Alien: The Cold Forge

by Alex White

  “Hit the auto-reel, you fucking idiot!” Anne screams at him. If she didn’t have the escape pod codes, he’d definitely drop the door on her. Instead he hefts his way to the hose controls, purges the line to slacken it, and hits the auto-reel. The winching system inside whines at the weight, but impossibly, it begins to pull them closer.

  The air is unbearably thin, and warning lights erupt from hidden panels, announcing that the partition is going to drop. He looks from the crew to the door, mentally judging the distance. It’s going to drop on them either way. He may as well go ahead and shut it.

  Using the gratings as a purchase, he climbs across the door controls, keenly watching the progress of the crew as he does. He’ll give them ten more seconds, but they’re all screwed.

  The door begins sliding shut.

  As they draw close to the entrance, Dorian peers around them to watch Daniel struggling. The creatures have begun to circle him, looking for the best way to attack without being sucked outside. With each passing second the atmosphere dwindles and the suction lessens. He’ll be a meal soon enough.

  The airlock next to Dorian beeps, its sound startling him—almost costing him his grip. Marcus comes storming out, tearing off his helmet. Dorian can’t recall ever seeing a synthetic move that fast, and his stomach flips at the sight. At first, he believes it’s Blue, come to exact some kind of revenge on him—except he locked Blue out, so that can’t be the case.

  Marcus vaults through the mercurial wind currents, making adjustments to his balance using a series of quick gestures and twists, snatching the grating by Anne’s team to make an impressive landing. He then grasps the hose with one hand and drags it forward, using his other to pull himself along the deck.

  The air has grown so thin that sounds are dimmed. The lab tech at the back of the hose train faints, and his unconscious body tumbles toward the breach. One of the creatures snatches him out of midair, sinking its teeth deep into the fatty tissue around his thigh.

  Dorian searches again for Blue and Kambili, and sees another of the bugs clambering after her. It makes an aborted attempt at a pounce, fails, and sets up to try again. He watches as Kambili grabs her and pulls her toward the door, showing little regard for his own safety. Chivalry is an artifact of his Earth-bound life—it’s useless out here.

  Earth teaches people that everyone should be treated equally, they are all worth the same. It’s a bunch of garbage. Anyone who can’t pull his own weight deserves to be dragged down by it, no matter what the reason. To see Kambili risking his own life to save Blue Marsalis, just because she’s pathetic, strikes Dorian as a farce.

  Kambili shoves Blue under the partition just in time to have his arms sheared off at the elbows. The snatcher is right behind him, about to pounce. Yet Kambili should’ve been the one who survived, with four limbs and a long life expectancy. He should’ve cut Blue—with her stink of sickness—out of the herd. That’s the truth that animals know, and it’s the way of the free market. Kambili has suffered the wages of altruism.

  Blue is nowhere to be seen.

  The door seals with a thunk, and the sound of the gale disappears, leaving only the alarms. Those who can, rush to the flashing oxygen panel. They unspool masks for themselves while Marcus assists those who can’t make it on their own.

  Dorian is among the first to get sips of oxygen while the bulkhead repressurizes. There are twelve people and eight masks, and the survivors take turns. Marcus apportions the oxygen treatments, taking the mask from Dorian’s hand and giving it to Javier. He then guides them one-by-one to the airlock before joining everyone inside. Dorian considers telling Marcus about Blue, then decides against it. Better to keep him focused on their survival.

  If Blue isn’t dead already, she will be soon enough.

  “We have to remain here for the next five hours,” Marcus says. He opens a control panel and adjusts the parameters. Dorian’s ears pop loudly as the air pressure returns. It feels different somehow—heavier.

  “What?”

  “No!” Lucy says. “Those things are right outside, Blue!”

  “It’s Marcus,” the synthetic replies.

  “Explains all the flipping and shit when you came to the rescue,” Javier mutters. “Just glad you were there, man.”

  “Blue’s whereabouts are currently unknown,” Marcus says, then he sweeps the group with his gaze. “You are all likely to be suffering from decompression sickness, and you need hyperbaric treatment to prevent an arterial gas embolism.”

  “Fuck… the bends,” Anne says.

  “Five hours?” Dorian says.

  Marcus nods and gestures to the seats. There are a few space suits hanging on the wall, and some of the survivors pull them down, placing them open on the floor for use as bedding. The airlock is cramped for a dozen people, but they manage to find enough space for everyone to relax. Marcus stands in the corner keeping silent vigil over the tableau.

  Dorian chooses a spot closest to the outer hatch, resting his back against it. Every muscle in his body is slackened by exhaustion, and his mind doesn’t want to work right as the adrenaline drains from his body. People are crying. Lucy makes an idiotic whimpering noise that sounds like a cross between creaky metal and a sinus infection. He wants to tell her to shut up, but decides another approach will be more to his advantage.

  “They’re all dead,” she says, repeating the phrase as if it wasn’t completely obvious. Dorian takes her hand— those frail, slender bones—and squeezes… gently. He looks into her eyes.

  “But we’re not,” he says. So kindly shut the fuck up.

  Mercifully, she does, until they hear a loud thump on the outside of the airlock. Everyone shrieks except Dorian and Marcus. They calmly peer outside through the porthole. Dorian expects to see a piece of debris, or maybe one of the escape pods, but comes face-to-face with a black skull and knife-sharp teeth, visible through the thick glass. It pulls back and butts the airlock again, to no avail.

  More screams.

  “Don’t worry,” Marcus says. “That’s twelve inches of unbreakable carbon crystal with a very small diameter. It could withstand a direct hit from a starship.

  “Easy for you to say!” Lucy cries, and her distress eases Dorian’s heart. It’s hard to put a finger on why he hates her so much. Maybe it’s her constant overreactions, which seem almost fake.

  He places a hand against the porthole and watches as the beast strikes the glass, again and again, to the great distress of the airlock occupants. This close, in the shadow of the station, he can sense the raw strength of the thing, its drool freezing to its face. It’s probably dying, but it shows no signs of slowing down.

  What majesty, driven to waste.

  “It would appear that the freezing point of its blood is far lower than that of a human,” Marcus says.

  “That’s not surprising,” Dorian replies. “It’s the perfect killing machine.”

  “Thanks for saving us,” Javier says to Anne, then nods at Dorian. “We were fucked out there.” His words seem to calm the others, at least somewhat.

  “You should all get some rest,” Marcus says. “We’ll need to move as soon as the time is up.” The others look to him as though he’s gone mad, but Dorian knows he’s right.

  Dorian feels no remorse, no pity for those lost to the violence. They’re dead and he isn’t. They are useless, and he is paramount. He can’t allow sentimentality to deprive him of critical rest.

  So Dorian drifts off, lulled by the bass drum of the perfect skull.

  * * *

  Maybe it’s been an hour, maybe it’s been three, but Blue’s muscles feel as though they’re going to fall off her bones. She’s given up on trying to drag herself without her belly touching the ground, and long ago scraped off her colostomy bag. Not that she knows when she’s going to eat again. No G-tube, no shit filling her intestines.

  Her stomas itch.

  Every yard is agony. Her tender elbows are bruised and swollen, and much of her has been scr
aped raw by the deck plating. With each push, she swears that it’s her last, and yet she always rises, always pulls herself another step closer.

  Until her knee catches fire.

  It’s a tickle for just a moment, in the back of her joint, then a full-blown burning the likes of which she’s never felt. It’s like a Charlie horse fucking a stab wound. Aliens be damned, she screams out at the top of her lungs. Her cries echo down the halls, and for the second time that day she summons a strength she’d thought long lost.

  It won’t subside. Blue’s eyes drift between the crew quarters and the med bay, and she knows what she must do. There’s no time to pause, and yet she can barely think due to the utter anguish spreading through her legs.

  She drags herself to the med bay door—closer than she had guessed, thank god—as the fire spreads to her other knee. She repeats every curse word she knows as if it’s a solemn prayer and pulls herself toward the nearest operating bed.

  Pulling herself up the side, one handhold at a time, she rolls onto the mattress. It might be the softest thing she’s ever felt in her life, though she can’t enjoy it with her knees about to explode. Blue keeps racking her brain for some explanation, but nothing comes to her, and she can’t concentrate. She grabs the control panel wires, pulls the console close enough to see with her failing eyes, and hopes to god the bed isn’t on Titus’s network.

  “Scanning,” the bed says in a gentle voice coming through its tinny speakers. Blue lets out a breath in the closest thing she can get to relief. “Please wait.” Scanners circle the bed on long arms.

  Then she cries out as the pain strikes her again, and she bends her knees, clutching them close. The scanners pull away and go still. Miraculously, the agony reduces slightly, and she can think again.

  “Re-initializing scans,” the bed says. “Are you able to keep still?”

  “Yes,” Blue whispers, her throat raw.

  The scanners circle the bed again, and Blue wishes she was at a real hospital instead of this pathetic simulation. She wants real doctors, with real gear and real databases containing data for almost every disease known to mankind—though that didn’t help her when she was diagnosed with Bishara’s Syndrome.

  “Were you recently exposed to a vacuum or depressurization?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are suffering from decompression sickness, sometimes called DCS, Diver’s Disease, or the Bends. You have bubbles inside your bloodstream composed of soluble gasses which emerged during a decompression event.” The bed produces a servo for intravenous feeding. “Recommended treatment: hyperbaric oxygenation and rehydration. Can you get to an airlock?”

  “No.”

  She gasps as cold antiseptic sprays across her hand and the bed slips a needle into her. It shunts aside the first few drops of blood for various test procedures.

  “Then the best treatment is rehydration and rest. Elevated heart rate detected. Are you under emotional duress?”

  Blue laughs. “Yes.”

  “Acknowledged. This system will monitor the nitrogen bubbles for potential Type II complications, and you will be administered a sedative.”

  “Wait, what?” Blue tries to sit up, but her arm is caught in the IV. She can’t be unconscious right now. There’s too much to do. But the chemicals flow into her arm, sweet and warm, and she knows it’s too late. The world swims only briefly before sleep strikes her like a hammer.

  18

  RESET

  They’ve been high on heavy oxygen for hours, taking frequent breathing breaks to avoid toxicity. The air is thick, hot, and foul smelling, and the extreme flammability just makes him want to smoke. In another hour, they’ll be close to Earth barometric pressure.

  “Eeny, meeny, miney, mo,” Dorian whispers, his slender finger pointing toward each person trapped in the airlock with him. “Catch a—”

  “You’d better fucking say tiger,” Javier says. Dorian smirks, then continues the rhyme in the requested fashion. Javier shakes his head and turns away, curling up next to Lucy on an old spacesuit.

  “Do you think the traitor is dead?” Dorian asks.

  “What traitor?” Javier asks.

  “Someone brought Silversmile across the air gap to Titus. Someone opened the manual-only kennel doors.” Dorian picks at his nails. “Maybe that someone is floating outside right now, frosted over.”

  “That’s not appropriate, Director Sudler,” Marcus says.

  “But my money is on Doctor Marsalis,” Dorian continues. “If I had to guess, that is.”

  “I think so, too,” Lucy says. “Marcus, what has she been making you do?”

  Marcus shakes his head. “I’m afraid I can’t answer that question unless there’s a direct threat to your safety. It would be in violation of Doctor Marsalis’s privacy. Furthermore, I have no ability to recall actions taken while I’ve been under her control.”

  “Screw that,” Lucy says, sitting up. “We’re not safe. We’re stuck in an airlock and there are fucking monsters outside! Tell us anything you know.”

  “Director,” Anne says, putting a warm hand on his forearm. “Do you think now is really the time?”

  Dorian quirks an eyebrow. “What, did you have something better to do? Most of us are dead, someone is responsible, and I for one would like to know who it is.”

  Two of the techs in the corner huddle closer, and one of them yawns. No one besides Dorian has had a wink of sleep. In fact, he’s found the airlock to be his most comfortable accommodation to date. There’s nothing more bracing than the edge of death, nothing more satisfactory than another moment of survival.

  “Blue was in league with someone off-station,” Dorian says. “Trying to steal the results of the project and keep them to herself. That’s why we had her old boss arrested, so it’s not hard to put the pieces together.” Just in case Blue isn’t dead, he doesn’t want any talk of going to rescue her. There are mutterings of assent among the assembly, especially those who knew about Blue’s hidden server. It won’t take long to herd the sheep toward his way of thinking, and though it gives him great joy to think of turning them against Blue, he also wonders how wise his strategy may be.

  What if she’s not the saboteur?

  At this moment, the Cold Forge could be exporting ridiculous amounts of data, and no one would know. There could be long-range transmitters blasting out secrets to various and sundry parties, and none of the station’s countermeasures would stop them. Everything is offline. Everything is compromised.

  At some point, this might’ve been Blue’s plan, but he’d interrupted her. There was no point to killing everyone on the station, save for revenge, and that’s too petty for such a pretentious woman. Besides, Dorian already had interviewed Kambili Okoro to get the location of her research. Blue was trying to synthesize some super-cure, not murder everyone.

  The real saboteur is someone else.

  “Are there any escape pods left, Marcus?” he asks.

  “Yes. It appears there is one,” Marcus replies. “At least, that’s what I saw when I rescued you. Though my memory is impeccable, something may have happened to the pod since that time.”

  “We need to get to it,” Dorian says. “Need to get out of here.”

  Lucy laughs. “Those pods support two people each. Even if you were willing to remain unfrozen for the ten- year journey back to Earth, you’d run out of food.”

  He does a quick count of the survivors in the airlock. Javier, Lucy, Anne, himself… there are thirteen all told, if he counts Marcus. Blue is somewhere out there, too, if she’s still alive, but he’ll leave her behind when the time comes. He’d fuck over everyone here for a shot at one of the two remaining pod seats. When he imagines the scenarios for escape, he’s always alone.

  A sudden rush fills his gut, like he’s started a long fall. It takes all his concentration not to vomit in the hot, foul- smelling airlock. Tools rise from the ground. His hands begin to float. They’ve lost gravity.

  “Alert,” Titus says
. “Gravity drive failure.”

  No shit, Sherlock. A murmur rises in the crowd as they search for anything to which they can cling.

  “We have to reset Titus,” Marcus says, looking directly at Dorian. “If the computer has lost control of gravity, Silversmile may find a way to vent us into space.”

  “Wouldn’t that be something?” Dorian responds.

  “I suggest we cut short our hyperbaric therapy and address the Titus reset.” Marcus peers out of the airlock window into the depths of the station. “Someone will need to accompany me, as I do not have administrative access to Titus.”

  “Why not?” Anne asks.

  “Shit,” Javier says, his voice falling. “Synthetics never do. They’re not allowed to control life support. They’re not allowed to use firearms. They can’t do anything that would endanger real people.”

  Dorian looks Javier over. The station sysadmin has grown awfully pale for a brown man. His lips are white where they should be pink, and his eyes are pink where they should be white. His hands shake, and he’s only weakly holding onto the seat where he had been comfortably resting.

  “I’m going to have to go out there,” Javier says. “I’m the best qualified person to do it. Fucking shit.” But Javier could be the saboteur. After all, he’s the one who introduced Silversmile into Juno. It was his mistake that brought the first round of ruin. If he continues to cripple RB-232’s systems, he can run any play he wishes, unopposed. He might just grab a spacesuit and head for the escape pod.

  “I’ll go, too,” Dorian says. “You need someone to watch your back.”

  Javier eyes him, surprise in his expression, and gives him a smile.

  “Thanks, man.”

  “Marcus, you should act as a distraction,” Dorian continues. “Javier and I can handle the reset.”

  “Very well. I’ll go out ahead and see if I can draw some attention away from your egress.” Marcus grabs onto the access panel, preparing to open the hatch. Their ears pop as pressure equalizes with the rest of the station. “From what I have observed, the animals will be torpid without targets to hunt.”