Escape from Enceladus (Stark Raven Voyages Book 1)

by Jake Elwood

  "Look at that," said Vogel, pointing at the floor on the opposite side of the tentacle. Cartridge casings littered the floor, and a purple smear ran across the linoleum, as if something had been dragged through the blood. It led to an office doorway on the far wall. The door to the office had been smashed from its hinges. Bits of broken door littered the office floor.

  The four of them moved forward in a group. Chan had his hand on Singh's shoulder, and Joss, both hands wrapped around her wrench, kept her shoulder against Chan's other arm. Vogel was right behind him, with a hand on Chan's back.

  Singh stopped, and the others froze. He shook his head. "We're acting like a bunch of amateurs," he said, and brushed Chan's hand away. Then he plucked the wrench from Joss's hand. "Give me room. I might need to swing this thing."

  The others spread out, looking sheepish, and Chan hefted his pipe wrench. Singh stepped into the office. When nothing leaped out at him, the others followed. Cartridge casings and bits of the broken door crunched under their feet. There was more blood in here, some of it purple, some of it red. Clearly the machine gun hadn't been enough.

  "He shot it up," said Singh in a low voice. "It didn't die. So he crawled in here, and it smashed its way in. Then it finished him off."

  "But what happened to him?" Chan asked. "There's no body."

  "Not him," said Vogel, sounding a bit sick. "Her." He was staring into the corner, and the others followed his gaze.

  At first Chan thought he was looking at another potted plant. There were yellowish tufts that might have been leaves. It took him a long, ghastly moment to realize that he was looking at the blonde hair on a severed human head.

  Joss screamed and turned, clutching the first person she saw, which happened to be Vogel. His hands rose automatically to hold her, and he looked at the others over the top of her head, his face a strange mixture of queasy horror and smugness.

  "What's the matter there, Special Agent?" Singh sneered. "Never seen a dead body before?"

  She stiffened in Vogel's arms, then squared her shoulders and lifted her head. She stared at Vogel's chest for a moment as she composed herself, then stepped back out of the circle of his arms. "I've seen bodies before," she said, her voice brittle. "I'll admit that this is my first severed head." She took a deep breath. "All right. This whole station is a crime scene. Try not to touch anything." She looked at the mess on the floor. "In particular, try to stay out of the blood."

  "I'm way ahead of you there," Chan muttered.

  Joss was rapidly regaining her composure. She stepped across a dried rivulet of human blood and squatted close to the head. She didn't touch it, just peered intently, craning her neck to see the head from several angles. "There's no cuts," she said.

  "Huh?" Singh was clearly torn between scorn and curiosity.

  "This head wasn't cut off," she said.

  Singh gave a snort. "Well, it sure doesn't seem to be attached."

  She didn't bother looking at him as she replied. "There are no cut marks. No hacking, no chopping, no laser burns. It wasn't cut off. This head looks like it was… ripped off."

  An uneasy silence settled over the room. Vogel said, "But what could…" His voice trailed off as his eyes went to the tentacle behind them.

  "Well, I've seen enough," Chan said. "We looked for survivors, we didn't find any. We're getting out of here."

  There was no argument from the others. Singh nodded, and Vogel looked relieved. Joss's face was thoughtful. Her eyes scanned the room one last time, and she turned toward the door.

  And froze.

  "What is it?" Chan said, his heart starting to beat faster. "Whatever it is, forget about it. We need to go."

  She was staring at the floor near the side wall, and Chan followed her gaze in spite of himself. There was a clear shoe print in the blood, as if someone had stood facing the wall.

  Except that it wasn't a wall, Chan realized. There was a cabinet built into the wall. It seemed obvious now that he looked at it, but with the blood and the body parts, he hadn't noticed.

  Joss took a step toward the cabinet, then another, doing her best to step around the blood splatter on the floor.

  "Now, hang on," Chan said. "Are you sure that's a good—"

  She swung the door open. There was nothing inside but a rumpled pile of clothing, and Chan made his fingers loosen their deathgrip on the handle of the pipe wrench. Then Joss reached down and laid her hand on the top of the laundry heap.

  Something stirred.

  Chan took an involuntary step back, but Joss didn't even flinch. She murmured something in a low, soothing voice, and made a patting motion with her hand. The fabric under her hand trembled. Chan could see now that it was someone's back, someone curled forward, kneeling, arms covering the hidden head. Other garments had tumbled from the hangers that lined the top of the cabinet, and jackets and sweaters fell away as the trembling figure straightened up.

  It was a man, with the stick-thin limbs of someone who'd been a long time in microgravity. He was on his knees in the bottom of the cabinet, and he rose slowly, uncurling his spine one hesitant centimetre at a time until he was kneeling, blinking up at them. He was in his fifties, with several days of salt-and-pepper stubble, mussed gray hair, and wide, frightened eyes. He wore a blood-caked lab coat and an expression of equal parts mystification and terror.

  "Who..." He cleared his throat, then said, "Who are you?"

  "We're from a salvage ship," Chan said. "I'm Captain Chan."

  The man leaned sideways, trying to see past them. "What have you done with the creatures?" He grabbed the top of the cabinet and climbed out, wincing as his legs straightened.

  "We haven't seen any creatures," Chan told him. "Not any whole ones, anyway. You're the first living thing we've found."

  The man leaned in close, staring into Chan's eyes. His breath was hot and foul. "You haven't seen them?"

  "No."

  "You just walked in here?"

  Chan leaned back, trying not to be obvious about it. "Yes."

  "You're an idiot," the man said calmly. His eyes swept over the others. "All of you are idiots." His voice rose. "You're going to die, and die badly. If you had any sense you'd shoot yourselves, because the alternative is much, much worse!"

  "We can't shoot ourselves," Chan said, trying to sound soothing. "We're not armed."

  The man barked a laugh. "Morons! You're all dead!" He looked wildly around the room. "Dead!" He lunged for the door, kicking off too hard and rebounding from the ceiling. Before his feet reached the floor his hands clutched the door frame and he dragged himself through. They heard echoing thumps and thuds as he hurtled through the office area, heading back the way they had come.

  Singh gave Chan a sardonic grin. "I guess he agrees with you about getting out of here."

  Chan nodded. "We better see where he's gone."

  They trouped out of the office. Joss looked around at the terminals. "I guess I better report this," she said.

  "You could use this terminal here," Singh said, walking over to the desk he'd used before. He leaned over the desk and tapped the screen. "Oh, look! A reply to my message."

  The look of malicious glee on his face told Chan all that he needed to know. The unpleasant lump was back in his stomach before Singh began to speak.

  "From Special Agent Millicent Dobbs, officer in charge of blah blah blah, dear Mister Smith," and he looked up with a nasty grin. "I lied to Ms. Dobbs about my name. I know, I know, what kind of a person would do that?" He returned his gaze to the screen.

  "The IPBI has no agents or employees named Jocelyn Green. Impersonating a Bureau agent is a serious offense, and blah blah blah…"

  Chan looked at Joss, aware of the hurt, bewildered look on his face but unable to hide it. Singh's expression was all grim satisfaction. Only Vogel was smiling. "I knew you weren't a cop," he said. "You're too cool."

  Joss ignored the other two and turned her gaze to Chan. "I'm sorry I lied to you," she said. "This is a highly clas
sified operation. I wasn't allowed to tell you the truth."

  "Oh, come on," said Singh, and she silenced him with a raised hand.

  "You've seen what's going on here," she said. "Illegal and highly dangerous experiments. Solar Force has been hearing rumors about it for months. We knew the pirates were involved, but we didn't know what the connection was. The agency sent me out to infiltrate the pirate crew and try to find out what's really going on."

  Singh gave a sarcastic chuckle. "Do you really expect us to believe this malarkey?"

  "No," she said, looking at him for the first time. "But it happens to be the truth."

  "So your name isn't really Jocelyn Green," Chan said wearily.

  "It's Jocelyn Fleming. You can still call me Joss."

  "Of course." He sighed. "Now, if everyone's done playing silly games, I'd like to get out of here before something tears my head off."

  They followed him through the offices and down the corridor that led through the dormitory section. A scuff mark from a shoe, in the middle of the wall at eye level, told them that the wild-eyed man had come this way.

  Chan had just stepped into the dressing room when the floor trembled ever so slightly under his feet. A faint rumble reached his ears, and his stomach sank. His eyes scanned the room, and he saw a small window in the wall near the airlock. He hurried to the window and peered outside. And swore.

  The Stark Raven was lifting off. They were trapped.

  Chapter 5

  Liz paced back and forth on the bridge of the Raven, fuming. After eighteen claustrophobic days on the Albatross, the Raven had seemed enormous. With no one on board but Liz, it should've been even better. But somehow the presence of a moon just outside, the open ground and blowing snow, made the ship seem unbearably confining.

  She walked to the front of the bridge and peered through the glass. Nothing was moving. Nothing had changed. She stomped back to her chair, hit the microphone button, and said, "Is anyone on the air?"

  No response. They'd left their helmets behind, or they were all dead. "We really need hand radios," she muttered.

  She stood up and resumed pacing. The clank of her boot magnets was starting to get on her nerves. She was more than ready to get off this rock and back into space, out of the vac suit and into some comfortable clothes.

  Stomp. Clank. Stomp. Clank. And she froze. Was that a muffled thud?

  She held her breath, looking around the empty bridge. Nothing moved.

  There was a clumping sound, then a rustle of cloth. Her eyes went to the panes of glass. The atmosphere outside was thin, but would it carry sound? If not, there had to be someone on the ship with her.

  She heard breathing, quick, urgent gasps that raised the hair on the back of her neck. It was too loud to come through the walls. There was someone on the bridge with her.

  Her eyes went to the helm station, and she released the breath she'd been holding, not knowing whether to laugh or snarl. Someone had put their helmet back on. She hit the microphone button. "Welcome back. Want to tell me what's going on?"

  The answer was a startled grunt, followed by the unmistakable sound of an airlock door sliding open.

  "Hello?" she said. "Are you there? Anybody? Oh, for—"

  She stood and walked to the front of the bridge. There was nothing to be seen but flat white snow and the pale walls of the station. Then a slice of light appeared on the ground, growing rapidly into a rectangle as the outside door of the lock slid open. Someone squirmed through the gap as the door was still opening, casting a huge, grotesque shadow across the snow. And then a figure in a red and white vac suit came bounding across the snow toward her.

  Liz frowned. No one on the ship had been wearing red and white. Everyone looked the same in a vac suit, though. She couldn't tell who it was.

  Whoever he was, he was in a hurry. The first leap carried him a good eight metres, and his legs made running motions in the air before he even reached the ground. His feet touched down...

  And the snow seemed to erupt in front of him. Something blue and white burst upward in a cloud of white flakes, and the figure in the red and white vac suit jumped. In the microgravity of Enceladus, a startled jump was something to see. He sprang straight up, and he just kept rising.

  The thing, the creature from the snow, jumped with him. He was seven metres in the air when a tentacle closed around his ankle and the creature yanked him close. They wrestled as they continued to rise. They must have been fifteen metres up before they drifted to a halt and slowly began to descend. They looked almost graceful as they floated downward, but the one in the vac suit was no longer moving.

  The blue and white shape was monstrous, alien, bizarre. There was a torso and a head that looked vaguely human, but the rest was a perverse eruption of writhing, squirming tentacles. Liz stared, rigid with shock, watching tentacles wrap themselves around the arms and legs of the vac suit. One leg stuck out at an impossible angle, and she saw a puff of vapor as the suit tore at the shoulder seam. A single urgent thought began to penetrate the fog around her brain. In a moment that thing would reach the ground, and she didn't know what it would do next.

  She tore herself away from the window, lurching toward the helm console, distantly aware that she was making an embarrassing keening sound in the back of her throat. She threw herself into her seat and slapped a hand down on the main thrust controls. The white horizon of Enceladus vanished as the ship blasted upward, and she took a long, ragged breath, telling herself that she was safe.

  She saw the black of space through the transparent strips on either side of the patch. The view turned white, then black again, and she swore, her hands moving on the controls without conscious thought. Her mind was still filled with visions of tentacles and death, but her training kicked in and took control. Rising vertically with a force engine took a delicate touch to balance thrust against the unevenly-distributed mass of the ship. Her sudden takeoff had been the equivalent of slapping the end of a spoon, launching it upward but giving it a wild spin. She fought for control, fought for her life, as the ship tumbled madly toward the surface of Enceladus.

  Chan's voice babbled at her over the radio, and she broke the connection before he could distract her. She cut thrust, then turned on the maneuvering thruster in the nose of the ship. It would stop the spin, given enough time. As she was tumbling toward the surface, though, time was rapidly running out.

  At any meaningful distance from the surface the small gravity of Enceladus became inconsequential. She didn't have to fight against gravity, just the mad velocity of the tumbling ship. Her eyes scanned readouts, her fingers danced over the controls, and a corner of her mind was grateful for the patch that mostly kept her from seeing out the front of the ship. The sight of the horizon flashing past once per second might have pushed her over the edge into full-blown panic.

  Enceladus's thin atmosphere played a part in saving her, creating a bit of drag that slowed the spinning of the ship. In the end it wasn't enough. The ship was still revolving end over end as the surface rushed up. The spin was slow enough, though, that Liz was able to choose her moment and hit main thrust when the ship was pointing upward. She cut the thrust almost immediately and brought the ship under control a comfortable hundred kilometres above the moon.

  Then she sat and stared at nothing until her hands stopped shaking. She didn't know what to do, and when her hands went to the controls she wasn't sure why. But she guided the ship down and landed alongside a ridge of ice half way between the equator and the moon's north pole. The sun was below the horizon, but the sun didn't amount to much this far out. Saturn gave a yellow light that was more than adequate to see by. When she walked to the front of the bridge and peered out, she could see the expanse of the ring, back-lit by the distant sun, glittering like a field of diamonds whenever a ray of sunlight broke through. The beauty of it soothed her, and she stood watching until her pulse returned to normal.

  A faint clicking sound came to her ears. Someone was fooling aroun
d with a suit radio. With any luck that meant most of them were alive. Maybe even all of them. That red and white suit could have belonged to one of those annoying survivors who were causing so much trouble. She walked over to the helm station and reached for the microphone button.

  And froze, her finger a centimetre above the button. The radio was off.

  She straightened. Her first thought was of tentacled monsters, but they couldn't be everywhere. She was a hundred kilometres or more from the research station. No, her wild flight had broken something or pulled something loose. She would have to figure out what was wrong before she dared take off again.

  The sound was definitely coming from aft. Liz walked to the back of the bridge, and the noise got louder as the hatch slid open. She moved down the corridor, listening, moving farther and farther aft.

  She didn't get really worried until she reached the aft airlock. Still, there was no reason to think that anything was in the airlock. The lock would have been open, the ramp down, when she made her emergency takeoff. If anything was going to tear loose, it would be the hydraulics for the ramp. There was a hose loose, flapping in the wind. That was all.

  I need a weapon. She shook her head at the thought. Vogel and Joss had gone over the ship trying to arm themselves, and what had they come up with? A hammer and a pipe wrench? The monstrosity that had burst from the snow and killed the man in red and white wouldn't have been fazed by anything less than an assault rifle, and maybe not even by that. Thumping it with a wrench wasn't going to do much.

  She put her hands on her hips and glared at the lock. There was no way she was going to be intimidated by something as trivial as a knocking sound, monster or no monster. She was, however, going to put her helmet on. The readouts showed that the lock was closed, but the noise told her something was malfunctioning. She wouldn't take a chance on the ship depressurizing.

  Her helmet clicked into place and the radio turned itself on. She called out a tentative "Hello" and got no response. Shrugging, she walked back to the aft lock. If the others had been watching, she would have hit the button right away. Since no one could see her, she hesitated, working up her courage. Finally she told herself she was being silly, and laid her hand across the panel.