Darkness Falling

by Ian Douglas

  “Reinforcements!” Foley yelled, slapping the bulkhead contact to close the compartment door. “Company HQ, we need backup down here! They’re coming through!”

  And then the door and a huge chunk of the surrounding bulkhead vanished, whisked away into a direction that was not up or down, in or out, left or right, but another direction, an alien direction that defied any sane understanding of space.

  The compartment now was filled with writhing and indescribably horrible shapes and pulse fire.

  Lance Corporal Fisher was firing steadily now, swinging from target to target, trying to pick out and fry the closest, the most threatening. Her own sickness and stomach-wrenching terror were mostly gone now as training kicked in. She had targets, she had a weapon, she had a clear field of fire.

  She had her duty.

  Rough and misshapen spheres of gray matter unfolded from the air around Drummond and he shrieked, backpedaling in the air in a desperate attempt to get clear. The spheres followed him, growing larger, merging with one another as something with more than three spatial dimensions unfolded into the realm of simple length, width, and height relentlessly closed around him. Fisher shifted her aim and began firing into the mass. She knew she would hit Jimmy Drummond, but hoped that his combat armor would protect him enough to let her burn that monstrosity off him.

  Something closed on her armored leg and she glanced down. A tentacle was wrapping itself around her, sinuous and insistent . . . and then another tentacle uncoiled out of the air and stretched out toward her.

  The shapes were too close to let her bring her weapon to bear. “Hold still, Fish!” Zhou yelled at her, and then a laser pulse sliced the first tentacle clean through. She kicked at the other, the reaction pushing her away. The alien shapes appeared to be limited in how far they could enter normal space from the peculiarly twisted geometry of the area from which they’d emerged, but that area appeared to be growing larger. More and more of the bulkhead, the deck, the overhead all were peeling away into the intruding dimensions. A stiff wind picked up, howling past the Marines and into the opening void in front of them.

  Drummond screamed as he was dragged deeper into the tortured geometry, his body twisting impossibly . . . and then he was gone. Foley bellowed an incoherent curse and fired bolt after bolt of high-energy coherent light into the writhing mass of shapes. Fisher added her fire to the fury of pulsed laser destruction . . . and then other armored Marines were streaming into the breached passageway, laying down a firestorm of suppressing fire. Gobbets of charred flesh drifted and bobbed through the air, together with roiling clouds of smoke. Fisher’s helmet was floating away somewhere behind her, and she was beginning to have trouble breathing the acrid stuff that carried with it the sharp stink of burnt hair.

  Lieutenant Velasquez slapped Foley’s shoulder. “Pull your people back, Gunny!” she yelled. “We’re gonna seal the passageway!”

  “Roger that! C’mon, Link! Zhou! Fish! With me!”

  Fisher began backing away from the bubble of death and destruction in front of them, wedged in between Foley and Zhou, pushing off the deck with her boots while continuing to fire her weapon. The other Marines, the rest of First Platoon, Bravo kept laying down suppressive fire, giving ground slowly. Behind them was the nearest bulkhead vacwall, open at the moment, but the dropping pressure in the corridor was going to trigger it at any moment.

  Shit. A flashing red light showed that the barrier had already been triggered. Someone, probably Velasquez, was overriding it to give the Marines time to get clear.

  But time—like air—was going to be in short supply real soon.

  In front of them, the passageway was filled by an advancing wall of writhing alien flesh, of tentacles, arms, claws, and gaping mouths, of eyes, dozens of them, some as big as half a meter across, of bodies that continued to morph and change and reshape themselves as they moved. Part of that movement was a kind of constant extrusion through the confines of the passageway . . . but part involved masses of flesh materializing out of thin air in front of the advancing wall and growing, merging, and surging along, adding to the mass behind them. Fisher was having trouble understanding exactly what she was seeing; the mass might have been separate bodies, but they seemed to keep joining together, then breaking apart, and she couldn’t tell whether she was seeing an army of creatures, or a single nightmarish amoeba-thing a dozen meters across.

  Hyperdimensional movement, Fisher thought. The thing was descending—if you could use that word to describe movement through and from a higher dimension—“down” into normal space, bypassing it, appearing in normal space as three-dimensional cross sections of something much larger, something unseen because the human eye and brain were simply not designed to handle the geometries involved.

  Whatever it was, it or them, the concentrated laser fire from First Platoon was definitely hurting it, burning into it, hacking at it. After closing to within five meters, it seemed to hesitate, to waver, as pieces of it began breaking off and joining the drifting cloud of detritus already filling the passageway, dragged steadily away by the shrieking wind. Fisher, her thoughts escaping into a kind of dull but observant trance as she continued the rote process of move and fire, move and fire, wondered at the lack of blood. The thing’s flesh appeared to be surprisingly light, almost like solid foam when it was burned away from the main body; it was possible, she thought, that she was seeing something more like a biological machine than anything organic, anything flesh and blood.

  She’d heard scuttlebutt about the Andromedan Dark—was that what this thing was?—being some sort of vast machine intelligence.

  She dared to think they might be winning . . .

  . . . but then the thing redoubled its advance, new masses materializing ahead of the main body faster and faster, the whole monstrosity rippling as it surged up the passageway. One Marine at the right end of the defensive line collided with the bulkhead and tumbled forward, and in a blur of motion the alien monstrosity snatched him from the air and dragged him screaming into the mass.

  Another Marine yelled and moved forward, firing wildly into the Dark. “Churkin!” Velasquez bellowed. “Get your ass back in line!”

  “But it grabbed Novak!”

  “Get back in the fucking line! Hold your position! Everyone, hold your position!”

  The line wavered, then steadied, still firing across a gulf of eight to ten meters.

  “Move back, now,” Velasquez ordered. “Slowly! Slowly! We’re almost there . . .”

  And then they were past the bulkhead frame of the vacseal blast doors, and Velasquez was palming a contact plate nearby. Carballoy doors—cobalt-tungsten-carbide sheets centimeters thick—slid from hidden recesses and clanged shut immediately in front of them, closing off the crawling horror beyond. The shriek of escaping atmosphere cut off instantly, as bits of floating debris slapped up against the vacseal. Something heavy thudded against the other side.

  “It won’t do any good!” Fisher cried. “It’ll come past the doors!”

  Velasquez glanced at her, then waved her arm. “Shit, she’s right! Back! Everyone back-back-back . . .”

  Sure enough, a rough globe of gray-black integument popped into existence in front of the sealed door. The vacseal was designed to cut off the passageway in the event of a serious air leak or a fire, but it wasn’t designed to hold off direct assaults against it, let alone extradimensional threats. Air couldn’t escape . . . but the thing on the other side had no problem at all with simply reaching in past the closed door and continuing its attack on the Marine platoon.

  But as it materialized and grew, the thirty men of First Platoon concentrated all of their fire on that one target, burning it away into carbonized debris within seconds. Another mass appeared . . . and another . . . and another, the separate masses growing rapidly larger until they merged into a squirming wall. Fisher heard the tortured shriek of tearing metal, and saw the vacseal door twisted back from its mountings. Air screamed once more as the atmosph
ere began vanishing into the void of wherever it was the monster was coming from.

  “Fall back! Everybody fall back!”

  The Marines needed no urging now as they turned and triggered their suit drives to clear the passageway. The next vacseal bulkhead was located twenty meters farther down the corridor at a four-way junction. Behind them, the massive carballoy doors twisted oddly, then vanished, and the Andromedan Dark oozed through.

  Velasquez triggered the second set of blast doors, cutting off the shrill hiss of escaping atmosphere as another group of Marines arrived from the rear. They had a pair of mobile gun platforms with them, gray floater disks mounting the ugly black snub-snouts of heavy particle-beam cannon. Fisher recognized the company’s heavy weapons platoon. “What’s your situation, Lieutenant?” an armored figure with a captain’s insignia on his shoulders demanded. That would be Captain Pierce, the company commander.

  “We haven’t been able to stop it, sir. We keep killing it and it keeps coming for more! It comes through the barriers!”

  “We’ll hold it here,” Pierce decided. “Pull your people back behind the line, Velasquez. But stay alert!”

  “Aye, aye, sir!”

  Fisher looked down the brightly lit corridor to the rear. If the Dark had been able to reach, not through, as Velasquez had said, but past a set of closed and vacuum-sealed blast doors, what was to stop it from materializing part of its body behind the Marines and engulfing them all?

  But minutes dragged past and nothing appeared, either before them or in the rear. Pierce, apparently, was trying to get an image from the other side of the blast doors by tapping a security camera or possibly a Marine battlespace drone. “Can’t see a damned thing,” he muttered aloud. “I think the power’s out over there.”

  “It was showing signs of slowing up, Skipper,” Velasquez told him. “It might have a limited range.”

  “How the hell would that work? What kind of range are you saying?”

  “I don’t know, sir. Sixty . . . eighty meters? It was definitely slowing down when it hit the last set of blast doors.”

  Pierce considered this for a moment . . . or perhaps he was consulting with his superiors through his cerebral links.

  “Okay,” he said after a moment. “We need to see what’s going on. Marines! Weapons charged, at the ready!”

  Fisher felt a sinking flutter down in her gut. Somehow, she’d been able to hold back the fear that had threatened to consume her in there, but now, with time to wait, with time to think, the fear was beginning to surface once more, to reassert itself as a gnawing, inner terror.

  “Stand ready on those heavies!” Pierce called. “Okay . . . open the blast doors!”

  The cobalt-tungsten doors slid open and the wind picked up.

  Fisher braced herself for whatever was on the other side. . . .

  Chapter Twelve

  Lance Corporal Adria Fisher had been a Marine for less than two years, and her deployment with the Tellus Ad Astra diplomatic mission to the galactic core had been, except for training runs, her first time off Earth.

  But she thought of herself as a small-town girl from Xenia, Ohio, and she’d never given much consideration to aliens or nightmare things wriggling through from other dimensions. She’d joined the Marines because her older brother had done so. He’d been stationed at the Imperial Solar Guard outpost on Triton when the Ad Astra had boosted for the Core. The thought brought with it a sharp twist in her belly. She still hadn’t been able to wrap her head around the fact that Earth’s civilization and everyone she’d known there had been dust now for 4 billion years. The loneliness, sometimes, was agonizing.

  There was no time to dwell on any of that now. The blast doors completed their slow and rumbling slide apart as the wind again kicked up. The next set of doors along the passageway to their rear had already been sealed, so at least they weren’t emptying the entire ship of atmosphere. And in front of the massed line of Marines . . .

  . . . a yawning emptiness.

  “What the hell?” Captain Pierce said. “Where are they?”

  The Marines stirred, restless and nervous. From their line behind the open blast doors, they could see where the previous set of doors had been one hundred meters away, but the doors there were gone, and in their place was a swirling spiral of blue light. Surrounding the opening was a kind of graininess. Fisher couldn’t make out the details without her helmet optics, but from her position it looked like swarms of insects or tiny, animated motes were swirling over the edges of torn-open bulkhead and deck.

  “Corpsman’s here,” someone said.

  “Fisher!” Velasquez said. “Get to sick bay.”

  “I’m okay, Lieutenant. I want to stay.”

  “Get the fuck out of here, Fish. You’re out of uniform.”

  The Navy corpsman, wearing combat armor like the Marines, approached her. “Let’s just check you out first,” he told her. “You can come back and play later.”

  Reluctantly, she turned and moved out of the line. The Marines were her family, all the family she had, now, and she didn’t want to leave them.

  “Damage control!” St. Clair shouted aloud, though he was linked in through the ship’s network. “What’s happening with that hull breach?”

  “Vacseal doors are closed, Lord Commander,” the voice of Ad Astra’s damage control department replied inside his head. “We’ve lost pressure in twelve compartments aft of Frame Forty-nine, but the damage is no longer spreading. Ship’s systems and networks have been rerouted.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “And it doesn’t appear to be a hull breach, my lord.”

  “Why were we losing atmosphere then?”

  “We’re still working out the details, sir, but our best guess is that there was some sort of dimensional gateway or portal, a kind of hole leading to . . . uh . . . someplace else. Someplace above Flatland. Someplace that was open to hard vacuum.”

  “Okay. Keep me up to date.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Somewhere above Flatland. St. Clair gave a brief, grim smile at that. The reference was somewhat obscure, but he’d been doing his research. Faced by the reality of an enemy that seemed to move through multiple higher dimensions at will, he’d recently downloaded the nineteenth century novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, and evidently others of Ad Astra’s crew had done so as well. Good. . . .

  But there were other things to worry about than the crew’s download reading habits. The sudden intrusion into Ad Astra appeared to have been blocked, at least for the moment, but the battle was still raging some tens of thousands of kilometers ahead, where the hyperdimensional tesseract had partially extended itself into normal space. Marines in combat armor were swarming around the alien object now, as human ships continued hammering volley upon volley of high-energy laser and particle beam fire into the enemy structure. The gunboat Black Hawk was reported missing, fallen into the disturbance in spacetime ahead. The Marine assault transport Vera Cruz was in trouble but still holding her own, damaged and under heavy attack, but so far able to hold off the enemy needleship swarms.

  But St. Clair knew that they wouldn’t be able to do so for much longer.

  Jacked into Vera Cruz’s AI network, General Wilson continued giving orders to the distinct clouds of Marines maneuvering through local space. Though he was in the ship’s C3, from his inner point of view, fed by data streaming in from the ship’s network, he was adrift in open space, the blue swirl of the alien anomaly gaping beneath him as he tagged company commanders in his mind and transmitted to them terse, urgent orders.

  Every battle, Wilson believed, no matter where or how it was fought, was a kind of intricate and finely crafted ballet. Each possessed a rhythm, a dynamic pulse of movement and of maneuver, and each had the same overall goals: be where the enemy is not, bring force to bear where the enemy is weak, grab and hold the lead so that the enemy is forced to respond to you rather than the other way around. Unfortunately, in this case ene
my numbers were simply overwhelming; the enemy was everywhere, and the human forces more and more were being pushed into the defensive.

  The humans were losing. . . .

  “You must get at least one drone inside that object,” Newton’s voice whispered in Wilson’s mind.

  Wilson stared into the vast gape of spiraling blue light centered on a spacecraft larger than the planet Jupiter. It was, he thought, like staring down into the very mouth of hell.

  “Will you be able to stop that thing if we do?”

  “Unknown. But it is a truism that a knowledge of the enemy is necessary for victory.”

  Wilson didn’t add the corollary—that a knowledge of self was also necessary for that victory. One of Sun Tzu’s most important maxims.

  “Deladier!” he called. “We need to get in closer.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  Wilson heard the reluctance in Deladier’s mental voice, but ignored it. They weren’t doing any good out here, and the way things were unfolding around them, it wouldn’t be much longer before the enemy needles punched through Vera Cruz’s fighter screens and overwhelmed the assault transport’s close-in defenses.

  “Status on the AI torpedoes.”

  “Four AI clones ready for launch.”

  “Okay. Here’s how we’ll play it. We’ll focus the zoomies forward to clear a path. We go right up the middle as close as we can get. When I give the word, launch every Firestorm we have left, then follow them up with all four AIs.”

  “You’re using the nukes to punch inside the tesseract?”

  “I don’t even know if these bastards’ll feel it,” Wilson replied. “But that’ll be our best shot, and we’re going to take it. As soon as the AI clones are away, hightail it back out to 20 million kilometers, then hold position and wait for the zoomies to catch up to us.”