by Jonah Buck
“Thank God.”
“Here’s the bad news, though. They’re a commercial fishing vessel out of Tasmania, maybe a day away on their current route. They’re not an ice-breaker ship. The only way they can get anywhere close to the coast is to anchor out near Delambre Station.”
“But Dagenais and his warship are out there.”
“You see the gist of the problem. If that ship gets too close, they’re going to end up like the Sulaco. The closest ice-breaker is even further away.”
“The soldiers will be here by then.”
“Right. And if we set out from here, we won’t have the supplies to defend ourselves. Dagenais has that scout plane. It would spot us pretty quickly. And then there’s your friend from the cable car to consider.”
In the span of a couple of minutes, Denise had felt her heart sink, rise in hope, and immediately sink again. There had to be something they could do. They weren’t completely helpless. They just needed a plan.
The speaker system crackled to life again. “This is Colonel Dagenais. You are running out of time. Anyone still alive and listening to this message needs to surrender soon. Your options are rapidly dwindling.” Dagenais continued his spiel, again promising safety to anyone who surrendered. It was tempting on the surface. Remembering how he shelled the Sulaco and drove them out here in the first place punctured any false hopes, though. Dagenais wasn’t a sneering radio drama villain, but he did have ice water running through his veins.
Denise thought back to those pictures in the colonel’s office. She wondered if the man’s wife and sons were fully aware that the husband and father in their lives was a major dick. She wondered if Dagenais thought about them and the shame they would go through if he failed when he justified what an asshole he was to himself. Or maybe, like so many dicks, he was blissfully unaware of what a sack of turds he was and saw no need to reflect on it. From her experience, a lot of jerks were taken completely by surprise when they were informed they were jerks. It was like someone going to the doctor and being told they had had a terminal disease. The diagnosis was met with shock and disbelief. The world would be a much better place if more imbeciles were aware of their condition and had an interest in treating it. A lot of them just stuffed any news that they might have personal flaws right down the mental garbage chute, though.
People would go to enormous lengths to justify to themselves that they were the sort of person they believed themselves to be. Sometimes that meant great acts of kindness and selflessness from flawed individuals. But there was a flipside to that. There were many types of frightening personality defects out there. Psychopaths. Crazed murderers. Lawyers. No type of person was scarier than a jerk who had managed to convince himself that he was in the right, though. Denise heavily suspected that was the category Colonel Dagenais fell into.
“This fishing vessel you mentioned. Did you warn them about coming here?” Denise asked.
“Yeah. I was a bit vague on the specifics because I didn’t want to sound like a loon. They know things aren’t safe, though.”
“Good,” Denise said. The cogs in her head were turning. She didn’t have that plan she needed yet, but the parameters were coming together. A lot of their options were hemmed in, but the contours of the problem were starting to take shape in her head. Once she knew where the trouble spots were, she could formulate a plan to avoid them. And once she had a plan, she could improvise off it when everything inevitably went to hell.
“There’s something else,” Cornelia said, speaking up again.
“What?” Denise asked.
“I learned something about the meteor while you were out. I think it tells us something about the monsters, too.”
“Do tell.”
Cornelia grabbed a clipboard off a nearby desk and handed it to Denise. “Anything stand out to you?”
Denise took the clipboard and looked at the neatly typed paper attached to it. The words written on it were all in French, so most of it might as well have been written in Sumerian cuneiform. She could tell a few things just by looking at the format, though.
It was a report of some kind. The sentences were all arranged in neat paragraphs. There was an official-looking stamp at the bottom as well. Denise was pretty sure that the stamp translated to something along the lines of Top Secret. There was also a signature, signed with a flourish, near the stamp. The document looked like it was probably some sort of internal memorandum, the sort of thing that might be passed around to a few people in charge of this operation. Not necessarily a scientific paper. More of an internal report.
The other thing she noted was that someone had gone through and underlined a single word that kept reappearing throughout the document. Merde. It appeared in the memo seven times on one page.
Denise’s French was quite limited. Merci. Bonjour. But it was usually the niceties and the curse words that spread the furthest in any given language. Merde was French for “shit.”
She stared at the page for another few seconds, unsure of the significance, if any, of what she was looking at. It seemed a bit odd that the French researchers here would have been using such a phrase in their internal communications. Especially so frequently. It was in every paragraph at least once. The second paragraph had three instances of the word.
She glanced up at Cornelia. “Did you do the underlining, or did you find it like this?” Denise handed the clipboard to Metrodora so she could examine it. Maybe she could puzzle out something more.
“I did the underlining,” Cornelia said. “Once I noticed it, it grabbed my attention. I didn’t come back and underline it until I had looked at a few of the meteor samples that the research team chipped off, though. Here, follow me. I want to show you something.”
Denise’s bones ached as she followed Cornelia over to the edge of the room. There was a table with a series of rocks sitting under glass cubes. For some reason, the setup reminded Denise of meals hidden under serving trays at a fancy restaurant.
Cornelia lifted one of the glass cubes up and plucked out the hunk of rock beneath. It was about the length of a bottle of wine. The portion had come from the outermost layer of the meteor. One end of the chunk was blackened, but the scorching faded further along the sample, toward what would have been the interior. There was a weird groove along part of the sample that looked like someone had accidentally hit it with a glancing blow from a large drill.
She handed the sample to Denise. It was lighter than she’d been expecting. It wasn’t exactly the weight of a feather, but it was easier to heft around than it looked. Denise still could have used it to smash someone’s skull in if she wanted, but she could tell that there was something unusual about the weight. By the standards of solid stone, it must have had a relatively low density.
“Feel that?” Cornelia asked.
“It’s light. Well, light-ish.”
“Yup. And I think I’ve found out the reason why. Metrodora, do you still have those pictures you first showed us? The ones that observatory took when the meteor entered the atmosphere.”
“Here.” Metrodora pulled a tightly folded photograph out of her pocket and pulled it open. It was creased in every direction, but the image was clear enough. It was the same photo she’d presented them with back in Cape Town. It showed the meteor apparently breaking off an even larger celestial object, a large blot in the sky, just before it fell to earth.
“I can tell you’re excited about whatever you think you discovered, but would you mind just telling us what this is all about?”
“I want to walk you through my reasoning here. I’m just showing you some of my evidence before I take you straight to the conclusion,” Cornelia said.
Denise turned to Fletch. “Has she told you what this is all about?”
“Yeah. I think it’s a big load of crap,” he said, crossing his arms.
Cornelia gave him a look but then turned back to Denise. “Take a good close look at that chunk of meteor. Especially the parts that were closer to the interi
or. Tell me what you see.”
Denise decided to play along. She held the meteor up to the light and stuck her face in close. “Let’s see here. There’s bits of different material. It’s not all the same kind of rock. Kind of lumpy.”
“Yes. It’s what geologists call a conglomerate. There’s lots of things suspended in a matrix of other material. It almost looks like someone fossilized a cross-section of a mixed berry pie. You can make out some distinct elements. That’s very unusual. Most meteors are made up of an iron and nickel alloy. This one isn’t. In fact, it’s not even really a meteorite at all.”
“You want to slow down and unpack that for me?”
“Those are organic materials in that matrix. They’ve just been processed a bit, though. The matrix itself is organic in nature too, really. They’re both just highly compacted, the same way coal is just carbon from the biosphere that’s been crushed and crushed and crushed until it’s a little lump. This stuff was first compacted and then baked a bit when it went through the atmosphere. It probably lost a lot of its mass in the process, actually.”
Denise was starting to feel dumb. “I still don’t get it.”
Cornelia took the meteor sample back and held it up. “As my colleague over here so eloquently put it, what you’re looking at here is a big pile of crap. It’s just been flash baked into rock.”
“I…wait…you mean…?”
Cornelia pointed at the picture showing the larger blot in the sky. “We assumed that this meteorite broke off from a larger chunk of space debris. I don’t think that’s true. This big, dark shape here? I think that’s a creature. A really big space-faring creature.”
“And you’re saying it dropped a load as it passed by Earth?”
“Exactly.”
“And that’s what we’re looking at over there.” Denise pointed to the meteorite up on its pedestal. The thing was bigger than the statues most tin-pot dictators ordered erected in their likeness. And that was after a lot of it had burned off in the atmosphere.
“That’s it.”
Denise looked at the sample she’d been holding. She felt the sudden urge to wash her hands.
SIXTEEN
ESCAPE PLAN
“But time is running out. If you do not surrender in time, we will have no choice but to assume the worst. For your sake and the sake of everyone you love, please contact us, and we can sort this out.” Colonel Dagenais signed off on the radio again. His calls increasingly reminded Denise of some sort of surreal radio pledge drive. Act now, and you’ll receive hours of great programming, this free tote bag, and certain doom.
There was technically still time for them to contact Dagenais, if they wanted. None of them had any intention of doing so, though. Listening to him preach their imminent destruction over the speaker system was picking at their nerves, but no one seriously thought that Dagenais was offering them a square deal.
At this point, he probably knew that they were either dead or not going to answer him. Denise was pretty sure that he was just trying to make them nervous or drive a wedge between them by counting down to their potential destruction and ratcheting up the tension.
She wasn’t going to pay any more attention to him than was necessary. She was still trying to wrap her head around what Cornelia had just told her, as a matter of fact.
“Alright, so let’s assume you’re right,” she said. “Let’s assume that the meteor is just one big pile of baked dung. Where does that leave us with the various monsters down here? Maybe the slugs could hitch a ride on that thing as it plummeted down to earth. There’s no way for the bug men or that giant creature to fit inside, though. The dragon-thing is about the same size as the meteor. It’s the size of a dinosaur.”
“I think I know what’s going on there, too. I found a few other documents scattered around here. Can’t read any of them, but there were some informative bits anyway. I think it reinforces my theory about the meteor’s composition, too. Come over here.” Cornelia waved them over to a nearby desk with a couple of binders stacked on top.
She lifted one of the binders off the desk and flipped it open, pawing through the pages until she found the section she wanted. It was a diagram of one of the slugs. Apparently, someone had autopsied one of the creatures and catalogued its innards at some point. The drawing labeled each of the organs and other points of interest as best it could. A lot of the points of interest had asterisks near the label. Apparently, the creatures were alien enough that the scientists here had to make educated guesses on some elements of the creatures’ inner anatomy.
Cornelia handed the binder over to Denise. “While I was looking at the meteor samples, I noticed a lot of boreholes leading through the layers. They don’t seem to be related to any process having to do with entry into the atmosphere. I’m pretty sure the slugs made them as they burrowed through the material. But that tells us something about the slugs.”
“Yes, that they arrived on the meteor.” Denise was still calling it a meteor. She wasn’t sure it really qualified for that phrase, knowing what she did now. She couldn’t quite bring herself to start calling it a space turd, though.
“That’s right. The samples also don’t show any larger boreholes. Certainly not large enough to house anything human-sized or larger. That means that only the slugs arrived with the meteor. What does that tell you about the other creatures?”
“That they arrived separately? Either before or after.” Denise didn’t really like being led around by the nose like this, but she could tell Cornelia was trying to lay out all her evidence in a way that she thought made sense. She’d indulge her friend a little bit longer, but what she really wanted was some straight answers.
“That was what I first thought, too.” Cornelia took the binder back from Denise and flipped ahead past large sections of graphs and French to another series of diagrams. These illustrations showed a cross-section of a human skull with a slug nestled inside its brain. There was a cutaway diagram that showed the creature’s jaws clamped onto a nerve near where the spinal cord connected to the base of the brain.
“Okay,” Denise said, making a little hand gesture for Cornelia to speed it up.
“Well, the answer seems to be a little more complicated than a matter of the other monsters arriving at a different time. It has to do with the slugs themselves. We were wrong about them. They look a bit like slugs, but they’re actually a lot more like a different kind of animal. Maggots.”
Cornelia flipped another page in the binder and revealed another set of diagrams. The first was similar to the previous one. It showed a slug-maggot inside a human skull, but this time the creature was significantly engorged. It took up a lot more space than before. In the next illustration, the creature was barely recognizable. Some sort of extensions had formed around its form and were spreading down through the corpse’s central nervous system.
There was a third diagram, too. This one showed that the entire human body had been mostly hollowed out and consumed. There was nothing left that was recognizably human in there. Instead, a second form had been weaving itself together inside the cadaver’s body. It was one of the bug men that had killed Poole and emerged from the rubbish heap.
Denise thought back to some of the weird, husked bodies they’d seen. There wasn’t anything left but a crust of skin. At the time, she’d assumed that something had scooped everything out of the body. Some exterior force. Now, she could see that was wrong. The bodies were like cracked eggshells after the chicken hatched. Something had emerged from the inside and clawed its way out.
“Maggots,” Denise muttered, more to herself than anyone else. “Maggots turn into flies.”
“Exactly,” Cornelia said. “When the meteor over there was, ah, expelled, something laid eggs in it. The same thing happens on Earth a million times a day. The eggs hatched into maggots, and they started eating their way out of their nest here. Then, the French research teams discovered them, and the maggots discovered a new source of food.”
&nbs
p; “But the maggots needed even more food to pupate and turn into their next form,” Denise said, letting herself extrapolate from what Cornelia was saying. “So they took over dead bodies and used those to actively hunt for more food.”
“Yeah. That’s why there’s been dead people trying to eat us. A belly full of meat doesn’t do a corpse any good. It’s vital for the little critter in that dead man’s skull, though. The maggots need food to reach the next stage of their lives. On this forsaken continent, human beings are basically the only thing edible for miles.”
“Great,” Denise said.
“In some ways, what Colonel Dagenais is doing is smart military tactics. Scorched earth. Remember from the history books when Napoleon invaded Russia and ran out of supplies, so pretty much his entire army starved to death?”
“Not exactly a moment to look back on with fondness for the French military.”
“Probably not. Apparently, it’s a lesson learned, though. Destroy the food stocks, and the enemy can’t do anything. An army marches on its belly, and all that. If Dagenais can deny the maggots food, they can’t reach the next stage in their life cycles. Eventually, they’ll starve and die off in their shells. Problem solved.”
“That sounds like a spiffy strategy and all, but it loses some of its charm when you realize that we’re the potential food sources that need to be destroyed. I don’t like being thought of as a food stock.”
“It’s almost flattering if you think of yourself as a strategically important resource.”
“Way to look on the bright side. I’ll be sure to include it on my résumé in the future. Denise DeMarco: strategically important food resource for space maggots.”
“There’s one last thing, though.” Cornelia flipped another page. It showed a series of cross sections from a fully-fledged bug man. They showed something peculiar happening to its insides. Based on the timescale printed under each diagram, it was occurring fairly rapidly.