So be it, she mused. For all she knew, maybe that lack of opportunity had saved her life. What if that alien creature had glommed onto her leg before she had a chance to react? Whipped that bullet head and those razor-sharp teeth right through her armor. Her thoughts returned to poor Mister Duff down in the shower compartment. What a horrible way to die. And Ginty, too.
“Chief Cott, they bagged another worm topside. I think that just leaves us one to worry about. You concur with my count?” She had been listening to the command freq on her headset.
“Aye, sir, one to go.”
“It’s got to be somewhere around here, chief. All of those holes below us have been sealed and no new ones have appeared since we’ve been up here. What do you think?”
Cott pushed up the front of his headgear and looked down at his reader. He turned the display around so she could have a better look. “That fucker must be in one of the overhead ducts. Holed his way in somewhere aft of the bridge and slithered, or whatever they do to move, forward and up. That’s how it got into the cable trunk lines. It’s the only thing that makes any sense. Those aliens aren’t too smart and only their viciousness outshines their intellect. If it was me, and I found myself waking up in some kind of strange vessel after sleeping for two thousand years I think I would want to get a drink of scotch first before I went on a killing spree.”
Young smiled and shook her head. “So, why’re they doing it? Why’re they so hellbent on killing everything in sight?”
“Is that a rhetorical question, lieutenant? How the fuck do I know? Why does a dog bite you? They do it even when they’re not hungry. Why does anything happen in this crazy universe? The galaxy is a cold and deadly place. Everything has sharp teeth and a taste for blood. That’s just the way it is, ma’am. Shit, this place was fucked up when I got here and it’s going to be fucked up when I leave,” Cott opined.
They were standing next to the navigation shack just aft and below the bridge. Young could hear the chattering of space noise and the constant pinging from the sonarmen and the operations specialists. They were tracking an inbound ship and relaying the plots to the helm. Since the Christi was a corvette-class patrol boat instead of one of the bigger cruisers, the CIC — Combat Information Center — was co-located on the bridge with patches from the navigation shack to the weapons alcove and the helm.
“Yeah. I agree,” she said. “Looks like something’s coming in. Let’s see if we can get the scoop, chief. You know, get our leg up.”
“Roger, that. Why don’t we just go on in and have a little look around? Go worm hunting for a few minutes.”
Young nodded and cycled the hatch.
* * *
“You’ve got to be kidding me, doc,” Gertz said.
“Hey, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. I hear it’s great with a little hot sauce.”
Milli Gertz was standing next to Doctor Isaacs looking into the makeshift containment sick bay. The revived birds were prancing and preening and eating. She watched with a combination of horror and fascination as one of the birds walked up to the pile of offal and bent its long neck down and pulled a long stringy morsel of worm meat loose. It raised its head skyward and opened its truncated beak and allowed the flesh to gravity-feed down into its gullet. Then the neck convulsed a couple of times and the chunk of worm was gone.
Nature righting itself, she thought. The worms had enslaved the birds sometime in the past. Almost a violation of the paradigm on Earth where the early birds always got the worms. Somehow, on whatever planet these creatures hailed from, that biological and social framework was inoperable. But, in the final analysis, these birds were getting their just desserts.
“I just thought it made sense, Mildred. What would a hungry bird want to eat? And judging by their rudimentary jaws and lack of any real beak, I figured they would prefer soft grubs or worms. Just like their distant cousins on Earth.”
She turned and looked at him. “Distant cousins?”
“Oh yeah, I forgot. While you were topside rubbing elbows with the brass, some of us continued to do our duties. Your DNA analysis on both the worm and the birds was completed. I went up to your lab and got the information.”
“Don’t make me beg. What did it say?”
He smiled and looked back at the feeding birds. “They share a forty-seven percent DNA structure with common avian creatures on Earth. That’s a huge number considering how many species of birds there are. But it also means that when the giant lizards died off and were replaced by their modern ancestors on Earth, these things were harvested. Both species. Worm and bird. That would be the only way the two of them could have DNA common to creatures in our own lineage.”
“Okay, you lost me, doc. What exactly are you saying? I’m supposed to be the exobiologist here.”
He placed a hand on her shoulder. “Say an advanced race visited Earth fifty million years ago and harvested some of its flora and fauna. Of course it would have selected some kinds of worms. Did you know that half of the species on Earth today are evolutionary more developed than the common earthworm? That means that half are not. The segmented worm sits right in the middle. Given enough time, and perhaps a different environment, those lowly worms could evolve into just about any higher-order life.”
Gertz blew out a puff of air and rolled her eyes. She still didn’t get it.
He went on. “You ever consider those pods that alien derelict was ejecting? Did it ever cross your mind to wonder about that?”
“I wondered, but I don’t see —”
He shook his head. “It was seeding. It was spewing out cocoons of fertilized worm cells. In stasis pods.”
“And it was doing that because. . . ?” She still had her doubts. Those seed cocoons could have been deposited on Earth in our distant past just as well. Coated in ice and dust, seeded out in the Oort Cloud, bumped into a long orbit around the Sun —
“Now hear this,” Captain Haad’s metallic voice sounded from every open comm stack speaker on the Christi and interrupted Gertz’s thought. “Prepare for engagement. I repeat, prepare for battle,” the captain finished.
Doctor Isaacs grabbed her by the arm and pulled her towards the hatch.
“Come on, you can help me. We have to get ready for casualties,” he said.
She hurried along with him and they headed for the medical supply lockers up on deck five.
* * *
Har Hansen froze. Not more than two meters away from him was one of the aliens. In the dark confines of the duct he had a hard time making out the thing’s face. His mind refused to accept the fact that the alien worm had four eyes and they all appeared to be looking directly at him.
Then the thing opened its slash of a mouth and Har could see the tiny sharp teeth.
No sound came out of the thing’s throat. God, that thing had a huge mouth, Har thought. He could see almost twenty centimeters down that gaping maw, could see the brownish alien internal flesh glistening with some kind of slimy mucus. He noticed the stubby arms that jutted out from the alien body just below its head. The bulk of the thing’s body blocked out most of the light from behind it, only allowing thin slivers of illumination to filter past. The thing looked wedged in the narrow duct. That could be an advantage for his side, Har speculated.
As if the thing had read his mind, it slithered forward a few centimeters.
So much for it being stuck.
Har fumbled through his pockets with his left hand. He kept his right hand on his gun.
Successfully finding a half-eaten breakfast bar in his pants pocket, he tossed it at the slithering alien. Maybe if he could get it to eat something else it wouldn’t look at him as food. It was worth a shot.
Amazingly, the alien worm lowered its head and nudged the offered treat with its small hand. He looked back up at the boy. In a motion reminiscent of super slow-motion digital video the thing pushed the bar of food towards its mouth.
Down the hatch it went.
Then the worm spit the
breakfast bar back out and spewed slimy granola and oats into the air duct. Then it emitted a stuttering wail and Har could see the rings around its head start to compress. The slimy worm was getting ready to attack!
He pushed his arm out and fired his UAW. The blast lit up the duct and sent showers of sparks in every direction. But Har’s aim had been off. Instead of frying the worm and making the universe safe from alien creatures determined to enslave mankind and rape our women and pillage our cities, he had only succeeded in blowing a big hole in the bottom of the duct.
He closed his eyes and prepared to fire again.
But the alien was gone. Slipped through the hole. Har heard its frantic efforts to grab onto the collapsing ductwork and heard the futile scraping of those little paws on the ruined metal. When he opened his right eye, the aiming eye, the creature was entirely gone, leaving behind a swirling mist of grey smoke and a half-eaten granola bar.
Chapter 39
The alien worm bounced on a conduit, fought for control, slid off and hit a pressure tube next. It grabbed the small pipe and hung on for a few seconds before dropping between two cable runs.
On the deck of the bridge, Commander Yorn was watching the overhead with deliberate scrutiny. Har’s blast had sent a rainbow of sparks cascading down right in front of the main blister. That display of fireworks had garnered everyone’s attention on the bridge save one. The captain leapt from his chair and reached for his sidearm. Mister Gant ducked instinctively at the helm’s control stack. Cain Washoe, still not completely over the rude visit from the other worm, went down on his knees. Lieutenant Mols didn’t take her eyes off the screen of her portable. Ensign Corman transmitted a few choice well-known curses shipwide from the communications console. The marine sentry ran around the upper alcoves and drew his weapon at the same time Max Hansen hurdled the railing above the command pit. In all, twenty people were in motion at once.
When the worm hit the deck it raised up and pointed the little metal cylinder directly at Captain Haad’s face.
“Hold your fire, hold your fire!” Yorn screamed at the advancing sentry. “You’ll hit the skipper!”
Max eased around to her right and kept her UAW by her right thigh.
The worm sensed a shift in the room as the advancing creatures seemed to slow and show curious respect for its weapon. It aimed the cylinder a few centimeters away from the captain’s head and shot a beam of purple energy at one of the partitions. The area bubbled for a second and then fell away.
Yorn took a step closer and eased his weapon from his hip.
The worm scrabbled a meter closer to Haad and stretched out his segmented neck. Then it pointed the cylinder at Yorn’s feet and blasted a meter-wide ellipse of chalky flooring away. Yorn retreated a step as the creature returned the weapon in the direction of the captain. Yorn could not be sure if the thing knew that this man he was threatening was the master of the boat or if Haad was just a target of convenience. Either way, he stood still and advanced no more.
While the worm was busy intimidating Yorn, Max managed to close the distance to the creature by another meter. When its bullet head turned back around, when she thought one of the eyes on the thing could see her, she stopped.
In the midst of the excitement, none of the participants in this little drama noticed the thin trickle of dust cascading down from the overhead behind the worm.
Then suddenly things began to happen. Lieutenant Mols hit a stud on her portable and sent the transmissions from the alien warship over the comm speakers. The raw carrier with the twittering and clacking alien voice.
The worm turned and looked skyward, then did a three-sixty and stared at the huge blister. It reacted visibly when it saw the ship on the screen. It opened its mouth and began twittering loudly.
That’s when Fleet Admiral Harold Hansen struck.
Har had been up in the overhead. Once the worm had dropped out of the duct, through the hole he had blasted, he had followed. He’d gingerly lowered himself onto the big conduit and waited. He was careful to avoid the slimy part where the worm had been. When he saw the worm blasting away at the officers he’d decided to make his move.
But then the stupid alien had turned around and started talking to that big computer screen. What a stupid thing to be doing when twenty guns were pointed at you. Maybe the thing was trying to give orders to his compatriots. Hadn’t he read somewhere that aliens could communicate over long distances using thought waves? He was sure the thing was up to no good and decided to put an end to its folly once and for all. The stupid thing didn’t even like the food he’d offered.
Har wasn’t sure he yelled the right thing when he leapt from the conduit. He thought the word was “Geronimo” or something like that. But in his excitement, he yelled “Geritol!” and landed squarely on the alien’s back, knocking it face-first to the deck. The stunned creature’s chittering came to an abrupt halt. Someone behind him was yelling. He knew what he had to do. He waited for the worm to twist itself around. He would be denigrating the honorable traditions of the Galactic Navy if he shot the stupid worm in the back, he thought.
As soon as the worm was on its back and grabbing at Har with those tiny arms and feet, Har pulled the trigger on his M2-A2 Urban Assault Weapon. The barrel of the instrument was pressed right up against the things head. The blast instantly turned the top half of the worm into mush and a huge scarlet and brown wash of alien innards slammed into the forward bulkhead just below the blister. Then a half dozen hands were on him. Human hands. One set belonged to his mother.
* * *
The CNS Pearl Harbor unfolded some 139,000 kilometers from the Corpus Christi but her angle was too high. Keeping in line with security protocols, Pax Curton maintained radio silence. He got the Christi on his main viewer and from his position, he was almost looking down on the top of the ship. He instructed the helmsman to make for the ship with deliberate speed and then noticed the second ship.
Was that the alien craft Admiral Paine had described in his orders? Impossible. The admiral had described a derelict ship that was leaking shit and listing badly to starboard. He used his little joystick on his console to jockey the image on the viewer. Once centered, he pushed the stick forward and zoomed in for a closer look at the alien vessel. The ship was huge, probably displacing two- or three-hundred-thousand metric tons more than the little patrol boat. He judged the alien craft to be slightly above and maybe a thousand klicks off the Christi’s bow. The ships were flank to flank, classic battle formation.
Pax fiddled with his comm controls and locked onto the standard ship-to-ship frequency. He had to fight with his instincts and surrender to his protocols. No unfolding ship was to broadcast first. Especially in an unknown situation. Why let your adversaries know you’re there? He had brought the Pearl safely outside of the 125,000 kilometer limit, usually the distance at which an unfolding ship could not be detected. At least the Varsons hadn’t been able to scan and return from that distance.
But this was something new, something the admiral said had never been encountered before. Still, he stuck to his basic battle tactics and waited for the Christi to hail him. The slow crawl to the center of the action would also give his oiler a chance to make local space and start replenishing stores.
He looked at his chronometer. He was early.
He had the CIC scan for other ships in the area and asked to be notified immediately when the Casco Bay and Robi Zane unfolded.
He would not have a long wait.
* * *
Being held up by the scruff of one’s neck was not the way to be introduced, not properly, that is.
Commander Yorn held the boy at arm’s length and assessed him from troubled eyes. He also realized that the boy was filthy and that he was getting pretty ripe.
“Hey, you goon, put me down!”
Yorn raised his brow and looked around the bridge. This kid was drawing a crowd. Only Max Hansen had her hands over both sides of her startled face.
“Goon
?”
“Don’t you know who I am?” the boy said.
Yorn loosened his grip somewhat and allowed the boy’s feet to touch the deck plates. “Should I know you?”
“Davi, let the boy go,” Captain Haad said. “You’ve secured his weapon, I don’t see him as a further threat, do you?”
“As you wish, sir.” Yorn dropped the boy’s shirt and slowly wiped his hands together in a gesture that meant he was finished with the lad or one that signified the kid was extremely filthy. Either way, it made Max look down and turn her head.
“See, the captain knows I’m on the side of the good guys,” Har said boastfully.
“So, young man, why don’t you tell me who you are, where you came from, and what you’re doing on my ship?” Haad said in a soothing voice that betrayed the anger that was building underneath. His ship was damaged, many sailors had lost their lives, one lifeboat had been half-way destroyed, those fucking alien worms had bored tons of holes in the Christi and now this? And an alien warship hard off the starboard flank sending nastygrams over the ship-to-ship, and now this? The captain was on the verge of one of his volcanic eruptions.
“Harold Hansen, sir, Fleet Admiral Harold Hansen!”
Max sat down hard on the metal deck and draped her arms on her knees.
The captain had to smile at that pronouncement. He shot a look at Max but turned back to the boy before he spoke. “A real live admiral on my bridge. Unannounced. I’ll have to speak to the boatswain’s mate. With your permission.”
“Well, speak to the bosun, whatever, if you want, but I’m a Fleet Admiral. That’s five stars to you, buddy.”
The Belt Loop _Book One Page 24