by Diane Carey
His CANC partners had promised that his part in their plan would be concealed, when the time came.
Cruz lowered himself into the mist, to stand close beside the leathery sacs…
And Cruz reached out, his hand breaking the mist, his fingers prodding curiously at the membrane, the veined, living membrane…
Which suddenly split wide, opened up, and spat something at his face.
5
“Captain,” Beresford said, “I’m getting a garbled call from Rondell and Reynolds… I can’t make it out… But she definitely sounds upset by something. Only I don’t get what happened.”
“Is it a serious problem?” Corgan asked, looking up reluctantly from the opened panel under the controls that he was examining with Ashley. He felt he was close to understanding the control panel system—it was something not far from fiberoptics, but there were clusters of crystals here, like small versions of the ones they’d seen in the other chamber, that puzzled him. He suspected there was a complex nanotechnology at work too in the control panels’ “keyboard.” But real comprehension of the system remained tantalizingly just out of reach. He felt that if he could just make one intuitive leap he’d get it.
Stupid, he thought. You’re only technically a scientist—
mostly you’re just a flyboy spaceship jockey with military background. Leave it to the researchers.
But he couldn’t quite take his eyes off it… it was so tantalizing…
“It’s getting to us distorted from down in that shaft, sir,” Beresford was saying, shaking his head as he tried to adjust the radio in his spacesuit, tapping the control on his wrist. “I can’t work out if it’s a mayday or what…”
“Well—take Collindale and head on down there, see if they need help.”
“Yes sir…”
“Uhhh… sir?” It was Collindale.
“Yeah?”
“I found something—at the other end of the platform. By that other chair, there. A… hole in the platform deck, big enough to put your fist through. I mean—not an artificial hole. It’s like it was burned there, burned right through. My scanner picked up traces of acid on the hole. An unknown acid, Captain. The stuff went down through the platform, through the deck below it—looks like a long time ago.”
“Really. An acid… I’ll have a look in a minute. For now, go with Berry, find out what’s going on down in that shaft.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Corgan was reluctant to leave the control panel just now. And maybe he was reluctant to leave a chance to work so closely, almost intimately, with Ashley, who was very nearly snuggled against him as they looked at the panel—which had opened at the touch of a finger.
But in the back of his mind, as Beresford and Collindale rode their diamond-flyers down to the floor and to the shaft in the next room, Corgan began to suspect he’d just made a mistake.
* * *
Even before he got to the bottom of the shaft, Beresford could hear Dorea Rondell arguing with Reynolds about what to do with Cruz—something about “Cruz’s face.”
What did they mean? he wondered, as he and Collindale ducked into the axle passage. Then they saw the creatures, reminding Beresford of giant leathery barnacles that seemed to be growing right out of the floor, blanketed by that peculiar mist. And Beresford sucked in his breath in sick horror when he saw the other thing clamped to the supine Cruz’s face.
Cruz was lying on his back, motionless, on the floor of the tunnel just out of the mist generated by the egg sac things. Dorea and Reynolds were crouched beside him, awkward on the curved deck, beside the big humming pipe.
At first the hideous thing on Cruz’s face looked to Beresford like an enormous skeletal hand, utterly fleshless and cut from the wrist; a hand of bone that had clamped with brutal fatality onto Cruz’s face, smothering his nose and mouth, the bony, jointed yellow “fingers” wrapped tightly around his head. But when Beresford drifted closer, hunched in the low ceiling on his flyer, Collindale beside him, he saw that the hand-like creature on Cruz’s face had eight “fingers”—and the fingers were really long legs, like the legs of a crab or a huge spider; he saw its flattened, rounded abdomen, like a spider’s belly, an abbreviated thorax, but no visible mouth parts. And growing from the bottom of its abdomen was a tail, a prehensile bony tail like a spine torn loose from a vertebrate and made to irrationally emerge from an arthropod, but looped nooselike several times around Cruz’s throat. Tight enough to strangle him.
“What the fuck is that thing?” Collindale muttered.
“And what the fuck are those things?” Beresford added, nodding toward the leathery egg sacs in the mist under the big cylinder.
“That thing on Cruz came out of one of those things— that open one over there,” Dorea said, her voice hoarse with fear. “And… we figure they’re something like eggs. And there’s more of those things in ’em so don’t get close to ’em. Cruz poked at one. He got up real close and he…” Her lips trembled. “And then it… just whipped out, so fast, we couldn’t…we couldn’t help…”
“But—what the hell kind of creature is it?” Collindale persisted. “The thing on his face.”
“I suspect it may be an arthropod of some kind—at least at this stage,” Reynolds said, hunched over Cruz, examining the creature with a small scanner. “It may possibly… well, it’s too soon to say for sure. We need a full-body internal scan…”
“We need to pry that fucking thing off him!” Dorea insisted. “He can’t fucking breathe!”
“He is getting air somehow—he has a pulse,” Reynolds said, with that sneering dismissal that he fell back on so much. “You aren’t dead if you have a pulse, last I heard. And you can’t live without air, I believe. Ergo, he is getting air. He’s quite unconscious, however.”
“Did you try prying it off?” Beresford asked. God, but his mouth had gone dry. He could almost feel the thing on his own face, just looking at it on Cruz. He could imagine that thing leaping up, attaching itself, gripping. Blocking out all sight, all breath with its foul alien body. He had a horror of lice and ticks and spiders… and that thing was, in a way, all of those and worse…
“We tried once to pry it off,” Dorea said. “Or I did anyway. Reynolds was too fascinated…” she said, putting a freight-load of disgust into the word, “. . . to help much. When I pulled at it, it tightened its grip even more.”
“So that thing,” Collindale said, shaking his head slowly, “is the first alien contact we have? That thing?”
“I suspect it may be a nascent form,” Reynolds said. “An early stage in the organism’s life cycle.”
“We have to try again to pull it off,” Dorea said. “Or… or cut it off somehow. We can’t leave it on him!”
“I absolutely forbid it,” said Reynolds. “And when it comes to alien life forms, I have authority. It must go back to the ship.”
“Back to the ship?” Beresford said. “What about a goddamn quarantine! There’s a small emergency scanner in the landers. We can examine him there! But not on the Hornblower!”
“It’s up to the captain,” Collindale put in, “alien life form authority or not, Reynolds.”
Reynolds’s mouth twisted with contempt but he said nothing—instead he tapped the jointed, prehensile tail of the creature with his scanning pen. The tail tightened yet more in response, further reddening Cruz’s neck.
“Don’t touch it!” Beresford said, disgusted. “You made it move! You made it—it’s still moving! It’s gonna jump on one of us—!”
He backed away from it, feeling his skin crawl…
“Beresford!” Dorea said, turning to him suddenly. “Careful—those egg things are right behind you, don’t—!”
But when she said that he remembered that the thing on Cruz had come from the egg sacs and he turned in panic; the quick motion in the low gravity, when he was already off balance, making him fall face down into the acrid-smelling mist, and right on top of three of the egg sacs…
But it was the one right in front of him that was opening up.
The egg sac was only a dozen centimeters from his face—and the lips on its top were spreading wide, and something was climbing out of it, scuttling into view, turning his way, poising to leap at his face…
He screamed and struggled to get up but couldn’t get his feet under him and he felt another egg sac opening under him, something walking up onto his body from there, climbing onto him with its eight bony legs, like a giant spider working its way up his body.
He shrieked and flailed, and felt someone grab his ankles, pulling him backward.
“I got you, Berry!” Collindale was shouting.
But then the one right in front of his face was leaping, was a flurry in front of him. He caught a flickering glimpse of a wet opening on the underside of its abdomen, opening to release a fleshy, moist, barbed probe—and then it blackened the world with its body, blotting out his eyesight, clamping his head, hugging his face with obscene intimacy, and everything went dark as he struggled to scream but he couldn’t because of the thing it was jamming into his throat, the thing it was forcing down his esophagus: a fiery intrusive agony as it jammed itself down into him, into his windpipe, into his lungs… The pain was beyond any he’d ever felt, but worse was the feeling of violation, mixed with a rising despair, even as he clawed at it… and felt it utterly immovable. A part of him now.
It seemed to go on and on. But then a soothing warmth spread out from his lungs, bringing with it a pregnant darkness.
The last thing he heard before he lost consciousness completely was Collindale screaming. “Get it off, get it off, get it off me, it’s climbing up me, the fucking thing is climbing up my…”
And then a gagging sound, and nothing more. Just the warm darkness that went on and on.
* * *
“Three of them down?” Corgan asked, though he’d heard Dorea clearly enough. She and Reynolds had managed to get the fallen crew members onto their flyers and up the shaft, though it had been awkward going. “Collindale, Cruz, and Beresford—all of them down?”
“That’s affirmative,” she answered, and even over the radio, transmitted from Room Two—the room with the vertical pipes—he could tell she was trying not to cry. “They’re still… we think they’re alive. Reynolds says they are. But I’m not sure.”
“Okay, keep your cool, Dorea,” he said. “I’ll uh—we’ll come to you. Just stay there.”
Just a few minutes later, Corgan and Ashley were standing beside the open shaft in the floor of Room Two, staring in shock at the three alien-gripped bodies of Beresford, Collindale, and Cruz.
Dorea, looking dull-eyed and pale now, told him the story.
When she’d finished, he cleared his throat and asked, “You tried to… to pull those things off them?”
She held up a gripping tool she’d taken from her belt pack—the metal end was melted away, as if it’d been wax held to a flame. “You try hard enough, they break—and acid comes out. And you can see how strong the stuff is…”
“Astounding—admirable, really,” Reynolds put in, abstractedly, rocking on his heels like a small boy waiting for an amusement park ride. “A protective acid that will burn through steel—yet it doesn’t harm the organism. Something like certain jellyfish—like the sea wasp. Obviously there’s a neutralizing agent in its own celluar makeup—it would be interesting to locate it, could have applications in…”
His voice trailed off as he sensed, obscurely, that he’d offended the others. Reynolds, being Reynolds, wouldn’t realize, Corgan supposed, how they would be offended by his light-hearted attitude at a time when three crewmembers were in mortal danger. Perhaps already doomed.
“And look at Cruz’s face,” Dorea went on. “When I tried to pull it off him the acid burned it down to the bone on the right side—lost most of an ear. The acid was dripping downward toward the deck… or it probably would’ve gone right through his skull into his brain. But he didn’t react, much. If he’s alive he’s out cold… I really screwed up…”
“I did try and tell you not to do it,” Reynolds sniffed.
“She only did what I’d have done,” Corgan said, squatting to try and see what the organisms were doing, where their undersides met Collindale’s face. It was pushed so close that the flesh was bruisingly pressed out under it; there was no telling what was going on under there. His stomach lurched, trying to imagine it. “Dorea— acid dripped down you said… through the deck?”
“It burned into it but not too far—it was only a drop! Just a little drop did all that damage to him.”
“Your suit cameras were going—so there’ll be some footage of all this. We can slow it down and try and figure it out. But the main thing is to remove these fucking things somehow. Safely—without the acid leak.”
He stood up, frowning. “Ashley—Collindale said something about acid up at the ship’s bridge?”
She nodded numbly. “Traces of it—where something had burned through the deck up there too. It figures—there must’ve been a serious infestation of these things. They shot at one, with something—and when you break them open…”
“Yeah—and if it burns through the deck,” he mused, “maybe it’ll breach the hull, if you do it too close to the outside of a ship. And then we’re all screwed. So nobody mess with those things till we figure it out. Could be we can find something to kill them. A poison or something. They die, maybe they release their grip. Let’s take these three up to the ship—”
“Um—Captain? There are quarantine rules,” Dorea pointed out.
“I know. It’s a risk. But—that’s three crew members. We can’t just… abandon them. And we can’t help them here. It’s a decision I’m making alone—I’m taking responsibility for it.”
“The captain’s right,” said Reynolds, seeming obscurely pleased.
It made Corgan nervous to have Reynolds agree with him.
It was easy enough to get the three stricken crew members to the airlock. But once outside the alien craft the diamond-flyers, apparently powered by something inside the ship, refused to work. They couldn’t easily carry the three fallen crewmen up the quasi-steps they’d taken down the incline of the “navel.”
Once more wearing his helmet, standing in the vacuum of space outside the newly sealed airlock of the alien craft, Corgan called up to O’Neil.
“Goddamn, I’m glad to hear from you guys,” came O’Neil’s crackling reply. “Nate was about to send me in there to look for you…”
“You’re going to have to hover the lander above us, and lower a personnel loop, O’Neil,” Corgan told him. “If you need help ask Buxton to come out and give you a hand.”
“I can handle that… Someone hurt?”
“Three crew men down. No questions. Just do it.”
It took a while. When they finally got back in the Hornblower, Corgan felt an enormous sense of relief. He was on familiar ground—and now he could do something about the parasites that had fixed themselves to Cruz and the others…
He was sure he could deal with it once he had the things isolated in the infirmary. Hell… what else could happen?
6
“Oh fuck, I think I’m gonna be sick,” Bayfield muttered, staring at the internal scan on the infirmary’s monitor screen.
“If you’re drunk again,” Corgan began. “I’ll lock your ass in a storage room…”
“It ain’t that,” Bayfield said. He pointed at the screen. “It’s that! It’s… stuck something down inside Cruz, man! Cruz was a good guy and now he’s got that thing eatin’ his guts!”
“It’s doing nothing of the sort!” Reynolds sneered. “It’s merely inserted an ovipositor in his mouth, and down to his lungs—it’s feeding him oxygen. And… doing something else. It’s difficult to make out. There appears to be a growth of some kind… It’s interesting, really—the strangulation when it first takes over isn’t just a control mechanism. It forces him to gasp for oxygen—opens his mouth, his throat wide,
betters access to his lungs. Gives it entre, as it were.”
“Oooh,” Bayfield said, turning a glare to Reynolds, “gives it fucking ‘on-tray’ as it were! You fucking asshole—”
“Bayfield,” Corgan said. “Get back to work. Cruz was your friend, I said you could check it out, you’ve done it, now go.”
“Yeah, whatever.” Bayfield shuffled off. “I need a goddamn…” He glanced back at Corgan. “Cup of coffee.”
Julie Murteno, their nurse and life-support specialist— the ship’s “doctor” was robotic—came back into the observation room from the airtight chamber on the other side of the quarantine glass, where she’d been operating the scanner. They all called her Nurse Julie. She was a small, bright, normally cheerful Filipino woman in a white cover-all uniform, but today she looked as if someone had just slapped her in the face.
“That thing… is… not exactly a parasite,” she said. “It’s not really taking anything from him. It’s… as if it’s feeding him, in a way. It’s losing mass… into him. For what, and why—I don’t know yet. We’d have to get in there. But every time I try to do a little exploratory surgery it starts choking him… as if it’s warning me it’s going to kill him if I go on…” She chewed her lower lip. Made a gesture of helplessness. “I’m out of my depth…”
“Interesting—it’s adding, not subtracting,” Reynolds muttered. “Oh dear.”
Corgan looked at him. “What?”
“I… am not sure. I can’t speculate as yet. I’ve got a great many tests to run.”
Corgan stared—and was on the point of pressing him when Nate called from the Hornblower’s bridge. Corgan turned to look at Nate’s image on the comm panel. “Captain? We’re in position and ready to transmit the discovery to UNIC Central… You want to give it the personal touch?”