by Diane Carey
“You think these creatures are acts of God?” Alley uttered.
“Who else?”
Alley took the moment to hate seeing that expression on his otherwise cheerful and willing crewman.
He had never expected to be the captain of a battlefield. Somehow, though, all the training, the years of shipboard life, the ancient quasi-military existence, honed by untold millennia of tradition instilled in every sailor the idea of orderly defense. Any day, any sailor could end up defending his ship. Over thousands of years, the style of life aboard ships had hardened into one right way that worked all the time—an unbroken chain of command, a system of commands and orders, strict procedures that clicked into place even when minds were foggy or shocked. And he was ready.
If they were alive at this moment, it was only because of procedure. If they were dying, it was because their ship itself had become the hostile environment.
“Pick up this wretch.” No longer sneaking, Alley raised his voice so all could hear. “Let’s go. Come on, everybody, let’s go.”
His pistol now hung at his side. He strode down his corridor, his ship, taking possession boldly if only for his last few steps. Though the survivors were afraid, knew they could be leapt upon from any orifice, they only let him get about twenty feet ahead before they emboldened and followed, matching his pace.
“Come on, everybody inside.” At the hatch to the main engine room, Alley smacked the controls, fed in his entry code, and pressed his thumb to the identification plate. The hatch slid open in a beautiful industrial way. He had no idea whether the compartment had been compromised, whether a handful of attackers was lurking inside. He made a bet. The ship’s policy was that the engine room was constantly sealed, to be opened only by authorized personnel, and since none of those things had a thumbprint, he made the mental bet that the area was safe.
What difference did it make? Either it was or it wasn’t. No place else was, anyway.
He stepped into the engine room and stood aside, using his gun to wave the others inside. “Come on, keep moving. Don’t stop. That’s it, come on in. Everybody sit down over there. Just sit down and breathe. Tell us if you’re wounded. Otherwise just everybody sit down. Clyde, seal this hatch up.”
He scanned the engine room. It was a dim chamber, rarely lit. Usually it operated in darkness. The engines of the Virginia were so dependable, so time-tried, that they required almost no attention other than basic maintenance. He’d often joked that Gunny’s job was the easiest on board, with the most cooperative motive power in the entire merchant space fleet. A sudden urge to give Gunny a compliment for the excellent condition of the engines was crushed by a sharp recollection that Gunny was now little more than a flattened puddle with claw marks, somewhere in the port quarter.
He made a private vow to give somebody a compliment. Who? Didn’t matter.
There was momentary silence, except for Jonsy’s pathetic sobbing somewhere down the line of people.
“Clyde, Dave, spread out,” Alley ordered. “Check the security of this area, quick.” He paused and kept looking around while the passengers found places against a bulkhead to sit and gather their wits. They were bruised, dirty, unkempt. Most of them were in shock, mourning their own dead. None had been spared a loss. A husband, a wife, a friend, a traveling companion. Each had paid somehow. Many had seen the slaughter of their loved ones in person, managing to escape somehow, thanks often to the narrow hatches of the Virginia’s cabins and common areas, hatches skinny enough to let a human through but would give one of those creatures a tangle that bought time.
There was no talking for the two minutes it took for Clyde and Dave to return from the corners of the chamber.
“All secure,” Clyde reported.
“We locked everything,” LaMay added. “Even the vent shafts.”
Mercifully, he didn’t mention what that meant—that there would only be air for a handful of hours before the room had to be allowed to breathe again.
Voola settled on her wide backside between the two other women and began tending the lacerated hand of the woman on her left. She glanced up at Alley and asked the most reasonable question.
“Do they eat?” she asked. “Vill dey eat us?”
“No information on that,” Alley said. “We know they use other life-forms as incubators.”
“They must consume something,” LaMay ventured. “They can’t gain mass without fuel of equal mass… can they? We know they grow—”
“They’re also alien life-forms,” Clyde told him, as if discussing any ordinary ship’s business. “Who knows what kind of environment they evolved in?”
“Increase in mass could be locked into their biology. Maybe they’re born with packages of hyper enzymes or hormones… something that gets triggered when they… erupt. For all we know, they may never eat. We don’t know enough about them.”
“Knowing might not help us,” Alley said. “We’re at war. That’s what we know. We know they kill. If they see you, they kill you for no reason. If they leave you alive, it’s to use you.”
“What for?” the red-headed man asked. “‘Use’ us for what?”
Alley looked at him.
“You know, don’t you?” the man asked. He stood up, pushing his huge frame off the floor. He was all shoulders and chest, with narrow hips and short legs, but somehow, presented as a package he seemed huge. “You know what they are, don’t you?”
“Tell us,” one of the woman pleaded. “Be honest.”
Realizing he’d slipped, Alley rubbed his aching hand across his face and around his neck. “Yeah,” he admitted. “I think I know. Warnings have been sent out about a species of… aliens… that are highly destructive. Several ships and a colony have been compromised.” He offered a small shrug with both shoulders. “They’re… galactic heartburn.”
“‘Compromised’?” the woman challenged. “That’s what you call it?”
Her painted-on eyebrows were clownish in their positions of worry. They were embarrassingly artificial, drawn on as if with a brown marker by a man with no artistic talent. They traveled from way over on her temples, in big poorly shaped arches, to the bridge of her nose, like tracings of a country road on some old map. They amplified her expression, which flipped between anger and terror.
“What’s your name?” Alley asked, dumping all pretense that the captain knew everybody who ever rode aboard his ship.
Her medium-length brown hair made a frowsy frame around her face. Long, small scratches in one cheek now defined a formerly pretty face. “Lena Dearborn.”
Alley nodded passively. “Lena, we’ll do our best.”
Disarmed by his tone, she asked, “Where do they come from?”
“Nobody knows.”
“But how did they get here?”
“They were smuggled aboard.”
“What? You mean… you mean that loading show you gave us? They came aboard then?”
“Seems to be.”
She began to cry fitfully, angrily. “How could you do this to us!”
He was willing to take her abuse.
“That’s not fair, Lena,” the big red-headed man said.
“Fair?” she wept. Sobs broke from deep in her chest. “My sister… my only sister… my nephews…”
Voola coiled a chubby arm around her. “Oh, merciful God… hear our prayer…”
“Put in a good word for the rest of us,” LaMay said. He was annoyed. Alley appreciated that.
Clyde approached, and from his body language it was clear he wanted to speak privately. Alley bore off to the other side of one of the power cells. LaMay followed.
“How long can we hold out in here?” Clyde asked.
“Does this fit into the Space Perils Clause?” LaMay asked.
Alley screwed him a glower. “What is it with you?”
He shrugged. “I’m studying for my captain’s license.”
“Oh, yeah. That’s some one-track mind, kid.”
“It helps
me keep going.”
Alley broke into an involuntary smile. Everybody had his own recipe for bravery. “Under ‘dangerous cargo.’ I’d sure like to see the dock warrant for that box. If we live through this, I’ve got a customs officer to eviscerate.”
He pushed both hands through his short hair and massaged his scalp for a couple of seconds, thinking under his hands. What was the next step? Were there people huddling anywhere else aboard, hoping for rescue? Could he even get to them? Or would there have to be a bigger goal than to save individual lives?
How had they come to this? Just this morning, they were enjoying a perfect run, with a ship full of people anticipating long lives on a golden planet. His career was secure. There would always be a need for experienced space captains and time-tried dependable ships. Soon his wife would’ve joined him and begun a life of living aboard Virginia.
He was glad she wasn’t here. One lucky line they hadn’t crossed.
He thought of Roxanne’s head rolling across the deck, sorrowfully pursued by her distraught husband. Silence spread through the engine room. In its way, the silence was like an ooze, moistening their fears and causing their mental wounds to welter. They were confused, stunned. He felt their percolating panic. They were trapped, but even worse than being on some deserted island. They couldn’t even swim away. Even the lifepods had been rendered inoperable. They’d lost three people trying to reach the pods, only to find both lifeboats ruined, one by physical smashing, the other by acid draining from the deck above.
Finally, aloud, he uttered, “This won’t work.”
LaMay looked up. “Pardon?”
“We can’t outlast them in here. We’re ten weeks out from the nearest outpost, flying on autonav.”
“Doesn’t the autonav have to be refreshed every few days by an officer?” LaMay asked.
“Yes, but it has an automatic failsafe. Deprived of refreshed orders, she’ll reprogram herself to her last ordered course. The ship’ll just keep going to her next point of rendezvous and carry out an autotransfer, and infect the Umiak. After that, she’ll go on into space and connect with one unsuspecting ship after another.”
He paused for thought, added up everything in his mind, and ran through a dozen scenarios, but they all turned out the same. The ship had its orders.
More to himself than anyone else, he said, “I can’t let it happen.”
The words helped clear his head. The decision was made.
Everyone was watching him. They could wage a fair but protracted battle here, hoping for some other ship to stumble upon them and help, or they could do something else.
“Okay, folks,” he began, turning to the desperate faces. “We’ve just entered an elite phalanx of human beings. We’re the Titanic. The Lusitania. The World Trade Center. The Nimbus Expedition. The victims of Velvet Brigade’s Slaughter Dawn. The Yellowstone Supervolcano of 2103.”
He paused, reading the realization in their faces, and gave them a moment to absorb the grim picture before continuing.
“We’re the people who woke up this morning expecting one future and getting another because of forces out of our control. We’re about to become that small group who make it into the history books. At this moment, we have to decide what history will say about us. Will we be victims or heroes? It’s up to us now.”
They saw it in Nick Alley’s eyes. He didn’t have to explain further.
“Out here, with no weapons?” Clyde wondered quietly.
“I wouldn’t say that,” Alley told him. “Take a look over here.”
While the others watched, he led his officers past the inhibitor casings, and under the access ramp, which made a scalene triangle and created the little cubby he ducked into. “Right here.”
Aware of the audience watching him—his surviving passengers who counted on him—he squatted before an untouched locker with a rolling shield of circular borium dragonskin plates. Alley engaged the lock with his personal code and raised the rolling shield.
Inside was a pretty fair arsenal, loaded into neat racks. Four RPG rifles, sixteen M-40 grenades, and five independent-targeting shoulder-held missiles.
“We’re armed?” LaMay said with a lilt of hope.
“Hope for the best, prepare for the worst,” Alley said, and pulled out two rifles. “Standard Marine assault weapons, with a couple of non-standards thrown in for spice.”
He pulled out a stocky, unfriendly pulse-shot with a wide shoulder-rest and a heavy barrel the diameter of his wrist.
“What the demon is that?” LaMay asked.
Alley checked the propulsion charge on his old favorite. “It’s a MacGregor Firebolt. My own personal contribution to repelling boarders.”
“Just to be clear,” Clyde began, “this means we go on the offensive and hunt them out?”
“Yes.” Alley’s answer was deliberately simple. “Our cargo’s worth millions and our mission is worth billions. Our lives are priceless. Every hour makes us hungrier and more tired. In a handful of hours we won’t have the strength to fight. Either we starve slowly or we fight them now, while we’re still strong. We’ll leave these people here and go out on assault. We’ll kill as many of those hell-cats as we can. If we get lucky, maybe we’ll get them all and survive.”
“Which direction?”
Caressing his Firebolt, Alley thought about it. “First to the pilot house. It’s the last stand for navigation. We have to destroy the autonav system so the ship doesn’t go on to infect other ships. If nothing else, we have to do that. We have to stop this malignancy before it spreads.”
He lowered his weapon and took a step back. He suddenly thought of his wife.
“Can we track them?” Dave asked. “Body heat? Motion?”
“We don’t have that equipment aboard,” Clyde said. “Why should we?”
Alley shrugged, feeling a little guilty for not loading everything possible for any wildly imaginable situation. “Nobody carries more weight or bulk on a ship than necessary. That’s just reality.”
“There has to be something we can convert,” Dave said, his imagination cooking. “We’ve got medical sensors. Let’s reprogram the suckers.”
“They’re all in the medical section,” Alley said. “We’re not. That’s a whole other expedition.”
“I don’t understand,” one of the passengers asked. This was a man, elderly and frail. “You’re going to try to send a distress signal or kill the monsters or… turn off the ship so it doesn’t meet with another ship?”
“If we could do all those things, that would be a good day.”
“Can’t you just turn off the ship from down here in the engine room?”
Alley tipped his head, helpless to explain in such a short time. “We can’t just pull a wire and the engines turn off. It’s wicked complicated.” With his tone, he let them know the subject was now closed. He didn’t remember when he’d developed that skill, but every captain eventually got it. “This is volunteers only. Who’s going with me? And don’t worry about wanting to stay here. These people are going to need leadership.”
“I’m going,” Clyde said.
Dave shook off a wave of exhaustion. “Me too, Captain.”
“I’ll go,” said a third voice.
They looked back toward the main deck and saw the big red-haired man standing in a shadow that struggled to cover him.
“What’s your name?” Alley asked.
“Henry Nagle, sir.”
Alley approached him and shook his hand. “I know about you, Henry. You’ve had a hell of a career. You deserve better than this.”
“Everybody has to fight some time, Captain. I’m willing.”
“So am I,” came another voice.
Behind Henry’s huge form, Lena peered at them. “I won’t die sitting here.”
Somehow her volunteering didn’t help Alley’s sense of possibility. As a husband, he wouldn’t want his wife to have to be in the vanguard, even though he suspected she would do just as Lena was doing
.
“That’s enough,” he said. “The rest will fortify here and defend themselves. We’ll try to get to the pilot house and at least send out a warning and a distress signal.”
“A distress signal?” Lena asked. “You mean somebody could come help us?”
“What about the ship we’re meeting?” another woman asked. “I’m Beatrice Foley… I’m supposed to transfer mail to the students on that ship. Can they help us? If they know what’s happening? Can we call them?”
Alley glanced at Clyde, but offered only a vague answer. “We’ll try.”
He started handing out weapons. They emptied the locker completely, and came out packing. He loaded Clyde, Dave, Henry, Lena, and himself with all the weapons and rounds and grenades they could carry, then doled out the rest to the row of survivors, and one by one gave them instructions about the basic use of each weapon, about half of which involved how not to blow themselves up by mistake.
“Okay, this is it,” Alley said finally, when there was nothing left to be said. He made eye contact with each of his assault team, and added, “Destination… the pilot house at all costs. Whoever makes it will have to shut down the autopilot and hit the distress button. It’s just a big red button high up on the nav theatre. A monkey can do it. Are we set?”
One by one, they nodded. All seemed calm, except Lena, whose face was sketched with pure revenge. She’d crossed that line.
Might actually help her.
“How can dis be happening?” Sitting now on a utility bench, Voola uttered words slurred with disillusionment. “How God could create such demons? How he could make dis happen to us? Please, Holy Father of Grace, how dis can happen?”
“Voola, give me your hand.” Alley stepped close and took the woman’s cold, plump fingers. He held tightly for a moment, until she looked at him and blinked her eyes clear. Then he pried her fingers open, slapped a plasma rifle into them, and folded both her hands into the form-fitted grips.
“Stop praying,” he ordered. “Fight for your life.”