The Hyperspace Trap

by Christopher Nuttall

  “This looks like something from a bad movie,” Slater muttered.

  “That’s where I got the idea,” Joan said. She shot him a venomous look. “Can you think of a better one?”

  “That will do,” Paul said. He felt tired too. The exhaustion felt chillingly unnatural. “Shall we begin?”

  He looked at the chair. Nancy sat there, cloth restraints wrapped around her wrists and ankles. She looked tiny, helpless . . . he felt a stab of guilt for putting her through the procedure, even though he knew he had no choice. Would he have felt better if Nancy had been older, more able to give informed consent? It certainly would have soothed his conscience more.

  She refused to allow her father to watch, Paul thought. Why?

  “The medical telltales aren’t working,” Joan said. Paul put his worries aside. “Right now, they’re insisting that Nancy is a forty-year-old man!”

  “I’m twelve,” Nancy protested. Beside her, Angela giggled nervously. “I have a birth certificate to prove it.”

  Joan ignored her. “Angela, I want you to keep a close eye on your sister,” she ordered. “If you think something is wrong, let me know at once.”

  “I will,” Angela said.

  Paul sucked in his breath as Joan dimmed the lights, then knelt beside Nancy and began the induction. The doctor hadn’t been having an easy time of it, not when half her medical tools were either offline or dangerously unreliable. All Joan’s normal tricks for monitoring a patient’s health were gone, forcing her to rely on guesswork. She had plenty of experience and training, Paul knew, but hardly anyone had been made to work without advanced technology for centuries. Even battlefield medics had more equipment when they deployed to a combat zone.

  We’ll have to expand our training programs, he thought. Losing so many systems had never really been contemplated, not when there were so many redundancies built into the starship’s hull. And cram more ration bars into storage.

  Joan’s soft voice washed over him, threatening to lull him to sleep. Nancy looked fatigued, her chin already nodding towards her chest. Paul couldn’t help feeling there was something fundamentally wrong about the whole procedure, even though he knew it was safe. Hypnosis had a bad reputation, but it was nothing compared to personality reconditioning or subversion implants.

  And Angela had the nerve to joke about Nancy being programmed to cluck like a chicken, Paul thought. He would have felt sorry for the older girl if he hadn’t had a hundred different problems to cope with. Angela would have to recover from her ordeal on her own. Joan was very insistent it didn’t work that way.

  He looked at Angela. The older girl looked to be on the verge of nodding off too. Her chin would drift downward, only to snap up a moment later. Paul shot her an encouraging glance, promising himself that he’d have a word with her father later. If they were truly trapped, it might be time for Robert Cavendish to make peace with his daughter before it was too late. Paul had no illusions. Gladys hadn’t managed to escape, and Supreme might suffer the same fate.

  “You’re going deeper and deeper now,” Joan said softly. “You’re drifting in a pool of light, listening to the voices. Can you hear the voices?”

  “Yes,” Nancy breathed.

  Paul tensed. Her voice sounded . . . different. There was a harder edge to it now, something cutting and foul. The sense of threat was palpable. He touched the butt of his pistol before realizing that he was being silly. Nancy was twelve, small for her age . . . and restrained. But Finley Mackintosh had fought like a wildcat before he’d been subdued. Robert Cavendish had even confirmed that Mackintosh hadn’t had any genetic enhancement or military training.

  Not that Cavendish’s words prove anything, Paul reminded himself. Finley could easily have hired private trainers and then covered it up afterwards.

  “You can hear the voices,” Joan said. “Can you make out their words?”

  Nancy’s face twisted, baring her teeth. “Hungry.”

  “Shit,” Angela muttered.

  Joan shot her a look that said, very clearly, Be quiet. Paul tapped his lips firmly, warning the girl to keep her mouth closed. They had to know what they were dealing with, whatever the cost. And if that meant Nancy getting hurt . . . he swallowed, hard. He’d thought he knew how to make the big decisions, but perhaps he didn’t have it in him after all.

  “Hungry,” Nancy said. Her voice was extremely different now, inhuman. Blood dribbled down her chin from where she’d bitten her lip. “We are hungry.”

  Joan exchanged glances with Paul. “Who is hungry?”

  “We are,” Nancy said. Her face shifted in the dimmed light. For a terrifying moment, Paul was sure she was going to explode in front of them. “You will feed us.”

  Paul took a breath. Aliens. They were dealing with aliens. He reminded himself, sharply, that their concepts of logic and reason, or morality, might be radically different from humanity’s. If these beings were hungry . . . what did they want to eat? He trembled as he remembered the growing power drain, the fatigue that was wearing his crew and passengers down. Were the aliens feeding on his ship and crew?

  “I am Captain VanGundy of the Royal Tyre Navy,” he said, carefully. None of the first-contact protocols had covered this situation. Clearly the planners had experienced a failure of imagination. “To whom am I speaking?”

  “We are who we are,” Nancy said. Her voice was still inhuman. She turned her head to look at him. “We are hungry.”

  Paul gritted his teeth. He’d envisaged a peaceful, diplomatic solution. But it sounded as if they couldn’t hope to really communicate with the aliens.

  “You brought us here,” he said. “Why?”

  “You will feed us,” Nancy informed him. Her eyes suddenly seemed darker, as if something else was peering through them. “You will feed us.”

  “With what?” Paul asked. “What can we feed you?”

  “You. Your energy.”

  Paul cursed under his breath. The aliens wanted . . . energy? First the power cells, then . . . then the ship’s crew. No wonder every other ship in the graveyard was as dead as the dodo. The aliens had steadily drained them of life until every last spark was gone. He wondered, briefly, if he could leave the Brethren and a few of their converts behind if they wished to stay. He’d prefer to put them all in the brig, just to keep them out of trouble, but he didn’t have the manpower to enforce the decision. And they knew it too.

  “Where are you?” he asked. Perhaps they could locate the alien base . . . if there was an alien base. So far, the only things they’d detected were derelict ships and impassable energy storms. “We could come to you.”

  Nancy giggled. The sound was chilling. “We are everywhere.”

  A colorful glimmer danced at the corner of Paul’s eye, just for a second. His blood froze as it all fell into place. He wasn’t dealing with humanoid aliens; he wasn’t even dealing with matter-based aliens. The aliens were native to hyperspace, so far beyond his ability to perceive them that all he could see were the tiny flickers. And yet, they were all around him. How could his crew plan an escape when the aliens were watching them?

  A thought struck him. “What did you do to Nancy?”

  “We touched her,” Nancy said. “When the time came, we called to her.”

  Paul, oddly, found that a little reassuring. It was possible, just possible, that the aliens had as little ability to influence the matter universe as humanity had to interfere with their universe. Come to think of it, the problem of actually seeing one’s enemy might apply to them as well. They could drain the starship’s power, perhaps even direct energy storms to cripple the starship, but beyond that, their abilities were limited. There was no sign of alien storm troopers threatening to board Supreme.

  Careful, he told himself firmly. You don’t know any of that for sure.

  Nancy’s body twitched. “We are everywhere,” she said. “This is our realm.”

  “Some of us will stay behind, if you let the rest go,” Paul said caref
ully. The Brethren . . . and that damnable serial killer. He was past caring about making sure the asshole reached Britannia. “We could—”

  “You will all come to us,” Nancy said. Her body jerked, then twisted violently. “We are everywhere.”

  Angela looked up. “She’s having an attack!”

  “She’s going into shock,” Joan said as Nancy started to struggle against the restraints. The doctor pressed an injector tab against the girl’s neck. She should have been out like a light, but Nancy kept fighting desperately. “Captain, she’s being drained!”

  She was born in hyperspace, Paul thought. Did they tag her when she was born for future attention?

  “You will all come to us,” Nancy growled. Her body convulsed. She threw up violently, then started to choke. “You will all come to us.”

  She sagged, then collapsed. A foul stench filled the air. Paul realized, to his horror, that she’d voided her bowels too. Flashing lights darted past him. He reached out to swat one of them, only to see it vanish before his fingers made contact. And even if he had touched it, part of his mind noted, it wouldn’t have made any difference. No one had been able to touch the flickers. They were . . . just there.

  Joan undid the straps, then moved Nancy to an examination table. “Her heart’s beating rapidly, Captain,” she said, “but I think she’s in no immediate danger. I think they tried to force her body to flush out the sedative, unsuccessfully.”

  Paul nodded, coldly. He needed to think. They all needed to think. And then they had to find a way out of the lobster pot before it was too late.

  “When she wakes up . . .” He swallowed and started again. “When she wakes up, make sure she’s restrained until we know what we’re dealing with,” he said. “Is there any way to monitor her brain waves?”

  “Not with what we have on hand,” Joan said. Her eyes darkened in frustration. People were dying because she lacked the tools to save them. “Engineering might be able to put together something a little more primitive, but . . . but I don’t know if they have time.”

  “She’s no longer the only one hearing voices anyway,” Paul muttered. There had always been reports of voices in hyperspace, but no one had ever believed them. Not really. Now . . . now he suspected the voices had been all too real. “Is there anything we can do about that?”

  “I don’t know,” Joan said. “Captain, we have a very limited supply of sedatives. If we hand them out to everyone, we’d run out within hours.”

  Angela cleared her throat. Paul jumped. He’d practically forgotten she was there.

  “What about stimulants?” Angela asked. “You could try to keep people awake instead . . .”

  “That would be risky,” Joan said. “No matter what you took, you’d start running up against hard limits very quickly. I might be able to keep someone awake for three or four days using civilian-grade pills, but they’d be seeing things by the third day. And without the implants and tools I’d normally use to monitor someone’s internal state, I’d be reluctant to risk it.”

  “And it would come crashing down eventually,” Paul added. He’d seen people die after taking too many stimulants. Their hearts couldn’t take the stress and eventually gave out. Most spacers had nanites to compensate for the stimulants, but even they had limits. “After two or three days, you’d fall into sleep, if you were lucky. I’ve seen it happen during the war.”

  He wondered, briefly, what would happen if he triggered the self-destruct and blew up the entire ship. Would that spite the aliens, if nothing else? Or would it just give them everything they wanted at once? He frowned as he remembered a note from the recovered logbook. The nukes had detonated, but the detonation had been . . . odd. Had the aliens tried to drain the power even as the nukes exploded?

  “Take care of your sister,” he told Angela. He looked at Joan. “Keep me informed, please.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Joan said. “I’ll let you know when she wakes up.”

  Paul keyed his wristcom as he walked through the hatch. “Keep working on the salvage operation,” he ordered when the bridge responded. “We may have less time than we thought.”

  A glimmer of light darted past, mocking him. He ignored it. If he was right, the aliens had as much trouble perceiving humans as humans had perceiving them. And if he was wrong, they were dead anyway. He saw no point in fretting about something outside his control.

  “She’s so small,” Angela said as Joan wiped Nancy down. “Has she grown smaller?”

  “Your perceptions of her have changed,” Joan said briskly. “That’s not exactly uncommon.”

  Angela scowled. She wished, suddenly, that she’d spent more time with Nancy. Sure, there were seven years between them, but they could still have been friends. And yet, it would have meant social death for both of them. Nancy couldn’t take part in adult activities, and Angela would be a laughing stock if she joined childish games and . . .

  She shook her head, silently rebuking herself. Nancy was dying . . . they were all dying. Her friends, the ones who had seemed so important, were on the other side of the distortion, hundreds of light-years away. They’d thought they were rebelling, but . . . she knew, now, that they’d been childish brats in adult bodies. None of them were prepared for adulthood.

  I wouldn’t have been so concerned about looking mature if I’d actually been mature, Angela thought. She could have spent a lot more time with her sister. She promised herself that she would if they ever made it home. And I’ll work harder too.

  She looked at the doctor. “Can’t you give her a proper bath?”

  “There’s a water shortage,” Joan reminded her. “How are you feeling?”

  Angela shook her head, gently. In truth, she’d forgotten about her aches and pains the moment the session started. Her body had been slow to recover, despite the genetic engineering spliced into her DNA. She told herself, firmly, that it didn’t matter. Nancy was in a far worse state.

  “I’ve been better,” she said. She wanted a bath too, though she’d settle for a shower. “Take care of her.”

  She stepped through the door and into the antechamber. Marie would be down there, she knew, helping to tend to the wounded. Angela suspected she should probably go join her governess, but . . . but she didn’t know what she wanted to do. It didn’t matter anyway, she told herself. If she’d learned one thing over the last few days, it was that the universe was no longer guided by her whims. In truth, it had never been so.

  Matt was sitting on a chair, half-asleep. He jumped when she touched him.

  “Angela,” he stammered. “Are you . . . are you all right?”

  “No,” Angela said, sitting down beside him. “Are you all right?”

  “That bastard caught me a few nasty blows,” Matt said. He shook his head. “And the shockrod didn’t help either. I don’t know how he shrugged it off.”

  “He was like a different person,” Angela said. She leaned into Matt. After a moment of hesitation, he put an arm around her. “Is that . . . are we all going to go mad here?”

  “I don’t know,” Matt said. He glanced down at his wristcom. “I have to be at the shuttlebay in twenty minutes.”

  Angela frowned. “What for?”

  “We’re going to visit one of the alien ships,” Matt said. He sounded as though he would be excited if he wasn’t so tired. “I’ll be glad to be away from Supreme for a while.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Angela said. She opened her mouth to ask about what Carla had shared, then decided to change the subject. That was Carla’s story to tell. “Matt . . . what’s going to happen to us?”

  “I don’t know,” Matt said. He yawned. “If we can get out of here, we’ll be free.”

  And if not, we’ll be dead, Angela thought. And who cares what happens then?

  She wrapped her arms around him and kissed his lips, as hard as she could. He seemed surprised, but kissed her back with the same intensity. She felt his body shivering against her . . . she expected to feel horror,
or fear, but . . . Finley hadn’t ruined her. She could touch another man and not be repulsed. And he could touch her too . . .

  “Come back,” she whispered, putting as much promise into her words as she could. “I want to see you again.”

  Matt kissed her again. “I will,” he promised quietly. “I’ll see you soon.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “That is one eerie ship,” Lieutenant Avis Grosskopf said.

  Matt couldn’t disagree. The vessel looked like a squashed spider washed with spooky green light. The team was unable to tell which end was the prow and which was the stern, if such concepts had meant anything to the alien designers in the first place. Giant gangly struts—he tried hard not to think of them as legs—ran out in all directions, bending and twisting seemingly at random. His head hurt when he looked at them too closely, as if they went in directions the human eye wasn’t designed to follow. The thought of boarding the alien ship made him want to wet himself in fear. It was powerless, as far as anyone could tell, but . . .

  “Remember the procedures,” Slater warned. If the security chief was nervous, there was no sign of it in his voice. “Remain in your suits at all times. If you encounter extraterrestrial life, remain calm and alert me . . .”

  Matt kept his thoughts to himself as they made their way down towards what looked like a command core. The spider’s body—he told himself, again, that it wasn’t a real spider—had to be the command center, didn’t it? But then nothing could be taken for granted. He couldn’t imagine any merely human designer building the spider-craft, then sending it into interstellar space. Something about its appearance resonated with humanity’s deepest, darkest fears. He wished, suddenly, that they’d thought to pick another craft. They didn’t have to inspect the ship closest to Supreme first.

  Up close, the alien hull looked rugged. He tried hard not to think of it as dried skin. Slater landed neatly on the hull and bent down to inspect it, touching it lightly with his armored hands. Matt followed him, feeling a chill as he realized that the hull felt springy under his feet. He told himself, firmly, that he was imagining the sensation. The aliens couldn’t have built a biological starship, could they?