“There might be sleeping macrobes there,” said Torrence, his voice grim. “I will scout it out. Reader, if you could accompany me, that would be welcome. Cassie, if you can accompany us to watch for macrobe attacks, that would be welcome.”
“Of course,” said Cassandra.
“Jack, Miss Morgan, please guard the door,” said Torrence. “We’ll be back in a few moments.”
“All right,” said March. He ejected the spent power pack from his pistol and slapped a fresh one into place as the others left. Hauling around the weight of all those extra power packs had been annoying, but he didn’t regret it now.
Tessa leaned against the wall, arms wrapped tight around herself, her white uniform smeared with dust and soot from the explosion. Her eyes were haunted and grim, and she looked shaken.
“Were you close with Warner?” said March.
She shook her head. “No. Not at all. I mean, I liked him...he seemed like a nice guy. He worked in the kitchens. But...I didn’t want to date him. I don’t want to date anyone right now. And I almost got killed for it. He almost killed me for it.”
“He didn’t,” said March. “Warner was dead long before we came here. The macrobe killed him and turned his body into that creature. It just had his memories and knowledge, and the macrobe used that to taunt you.”
“Do you really believe that?” said Tessa.
March nodded.
“It helps to think that,” said Tessa. “Thank you. For my life. That thing would have killed me.”
March nodded again.
“I think...” Tessa looked up and down the corridor, and then she smiled. Before March could react, she stepped forward and gave him a quick, hard kiss on the mouth.
“Why the hell did you do that?” said March, baffled. Part of his mind was noting how soft and warm her lips had felt against his, or wondered how the rest of her body would feel. The rest of his mind noted how odd her behavior was.
“Well, you did save my life,” said Tessa with a smile.
March took a deep breath. “You do realize that I have a girlfriend.”
“Oh, come on,” said Tessa. “You don’t expect me to believe that she’s really your girlfriend?”
March’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?” Did she know who Cassandra really was?
“Her body language is all wrong,” said Tessa. “She’s too stiff and wooden around you. I bet she’s a criminal or something. You must have hired her on some lawless asteroid station, and now she pretends to be your girlfriend so the bounty hunters don’t find her.”
March let out a long breath. “You’ve watched too many video dramas.”
“I don’t know,” said Tessa. “Sometimes a girl’s just got to trust her intuition.” Her smile widened. “If we live through this, we’ve got a long flight back to Calaskaran space. We can talk about it some more.”
March said nothing. He had to admit that he was attracted to her. Yet this kind of thing was a distraction from his mission. And her behavior was odd. He had just met Tessa, and March knew that he looked intimidating. Tessa Morgan was an attractive woman, and attractive women generally did not throw themselves at intimidating-looking men they had just met. Cassandra Yerzhov had taken a few days to warm up to March, and she had never flirted with him so openly.
Maybe Tessa was just more assertive.
Or maybe there was something more going on. If there was, this was a hell of a bad time for it.
March started to ask another question when he heard the clang of boots against the metal grill floor of the utility corridor.
“Don’t worry,” said Tessa, leaning back against the wall. “Your secret is safe with me, Captain March.”
March frowned, and Torrence, Reader, and Cassandra returned.
“Well?” said March.
“Junction’s safe,” said Torrence. “But Miss Smith detected a large group of macrobes heading this way. The sooner we’re gone from here, the better.”
March nodded. “Then lead the way.”
They set out, heading for the junction box.
Chapter 8: Revolution
Bit by bit, March and the others traversed the length of the Alpine.
He soon realized that without Cassandra’s Eclipse detector and Torrence’s detailed knowledge of the ship, they would have come to disaster. The utility corridors were a maze, but Torrence had them memorized. Without him, March would have gotten lost if he had attempted to use the utility corridors to reach the engineering section.
He instead would have taken the main corridors, and he would have likely been killed. Based on what Cassandra’s Eclipse device detected, it seemed that the surviving macrobes had banded together in groups of twenty to thirty and roamed the ship fighting each other. Had March encountered one of those groups, or if he had walked into the middle of a fight, there was no way he could have gotten himself and Cassandra clear. They would have died then and there.
They had to double back frequently, and sometimes take a convoluted route to avoid macrobes. Yet after about three hours, they reached the ventral deck and the cargo bays. March supposed that if he and Cassandra had turned left instead of right when they had boarded the Alpine, they might have already reached the engineering section.
Of course, if they had done that, they likely would have been dead for hours by now.
The cabling along the walls changed. Instead of bundles of wiring and pipes, they passed huge cables as thick as March’s thigh, the main power feeds that drew from the Alpine’s fusion reactor to power the ship’s systems. A faint hum grew louder and louder as they approached the mechanical heart of the ship.
The utility corridor ended in a T-junction. Two more utility corridors stretched off to the port and starboard sides of the ship, and another access door waited in front of them.
“All right,” said Torrence. “We’re almost there, but we have some problems first.”
“There are a lot of macrobes behind that door,” said Cassandra. “Nearly forty or fifty of them.”
“Wonder if they like the dark energy emissions from the dark matter reactor,” said Reader. “Like cats in a sunbeam.”
“Ugly damn cats,” muttered Tessa.
“No argument,” said Torrence.
“But if they’re basking in the radiation from the dark matter reactor,” said March, “that means they won’t be fighting. We won’t be able to count on them to thin their own numbers for us.”
“No,” said Torrence. “You’ve all got your maps of the ship, so you know that right behind this door is the main hyperdrive room. The Alpine’s got a main hyperdrive and a backup. The main one is right in front of us, and the backup is below us.”
“Maybe we could go to the backup hyperdrive room?” said Tessa.
Cassandra shook her head. “No such luck, I am afraid. There are another thirty to fifty macrobes down there, and they’re clustered together so thickly that I can’t get a solid count.”
“The backup room is closer to the dark matter reactor,” said Torrence. “Probably even more macrobes down there than up here.” He pointed to port and then starboard. “If the engineering section is shaped like the letter T, then the hyperdrive room would be the vertical slash of the T. The starboard arm of the T would be the control area for the fusion drive, and the port side would be the control area for the ion thrusters. Shield control, life support, and other key systems are housed right above us.”
“So how are we going to get past that many macrobes, sir?” said Tessa.
“There might be a way,” said Torrence. “Remember that I said the engineering rooms look like a big T? There are a lot of potentially explosive things down here...coolant lines and power transformers and the like. In the case of emergency, heavy blast doors can seal off the hyperdrive room, the fusion drive control room, and the ion thruster control room from each other.”
March grasped Torrence’s plan. “So the idea is to lure off as many of the macrobes as we can into the fusion control
and ion control rooms, and then you trigger the blast doors. Hopefully, we can deal with any macrobes left in the hyperdrive room.”
“That is the plan,” said Torrence. He pointed at a metal box next to the access door. “The main computer is still down, God only knows why, and we haven’t been able to get it back up. Our main computer operator is either dead or transformed. But my access codes still work locally, and I can trigger the blast doors from here.”
“But someone is going to have to lure the macrobes into the fusion and ion control rooms,” said Cassandra.
“Yes,” said Torrence. “I would do it, but I have to remain here to trigger the blast doors.”
March met Reader’s eyes. “Looks like it’s going to be you and me, then.” Reader nodded, his expression grave. “I’ll do the fusion drive room.”
“I’ll take ion thrusters,” said Reader. “How do you want to play this?”
March looked at Torrence. “I assume there are access doors to the fusion and ion rooms?”
Torrence nodded. “Down that utility corridor and that one.”
“All right,” said March, looking back to Reader. “We’ll both go through the access doors. Together we’ll walk to the hyperdrive room, and we’ll attack at the same time. Hopefully, the macrobes will chase us, and then we’ll retreat through the access doors and into the utility corridors. Then Captain Torrence will trigger the blast doors, and we’ll have clear access to the hyperdrive and the spare parts.”
“That is a very risky plan,” said Cassandra.
“Yeah,” said March, but he thought it ought to work. “Reader, you’ve got two guns?” The former Royal Marine nodded. “Better use both.”
“Be careful where you shoot,” said Torrence. “There are a lot of pressurized coolant lines in those rooms. One stray shot would flood the entire engineering section with toxic gas.”
“Maybe that’s a better idea,” said Tessa. “We can kill all the macrobes that way.”
Reader shook his head. “Sorry, miss, but macrobes don’t need air.”
“Reader’s right,” said Torrence. “Something about their physiology alters in the mutation. Most of them don’t seem to breathe at all. They only seem to subsist on dark energy and human flesh.”
“Then we won’t shoot any pipes,” said March. “Ready?”
“I was a Royal Marine, Captain March,” said Reader. “I was born ready.”
“Good man,” said Torrence.
“Be careful,” said Cassandra. Again, she leaned up to kiss his cheek for luck. March caught Tessa’s brief scowl before she concealed it.
“It’s way too late for careful,” said March, “but we’ll be back soon. Reader?”
Reader nodded and jogged down the port-side utility corridor, and March took the one to starboard. Soon he came to an access door labeled FUSION DRIVE CONTROL. March glanced to his right and saw Reader two hundred meters away, standing before the door leading to the thruster control room.
The two men exchanged nods, and March opened the access door.
He had feared that he would walk into dozens of sleeping macrobes invisible to Cassandra’s Eclipse, but the control room was deserted. It was a cavernous space, the size of a mid-sized church, the walls lined with control consoles and displays showing the status of the drive and the fusion reactor. A raised platform against the far wall held the throne-like seat of the chief fusion drive engineer, ringed by a computer console and multiple holographic status displays.
March drew his second pistol with his left hand and glided forward. Far at the other end of the room, he saw the junction with the hyperdrive room, and beyond that, he saw the massive arch that led to ion thruster control. Within the maze of consoles filling that room, March saw Reader moving forward, guns in either hand.
At last, March reached the archway at the end of the fusion control room, and he saw the massive blast door waiting overhead, a meter thick and constructed of reinforced hull armor alloy. His plasma pistol could burn through a human head in a single shot, but he could empty a dozen power packs into that massive door and not make a scratch. There would be an identical blast door in the archway to the thruster control room.
Reader reached his archway, and both he and March turned towards the hyperdrive room.
The hyperdrive resembled the one on the Tiger, a cylindrical metal cowling covering the innards of the device. Unlike the hyperdrive on the Tiger, it was nearly the size of a truck trailer. March knew the mighty engine used a series of dark energy surge regulators linked together to function in a single circuit, so he had no doubt they would find a compatible regulator here.
Nor would they need to scavenge one from the hyperdrive. A row of metal cabinets lined the wall for nearly twenty meters, holding an array of spare parts for the hyperdrive. March could help himself to as many surge regulators as he needed.
On the opposite wall from the storage cabinets stood the dark energy resonator coils that kept macrobes from possessing humans while in hyperspace. At least, that was where the coils should have been. A functional coil would have looked like a massive cylinder of gleaming gray metal.
These coils were blackened and charred, craters blasted into their centers.
They had exploded, and March realized that it hadn’t been a malfunction or negligence or freak misfortune.
Someone had detonated a small bomb on the resonator coils, and someone had probably also done a hard reset on the Alpine’s computer at the same time.
The disaster had been deliberate sabotage.
That was bad. As bad as that was, that was still only a background consideration.
The macrobes gathered around the cylinder were the primary problem.
Nearly seventy creatures had gathered around the hyperdrive cylinder, looking like a collection of spiders and scorpions and slugs and lizards out of a hallucinogenic nightmare. They were all awake, and they all stared at the hyperdrive. Their legs clicked and tapped and their arms twitched, and some of the macrobes made crooning sounds of pleasure. Reader had compared the situation to cats lying in a sunbeam, but it instead reminded March of flies landing on a bloodstain, their legs twitching and their wings flickering as they dined.
Seventy macrobes. A hundred meter dash back to the access door. Could March do it? Could Reader do it?
Time to find out.
He met Reader’s eyes across the hyperdrive room, and they both nodded.
As one, they turned, raised their pistols, and started shooting.
March had plenty of time to pick his shots, and his first two shots burned through the heads of a pair of macrobes. The creatures fell dead to the floor before the others noticed, and March repeated the feat, killing two more and then another two. Reader did the same thing, killing six macrobes in the space of a few heartbeats.
Then the creatures realized their danger.
Screams of rage and fury rose from the macrobes, and as one they whirled and charged, hurtling towards March in a tide of claws and pincers and glowing blue tumors. March squeezed off one more shot, turned, and ran as fast as he could manage. He was fast, but the macrobes were just as fast despite their great bulk, and they started to close. March did not even spare the breath to curse but ran as fast as his legs could carry him, his boots striking the deck like hammer blows. He felt the brush of air as a pincer swung at his head, missing his neck by a few inches.
Then the access door was in front of him, and March tore through it, slapping at the door control as he crashed into the far wall. He whirled and leveled his pistols at the door. A sea of nightmares loomed on the other side, and his fingers tightened against the triggers.
The door hissed shut with a clang.
He twisted his head to the side just in time to see Reader burst through the door at the far end of the utility corridor. A deep rumbling groan echoed through the corridor, followed by a pair of massive, resonant clangs. Torrence had triggered the blast doors. Furious pounding and hammering came from the access door, but s
o far it was holding. March took a deep breath, shoved his second pistol back into its holster, and ran to rejoin the others.
“You made it,” said Cassandra when he reached them. “You’re not hurt?”
March shook his head. “No. Reader?” Reader jogged up. “That was some fine shooting.”
“Thanks,” said Reader. A rare smile cracked his face. “Just glad I was able to run faster than the macrobes.”
“How does the hyperdrive room look?” said Torrence to Cassandra.
She tapped at her phone’s screen. “It’s mostly empty.”
“Mostly?” said Tessa.
“There are two to four macrobes still in there,” said Cassandra, “but most of them are trapped in the ion and fusion control rooms.” Furious clanging echoed through the corridor. “At least until those access doors give way.”
“Reader, you’re injured?” said Torrence.
Reader grimaced and flexed his left hand. The slash of a claw had opened his left forearm, his black uniform dampening with blood. “Just a scratch, sir.”
“Get that bandaged up before we go any further,” said Torrence. “I don’t know if the smell of blood will draw macrobes like it does sharks, but let’s not find out.” Fortunately, both he and Reader had thought to carry medical supplies with them from the banquet room, and soon Reader’s left forearm was bound in a field dressing and smelled of antiseptic instead of blood.
“I suppose you can’t pinpoint the exact location of the remaining macrobes?” said Tessa.
Cassandra shook her head. “Sorry. Only that they’re close. I can’t locate them any more precisely than that.”
“Then let’s do it,” said Torrence. “Jack and I will go first. Reader and Morgan, you come next. Miss Smith, you bring up the back, and stay behind us.” Cassandra bobbed her head. She had seen enough of the macrobes by now to know that she didn’t want to go first for any reason. “Let’s go.”
He hit the door control, and March and Torrence jumped through. March’s gaze swept the room, both hands grasping his pistol. No macrobes near the hyperdrive. He turned to the right, Torrence covering the left, and spotted a spider-like macrobe near the blast door to the thruster control room. The creature started to turn, but March’s gun was already coming up. He squeezed the trigger twice. The first shot clipped the macrobe on the shoulder, and his second shot caught it on the forehead. The creature reared back, spider legs drumming against the deck, and then went down.
Silent Order: Eclipse Hand Page 14