“Ah, fuck it,” Jenkins said, shaking her head. She and Blake were close, but she didn’t dwell on his death. No time for grieving, the expression on her face said, because we might be next.
The access doors creaked open. There was another set of double-doors inside; endorsed QUANTUM-DRIVE CHAMBER—AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY.
A calm electronic voice began a looped message: “Warning. Warning. Breach doors to drive chamber are now open. This presents an extreme radiation hazard. Warning. Warning.”
A second too late, my suit bio-sensors began to trill; detecting massive radiation levels. I couldn’t let it concern me. Radiation on an op like this was always a danger, but being killed by the Krell was a more immediate risk. I rattled off a few shots into the shadows, and heard the impact against hard chitin. The things screamed, their voices creating a discordant racket with the alarm system.
Kaminski cracked the inner door, and he and Martinez moved inside. I laid down suppressing fire with Jenkins, falling back slowly as the things tested our defences. It was difficult to make much out in the intermittent light: flashes of a claw, an alien head, then the explosion of plasma as another went down. My suit counted ten, twenty, thirty targets.
“Into the airlock!” Kaminski shouted, and we were all suddenly inside, drenched in sweat and blood.
The drive chamber housed the most complex piece of technology on the ship—the energy core. Once, this might’ve been called the engine room. Now, the device contained within the chamber was so far advanced that it was no longer mechanical. The drive energy core sat in the centre of the room—an ugly-looking metal box, so big that it filled the place, adorned with even more warning signs. This was our objective.
Olsen stole a glance at the chamber, but stuck close to me as we assembled around the machine. Kaminski paused at the control terminal near the door, and sealed the inner lock. Despite the reinforced metal doors, the squealing and shrieking of the Krell was still audible. I knew that they would be through those doors in less than a minute. Then there was the scuttling and scraping overhead. The chamber was supposed to be secure, but these things had probably been on-ship for long enough to know every access corridor and every room. They had the advantage.
They’ll find a way in here soon enough, I thought. A mental image of the dead merchant captain—still strapped to his seat back on the bridge—suddenly came to mind.
The possibility that I would die out here abruptly dawned on me. The thought triggered a burst of anger—not directed at the Alliance military for sending us, nor at the idiot colonists who had flown their ship into the Quarantine Zone, but at the Krell.
My suit didn’t take any medical action to compensate for that emotion. Anger is good. It was pure and made me focused.
“Jenkins—set the charges.”
“Affirmative, Captain.”
Jenkins moved to the drive core and began unpacking her kit. She carried three demolition-packs. Each of the big metal discs had a separate control panel, and was packed with a low-yield nuclear charge.
“Wh-what are you doing?” Olsen stammered.
Jenkins kept working, but shook her head with a smile. “We’re going to destroy the generator. You should have read the mission briefing. That was your first mistake.”
“Forgetting to bring a gun was his second,” Kaminski added.
“We’re going to set these charges off,” Jenkins muttered, “and the resulting explosion will breach the Q-drive energy core. That’ll take out the main deck. The chain reaction will destroy the ship.”
“In short: gran explosión,” said Martinez.
Kaminski laughed. “There you go again. You know I hate it when you don’t speak Standard. Martinez always does this—he gets all excited and starts speaking funny.”
“El no habla la lengua,” I said. You don’t grow up in the Detroit Metro without picking up some of the lingo.
“It’s Spanish,” Martinez replied, shooting Kaminski a sideways glance.
“I thought that you were from Venus?” Kaminski said.
Olsen whimpered again. “How can you laugh at a time like this?”
“Because Kaminski is an asshole,” Martinez said, without missing a beat.
Kaminski shrugged. “It’s war.”
Thump. Thump.
“Give us enough time to fall back to the APS,” I ordered. “Set the charges with a five-minute delay. The rest of you—cállate y trabaja.”
“Affirmative.”
Thump! Thump! Thump!
They were nearly through now. Welts appeared in the metal door panels.
Jenkins programmed each charge in turn, using magnetic locks to hold them in place on the core outer shielding. Two of the charges were already primed, and she was working on the third. She positioned the charges very deliberately, very carefully, to ensure that each would do maximum damage to the core. If one charge didn’t light, then the others would act as a failsafe. There was probably a more technical way of doing this—perhaps hacking the Q-drive directly—but that would take time, and right now that was the one thing that we didn’t have.
“Precise as ever,” I said to Jenkins.
“It’s what I do.”
“Feel free to cut some corners; we’re on a tight timescale,” Kaminski shouted.
“Fuck you, ’Ski.”
“Is five minutes going to be enough?” Olsen asked.
I shrugged. “It will have to be. Be prepared for heavy resistance en route, people.”
My suit indicated that the Krell were all over the main corridor. They would be in the APS by now, probably waiting for us to fall back.
THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!
“Once the charges are in place, I want a defensive perimeter around that door,” I ordered.
“This can’t be rushed.”
The scraping of claws on metal, from above, was becoming intense. I wondered which defence would be the first to give: whether the Krell would come in through the ceiling or the door.
Kaminski looked back at Jenkins expectantly. Olsen just stood there, his breathing so hard that I could hear him over the communicator.
“And done!”
The third charge snapped into place. Jenkins was up, with Martinez, and Kaminski was ready at the data terminal. There was noise all around us now, signals swarming on our position. I had no time to dictate a proper strategy for our retreat.
“Jenkins—put down a barrier with your torch. Kaminski—on my mark.”
I dropped my hand, and the doors started to open. The mechanism buckled and groaned in protest. Immediately, the Krell grappled with the door, slamming into the metal frame to get through.
Stinger-spines—flechette rounds, the Krell equivalent of armour-piercing ammo—showered the room. Three of them punctured my suit; a neat line of black spines protruding from my chest, weeping streamers of blood. Krell tech is so much more fucked-up than ours. The spines were poison-tipped and my body was immediately pumped with enough toxins to kill a bull. My suit futilely attempted to compensate by issuing a cocktail of adrenaline and anti-venom.
Martinez flipped another grenade into the horde. The nearest creatures folded over it as it landed, shielding their kin from the explosion. Mindless fuckers.
We advanced in formation. Shot after shot poured into the things, but they kept coming. Wave after wave—how many were there on this ship?—thundered into the drive chamber. The doors were suddenly gone. The noise was unbearable—the klaxon, the warnings, a chorus of screams, shrieks and wails. The ringing in my ears didn’t stop, as more grenades exploded.
“We’re not going to make this!” Jenkins yelled.
“Stay on it! The APS is just ahead!”
Maybe Jenkins was right, but I wasn’t going down without a damned good fight. Somewhere in the chaos, Martinez was torn apart. His body disappeared underneath a mass of them. Jenkins poured on her flamethrower—avenging Martinez in some absurd way. Olsen was crying, his helmet now discarded just like the rest of
us.
War is such an equaliser.
I grabbed the nearest Krell with one hand, and snapped its neck. I fired my plasma rifle on full-auto with the other, just eager to take down as many of them as I could. My HUD suddenly issued another warning—a counter, interminably in decline.
Ten… Nine… Eight… Seven…
Then Jenkins was gone. Her flamer was a beacon and her own blood a fountain among the alien bodies. It was difficult to focus on much except for the pain in my chest. My suit reported catastrophic damage in too many places. My heart began a slower, staccato beat.
Six… Five… Four…
My rifle bucked in protest. Even through reinforced gloves, the barrel was burning hot.
Three… Two… One…
The demo-charges activated.
Breached, the anti-matter core destabilised. The reaction was instantaneous: uncontrolled white and blue energy spilled out. A series of explosions rippled along the ship’s spine. She became a white-hot smudge across the blackness of space.
Then she was gone, along with everything inside her.
The Krell did not pause.
They did not even comprehend what had happened.
introducing
If you enjoyed
ANCESTRAL MACHINES,
look out for
TRACER
by Rob Boffard
A huge space station orbits Earth, holding the last of humanity. It’s broken, rusted, falling apart. We’ve wrecked our planet and now we have to live with the consequences: a new home that’s dirty, overcrowded, and inescapable.
What’s more, there’s a madman hiding on the station. He’s about to unleash chaos. And when he does, there’ll be nowhere left to run.
In space, every second counts. Who said nobody could hear you scream?
SEVEN YEARS AGO
The ship is breaking up around them.
The hull is twisting and creaking, like it’s trying to tear away from the heat of re-entry. The outer panels are snapping off, hurtling past the cockpit viewports, black blurs against a dull orange glow.
The ship’s second-in-command, Singh, is tearing at her seat straps, as if getting loose will be enough to save her. She’s yelling at the captain, seated beside her, but he pays her no attention. The flight deck below them is a sea of flashing red, the crew spinning in their chairs, hunting for something, anything they can use.
They have checklists for these situations. But there’s no checklist for when a ship, plunging belly-down through Earth’s atmosphere to maximise the drag, gets flipped over by an explosion deep in the guts of the engine, sending it first into a spin and then into a screaming nosedive. Now it’s spearing through the atmosphere, the friction tearing it to pieces.
The captain doesn’t raise his voice. “We have to eject the rear module,” he says.
Singh’s eyes go wide. “Captain—”
He ignores her, reaching up to touch the communicator in his ear. “Officer Yamamoto,” he says, speaking as clearly as he can. “Cut the rear module loose.”
Koji Yamamoto stares up at him. His eyes are huge, his mouth slightly open. He’s the youngest crew member, barely eighteen. The captain has to say his name again before he turns and hammers on the touch-screens.
The loudest bang of all shudders through the ship as its entire rear third explodes away. Now the ship and its crew are tumbling end over end, the movement forcing them back in their seats. The captain’s stomach feels like it’s broken free of its moorings. He waits for the tumbling to stop, for the ship to right itself. Three seconds. Five.
He sees his wife’s face, his daughter’s. No, don’t think about them. Think about the ship.
“Guidance systems are gone,” McCallister shouts, her voice distorting over the comms. “The core’s down. I got nothing.”
“Command’s heard our mayday,” Dominguez says. “They—”
McCallister’s straps snap. She’s hurled out of her chair, thudding off the control panel, leaving a dark red spatter of blood across a screen. Yamamoto reaches for her, forgetting that he’s still strapped in. Singh is screaming.
“Dominguez,” says the captain. “Patch me through.”
Dominguez tears his eyes away from the injured McCallister. A second later, his hands are flying across the controls. A burst of static sounds in the captain’s comms unit, followed by two quick beeps.
He doesn’t bother with radio protocol. “Ship is on a collision path. We’re going to try to crash-land. If we—”
“John.”
Foster doesn’t have to identify himself. His voice is etched into the captain’s memory from dozens of flight briefings and planning sessions and quiet conversations in the pilots’ bar.
The captain doesn’t know if the rest of flight command are listening in, and he doesn’t care. “Marshall,” he says. “I think I can bring the ship down. We’ll activate our emergency beacon; sit tight until you can get to us.”
“I’m sorry, John. There’s nothing I can do.”
“What are you talking about?”
There’s another bang, and then a roar, as if the ship is caught in the jaws of an enormous beast. The captain turns to look at Singh, but she’s gone. So is the side of the ship. There’s nothing but a jagged gash, the edges a mess of torn metal and sputtering wires. The awful orange glow is coming in, its fingers reaching for him, and he can feel the heat baking on his skin.
“Marshall, listen to me,” the captain says, but Marshall is gone too. The captain can see the sky beyond the ship, beyond the flames. It’s blue, clearer than he could have ever imagined. It fades to black where it reaches the upper atmosphere, and the space beyond that is pinpricked with stars.
One of those stars is Outer Earth.
Maybe I can find it, the captain thinks, if I look hard enough. He can feel the anger, the disbelief at Marshall’s words, but he refuses to let it take hold. He tells himself that Outer Earth will send help. They have to. He tries to picture the faces of his family, tries to hold them uppermost in his mind, but the roaring and the heat are everywhere and he can’t—
1
Riley
My name is Riley Hale, and when I run, the world disappears.
Feet pounding. Heart thudding. Steel plates thundering under my feet as I run, high up on Level 6, keeping a good momentum as I move through the darkened corridors. I focus on the next step, on the in–out, push–pull of my breathing. Stride, land, cushion, spring, repeat. The station is a tight warren of crawlspaces and vents around me, every surface metal etched with ancient graffiti.
“She’s over there!”
The shout comes from behind me, down the other end of the corridor. The skittering footsteps that follow it echo off the walls. I thought I’d lost these idiots back at the sector border—now I have to outrun them all over again. I got lost in the rhythm of running—always dangerous when someone’s trying to jack your cargo. I refuse to waste a breath on cursing, but one of my exhales turns into a growl of frustration.
The Lieren might not be as fast as I am, but they obviously don’t give up.
I go from a jog to a sprint, my pack juddering on my spine as I pump my arms even harder. A tiny bead of sweat touches my eye, sizzling and stinging. I ignore it. No tracer in my crew has ever failed to deliver their cargo, and I am not going to be the first.
I round the corner—and nearly slam into a crush of people. There are five of them, sauntering down the corridor, talking among themselves. But I’m already reacting, pushing off with my right foot, springing in the direction of the wall. I bring my other foot up to meet it, flattening it against the metal and tucking my left knee up to my chest. The momentum keeps me going forwards even as I’m pushing off, exhaling with a whoop as I squeeze through the space between the people and the wall. My right foot comes down, and I’m instantly in motion again. Full momentum. A perfect tic-tac.
The Lieren are close behind, colliding with the group, bowling them over in a mess of confu
sed shouts. But I’ve got the edge now. Their cries fade into the distance.
There’s not a lot you can move between sectors without paying off the gangs. Not unless you know where and how to cross. Tracers do. And that’s why we exist. If you need to get something to someone, or if you’ve got a little package you don’t want any gangs knowing about, you come find us. We’ll get it there—for a price, of course—and if you come to my crew, the Devil Dancers, we’ll get it there fast.
The corridor exit looms, and then I’m out, into the gallery. After the corridors, the giant lights illuminating the massive open area are blinding. Corridor becomes catwalk, bordered with rusted metal railings, and the sound of my footfalls fades away, whirling off into the open space.
I catch a glimpse of the diagram on the far wall, still legible a hundred years after it was painted. A scale picture of the station. The Core at the centre, a giant sphere which houses the main fusion reactor. Shooting out from it on either side, two spokes, connected to an enormous ring, the main body. And under it, faded to almost nothing after over a century: Outer Earth Orbit Preservation Module, Founded AD 2234.
Ahead of me, more people emerge from the far entrance to the catwalk. A group of teenage girls, packed tight, talking loudly among themselves. I count ten, fifteen—no. They haven’t seen me. I’m heading full tilt towards them.
Without breaking stride, I grab the right-hand railing of the catwalk and launch myself up and over, into space.
For a second, there’s no noise but the air rushing past me. The sound of the girls’ conversation vanishes, like someone turned down a volume knob. I can see all the way down to the bottom of the gallery, a hundred feet below, picking out details snatched from the gaps in the web of criss-crossing catwalks.
The floor is a mess of broken benches and circular flowerbeds with nothing in them. There are two young girls, skipping back and forth over a line they’ve drawn on the floor. One is wearing a faded smock. I can just make out the word Astro on the back as it twirls around her. A light above them is flickering off–on–off, and their shadows flit in and out on the wall behind them, dancing off metal plates. My own shadow is spread out before me, split by the catwalks; a black shape broken on rusted railings. On one of the catwalks lower down, two men are arguing, pushing each other. One man throws a punch, his target dodging back as the group around them scream dull threats.
Ancestral Machines Page 49