Wormhole - 03

by Richard Phillips

  Shrugging off this distraction, he prepared himself for the human male’s charge. It never came. As Ketaan-Ra’s wrist knitted itself back together, the human broke into panicked retreat. With his legs providing more controlled explosions, Ketaan-Ra gave chase, smiling at the cascading displays in his head. The chase wasn’t going to be a long one.

  The human cut to the right and, once again, the absence of sufficient gravity betrayed Ketaan-Ra, robbing him of the friction necessary to match the human’s two tight turns. At least now the other’s plan was clear. Get to the dropped kedra. He planned to stop and fight. Ketaan-Ra relaxed, letting his pace slow just enough to make sure the human got there first. It was the kind of fight he wanted, kedra to kedra, his four hands and superior strength and healing against this human’s quickness. A truly worthy opponent.

  Mark’s finger closed around the alien sword’s haft, feeling the grip adapt to his hand. As he whirled to face his pursuer, he measured the weapon’s weight and balance, his eyes caressing the black sword’s three-foot blade. Two razor-sharp edges swept to a Roman point, practically screaming for blood. He liked it.

  The big alien came to a controlled stop three paces from where Mark waited, its own sword gripped in its lower right fist, the other three arms reaching toward him like a wrestler’s. Like a couple of wrestlers’.

  So it had learned Mark’s momentum tricks. No more bull rushes. Just good old-fashioned man-versus-giant-four-armed-alien combat. A mental image from the classic B movie Clash of the Titans brought a grin to his face.

  Amazing. The alien warrior appeared to be waiting for him to make the first move. As Mark raised the sword in front of him, another thought filled his mind.

  Hail Caesar! We who are about to die salute you.

  Then Mark’s body blurred into motion.

  Heather tossed the M25 rifle up onto the third level of scaffolding, swinging herself up along the rifle’s arc, ejecting one magazine and slapping another into the Glock as she landed. Fifteen feet below, the ugly beastie righted itself from the impact of fifteen nine-millimeter Parabellums, the holes in its body healing as it moved to follow her.

  With visions filling Heather’s mind, rearranging themselves as she and the alien creature danced their deadly waltz, she emptied the fresh magazine into the gorilla-spider, each round striking a different body part as she sought lethality data. The bullets tore the alien from its hold on the railing, sending it sprawling onto the floor below. And once again, Heather grabbed the M25 and tossed it to a higher level, following it up along the metal latticework with all the speed her body and training could provide.

  Her vision shifted and Heather leaped to her left as a long blade flashed through the space she’d just occupied, clanged off the wall, and rattled down through the spaces between the steel walkways. Then, with a thin, mewling squall, the alien propelled itself up after her.

  Click. Clack.

  Another magazine replaced its predecessor. Once more the Glock spewed its lead saliva into her pursuer, this time targeting the small bulbous knobs Heather believed to be the thing’s sensory organs. And although it continued its upward climb, it failed to follow her as she picked up the M25 and ran east along the north wall.

  Realizing it had lost her, the creature paused, allowing the nano-bot healing process to restore its sensory array. It didn’t take long. A mere eight seconds. But as it reacquired her, Heather finished lasing her target.

  The projectile armed itself at thirty meters, tore into its target at thirty-two, and exploded with the force of a grenade. The Graath became a fine green-yellow mist, out of which writhing gelatinous blobs and twitching limbs whipped into the cavern below.

  Before her exultant yell could make it from her lungs to her lips, one of Heather’s visions stifled it in her throat. Leaning out over the railing, she looked up.

  Less than ten meters up and to the right, a second gorilla-spider raced down the steel latticework toward her.

  Heather spun left, running along the metal grating, her black boots making the flooring sing as she approached the near corner. Behind her she felt the gorilla-spider land on the walkway, the sound painting a clear image of its powerful eight-legged lope quickly closing the space between them.

  The quick look she’d just gotten of this one had been enough. Unlike the four-armed alien fighting Mark on the cavern floor, the spider thing carried no weapons. Each of its eight legs ended in a hairy hand, each finger sporting raptor-like retractable claws. From the goo, blood, and intestinal splatter that covered its bulbous body, it must have torn apart her partner after wading through the goober munition’s web. And if it got its hands on her, the result would be no different.

  With each stride, Heather watched a hundred scenarios play out in her mind. Cradling the short rifle in the crook of her right arm, she hit the end of the walkway, spun and pulled the trigger. The explosive round had no time to arm, hammering into the alien body after travelling only 3.872 meters. And although it didn’t explode, the impact lifted the black, hairy body, sending it rolling back along the walkway as if it had stepped in front of a speeding truck. Since she hadn’t been braced, the recoil flung Heather backward, her left hand just catching the rail as she tumbled backward over it, her beret spinning away like a small black Frisbee.

  Seeing the spider-thing right itself, Heather kicked outward, released her grip on the rail, and dropped the twenty-two feet to the concrete floor, transferring momentum into a forward roll as she landed. As she came back to her feet, she squeezed off another round into the alien as it scurried down the steel lattice after her. No time to lase the target or thumb in extra distance. It didn’t matter. She hadn’t gained the required arming distance, and her mind told her the alien had figured it out.

  As the twenty-five-millimeter round knocked the alien from the scaffolding, Heather ran toward the Cage, a massive rack-support structure that housed all the heavy cables that carried power from the matter disruptor facility to the wormhole device and stasis field generators. The workmen who had built it, Mark included, all hated it with a passion that bespoke the claustrophobia the Cage generated in those who had experienced its interior. As big as the thickly insulated cables were, most of the room was taken up with the pipes and cooling equipment required to keep them superconductive. Like everything else on this project, it had been designed with speed of construction and efficiency of operation in mind. Only enough crawl space had been left to allow workmen to wriggle along twisting paths and up narrow ladders. Mark had said there weren’t many places inside the Cage where he didn’t have surfaces pressed against both his front and back sides. And while that might have been an exaggeration, it wasn’t much of one.

  Add that to the wind that howled through these passageways from the powerful fans designed to clear the heat from the cooling machines and you had something Dante would have loved to include in his description of the lower pits of hell.

  Pulling the Cage schematics to the front of her memory, Heather calculated how long it would take her to make the GF2 access door, the closest to her position. Overlaying time-sequenced imagery of her and her opponent’s anticipated intercept paths, she managed to pull just a bit more speed from her adrenaline-fueled legs. She would beat spidey to the Cage, but getting the door open and getting inside before the alien ripped her apart was going to be close.

  Her pursuer was adapting to each new twenty-five-millimeter impact, having compensated for the last hit in half the time the first recovery had taken. Without the explosive force provided by a fully armed round, another slug into its body wasn’t going to do it. And having lost the Glock and her extra magazines in the fall over the railing, she was down to three rounds remaining in the M25’s six-round mag.

  She hit the steel gate with a downward swipe and pulled at the lever handle, sliding through and closing it behind her as the alien’s bulk hit it, denting the metal frame inward and jamming the door latch. Heather turned sideways, sliding along the access way until she
reached the first junction. Squeezing into the passage on her right, she heard the squeal of tearing metal as the alien ripped the gate from its hinges and flung it into the cavern.

  At the first ladder, she began climbing.

  A glance through a narrow gap between equipment and cables showed the alien squeeze into the narrow space, bones flexing and dislocating like a giant hamster’s as it adapted to this new environment.

  Heather climbed faster. Twenty meters up she shifted her body off the ladder and into an even tighter crawl space that forced her to lie on her back and wriggle her body forward along a shaft that scraped her back and sides. She knew what she was headed for, and although the alien had shown the capability to rapidly adapt, it was still quadruple her bulk, and the Cage would extract a price for that bulk.

  Because the crawlways and chimneys between equipment were so tight that tool belts and hand-carried toolboxes were impractical, electrical tool cases had been bolted to the racks at strategic points throughout the Cage, providing engineers and technicians with an extensive set of test and repair equipment within ten meters of any point. Squeezing through a space not meant for passage, Heather took advantage of her small form to take a significant shortcut to one of these tool cases.

  Popping open the latch, she found what she wanted. Ejecting the M25 rifle’s magazine from the butt stock, she popped one of the high-explosive air burst rounds into her hand and set to work on it. Carefully cracking open the lower portion of the case, she gained access to the safe-and-arm circuit. Working with all the speed and dexterity her Bandolier Ship neural enhancements and Jack’s training had provided her, she made a simple logic circuit modification, bypassing the thirty-meter safety mechanism, setting the round to arm immediately upon firing.

  A guttural roar of frustration three meters to her left alerted her to the alien’s arrival at the point where she’d squeezed between equipment racks. Good. So there were limits to how much the creature could contort its body. It would have to find its way around. And unless it had a complete schematic of the Cage, as she did, that would take a while.

  As she worked to put the round back together, Heather’s mind tracked the alien’s progress. Not good. If it didn’t have the complete Cage schematic, it had a damn good approximation.

  Rushing through her final task, Heather placed the modified round topmost in the magazine. Slapping it home, she chambered the new round, ejecting its predecessor from the right ejection port. The ejected round clipped the railing and spun away, the cling-clang of its passage sounding all the way down to the Cage floor, sixty-seven feet below.

  Heather reached a new ladder and began climbing once again, the knowledge that she was now down to two rounds tugging at her mind. She shrugged it off. If the modified round didn’t do the job, whether or not she had one or two additional shots wouldn’t make a bit of difference.

  “Dr. Ivanovich. Prepare for anomaly transport within twenty seconds. Initiate on my mark.”

  Dr. Stephenson’s voice nudged Jennifer into action. The data on the six flat-panel displays that wrapped halfway around her swivel chair felt like a demon, reaching out to grab her by the throat, nine-inch nails penetrating into her windpipe, shutting off both blood and oxygen flows to her brain. As fast as Stephenson had been in transferring stasis field control to her workstation, he’d taken longer than they’d projected, that delay funneling in extra feed matter to the anomaly, a creature that existed and changed on a femtosecond scale.

  In a second light could race almost seven and a half times around the Earth. In a nanosecond light traveled almost a foot. In a femtosecond light barely got past one hundred thousandth of an inch, roughly three times the diameter of a human hair. In a femtosecond you could die before the electrochemical impulse traveled from one synapse to the next. All things considered, not a bad way to go. If you were dead set on dying.

  The anomaly was on a decaying spiral with an acceleration curve that scared the shit out of Jennifer. And although they had very little time left, Mark and the alien were locked in a battle directly in front of the gateway. And as long as her brother was between the anomaly and the gateway, there was no way Jennifer was going to thrust the anomaly containment field through that portal.

  If only the anomaly had been a bit more stable, she could have funneled off a little of the containment field and used it to pluck Mark out of the way before jamming the anomaly through the opening. But it was all she could do, using every bit of the energy available to the stasis field generator, to keep the micro black hole from becoming an instant big one.

  Diverting just a touch of her concentration, Jennifer contacted Mark.

  Can’t hold it much longer. Get the hell out of the way.

  Operating in a maze of intertwined futures, Heather slithered through the tangle of pipes, cables, and machinery, steadily working her way up toward that point ninety meters above the ATLAS cavern floor where the Cage touched the ceiling, up on the skywalk that ran from the Cage’s highest gate to the cavern exit. That’s where she wanted to be, but she wasn’t going to make it.

  Behind her, the gorilla-spider continued to adapt to the tight spaces, and as it did, its speed increased. Heather reached a turn and threw her body into the crawl space to her right, feeling a puff of air on her cheek as one of the clawed hands sliced the air where she had just been. The alien body hit the turn, all eight legs propelling it after her. From this angle Heather could see a toothy maw along the thing’s underside. She assumed the horrible smell came from this orifice, although it wasn’t helped by the human blood and excrement that still dripped from its body.

  Grabbing a cable above her head, Heather swung herself up like a gymnast, twisting her body to miss protruding steel cable supports. The maneuver gained her three feet. The decision point was rapidly approaching, the moment she would be forced to fire the twenty-five-millimeter high-explosive round, danger close. And when she did, she wasn’t the only thing likely to suffer collateral damage. The super-cooling system for the primary stasis field wrapped all the power cables in this section of the Cage, and that equipment wasn’t exactly designed to withstand explosives. As she scrambled hand over hand up a two-inch vertical pipe, she looked up. Another twenty-five feet and she’d reach the ramp that would dump her onto the skywalk.

  The claw speared her left calf, tearing an inch-deep gash in the muscle and almost tearing her loose from the pipe. Heather scissored her legs, the kick breaking the alien hand and ripping the claw free, sending the creature tumbling six feet down the shaft before it caught itself.

  Heather focused on her leg, shunting away the pain and using her fine muscle control to constrict the torn veins, reducing the wound’s blood flow to a trickle. But she was out of time. She would make her final stand right here and now. Swinging herself behind a metal panel, she swung the M25 back into the shaft, visualized the bullet trajectory, and pulled the trigger.

  The concussive blast penetrated the thin steel plates, coating her body in alien slime as it lifted her from her perch and flung her against the outer railing, sending a tidal wave of pain through her right shoulder. Fighting to stay conscious, Heather saw that a foot-long sheet metal shard had speared her just below the right collarbone, a third of its length extending out her back. Her other symptoms pointed to severe concussion.

  Struggling to a sitting position, she braced herself against the railing that had prevented her from falling 250 feet to the cavern floor below.

  Shit. When does this get fun?

  Then a new alarm Klaxon sounded, accompanied by a digitized voice over the PA system.

  “WARNING. PRIMARY STASIS FIELD COOLING SYSTEM MALFUNCTION. PRIMARY STASIS FIELD POWER FAILURE IMMINENT.”

  As a new vision filled her mind, Heather wrapped her good arm and leg around the support strut.

  Then, with a hurricane squall, the primary stasis field died, opening the portal to the vacuum of empty space.

  Mark was one with the dance. Once he’d thought he was m
eant for basketball, but he’d been born for this.

  Adrenaline coursed through his system unchecked, fueling his attack. Dodging the alien’s counterstroke, his black sword swept an arc that removed the alien’s top left arm at the elbow, sending the clutching hand to the concrete floor between them.

  The alien ignored the loss of a hand, lunging forward onto Mark’s blade, its momentum aiding Mark in driving the full length through its thick torso. Only as one of its hands closed around his right wrist, preventing him from pulling the sword free, did Mark realize his mistake.

  Twisting to the left, Mark grabbed the alien’s sword arm with his left hand as the remaining alien hand grabbed his throat and squeezed. With electric sparks arcing across his dimming vision, Jennifer touched his mind.

  Can’t hold it much longer. Get the hell out of the way.

  Bracing his arms like a gymnast performing the iron cross, Mark brought both knees up to his chest, leaned back, and hammered his heels into the alien’s face, breaking what would have passed for a nose and rocking its head back. As the alien hammered at his ribs with its amputated stump, Mark scissored his legs around the thing’s head, locked his heels, and squeezed.

  Feeling the alien grip on his throat loosen slightly, Mark twisted his head to the side and bit into the alien fist, feeling bones snap between his teeth as the acrid alien blood filled his mouth, stinging his lips and gums. The alien’s grip on his throat loosened another notch and Mark felt the blood flow return to his brain. Sucking in a rattling breath, he increased the pressure his legs were applying to the alien’s head and neck.