She felt uneasy. This wasn’t exactly the scenario she had trained for, and the creepy dim light in the shower room made for wispy shadows and imaginary worms lurking behind every partition. Cott and Gibbs trailed little corkscrews of thinning steam as they proceeded. She noticed Rankin looking down, her attention focused on each and every step. Tank swept the area from the rear, constantly looking back toward the entranceway and calculating escape routes should they become necessary. Duff was a couple of meters in front of Rankin and he accidentally knocked over a plastic bottle of shampoo from one of the ledges to his right.
Young tensed and everyone turned towards the sound of plastic skittering on metal. “Sorry,” he said and bent to pick up the bottle. His hand was only centimeters from the spinning bottle when the floor erupted beneath him. A half-meter section of the non-skid metal deck glowed white-hot for a second and fell away. Before he could react the pinkish-brown bullet-head of a worm arced through the hissing opening.
Duff jumped and his back hit the bulkhead behind him “Worm, worm!” he yelled and brought his UAW around and down. But the creature was too agile. As Duff loosed his first shot the worm slithered almost a meter more of its annelid body from the hole and used its powerful mouth to clamp onto Duff’s leg. The worm’s vestigial arms and stubby feet twitched and turned looking for purchase. Duff screamed and then put his weapon right into the wriggling flesh of the alien and fired.
Young and Tank sprinted carefully to the edge of the stall partition and readied their weapons. Duff had managed to decapitate the worm by burning through its upper thorax. But the creature’s head was still attached to his leg and was making a bloody assault on his armor and the muscular tissue contained within. Meanwhile, the rest of the worm was skittering across the deck, its tiny setae looking for anything to attach themselves to. Young and Tank put short electrical bolts through the writhing body and it tried to push itself up on the four posterior stumps below the edge of its shimmering garment. Cott took a step forward out of the mist and kicked the thing over and put five amps through its middle.
Duff was down. He was shaking and convulsing, twisting and turning. The head of the creature was slowing down its assault on his thigh but had no intention of letting go. He screamed an agonized scream and started hitting the thing’s head with his fists. Dark banded gore sluiced out of the creature’s ruined neck and splashed on the deck.
“Move, get out of the way!” Cott yelled and pushed Rankin so hard she fell on her ass and skidded a meter away until her back hit the bulkhead. Cott put his weapon on the side of the worm’s gyrating head and pulled the trigger. The burst of energy blew the head apart and showered them with tiny slabs of worm flesh. Its serrated teeth tinkled as they hit the metal partitions, walls and deck.
He reached out and pried the rest of the worm’s jaw from what remained of Duff’s right leg. The lance corporal was shaking and his breathing was very shallow. He was heading into shock. Pools of bright red blood seeped out from his lower body and from all indications the alien had chewed through his femoral artery. Duff wasn’t going to make it. He heard Young calling for another corpsman. A band of medtechs had been following them a few meters to the rear since the excitement in sick bay.
“Okay, alright, look alive, people. Cott, let him go. He’s gone.” Young regretted saying it but it was true. Duff pushed out a last gasp of breath and was still.
Damn. Another victim. There had to be a better way, she mused.
* * *
A determined Fleet Admiral Har Hansen pushed on. He only stopped for an occasional snack or for some water. By now he was almost completely covered in dirt and grime. But he was determined not to let his physical appearance deter him in his quest. He knew that he had to get topside and help save the ship.
He guessed that he was somewhere over deck four. He took time to venture off the main shaft to another vent opening and tried to get his bearings. He was in new territory and the last thing he needed was to get lost or wind up retracing his steps. No, not steps. His wriggles.
Then he stiffened. What was that? A high-pitched sound. Flesh on metal. Moist flesh on metal.
Was something else in this duct?
His heart started to triphammer in his chest.
There it was again! Something was definitely squirming through the ductworks behind him.
Har reached for his gun and pulled it out of his waistband. He gripped it with two hands and flipped over on his back. He looked between his feet at the dark tunnel beyond.
Nothing.
After five terrifying minutes he scrabbled out of the side vent and made his way back to the main shaft. Time to move up a level, he thought. If something else was in this part of the ship, well, he’d just have to get to another deck. No use in hanging around here, waiting for some three-headed monster to come slithering out of the dark.
What if it was one of those alien worms? Worms were good at slithering, weren’t they?
No matter. He was ready for them. He had read all there was to read about attacking and killing aliens. Killing mindless creatures hellbent on enslaving humanity was something he thought he knew something about.
He found a vertical shaft and wedged his way up.
Only about three decks to go, he thought.
Chapter 33
Milli Gertz made it topside just in time. There was a slight hassle from one of the sentries at the head of the passageway leading to the bridge but the confusion was cleared up with a call to the captain. The guard scanned her ID and passed her through the hatch.
She was really surprised at the amount of activity taking place on the bridge. She stepped down into the command well and looked around. Up around the perimeter of the bridge technicians and assorted personnel were hovering over consoles in little knots. The place was alive with reports being verbalized, notices being transmitted back below, yeomen carrying tablets and readers from department to department and Captain Haad snapping off orders from his command console. He gave her a quick look with raised eyebrows. She raised her gloved hand and shrugged her shoulders. She could tell he was busy so she just waved him a two-finger salute and moved away.
The most disturbing thing was taking place below the comm center console. A young lieutenant was knee deep in one of the cable troughs and Lieutenant Hansen and two electronic technicians were jumping around, following her every command. She was saying, “Hand me this, bring me that, no, not that, that.”
Gertz moved in to get a better look. Hansen took a moment to introduce Gertz to the intrepid Lieutenant Mols. The lieutenant brushed a strand of wayward hair from her forehead and offered a grimy hand. “Oh, hello. You’re the resident exobiologist, right?”
“That would be me,” she replied.
Mols looked up at the offered hand and her head quickly snapped to Gertz’s other mitt. It was covered with a blue latex glove. “Oh, just a little accident down in the lab,” she said. Mols took the offered hand and they exchanged a quick shake. “What’re you doing, if I might ask. It’s obvious the captain thinks it’s okay for you to wreck his bridge, because he’s not saying anything, but, I’m curious.”
Mols explained. “I’m almost done, commander. See, when I hook up this recorder to the ship’s electrical system and feed the output to the ship’s media processor, not only will we be able to see these records I took from the worm, we’ll have an archived copy for the captain’s log.”
Gertz looked at the nest of wires and cables. Some had been cut apart and spliced together again; others were soldered to a component board of foreign manufacture. Real foreign. A small metallic device sat on the top of Hansen’s station in the comm alcove and a ganglion of connecting cables and wires snaked its way to the cable trough. “Oh. I see.” Gertz said. “Well, don’t let me hold you up, lieutenant. I’m as anxious to see this as the next man.”
Mols and Hansen worked on some cross-connects in the back of the alien device and within two minutes Mols pronounced the interface ready. She
hauled herself out of the trough and told one of the techs to stand by and make sure no one stumbled into it. “Ah, Captain Haad,” she said timidly, “I think I’m all set back here.”
The captain turned in his chair and nodded. “Well, turn the damned thing on, lieutenant.” Then he told Mister Gant to clear the blister. They had been monitoring the pieces of the shattered derelict ship wandering away aft of the Christi.
Mols wiped her hand across the controls on the alien recorder and the main viewing blister sputtered to life. The first images were jumpy and jumbled and they were replaced with pixellated snow. Mols pushed another stud and a small panel eased open on the alien device. She reached into her bag and produced a small cylinder about the size of a spool of thread for an old-fashioned sewing machine. She dropped the spool into the slot and manually closed the door. On the forward blister the image danced and small diagonal bands of light streaked across the huge screen. Mols adjusted the gains and holds and seconds later she had a still picture on the screen.
It was a portrait of a bird. An alien bird.
“Okay. We’re good. I think I put the wrong cylinder in, standby one,” she said.
She switched spools and finally her pitch was ready to be delivered. On the screen was a block of alien writing. Row after row of glyphs and arcane symbols.
“So, for those of you I haven’t met, My name is Lieutenant Mols. I was sent up on the courier from Fleet to see if I could help make sense out of your worm. What you see on the screen is the culmination of my efforts. I am a cryptologist. I was the one that cracked the Varson codes some years back. I’ve been told that I have different wiring in my brain that allows me to see and recognize random patterns and flip them into language. I don’t know if that is true, but, so far, it has worked for me.” She paused and looked around the bridge. All eyes were on the blister. “That having been said,” she continued, “let me walk you through some of the things that led me to finding this alien logbook.”
She went on to describe how she had started on the bridge and deciphered some of the alien symbols and how that had led her into the compartment with the data recorder. She didn’t dwell on the escape from the worm and how getting these things off that ship had almost cost her life. She treated it as just something that happened on the way home from work. She made no mention of the three deaths on the lifeboat because it had nothing to do with what she was going to present. The Navy had thousands of rankings that would be investigating the worm incident for years. Her mission right now was to impart as much of this information to the captain and his crew in as timely a manner as was possible.
“Your Lieutenant Hansen back here had already deciphered the base-eight numbering system and had managed to get some of the controls working by the time I got on board. Her work saved me a great deal of time. After figuring out how to make this little gizmo work, what voltages and such, the rest was relatively easy. I plugged my portable into it and scanned all of the symbols into my machine that I could find on the deck of the alien ship. Repeating patterns led me to simple controls, and soon I had UP and DOWN. Hansen’s work on the intercom and the ship-to-ship radio frequencies led me to figuring out the alien math. The rest was accomplished by running the library of symbols thus created through enough algorithms until lengthy patterns matching known mathematical principles emerged. Then I took over.”
Max was starting to like this kid. She also appreciated the way Mols had acknowledged her preliminary work on the alien bridge. And all of this was going into the ship’s record. Who knows if later, when she had to confess to the captain about Har, some of this good-will shit would help her avoid serious jail time.
Mols touched controls on the alien recorder as she spoke. The first few images were written in the thin strokes of the alien chicken-scratch and were meaningless for those without Mols’s internal pattern-recognition software. Finally she got to the moving pictures, the video parts of the spool. At first she talked over the image, then she was silent as the spool played out.
She said, “As you can see here, this ship was actually run by the worm-like creatures, not the birds.”
Milli Gertz snapped to attention almost as the first images from the recorder spooled out. In her mind she had it backwards. For some illogical reason she had just assumed the “higher order” birds were in charge of the vessel, if the two species had evolved simultaneously on the same planet, she naturally assumed the more evolutionary advanced creatures would have developed the spacefaring technology first.
Max looked on with a sense of awe and wonder. Her early thoughts had been correct.
On the screen a high-angle image of the alien bridge resolved itself one scan-line at a time. It showed various worms doing assorted and sundry jobs at the various consoles. They all wore the silverized uniforms and used their tiny arms to manipulate controls and levers. The display was silent but from the way the worms moved their slash-mouth jaws it was obvious that they were using vocal commands and communications. A couple of them had strange headgear on and one even had a wraparound visor attached to its helmet. The worms used their rows of setae to assume various poses and stances. Some were propelling themselves along giant conduits and pipes. Others scuttled across the uneven floor and raised up to manipulate control stacks. In the harsh lighting of the overhead lights on the bridge it looked like a maggot infestation, the wriggling critters contracting and expanding in a rhythmic convulsion that was difficult to watch and not associate with more visceral experiences.
Then one of the birds came in through a hatch that was out of the frame. It had a minimum amount of clothes and its garments were tattered and unkempt. It had scars on its face and its legs were in some kind of metallic restraint device that looked like a pair of cuffs spanned by a short threaded rod. The restraints made it hop instead of allowing it to walk. It carried something in its hand that looked like an assortment of liquid bottles strapped together with a thick plastic sleeve. Refreshments for the worm masters? It stopped in the middle of the bridge and tried to unfasten one of the bottles with its small taloned hands. The bottle dropped soundlessly to the deck and the bird was immediately set upon by two of the worms. These two were armed with short whiplike weapons and they proceeded to thrash the bird into submission. It was hard to watch.
The video flickered to its conclusion and Mols remarked, “I don’t know what was being said on that bridge, I was unable to find any audio feeds. But from what we just witnessed, it’s clear who was in charge. There are three more spools pretty much the same as that one, the high-angle shot of the bridge.”
“Show us more, lieutenant,” Commander Yorn said from the science alcove. The captain just nodded without turning his head.
Mols changed cylinders and the show continued.
The next reel was the one that had been in the recorder first. It started with an up close head shot of one of the birds. It was a still and several lines of nomenclature popped up and leaders indicated what the words were describing. Then the image ratcheted out in measured steps and it paused momentarily to point out more attractions on the bird’s anatomy like a tourist map of the hot spots back on Elber Prime. Finally the screen was filled with a full image of the bird and the image rotated laterally and then axially. The bird was transparentized on the screen and the image zoomed in to show important features. Alien writing scrolled up the side of the screen and certain passages blinked and fluttered in muted yellow before returning to the basic white of the script.
Suddenly the image shifted to the cargo hold. The birds were crowded into the cages and they were shoulder to shoulder. All of their hands and feet were restrained. The video showed what must have been over ten thousand birds crying and cawing in silent protest. Worm guards walked in front of the cages and on occasion one would stop and whip his little wand into one of the cages and strike the captives. Where the wand touched bird flesh an angry dark welt would erupt, fester for a moment, then rupture. The birds were crowded so close together that the explodi
ng bird would shower parts and pieces throughout the cage. The alien camera panned backward and up. The cages were stacked as high as the eye could see and as far as the lens could penetrate the chamber. Max had to turn away.
The scene reminded her of books she had read about the great slave trade that had occured back on Earth over a thousand years ago. Huge ships crossing the Atlantic from Western Africa bound for the Americas with African men, women and children stacked below decks by the thousands. Most of the voyages connected to the Middle Passage routes lost almost fifteen percent of their stock on the way across. Some lost more to uncaring slavers or cruel ship captains. Men and women killed for asking for water; children thrown overboard to coerce cooperation from their parents; whole human cargoes doused with rum and set afire to quell revolts. She shuddered. Could this have been what they saw in that huge chamber just outside the bridge? A revolt in the making?
“So as you can see, this worm was used to transport these bird creatures to an unknown market,” Mols said. “I think Lieutenant Hansen was once again right on the money about this ship. It definitely was a slave ship. Now, where it came from and where it was going will have to be figured out by bigger brains than mine.”
The Belt Loop _Book One Page 21