by Diane Carey
She stirred in her sleep, and moaned, and then seemed to punch at the air. Her eyes still closed, she sat up—and her mouth opened in a silent scream. She covered her eyes and then bared her teeth and clawed at the air and…
And began to scream.
Corgan laid the missile launcher aside. Acting on instinct, he took her in his arms, held her as she thrashed. He whispered, “Ashley! Hey kid, wake up!”
Her eyes snapped open and she lay there a moment, lips parted, eyes wide, gasping softly. “I… oh. We’re still in that tunnel. I was dreaming we were on the Hornblower. The xenomorphs were… What, uh, are you doing… Captain?” “Yeah, Captain,” Nate chuckled. “Whatcha doing?”
“You were having a nightmare. I just…” He cleared his throat and eased her down, letting go of her. “You were, you know, yelling… I was afraid someone would hear.”
She brushed her hair back with her hands. “Yeah. I’m sorry I was having a… the xenomorphs were killing us all. Taking their time about it too.”
He nodded. “That’s only natural. Whole thing’s a nightmare…”
She took a plastic bottle of water from a pocket in her spacesuit. “I gotta get this spacesuit off. It’s killing me.” She drank, and put it back—and suddenly turned to him, as a thought struck her. “You’re glad I had a nightmare!”
“What?” He was startled. Partly because it was true.
“You’re glad I was having a nightmare! Because it was like I was suddenly the needy female who you could… could…”
Her voice broke off, then, and she blushed—as she realized she was revealing more about herself than him at that moment.
“Heh,” Nate chuckled. “You guys oughta just—”
“Nate?” Ashley interrupted.
“Yeah?”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“Right.”
Corgan looked at her, smiling softly. She was into him. He knew it now. But he wiped the smile away when she looked frowningly back. “Ashley—you think I don’t respect you, or something? You’ve done everything right. You showed your guts and your resource every possible way. I just hope I don’t piss you off—because you’d kick my ass. What more you want?”
“Forget it.” She busied herself unwrapping a food bar. “I need to get this suit off, and stretch, before I go insane.”
“We shouldn’t take off the spacesuits—we’ve gotta get to another ship. Probably have to go out through an airlock.”
“Who knows how long before we ever get outside the ship again? If we ever do. Which isn’t very likely, Captain.”
He shrugged. “Go for it, then. You’ve earned it.”
She finished her food bar and said around a full mouth, “You gotta help me with it, Captain…”
There was theoretically nothing sexy about it, they were all wearing cling coveralls under the spacesuits, but helping her wriggle out of anything was provocative to him. Even the smell of her sweat…
“Man, I envy that,” Nate said. “I mean—getting to take off the… I mean, uh, I’d like to take my own spacesuit off.”
Ten minutes later they’d all removed their spacesuits, Corgan deciding that freedom of movement in the fight that was sure to come was more important than having the suits ready for an improbable escape. They’d stash them here in the tunnel for now.
“Let’s check out that forward room again,” Nate suggested.
Corgan nodded. “Roger that.” Wearing radio headsets still attached to batteries now fitted in overall chest pockets—pockets also stuffed with their meager supplies— and carrying their diamond-flyers under their arms, they worked their way awkwardly down the tunnel to the circular room under the bridge. They stepped down onto its deck, looked around, stretching in the roomier area, more puzzled than informed by the room, until Ashley had a thought.
“Captain—what if there’s a hidden entrance here? What if you tried the sonic key?”
“Worth trying.” He put his missile launcher down, took the sonic key from his pocket and started to activate it—then hesitated. “Wait—what if we’re standing on a door and it opens?” He stepped onto his diamond-flyer, activated it to float. Was lifted a short distance off the floor. The others did the same—and then he made the sonic key sound its note.
A doorway opened in the floor, about three meters away. They drifted over to it and looked down. It descended only two meters before opening to another room.
Corgan picked up his weapon, then slowly descended, ready to fire at anything that moved.
He emerged into a room shaped like a Quonset hut, with a curved ceiling, concave walls. There were four large mechanisms in it—and after a moment, he decided they were space vehicles.
He was in a hangar—with small spacecraft, the Giff version of landers, that might just be capable of leaving the steel egg…
20
Parked three meters apart, side by side, the alien shuttlecraft, if that’s what they were, faced a wide, flat wall that Corgan suspected was also a door into space when activated. A little bigger than an airport shuttle back home, the Giff shuttlecraft were shaped like diamonds, to no one’s surprise, but three-dimensional diamonds: they were faceted diamond-shapes of unknown alloy, the metal in the prow seamlessly becoming transparent at windshield height. They stood on ski-like runners, and there were circular repulsors—that was Corgan’s guess as to the function of the big disks—on the underside and the stern, for propulsion. But he saw no doorway, no hatch into the craft, no way to get in.
“Try the…” Ashley began.
“The sonic key,” he said, nodding. He pressed the key, it whistled… and there was no response, except the ceiling entrance to the hangar seamlessly closed itself.
The spacecraft remained sealed. Corgan walked around the nearest one, got a boost from Nate to climb up on its beveled snout to look through the window. There was a control panel and there were seats but no joystick, no wheel that he could see. The craft seemed intact.
“Nate,” he said, “Ashley, you guys go get our spacesuits, make it quick, bring them back here. We’re going to have them handy in case we can get these buckets flying.”
“Aye aye,” said Ashley. Sounding only slightly sarcastic. “Come on, Nate.”
Corgan slid down to the deck again and went to look at the other craft. By the time he was done puzzling over them, Nate and Ashley were back with their spacesuits and collapsed helmets, looking both anxious and hopeful.
“I could almost get into this one here,” Corgan called to them, as they laid the gear onto the deck next to the second shuttlecraft. “Through the holes—acid burns, I figure.” Two of the shuttlecraft had been burned raggedly and randomly right through on their prow “windshield” areas with acid, in one case a sizeable hole—big enough for a xenomorph to climb through. In that one, at the far end of the hangar, were three desiccated bodies, Giff, in their seats, badly mangled. Neither vehicle looked like it would fly again—at least not in the vacuum of space.
Where were the bodies of the xenomorphs who’d attacked here? Corgan wondered—surely they’d died, at some point.
But there was something potentially useful in the craft. He could reach through one of the melt-edged circular holes made by xenomorphic acid, probably centuries before, and clumsily search the shriveled bodies of the Giffs…
And he came up with another sonic key, plucked from the withered hand of an alien. It could be that it opened—
“There’s a door to a ramp over here!” Ashley said. “I just got it open!”
“How’d you open it?”
“I just touched this panel here…”
Corgan looked over and saw that she was looking through a wide hatchway in the farther bulkhead—the door resembled the outer door they’d come through, at the navel, into the first airlock. Beyond it was a half-spiral ramp like the one they’d seen in one of the upper rooms, heading upward. Where did this one go to?
He never found out, because the attack happened then—a
nd it came through that very door.
Ashley was yelling a warning when the mini-missile came flashing through the hatchway, detonating against the alien shuttlecraft nearest the attackers, the blast tearing a tattered chunk from through the outer rear corner of the vehicle. Now there was only one shuttlecraft that could theoretically fly—the second one, next in line to be a target for the CANC.
He glimpsed CANC soldiers through the doorway, coming down the ramp, at least twenty, with assault rifles and missile launchers, and Lieutenant Zhang and Chou behind them, shouting orders.
Corgan looked for Ashley through the smoke from the explosive, saw her moving, apparently unhurt, toward the back of the hangar, getting on her diamond-flyer. Nate was behind him, aiming through the door with his own weapon. He fired, and his mini-missile flew through it, and exploded, and someone screamed. Corgan picked up his own missile launcher, prepared it to fire—but held off, not wanting to waste his seven shots.
Ashley was unarmed. Should he open the ceiling shaft, tell Ashley to retreat up the shaft, to the tunnel? They might be up there too. He suspected they were. Another missile flew through the hatchway, impacting on the floor not three meters away so that Corgan had to throw himself down when he saw where it was going to hit. He felt blast waves pass over his head, searing his back.
He looked up to see Ashley angling down on the diamond-flyer, descending to the right of the hatchway— he opened his mouth to shout at her to get away from there but she was already triggering the door, to close it, just as another two missiles came at them accompanied by a burst of machine-gun fire. The machine-gun strafe came through, ricocheting off the floor to glance off the overhead, but the missiles struck the closing door. It held, though he could see it quivering with the impacts.
Could CANC open it from the outside? Would they know how? He could see it was dented in by the blasts, malformed; which meant it wouldn’t open properly on its own now. But they’d continue hammering at it.
How long would it hold?
Corgan shouted, “Ashley! Meet me at that Giff vehicle! Nate, let’s go, you too!” And he ran to meet them, activating the new sonic key he’d found.
The new key’s chime must have struck the right note: an oval hatch formed in the side of the vehicle, in what would, in a bus back home, be the “driver’s side.” The opening simply dilated in the metal, forming itself as if it had always been there. “Get inside!” Corgan ordered. “Take the spacesuits and get in!” he yelled, rushing up to the shuttlecraft.
“That’s a negative, there, Captain,” Nate said, looking at the hatchway, vibrating under another impact. And something in Corgan shivered at the fatalistic calm in Nate’s voice. “I think I should take up a defensive position—they’re gonna bust that door in, and rush us.”
“Nate—”
“Sorry, Captain, that’s my mind being made up you’re hearing there!” he said, as a thunderous boom came against the hatchway to the ramp.
And Nate ran to the still-smoking aft-end of the craft nearer the door, took up a position with such fixity of purpose, such focused intent in his body language, Corgan could see there was no arguing with him. Anyway there was no time to have a discussion about chain of command.
The hatchway thudded again, buckling inward, blackening. Ashley was shoving the spacesuits into the shuttlecraft, and climbing in after them. Corgan looked over at Nate—he was leaning the missile-launcher on a blackened metal brace from the aft of the damaged craft, coughing from the smoke, aiming at the doorway.
“Captain?” Ashley called to him. “Daryl?”
Another timpanic thud and the hatchway was cracking, flame and smoke jetting through the cracks…
I should back Nate up, Corgan thought—try to hold them off. The shuttlecraft didn’t offer much hope. Not with only seconds to spare. He had no idea how to get the craft operating, or how to open the hangar doors, or how to navigate the thing, or where to go even if they did get those devices working.
In some part of his mind he’d counted on the highly intuitive, autopilot-reactivity of the Giff equipage—but he knew he was probably kidding himself.
The door quivered—
“Stay inside there, Ashley!” Corgan ordered.
Carrying his appropriated missile launcher, Corgan hurried to join Nate—just as the hatchway buckled and split apart, shrapnel spinning past them trailing streamers of smoke, rebounding from the walls with high-pitched pings. Through the heat shimmer rising from the low flames where the door had been they could see CANC soldiers aiming their weapons, others barking orders, the soldiers moving up to charge through the door.
“Daryl, you dumb son of a bitch, get in that craft and get it flying!” Nate hissed, facing front. And he fired a mini-missile which flew through the smoking gap and exploded in the midst of three soldiers, sending them flying in three directions, the shrapnel this time made of human bone.
“Come on, Nate, that’ll hold them!”
“Naw—you get it going, I’ll run over and get in once you got it started, then we can get outta here! Go on, you gotta figure how to fly the fucking thing, Captain! Go go go!”
And they both ducked as bullets smacked into the wreckage in front of them, and clanged off the deck.
Corgan popped up and fired a mini-missile, and two more, the launcher bucking and hissing in his hands, and he had the satisfaction of seeing Lieutenant Zhang and three soldiers vanish screaming in a ball of flame.
The CANC soldiers scattered from the ramp, moved to the left and right, taking up positions on the flanks where they’d be hard to hit.
Nate was right—if they were going to get out of here he had to figure out how to fly the alien shuttle. Or they had to surrender. And he was pretty sure surrender would be another kind of death sentence.
“Just keep your head down!” Corgan ordered—as if Nate were still taking his orders. “Fire back when you have to!”
“I’m the one who kept those terrorist motherfuckers off your ass in Pakistan, pal, don’t tell me how to do it— just go!”
“Change weapons with me—I’ve got more rounds.”
They each tossed a launcher, they each caught one— adrenaline making them as adept as jugglers. Corgan reached out, squeezed Nate’s shoulder, once. Then he popped his weapon to his shoulder, fired a mini-missile, deliberately aiming at the floor just on the other side of the door to create a smoke and blast diversion, cover his retreat.
The round impacted, someone shouted in pain—probably trying to sneak up on the other side of the door, to the right— and for a few moments smoke and fire of the explosion obscured the enemy’s line of sight as he turned and ran back to the craft where Ashley was puzzling over the controls.
Corgan stopped at the rear of the craft and fired another round through at the doorway—this one missed the entrance, struck the inner door frame, so he fired his last round, sending it through the gap as close as he could to the CANC positions.
Another scream, and returning fire, bullets strafing up the floor just behind him as he tossed the unloaded missile launcher aside and rushed to the oval entrance to the craft, ducking low. He climbed inside, found that Ashley had her hand extended over a piano-like control panel—like translucent piano keys, without the black ones. Lights glimmered along it, in response…
“I don’t know,” she said, breathing hard with tension. “I almost get it to respond but then…” She shook her head.
“Wait—what if you open the hangar doors? We’ll lose pressure. Nate…”
The craft rocked with the impact of a missile just behind it—he looked through a transparent side panel, saw Nate firing at a group of soldiers trying to rush the door. Getting them square. Bodies flew. But that would be his last shot.
They had to surrender. Nothing else was going to work. Maybe CANC would let them live. Maybe.
He started toward the oval entrance in the bulkhead of the craft—and then Ashley screamed. He turned to see her with her hand pressed over he
r mouth, staring out the side panel at Nate. His left arm was dangling by a shred, spewing blood, and the missile launcher was tucked up under his right. He pinned it in place like a knight holding a lance, and rushed howling at the oncoming CANC soldiers, slamming it into one of them—right before two others opened fire with assault rifles and blew the top of his head off…
Corgan clamped his feelings down, without even knowing he was doing it, and turned away before Nate had fallen to the deck. He activated the sonic key and the oval entrance gap closed; the vehicle sealed, airtight.
As if it had been waiting for the entrance to close, the whole piano-key-like panel lit up, chiming to itself, the vehicle trembled… and lifted off the deck.
A mini-missile sang past them… Another struck near the stern, making the shuttlecraft shake.
Corgan noticed a red tab set on a dashboard shelf below the piano-like keys, with a figure incised above it like two Giff tentacles pointed away from one another, and some of the squiggly wavelength-styled Giff writing.
He reached out, waved his hand over it…
The screams of the CANC soldiers started almost immediately, as atmosphere began to suck out of the chamber, air pressure dropping radically in seconds. Corgan could see the atmosphere’s going marked by the smoke from the missile detonations, the gray-black fumes sucking up into minute holes in the overhead. The damaged hatchway was sealing over, the way the shaft entrances in the deck had, a nanotech “healing” response covering up the damage to the portal. About seven CANC soldiers were trapped in the hangar, when that entrance shut, looking around in desperation as the atmosphere was drawn out. The shuttle itself, on an autopilot response, moved toward the hangar door… which remained closed.
“Oh shit,” Ashley said, “the Giff equipment’s too old, no way that door’s going to—”
But then the hangar door seemed to dissolve away, a nanotech withdrawal—and suddenly the shuttlecraft was whipping out into space, with the dying CANC soldiers following them out, drawn out by their own final exhalations, the air sucked out into space, pulling them inexorably with it. The soldiers spun flailing, screaming silently, through the void—until they exploded, their insides bursting out through eyes and mouths in the absence of air pressure. They became red flowers with rough human outlines at their centers, whirling away through space…