by Diane Carey
The room seemed to chill abruptly.
Ned let out a sharp sigh of annoyance. “I think we’ve had enough of that kind of talk.”
“Shame on you, Adam,” Mary scolded.
“You’re making that up,” Robin murmured.
Adam’s deeply lidded eyes raised slightly, just enough to make a subtle communication. “Am I?”
Ned confronted him the way he confronted challenging rams in the herd at home. Never let an animal know you’re not dominant.
“Pearl is one of us,” he declared. “We’re in a ship together, out here, alone. Like an island. It’s different. Her life depends on us. Someday our lives might depend on her. We’re going to respect her just for that.”
He felt the eyes of the others, but his eyes remained fixed on Adam’s, drilling in his point and making the best silent dare he could muster.
It was then that Captain Thomas Scott Pangborn made another dramatic entrance, punctuating the already tense mood.
Probably this wasn’t actually a consciously dramatic entrance, except that every time the captain entered, it seemed dramatic. When he was in the room, all eyes were drawn to him, no doubt about that. Ned felt the magnetism and a deeply churning respect, dashed with fear.
Followed in by Luke, Pangborn had clearly been clued in about the issue at hand, because he ignored all the other cadets and immediately locked eyes with Adam. The captain matched the boy’s self-confidence glare for glare. He came into the salon’s aft hatch, and strode slowly forward, past the other teens, until he was only a long step from Adam. He put his hands in his pockets, taking his time, drew a long breath, tipped his head this way, then that, as if regarding an art work.
“What’s your story, sport?” he asked.
Adam pressed his lips. “No story.”
“You’re refusing to do your work?”
“No. I’m refusing to do menial work.”
“You’re here to learn how to be part of a crew.”
“I’m here to learn spacefaring skills. Navigation. Ship operations. Interplanetary commerce laws. You have a paid crew to do the cleaning.”
The captain nodded once, and raised his brows. “I understand. Well.” He turned in a direction that let him address all the cadets. “You kids wanted an adventure? This is the real thing. You’re working. Adults work. They don’t ride around on horses with their capes flowing, dueling with dragons. They get down on their aching knees and work, and while they’re down, they thank God that they have work at all.”
Without further discussion, no attempts to talk Adam into participating, Pangborn simply turned his back on the boy and faced Luke, still lingering at the aft hatch.
“If he doesn’t work,” Captain Pangborn said, “he doesn’t eat.”
Robin made a little gasp of empathy, but all the others were frozen with astonishment.
Ned held his breath. He’d never heard of such a thing. Not in real life.
“Confine him to quarters?” Luke asked.
“I think he’d like that,” Pangborn said. “He doesn’t eat, but he has to come to the salon for every meal and watch the others eat.”
“What if he doesn’t?”
The captain didn’t look back at Adam, nor make any acknowledgement of him, but seemed aware of the attention of the other kids. “Then bind him and carry him.”
The ruinous sentence was stated with absolute confidence that the hard-boiled crew could overpower Adam.
“Sorry about this,” Luke said.
“Ah, he’ll get over it.” The captain rocked on his heels, allowing the tension to drop some. “We’re on schedule to raft with the Virginia at 1300 tomorrow. I’ve received an automatic confirmation that she’s on course and on time. All of you will be interested to watch the autoload. It’s a fascinating process. Today and tomorrow morning, Dana will be teaching you about the autoload technology and procedures, so you’ll understand what you’re seeing. We’re offloading our own containers from the last port and boarding all of Virginia’s cargo containers, which we will then deliver to Zone Emerald at the same time we deliver you. I suggest you take a look at the educational pamphlets right over there in that cabinet and familiarize yourself with the basics and work up some questions. Any questions for me right here and now?”
During the little dance of glances and lowered chins, no one spoke.
“All right, then, carry on.” The captain gave a brief look at the table of splattered plates and food, and paused over the puddles of milk in the spaghetti sauce. “Spiderlegs trying a new recipe?”
“Uh…” Chris began to say something—who could imagine what?
“Yes,” Ned spoke up. “Like some?”
The captain didn’t look at him. “I eat in my quarters. Hope it’s good.”
With his hands still in his pockets, Pangborn strode down the narrow salon as if beside a meandering stream, and looked at the students as if they were ducks scattering out of his way.
At the last moment before stepping out, he suddenly turned.
“You… uh, Mank.”
“Sir?” Ned straightened as if a giant spirit hand had reached out and pulled his shoulders back. Being singled out set him right on the emotional edge. He’d rarely been looked at in his life, going to a small school, living on a farm, enjoying the solitude that suited him fairly well. Not that he was a solitary type—he enjoyed his family and a handful of friends at the Isle of Man TT motorcycle road race. He even had a sponsor, and a pit crew. That was his social life, and it was enough for him.
Right now he wished he were there, soaring along the miles and miles of open road on the little ancient island. He belonged there. Not here.
The captain’s eyes gripped him. “How’d you like an assignment?”
Ned nodded valiantly. “Surely.”
“You clean my bell.”
About to leave the salon, Luke turned back. “He’s not on that duty this week, Captain.”
“Yes, he is.”
Luke shifted, disturbed. “Oh… okay…”
The other cadets began to slip away, even though they hadn’t finished breakfast, escaping for their own preservation. Ned caught their backs as they vanished one by one, and even Pearl somehow shimmied between him and the captain, turning sideways like an envelope going through a slot.
Ned found his eyes drawn magnetically to the bell, big as a watermelon and standing with its shoulders squared on its pedestal.
“I’ll be back to inspect it,” the captain said. “You have two hours.”
7
Space is the ocean of the gods. There is no one plane of travel, no up, no down, and across is a navigation nightmare. Like a diver in deep water, a ship could turn upside down or completely around and never know the difference. Though there was artificial gravity inside a ship, the spacefares were without orientation in the vastness of the cosmos. Primary to survival was scrupulous attention to the instruments which told a ship where it was. Line of sight in such expanses just didn’t serve. A shaving of a degree’s mistake would be ruinous.
Inside the ship, even with gravity, the crew of a space vessel were more like divers. There was no single plane, no main deck. For every deck that went out in front and back behind, there were ten compartments, conduits, shafts, utility cubbies, access tubes branching out above, below, to the sides, at angles away and back. It wasn’t enough for Nicholas Alley to lead his little assault team straight to the pilot house, concentrating only on going forward through the most direct routes. The direct routes were big, bright open corridors, perfect traps in which the first people had been killed. Keith had died walking down the main starboard corridor, carrying a tray of snacks for ten passengers who had died five minutes later. He hadn’t even realized he was leading the predator to the prey.
Now the ship was conserving power in emergency status and the corridors, tunnels, ladder tubes, and veins were lit only by the amber or red hazard bulbs. Moving through them was like being part of an arcade game.
>
In Alley’s mind, every artery laid itself out around them as sharply as a 3-D schematic. They were floating in the middle of a pool, with sharks circling from every direction. The monsters could be anywhere, rise or drop before them, or behind them, from the sides, or any angle.
He had stationed Dave LaMay at the vanguard, just in front of himself, with a meaty M-40 pulse rifle and two hand-pistols stuffed in his belt. The rearguard was big Henry, never mind that Clyde had wanted to do it. Clyde was behind Lena. Would they think their captain was chicken, to put LaMay in front instead of doing that duty himself, and to protect Clyde with a passenger? Explaining would seem petty in itself. He had to stay alive, he or Clyde. They were the only ones who knew the complex shutdown codes that would disable the autopilot and turn off the beacons. To turn off a ship’s beacons was tantamount to sitting down in a blizzard. It was suicide.
That was his plan. To cook the pig by burning the house down. He thought the others knew it, but left the blunt words unspoken.
In the middle of the short team, the woman named Lena gripped her weapon with unfamiliarity, but with zest. She was out for revenge. Grief was her shield.
Alley hoped she would get what she needed. He wanted some too. He let his mind burn with insult and rage. It helped.
“Doing a great job, Dave,” he murmured to LaMay.
Dave’s platinum hair stuck to his forehead as he glanced back and managed a sturdy half-smile. “I just want a big can of bug spray.”
“If we’re going to send a distress signal, why didn’t we do it from the engine room?” Lena asked. Her pencilled-on brows undulated.
Alley looked sideways at her, and caught the pained look on Clyde’s face. She still thought they were going for help.
“No way to do it from there,” Alley said, preserving her hope.
He was halfway telling the truth. Only from two stations—the pilot house and the captain’s quarters—could the ship’s complex engine system and beacon broadcast be shut down, and only by an officer, which meant him or Clyde. They were each other’s failsafes.
It was a mistake to bring him. I should’ve put him in charge of the survivors.
“Keep going,” he said, to bury his thought. There was no correcting the error now.
Dave LaMay moved out again, heading aft in the ship. They were under the flank bay where Jonsy had loaded the blue container, heading back along the arteries of access that weren’t really corridors, but work tunnels. They were uninviting utilitarian crawlspaces and tool alleys, veined with open cables, tubes, wires, hotboxes, and direct electrical accesses, each one loaded with storage places for the equipment required to maintain them.
Their target was the pilothouse. Alley calculated the odds that any of those attacking creatures would be in this particular crawlspace, but that didn’t work. The answers were too random to calculate. Keith and Gunny had inadvertently released either seven or eight proto-morphs. He’d set the alarms off to warn everyone, but the half-hour they’d eaten up trying to iron out the truth, research the threat, and make a plan had been used by the proto-morphs to… morph. Through some unrevealed wonder of growth hormones or other natural magic, the little alien embryos didn’t stay little for very long. They acquired lots of mass, seemingly out of thin air, and within hours became full-grown killers. The innocent crew and passengers of the Virginia were suddenly caught on a slaughter field.
The tunnel was its own kind of horror. He and LaMay had been here a thousand times in their years together, and Clyde had done a good job of making his life here a crash course in learning the systems in the short time he had been first mate. Alley felt bad for both of them. LaMay was studying for his captain’s license, but hadn’t held the right tickets for chief mate on a ship of this configuration, or Alley would just have promoted him to the post. To fill the gap for this voyage he had called on Clyde, a dependable friend from his former ship, and now here they were. Dave had taken it sportingly, just as he was now bravely leading the way along the sausage-shaped tunnel.
I should’ve left one of them behind, with the passengers. I should’ve left Clyde. That was a screw-up. We can’t afford any more screw-ups.
The silence again… Alley wanted to shout it away. The ordinary hum of engineering and life-support systems was today a terrible drone, and seemed distant. There was no scratching of claws or hiss of animal noise. There was only the soundlessness of being stalked. Nothing was as silent as a predator on the prowl. Or lying in wait.
Was that it? Would they simply walk into a trap?
What choice was there but to make that bet?
He pushed his thoughts away and put his hand on Dave’s shoulder, the other holding his own Old Reliable, a vintage MacGregor Firebolt that spat flame grenades.
“Where’d you get that old thing, Captain?” Clyde asked, as if reading his mind. Perhaps he saw the way Alley held the weapon to his chest, how comfortable he was with it.
“I grew up with this Firebolt,” Alley quietly said. “Used to light up targets of straw in my Grandpa Breakspeare’s backyard near Baltimore. When the police came because of the noise and flames, Grandpa took out a special permit and spent some serious dough setting up a safe shooting range for neighborhood kids. Three of them grew up to be cops, and two to be Colonial Marines.”
“Wish they were here,” Lena uttered.
“Yeah, me too.”
Dave crunched over a spark tarp left on the floor to protect a circuit in need of repair. He glanced back. “Breakspeare?”
Alley’s lips twisted into a little grin. “Family name.”
“God, I wish I’d known that a year ago.”
“Why?”
“I lost a year of ribbing you over it. Breakspeare… creator of Momeo and Vuliet.”
“Nick!” Clyde’s abrupt call snapped them back to reality. “Henry is gone!”
They twisted around. He realized what an error it had been to drop their guard even for a moment. Who could tell—maybe the enemy could smell levels of tension and knew when to strike! Anything was possible at this point.
“He was right behind me!” Clyde whispered frantically.
“Move!” Alley shoved Lena past him to LaMay and brandished his Firebolt back the way they had just come. As Clyde came to his side and formed up with him, he raised his voice just enough. “Henry! Speak up!”
“No—oh, no!” Lena choked.
“Henry!” Alley raised his voice another notch.
“Do we go back for him?” Dave asked, as if anybody had the answer.
“Yes!” Lena gasped. “He has six children! Captain, please—”
“Shut up!” Dave warned, and pulled her behind him.
Alley motioned them to stay where they were. He moved toward the empty spot where Henry had been.
He brought his weapon to his shoulder. His finger on the trigger made a faint squish with sweat as he sighted down the wide blue-gray barrel. The weapon began to warm itself, feeling the pressure against his shoulder, getting ready to shoot its fire bombs. He had always loved the old MacGregor because it could anticipate being fired. It seemed a little bit alive, a little smart.
“Henry, last chance!” he called.
His heart almost stopped when Henry stepped out from a slot in the tunnel wall that Alley thought had been sealed up months ago.
Lena shrieked at the appearance, then gasped, “Oh, thank God!”
“Sorry,” Henry said, his face rosy with embarrassment. “I had to… I really had to… go.”
“Christ!” Alley blurted. He lowered his weapon. “All you had to do was say so!”
“I’m sorry.” The big man shrugged and closed his pants, then picked up his weapon from where he’d left it leaning against the wall. “When nature calls… it gets what it wants.”
In the history of famous last lines, Henry would now have his own place of honor. The sheetboard above him peeled back like the skin of a fruit, and suddenly all they saw was his thick legs wagging. And they he
ard his screams.
Clyde opened fire instantly, having never lowered his weapon, but Alley held back, knowing his fire bombs would murder Henry first. “Move! Move!” he shouted at LaMay and Lena. He plunged forward and grabbed one of Henry’s ankles, then threw his weight back. “Clyde, shoot, shoot!”
But Clyde was already shooting up into the new hole. The squawl of a xenomorph blared at them, hurting their ears, and Alley saw the snakelike gray trunk of a tail dip down for just a moment, coil around Henry’s torso, and tighten its grip as it retracted into the hole, taking Henry with it.
Alley hauled hard on the one ankle, as hard as he could with no real purchase, using only his own weight. “Shoot! Shoot!” he kept calling.
LaMay plunged toward them, gritted his bright teeth, aimed upward, and rattled off burst after burst.
Above them, something cracked. The noise was sharp and loud, like cured plastic snapping.
Alley fell backward and slammed into the side of the tunnel. Clyde jumped away, taking Dave with him, as a shower of green sluice splashed down, draining over Henry’s lower body, burning his clothing to rags. Acid!
Alley shouted, “Get back!”
He slammed his Firebolt into Clyde’s chest and lashed out with his left arm—only now realizing that he hadn’t let go of Henry’s ankle. He still had it. The detached leg of the big man swung in his grip like a club and swatted Lena in the face. The woman gasped and disappeared from Alley’s line of sight.
Alley let out a yelp and dropped the leg. Clyde was screaming—burned in the neck by acid. Dave dragged him back as the acid shower turned first to a mixture, and then to pure red blood as Henry’s huge body was dissolved.