by CK Burch
″Go,″ he said weakly. ″Go now. Go!″
They turned and began hopping back down the hill, the beacon signal strong and clear in their displays. It was a tough decline, and Straub found himself sliding, trying to grip the ground with his boots to keep from tumbling end over end, which considering what was coming up behind them didn't seem like such a bad idea.
Collins was screaming. ″Holy fuck! Holy fucking Christ!″
Straub looked up; he didn't have to look far. All around them, the black mounds strewn across the field were beginning to move, to shuffle, to slither over the crust of the star. Most of them were ambling about in odd directions, but too many were coming towards them. He saw tiny, insectoid legs coming out from underneath their oily bodies. They looked like millipedes, twisting and winding as they came. Jesus Christ!
″Keep moving!″ Laguardia shouted. She was tugging on Tybalt, who was slowing them down. Oh god, Tybalt was a mess. Straub could hear her moaning sobs through his headset, a terrifying soundtrack to the crawling things surrounding them.
Ten yards to the beacon. He looked ahead; there were crawlers already there. Had some gone through?
″Don't fucking stop! Take her!″ Laguardia shoved Tybalt at Straub; he caught her and then Laguardia brought her pulse rifle to bear and opened up a few rounds at the crawlers in front of them. Pus and black fluid erupted from the bodies that were struck, and they flipped over and around. Crawlers surrounding the ones shot recoiled instantly. Straub caught sight of what looked like suction cups and teeth on the underside of the ones flipped over. He kept running.
″Collins! Stay with them and keep moving!″ Laguardia took a few large, bounding strides to the left and took a firing position. Straub looked away and kept his sight on the artifact ahead, on the salvation of the beacon signal, pulling Tybalt with him who was doing little more than providing heavy weight. Ahead of them, crawlers burst and portions of their bodies blew away. Laguardia was carving them a path.
Collins dropped behind. ″Laguardia! Your turn! Move!″ Straub imagined Collins taking a firing position now. More crawlers between them and the artifact blew open into pus. He didn't stop to look around or to do anything other than lift Tybalt's arm over his shoulder and support her weight better.
″Go! Go! Fucking go!″ Laguardia shouted over the headset.
″Goddammit, advance!″ Collins retorted.
″Move out! Keep fucking moving!″
Straub couldn't look back. Just a couple more yards away. He couldn't look back. God help him, he had to keep moving.
″Straub!″
He turned at Collins's warning and saw a crawler moving right towards him and Tybalt. There was no further warning. It was just in the air then, sailing directly for him. The front of it split into four long, grasping tentacles, all of them reaching towards his face. He could see it very clearly: the suction cups, the legs coming out of the suction cups retracting inward, the large tentacle on the underside and the circular beakjaw beneath it. Something was unspooling from below that and it lashed out, wrapping about his ankles even as it flew through the air. Straub threw Tybalt forward and then fell into the path of the crawler as it landed over his face.
He pushed at it, found the pink meat of the underside wet and unyielding, then reached for the tentacles. Suction cups held against him and he felt them pop as they pulled away. The thin tendrils around his ankles released and came up to his wrists, attempting to bind them together, but he resisted. The beak tried snapping at his chest, oh fuck, the chest of the suit. The beak found the metal and recoiled momentarily. Then his vision was obscured as the thick body burst open from gunfire and spilled open all over him. Thank god there was no smell, no sound, oh fuck he just wanted to gag as it was. He shoved the body off of his own and looked up just in time to see Tybalt flee into the artifact back to the Icarus and disappear.
Collins grabbed his arm and heaved him to his feet. He looked over towards Laguardia and saw her nearly surrounded by the crawlers. There was no way that she was going to make it. Collins released him and dropped into a crouch and opened up on the group, crawlers exploding left and right into bags of leaking pus. Laguardia turned around and fired a grenade into the group behind her. A mass of crawlers exploded high into the air, other bodies simply tossed from the blast radius. The ground shuddered from the explosion. Laguardia turned and leapt high and over the ones in front of her, landing on one with both feet and squishing it, but her feet slipped out from under her and she fell.
A mass of crawlers swarmed Laguardia, tendrils whipping into bindings about her body even as she attempted to cut them down with her rifle. ″Go! Go! Get the fuck out of here!″ she screamed.
″Laguardia!″ Collins went full-auto, advancing slowly, trying to pick them off the sergeant, but it was no good. There were too many.
″Go,″ Laguardia said, her voice full of struggle. ″Go.″
Straub looked around and saw more coming their way. He reached out for Collins. ″We have to go! We have to go now!″
″Fuck!″ Collins yelled, still firing.
″Go.″ Laguardia's voice was a weak whispered plea. She was trying to fight, couldn't do it.
″Fuck!″ Collins screamed. Her clip emptied. She began to reach for another one.
Straub felt a rumbling sensation coming from behind them; he turned to look. Over the crest of the hill one of the star-eater's tentacles was worming its way up and over the hill. ″Jesus Christ,″ he whispered. It was as thick as a shuttlecraft and headed towards them. Towards the artifact; their artifact. Straub grabbed her Collins's arm and pulled. ″Now! We have to go now!″
The commander turned and they began to run, twenty feet away from the artifact, and as they did the sound of Laguardia's defiant cries filled their ears. ″Come on! Come on! Fuuuuuuuuck!″ Then the ground trembled with another explosion as she screamed.
Straub closed his eyes as they hit the artifact and fell through. Laguardia's voice ended in mid-scream.
***
CHAPTER XII.
Forty-five fucking minutes. That's how long they had been gone for, now. Forty-five fucking minutes. Markov had almost been counting each one individually, by hand, for the last twenty-five of them. He was in the lift headed towards engineering to have a sitrep with Mac; apparently the chief didn't want to have the conversation over the comm with people listening in. That was bad. They were down to four hours left before Icarus dipped below max safe dive now that orbital thrust was no longer operational. He hated keeping it a secret from the rest of the crew, but with the way things were, how could he do otherwise? Telling them that they needed to race the clock was potentially the needle to the camel's back and he couldn't risk that. He was already risking his crew by not ejecting the artifact now. Something in his intuition had told him, after that twenty-minute mark, to wait. And here he was, waiting. Waiting. Still waiting. The same intuition that had told him to bypass his urge to abort the mission earlier was telling him to continue now. That hadn't worked so well before, but there were other things on his mind that were overpowering his thought processes.
He couldn't get a hold of Fleur. Well, he had, but only for a moment. She'd been in her office earlier, but she'd been tired, exhausted from her work. He believed it; practically everyone on the crew was suffering from exhaustion and stress tension. Why not the ship's psychologist as well? And he might have thought it a deflection at first, to keep that professional barrier intact after their sex, but she'd kissed his cheek and pressed her face to his, and he'd smelled her scent of lavender and cedar and instantly felt relieved, like there was still something there, bubbling, simmering and waiting. Copulation had lessened that tension somewhat, but by god it was still there. So he left her to sleep and that had been well over half an hour ago, another thing which he'd been counting by hand, and goddamn if he wasn't counting too many things. He wanted to talk to her, not just see her but talk to her. If anything she had the right to be prepared, maybe give him advice on whether or not
to involve the rest of the crew in the crisis that they were facing. He just wanted her voice in his ear, soothing, a salve to his spirit. He also just wanted to dispel the fear that it was the radiation on the ship affecting this newfound relationship, pushing it towards sexual urgency and tugging at heartstrings. But maybe, for him, the radiation was enhancing his fear of it being unreal. In the pit of his heart he knew it wasn't true, that it wasn't actual, but he loved her, dammit. He knew he loved her. He'd loved her for years now and had been unable to say anything, still couldn't say anything because of obligations to duty. And, of course, because it was too soon. But part of him still whispered that it wasn't real. That it wasn't going to work.
Fuck it.
He stood with his arms crossed, leaning against the side of the lift, facing the doors, descending towards engineering. He thought about everything but the ship. He thought about everything involving him and Fleur. He was obsessing and he didn't want to obsess any longer but he felt the insecurity creeping over his spine and into his brain. Fuck. Women. It hadn't been this way with his wife, God rest her soul, but she had never stirred him the way Fleur did. This was different.
Then the ship's quarantine alarm began to sound. He looked up, confused; the quarantine system was designed to regularly scan the atmosphere of the ship for any unknown bacteria or contagion that the oxygen scrubbers failed to detoxify. If it was something highly toxic or poisonous, the alarm would sound and would seal off the areas of the ship where the infection was. The ship also went into quarantine mode if it detected anything of unknown genetic origin. Markov knew the system and had regularly tested the operation of the alarm during each inspection in dock, but he had never in his ten years as captain actually heard it go off while in space, and he felt displaced for a moment. Then the lift came to a jolting stop and the force of it knocked him off balance.
Markov fell over and hit the back of his skull on the wall. He thought he was going to black out, but he kept breathing, kept moving. The alarm was a high-pitched tone, bleeping over and over again. His comm chirruped from the pocket of his jumpsuit, absurdly keeping time with the alarm. If the back of his head didn't fucking hurt so bad he might have laughed at the timing. Instead he groped blindly for it, trying and failing with awkward motor skills from the pain. Finally he grasped it, and pulled himself upward by the rail on the lift wall. ″Markov,″ he moaned.
″Captain! Captain!″ It was Decker. ″Holy shit! Watch out!″
Decker. The artifact. Markov became instantly alert and pushed through the pain. ″Decker! Talk to me!″
″Holy fucking Christ!″ That was Wilcox in the background, screaming at the top of his lungs. Markov heard the other scientists shouting and screaming in the background as well. Then Decker came back on. ″Sir! They're coming out of the artifact! Oh fuck, open the door!″
″What? What's coming out of the artifact? Is it Collins?″ He began to shout; in the background Wilcox was screaming over and over, swearing and cursing like a madman, and Decker was beginning to join in. ″Decker! Decker! What's coming out of the artifact?″
″Fuck! Fuck!″ Decker screamed. ″Open the quarantine seal! Please for Christ's sake!″
″Shit.″ Markov moved to the control panel and saw the holo controls were locked out. QUARANTINE IN EFFECT it read. ″Shit. Decker! Decker tell me what's going on!″
″Wilcox!″ There was a scream, the kind that Markov hadn't heard in years, the kind that a man issued when he was being brutally murdered in blind fear. ″Wilcox! Fuck! FUCK! CAPTAIN! FU – ″ And then Decker's voice became that scream, mercifully cut short as the comm cut out and the signal ended.
Jesus fucking Christ. Markov cut to Mac's comm. ″Mac! Answer me!″
″Shit, Captain, what's going on? The quarantine alarm sounded and – ″
″No time! Listen to me! There's something wrong happening in the cargo bay with the artifact! I just got a call from Decker, and it sounded like people were dying in there!″ Markov tried punching in his override code but it was no use: the quarantine systems were reading his bio signature and recognizing that he was unprotected without a HES. It wouldn't let him override the fucking lift controls to take him anywhere, let alone the cargo bay. He punched the wall. ″Fuck! I'm trapped in the lift to engineering. It's stopped due to quarantine, and it won't accept the override. Can you get anyone to cargo? Something is happening and we need to find out what.″
″Christ,″ Mac said. ″This is piss fucking poor timing, Captain.″
″Mac, at least one man just died, maybe more, and if they didn't then it sounded like they wish they had. I don't give a fuck about timing, I need to know if you can get there.″ Markov looked up; the hatch on the top should still open. One of those loopholes in quarantine restrictions. If he could get out and descend the elevator shaft using the maintenance ladder, he could find an alcove and equip a HES. ″Mac?″
″I'm on it. I'll go myself, I can't spare a single fucking soul down here. I'll go through the maintenance ducts.″
″Take a weapon.″
″Sir? Seriously?″
″Just do it, Mac, and get a fucking move on.″
″Alright, alright, I'm going.″ The signal ended.
Markov put the comm in his pocket and opened the hatch through the holo control; thank god it worked. He climbed up onto the handrail and was just barely able to reach the edge of the opening with his fingers and paused for a moment to ready himself before he swung his feet off the rail and lifted. Christ, he was getting old. But the adrenaline running through his body after hearing Decker's voice gave him speed, and he pulled his body out the opening and he was on the top of the lift. The maintenance ladder was just to the left of the carriage along the wall of the shaft. First, he took his comm from his pocket, activated a call to Doctor Gaines, and strapped the comm to his wrist before he mounted the ladder and started down.
″Gaines,″ came a bored voice.
″Gaines, it's Markov. Round up some of your staff, the quarantine zone is situated in the cargo bay. The ship's science crew is either dead or wounded in there, we need a medical team in suits on the move.″
″Doesn't sound like my problem.″
Markov stopped his descent. He couldn't believe what he was hearing. ″What?″
″I said...you know, oh well. You didn't hear me the first time.″ Then Gaines actually ended the transmission. That son of a bitch was absolutely unconcerned. Fucking Gaines. He'd always been a little nonchalant, a little apathetic, but this was disgusting. Markov fumed. He was going to court-martial that bastard. But then, he wondered: was the radiation affecting Gaines, making him even more apathetic than he normally was? There was no time to think about it. Markov resumed his downward climb until he came to the cargo deck. He punched in his code to the maintenance controls, hoping the system wouldn't be looking for his bios, and after a fraught moment the doors slid open and he pulled himself into the corridor.
The HES alcove was just outside of the entrance to the cargo bay, next to a weapons locker. Markov backed into the alcove and once the HES shell had wrapped around him he grabbed a helmet and removed a pulse rifle from the weapons locker. He was not going in there without something to defend himself with. Then he moved to the control panel for the bay doors, punched in his override and the doors opened.
The cargo bay was lit with crimson, as per quarantine procedure. All areas directly under quarantine were lit with red warning lights. The effect was unsettling even before he could see clearly into the bay; at first all he could see was the artifact dead center in his field of vision lit in red, and for a moment he thought the whole thing was rippling with blood. Then the doors opened all the way and he stepped inside, swinging his rifle back and forth slowly, keeping his eyes moving with it, looking, searching. One of the scientists was on the floor next to the electromagnetic battery, but Markov couldn't tell which one it was because something big and wet was covering it, moving with slow pulsating waves, like a jellyfish or a wor
m. But then Markov saw the tentacles wave ever so slightly and he froze. What the fuck was that thing?
Then he turned and got a better look around the floor of the cargo bay and saw multiple things crawling around multiple dead bodies. The crawling things looked like giant millipedes, but there were tentacles at the front of their bodies. Some of them were holding up their tentacles, like they were searching the air for something. Markov did not move. He didn't dare breathe. His rifle was up and ready and he was tracking one of them as it crawled across the floor to the wall, where it promptly raised itself up by it rear and slapped against the wall. Markov heard that wet, hard slap and nearly jumped. Its legs disappeared. It started climbing up the wall, making multiple popping sounds as its tentacles – no, its whole fucking body – rippled and moved up the wall. He thought he saw suckers on the tentacles all the way down the underside of the body. There were others climbing up the wall, too, and some littered about the floor. There were maybe a dozen or more, all of them four or five feet long. Markov did not move.
The comm in his helmet sounded and he still didn't move. ″Captain, it's Mac, I'm on my way to the cargo bay through the ductwork. About two levels away. What's your position? You still in the lift?″
Markov watched one of the crawlers as it moved up the wall, towards the vent opening near the ceiling. Two of its tentacles waved about, touched the opening of the duct, and pulled the vent cover from the wall. Then the whole thing slipped inside.
″Mac,″ he said, his voice almost a whisper. ″Seal off the duct where you are and get the hell out of there.″
″What? I can't hear you, Captain. Say again.″
″Seal the duct where you are and get out of there. Copy.″ The thing covering the body on the floor made a slurping sound and Markov turned toward it. Was the body moving? Holy Christ, was the man still alive?
″Captain. I can't fucking hear you. Speak louder.″
Markov spoke as loud as he dared. ″Seal off the goddamn duct, Mac. There are creatures in the cargo bay and one of them just went into the ducts. We need to seal them off. Copy.″ The body of the scientist kept moving, twitching, the arm doing a rubberband dance like a seizure. Markov wanted to put a bullet in the man to put him out of his misery but he didn't dare take the chance, not with so many of these things everywhere.