.
“Run!” I shouted.
Sixteen
New Alliance Page 13
