by Diane Carey
“That sucks,” Collindale said. “Makes me feel like… a thing, myself. Like I’m the fucking alien here.”
“I know. I’m sorry. But it’s not for long, Horus. Procedure. I shouldn’t have brought you back to the ship, really, if I was going to be a stickler. But at least we’re gonna have a period of quarantine. Make it as sure as we can.” He turned away from the scowling Collindale to Nurse Julie. “Where’s the… the things?”
“Reynolds has got them in quarantine. Trying to dissect them without getting acid on himself.”
“He’s what? He’s cutting them open? If it gets on the deck…”
Corgan strode into the quarantine. “Reynolds!”
Eyes red, hair mussed, the exobiologist looked up, glaring, from an electron microscope, looking like he hadn’t slept at all. “What is it? I’m busy, Captain!”
“You’re not trying to cut into those things?”
“No. No I’m using energy probes.”
Something was bothering Corgan but he was almost reluctant to ask about it. He was afraid of the answer. He asked anyway. He was captain—he had to know. “Listen…” He glanced at the window, saw the others were occupied talking, drinking the nutrition shakes Julie was handing out. “… Those recordings on the ship, Reynolds. We didn’t see anything about these things… but… the color of the things. The way the… what do you call it, the exoskeleton looks. You figure they’re related, right?”
Reynolds hesitated. Then he nodded wordlessly.
“And you remember that other fucking, like, homunculus, whatever it was, that jumped out of that Giff’s chest? And then—what was the point of those things…” He looked at the dead creatures laid out on the lab table, their tonguelike ovipositors stretched out from their abdomen slits, flopped out like the “foot” of a large razor clam. They had a distinctive bivalve appearance from this angle. “… If they… if they just up and die?”
Reynolds shrugged. “Perhaps they don’t thrive on human beings. Or in our spacecraft. Atmospheric composition not exactly right. Or something.”
“Yeah. Or maybe their job was done. Maybe they implanted something.”
“It’s… possible.” Reynolds said cautiously.
Corgan closed his eyes, feeling sick at the thought. Should he tell the others about the possibility? He wished the ship had some kind of suspended animation to arrest the growth of the organism, if it was in there—but suspension was only for the interstellar trips that no one but monkeys had even taken yet. Anyway—he couldn’t be sure. He could be wrong about what was growing in Cruz and the others.
But the twisting feeling deep in his gut told him he was right.
“All right,” Corgan said. “The infected crew members will remain in quarantine, no matter what happens, until further notice…”
* * *
“You wanted me, Nate?” Corgan asked, striding briskly onto the big lander-crowded hangar deck.
Nate was leaning into the lander’s engine housing, Buxton beside him. “Just that we got those flamethrowers ready and stowed on the landers, Captain.”
Buxton, Chang, and Hesse came in, then, talking in low tones. “Hey Captain!” Hesse called out. He was a narrow-faced, saturnine man, his eyes slightly blurred by the wifi contact cusps he wore. “There’s a goddamn computer from another solar system out there and you won’t let me near it?”
“You’ll go down just as soon as Nate and Dorea and Harl here do a little job for me.”
But should the Hornblower remain in orbit around Iapetus at all? Once the egg sacs were destroyed, they should get the hell out of Dodge, shouldn’t they? They needed to move Cruz, Beresford, and Collindale to the hospital on the Mars colony, and fast. “But…” he added aloud, “it might be that you’ve gotta wait till we take Cruz and the other two to a hospital. I’m not sure they’re… safe.”
Chang shook his head. “Sorry Captain. I just came from the bridge. You got a Priority One transsy from UNIC.” He was a slight man with jet-black eyes, jet-black hair, and a perpetual, faint smile. “We’re supposed to stay right here and protect that ship, best we can. Continue research.”
Hesse grinned. “Excellent! All of a sudden I like those tightasses at UNIC!”
Corgan smiled weakly. Hesse didn’t know what he knew. And he wasn’t ready to tell anyone else yet. “Okay— I’ll deal with that. Nate, you and Harl, get it done. Fry those things. Then get back here immediately. Oh, you’d better take Dorea… she knows how to operate the flyers.”
“The what?” Chang asked.
“You haven’t seen the suit footage?” Hesse chided him. “It’s fucking amazing. Captain—you gotta let me go.”
“Later. After. You stay here and that’s an order. I’m gonna go to the bridge and review that transsy. Maybe get an update.”
He turned on his heels and walked out.
* * *
Chang looked after Corgan speculatively. He watched him step into the lift and vanish from sight. “It’s like he’s hoping he can change their minds. Once UNIC picks a course, they don’t shift. It’s surprising—you’d think he’d want to stay here. Explore the hell out of that thing. This is glory for him. This is the true big time. For all of us.”
“Did seem kind of down when he heard we were staying,” Buxton said. Harl Buxton was a genial man with a short beard, a big belly that normally would’ve gotten him selected out of the Interplanetary Corp, but he was so good at engineering he was in high demand. “Maybe he’s spooked.”
“If he is,” Nate said, “he’s got a reason. He’s no coward. I was in the UN Marines in Pakistan, after the People’s Jihad took over, there. Trying to restore order…” He bent over the engine, made a final adjustment, and closed the cowling. He stuck the tool in his coveralls, wiped his hands, and went on, “And the Jihad was executing five hundred people a day. We couldn’t get through their lines, so command called in the Orbital Marines. In those days, our man Corgan was a Marine lieutenant commanding an o-spike.”
Chang whistled. “Oh man—one of those drop vehicles, come straight down on the target from orbit? Like one in three of those guys died coming down.”
“Wasn’t that many—one in four! It was experimental. And Corgan’s o-spike crashed—right into the Pakistani Presidential palace. He got out alive and kicking, but his partner was pretty badly smashed up. Corgan had to half carry him out of there—shot his way through a couple of Jihad platoons till the other spike teams got there. I fought next to Corgan a few days later, when we took Lahore. He was young, right out of the academy—but he had good instincts. And guts—he always took point. So don’t imagine Corgan’s worried about himself—it’s our asses he’s worried about. That’s how that son of a bitch is. He’s a damned good man.”
“Jesus,” Harl Buxton said, “I had no idea. Did he win a—”
But Buxton never found out about Corgan’s medals, because Reynolds came storming onto the hangar deck then.
“What is this I hear? You’re not planning to go down to that ship without me? What is your assignment? Who is going? What is going on?”
“How many questions is that, John, five or six?” Hesse asked, as the others went to the lockers to suit up.
“Fifteen or sixteen I think,” Chang said. “Reynolds— take it easy! They’re going to burn those egg things out!”
“What?!”
“Reynolds—you see what those fucking things did to our guys? No telling if they’ve been poisoned or something. It’s going to happen whether you want it to or not. And that’s all she wrote—and last I knew you weren’t going.”
“I insist on going with you! I am the exobiologist!”
“He is The Exobiologist!” Hesse laughed. “Isn’t that, like, a supervillain on the holos?”
Reynolds stalked away, fleeing their laughter with all the dignity he could take with him.
* * *
Corgan listened to the transsy twice. The image of the officer sending the transmission, Leon Sparks, a UNIC
s Rear Admiral, came in fuzzily, a talking head that sometimes froze. But the words came through, crystal clear, spoken and printed out. The last part was especially disturbing.
“… And you are further directed to arm yourselves, as there are indications that the CANC ship believed in the vicinity is moving toward your position…”
Corgan leaned back in his seat on the bridge and grimaced. He had to get into the weapons locker, issue the rifles. Prepare for a possible invasion from the communist CANC nations.
He could disobey orders, and take his crew to safety— he’d be court martialed but he might come out of it all right when he explained.
On the other hand, they were right to order him to stay. Even if he told them what his concern was—that Cruz, Beresford, and Collindale needed a hospital and fast—they might order him to stay. There were bigger issues at stake here than the lives of three men.
If CANC got hold of the Giff ship… it could give the communists incalculable power.
It could mean the end of freedom on the planet Earth.
8
Nate and Dorea were both working hard at not seeming nervous as they descended the shaft to the axis of the Giff vessel. Buxton wasn’t even trying to seem collected. He was scared. He’d seen those things clinging to Cruz and the other two. He knew the organisms had penetrated their bodies with “ovipositors”—a kind of interspecies oral rape.
There was an odd flip-flop feeling of gravitational dislocation when they got to the bottom of the shaft— something to do with the ship’s rotation, this being the center of its mass. They stepped off the flyers onto the curved wall, finding themselves projecting at a forty-five-degree angle relative to the egg sacs, but in no danger of falling. The flyers waited, hovering over the curved deck of the circular passage, as the three crew members hunched in the confined space, confined even more than the previous team had been because of the improvised flamethrowers strapped to the backs of their spacesuits.
And they stared at the leathery growths quietly palpitating in their baby blanket of mist.
“God those things are ugly,” Buxton said softly.
“They’re sure not fucking Easter eggs,” Nate agreed, grimacing.
“Be sure you don’t get any closer to them than you absolutely have to,” Dorea said. “Just… don’t. Tell you the truth—I’m not sure Beresford and those others… are, uh, completely…”
Buxton looked at her. “What?”
“I don’t know if they’re all right. I mean—Reynolds said something that made me wonder. They might be infected in some way.”
“I thought this ship was sterile. I mean—sterilized of germs.”
“What’s sterile inside an organism? And if those things can live down here, then…”
“Hey,” Nate put in, “maybe we should have our helmets on. Maybe if you guys had your helmets on when you were here before, Dorea, they’d have kept those things off.”
“I asked Reynolds that,” Dorea said. “He says they spit acid when they want to. He thinks they’d have burned right through the helmets. But it couldn’t hurt. Anyway it’s going to be smoky in here…”
They put their helmets on, started the airflow and radio. Nate took the corrugated metal hose from the clamp on his belt, aimed it at the eggs, and reached back, found the switch.
“Careful now—be aware of where everybody is and where your flames are going!”
“Why couldn’t we have just dumped fuel on those things and tossed on a light?” Buxton asked, getting his flamethrower ready. “I mean, who knows if these units are safe? The fucking flamethrower could blow up on me, it was built from scratch…”
“You sound as whiny as O’Neil,” Dorea said. “Wait—I thought you tested these things. In fact I thought you built them?”
“I did, I was part of the team anyway. But one test doesn’t mean they’re safe.”
“Oh great!”
“I’m just saying, if we could’ve just flat-out dumped fuel on these pretty bunny eggs…”
“You wouldn’t want to get that close,” Nate said. “And we’re using fire because Reynolds thought it’d neutralize the acid. Let’s hope so—if those things start spitting acid, back off fast, get up the shaft. If it starts burning through the deck we’ll have to beat it for the Hornblower. Everybody ready? Positioned? Let’s do it!”
He flipped the switch, a gas hissed, a liquid mixed with it, a spark flicked within the mechanism, and a yellow-blue flame gushed out of the metal hose, licking three meters out.
“Whoa!” Dorea said, surprised by how far her own flame leapt out. Black smoke boiled up around the flame, as burning liquid boiled over the egg sacs, cooking the creatures within.
“This a ten-minute boiled egg or twelve?” Buxton joked nervously, playing his flame over the eggs.
“Don’t kid around!” Nate said. “Focus! Be careful!”
The long cylindrical chamber was getting dark with smoke, flames were licking up from the egg sacs, which turned brown, black, shriveling away to reveal the organisms inside.
Some of the egg sacs seemed to pop open, to shoot the burning, blackening creatures inside up like popcorn. Other alien-arthropods, awakened from their dormancy by being cooked, scuttled and clattered about, trying to escape the flames. But the three flamethrowers swept over them—over the whole extent of the infestation, Nate moving down the tunnel to get the ones further along.
“How do we know there isn’t more down this tunnel somewhere?” came Buxton’s voice, crackling in the radio over the snapping and roaring of the flames.
“We don’t,” Dorea said. “Look at those little bastards— you want to go look? Hey—feel free!”
“Hell, no!”
The arthropodic aliens ran about the curved deck in panicked confusion…
“Nate!” Dorea screamed. “One of them’s on you!”
He looked down to see it crawling up his spacesuit’s leg, working toward his helmet…
Skin prickling with alarm, Nate reached back, turned off the flame, then tried to hit the clambering eight-fingered thing with the metal hose—but it was up on his chest now and he couldn’t hit it directly at that angle. He clawed at it with his left hand but it leapt—and fastened itself on his helmet, gripping his faceplate.
He stared in horror as the wet rift on its belly opened to extrude the ovipositor, close to his eyes. He snatched at the creature with his gloved hands, tried to pry it away, but it already had stretched its fingerlike legs around his helmet, gripping the back of it, pulling itself tautly close.
And then it struck at the glass of his helmet with its ovipositor—the glass held and, frustrated, the killer alien drew back a little—and sprayed something yellowish from its fleshy probe. The thick fluid dripped down his faceplate, steaming…
Acid!
He gave a shout of fear and fury and redoubled his efforts to tear it away. The acid was burning through. He could smell the acrid fume rising from it. The ovipositor, a fleshy yellow probe, was pushing through the hole burned in the glass… trying to get at his mouth.
And then he felt someone twisting the catch on his helmet, heard Dorea yelling in his radio. “The switch! On your wrist control!”
He punched the release switch on his wrist in the right combination—he was very, very focused on getting it right—and the helmet unhooked from his spacesuit collar. She pulled it away exactly as the creature’s probe slammed through the glass, just missing him.
She tossed it, helmet and creature both, into the flames.
Coughing from the smoke, he turned and stumbled toward the diamond-flyers and the shaft. “Thanks…” He coughed again. “… Dorea!”
“We got them all!” Buxton said. “Let’s get outta here!”
Another sixty seconds and they were lofting up the shaft, Nate first—coughing as he went—to the upper room.
The moment the three of them were clear, Dorea used the sonic key Cruz had found to close the cover on the shaft, abruptly cutting of
f the smoke and stench rising from the burning egg sacs far below.
“Oh Jeez…” Nate said, between coughs. “That… I thought I was gonna get a…” He paused to cough, then continued, “. . . a mouth full of alien.”
“You almost got fried,” Buxton said. “I didn’t know what else to do. I was aiming my flamethrower at your helmet when she ran up to you. I thought I’d see if your suit would protect you from the flames—but Dorea had the better idea.”
“Thank God she was there. You were gonna fucking cook me in my suit, Buxton? Christ!”
“Kind of hard to think of alternatives on the spot. Let’s get O’Neil down here with another helmet for you.”
“I just hope that’s all of those goddamn things…”
* * *
Carrying the assault rifle he’d issued, Ashley looked worried when she called Corgan at the bridge. Her image appeared in the interdeck comm system’s monitor. “Collindale and the others want to know why they’re being kept under lock and key—that’s how Collindale’s putting it…”
Corgan was repositioning the Hornblower a little closer to the alien craft. They were planning another expedition— UNIC orders. Corgan had mixed feelings about the expedition. His pulse raced in excitement at the thought of entering the alien craft again—but he dreaded leaving the ship while Collindale, Cruz, and Beresford were still status unknown.
“Captain?” “Yeah?”
“There something you’re not telling us? I mean— Nurse Julie is being pretty tight-lipped… Like there’s something she’d like to tell us. And maybe someone told her not to. You know?”
“Yeah. Well. Maybe. I’m not sure those three are… out of the woods yet. And if they’re not, they could put the ship at risk.”
“You figure they’re infected with something?”
She was thinking microorganism. He let her think that—because there was no knowing for sure… Not yet. “Something like that.”
“They’re insisting on talking to you, Captain.”