Deceit

by Peter Darvill-Evans

  Defries made a noise in her throat. Daak cursed. Ace felt sick.

  Ace thought of it as some sort of insect, although she knew it had too many legs. She estimated that its body was about twice the size of the shuttle, but it seemed much larger because of the mottled membranes that extended like wings on both sides of the creature, and rippled lazily as it swam through space.

  She tried to be rational. The flapping wings weren’t too bad. Even the wriggling, claw-tipped legs – well, they were just legs, like a prawn’s. But the thing had a sort of head, as big as its body. With eyes that weren’t set in sockets but instead hung loose. And moved, twitching. And a round mouth, ringed with irregular scales, and full of writhing cilia.

  It was climbing, moving into a position just above the shuttle’s flightpath.

  No doubt about it, that was one creepy monster. Well shocking. Ace explored her fear; tasted it; weighed it. Yeah, she was scared. This was an interesting fear: a little different from anything she’d experienced before. But no worse than some others.

  Right, she’d catalogued it. Time to conquer it.

  ‘Giant prawns can’t live in space,’ she announced. ‘Well known fact. That thing’s not real.’

  ‘The thing that ripped apart the Raistrick,’ Defries started to say, turning from the window towards Ace, ‘that was – oh shit. What about small versions of giant prawns, Ace? Can they live in space shuttles?’

  Ace’s blaster was in her hand as she turned, before she had understood the meaning of Defries’s words. As soon as she saw them she started firing, realized she was shouting something meaningless, and then at last understood what she was seeing.

  They were all over the walls and ceiling. They were just like the creature outside, but only about twenty centimetres long.

  Only! Ace thought, as the nearest pair flapped, smoking and foul-smelling and dead, from the ceiling to the floor.

  She was firing again; she couldn’t afford to let them get closer, she wouldn’t be able to bear it. She yelled ‘Continuous!’ to the blaster and used her free hand to adjust the beam.

  ‘Belle!’ Ace waved her gun, frying a swathe of the creatures that were advancing along the wall on Defries’s side of the cabin. ‘Get shooting, Belle. Very close range, wide beam, or we’ll cut through the fuselage. OK? We’ve got to keep them away from Daak, He’s driving.’

  Very good, Ace told herself. I’m scared shitless, but I remembered to re-set the laser. How many of these fragged things are there?

  They were swarming in an endless moving blanket along every surface inside the shuttle. Ace could see them coming in boiling waves through the sick-bay door. The atmosphere consisted of nothing but the noxious fumes of burnt bodies: the recyclers couldn’t cope. The floor was one huge mound of twitching corpses, over which rank after rank of the creatures advanced.

  Defries and Ace were being forced back, step by step, towards the nose of the cabin.

  Without ceasing to play wide beam of heat back and forth across the advancing hordes, Ace checked the power supply of her blaster. Half empty. When it ran out... Best not to think about it.

  One of the creatures had survived the rays and was scuttling towards Defries’s feet. Ace yelled and pointed. Defries shouted, a cry of mixed defiance and horror, and brought a boot down on the thing. The liquid crunch was sickening.

  Another step back, and the back of Ace’s head touched Daak’s shoulder. There was no more room to retreat. ‘Put it on auto,’ Ace said without turning. ‘We need more firepower here.’

  Daak glanced over his shoulder. ‘You look after the little ones, girlie,’ he said. ‘My meat’s the big mother.’

  Ace looked round. At first she thought the monster had gone. The windows were black. Then, at the periphery of her vision, she saw the rippling movement of the circles of cilia. The shuttle was almost inside the thing’s mouth.

  ‘Daak, have you gone – ‘ Something was on her boot. She turned, back, kicking, to find that the assault was over. There were no more creatures streaming from the rear of the shuttle. Defries was picking off the survivors.

  The air was improving as the recyclers filtered out the stench and the smoke. Ace slid to the floor and cleared a space around her by tossing dead creatures on to the pile of bodies in the middle of the cabin. She needed a rest. She didn’t want to think about what would happen next until it happened.

  Defries had other ideas.

  ‘Take evasive action, DK. That’s an order.’ She was almost as tall as Daak, standing beside him shouting in his ear. She hadn’t holstered her blaster.

  Daak folded his arms and stared ahead. ‘If they want us alive,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t matter what we do. We’ll be OK. And if they want us dead, likewise, we’ll be dead. I’m going in on my terms, not theirs.’

  Defries narrowed her eyes and raised her gun.

  ‘I took us straight through that thing’s teeth,’ Daak went on doggedly. ‘But we ain’t been eaten.’

  It was true. The shuttle was inside the monster’s mouth now, but remained undamaged. And it was no longer black outside: Ace could see the stars and, as she stood, she found herself looking down, through’ one of the side windows, at the reticulated surface of the top of the space station. The gigantic creature had disappeared without trace.

  ‘For a DK,’ Defries said, turning on her heel, ‘you lead a remarkably charmed life.’

  Daak shrugged his massive shoulders. ‘They want us alive.’

  ‘OK, Daak. Looks like we’re in the clear for now.’ Ace had heard the scraping noises on the hull, so she isn’t entirely terrified when a scaly, bristly limb extended across the outside of the window next to her.

  ‘Don’t you believe it,’ she said. ‘There’s something outside, It’s on the fuselage. And it’s not small.’

  It wasn’t the same corridor: it was narrower than the one they’d been carried along on the transporter. But it was equally long and straight. And its walls were decorated, if that was the right expression, with bas-relief portraits. From floor to ceiling, along its entire length, tens of thousands of expressionless faces stared, at Bernice as she hurried away from the circular chamber. They were like death masks, Bernice thought, and then rather wished she hadn’t.

  It wasn’t a comfortable place to be. Bernice told herself that it wasn’t, surprising that she felt as though she was being watched. She tried to ignore the feeling, as well as the insistent whispering voices that seemed to be always at the edge of her hearing. She had other things to worry about.’

  She was sure she could believe Elaine. The androids had killed her sister, just as they had almost killed her. But Elaine had also said that the Counsellors had cut open Christina’s head, and that when Elaine had looked at her sister’s body, the head had been empty. No brain. The androids had taken it away.

  Bernice had tried to tell the Doctor, but he had seemed preoccupied. She had been interrupted, she hadn’t been able to make him understand exactly what had happened to Christina. It had been her own fault, in a way: she had been reluctant to talk about it in front of Francis.

  Pool. Who or what was Pool? Come to that, what exactly was the Lacuna woman. And her bimbo sidekick. The Doctor, Bernice thought, doesn’t seem to realize just how weird and dangerous these people are. They take people’s brains, for goodness’ sake! What for? What are they up to?

  Face it, Summerfield, you don’t know. But, she resolved, I’m going to do what I can to put a stop to it. I’ve managed to get away. I’m sure the girl – Britta, that was her name – I’m sure she saw me. But she turned away. Didn’t raise the alarm. Maybe it’s a trap. Perhaps there’s something worse at the other end of this creepy corridor.

  Don’t be defeatist. For the moment, I’m free. No androids with blasters, no maze of passages. I’ve got a slim chance to do something.

  Now what shall I do?

  It’s obvious: I’ve got to join forces with Ace. She’s got weapons. She’s got a couple of chums who look lik
e they can handle themselves in a scrap. And she needs to be told what little I know about what’s going on here.

  Ace. Gods, that was a shock. Why hadn’t the Doctor told her? Ace had looked thinner. Hard to tell. Those old 2-D screens didn’t give a good picture. Older, too. But of course: it had been three years for Ace.

  Why hadn’t the Doctor told her? It couldn’t be a coincidence. Of all the space-time locations in all the universe, the Doctor had to land his TARDIS in Ace’s. Not a coincidence.

  There was a door at the end of the corridor. It slid open as Bernice approached. Time for action, she thought. The big Dalek Killer had seemed determined to bring the shuttle in at the top of the space station. All right: let’s go and see if I can help them get in. Onward and upward.

  She stood in the doorway at the end of the corridor, looking into a small polygonal room with a sloping ceiling. There was a door in each wall, No androids. No sound. No sign of life.

  She set off to find a lift. Onward and upward.

  ‘Cybershit, Belle! I said I’ll do it, OK? Just check the suit and open the airlock, will you?’

  Ace winced. Her own voice sounded harsh and metallic inside the spacesuit helmet. She flexed her fingers, trying to become accustomed to the power-assisted joints.

  She had never liked suiting up for trips outside in space, and this suit was an old model, and equipped for combat as well as maintenance. It was big and heavy. Wearing the suit, she weighed three hundred kilos and felt as graceful as a rhinoceros; as soon as she was outside she’d feel almost weightless, and the suit’s systems would give her the strength of a robot while hardly affecting the speed and ease of her movements. Firepower, too: there were laser cannons built into both arms, and the thrusters beneath her heels would melt anything at close range.

  Nonetheless, Ace hoped that Daak’s flamboyant display of aerobatics had dislodged whatever creature had been on the hull. They hadn’t heard the scratching sounds since Daak had straightened out the protesting shuttle and lowered it serenely towards the whorled ridges that made up the top of the space station.

  It was like coming in to land on the wrinkled hide of some sleeping behemoth.

  And the problem was: how could they break in? There were cargo bays and airlocks situated at random among the folds and spirals, but all of them remained closed. Ace had found herself inventing new techniques as she tried to use the shuttle’s processors to hack into the station’s maintenance systems, but there had been no indication that the station had even been receiving her signals.

  The shuttle had no on-board weaponry: not a single missile, not even a laser with which they might have tried to cut a way in.

  Someone had to go down there.

  And, as Ace had pointed out, it had to be her. She knew more than either Defries or Daak about sliding rogue instructions into computerized systems. She would drop to the surface of the station – its mass generated enough gravity to pull her – and, if she could find a suitable maintenance terminal, she would jack in her wrist processor and try to manipulate the station’s doors through the interface.

  There had been another brief argument about what to do if the plan didn’t work.

  ‘I’ll go down,’ Daak had said. ‘Chainsword’ll cut us a way in.’

  Ace had produced a strip of plastic. ‘If I can’t get in by asking nicely,’ she had said, ‘I’ll blow apart a set of doors. This stuff’s primitive, but effective. And probably neater than that hedge trimmer of yours.’

  The shuttle had not been attacked since Daak had started the descent towards the station. No torpedoes had been launched, no laser pulses flashed.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ Daak had said. ‘It’s too quiet.’

  Ace, in the depths of the spacesuit, had rolled her eyes.

  Defries finished checking the suit, and opened the airlock. Ace moved her arm, and watched with a smile as a huge claw moved in front of her, its metal digits flexing exactly as her fingers moved inside it. The claw touched the transparent visor of the helmet and slid it down in front of Ace’s face.

  ‘Radio check,’ Ace said, her voice echoing. ‘Is that OK?’

  There was no reply, just a hiss of static. Ace turned to look at Defries, who shrugged, put a hand to an ear, and mouthed ‘No sound.’

  Ace lifted the visor. ‘So the radio’s out. Just like on the planet. Explains why I couldn’t hack in from up here.’

  Defries started to close the airlock. ‘So much for that idea,’ she said.

  ‘Leave it open,’ Ace said. ‘This is still the only way we can go. The radio doesn’t make that much difference. Just keep an eye on me, OK?’

  She slid the visor down and squeezed the suit into the airlock. The door closed behind her, and the floor descended a couple of metres. She was in the cargo hold, standing on the ribbed floor of the shuttle next to the loading hatch. This was the only door in the vehicle protected by an airlock.

  She scanned the displays set round the visor on the inside of the helmet. Air pressure was falling. She located the air supply tap, pulled a tube from the back of her suit and plugged it into the tap: there was no point in using the suit’s air and batteries while she could draw air from the shuttle’s recyclers.

  She waited until the pressure outside the suit was near zero, checked that the pressure inside was normal, and used her right claw with surprising delicacy to tap in the instruction to open the hatch. The smooth metal slid away from in front of her box-like boots to reveal the surface of the space station, now only a hundred metres below the shuttle. Ace took a deep breath and jumped into space.

  For a moment, she couldn’t remember how to switch the suit to spacewalk mode. She tumbled lazily as she racked her memory and the air line started to twist round her body.

  Got it! She touched the wrist of the suit’s left arm with the index finger of the right claw, and felt the suit vibrate as small orientation jets burst into life at every joint. She experimented, twisting her body so as to unwind the air line. With a delay that was hardly noticeable, the suit interpreted her movement and sent instructions to the orientation jets. The suit emulated the movement that Ace had made, twisting slowly in space and freeing the air line so that it ran straight from the suit into the shuttle’s open cargo hatch.

  The station’s gravity was far from negligible. Ace stretched upwards, and the jets responded by moving the suit into a vertical position and resisting the pull of the station, Hovering, Ace considered where to touch down on the surface below.

  The nearest entry point, almost directly below Ace’s feet, looked like the doors of a shuttle bay. But the doors were situated between two spine-tipped ridges that reminded Ace too strongly of a Venus fly trap. She leant forward, and the suit floated gently forward and downward.

  The next set of doors looked more promising. Featureless blocks as big as warehouses jutted at crazy. angles from a bald hemisphere. Among the blocks there were other large items embedded in the hump: a skeletal pylon, a diminishing spiral of linked, vitreous bubbles – and something that looked like the front end of an asteroid cruncher, a large sub-warp ship with front-opening doors big enough to engulf space rocks. Ace had had to break into an asteroid cruncher once, when she’d worked security for a mining corporation: the big doors could usually be operated from an external control panel near the front of the hull.

  Ace half turned back to the shuttle, pointed towards the sprouting hemisphere (like chunks of cheddar stuck all over half a grapefruit, she thought), and aimed the suit towards the shape that looked like the nose of an asteroid cruncher.

  It wasn’t any part of any sort of mining ship, Ace realized as she floated nearer to it. The sun was fully eclipsed by Arcadia now, and although the main source of illumination was now only the light refracted through the halo of the planet’s atmosphere, it was easier to see in the dim but diffuse light than in the glare and dark shadows that had been made by the unshielded sun.

  The angular shape was obviously modelled on the front ha
lf of a mining ship, but modelled by a madman with no sense of proportion. Its profile was an irregular parallelogram, and it appeared to be made up of interlocking blocks of crystalline metal. But embedded in its nose, unobstructed and facing into space, there was a normal-looking set of airlock doors, wide enough to accept the shuttle. Ace floated towards them.

  The suit’s feet touched the metal blocks: Ace felt a tremor as the attractors cut in and anchored the boots to the station. A vibration that Ace had hardly been aware of ceased: the spacewalk jets closing down automatically.

  Ace breathed out loudly. It was a relief to be on something like solid ground again, even if the terrain did resemble the jumbled building bricks of a gigantic child. The airlock doors stretched away in front of her, sloping slightly upwards, like a smooth square clearing in the midst of undergrowth.

  There was no sound except for her breathing and the hiss of the air exchanger. She didn’t know what alerted her; perhaps a slight tug on the back of the suit, perhaps a sixth sense. She turned, one heavy boot at a time, and cursed softly.

  Daak’s aerobatics hadn’t shaken it off the shuttle. It was coming towards her, scuttling down the air line. It moved like a spider, and looked like – well, it looked like a spider. Too many legs though, round luminous eyes, and more complicated mandibles than any arachnid Ace had ever seen on Earth. And very big.

  Ace hadn’t consciously lifted her arm and fired the suit’s built-in blaster. A stream of laser light, almost invisible in the near-vacuum, played across the creature’s head and glistening body. Pulses of energy coursed down the beam. It stopped, swaying as it hung below the air line, but it didn’t appear to be damaged. Its eyes glowed more brightly, and it scuttled forwards again.

  Ace had been in a situation like this before: in a VR game called Horror Walk 3. The funny thing was, this was less frightening, even though it was real. Maybe because it was real. Well, not quite real: an illusory monster but a very real threat. Anyway, it was dead simple. She moved her arm behind her back, and the metal claw responded simultaneously, grasping the lair line and plucking it from its housing in the back of the suit.