She had made no close alliances on the Christi and had turned down many an invitation to share a bunk from some of the rankings she served with. Appealing as that was in the beginning, she had seen no way to explain away her son without it starting her down the road to the brig. Court Martial. Reduction in Grade. Loss of Pay and Benefits. The phrases bounced off the inside of her skull like a runaway chain reaction, one that she was powerless to control once the process started.
She sighed, voiced on her reader, and pulled up a scholarly tome on radio/tv communications. Studying history was one of her pastimes and she read as much as she could about the subject. She was at the point in the abstract on her reader that discussed the expanding bubble of electromagnetic radiation spreading from Earth at the speed of light since roughly 1900.
That was over 800 years ago and since they were now 800-plus years away from Earth, sooner or later the Christi should be able to pick up some of those first feeble broadcasts. The folks back on Elber had already done so, regaling in the television broadcasts from the middle of the Twentieth Century: names like Milton Berle, Lucille Ball, James Arness, Richard Boone and others were familiar names in a lot of homes. The weak, drifting, fuzzy pictures from ancient Earth fascinated her as well. After a few minutes of reading, her mind drifted, just as it did when she was on the bridge. She kept her off-axis sets tuned to the RF and UHF/VHF bands and when she wasn’t listening to her assigned ship-to-ship traffic she listened with one ear for the old Earth signals. So far, in the Loop, she had heard nothing even with the signal gain at maximum, adjusted to detect a cricket fart in a thunderstorm from this distance.
Her eyes drifted away from the reader and eventually she faded into a troubled sleep.
* * *
“Mister Yorn, how about breaking off a piece of that glass you were talking about,” Milli Gertz said.
“I can do that. What’re you thinking?”
“I wasn’t talking about you doing it yourself, commander. Have one of the techs do it. Bag it and tag it for me. Get Mister Bone to record where the sample comes from. Get Singh, he’s pretty good at that kind of thing.”
“Okay, will do. Are you thinking of something we should know over here, or are you just trying to keep up with your rankings?” Yorn asked.
“A little of both. I’m thinking those glass tunnels are made of hardened mucus. You know, from the worms? To help them get around that big-assed ship of theirs.”
Yorn grunted. “So you think the life forms we registered are still alive somewhere in this tunnel factory? We haven’t seen anything yet. Only these walls. But, we’re only making about two to three meters per minute. The surfaces are pretty slippery. And if what you suspect is true, that explains why our magnetic boots don’t work; they’re not attracted to dried worm mucus.”
Gertz laughed out loud. “I’m going back over to command freq. Let me know if you can get me that sample, Davi.”
“Affirmative. See you on the other side.”
Yorn directed his crew to step up the pace. The group had been methodically working their way to the bow of the derelict, stopping only to mark their passage with lines of luminous paint delivered from a small hand-held canister. An arrowhead was inserted in the line at every ten meters by Ensign Volta. They had only about ten hours of air left and if they wanted to get to the front of the boat before their mandatory turn-back registered, they would have to step it up. The smooth glassy tunnels made for hard going and the reflected light made it even more difficult. Yorn wore his blast shield down and that helped a little but the resultant shadows he saw did nothing to improve his sense of well being.
Every so often they would come across a set of smaller tubes, or pipes, that emptied out into the larger passageways. Here again, he could think of no purpose for the secondary openings. Maybe the infant worms took those tubes on their way to worm pre-school.
He stopped and looked at a small bulge on the side of the tunnel he was in. It jutted out about six or eight centimeters from the adjoining wall. He went down on one knee to investigate and the rest of his crew continued forward.
“Got something up here, commander,” Sergeant Ryon said, pushing his way past Lieutenant Volta.
Yorn was just turning his head when he saw it. Coming out of the bump on the circular wall. A thin beam of light, pencil thin, aimed at the far side of the tunnel, disappearing into its duplicate at knee height.
“Another one of those panels, sir, just like the one on the air lock —”
“Don’t move!” Yorn shouted.
But everyone turned in his direction except Sergeant Mike Ryon. “All we have to do is press these two red —”
“We just broke an intrusion beam, I’m sure of it!” Yorn said.
“Say again, Davi,” from the bridge.
Ryon hit the two studs simultaneously. Instead of a hatchway opening up, the tunnel peeled back on itself, telescoped back towards the group and Ryon yelled as the floor disappeared beneath him.
Yorn heard his scream for the ten or fifteen seconds it took him to fall to his death.
* * *
Chief Eddie Rich was a Fire Control Technician. It was his responsibility to maintain and operate the vast electronic weaponry at the ship’s disposal. On command from the captain through the weapons officer, he could deliver a large payload of destruction on a given target at a given range. He had electronic and explosive ordnance to play with in addition to lasers and sun-burst torpedoes. His magazine was fully stocked and he had been satisfied when his ratings cycled through the arsenal in under six seconds before shift change this morning. He had been working his butt off getting all of the newbies trained and getting the seasoned fire controlmen up to snuff.
Just to be on the safe side, he decided to swing by the weapons bay before heading to the crew deck and his hammock. A good petty officer seldom rested and a good chief petty officer never did. He shuddered when he thought of that thing hanging out there in space a mere 500 meters away. Oozing shit from some kinda pores he had heard. Well, he was determined to not get caught with his proverbial pants down.
He figured that he would pull a surprise inspection this morning. That would get the men in gear sure enough. But his mission would be dual-purpose.
Actually, he wanted nothing to do with the men. He couldn’t have cared less what the men were doing. Probably playing grab-ass or poker, two of the ways most sailors spent their time aboard ship.
No, he was interested in the item under the tarpaulin in his workshop, the one with the yellow and black stripes on the cover, the one with the skull and crossbones painted on its side.
The special weapon he had been tinkering together for the last three years.
His baby.
* * *
Doctor Isaacs asked, “What kind of casualty, sir? Can you be more specific?”
“A marine sergeant,” Haad said.
“And, they’re sure he’s dead?”
Haad absent-mindedly rubbed the left side of his face. “He’s dead, alright. He fell about 100 meters into some kind of cargo hold on that ship. They just reached him. His faceplate cracked and the slivers severed his carotid. He was knocked unconscious by the fall and probably died instantly from the impact before he bled out,” Haad replied somberly. “Yorn reported his helmet was just full of mush.”
Isaacs made a sucking sound with his lips and said, “Jesus, Uriel, what a hell of a thing to happen. Are they bringing him back now?” When Doctor Isaacs got stressed he often called his comrades by their birth names, ignoring the habit most of the Elberites used to distinguish them from Earth-born visitors to the Fringes. Most of the names used out here by the natives were only three to four letters in length. Many of the colonists opted to make the names official when they reached their majority ages.
Haad paced a few steps and turned. “Yorn’s sending him back with two of his rankings on the lifeboat. We’ll replace him when the boat goes back to the derelict. Make sure he gets a proper burial, doc
tor. Full dress. Make it a priority and assemble as many of the ship’s company as you can. Get with the chaplain.”
Isaacs nodded and patted Haad on his shoulder. Then he retreated into his office without another word.
PART TWO: The Worm Turns
Chapter 10
Logistics Specialist Petty Officer Third Class Hollis Torne scratched his head and stared aft. Something was not right, he thought. He looked at his portable inventory reader and slid a few documents across the screen. Powdered chocolate, cereal grains, granola bars, condensed and unconstituted foodstuffs: all below what they should be.
He walked through the stacks again, recalculated his stocks on hand, stocks to the mess, and stocks declared as waste.
He voiced a note to the file and continued his inventory. Perhaps the ship had an unseen visitor? Vermin? No, that was not possible. He knew the occasional rat or ferret was routinely found among the grain stores before departure, but they were systematically eliminated by the vacuum exposure at the base warehouses on Elber’s moon Canton. No, this was something different, and something that had been going on for a long time. He checked back through his lading manifests and reached a disquieting conclusion: somebody on board was raiding his stores and pilfering food.
Torne walked the stacks again, row by row. Then he noticed a section of tarpaulin that had been crudely removed from the covering on a pallet of MREs. The “Meals, Ready to Eat” were emergency rations. Torne fiddled with his reader again and noted that there had been no situations that had called for the use of MREs. He pulled back the tarp and saw that a few of the small containers had been removed, the shrink-wrapped pallet violated.
While not high on the priority list, petty thefts like this were unusual and troublesome. With the supply boat still weeks away, it was his duty to inform his Logistics Specialist Chief.
After all, wasn’t this what the Navy was paying him for?
* * *
Commander Yorn paced the wardroom, a small enclosure just forward and below the bridge. Traditionally, the ship’s captain didn’t frequent the officer’s lounge area but today was an exception. Captain Uri Haad was sitting at one of the steel tables and staring at a point just beyond Yorn’s left shoulder. “Uri, we need to send over another boat and take some sophisticated gear with us this time. That ship is a warren of tunnels and tubes and what happened to Ryon could have been prevented had we had a better idea of what the interior of that worm was like. That hold was massive, and it contained over 5,000 cages!”
“I saw. Exobiology has the feeds and they’re going over them as we speak, Davi,” the captain said.
“Get another line ranking to go back with me, sir. I think maybe twenty or thirty ratings could give that beast the scrutiny it deserves. Ferry over some atmosphere processors, too. That’d make it a hell of a lot easier to work over there.”
A couple of officers entered the wardroom and Haad waved them away. “You said cages? What did you see before you pulled Ryon out? Not a lot to go on with the illumination you had from your suit lights.”
“I popped a flare and lit the cavern up. Floor to ceiling cages, metal bars, chain-like restraints. Plenty of dead ‘raisins’ chained to the bulkheads between those cells. Dried pods, man-sized.”
Haad nodded and looked into his empty coffee cup. “Well, Ryon’s death makes it imperative that I send a courier boat back to Elber. Fleet needs to be notified of what we found. I’m thinking they might want to send us some help, too. You know, the ‘First Contact’ protocol?”
“Agreed, captain. Shit, we still don’t know what we’re going to find when we take that sucker apart. Maybe those life forms we detected are holed up somewhere forward of that cargo hold, maybe they aren’t all dried and desiccated, maybe we’ll find the bridge or control center. I don’t think the ship itself is sentient, it’s just a biomechanical robot carrying out its programming.”
“And that programming includes spitting out spores into vacuum?” Haad said, raising his eyebrows.
Yorn shrugged. “I don’t know. But I do know that we have to go back in there and find the brain, the controls, and find whatever registered on our scans. We can get some portable radar gear over there, too, and get a look at the layout before we pop any more hatches,” he finished, then looked away. He was obviously thinking about Sergeant Ryon, subconsciously hearing him scream.
“Well, rest assured, Davi, you did what you could to stop Ryon. The recordings will verify that,” Haad said as if he was reading Yorn’s somber thoughts.
“I know, captain, but I still feel terrible about what happened to him, and since I was in command, the responsibility for his death falls squarely onto my shoulders.”
Uri Haad got up from his chair and approached his XO. He grabbed his shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “Ultimately, Davi, the responsibility is mine. Get what you need from stores, and get another line ranking to assemble your second team. I trust your assessment of the situation and will approve your actions.”
“Aye, aye, sir. And, thank you,” Yorn said as he turned to leave.
No, Davi, thank you, Haad thought but didn’t say aloud.
* * *
The weak yellow-orange light from Elber’s sun was scattered by the scudding high clouds near the horizon and their edges were outlined in bright silver filaments. Maxine Hansen propped herself up on her elbows, closed her eyes and let her head fall back towards the sand. The past few weeks had been a whirlwind of activity and she was really enjoying this quiet respite on the shores of the Scorpius Ocean.
Jerr was just in from Bayliss and they had two weeks to enjoy together with young Harold, their seven-year-old bundle of frayed nerve endings masquerading as a little boy. Max looked over at her husband. Jerrod was asleep on a beach towel to her right and she shaded her eyes when she looked at him. Her heart tripped when she thought of the life they shared, but at the same time she worried about the dangerous businesses they were in. He was a mining supervisor for Belt Energy, she was a naval communications officer working in the areas around Elber. He was faced with short trips out to systems close to Elber, she had to deal with the long-haul complications of military life. Her yearly month-long shore leaves were not sufficient enough down time to give her what she wanted: a real home, permanency, and more children.
“Hey, what’re you thinking, Max?” Jerrod Hansen said as he sat up and brushed sand off his hairy forearms.
“Oh, just imagining what it would be like if we could settle down here, get out of those military housing dumps, maybe set up a place of our own. . .”
He smiled. Jerrod had dark wavy hair, kind eyes, a broken nose, and a square chin that quivered when he flashed his dutiful-husband smile. “But, don’t forget, you’re the one volunteering for deep-space missions right and left. Sooner or later you’re gonna get picked up by an outbound boat, headed for the Fringes or The Belt Loop. How’re we going to manage after that?”
The oblate orange sun seemed to hiss its way into the Scorpius. Maxine looked away and just shook her head. She had to get more spacefaring time or she would languish in the Colonial Navy as an O-3 or -4 for the rest of her career. It was times like these that made her regret having ever enlisted in the first place. She had a promising career going for herself as a communications specialist for one of Elber’s premier broadcasting networks. But in the feeding frenzy of patriotism that followed the brief war with the Varsonians, she had joined the Navy. “Haul away and join the Navy” as the old song goes. That was water under the keel she told herself and as her first six-year hitch was drawing to a close, she wondered what her next move was going to be. Getting Harold acclimated to endless variations of day schools, endless hours under supervised military daycare, and endless time away from his parents was a big challenge for them. He was very smart and growing up very fast. Why just this morning he had —
Suddenly she stiffened. “Hey, Jerr, where’s Harold?” she asked, her head on a swivel. She looked up and down the beach and saw nothin
g but an assortment of terns and gulls meandering in the surf or squawking noisily overhead. She stood.
“Har! Harold!” she yelled at the top of her lungs. Panic-mode onset quicked her heart rate. She turned in a complete circle in the sand, got up on her toes, then yelled again.
Jerr stood up and ran a few paces down the beach and started shouting his son’s name.
When her head was again facing the ocean Max saw what at first looked like a floating piece of debris out on the water, a dark shape bobbing up and down in the relentless tidal march. Elber’s axial tilt was almost thirty-six degrees and the orange sun was disappearing into the ocean at a very acute angle, sending little yellow explosions of light off the wave crests to her right. She ran toward the darkening water, yelling her son’s name as she splashed into the surf.
She looked back over her shoulder and saw Jerr surrounded by seagulls. They were swooping down at him and their screeching and squawking was getting louder and more ominous.
Max snapped her head around and saw her son, the wild hope that this was some idle flotsam suddenly dashed. He was floating face down, arms limp, his tiny body bobbing and twitching in the undulating water about three meters away from her. She cried out and tried to run to him, her legs pumping hard, her high steps slowed by the deepening water. She extended her arms and kicked forward but her feet were mired in the sucking muddy bottom. She screamed, “Nooooo!”
The Belt Loop _Book One Page 5