by Diane Carey
“If we unshackle him, he’ll feed us to them. Look at his eyes.” Adam’s warning came from where he was pressed back against the refrigerator, both his hands palm-flat on the cool door behind him. Sprayed with blood and panting like a racehorse, he still kept some kind of cool despite all this. “How do we fight them?” he asked.
“Fight them?” Chris blurted. “We don’t fight them! We hide or something!”
“Or we escape the ship!” Leigh gasped, sucking each breath. “The life craft!”
“Do you want to go back out there?” Dylan countered. He shook his head wildly. “I’m not going! Not me!”
“Walk through the whole ship to the pods?” Chris echoed.
“Not me,” Stewart mumbled, “not me, no way, not me, not me…”
“You can’t hide from them,” Pangborn said. “They’ve broken through every barrier ever put in front of them. You can’t camouflage against them. They already know we’re here. They sense body heat and movement. We’re the only warm bodies aboard. No matter how smart you think you are, you can’t turn into reptiles and you can’t hold still enough. You have to unlock me right now. I have to fortify this ship. I’m the only one who knows how. I can save all your lives.”
“He’s not interested in our lives,” Adam warned. “He’s out for himself.”
“Stop it, Adam,” Ned said. “Hold your luff.”
“My luff?” For the first time, a tint of anger colored Adam’s tone.
The captain maintained his dignified sangfroid. “If any of those people are still alive, they’re well-armed and trained in the use of their weapons. We need to find them and put up a united front.”
“You mean you’ll unite with them,” Adam said. “What does that mean you’ll do with us?”
“With you? I haven’t decided. These other kids haven’t done anything. They’re innocent. You’re the one who took this upon yourself. All of you others, you’re not in mutiny… not yet. Not if you untie me and let me get about my business of defending my ship. What do you say, ah… sport?”
He held his shackled hands out to Stewart.
Stewart, ever complacent and cooperative, was clearly drawn to do as the authority told him.
“Stewart,” Adam broke in, using a special tone, “he’s stirring up trouble among us. A good leader doesn’t do that. He doesn’t even know your name.”
Pangborn let his hands drop. “You’re a piece of work, boy.”
“If there are armed people still alive,” Dylan quietly uttered, “then they’ll be on our side against those things.”
“Or they’ll be on his side against us,” Adam countered.
Chris spat, “That’s crazy!”
“No,” Ned said, “it’s not. Think about it… why would we have not heard of these people until now?”
Mary held out a hand. “Do we know everything?”
He ignored her. “Leigh, there was no itinerary for this meeting with this other ship that had no name?”
Leigh nodded her head, with a loosened cornrow starting to unbraid right over her eyes. “True… Dustin was teaching me the nav computer and the rendezvous with Virginia was on it, but nothing else. They’re coming from down there.” She pointed with the confidence of accuracy at the deck and a few degrees to her side.
“How do you know that?” Ned asked.
“I can see space in my mind, in three dimensions, as deep as astronomy has mapped it. If I know the relative attitude of the ship, I’ll know where everything else is.”
“Really…” He moved toward her. “Where’s Earth?”
“There.” She pointed backward, and slightly up, as if her finger could extend through the ship, through space, past every spatial body in the way, through every cloud and nebula, through all the stellar dust, to the one planet to which they were eternally tied.
“Zone Emerald.”
“There.” She pointed up in front of her, at the ship’s chronometer embedded in the wall.
“Alpha Negris,” Dylan challenged.
She pointed over Ned’s shoulder. “I’m never wrong,” she said without a bit of arrogance. “They’ve tested me. I just look at a topographical design and I’m all set. They put me upside down in a deep diving bell and I still knew where every city and navigational marker was on the whole ocean around me. I knew the underwater rock formations and the trenches and everything. They put me in the Andes and I guided them out without a map. I’ve known the universe since I was twelve.”
“Is that the truth…”
“The ship?”
“Yes.” She said it in a way that made Ned understand that she could go through this ship as accurately as a rat who had been living here all its life. She knew every conduit and duct, every ladder and crawlspace, because she had simply looked at the design diagrams on the computer.
“Say so…” he murmured in admiration.
Adam, tired of the brain tour, held out an accusing hand at the captain. “Haven’t you figured out what the smugglers were here to ‘pick up’? Those things are here because of him. This is his little extra ‘delivery.’”
“What’s that mean?” Stewart asked.
“It means hired guns,” Adam said. “Mercenaries. Killers.”
Ned buried a shudder and took a leap. “Means smuggling.”
Dan appeared in the middle of the argument. “Smuggling what?” When Ned and Adam simply glared at him, he came to his own conclusion. “Aww—aw! Those things? We’re on a bloody ship smuggling bloody space wasps? Aw!”
He whirled without destination.
On the floor under the counter, Dylan banged his head against the metal counter. “We’re in such trouble…”
“Is that true?” Mary gagged. She looked at Pangborn. “Did you know they were here?” She began sobbing again. Her face dropped between her knees, showing only the blood-crusted blond hair at the top of her head.
“Adam—” Ned turned to him squarely. “Tell me again that we can’t wake up Dana. We need to wake her up so she can make the decision.”
“She’d be with us!” Stewart said. “He pushed her around more than anybody else!”
“But she’s an officer,” Dan protested. “She’s sworn to chain of command.”
Chris shook his head. “How does that change when we tell her about those things and those people?”
“Maybe she knew!” Mary raised her head, wide-eyed. “Maybe she was with him all the time!”
“You don’t need any other adults,” Pangborn said. “You only need me. It’s time to let your captain take over.”
Adam rolled his wavy head toward Ned. “If you wake her up early, you could kill her.”
“How long does your hibernation last?” Ned pressed on.
“Different for each person. Body mass, metabolic rate—”
“There’s no way to reverse it or cure it… accelerate it?”
Adam paused to think. “I… don’t know.”
“Sure you don’t!” Leigh bitterly accused. “Gosh, there’s a shock! Something he doesn’t know!”
“It’s not approved yet,” Adam told her.
“Perfect! You fed narcotics to the people taking care of us and you don’t even know whether it’ll ever be approved for human consumption?” She stood up abruptly, whirled on him, and with her short powerful body kicked him in the shin.
“Hey!” Adam crumpled in pain. “Why do you need somebody else to make a—”
“Because this isn’t our ship!” Ned erupted. “It’s not our call! We haven’t the authority or the… the training… or any experience!”
“Look, Mank, I know you came here with no talents, but don’t lump the rest of us—”
Ned drew a sharp breath in frustration. “Must you be so against the throw? Always putting a poor mouth on things!”
“Arrogant!” Leigh shouted. “Ned’s right, Adam! Your talents, my talents—what good are they now? Against those — those hornets!”
“Hello?” A timid voice came o
ut of a cabinet and nearly set the group to quaking.
“Oh, God!” Leigh bolted out of the way, shocked.
They froze as the cabinet door opened. Crammed into a pantry, out peeked the cook’s funny face, capped with a soup pot on his head.
“Spiderlegs!” Mary gasped. “You’re all right!”
Along with Chris and Dylan, she pulled him out of his hiding place. He elbowed his way out, because his hands were occupied. In one he held a huge rendering cleaver, the old-fashioned kind that Ned had seen used to butcher deer, and in the other he held a canister clearly marked “BAKING SODA.” The round little man blinked his black-dot eyes at them. “This is terrible, just terrible! I saw ’em. Did you see ’em? They dint see me, but I saw dem! They got acid inside dem! Like real stomach acid, like the bad kind of stuff, eats through everything! Did you see ’em?”
“We saw ’em,” Adam mumbled. He seemed annoyed that the disturbance was only the cook and not something more important.
Spiderlegs trundled around the galley, holding his cleaver and his baking soda can, agitated and waiting to be told what to do. “Good kids, good kids, don’t worry… captain’s here… Captain, you here?”
“I’m here,” Pangborn said.
Spiderlegs looked at the manacles. “Playing a game?”
“Yes,” the captain enticed. “It’s a game. We’re trying to see who can unlock these shackles.”
“Oooh! I could try!”
“Yes, you could.”
“Not yet,” Adam broke in. “It’s not your turn.”
Spiderlegs wasn’t exactly happy, not being childlike enough to forget what he had seen, but he was agreeable. “Oh, okay… Whose turn is it?”
Realizing this could be an unknown factor in the captain’s play for power, Ned stepped between Adam and the cook. “We’re still deciding. Do you have any snacks for us?”
“Um, sure… what’s your name again?”
“Ned Menzie.”
“I’m so bad wid names! I’m so dumb!”
“You’re not at all. It’s just a funny name.”
“Nedmenzie, Nedmenzie… Uh, sure, I got graham crackers and I got some fruit and I got some plum preserves. Maybe I got wheat bread…”
Ned took the moment to rub his arms. He’d taken a sudden chill out of nowhere, even after the running and the rush of his blood through his veins. He knew the creeping cold was pure fear and couldn’t banish it. He thought himself a perfect coward to be so craven and shuddering. Yet, what more could be asked? They had been pitched into a pot with their tormentors, and now the tormentors ran the show.
What could be done? How could such a pestilence be fought?
He heard then a tiny noise, a small whimper as thin and different to this place as the call of a curlew way on a hill. It cut through his foul thoughts and brought him back to himself. Where was Robin? Somehow he knew to look for her.
She was there, in the corner by the ovens. Perhaps there was residual warmth from the last meal.
“Robin?” He moved toward her.
She was softly sniffling, huddled about herself with her back to him, her legs bent under her and off to the side, as if she were one of the mermaids holding the bell. The little mermaid on the rock at the water’s edge.
He came slowly around her, kneeling as he moved, thinking to comfort her with empty hopes and reassurances he couldn’t support. Would he be able to protect her from the fear? And from the coming struggle and its dim end?
But another sound startled him and he flinched and blinked. A tiny, breathy sound, like a newborn lamb. Imagine his surprise, his amazement, to find his sister holding not a lamb, but a tiny bloody baby.
A human baby, meek and sweet, sucking on its nut-sized fist. Its umbilical cord was still attached, torn half-way down into blue shreds and the remnants of the amniotic sac still entangling the little bunched-up legs. He had seen it a thousand times—on farm animals.
“Souls… what am I seeing… ?”
Robin’s gentle eyes turned up to meet his, soggy with tears and heavy with their new burden.
“They struck her about the throat… she tried to protect herself, but they ripped her open like a spit… all of a slap she was almost in half… and they threw the poor wee thing. They just lashed him out… it was terrible in this world to see…”
Ned’s soft murmur rang in his own ears. “Oh, my soul… a changeling.”
He stared at the moist wiggle, and watched his innocent sister grow a decade older before his eyes.
Soon he sensed other presences, and noted that the cadets had begun to gather around them, to bunch around and look at the unexpected and bizarre miracle in Robin’s arms. With the wonderment immediately came the realization that they had another very big, very small problem.
And over there, the captain shook his head and seemed troubled for his own reasons.
Ned put his hand on Robin’s shoulder and gazed down in abject wonder at the child who seemed so peaceful in his sister’s arms. It was a little boy, growing more rosy and pleasant by the second. He had lovely black curls and might have been of some darker race. Ned couldn’t tell.
A handsome child, conceived in the velvet folds of space, born of the ship of dread.
16
“Jee-ach… that was mortal…”
Exhausted, Ned slipped back to sit on one of the little stools. He fought valiantly to digest everything that had transpired in the last few minutes, for the universe had turned on its side. Everything that could change somehow had changed. There had been confusion, mutiny, invasion, death, and birth. Shakespeare, move aside, for we are here.
“You know what this is?” he muttered. “This is a teen slasher flick. I’ll go to the attic, you go to the basement, and you girls strip down to your underwear.”
Leigh pressed her hot face with her hands, but she was miserably laughing behind them. Dan shook his head and Chris dissolved into a mix of chuckles and trembling sighs. Mary’s eyes were ringed with red, but she gazed at him and swallowed away her sobs.
Dylan, hunkered under the counter, reached up and slapped Ned a low-five.
Adam looked at Ned as if the words were a marvel in the wilderness. Somehow Ned had taken them to the next plateau, beyond initial shock, and to something else, a new stage of realization and grappling, to a point where they began to think about what to do, not what had been done. Ned had seen in his life many animals frightened nigh to their own deaths, only to suddenly move past their fright, rather to die in the grapple than to submit. Humans too. In all of history the story was told again and again of overcoming and rebounding. Could they rebound? Or were they trapped in a bottle dungeon with no rope?
“It’s a medieval passion play,” Adam contributed, “complete with dragons.” He paused, looked at Pangborn, and added, “And ogres.”
Ned almost said something to Adam, almost spoke, parted his lips to begin to speak. Instead, he pushed off his stool and paced, trying to keep things moving. “How can we fight them?”
“We can’t,” Leigh deduced wisely. “We can’t. No way. We can’t fight. Not those things.”
“Nothing can fight those things!” Stewart gulped.
“Nothing can fight them,” Pangborn echoed.
From where she stood with her miscreant frame braced against a vegetable crisper with both hands on the handle, Pearl said, “I hear a noise.”
Leigh, her superior mind absorbing all the facts and dynamics and everything she had heard, glared at Pangborn. “How could you do this?”
“It was just a matter of shifting containers,” he said. “Just a business deal. I don’t pass judgments on what I ship. That’s for the authorities and the politicians and the priests. The xenomorphs were supposed to be embryos in cryo-stasis. Completely non-animate. There was no danger at all. Somebody must’ve opened the container.”
“Didn’t you factor in that possibility?”
“We never open containers. Why would we?”
“Poin
tless conversation,” Adam commented. “It’s done.”
“Aye, it’s done,” Ned said. “The sun’s gone down on it and we have to think what our options are. How many dragons are here? Can we track them?”
“There’s a funny noise,” Pearl insisted.
Dan spoke at almost the same time, bowling over her attempt. “You mean to fight ’em?”
“Every living thing must fight for its own life,” Ned told him. “We can’t live for each other nor can we die for each other. But together, we can fight full fetch.”
He paced to the freezer and back.
“They’re animals… nothing more. Fancy ones, aye, but animals nonetheless.” He turned to Captain Pangborn, to the man he truly did not know whether or not to trust for anything—for help, or for answers. “Can we track them? Have they ever been tracked before? How can we count them? How can we know what we’re up against?”
Pangborn sniffed and gazed at him. Would he answer?
He then swallowed as if he’d just taken a drink, and relented. “The ship is rigged with motion sensors. They’re top-of-the-line. Brand new. They’re a safety feature to find injured crewmen or… illegal boarders.”
“That’s smashing!” Dan cheered. “We’ve got something!”
Glimmers of hope shined in many eyes.
“I hear a noise.”
“And how do they track us?” Ned persisted. “Has anyone ever known?”
“They got no eyes!” Spiderlegs declared. “Nothing up there… nothing! I din see no eyes at all!”
“Does that mean they’re just big insects, working on sensors?” Leigh contributed.
“Why don’t we have these on Earth?” Ned asked, but he was only thinking aloud. “Why aren’t there giant insects on Earth?”
“Because of the gravity,” Adam said. “Nature decided a long time ago how big things could be. Giant bugs would be crushed by gravity. They’re not built for it.”
“Big help,” Chris grumbled. “It’s not like we can use that…”