“Best disable it,” Max decided. He removed the ammunition belt and cleared the weapon. For good measure, he then switched off the sensor for the laser trip down the hall. “Let’s move on, but keep your eyes open. The next one might be pointing at us.”
The scent of spent gun powder grew stronger. At a T-intersection, about forty feet ahead, sat another tripod-mounted minigun. This time brass shell casings lay scattered across the floor at the intersection, winking in the glare of their flashlights.
“Stop,” Max ordered. “That thing might be rigged to fire down any hallway. Red, scan the left wall for trips. I’ll take the right.”
Red nodded, and they pressed on, the bulk of their bodies filling the hallway from side to side. As they moved, a new scent began to compete for their attention: organic rot.
The trip had been hastily rigged, the apparatus glaringly apparent on the ship’s smooth walls despite its diminutive sensors. The invisible beam spanned the hall at a height of three feet, too high to step over safely. Red crawled underneath on his belly. Max followed, indicating the laser’s location to Gable beforehand. Each man and woman crawled beneath, in turn, having been alerted to the danger by the person in front of them.
Red stopped a few feet past the laser beam. He jerked a thumb toward the left wall and then the right. Two Claymore mines, each detonated, had been rigged at a height of six feet, both pointed at a slight angle to completely cover the last few feet of hallway and the intersection. The sickly sweet smell of gore rotting in the heat fought to overpower the pungent sting of burnt powder. Max had smelled the same scent dozens of times during his career, and it always made him edgy, an expectation that things would get worse before they got better.
“How in the fuck?” Red eyed the floor and walls covered in splatters and smears of black crystalline residue where the creature had been blasted by the mines. It had been headed toward the ship’s only exit, yet only a tiny trail of the scattered black drops led in that direction.
Max couldn’t suppress a sigh. “Yeah, they’re that tough.”
“What the fuck? Does it just regenerate like a troll or something?”
Shot up with a chain gun, direct hits from two Claymores, and still running around. We are fucked. “That’s pretty much the size of it.” Max pointed ahead. “The intersection. Let’s move.”
The creature hadn’t been hit by all fourteen hundred bb’s from the Claymore mines. The errant pellets, however, had barely scarred the ship’s resin-like interior. They had partially destroyed the directory sign adhered to the wall at the intersection. The remaining half listed points of interest: Cargo Hold, Bridge, Holochamber, Diagnostics, Microbiology, Security, Personnel Quarters, and Services Deck. The half pointing the way to each area had taken the brunt of the blast, leaving it unreadable.
Max noticed that some bb’s and the shell casings from the tripod-mounted gun had rolled down the right hallway, yet none had rolled to the left, indicating the ship had come to rest listing slightly. The chain gun had fired about half a belt of 7.62mm ammunition into the creature—Max saw the gleaming blood spatter where it had been hit about fifty feet down the right hallway.
The team and survivors gathered at the intersection.
“Disable the gun?” LT asked.
“Yeah, I’ll disconnect the belt and clear the weapon. While it’s inoperable, we’ll destroy the sensors down each of these hallways. We’ll leave the trigger we crawled under intact and reload the gun before we move on. Hopefully, the creature outside will trigger the weapon when it follows us in. It probably won’t kill it, but the gunfire might alert us to its presence if we’re close enough to hear.”
Kumar added, “If it even follows us in.”
Max glared at him. “Your opinion is only important when I ask for it. Until then, keep your mouth shut.”
Kumar smirked and turned away.
The team carried out Max’s orders within minutes. Sugar got down in the prone position and covered the hallway they’d traversed, and Max wished for the beast to come right now. With the chain gun and Sugar lighting it up simultaneously, they might actually be able to drop the thing. Yet Max knew the timing wasn’t right. No, we’re too alert for it to attack right now. It’ll wait for us to drop our guard.
“Form it up,” Max ordered when the gun was reloaded. “That way.” He pointed down the left hallway. No one questioned his choice of direction since the creature had come from the right. Hopefully, it hadn’t dined on Dr. Rogers before getting blasted at the intersection.
The going was slow. Max and Red moved with great care as they examined the walls and ceiling for more traps, yet they found none. There were doors aplenty, some of the sliding variety that automatically opened when someone stood before them, and others apparently controlled by a touch-screen mounted next to them in the wall. All the doors were seamless and constructed of the lightweight resin material. Not surprisingly, the automatic doors revealed rooms that were largely empty and devoid of any signs of habitation. The touch-screen doors could not be opened. When touched a holographic image appeared with strange floating symbols. A swipe of the hand through the image and the symbols would move into a pattern and change colors. Max assumed that they required a biometric reading from someone authorized to enter, but it was impossible to say since the script on the screen was in an alphabet foreign to Earth.
“Greytech brought in four professors just to decipher this alphabet, not that you asked,” Dr. Kumar told Max.
“They obviously failed,” Max replied.
“Looks Oriental to me,” Irish squinted at one of the screens.
“The characters closely resemble ancient Sumerian cuneiform text, so I’m told,” Kumar informed them. “I wouldn’t know; I slept through most of Ancient History 102.”
“Yeah, go figure,” Gable grumbled. “Even in college you were useless.”
Irish rapped against a door as he passed. “I bet we could blow one of these suckers open.”
“No time for that,” Max said. “We need to keep moving.”
Red asked, “What if she’s behind one of them? How the hell would we know?”
“There’s nothing living behind them,” LT assured him. “They haven’t been opened in God knows how long.”
“I agree,” Max said. “That creature has a thing for tearing down doors to get at anything tasty. There’s likely nothing important behind any of them.”
They pressed on for a hundred more feet at just below a normal walking pace before stopping to observe something all too familiar: body parts, in this case, the naked lower half of a man lying in front of a closed door, knees broken, the severed intestines oozing blood and excrement.
Someone retched behind him; Ms. Harlow, Max assumed.
Red leveled his flamethrower, stepped over the remains, and stood before the door which slid open quickly to reveal more Greytech casualties. Four dead men lay amongst tables and chairs overturned and broken. Max noted a busted laptop lying in a corner, its surfaces bloody, the weapon used to bludgeon one of them to death. All the corpses lay in twisted positions with necks and backs broken, elbows and knees bent backward. Some were missing portions of limbs, most of which had been gnawed on by the creature and then discarded. The beast had scooped the innards from a torso, the counterpart to the legs in the hallway, and flung them about the place. Papers covered in characters similar to those on the touch-screen doors were scattered everywhere.
“So much for the Four Horsemen of Linguistics,” Max commented. “Sugar, Diaz, remain outside with the ladies and the doc. Everyone else, toss the place.”
The papers revealed nothing but gibberish; half were illegible with blood. Red found an intact laptop and powered it on. Max watched over his shoulder as he pulled up programs and entered Greytech in the search box, finding a folder labeled Greytech Alphabet Analysis.
“Fuck, it’s password protected.” Red shook his head.
Max didn’t miss a beat. “Don’t sweat it; there probab
ly isn’t anything here that’ll help us anyway.”
“Got something here, Chief.” LT stood up from the corner he’d been searching and held aloft a black leather daily planner.
“There we go,” Max said.
The planner belonged to Lucian Sprague, Ph.D., a professor from Columbia University. It didn’t mention Dr. Sprague’s area of academic expertise; it did, however, reveal that he’d arrived at the Greytech camp ten days previous and chronicled his various appointments with other researchers since then.
“Bingo!” Max pointed out to LT an appointment entry from four days before: “Dr. Rogers, Holochamber, 8am.” He’d scrawled feedback from his appointment below that: “Oddly distracted and supercilious...”
“There’s a word you don’t hear every day,” Max said.
“I thought all professors were supercilious.” LT snorted. “The one out in the hall certainly is.”
“Whatever the case, we know where to start searching for her.” Max rounded up the team, none of whom had found anything else of note. “Be on the lookout for any directions to the Holochamber. Let’s move out.”
Luck was with the team. The next intersection, a four-way, opened into a round room in the center of which sat a circular elevator. No combat had taken place here. According to the intact sign, the Holochamber was four floors up, on deck eight.
As they approached, the elevator showed up in moments, on its own accord as if it reacted to their presence. Max noted it was made of the same mysterious material as everything else. The team and survivors packed themselves into the round car, an uncomfortably tight squeeze for all. Next to the elevator’s holographic controls. Max touched the glowing prompt with the “8” plastered next to it. The weight of the team with their gear would have stalled the elevator in just about any building. But not this tin can. Max felt blood rush from his head down to his boots when the car shot upward as though it were rocket-propelled.
“Know what I’m wondering?” Gable asked. “How the hell is the power on in here?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” Dr. Kumar sniped.
“That so, Professor?” Gable leaned over Ms. Quinones to get in Kumar’s face. “And why is that?”
“Because I don’t understand it.”
Max had to give Kumar grudging credit. He was probably terrified of Gable—and justly so—but he hadn’t flinched when the old Ranger invaded his personal space.
Gable wasn’t impressed. “Maybe we should feed you to this fuckin’ critter. Buy the rest of us a little more time.”
Kumar wrinkled his nose against the onslaught of Gable’s reeking Copenhagen breath.
“Just delaying lo inevitable,” Diaz said. “That thing’ll be shitting us all out before this is over.”
“Both of you idiots shut your mouths; nobody needs to hear it,” Max growled.
When the speeding elevator came to a gentle halt, opening on deck eight, everyone flinched. Sugar alighted first to cover the elevator landing. Max followed on his heels and swept the chamber with his rifle’s reflex sight. They found the room empty, similar yet not identical to the four-way intersection four floors below. The hallways leading from this chamber were much wider, the lighting brighter, and the atmosphere a comfortable room temperature. A laminated sign on the wall pointed the way to the Holochamber.
Max formed the team up two abreast, and they moved out. The elevator disappeared below as if on cue. About fifty feet into their journey they spotted double sliding doors ajar, from which an amber-orange light poured forth into the hallway. Max halted the group and he and Red crept forward to cover the doorway. The rest of the team moved up silently on Max’s nodded signal.
Max peered around the doorway and scanned the room. He could make out what appeared to be a reclining amphitheater seating built into the floor ringed most of the chamber. On the floor, a raised circular platform about ten feet across projected amber light upward to form an abstruse image that Max assumed was a blowup of a molecular structure, complete with notes in the strange cuneiform characters.
Red took in the room from the other side with his NVGs down. He silently signaled that he saw something in the corner of the room. Max motioned the team up and wordlessly relayed the information and, on his signal, they did a dynamic entry into the room.
As they entered, Max could make out a lone female who crouched in the shadows of the room corner. Upon hearing the team approach, she stood up and leveled a Glock at Max and the team.
“Gun,” Max yelled, causing the team to fan out. “Hold your fire!”
A standoff ensued, neither party speaking as they sized up the other. Max lifted his NVGs and engaged his rifle mounted flash light illuminating the corner. Max noticed the tatters in her jumpsuit; some of the rips ringed with dried blood. Her pistol arm did not shake with nervousness, and the dark-brown eyes that stared Max down glinted with unwavering determination in the light. He knew the look well and harbored no doubts that she would open fire if she thought it necessary.
“Dr. Rogers?” Max asked, though he doubted this fiery female could be a reclusive researcher. At first glance, nothing appeared professorial about her. She came off as more Lara Croft than Madame Curie. As he slowly approached her, Max was struck by her intense beauty. Of average height, she wore a charcoal gray Greytech jumpsuit that clung to the contours of her taut, toned body, and long raven colored hair hung down her back. He couldn’t make out her ethnicity—she seemed to be an exotic mix of possibly many things—but she looked like trouble.
“Who are you?” the woman demanded with cool brusqueness.
“My name’s Max Ahlgren, I’ve been contracted by Greytech to secure this installation and rescue any survivors.”
“You could be one of them.”
Red commented, “He doesn’t look like a twenty-foot-tall T. rex.”
“I see you’re familiar with the substance. But that’s merely one of its manifestations. How many in your group?” Her pistol remained raised, a Glock 19, the same sidearm the Greytech security personnel had been carrying.
Max understood her wariness but still found it unnerving that she hadn’t lowered her weapon. He glimpsed the computer screen and noticed the characters were all in alien script.
“Ten at the moment,” Max responded. “Seven on my team and three survivors.”
“Where are you from?”
The question seemed off. “What does it matter?”
“Humor me.”
“We’re based out of Las Vegas.”
“Ok, I wanted to make sure you weren’t one of those creatures.”
Supercilious indeed. “Are you Dr. Rogers or not?”
“I am, sorry.” She lowered the pistol and stepped forward out of the shadows.
“Thanks,” Red muttered.
“Dr. Rogers, I’m so glad to see you alive,” Dr. Kumar announced upon entering.
She cocked her head and considered him a moment, eyes slightly narrowed. “Yes. And you as well.”
Not the warmest of greetings. But Dr. Rogers wasn’t the warmest of people. She’s trapped on an alien spacecraft infested with man-eating monsters; cut her a break.
The survivors sat down in the amphitheater seats, plainly exhausted. The constant toll of being on high alert and having to check every corner and cranny they encountered had taken its toll. Max introduced the team who though also fatigued, remained standing at the ready, with Sugar posted at the door to monitor the hallway.
“Doctor, please allow my medic to have a look at those wounds,” Max suggested.
“Not necessary. They’re superficial in nature, and I’ve already dressed them. But thank you, anyway.”
“Very well, then.” Max pointed upward at the hologram. “So, would that be the substance up there?”
“Yes, it is from a sample I took after it formed into one of the more recent manifestations. Greytech’s security force placed all sorts of traps around the ship in the vain hope of killing the creatures. I was able to collect a
small bit of its tissue to determine its molecular structure.”
Kumar asked, “Did it change after it morphed from the substance?”
“Yes, the cells continue to adapt to whatever stimuli is presented to them.”
None of this set Max at ease. “So, there are definitely multiple creatures? What can you tell us about them?”
“It is a polymorphic organism of extraterrestrial origin. The cell structure is very large and vaguely similar in make-up to human stem cells. Its cells can take any form: muscle, nerves, bone, even tissues and organs not previously recorded. However, unlike stem cells, these cells can change shape and composition rapidly, allowing the substance to take almost any form. They regenerate at a frenetic pace. Amputate a large enough chunk, and it will propagate in its own right.”
Diaz muttered, “So we’ve seen.”
“Can we kill it?” Max asked.
“It is definitely organic and can be killed if a strong enough external stimulus is directed their way. Crude firepower will do the trick though probably not the most effective means to kill this organism.”
“Is it intelligent?” Max wondered.
“They display intelligence at the cellular level that appears to grow along with the creature, a collective intelligence, you might call it.”
Kumar glanced up. “It’s a shame the notes in the hologram are in alien script. I’m sure they’re very enlightening.”
“I should think so,” Dr. Rogers replied. “But I’m as in the dark as anyone trying to decipher all of them.”
“The linguists are dead,” Max informed her.
Dr. Rogers shrugged. “That doesn’t surprise me. They weren’t even close to deciphering the alphabet and were not the sort of men resourceful enough to avoid the creatures.”
“And how would you know that, not being a linguist?”
“I talked to one. They did not understand what they were looking at. The characters are only similar to cuneiform; not one of them has been identified as ancient Sumerian. Kind of makes sense actually, considering the cuneiform script was designed for making impressions in tablets of wax or clay.”
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