Vanderdeken's Children

by Christopher Bulis

  "They won't let us go.They'll never let us go...' 'We're not dead yet,' Rexton said, panting from his exertions but undaunted. 'Visors down and seal your suits.'

  Only as he adjusted his own suit did Sam realise he was carrying Lyset Wynter's camera case slung across his shoulder. Before she could say anything the middle door opened and they stumbled into the next compartment of the airlock. As soon as it shut behind them the Doctor fused the door control once again. 'At least it'll slow them down,' he said simply. Rexton stepped up to the third door. Sam felt the pressure drop and her suit tighten around her.

  She half expected the bay to be full of monsters, but the shuttle stood there just as the unfortunate Jenez must have left it.The Doctor punched the unlocking code into the keypad and Dessel began turning the wheel. Above them the roof hatch began to open. Sam saw a blurred flicker of motion silhouetted against the stars. 'Look out!'

  But it was too late. An indistinct grey form dropped through it on to the roof of the shuttle. And then another...

  ***

  The first indication Argen had that something was wrong was when the marines standing guard on the hole cut in the hull hatchway started firing rapidly downward. A babble of voices came crackling over the distorted suit channel.

  "They're right behind us... Dak, look out! Grenades! Take out the roof!'

  What the hell was happening down there? Argen thought, even as he began powering up the Resolve's systems. 'Ready on the ramp hatch,' he told the engineer. 'Turret, make ready to provide covering fire.'

  Argen saw a marine's head and shoulders appear over the edge of the hull hatchway only to be jerked backwards into the depths. The two guards redoubled their rate of fire. What were they fighting? Could he move the shuttle closer so they could angle the turret gun to -

  Grey forms frothed over the pit's edge .The marines fell back, threw their grenades, then turned and ran for the shuttle. Half-seen things boiled out of the pit after them, growing more substantial as they poured out on to the surface under the glare of the Indomitable'^ lights.

  The turret gun spat fire.

  The bolts tore through the ghostly horde and exploded behind them in showers of molten hull metal. The living shadows flickered and swirled where the energy pulses struck them. For a few seconds their advance was checked as they spread out. But then they surged forward once more.

  Watching in slack-jawed disbelief Argen saw their bodies grow more solid, resolving into a shapeless nightmare of mismatched forms. He felt sickened. Their grotesqueness defied all logic. This was an appalling, loathsomedanse macabre that was terribly, terribly wrong.

  'Run, run!' he shouted aloud to the marines, though they needed no encouragement from him.

  The turret gunner lowered his sights and blasted the ground at the pursuers' feet. Something resembling a huge crab with two sets of pincers was tossed aside by the concussion. A thing like a rolling tumbleweed fringed with lashing tentacles was split in half. But the two segments rolled on and after a few metres merged once more as though nothing had happened.

  As the two surviving marines reached theResolve the engineer dropped the access ramp and they tumbled aboard. Argen cut in the underjets and they lifted even as the leaders of the horde washed about them like a grey wave. He saw grotesque forms blasted aside and sent tumbling out across the marbled metal plain.

  'Yes!' he exclaimed fiercely.

  He was fifty metres up when a long, shapeless, translucent limb slapped across the forward viewport before his eyes. One of them was clinging to the hull. He heard a scream from the compartment behind him, followed instantly by the crack of guns. He saw the HATCH CLOSED light on the display panel flicker and suddenly the pressure dropped.The sound of gunfire ceased abruptly. Over his headphones he heard the gunner in the upper turret give one startled yell that ended in a sudden choking gurgle of pain.

  Argen engaged the autopilot and tried to twist about, drawing his sidearm, but his seat harness held him back.

  Even as he reached for the buckle a grey ballooning mass swelled and bubbled up through the hatchway behind him, taking on a terrible solidity as it came.An extruded limb lashed out.Argen felt the terrific thud as it struck the back of his chair and something seemed to tug very hard at his chest.

  He looked down.

  A needle-pointed, curving, glassy spike was protruding thirty centimetres out of his suit just below his sternum. He saw, with a detached and surprising clarity of perception, his own blood laced about its tip begin to steam and boil away into the vacuum.

  Then the darkness swallowed him.

  ***

  They were fighting for their very lives.

  Bolts of fire crisscrossed the shuttle bay, exploding in showers of sparks as they struck the walls.A thin haze was billowing rapidly out of the roof hatch, from which more of the creatures were dropping on to them every second.

  Sam didn't know if their efforts were doing anything but delaying the inevitable, but it was a simple stark choice: fight or die. Except that as fast as they knocked one of the hellish things down, another took its place. And the ones that had been hit flowed like syrup, reformed, and came back at them again, like creatures from a nightmare that would not end.

  Why couldn't they die decently? Sam thought. Or were they already dead?

  Were they really fighting ghosts?

  She was frantically cranking the roof hatch open wide enough to let the shuttle pass. Dessel stood by her side, his back to the wall, a rifle in one hand and pistol in the other, blazing methodically away at the nightmare horde that clutched and clawed and snapped at them.The Doctor was hunched over adjusting his sonic screwdriver. Rexton and Manders were standing on the Doria's ramp, fighting to keep it clear. Delray, one arm still held close to his chest, was hauling a feebly strugglingTane towards them.

  Bendix was visible through the Doria's cockpit viewscreen seated in the pilot's chair and powering up the shuttle for launch.

  An intense, rapidly pulsing light filled the bay.

  The Doctor was holding his sonic screwdriver aloft once more, this time radiating in the optical wavelengths.Again the things drew back. Sam looked at the steadily opening roof hatch. If only they could hold them for a few seconds more. 'It's wide enough!' the Doctor shouted.'Come on!'

  Dessel started forward with them, only to give a cry of pain and drop his weapons.

  Ghostly limbs bristling with dark sea-urchin spines had extended from the wall and coiled tightly about him. He struggled for a second then went limp.

  Sam saw the spines begin to tear into the fabric of his suit. Instinct overcoming her reluctance to use guns, she snatched up his pistol and fired at the spines at point-blank range. The gun flickered and died, its power cell drained. She threw it aside and tore desperately at the glassy limbs with her gloved hands. She felt a numbing cold bite into her bones and a dreadful weariness seep into her, as though the life force was being drained from her body. But at the same moment the length of limb she touched seemed to become more solid, and some of the spines broke off and melted away in her palm.

  Still holding the pulsating sonic screwdriver in one outstretched arm, the Doctor reached out with the other and grasped the thing that held Dessel.

  The glassy limbs became darker and more solid, as though suddenly infused with reality. She could see the pain on the Doctor's face.

  'Now, Sam!' he choked out.

  She kicked furiously at the restraining limbs. Spines snapped and fell away while their stems crushed into pulp under her blows. Dessel dropped limply to the ground while the remaining limbs released their hold and, threshing madly, faded and withdrew through the wall. The Doctor thrust the sonic screwdriver into Sam's hand, hauled Dessel upright and threw him over his shoulder. They plunged through a knot of grey things clustered about the shuttle's ramp with Sam holding the pulsating screwdriver before them like a talisman, even nerving herself to kick one of the confused creatures aside, ignoring the stab of pain it caused her.


  They tumbled through the hatch and it slammed shut behind them. Even as the Doctor laid Dessel down and they fell into their seats the underjets roared. The rim of the surface hatch flashed past just beyond the ports.

  Then they were powering their way out into free space and the great bulk of the alien ship was shrinking behind them.

  They slumped in their seats, too exhausted to speak. Sam saw the Doctor's head sagging on to his chest, as though evenhis remarkable reserves of vitality were temporarily drained. She herself felt like death.

  She was so exhausted that she was only vaguely aware that, despite the automatic heating cutting in, the interior of the shuttle was unnaturally cold.

  It remained so all the way back to the Cirrandaria .

  ***

  'The Resolve is clear of the interference zone, sir, but it is not responding to our signals,' the operator reported to Vega.

  "They may have been hurt,' Fayle said.

  'Override comm default protocols,' Vega said. 'Patch into cockpit camera.'

  A new image appeared on the screens. A collective gasp of dismay whispered round the Indomitable's bridge.

  Argen was seated upright in his chair, held in place by his acceleration harness. There was a dark stain around a ragged hole in the centre of his chest. Glittering red jewels tumbled slowly past the camera lens: droplets of frozen blood, Vega realised. Argen's bulging eyes were staring sightlessly through his visor. Blood had bubbled and freeze-dried about his lips.

  He was clearly quite dead.

  Yet somehow, impossibly, his arms were moving.

  It was a jerky motion, as though they belonged to a marionette operated by a clumsy puppeteer. But it could not possibly be mistaken for random movement generated by the motion of the shuttle. Argen's dead hands were operating the shuttle's controls, setting the autopilot to return it to the Indomitable .

  Vega found his lips were dry. He had to lick them before he could speak.'Sickbay, recovery team to shuttle port at the double.' He looked back at the screen.Argen's hands were motionless again, but he knew he hadn't imagined it.

  Fayle was leaning forward and peering intently at the macabre image, almost blocking Vega's own view. But Vega said nothing. Fayle's suspicious nature might not make him popular, but it had saved them from serious trouble more than once in the past.

  Slowly Fayle pointed over the back of Argen's chair.'What's that?'

  It seemed like a patch of mist. More blood droplets? Vega wondered. But surely no vapour could remain suspended in the vacuum the telemetry displays said filled the cabin. Yet the longer Vega stared at it the more it seemed to have distinct edges, and even a sort of fluid structure. Then, just for an instant, he thought he saw a distorted parody of a face within the improbable mist.

  'Helm, override the Resolve's autopilot. Steer it clear of the shuttle bay.Take it round to our port side out of the Emindians' line of sight. Keep it a minimum of two hundred metres clear of us as you go.'

  The remote operator bent over his duplicate controls and the shuttle began to circle the Indomitable . In half a minute it had been manoeuvred into position on the far side of the ship from the Cirrandaria and placed in station-keeping mode.

  'Resolve secure, sir,' he reported.

  'Good. Prepare a science team, Mr Fayle,'Vega said. "They are to take out another shuttle and -'

  'Resolve's autopilot has been engaged again, sir,' the remote operator interjected. 'External link has been cut.' On the screen they saw Argen's hands moving relentlessly over the controls. 'We can't override again. Main drive activated... now moving on an approach vector.'

  The external viewscreens showed the shuttle once again heading directly for them.

  'Shuttle bay!' Vega snapped,'Close hull doors.'

  'It's too close for pressor-beam lock,' Fayle said.

  Vega took a deep breath. "The Resolve is under hostile control. Target and destroy immediately.'

  A string of plasma bolts flared out into the void and connected with the incoming shuttle. It vanished in a swelling brilliant fireball which slowly thinned into a cloud of luminous vapour and faded into nothing.

  'The Resolve is totally destroyed, sir,' weapons control reported.

  'No external damage to the ship,' the systems monitor added.

  Vega nodded absently in response, feeling sick inside. For the first time in his career he had lost a ship to the enemy.

  But who, or what, was the enemy?

  Chapter 14

  Lost

  Lyset Wynter slowly recovered consciousness.

  The last thing she recalled was crawling on her hands and knees into the darkest corner she could find and collapsing in a state of total exhaustion.

  Now she ached all over, she was shivering, and she felt deathly tired. Tight skin around her eyes suggested she had been crying. That was something she hadn't done for years, but perhaps nobody would blame her in the circumstances.

  She was huddled at the end of a blind corridor that served no purpose she could discern. The floor was hard but at least nothing was disputing her right to lie on it. If anything did then she knew she would not have the strength to resist or even to run. It felt as though the life and strength had been drained from her. Her skin still tingled from the shock of the passage through the interface, while deep within her burned a different and deeper cold. That was a legacy of the creature that had taken her. If it had held on to her any longer she was sure she would have died. But it had clashed with some other walking nightmare and she had been cast aside like a rag doll in the ensuing struggle.That was when she had made her unsteady escape.

  Now all she wanted to do was go back to sleep again, but she knew she must stir herself. She didn't move. The mind is willing but the flesh is weak, she told herself dully. She licked her dry lips and wished she could have a drink.

  Idiot, she thought.You must start thinking straight again.

  She reached up with an unsteady hand and pressed a button on the side of her helmet. Feeder tubes extended within it on either side of her mouth.

  One dispensed water and the other glucose tablets. She chewed and sipped, and slowly began to feel better. With a tremendous effort she levered herself upright so that her back was resting against the wall.

  She recalled the posture of the Nimosian they'd found. Well, she could sympathise with him, if he'd been through what she had. It was probably only luck that she hadn't gone the same way. She still might, for that matter.

  She realised something was missing. Where was her camera? Damn, she must have dropped it. All those pictures lost.

  She suddenly began to laugh out loud at the incongruity of her reaction in the current circumstances and had to cram her knuckles into her mouth to muffle the sound. Careful, or you'll lose it, she told herself.

  All right, forget cameras. Think survival. What should she do now? Get back to the others, of course. Wait a moment. How long had she been gone?

  She checked her suit watch and found it was past six in the morning, ship time. She'd been unconscious for an hour and a half. Would they still be waiting for her? Were they still alive?

  She'd been thinking only about herself! Perhaps they were all dead and she was the only survivor. No, she told herself firmly. You must believe they got away. Either they'll wait in the landing bay or they'll come back with reinforcements.

  But where was the bay? How far had she been carried? How long might it take to get back there? She tried to work it out rationally.

  Excluding the tower structure, the main body of the ship was a cylinder over four kilometres long and perhaps seven hundred metres wide. As they'd discovered, under the hull was a network of corridors. If they ran the full length and width of the craft that meant an equivalent area, laid flat, of nearly nine square kilometres. Multiply that by however many deck levels there might be and it was the equivalent of a small city. She'd be wandering around in it for hours or even days if she wasn't careful.

  Well, at least she knew the long
level corridors ran lengthwise.That provided basic orientation. If she could find the interface chamber, she could get back to the landing bay.

  Assuming the things didn't find her first.

  Also assuming the shuttle would still be waiting for her.

  The realisation struck her that the others probably thought she was dead already. Poor Don would take it hard. He was more sensitive than most people realised. As soon as she had gathered her strength she must start back.

  Back through the interface?

  Would she have the courage to face the pain? Even if she threw herself at it would it be physically possible? Perhaps she could get out on the surface and bypass it. Yes, that was an idea. There was plenty of cover so she'd have a better chance of hiding if need be. Now if only she could find an external hatch -

  Lyset froze in horror as a faint scuffing came from around the corner of the corridor. She shrank backwards, but there was absolutely nowhere to hide.

  A shape rounded the corner and a bright light shone in her eyes, momentarily dazzling her.

  'Identify yourself!' a gruff voice demanded.

  Her heart leapt in relief. It was a human voice.

  'Lyset Wynter, photographer with the party from the Cirrandaria. Who are you?'

  The light was extinguished and she saw a man in a combat suit. He was holding a snub-nosed shoulder-slung pulse rifle. And it was pointed at her.

  'Squadleader Sho, of the Nimosian Space Marines,' he said crisply. 'And you are my prisoner.'

  Chapter 15

  Conundrum

  'Commander Vega,' the Doctor said, leaning towards the comm-screen image of the Nimosian for emphasis. 'The alien ship is extremely dangerous.You must avoid any further contact with it.Apart from the beings we encountered, the ship's systems are active and unstable. Your own men must have told you what it's like inside.'