Cyborg (The Deep Wide Black Book 1)

by JCH Rigby

  “Richter, you’ll stay outside until you hear from us. I want someone out of weapons range in case we run into trouble. You’re our link to Pedersen in the lander; keep him updated on how we’re getting on. We’ve only got thirty-two minutes left on the clock, so we can’t screw around. If we lose communication with each other, wait till the hour’s up then get the hell out of here. Once you are back on the ship, you can all decide what to do next.” Richter could imagine how the techs would feel on hearing that. “Pedersen, you getting this?”

  “Acknowledged.” The voice faint in their helmets. Instinctively, Richter looked for the lander but couldn’t make it out against the stars. His suit got the idea, though, and put a gently strobing blue ring on his HUD to indicate the craft; there it was, astern of one of the alien ships, and far beyond it. Range: 100.14 kilometers.

  Pedersen had been precise: exactly the stand-off distance they’d settled on. 100 kilometers was nearly an hour’s travel time for the lander. A hell of a long run-in to be a snatch wagon, and the flimsy little sled wasn’t very reassuring as an emergency escape vehicle.

  Richter returned his attention to Krause as he finished sketching out his plan. “As soon as I’m past this first hull skin layer, Lisl, you follow me. Max, same spacing. I want to see how far we can progress with a limit of ten minutes. Then we turn back. Gives us a little blunder time. Anyone not clear?”

  Richter felt rushed. He switched channels, knowing Krause would be monitoring both. “Gerhard, are you sure about this? The main threat must be down there, not up here. Max could act as link man; if I go with you you’ll have more fire power on hand if something happens.”

  “Can it, Richter. This is my call. You Mountain Troop guys may like to hold each other’s hands, but that’s not how I do it. Your job is to watch our backs, and be a link to Pedersen and the lander. There’s no obvious threat that I can see right now. The place is dead, yeah? This is a science mission, and I need these two in there where they can report back everything they see.”

  Idiot. “Okay, Krause; you’re the boss.”

  “That’s right, I am.” Krause changed channels. “Okay, everyone, here goes.”

  The sergeant gave his EVA suit a little thrust, lifting slightly away from the hull surface before rotating on his axis and turning himself to enter the crater. Richter twisted around to watch the maneuver.

  Lisl followed, showing the same surprising dexterity as before. For someone who spent most of her space time shipboard, she adapted well. Then Max, moving erratically but just about under control. Even face-down, Richter could see through the man’s helmet his abject terror. Suddenly he felt sorry for him, and regretted the way he’d laughed at the sight of the trussed pair of techs spinning slowly above the hangar floor. Twisting part of the way around so their faces were better aligned, and gave Max a thumbs-up and what he hoped was an encouraging smile. Max nodded tensely.

  Screw watching their backs. What was in front of them? Richter glanced down into the cavity, but Lisl and Max’s slowly-moving bodies blocked his view. All he could see were their air packs, and their backs. Almost immediately, Krause was completely hidden by the others. Frustrated, Richter settled for watching the image from the sergeant’s helmet cam in the corner of his HUD. Alongside it he put a clock display, counting down from ten minutes.

  On the screen Krause moved slowly through shadowy layers of hull material, his suit lights reflecting from twisted girders, buckled plates, torn ducting. The warped and torn entry hole gradually turned into a smooth-sided tubular tunnel, as if a more concentrated force had been brought to bear on the inside of the ship. Richter wondered if the attackers used one type of device to blow a hole, and another to cut this smoother passageway.

  They passed through bulkheads and floor plating, sinking deeper into the abandoned vessel. He was no engineer, but what Krause was seeing looked pretty much like the structure of any ship. Maybe there were only so many ways you could bolt a starship together, even if you were a bug-eyed monster.

  Richter parked the thought, and went back to watching the hull exterior. The images played on in the corner of his eye, still showing those curiously normal and blandly- colored hull sections drifting past, one after another. Something nagged at the back of his mind, but he couldn’t pin it down. Anxiety and tension kept shunting his train of thought into non-productive sidings. Fear, real fear, felt a heartbeat away.

  “Looks like a maintenance area—just decking and cabinets and stuff.” Krause on the comm sounded disappointed, as if he’d hoped to find a room full of sleeping alien crewmembers. “I’m going on.”

  A couple of seconds later Krause was back on the comms. “This is different from the other battle damage. This is a forced entry point. This is where an assault went in.” Richter’s eyes snapped to the image from Krause’s helmet cam. The suit lights illuminated a four-way junction between the smooth-sided shaft and a symmetrical cross-tunnel. “It started off looking like a blast crater, but now the shaft is even and regular. It’s like it’s been cut with a machine. It looks like it goes right through several decks and what could be a couple of corridors, that’s too convenient to be anything else.

  “Everyone hold where you are.” Ordered Krause. “Richter, is anything going on out there?”

  Double idiot. I’d have told you if there was. Nonetheless, he scanned the hull’s outer surfaces once more. “No, I’m good. It’s all clear. Why?” The screen clock gave them just over three minutes until the turn-round time Krause specified. What the hell was nagging at him?

  “I want to go a bit further in. There’s got to be a reason somebody blew a hole right through all these decks and corridors. This wasn’t just hostile fire: it was an access point for a boarding party. We need to see more.” Richter thought Krause sounded as though he was trying to convince himself.

  One of the other two made a tiny noise of protest, almost a whimper. Richter wasn’t sure who, but it was Lisl who spoke up. “Krause, you’re nuts. We know plenty already. We know this much: it’s alien, and someone’s hostile. How much longer do you want to go on for? I’m not creeping around behind you until my air runs out. Let’s get out of here right now.”

  Max muttered something which sounded at first like agreement, but then he surprised Richter.

  “No, Lisl, not yet. I think we should see if there’s anything telling us who these people are, or were. I’ve been running calculations on a range of different thermal conductivities. All right, we don’t know what it’s made of, but—”

  Krause was impatient. “What the hell are you going on about, Max?”

  Once more Max surprised Richter, this time by standing up to the sergeant. “Listen, back off—I’m arguing on your side. Whatever values I put in, I reckon it’s been between half a standard year and fifty standard years since this hole was blown in.”

  “What the hell use is a figure as vague as that?”

  “It means they aren’t in here anymore!”

  That was enough for Krause. “Yes. Good one. Right, this is what we do. Lisl, I hear what you say, but we should still learn what we can while we can. We’ll stretch the turn-around for another ten minutes from now, and we’ll go as far as we can in that time. Then we get out, however interesting things look. Okay?” He didn’t wait for her answer. “Richter, no changes to what you’ll do. Pedersen, relay all this back to the Amaterasu so they don’t start worrying. The hour’s just gone up by twenty more minutes in total. Okay, let’s press on.”

  Setting off along the entry shaft again, the small group entered the transverse corridor, the camera view sliding queasily over yet more wrecked structures. Somebody’s breath hissing loudly on the comms as they glided slowly onward, EVA jets barely venting. Richter added the other two cam views to the crowded HUD in his faceplate.

  Richter impatiently circled the entry hole, alternating between glancing down into it and staring outwards at the hull. Outside, the enigmatic structures drew his
gaze and then left him nauseated with their slithering colors. Inside, nothing. His heart thudded, but he saw from their cams the party was still moving steadily forward, nothing apparently amiss. Of course. Hull curvature must have forced a change of direction—they had dropped out of his line of sight.

  Hang on—that meant a couple of things.

  “Krause, are you leaving rebroadcast senders?” Stupid question; they had to be. He had audio and video data.

  “Stop flapping, Richter. We’re still here.”

  The teams route traced that of the device used to blast this entry route following a curved path around the inside of the vessel. What had this conflict been like?

  Richter considered how his own unit would have handled the mission, picturing an assault entry party waiting tensely off to a flank while a combat engineer team blew the first hole, then fired up some kind of burning machine. An engineering laser? He visualized the attackers swarming in through the entry point, overwhelming the defenders with aggression, firepower, and shock. How were they armed? What did the defenders do about it? How soon could you go through a tunnel cut by a machine using intense heat?

  Were there similar entry holes blasted into the other ten vessels? If so, that would mean the attackers would have needed to do simultaneous assaults on them all, or risk a forewarned enemy knowing about their intentions, weapons, and tactics. If there hadn’t been multiple coordinated attacks, then why hadn’t the other ships fled?

  Richter’s eye returned to the progress of Krause and the others. The beams from the suit lights of the team deep within the alien ship stabbed around the darkened tunnel, giving glimpses of an almost-familiar strangeness. A small chamber, racks of items suggesting stores of some kind. Tall things, sliced in half by whatever device had done this, they could be control panels, or perhaps they were computers. Or air conditioning, or pumps, or coffins.

  How could you tell? That looked like an inspection hatch, this might be a ladder, for small people. That was a little reassuring. Or maybe the aliens had small pets—or small slaves. That thought wasn’t.

  All the mad, scary visions of aliens anyone had ever dreamed up were stalking and slithering around in his mind. Green things with fangs and claws, things with tentacles, creatures with one arm or three or dozens; huge eyes, or insect eyes, or none at all; slimy skin in garish colors; aliens that were part-machine, or that looked human but weren’t. Wet, walking piles of bones with revolting desires. Aliens with death-rays, eaters of human flesh, hostile shape-changers morphing and melting into repulsive forms accompanied by disgusting sounds, aliens that wanted our planets, or our women, or just to conquer the universe. If anyone ever imagined peaceable, friendly bug-eyed monsters, he’d forgotten that story.

  Richter shook himself in an effort to try to relax nerves screwed up tight. At every second he expected something horrible to leap out of somewhere, however much he chided himself for childishness. Below his feet, the other three were drifting along in near-darkness while out here the sky was full of the gas giant and the other dead alien ships. Of course, it was scary.

  The last people who’d gone this way were presumably the attackers. Had they been scared too? Or were the defenders scared of them? Probably both. Wait a minute, though. What was to say the defenders had even been the same species as the attackers? Maybe there were two entirely different sets of aliens, at war for some unknown reason. Who were the locals, the home side?

  Up here he had a lot to keep an eye on, but it still felt like the wrong call to Richter for him to be staring at the barren outside of the hull when those three were creeping along this gloomy shaft toward who knew what.

  So far, they’d encountered only small spaces, suggesting lockers or storage areas. In the helmet cam a torn bulkhead loomed ahead of Krause, and the darkness beyond it hinted at a huge chamber. Something drifted up into the cam view from below Krause’s shoulders. Richter stared at the tiny image. A loop of the man’s disconnected tether.

  That was when the penny dropped. How did the aliens provide gravity? Like the slow-liners, they must be colony ships of some sort. Surely, they were too big to be used for anything else, there were eleven of them. If you went around in those numbers, well, you’d need to have gravity on long missions, wouldn’t you? Right now, the team were floating along on a breath of EVA jets, but somewhere in this vessel there was down. Or there had been, once.

  Richter opened his mouth to pass his thoughts to Krause, who was moving past a thick bulkhead, just as one of the cam images went crazy. Tunnel walls accelerated past on either side of the cam, and a distant wall loomed up, huge and solid and closing fast. Krause shouted something indistinct. Lisl screamed. Max gasped for breath.

  It was Krause. Arms flailing, falling , as if Richter’s mere thought of gravity somehow conjured it into existence, falling rapidly toward the far wall which came at him like a fist.

  The impact punched the faceplate of Krause’s helmet into broken flakes along with the skull beneath it, his air vanishing in a briefly-seen puff of vapor, and then the cam view in Richter’s HUD disappeared to be replaced by a dialogue calmly announcing, “no video” and then “no audio.” An alarm started beeping and red text flashed “bio monitor: Sergeant Krause: vital signs degrading,” in the darkness below Richter’s feet Krause disappeared from Lisl’s view as she spun her head away from the scene, her heart wrenching scream filling Richter’s ears. When the screamed died the sound of Max moaning softly as the two remaining cam views showed Richter the pair’s suit lights swinging around randomly illuminating indistinct shapes as they looked this way and that in their panic.

  “Richter. What’s happened?” Pedersen’s voice urgent in his ears. “Krause’s monitors just disappeared. What’s going on over there?”

  “Krause is down.” From up here Richter couldn’t see a thing. The tiny cam views from Lisl and Max’s head cams were useless. He needed to go in.

  “What the hell happened?” Demanded Pedersen

  “I don’t know. Wait.” Richter fought to get a hold of himself before coming to the only decision he could. “I’m going in after the others. Come and get us, and tell the Amaterasu we have a problem.”

  “On my way.” Thank God, the man didn’t argue. Heart pounding, Richter set the HUD’s clock for forty-five minutes. Pedersen should be nearly here by then. Blinking red in the HUD Krause’s cam view now showed “bio monitor: no data.” Richter slipped his tether off its mooring and took hold of the suit controls.

  “Lisl, Max. Don’t move. I’m coming in. What happened?”

  “He fell! Sergeant Krause just vanished! He was here one second and then he went!” Lisl half screamed, panic filling her voice.

  “Okay, Lisl, it’s all right. Hang on, I’m coming. Max, how are you doing?” Richter checked his rifle, swinging it around in front of him, freeing his hands to operate his EVA’s jets. In seconds he was lifting away from the hull and jetting forward and down, entering the blast hole. Where the others had gone in carefully; Richter simply opened the throttle and powered forward. Immediately the light reflected from the planet vanished, plunging him into near-darkness. The suit lights switching to their highest intensity to compensate.

  “I’m okay,” Max replied shakily. “What should I do?”

  “Stay there. Don’t move, but keep your eyes open for an enemy. When I reach you, we’ll see what we can do about Krause.” Wasted words for he knew the man was dead.

  Despite Krause’s fall, Richter felt not even the faintest gravitational tug in the broad, dark tunnel. It dropped slightly, curving down from his present orientation. After the team’s cam views, it looked familiar. As he plunged in, he realized how tense the others must have been feeling, inching along in this darkened passageway. Claustrophobia didn’t usually bother him, but now he felt penned in.

  This was even more alien than the hull surface. Smooth walls blurred past him: above, below, and on either side as he kept the throttle open in his
headlong dash to reach Lisl and Max. A wave of darkness flowed by, falling away from the trailing edge of the beam of his suit lights. Flickering lights ahead. That would-be Lisl and Max, around thirty meters ahead.

  The tunnel’s downward curvature brought Max into view first. His helmet appeared, then the torso, and then he was fully visible against one wall of the tunnel, bracing himself with a hand against the torn end of a girder. The other hand held his pistol, which he pointed uncertainly here and there. Lisl was a little further forward, fumbling to attach her tether to a protrusion in the floor. Her hands visibly shaking, even at this distance. Richter cranked the throttle a little wider eager to reach them.

  “Can you see Krause?” Asked Richter over the comm.

  Max answered him. “Yeah, just. He’s pinned to the far wall, like it’s the floor. How can that happen?”

  Richter did his best to instill reassuring confidence in his voice in an attempt to calm the two panicked scientists. “I think they had a kind of artificial gravity. Hold on, I’m nearly there.”

  Lisl’s cam still only showed Richter her ongoing struggle with the tether that was holding her resolutely in place, however Max’s helmet light beam was now fixed on the unmoving form of Krause. The man lay broken against the wall which became a floor. The bio monitor continued its dispassionate report: no pulse, no blood pressure, no respiration, and a rapidly cooling body temperature.

  Richter reached the pair, braked, and flipped his tether around the stub of the girder which Max was using. It cinched reassuringly tight. “Are you two all right?” He asked fighting the urge to lean over the hole which had claimed Krause.

  “I think so. What happened to him?” Lisl had managed to untangle her tether and sounded a great deal calmer and in control than she had only a minute before. Her boots were resting lightly on the tunnel floor, and Richter noticed she’d adjusted her jets to give a fractional downward force.