by Greig Beck
“You think the Americans …?” The young man’s eyes widened.
“Maybe something else. Something –” Bilov thought about their secret project, his imagination taking him down a dark and ominous path. He turned. “I think we need to prepare for all eventualities.” Bilov headed for the door. “Keep trying to communicate with our team. We need to protect our heroes, at all costs.”
CHAPTER 41
Sophia stood just beyond largest crater rim to the north of the Kennedy Base. She sensed again the strange presence that had attacked the lander and killed the young HAWC. It perplexed her – it was non-human but had fragments of human thought and physicality about it. Or within it. She’d tried to reach out and probe its mind but found there was nothing for her to link to, and the being’s process of thought was fragmented and disorganized as though it was in many places at once, or perhaps, many in one place at the same time.
But there were two things that she was convinced of: one, it was growing in size, intelligence, and strength, and the sensations she did draw forth indicated it held no malice, no antipathy, or desire for reprisal. Instead, it acted on instinct and an overarching will to survive that surpassed anything she had ever encountered.
And two: unfortunately, the lifeform’s instinct meant its very existence was the antithesis of human life. And a threat.
CHAPTER 42
Alex and Roy Maddock stepped onto the moon surface. The pair turned slowly, scanning their surroundings, before Alex turned back to give a thumbs-up to the camera. Now that the ship comms had been destroyed, their only communication was via each other. He started off.
Maddock caught up with him. “What exactly are we looking for?”
“We’re going fishing,” Alex said.
Maddock chuckled. “I got a bad feeling about what you’re going to tell me the bait is.”
“You guessed it – us.” Alex laughed softly. “Something Marion said made me think that I’ll be a target. This thing knows what we do, so will undoubtedly guess we’ll try and get the Russians to blow their ship out of the sky.”
“So, it needs to also improve its odds,” Maddock replied.
“Yep. I’m betting it wants our ship as well to improve its chances of getting to Earth. When it took Vin, it learned everything about us and will know about the launch key.”
“And who’s got it.”
“Sort of. Vin saw Sam remove it, but not sure if he saw Sam give it to me. So, it’ll know one of us has it. Me being outside will draw it out from the base, or, if there are any of those budded clones on the moon surface, I expect they might pay us a visit. Mia said it attacked them at the solar arrays, so we’ll head there first.”
The two large men in their silver amored suits walked across the moon surface, kicking up clouds of silken gray dust that glittered before falling in slow motion to settle again. Alex’s suit sensors scanned the surface, but there was no movement or heat sources.
It didn’t take them long to skirt the base and climb over the ridge of small craters to the solar arrays that Briggs and Mia had needed to repair. They continued on and a little further out they found the two empty suits Mia had described.
“Three men went down, and one got up and walked away,” Alex observed.
Maddock headed a few paces out to one side. “Got a single set of tracks leading back to the base.” He looked up. “Think it got back in?”
“Assume it did. And that means it knows how to work around the security system. Or worst case, someone inside is not who they say they are and is letting it in.” Alex turned slowly, looking at the disturbed moon dust. “Remember, it’s absorbed a lot of the base personnel so knows the base infrastructure better than we do.”
“It took Vin. That kid was a fighter and it still beat him.”
“Ambushed him. This thing gets in close and overwhelms its prey. I don’t think Vin had a chance. But we won’t give it that opportunity. It must have presented as a plausible, nonthreatening figure to him.”
“Until it got close enough.”
“Yeah, until then.”
It’s coming.
Alex frowned. “Josh?” The whisper in his head was familiar but somehow disturbing.
Maddock turned. “You say something, Boss?”
“No, I thought I heard …” Alex shook his head.
It’s here.
It wasn’t Joshua’s voice, or even the decrepit dryness of the other lurking within his id at the very core of his mind. It was someone else.
Then Alex sensed the minute vibrations beneath his feet.
“It’s here!” he yelled.
Black rope-like cords burst from the ground, enveloping both HAWCs. Alex felt them immediately begin to tighten. They surged across his mask, and he felt multiple points of pressure as the thing sought a way to get inside his armor to his flesh.
He remembered the torn clothing and black slime the base crew had encountered on their missing people. He also remembered that Vin’s suit was primarily undamaged – and what penetrations there were occurred from the inside.
“It can’t get in past our armor,” Alex said. “Yet.”
Still, the cords compressed, and he felt the pressure begin. The suits hydraulics kept it at bay, but in the next instant, he was pulled below the ground about six inches.
“Trying to … damn … bury us.” Maddock’s voice was strained. “Crushing …”
The black mass continued to surge over the two men, making Alex wonder about the size – the real size – of the thing below the surface. It had an ability to compress itself down to a human shape, but after absorbing so many human beings, its true mass must have been enormous.
“Roy …” Alex said.
“Yeah, here, but suit’s system is screaming at me – damn thing is exerting thousands of pounds of pressure per square inch. Gonna find a weakness eventually.” He groaned. “Can’t get it off.”
“Give it a shockwave,” Alex replied.
Alex initiated the suit’s external shock blast, discharging its full power. The 2000 volts surged across the silver suit, making it glow blue for several seconds.
The thing shivered, and where it touched Alex, it glowed red from the electricity.
He saw Maddock’s suit also release the charge, but the thing still gripped them both, and squeezed harder – he heard the minuscule popping of something on his helmet and prayed the thing didn’t have the power to crack it. He suddenly remembered taking the shot to the head from the Russians. Idiot! Should have checked it over, he thought.
“Shocking again,” Alex said.
“Bad idea, Boss,” Maddock replied.
Alex remembered what Quartermaine had told him about the discharges – continual use meant the charge would seep back in against their bodies.
“No choice. One of us has got to be free to save the other. Hang tough.” Alex released another shockwave, and then another, and the last time felt the agony of the discharge – it made his teeth clamp together so hard he tasted the metallic tang of blood in his mouth.
He released another pulse and once again felt the massive electrical charge run across his frame. His internal suits sensors screamed alarms, and for the first time, he felt his flesh singing. But where the creature touched him it went from scarlet red to a charred black, then let him go. It started to suck back below the ground, and he quickly drew his gun armed with the incendiary rounds and fired into the ground after it.
The thermal rounds ignited like miniature suns, burning the surrounding dust, catching the escaping cords. Hundreds of pounds of the creature was vomited up into a mound of stinking mush. The rest of it vanished.
He heard Roy Maddock groan and saw his soldier was now half-pulled below the lunar surface. The objective was clear: if the thing couldn’t pierce or peel him out of his suit, it’d drag him below the lunar surface and work on him at its leisure. Alex knew his soldier couldn’t repeat the process of continual shockwaves or even use thermal rounds while held in it
s grasp, as the trauma would certainly overwhelm the HAWC suit’s protection and kill him.
Over his comms he heard Maddock grunting as he strained. “It’s compressing the armor. I’ve got some integrity warnings.”
“Go for rocket burn,” Alex shouted.
“Good plan. On it.” From within the dark, rubbery mound there was an orange glow, and Maddock’s head and shoulders appeared as his personal booster rockets fired.
The creature started to burn but it held on, and Alex had one option left – he pulled free the neurotoxin stick and pointed it at where the mass was thickest on his friend. He fired.
The dart stuck and discharged its poison. One half of the black mound sagged as the drug worked its paralyzing effect.
“Don’t like that either, huh? Good.” Alex fired another dart, and another.
The mass sagged like thick jelly, and soon didn’t even have the muscle control to pull itself below the surface. In another few seconds, Maddock burst free with the twin jet of flame from his booster blasting out behind him. He cut the booster emission and as the mass fell from him, he landed on his feet.
“Gross shit.” He wiped away some remaining gobbets of the substance that rapidly dried on his suit.
Alex bumped fists with his soldier. “Thank you, Doctor Quartermain. Your suits just passed the field test.”
“What the hell is it?” Maddock asked as the pair looked down at the massive mound of dark jelly.
“I wonder if that was its normal shape. Or just another version of itself,” Alex said.
“It’s enormous.” Maddock was still wiping himself off. “And for all we know, it might be ten times as big under the ground.”
The blob started to shiver, and then moved, but not to try and slide back beneath the moon’s surface. It was changing shape.
Alex pointed the shock stick at it as the dark matter shrank, and changed color. It went from a large blob of several thousand pounds of black jelly to something about six feet long and pale.
As they watched, arms, legs, then a head formed. Hair sprouted and features appeared on its face.
“Tell me I’m going mad,” Maddock breathed.
Alex grimaced. “Eric Wilson, I presume.”
The man was naked, and it looked unbelievably incongruous to see him lying on the moon’s surface like he was just sleeping. And then it got worse – his eyes opened, and his head turned toward them.
“Where …?” he asked.
“Holy shit,” Maddock said.
The man sat up and held his head.
“Do you know who you are?” Alex asked.
The man frowned. “No, yes – Eric, Eric Wilson. I’m an engineer at the Kennedy Moon Base.” He held his arms out and looked at his hands, turning them over.
“That’s right, Eric,” Alex replied. “And do you know where you are?”
“I’m, I’m …” He looked around and then his expression changed to one of terror. “Where’s my suit?” He got to his feet, hugging himself. “How can this be? How can I breathe? How did I get here?”
“Take it easy, Eric. What do you remember?” Maddock asked.
Eric frowned and looked down at the gray powder beneath his feet. “Coldness. Screaming. Blackness. Then nothing.” He looked up. “Wait, I remember my friends, Art Dawson and Benny Minchen, coming to find me.” He shook his head. “But then … I can’t.” He looked up. “Weird. I can still hear Art and Benny … in my head.” He took a step toward Alex. “Where’s my suit?”
Alex stared hard at the man. “You don’t need a suit, Eric.”
“How? Why?”
“Because you’re not breathing,” Alex said evenly.
“What?” His face creased in confusion. “No, no …” Eric spun one way then the other. He turned back to the HAWCs. “Why aren’t I breathing anymore? What happened to me?”
“You’re not breathing because you’re not human anymore.” Maddock lowered his hand to his gun.
“There’s something’s wrong here. You have to help me.” Eric staggered forward.
“Stay there, Eric.” Alex held up a hand flat in front of his face.
Eric shook his head. “But I’m a person. I’m Eric James Wilson, thirty-four years old. I was born in West Des Moines, Iowa.” He held his arms out to the HAWCs. “You have to help me.”
Suddenly, all the expression fell from Eric Wilson’s face, and the smooth skin on his cheeks and forehead became lumpy and uneven.
Roy and Alex backed up, weapons in their hands. Before their eyes, Eric Wilson’s head grew to the size of a pumpkin, grotesquely swollen, and then the skin split horizontally and vertically to peel back like the petals of a giant flower, revealing a mass of stalks with bulbs at their ends. They began to swell.
Just as they began to explode forward, the HAWCS opened fire with incendiary rounds. The bullets entered the Eric Wilson thing’s body, and tiny points of light began to glow inside him.
A scream came from Eric Wilson, but it was hard to know from exactly where, as the thing didn’t have a mouth anymore. And it wasn’t a human scream but the sound of something from the dark depths of the cosmos itself.
Alex and Maddock fired again and again as the body of Eric expanded, and the thousand-degree rounds bloomed within it, causing ruptures, and large canker-like sores to burst open on the thing as it tried to expel the points of agony.
The bullets kept heating up, and the creature lost its man-like shape as it seemed unable to hold it together anymore. Finally, the body fell into a steaming mass that once again was a pool of dark liquid.
Both HAWCs just stared as the puddle expanded, dried, and then began to turn to dust.
Maddock turned. “I kind of expected first contact would be with some little fat guy with a light on the end of his finger. You?”
Alex snorted. “Pretty much. But it just learned lesson number one: you come in peace, then so do we. You come for war, then we fry you down to dust.”
“I heard that,” Maddock said, and then: “What now?”
“It’s not over. This isn’t all of the thing, or the only one.” Alex sighed. “We’ll collect a sample for Marion. This was a test of our firepower against our adversary. Bottom line, we confirmed that if we can flush it out, we can kill it.”
“All we need to do is find them or get them to show themselves.”
“This was just a bud or piece of the thing.” Alex turned back to the base. “I’m not sure that the thing or things inside are the source creature either. For all we know, the originator is or was deep in that Russian mine.”
“That’s our next stop?” Maddock grinned. “Coz I love being a guinea pig.”
“Probably, but not now. We need to get back, ensure that we get those comms working again, and protect the people who are still alive.”
“And still people.”
“Got that right.” Alex reached up to feel his helmet; he needed to get it checked out. A small problem in his suit could mean a death sentence if he was too far from the base.
He waved Maddock on. The helmet could wait. Right now, they had other priorities.
CHAPTER 43
Sam and McCarthy’s first stop was the machine room to gather parts and tools. Then they’d be spending however long it took down in the comms room to try and repair the external transmission tech. Right now, that was the priority.
Sam held up a hand to stop McCarthy as they were heading out so he could listen to the incoming message from his HAWC leader – Alex Hunter delivered his soldiers an update on their engagement with the lifeform, and what they used to push it back.
“Good,” Sam said and turned to McCarthy, who had his eyebrows raised. “Boss just had a confrontation with the lifeform and kicked the thing’s ass. Our weapons tech does the job, so now let’s do ours.”
Sam waved McCarthy on and saw Mia give him a small wave over the chief engineer’s shoulder. He smiled back, liking the young woman, and wondered whether she was just lonely or starved for affe
ction. Being marooned here can’t have been fun. Especially now, he thought. Sam knew he wasn’t the most attractive guy going around, more a massive lump of muscle and scar tissue, but it kinda made him feel good to have someone checking him out.
He placed a hand over his breastplate where the picture of Alyssa sat. Don’t worry, girl, you’re my one and only.
He nodded to Mia, and she pointed to herself and mouthed: Do you need me with you?
Sam shook his head and gave her a small salute. Her mouth turned down momentarily, then she nodded. But she came toward him anyway.
“Stay safe,” she said.
“Always,” he replied.
“I’m sorry about your friend Vincent.”
Sam grunted, not really wanting to talk about it.
“Thank heavens you didn’t lose your ship. That you had the foresight to lock it.” She brightened. “I bet it was you that thought of that.”
Sam shook his head. “Standard op on a mission in hostile territory.”
“Modest.” She smiled. “Just make sure you keep the key safe. That ship is our lifeline.”
“The Boss has it. No one, no time, is going to take that from him. You stay safe too.” Sam turned away. “Let’s go,” he said to McCarthy.
As he went out the door, Sam turned to see Mia staring at him, her expression strangely blank.
He and McCarthy headed down to the machine room, and McCarthy held his arms wide as he beheld its inventory. “This is in better shape than NASA’s shop.”
Sam grinned. “Hell, it’s in better shape than most of my house.”
Everything they needed was on walls, on shelves, in crates, clearly labeled and categorized. There was even a local computer catalogue system that identified smaller parts and where they were stored, the quantity in stock listed with an accompanying identifier image.
“Grab a trolley will you, Sam?” McCarthy spoke over his shoulder as he paged through the system.
Sam brought the trolley around, and when the engineer identified a required component, Sam retrieved it from its shelf, drawer, or cabinet. Sam had engineering experience, and he was one of the HAWCs’ go-to guys for weaponry and equipment repairs, so he knew his way around workshops, tools, and other aspects of the build-rebuild process.
