The Dark Side: Alex Hunter 9

by Greig Beck

  “We don’t know, sir.” The man’s voice was small.

  “For all we know it could be a fucking bomb!” Hammerson roared. He tilted his head back and closed his eyes for a moment as he fought to keep his anger from boiling over. “Okay.” He leaned on his knuckles. “Show me the footage from the surveillance cameras for the night before, right now.”

  Hammerson heard people scramble, keys being punched, and then the screen on the wall in front of him split into multiple views showing the storage silo from various angles. In the right bottom corner, there were digital readouts counting down the time. They all played at double speed.

  His eyes moved over the footage. The night edged toward dawn as the rocket continued to be loaded. Trucks came and went as the work went on.

  At around 0500 hours, a truck approached, and was emptied. Just before it took off something rolled out from underneath and went into the facility almost faster than the eye could follow. Hammerson stared.

  “Quadrant nine, slow it, rewind and enhance.”

  The other camera scenes were removed, as the single feed was slowed to normal speed and then enlarged. It replayed again, and once more there was the anomaly, but even cleaned up, it was still indistinct.

  Hammerson felt a growing knot twist in his gut. “Take it all the way down to frame by frame,” he said.

  His order was carried out.

  “Stop. Rewind two frames. Stop.” He straightened, placing his hands on his hips. “You gotta be shitting me.”

  The slim silver figure was blurred but unmistakable.

  “Sophia, Oh, God no,” Hammerson whispered. “Do we have a timeline on communications yet?”

  His technician looked up. “No, sir, we think the problem is at their end.”

  “She said she’d follow him to hell and back.” Hammerson sat down slowly. “I didn’t believe her.”

  CHAPTER 38

  Deep in the mine, Igor Stanislov and Anastasia Asimova continued into the last section of the tunnel, but now their steps were careful, each putting one foot softly in front of the other.

  Anna held out a hand and ran it over one of the dark walls. “Glass smooth.”

  “The melted look again,” Stanislov replied.

  “No, more like exuded.” She scanned the ground. “Look.” She crouched. One of the smooth walls seemed to have run like liquid and a puddle of it had congealed to one side. She pointed. “See in there? That’s a boot print. This place was still being formed when the people came in. It was made probably around the same time as our team was working. Or soon after.”

  “Let’s investigate a little further,” Stanislov said. “If we don’t find anything in the next two minutes, we will return to the surface and wait for the commander.”

  “Agreed,” she said eagerly.

  They continued, slowly. They used their helmet and wrist lights, but the Tartarean darkness inside the tunnel swallowed every particle of illumination as if a black cloth had been thrown over them.

  In another few moments they came to the end of the tunnel and stopped to stare.

  Anna clung to his arm. “This is where it ended,” she whispered.

  “No, this is where it started,” he replied softly.

  Scattered before them were empty spacesuits, dozens of them, as well as piles of laboratory smocks, boots, and even underwear.

  “The scientists,” Stanislov said softly, feeling a tickle of fear run up his spine. “Plus, our missing team members, I think.”

  Sure enough, heavily armored spacesuits were crumpled on the ground before the wall. Also empty.

  “They all took their suits off … in a vacuum?” He turned to Anna. “Not possible.”

  “And where are the bodies?” she responded. “They should have died in seconds.”

  But there was something else. Stanislov reached for his gun.

  “American.”

  Close to the wall, there was a figure standing there, or at least someone in a spacesuit with an American flag patch on the arm, facing the strange, dark wall, and so close he was almost touching it. His head drooped forward, and arms hung limply, like a small child who had misbehaved at school and been told to go and stand in the corner.

  Stanislov switched his speaker to the international channel. “Hey, America.”

  The figure ignored him and continued to face the black wall, not moving an inch.

  Even with their lights trained on the figure he was in shadow in the gloom of the viscous-looking cave.

  “Wait here,” Stanislov said and hated that his voice cracked. He lifted his gun and began to close in on the figure. “Hey, America, you okay?”

  He turned back briefly to Anna, who looked small and alone in the dark tunnel.

  When he was within a few feet of the man, he stopped. Stanislov could see that the back of the man’s suit was torn open. In the vacuum and with the temperature hundreds below zero, it was … “Impossible,” he whispered.

  As he stared, he saw the material around the tear shift and then things like small knobs on stalks start to extend from the rip. Inside, the flesh looked like it was moving – it was raw and rubbery like bread dough.

  He grimaced, feeling his gorge rise, and backed up a step. He kept his gun up.

  “What is it?” Anna asked.

  “Stay back.” His voice was strained as his throat constricted from fear.

  More bulbs appeared from the back of the torn suit, and these too began to swell ominously. They seemed to reach toward him.

  “Demon!” Stanislov yelled and fired his gun, once, twice, and a third time. All three shots hit the target.

  The American didn’t flinch but the swollen and questing bulbs finally burst, filling the area with a white, gritty powder that hung in the air and sparkled in their flashlights.

  Stanislov’s nerve broke and he spun, his jittery legs wanting to transport him far away. But instead, he felt a punch to his back that knocked the wind from his lungs. Immediately he felt a blistering cold and the breathable air in his suit began to thin. He knew what it was: a suit breach.

  He heard Anna scream, and continue to scream, and then Lieutenant Igor Stanislov thought one last thing as the cold began to penetrate his body: Zombie ant.

  * * *

  Anastasia stood rooted to the spot with her eyes wide in terror. A pencil-thick cord-like structure burst from the torn suit of the American spaceman to pierce Stanislov’s back.

  As she watched, her colleague’s body began to dance and vibrate as his screaming got even more panicked and loud. He must have been speared like a fish, with the barb hooked deep in his flesh.

  So, this is how it did it – their experiment had learned a new technique for capturing its prey, above using simply spore dispersion.

  Anna couldn’t move, or speak, or even breathe. All she could do was watch with a horrified fascination as Stanislov’s cries turned to a wet sound, as if he was gargling water. And by the unnatural movements in his suit, she knew what had struck him was actually pouring along that cord and entering his suit like a hypodermic injection.

  “Get back,” she said almost soundlessly, as she knew it was really only to herself.

  And then Stanislov’s suit, which had been ruffling like it was in a strong breeze, crumpled to the floor, empty.

  Her heart hammered and she felt she was in some sort of dream where nothing was real. The American man seemed unchanged, but where did Stanislov go? All his physical mass?

  Finally, the American suit started to grow and swell, and it turned toward her. The faceplate of the helmet was pocked with holes, and behind the glass there seemed movement from something that wasn’t a face at all, something that strained against the cracked glass.

  “We created you,” she whispered. “Do you understand me?”

  More cords shot out, but this time landed in the fallen suits of her colleagues, and, like a conjuring trick, they began to rise up, full again.

  “We can work together. Help each other,” s
he begged.

  The next cord struck her chest, and she knew it had also pierced her flesh as the agonizing coldness pumped into her skin.

  In those last seconds of Anna being Anna, when the cordyceps’ fungal threads reached her brain, she saw it, saw it all, and knew then what it really wanted – visions of an Earth covered in a layer of fungal matting, where every living thing, every insect, plant, animal, sea creature, had been absorbed and co-opted into a global mycelium mass.

  It just needed one thing – to get there – and they were the key.

  * * *

  “There’s something wrong,” Irina said. “I can’t raise Anna.” She plodded along beside Borgan and Grisha, who glanced at each other.

  “Radiation interference,” Grisha suggested.

  Borgan tried Stanislov, then the other soldiers, with the same result. “Strange. The men aren’t responding either. Maybe they are in the mine and out of range.”

  “No, the mine isn’t that deep,” Irina replied as she tried to fine tune the frequency. “It’s more like they are simply not answering. Anastasia would answer me if she could. We need to move faster.” She glanced at the broken body of Aleksi. “Leave him, he’s dead.”

  Borgan looked at Aleksi and saw the man’s eyes flutter. “He is not.”

  Irina reached out a hand to grip the captain’s arm. “He’s dead.”

  Borgan stared down for a moment more, knowing there was nothing they could do for him. “Let him go,” he said softly to Grisha.

  Borgan and Grisha released their colleague.

  “Hurry.” Irina tugged at him once more, and then turned to jog again.

  Soon they crested the last crater rim to the basin where the remains of the Russian base and their craft waited. But as they finally approached the apex of their climb, they slowed.

  “Oh.” Irina stopped dead.

  Borgan’s mouth hung open and his eyes bugged. “Our ship.”

  The lander lifted above the rim, throwing down thrust that whipped the powdery lunar dust into billowing clouds.

  “Go, go!” Borgan shoved Irina.

  They began to run now, but at the glacial speed they could manage it only meant that when they came over the crater rim, the lander was already several hundred feet in the air.

  “They left us?” Grisha asked. “Why?”

  As the trio watched, their lander got smaller and smaller. Borgan tried uselessly to raise someone, anyone, but he got dead air, as whoever was onboard wasn’t opening the communication link.

  Irina sat down heavily, followed by the two men. They watched and sat in silence as the lander became a dot, and then the dot vanished into the black atmosphere.

  How many minutes they remained there, staring, no one could remember.

  Finally, Irina sighed. “They’ve killed us.” She turned. “We only have about ninety minutes of oxygen remaining in our suit tanks.”

  Borgan sat beside her and held his knees.

  Grisha lent forward. “Don’t let it get home – that’s what the American said.”

  Borgan nodded. “It’s not home yet.” He groaned to his feet and held out a hand to Irina. “There is one option left. We need to return to the American base and beg them to take us in.”

  CHAPTER 39

  “Sir.” The technician spun in his seat.

  Briggs looked up from one of the external camera feeds. “What is it?”

  “We’ve detected a launch in the vicinity of the Russian base. A craft is leaving the lunar atmosphere.

  “What?” He rushed around the console. “The Russian lander?”

  Alex and Sam followed, and the rest of the HAWCs turned to watch.

  “Yes, sir, has to be,” the technician replied. “They’ve now departed the proximate atmosphere.”

  “Guess they’ve completed their work.” Briggs turned to Alex. “You guys must have really given them the heebie-jeebies.”

  “Like hell,” Alex shot back. “That craft cannot be allowed to land in Russia, or anywhere.”

  Briggs frowned. “I don’t understand. They probably found they had no survivors here, as we suspected.” His brows knitted. “I thought they were a security risk for us, and you wanted them gone. Them leaving is a good thing, isn’t it?”

  Alex strode closer to look at the radar blip of the departing craft. “When that thing attacked our lander and killed Vin, it wanted to take our ship, but couldn’t. So my bet is it took the Russian one instead.”

  “This thing can fly a spacecraft now?” Stevens’ voice was shrill. “That’s ridiculous. Your own scientist said its some sort of mutated fungus or something like that.”

  “It can’t, but the Russians can.” Marion folded her arms and joined the men. “It adapts and survives. Right now, we have no idea what this thing is capable of. We know that some fungus can retain memories and can even inherit memories – they learn through ingestion.”

  Casey’s laugh was like a bark. “Eats a fucking Russian lander pilot, becomes a Russian lander pilot.”

  Marion turned and gave her a flat smile. “Basically, that’s about it.”

  Alex lowered his head for a moment. “It’s what I feared. This thing isn’t smart, but it’s ingesting and then inheriting knowledge.” He looked up. “About the base, its people, our equipment …”

  “And our strengths and weaknesses,” Sam finished.

  Alex nodded. “Like all organisms, it just wants to survive. And knows it needs to find a place that will provide the best medium for maximum growth.”

  “Earth,” Sam said wearily.

  “So, ah, does that mean the thing is gone from here?” Stevens asked hopefully. “We’re safe now?”

  “Budding,” Marion said. “Cloning, budding, spooring – this thing can make copies of itself. The bit that took the ship might just be a fragment of the genesis entity. So in regards to your question, I think we still have a problem.”

  “The genesis entity?” Alex said.

  Marion nodded. “I think it confirms that the source of the infection might have been the Russian base. That’s where it all started.”

  “Then if the Russians were infected there, it means the blast didn’t kill it. Or kill all of it,” Sam added.

  “Sooner or later, we’re going to need to pay it a visit,” Alex said, and turned to Briggs. “It’ll take that Russian ship three and half days to make the trip back to Earth. So, we have three days to fix our communications, contact home, and then get someone to convince the Russians to blow their own craft and people out of the sky.”

  “You really think that the Russians are all infected?” McCarthy asked.

  “Yes.” Alex straightened. “I don’t think there are any Russians left alive on that lander. That’s a Trojan horse, headed for our planet.”

  Casey exhaled between her teeth. “Ah, for fuck’s sake.”

  “A Trojan Horse?” Marion sighed. “That’s very apt, Captain Hunter. And we just gave it a ride all the way to our front door.” She pressed her temples with her fingertips. “This is potentially the worst outcome. This … thing, has the ability to spread and dominate every place it goes. Every city, every country, every planet.”

  “It’s not there yet. First things first: our own problems haven’t gone away. We need to secure our power, light, and air, and priority one is Doctor Pandewahanna’s test,” Alex said.

  “You’re right. And it’ll be ready soon. Then we can test everyone, and hopefully identify our intruder,” Marion replied.

  “Good.” Alex turned to his team. “Casey, Klara, you watch Doctor Martin’s back. Nothing and nobody is to interfere with her work. Clear?”

  “Sir.” The two HAWC women’s eyes shone with intensity.

  Alex turned to McCarthy. “You get the big guy. Sam knows a thing or two about electronics and engineering, so can help speed the process up. We don’t have much time now. Everything is to be done at speed.”

  “I’ll do my best. But some of those parts need to be built.” Mc
Carthy shrugged.

  Alex grunted. “I don’t need to tell you what’s at stake, do I?”

  McCarthy shook his head. “I know: everything. I won’t rest until I’m done.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Roy Maddock asked.

  Alex put his hand on Maddock’s shoulder and turned to Briggs. “You be okay here for a while?”

  The base commander nodded.

  Alex turned back to his HAWC, his mouth curling into a smile. “Suit up. You and I are going for a little walk.”

  CHAPTER 40

  Baikonur Cosmodrome Spaceport, southern Kazakhstan

  The technician spun in his seat. “Still no response, sir.”

  Major Alexi Bilov turned, his forehead deeply furrowed. “Please tell me it could be a malfunction.”

  “I don’t think so. They’re just not picking up.” The young man listened in again. “No response on radio, or even to our attempts at Morse.”

  Bilov paced closer to the man’s console and looked over his shoulder. “Life signs?”

  “That’s another anomaly, sir. Sometimes I detect several life signs that read as normal, and other times I get a single reading that … isn’t.”

  “Isn’t?” Bilov scowled and then made a guttural sound in his throat. “Put me on speaker.”

  The technician did as asked and turned to the major. “Link open.”

  “This is Major Alexi Bilov, in a direct communication to commander Yuri Borgan aboard lander P23–09. What is your status?”

  The technician opened the comms to the room. Bilov waited, but there was nothing but the vacuum of dead air.

  “I am ordering Commander Yuri Borgan to respond immediately. If you cannot verbalize, then please use another means of communication.”

  Bilov waited again.

  After another moment, the technician just shook his head. “There is no white noise, or feedback. The system seems to be working fine. They’re just not responding.”

  Bilov rubbed his chin. “They might not be able to.” He looked up. “Someone or something might not be letting them.”