The transparent dome stuck up from behind the shoulders of the two front limbs. Rather than covering a head, it enclosed a pair of eyes on short stalks and what looked like clusters of thick wire loops that stuck up higher than the eyes. The eyes and wires were moving about as if taking in the scene. Lee’s reaction was that, if the wires were some kind of feelers like a cat’s whiskers, they’d be useless inside the dome. Maybe the way they’re moving around could be a kind of involuntary testing of the environment even though they can’t reach it at present? she wondered. Something it doesn’t have conscious control over?
The alien rose onto just the two heavy hind limbs, standing up to something like a human height. As opposed to humans who might’ve turned their heads or even their whole bodies to look around, Lee got the impression that the eyes were so mobile they could rotate to take in a 360-degree view without the ETs appearing to do so in a human sense. Having looked about, the alien dropped to four limbs and started down the hall toward the men the grenade had injured or killed.
Though the alien hadn’t said anything audible, three new aliens appeared one at a time in the airlock door. Each stopped in the doorway, dropped to a wide stance on all six legs, then with a shove from one hind limb, slid across the area of shiny-slippery Stade. They rose onto their back four limbs when they reached the flooring where they could get traction.
The first one told the others about the slippery floor somehow, Lee thought. Maybe low-powered radio between spacesuits?
Reaching the fallen humans, each of the aliens took a man by the ankle or wrist and began dragging him back down the hall to the lock.
One of the Maui’s crew spoke tensely, “I think the captain’s going after them!”
Looking up, Lee said, “Put his camera up on the big screen!”
Lee realized everyone was focusing on the big screen and started to tell them to keep watching their own assignments. Then she realized four of the cameras had been on people who were probably dead. Instead, she said, “Captain Massey, I hope you’re still tracking the big picture.” She turned to Carol, the crewwoman beside her, and said, “Please check through the other stationary cameras on the ship to be sure we aren’t missing something.”
Lee looked at the big screen. The captain was stepping around a corner, leading with his gun. She looked at Jones’ display which showed the hallway and airlock. The four ETs had dragged their victims to the end of the flooring and were sliding the first body across the frictionless Stade to another alien who leaned out of the airlock door and dragged it in. Lee got the impression from the way the body disappeared, that a sixth alien was pulling them farther into the airlock. What do they want with the bodies? she wondered with horrified curiosity.
Phoenix’s captain stopped at a hall corner and glanced back. Three of his men were behind him, each holding a gun aimed up at the ceiling. He said something in a whisper that Lee didn’t pick up completely but thought might’ve been, “Ready?” Getting nods, he said, “On three.”
The captain faced the corner again, holding up his hand. He lifted one finger, then another, then three of them. As the third finger went up, he extended his weapon and lunged around the corner.
As the captain rounded the corner the aliens came into view, but there was so much motion it was hard to understand what was happening. Lee’s eyes jumped to Ray Jones’s display of the hall camera. The four ETs stood at the edge of the exposed Stade, sliding the second body across it to the alien waiting in the airlock door.
The loud bangs of pistols firing came over the speakers, just before the captain and his three men passed the hall camera and came into view, charging toward the ETs.
At first, Lee thought the aliens must be deaf because they didn’t turn in reaction to the noise from the guns.
But, rather than turning, the ETs dove forward toward the airlock door, making it evident they knew what was happening behind them.
Lee realized once again that the aliens’ swiveling eyestalks gave them a view a human would’ve had to turn their head for.
Their bodies are too stiff to rotate and they don’t have a head they can turn, she thought, but their eye rotation makes up for it. I’ve got to get used to this!
In conjunction with the sounds of the gunshots, ripples had blossomed on the silvery suit of the rearmost alien in several locations.
It stumbled and fell, as did the next one.
The other two aliens skidded across the Stade floor and hurtled through the airlock door.
A claw reached back and slammed the door closed behind them.
“Shit!” someone said. “Two of them for eight of our own!”
Irritated, Lee said, “Don’t keep score! Try to figure out why they killed our people!”
“Because they’re monsters!” the same crewman said, disbelief in his voice.
Trying to force patience into her voice, Lee said, “Maybe. But what if there’s something we’ve done that brought on their actions? What if this’s all just a misunderstanding?”
“We haven’t done anything,” the man said resentfully.
Lee wanted to snap at him. Instead, realizing she had no ideas for what they might’ve done either, she looked around at the others, “Can anyone else think of something Phoenix’s crew might’ve done to set this off?”
They slowly shook their heads.
She sighed and looked back at the screen. The downed aliens were moving feebly but seemed to be slowing. Lee thought they looked like they were dying. Though, how would I know what a dying alien looks like? she wondered.
Other than a crewman the captain had assigned to hold the airlock door against it being re-opened, the Phoenix’s crew stood over the ETs, guns pointing down at their twitching bodies.
Lee worried they’d shoot the aliens again, but after a moment the captain told a couple of them to step back but keep the two aliens covered. The officer knelt and started cutting open one of the silver suits with what looked like an ordinary pocketknife.
The material was tough the way you’d expect a pressure suit to be.
The captain wasn’t gentle about hacking through it.
Lee looked up at the big screen that now carried the view from the captain’s camera. The alien’s skin was fuzzy and mottled, reminding Lee of camouflage. She got the distinct impression that much of the twitchy movement the alien exhibited was an attempt to breathe. This heaving seemed to grow even more desperate now that the captain had increased the size of the openings in the suit from bullet-sized to the great slashes that had laid the ET bare.
Lee wondered whether the air on their ship was toxic to the aliens, or didn’t have enough oxygen, or enough pressure. The thought was that the aliens breathed oxygen because some of the pictographs exchanged between the ships had seemed to indicate that the aliens breathed a mixture of the seventh and eighth elements—nitrogen and oxygen—like humans. Of course, the possibility for errors in translation had to be gigantic.
The captain poked at a spot on the side of the alien with his knife. Lee blinked when she realized that the spot was one of the bullet wounds. The captain hadn’t been trying to further wound the alien but had been testing the fluid that’d leaked out. It looked to Lee as if the alien blood had already hardened in the fuzzy outer layer of the skin, forming a composite material of sorts that closed the opening. Or is the fuzzy stuff clothing? Lee wondered. Clothing might explain the camo appearance and they might be using a material that clots blood to form a barrier-bandage?
“Captain!” the man at the airlock door said abruptly. “I think they’re trying to open the door!”
“Stand firm. They won’t be able to undog it as long as you’re holding the locking lever.”
“Captain,” one of the other men said, “Unless we fully dog this door, they’re trapped in the little box of that airlock. If we open the door just wide enough to poke the muzzle of a pistol into the opening, we should be able to finish them off.”
Lee found the thought of them
doing that somewhat reprehensible, but reminded herself of the saying that, “All’s fair in love and war.”
Despite her concern that it might all be a misunderstanding; it did feel like their two species were at war.
Phoenix’s captain said, “We’re not trained for this and I think the four of us were very lucky to take these two down without getting killed ourselves. We’re gonna wait for the soldiers in their armor to come out of stasis in…” he looked at his watch, “three more minutes.” He looked at one of the other men, “Randy, I don’t think these two ETs are a threat anymore. You get back there and wait for our guys to come out of stasis so you can fill them in on the situation. I’m gonna keep cutting these guys out of their suits so our soldiers can get a look at what they’re up against before they go at it.” He started chopping the alien’s clear dome free from the rest of the suit. Lee thought the eyes and wires inside the bubble looked droopy.
She felt pretty sure the ET was dead, but wouldn’t have wanted to bet her life on it.
“Okay,” Lee said to her team on Maui. “Looks like we’re just going to be waiting a few minutes. Any downtime you get, each of you review the recording of the camera you personally watched. Slow down the playback if needed. Look for anything we might’ve done to bring on the attack. Watch for any weaknesses the aliens may have that we could exploit if it comes to a fight. Consider what dangers we need to avoid. Remember, we’re going to pull into a trajectory parallel to them tomorrow morning. We’ll hold at a distance of 1,000 kilometers and all we’re expected to do is observe, but we don’t want to have them kill us somehow while we think we’re just watching. Especially not in some fashion we should’ve recognized might happen and would’ve been able to prevent if we’d planned for it.”
Ray said, “Honestly, the very first contact was them throwing the grenade. How could we possibly have pissed them off except by the diagrams we sent?”
Lee said, “I’m still gonna watch.” She pulled up her recording of General Martin’s viewpoint and started watching.
She hadn’t gotten very far when someone said, “The soldiers are out of stasis.”
“Put that up on the big screen,” Lee said, pausing Martin’s video and lifting her eyes to watch.
The video came up and she saw the grim look on the soldiers’ faces as Randy started telling them about the aliens’ attack. It’d been silent, but then someone turned up the audio and Lee heard Randy saying, “So, the captain and three of us rushed the hall and started shooting at ’em. Two of the bastards escaped into the airlock, but we took two of ’em down. The captain’s been cutting those two out of their suits so you can see what you’re up against.”
One of the men wearing the Stade armor stepped forward and motioned the others to follow him. “Let’s go.” He turned toward Randy, saying, “Are their suits armored?”
Randy’s voice said, “No. They look like they’re just pressure fabric to hold atmo. It’s tough, but the captain’s been cutting through it with a pocketknife. Bullets went through it, no problem.”
Someone shifted the view to the hall camera, showing the six armored men clumping in. The man in charge, Major Cohen, momentarily looked past the captain at the four remaining human bodies still lying in the hallway. He gave a sad shake of his head, then turned to the captain. “Tell me what you’ve learned so far.”
The captain pulled out some gloves and put them on, then squatted down and picked up his knife, holding it out to the major. “I only touched them with my knife at first because I forgot to bring gloves. If you want to touch something, I suggest you use my knife to keep your suit’s hands clean of any contamination.”
The major took the knife with a shrug, “If we’re going to fight them, we’re probably gonna get stuff all over us, but I guess we’ll put it off as long as possible.”
The captain turned to the alien’s body and showed the major that the fuzzy material was in fact some kind of camouflaged clothing over brown skin. The skin underneath had a few bristly hairs like a pig’s skin. He demonstrated how the blood had consolidated the fuzzy stuff into something hard suggesting it was probably intended to serve as a bandage as well as clothing and insulation.
He showed how the ET’s trunk consisted of three stiff segments joined by joints just ahead of the hind and middle limbs. Those joints allowed excellent flexion-extension of the body, limited side-to-side bending, and only about ten degrees of rotation.
The eyestalks rotated about 340 degrees and tilted up and down about 150 degrees. This let the aliens see pretty much straight behind themselves—assuming the eyes had a field of view that extended more than ten degrees from center gaze. When the front body segment was elevated to vertical, the eyes could tilt straight up, or down to the floor area in front of their middle limbs. With the front segment tilted down to horizontal when they were on all six limbs, they could see straight ahead and off ninety degrees to either side, as well as tilting their eyestalks downward to see their feet and legs beneath them.
The major, who’d bent over to watch the captain’s demonstration stood and looked around. He said, “Well, it’s time to take this battle to the enemy.” He turned to his five men and said, “Go on internal air, then weapons ready.”
While Lee was wondering how long their internal air would last, the major motioned one of his men to the airlock’s opening, then nodded to the crewman securing the door. “Open it.”
When the door opened, one of the aliens reached out a claw to pull it closed.
However, as soon as the opening was wide enough, the armored soldier standing in front of the door stuck the Stade barrel of his weapon into the gap and let it rip.
It was a slaughter.
A few minutes later the major’s men dragged four more alien bodies into Phoenix. Then they climbed into the lock, fully closed the inner airlock door, and then opened the outer one.
Lee was looking through the major’s camera as he first looked out the airlock.
The alien shuttle was pulling away. The alien’s massive ship was visible in the distance. What now? Lee wondered. She wondered whether the military suits had mobility jets on them. They didn’t have much of a backpack on them. Of course, Stade bottles could hold oxygen as a liquid indefinitely, so they contained a lot more oxygen than pressure bottles had in the past.
Before Lee had time to think much more about that, the major leaned out and looked around, though Lee didn’t see much. Then he clipped on a line and jumped out the airlock. Lee just had time to think, What the hell? when the major pivoted on the line and faced back toward Phoenix.
The man said, “Shit!” and started hauling himself back in.
Lee only puzzled a moment, then she realized there was a strange drum roped to a handhold beside the airlock. She hadn’t been that involved in the design of the City class spacecraft, but she certainly knew they didn’t have an external drum. It’d make a mess out of reentry aerodynamics. What the hell is it? she was wondering when her video feed from Major Cohen cut out. She looked up at the big display. She didn’t know what camera it had been displaying, but it was just as blank as her own.
A glance showed her that Ray Jones’ display was blank as well. “Anybody know what happened to our video feeds?” she asked the room.
Captain Massey croaked, “The aliens blew up SC Phoenix.”
Lee’s eyes flashed up to Massey’s face. The captain looked distraught.
Lee sagged back in her chair; all the stuffing gone out of her. I didn’t think you could hurt Stade! What kind of weapon did they use? She focused on Massey, “You saw the explosion on our scope?”
Massey nodded, sniffling and wiping her eyes. She reminded Lee of a basset hound.
“Damn,” Lee said weakly. She got up, struggling to do so despite the low gravity. She made her way over to Massey, bent down, and hugged her. The woman was trembling in reaction, so Lee held her at least a full minute. When she stood up, she looked around the room, taking in the shattered looks on e
veryone’s faces. “Anybody else need a hug?” she asked.
Ray Jones stood up, looking wobbly, “I sure as hell do.”
LaTanya, next to Ray, stood and gave him one. Soon everyone was hugging and crying.
Lee noticed Massey was just sitting in her chair, a thousand-yard stare in her red-rimmed eyes. I should give her something to do, Lee thought. She stepped over and leaned down, “Captain?” she said quietly. When the captain’s eyes had risen and focused on her, Lee said. “We’ve got things to do and I need you to do some of them.”
Massey nodded resignedly.
“First, I’d like to view the video of what happened to Phoenix. Can we look at it together?”
“Sure,” Massey said. She mumbled a couple of commands to her station’s AI and a moment later a video image of a rocket exhaust came up.
Lee blinked, then realized that once SC Phoenix had matched its trajectory with the aliens it’d had to start decelerating at the same rate the aliens were in order to station-keep. Since the aliens were only decelerating at 0.015g it didn’t take much of Phoenix’s power to do so.
Suddenly the screen whited out, almost to the edges. Lee jerked back. “What the hell?!”
“That was the explosion,” Massey said quietly.
“What kind of explosion was that?! It was ginormous!”
“Nuclear fission,” Massey said. “No chemical bomb could’ve done that.”
“Oh my God!” That’s what the barrel next to the lock was, Lee realized.
Massey’s screen had gone dark. “Did you turn off the video?” Lee asked her.
Mutely, Massey shook her head. “Notice you’re seeing stars again as the camera adjusts.”
“But… What happened to the…”
“To the big cloud you always see after A-bomb?” Massey asked, her tone morose.
Deep Space - Hidden Terror (The Stasis Stories #6) Page 17