“Well, I sure as hell think those crab things constituted a threat,” Chunda said. “Which means we shouldn’t be considering this an exploratory mission anymore. It’s an extermination.”
“I agree,” one of the other marines said. “Shouldn’t this be the part where we prepare to wipe out this ship and everything on it?”
“I know what Dollarhyde would say here, and that’s no,” Mingo said. “We’ve neutralized the crab swarm, as far as we know, and we haven’t seen any other threats yet.”
“The keyword is ‘yet,’” Llewellyn said. “We don’t know whether those things were local wildlife or if they were already on the ship when it crashed. Either way, where there’s one example of hostile fauna, there’s probably a lot more.”
“Even if there are more threats on the ship, we still can’t leave yet,” Mingo said. “At this point, a complete sterilization of all hostile organisms, if there are any more on board, would likely require the destruction of the entire ship. Those crab things could still be in any nook or cranny, after all. And before we destroy the ship, we have to get as much data out of it as possible.
“All these points seem pretty moot to me, anyway,” Mossier said. “Unless we want to destroy the ship while we’re still on it, the very first thing we need to do is figure out how to get out of this room without becoming a toasty side dish to the fried crab cakes at the door.”
“Marsden and I will work on trying to find an off switch for the energy fields,” Mingo said. “Axel and Hemingford, you two see what you can do about maybe disabling them by some other means.”
“Blow them up. Got it,” Axel said.
“Um, preferably not,” Mingo said. “It would be nice to be able to turn them on again if something else came for us.”
The PDMs erupted with static, followed by Arizona’s voice. “…think we might have a problem.”
“What is it?” Mingo asked.
“You… those big blue bubble things we…”
“Say again?” Mingo asked.
“…remember those bubbles we saw earlier?”
“Yeah? What about them?” Mingo asked.
“They’re gone.”
There was a moment of silence in the command room as all the marines exchanged uneasy glances. Finally Mingo asked, “Arizona, what do you mean they’re gone?”
“What isn’t there to… I say they’re gone, I mean they’re gone. Just poof. Vanished. Ex-bubbles. Ceased to… for the fjords.”
“I have no idea what you said at the end there,” Mingo said, “but I think I get the picture. But how could that happen?”
Arizona didn’t have an answer. Marsden, however, thought that he did. “The center console.”
Mingo turned to look at him. “What do you mean?”
“While we were trying to find some defensive measures against the crab swarm,” Marsden said. “We activated the center console.”
“But it didn’t do anything,” Zhou chimed in.
“I think it did,” Axel said.
“So do I,” Marsden agreed. “Just because it didn’t do anything that we could see didn’t mean it didn’t do anything at all.”
“So you’re saying we somehow mistranslated the symbols on the center console?” Mingo asked. “It destroyed those bubbles instead of activating some kind of weapon?”
Marsden waited for a moment, hoping Mingo would see it without Marsden having to tell him. Finally a look of horror dawned on Mingo’s face.
“Oh,” he simply said.
“What?” Llewellyn asked. “What am I missing here?”
Axel answered. “When Delta team first found the crab swarm, they were hibernating or sleeping or whatever it was they did in a place where one of the bubbles used to be. They’re obviously what killed the crew of this ship, but then they ended up back there, like they treated the area as though it were their home. Then Marsden hit a trigger that supposedly unleashed some kind of weapon, and now all the rest of the bubbles are gone. I don’t see how you could possibly need me to keep spelling it out.”
“Are you saying there’s now a whole hell of a lot more of those crab things running loose all over the ship?” Mossier asked.
“Maybe,” Marsden said. “But I don’t think so. Delta team saw one large shadow inside that one bubble. I don’t think that was another crab swarm. I think that was something else.”
“We released some kind of weapon loose on the ship,” Mingo said. “Is that what you’re trying to say?”
“No. Arizona said there were something like fifty of those bubbles in that room,” Marsden said. “And if two of those bubbles have different kinds of living, biological weapons inside, then all of the others…”
Mingo didn’t let him finish. Instead he was back on the PDMs trying to contact Delta team. “Delta team, get out of there now! Proceed to our location immediately. You are in danger!”
The only response he got from Delta team was static, followed by all of Charlie team’s PDMs pinging at the death of more marines.
August 2, 2147 (Earth Calendar)
1921 Greenwich Mean Time
Location: Alien Spacecraft Command Room, Bullfinch-2
Marine Heart Beats Detected on Planet: 36
“There goes another one,” Conway said grimly as she read the latest data coming through the PDMs. “Lochner. Either she succumbed to her earlier wounds, or something got her.”
Charlie team had been sitting her for almost fifteen minutes after completely losing contact with Delta team. Everyone nodded at Conway’s announcement. Although the loss of any Recon Marine at all was terrible, Marsden and some of the others took heart that, whatever was happening, only three more marines had died. Whatever hellish things Delta team was facing right now, apparently they were giving them hell right back.
Marsden swore from his place next to the console he’d used to activate the force field. He’d discovered some kind of maintenance access panel early on, but even after he’d figured out how to open it he still couldn’t make any sense of the vein and artery-like cords inside. Whoever these aliens were, their technology was completely beyond him or anyone else there. He’d hoped to find some wire he could unplug to disable to fields. There didn’t seem to be any plugs, however, or even anything at all that was even slightly recognizable.
Mingo had continued working on the translations this whole time, while Axel thought she had identified some kind of power junction near the doors that she could blow up if they had no other choice. That would get them out of this room, but they all agreed that, while the force fields may be keeping them trapped in here for the time being, they were also protecting them from whatever else might have come from those bubbles.
“Still nothing?” Laughingmoon asked Marsden.
“Nothing would probably be better,” Marsden said. “Instead what I am finding in here is a headache. Seriously, whatever this stuff is that they’re using to power their technology, it smells worse than Bayne.”
Laughingmoon raised an eyebrow. “Not possible.”
“If you don’t believe me, then get down here, stick your head through that panel, and take a big, deep whiff.”
“On second thought, I’ll take your word for it,” Laughingmoon said.
“That’s probably for the best.” Marsden sat up and looked over at Mingo. He’d been about to ask Mingo how the translation on the controls was going, but Mingo’s attention was now on the jelly-like screen in front of the consoles. “See something interesting, Mingo?”
“Maybe,” Mingo said. The screen had turned on right along with everything else when they’d restored power, but no one had paid much attention to it up to this point. They’d been too busy fighting for their lives, licking their wounds, and then trying to find a way out of this place. Now, however, Marsden let the screen grab his attention. The symbols that had appeared there didn’t seem to have changed for the last ten minutes.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Marsden asked as he stood up and w
ent to stand next to Mingo.
“I’m thinking I’ve been going about this the wrong way,” Mingo said. “I’ve been putting all my effort into translating the symbols on the consoles. But the way the translator program works, the more of a language it has to process, the quicker it can go.”
“That seems kind of counterintuitive,” one of the marines said.
“It might if you don’t know much about alien linguistics,” Mingo said. “But that’s still how it works. We’ve been sitting here trying to figure out what the markings on the controls mean so that we can find the off switch for the force fields. But maybe what we should be doing is putting the translator program to work on that first.” He pointed at the screen. “Once it has all that data processed, it should theoretically have an easier time with the markings on the controls.”
“I guess that makes sense,” Marsden said. “Also, I’m sure it won’t hurt to know what all that stuff on the screen actually says.”
Mingo got to work on that, but he wasn’t at it for very long before they heard something coming down one of the halls just beyond the force fields. Immediately, every marine that wasn’t otherwise occupied got their weapons ready. Even though the field should still be able to hold back any threat, they didn’t want to take any chances.
“Wait, hold off,” Marsden said after a moment. “I think that’s our own people.”
Mossier looked down the hall, but the force field caused enough visual distortion that none of them could see very far. “How can you tell?”
“What, you can’t smell that?” Marsden asked. “There’s only one thing in the galaxy that smells that foul, and it’s not any kind of alien.”
“I heard that!” Bayne called from somewhere down the corridor. Charlie team collectively made a sigh of relief, but that moment of feeling safe only lasted as long as it took for Bayne and the others to reach the force field. Up close, Marsden could now easily see that Bayne’s group was significantly smaller than it had any right to be. Marsden quickly did the arithmetic in his head.
“Bayne, where are the other ten members of Delta team?” Marsden asked.
Trieloff, one of the three other marines that had come down the corridor with Bayne, shook his head. “We have no idea. We were hoping they’d already made it to you guys.”
“Well, they’re certainly not dead,” Conway said. “The PDMs would have told us if they were.”
“But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re safe, either,” Marsden said. “Talk to us, Trieloff. What happened? The last any of us were able to communicate with Delta team, you were all in that room that used to have the blue bubbles.”
Trieloff shook his head. “I wish I could tell you, but it happened way too fast for any of us to see. We were able to hear some of what your team was talking about, but then all of a sudden the audio feeds on our PDMs went completely dead. There was a smell, a sort of skunk-like stench in the air, and then, well, something just came at us.”
“What came at you?” Axel asked.
“Whatever it was, it was something big,” Bayne said. “Taller than me, I think. And maybe it was hairy, too.”
“Big and hairy,” Llewellyn said in a nonplussed tone. “Very helpful description.”
“Yeah, and that’s about all the description you’re going to get from us for now, too,” Trieloff said. “Because it was also fast. We just saw this huge blur of hair coming at us, and before anyone could even aim their MH-56s, this thing took out Huang.”
“Took him out how?” Marsden asked.
“Um, it rolled over him,” Bayne said.
“Wait, what?” Llewellyn asked.
Trieloff shrugged. “I guess that’s about as good a way to describe what happened as anything. It was like a giant furry buzz saw flew through the room. It hit Huang right in the middle and, well, he kind of exploded. His torso and head were just gone, turned into, like, a meat shower.”
Llewellyn paled. “That’s a rather disturbing visual.”
“All that was left afterward were his arms and legs,” Bayne said. “I was standing right near him, and I got his elbow right in the face.”
“Huang was between us four and the others,” Trieloff said. “We immediately ducked for cover down a side corridor, but in the process we got cut off from the others.”
“This, uh, fur-coated razor blade thing?” Marsden asked. “Was that the only thing you saw? Or did you happen to see anything else.”
“No, we didn’t,” Trieloff said. “And honestly, if Hairy and the crab swarm are any indication of what else might have been in those bubbles, it’s probably an awfully good thing we didn’t run into anything else. Because then there probably wouldn’t even be four of us standing here.”
“Yeah, about that,” Mingo said from where he’d stood in front of the screen at the other side of the room. “I think I might have a better clue about what we’re dealing with.”
Marsden left the group at the force field to join Mingo. “Have you finished the translation of the screen?”
“Enough to understand the context of what it’s saying. Once we have a full translation we might be able to use the consoles to bring up further information, but for now it appears to be a list of the commands we executed when we used the consoles.” Mingo pointed at the translation on his PDM, then back up at the screen. “See? This first bit here is acknowledging that we turned the power back on to the whole ship. This part at the end confirms that we activated the emergency command room lockdown protocols.”
“What about that huge block of symbols in between them?” Marsden asked.
“That’s the interesting and disturbing part,” Mingo said. “That whole section corresponds to when you activated the center console.”
“The weapons?” Marsden asked.
Mingo nodded. “Yes. We just didn’t understand the context of what those weapons were or what they were supposed to be for. Each one of these groups of symbols refers to the shutting down of one specific ‘cage,’ as in the blue bubbles.”
“Does it give any specifics about what was in each cage?” Marsden asked. “Or why they were there in the first place?”
“I’m still working on that,” Mingo said, “but judging from what I’m seeing, those cages were the whole reason this ship existed.”
“So, what, this ship is some kind of ark?” Zhou asked.
“I’ll be able to say more once I dig deeper into all this,” Mingo said. “I think maybe we have enough of a translation now that I can figure out how to access more data, which I should be able to scan into our PDMs right away and then translate as we go along.”
“That’s all well and good, but have you figured out how to turn off the force fields yet?” Marsden asked.
“Give me a few more minutes and yeah, I think maybe I can.”
“Can you try to maybe go faster than that?” Bayne said through the force field. “I’m not exactly thrilled about being on this side of the protective barrier.”
Marsden raised an eyebrow. “Bayne, is there ever anything you’re thrilled about?”
“No,” Bayne said grouchily, then looked in Axel’s direction. “Well, maybe sometimes.”
Everyone in the room took note of the way he looked at Axel except Axel herself. She was too busy fidgeting with a grenade in her hand, pulling the pin out and then putting it back in over and over.
“Uh, Axel? Could you please not do that?” Chunda asked.
Axel looked confused. “Why?”
“Chunda, forget it,” Marsden said. “All she’s going to do is rattle off some calculation about how unlikely the odds are that she’s going to blow us all up.”
“3217 to one,” Axel said.
The PDMs lit up with an incoming transmission. Marsden had to do a double take at his when he saw that they were once again broadcasting by an audio and a video feed.
“Charlie team, this is Delta team. Come in.” The face that appeared on the video belonged to Murakame, but just at a glance Ma
rsden immediately felt like something was wrong.
“Murakame?” Mingo said. “Give us a status report on the rest of your team.”
“We are fine,” she said. She said the words with almost no inflection, as if she were just reading from a script. “You need to come to us.”
Mingo looked at Marsden, then the others. Every single person in the room had an uneasy look on their face. Conway took over the feed from Mingo. “Murakame, are you okay? We were told you were one of the ones who was severely injured in the crab swarm attack.”
Murakame paused. Her face showed a complete lack of emotion. “I am fine. It is important that you come to us. You must do it now.”
“Who’s us?” Conway asked. “Are all the remaining members of Delta team with you?”
A thought suddenly occurred to Marsden. He gestured to get Conway’s attention, then pointed at the four members of Delta team waiting just beyond the force field. For a second it looked like Conway didn’t understand what he was trying to say. Marsden gestured again, and Conway finally seemed to get it.
“Yes, everyone is here,” Murakame said. “We are fine.”
Conway looked like she was thinking for a second. “What about Bayne. Is he with you? Axel really wants to know. You know how she feels about him.”
Axel cocked her head curiously at Conway, but Marsden waved Axel off, trying to make sure she didn’t say anything to give away Conway’s lie.
“Bayne is here with us,” Murakame said. “He is fine. All of you must come to us.”
After a few seconds of hesitation, Conway cut off the feed.
“Everyone, disable the video and audio feeds on your PDMs,” Marsden said. “We don’t want anything we do or say to get back to her. Or them. Or whoever the hell that really was. Because I can tell you one thing for certain: that wasn’t Murakame.”
August 2, 2147 (Earth Calendar)
1937 Greenwich Mean Time
Location: Alien Spacecraft Command Room, Bullfinch-2
Marine Heartbeats Detected on Planet: 36
Recon Marines Page 5