"Can this part of the ship fly?" Kushner asked. "Navigate through space?"
"I will not assist you further."
An array of lights ringing the center the suit shone red.
"It's turning off the suit's life support," said Karen. "It knows that as long as it's alive, we can pry into its mind."
After a few spastic quivers, the alien lay unmoving.
"It's consciousness is fading," Karen spoke in dull tones. "He confirmed that this place can travel through space – has a propulsion system." She paused for a few moments, and lowered her eyes to the still alien figure. "It's gone."
"What are we supposed to do now?" Jake asked. "Chop off its flippers and operate the controls with them?"
"There's more," said Karen. "Their suits have a direct link to all operational systems. There's some kind of code needed..." She shook her head. "I'm afraid I can't help you with that."
"If we could get Terry into one of the suits...?" Jamie wondered out loud.
Terry bent down and placed his hands on the suit. He could see how it worked, even if he couldn't name its parts or the underlying mechanisms. It was a glowing, unified image in his mind, but his attempts to manipulate any of the components had no effect.
"Maybe if I could get inside –"
Terry was cut short as the suit withdrew from the alien's body, folding in on itself to its original briefcase shape on the dead creature's chest. Terry lifted the small square and turned it in his hands, receiving the same internal images which he couldn't alter as he could with human-made machines. He lifted his head to the hopeful eyes around him.
"I can't control this device," he said.
"I think the suit automatically encloses an alien," said Jamie. "We watched that happen with the first one we took out."
"That's right," said Tildie. "It didn't take more than a few seconds."
"So an alien body activates it." Kushner was staring at Jake.
"We're running out of time," said Major Harrington, also staring at the former Marine.
"I agree," said Kushner. "My best guess is that your shapeshifting ability wouldn't work with a corpse."
Jake eyed the body, repressing a shudder of revulsion. The thing was like an amoeba papered over with walrus skin. It just figured that he would go from the most beautiful thing on planet Earth to something that made his stomach turn just looking at it. Beauty and Beast. Had to believe in some kind of cosmic justice there. Or a god with a sickening sense of humor.
"All right," Jake grumbled. "Let's get this over with."
He lowered himself onto the body, stretching out to make full contact. He expected slimy skin and putrid smells, but the skin felt more like a soft rubber and gave off no odor that he could detect. Except for the purplish globes that he hoped weren't eyes, it was kind of like lying down on a memory foam mattress. He closed his eyes and tried to absorb the thing's essence. He had no sense of anything happening, but then he hadn't after hugging Jenna, either.
He rolled off after a full minute and lay on the soft grass, the glow of an artificial sun in his eyes. He shut that out and concentrated on flapping about in the water or whatever the hell these creatures did and hoped that would do what had to be done.
Jake's first clue that it was working was an extreme blurring of his vision while his hearing grew painfully sharp. It was almost as if his senses had turned themselves inside-out, and about as pleasant. He lifted a hand to wipe his eyes, and it was as if his hands had turned into windshield wipers – all rubbery and thin and floppy.
But that was a lot less disturbing than the vague, incomprehensible shapes around him making unintelligible noises. It reminded him of the time he'd overdosed on peyote, except what he was seeing now made a helluva lot less sense.
And he couldn't breathe. He was trying to, but it was as if he didn't know how.
Then everything changed again. He felt himself being enclosed, a comforting sheathe enfolding his body. His vision cleared, but what he was seeing still didn't make sense. Everything – the colors, the shapes, the dimensions of the shapes – was off. Sound was a hundred ice picks in his skull.
"Caaannnyehirmebuddy?"
Somebody was talking to him. Jake took a deep breath. Not a breath, exactly, but he drew air into his body. The pain in his head cleared. The noise faded to manageable levels. The figure looming over him almost looked familiar.
"Hold on," Jake said. The scrabbling voice he heard wasn't recognizable as his own. "Give me a second. You all sound like the fucking Muppets on crack right now."
He stood up. The terrain was continuing to clarify, to make more sense. He was wearing a Luminate suit and was surrounded by objects that were starting to resemble human figures. And believing they were human figures seemed to clarify them even more. It was starting to come together, to be recognizable, in the way that people and things were recognizable in a carnival mirror.
"Okay. What the hell. I'm gonna try to hook up with whatever technology is in the suit." He couldn't think of anything better than a verbal command. "Uh, navigation systems...come on line." Nothing changed, other than the figures around him were now resolving into familiar faces. "All systems, quit dicking around. Come on line right fucking now, goddammit!"
A map of lines and symbols appeared in the space within arm's reach before him. They didn't make a lick of sense, but he was definitely looking at a control schematic.
"I got something, people," he said.
One of the figures shuffled forward. Jake could make out its appendages – hands, he corrected himself – touching his chest.
"I can see it!"
"Terry? Is that you?"
"Yes. We know that you're disoriented dealing with alien sensory input. Karen says to try to relax. When you're ready, I'm going to ask you to try some things."
"I'm ready. The sooner this is over the better."
"Okay. Ah...you see the cluster of objects that look like stars or maybe asterisks on the right side?"
"Yup."
"Touch it. You know, like a touchpad."
"Right."
Jake stretched his arm about halfway out before his finger made contact with the star cluster. He felt nothing, but his touch caused the stars to blossom out and move to the center, consuming half of the display. Each one had a different color and what appeared to be a label. Terry had him touch a pink star on one edge, which caused the screen to split again, this time revealing a series of rectangles.
"We're getting somewhere," said Terry. "We're in the navigation menu, I'm sure of that. I think the rectangles are a passkey. You'll need to touch them in the right order to go to the next level. Ummm...just give me a sec." A few moments passed. "Okay. Here we go. Start with the middle rectangle..."
Jake, now able to hear the excitement in Terry's voice, and even make out the tension and hope in the faces around them, started to feel some excitement himself. Could this lunacy actually work? But hell, they were "super people." They were supposed to be able to pull off miracles and shit.
He followed Terry Mayes' instructions, tapping this rectangle and that until the rectangles abruptly disappeared and he was staring at a panorama of space – not just in front but all around him, even at his feet – framed in a grid of fine white lines.
"Okay," said Terry. "Tap the red sphere at the top. It's not a star, so I assume it’s a location tool." When Jake complied, the view seemed to slide back, with a blinking red sphere in the middle. "Yes! It's showing where we are. I think...hold on...looks like our sun to the right. Tap that larger star." He waited as Jake tapped the orb. "That's it! I recognize Mercury! Now...touch and hold the red sphere and drag it to the sun." Jake did so. "There! The course is set. Now we need to go back and set the speed..."
Ten minutes later, the alien suit withdrew, and Jake, now restored to normal form, stood on wobbly legs, feeling as if he'd capped off a marathon with an eight-pack of cheap beer. He had to blink hard and breathe in several times before his alien senses faded and h
is human faculties returned to rightful dominance.
"Holy...shit," Jake spat out. "Man, that sucked. Did it work?"
"Looks that way," said Kushner. "We'll know soon enough. According to Mr. Mayes here – someone I plan on recruiting to DARPA, by the way, should we all survive – we'll arrive back at our sun in less than five minutes. What we'll find there remains to be seen."
Chapter 25
THE ALIEN SHIP APPEARED without warning. A second later the high-pitched buzz of a proximity alert pinged the Cheyenne's bridge, followed by fluttering vermillion lights and PAT's prematurely calm voice announcing: "An alien craft has just emerged from hyperspace 1.4 million kilometers distant at 2-13-23. "
"Image on," said Captain Cameron.
An obsidian black ship materialized before them, approaching over the far edge of the sun. Without prodding, Pat zoomed in. The craft seemed different somehow, and it took Cameron a pair of seconds to see it was no longer a perfect ellipsoid.
"It's missing its back section?" Dan Mueller ventured.
"That's correct, Chief Engineer Mueller," said Pat. "The alien ship has launched some form of energy weapon. We are entering subspace per automatic evasion protocols."
All eyes were anxiously glued to the white-glowing star-shaped objects emerging from the alien craft.
"Contact with our rearward wave in one second," Pat announced in a neutral weather broadcaster's voice.
The wave would have a repulsive effect, Cameron knew. Clearly their shift into space compression drive had been insufficient to outdistance the energy projectile or whatever it was.
That was his last thought before his ship turned into Swiss cheese. Dark, moldy Swiss Cheese, Cameron thought. Whatever the best analogy was, his ship was shredded. Life Pods were ejected from the walls much as oxygen bags were ejected in commercial airlines. Dan Mueller wasted no time hopping into his, followed by Chief Navigator Andrea Wilkins and Exobiologist Koharu Akiyama. Chief Medical Officer Keira Quinn and Second-in-Command David Mallory sprang through the suddenly weightless environment toward Cameron, who was clinging to the com controls as the last of their atmosphere bled out. The balance of the superhuman team fumbled about in terrified confusion.
With one exception. Kylee Shepherd coasted over to the starship captain and helped Keira and David Mallory guide him toward the nearest Life Pod. Her grandfather waved her off. He and even the weakest members of the superhuman team were more than strong enough to survive in a vacuum and hold their breaths for an extended time. The ship was already starting to heal itself: repair panels were extruding onto damaged areas and the repair nanites were in full stride.
The problem, Kylee thought, wasn't the current state of the ship's disrepair. The problem was when the next alien bombshell arrived. She, as one of the two or three capable of spaceflight, needed to stop that.
Thomas Mayes, floating above near a rent in the ceiling, caught her eyes with a wave and an urgent finger jabbing at the stars. She nodded and flew up to join them. She lacked her mom's telescopic vision, but it wasn't hard to judge the approximate location of the alien ship: a dozen missiles were streaming from the other USSC ships toward a single spot in space. Kylee pointed at that spot and got a grim thumbs-up from Thomas. They shot in tandem toward where the missiles and light-beams were converging.
The missiles, still well-ahead of them, were detonating – a few isolated explosions, a few en masse. Not good news, but not unexpected. The upside, Kylee hoped, was that the barrage of missiles and the titanic explosions – she still felt their energy even from what she guessed was hundreds of thousands of miles away – would offer some cover for them. She remembered her mom's story about the final stages of their attack on the Elemental mothership, "Mothra" – how she had slowed up to present as a non-threatening object – and motioned to Thomas to slow down. He raised his hands in question, mouthing "Why?", and she mouthed back "So they don't think we're attacking them." She added a motion from the ship to them, miming them exploding, and he shrugged as if to say he didn't understand but would follow her lead.
Kaylee found it extremely hard to judge her speed in space. She might've been traveling hundreds or thousands of miles per hour. With the missiles destroyed, she had no frame of reference. The ship was slowly approaching, with no way of knowing if they'd trigger its defense systems...until, well, they did. She was also not sure what they were going to do. Terry's main weapon, as far as she'd seen in their training, was utilizing his toughness and strength and speed in the air as a human battering ram. That could be useful now, because Kylee couldn't see any way to get inside the ship without breaking through its hull. Once inside...she didn't really want to think about it. The Elementals looked just like people, her mom had told them. Applying her powers with lethal force to people made her stomach squirm. She prayed the ship was controlled by an AI or something hideous and threatening.
The alien ship was almost upon them. Dark and silent and freakily large, like something out of a horror SF movie, Kylee thought. But in Hollywood, alien space craft were usually heralded by deep, booming, creepy music. Now the stark reality of its silent, eerie presence struck her as infinitely more menacing.
She motioned Terry with her to one side of the craft. She guessed they were a few hundred meters from its surface, but distance was just as hard to judge as speed in space. They might've been a few miles out as far as she knew.
Kylee pointed to the hull and met Thomas's dark eyes. He gave her a hard nod and squared himself.
Whoosh! Of course, there really wasn't any sound, but that was what Kylee heard in her mind as Thomas torpedoed the ship – flying too fast for her eyes to follow. The next thing she saw was a burst of light on the ship's surface. Thomas! It had to be!
She raced down and found her large neighbor half-imbedded in the side of the ship. His kicking legs assured her that he was alive...unless they were death spasms. Whatever, she had to do something fast. Come on, superpowers! She pushed into the ship alongside Thomas, remembering her mom's "slow is fast" technique.
It worked. Her superpowers, which sometimes even now she couldn't quite believe, were doing their thing. It was kind of claustrophobic, but the material yielded to her telekinetics and strength fairly readily, and soon she burrowed past Thomas, whose face lit up with relief – thankfully, he seemed okay! – as she crawled in front of him, creating a tunnel for him to follow her inward.
Bursting through a final layer, Kylee was shocked by a torrential rush of water. She and Thomas were swept back a few yards before she re-exerted her power and pushed forward into what appeared to be a massive aquarium populated by giant slugs.
Thomas was gesturing to her and burbling out some incomprehensible words, his face contorted in bewildered disbelief. All Kylee could do was shrug. The slugs were presumably the aliens, but they bore no resemblance to her mother's descriptions of the Elementals. What now?
The creatures made that easy by firing a barrage of beam weapons at them. They hurt – in the way that wasp stings hurt – but it was soon obvious they weren't achieving anything approaching a lethal effect on either of them. Kylee and Thomas exchanged a look. Time to get busy, Thomas's eyes said. Kylee gave him a resigned nod. She'd always been opposed to war and violence of any kind. She even opposed her dad's minor hunting habit. Pretend they're just ugly monsters, she told herself.
Thomas didn't seem to share her reservations. In a blur he smashed through a row of slugs like a wrecking ball. In seconds the water turned reddish-brown with what Kylee assumed was blood. Kylee made herself telekinetically slap aside some of the hand or flipper-held weapons, but her control was not nearly as nuanced as her mom's, and several flipper-hands tore away along with the weapons. The water was becoming so murky with alien blood that she was struggling to see much of anything. Her stomach lurched as a bleeding flipper-hand floated by.
Thomas reappeared at her side, his dark face stricken. He made a shrugging motion to continue exploring the ship. That seemed unavoidab
le to Kylee. She nodded.
They pressed on, choosing a direction that would take them to the center of the ship. The Elementals, she recalled, had placed their main control area in a centrally located place. She gratefully followed Thomas out of the aquatic abattoir into crystal-clear water. Some distance ahead, brighter multicolored lights shone through a large, circular passageway. Passing through that they discovered that the brighter lights were three or four passageways ahead. No sign of the aliens. Had they gone into hiding – or off to gather more deadly weapons?
They accelerated toward the lights. Kylee was amazed at how fast they could travel – one or two hundreds miles per hour easily. In seconds they entered a chamber occupied by hundreds of concentric rings of lights surrounding a glowing yellow dome that reminded Kylee of the sun. No aliens in attendance.
She turned to Thomas and they both nodded together. This is it. It had to be the enemy bridge, or its equivalent. What now? Kylee mouthed. They had no chance of doing anything with the controls but destroying them.
Thomas rammed a fist into his open hand, the dark planes of his face taut with determination. Let's get busy, he mouthed.
"WE HAVE life-support issues, sir."
Pat's voice echoed within Captain Cameron's Life Pod. From his window he could view the other Life Pods and the increasingly uncomfortable-looking "superhumans" who were huddled about the bridge. Breathable air was the repair nanites' first priority after sealing the ship, but the sealing phase had involved fairly massive repairs, and was just now nearing completion in the bridge. So far, casualties had been minimal – two of the enhanced unit had been drawn out into space after the impact – and he wanted to keep it that way.
"Elaborate," said Cameron.
"Atmosphere will be restored in two hours, sir. You and others in the Life Pods will not be affected. However, I project that by that time two-thirds of the Enhanced Soldier Combat Unit will have expired."
Super World Two Page 48