Derelict_Destruction

by Paul E. Cooley

  Gunny’s HUD flashed with a squad warning. Lyke was losing compression. “Fuck!” Gunny yelled. He de-magged his boots and pushed off toward Lyke, barely conscious that he was now flying just below Wendt’s cannon. The flechettes streaked centimeters above his shoulder as Wendt continued firing at the creature. All Gunny could focus on was Lyke. And the young marine was about to die.

  Lyke’s rifle, still mag-locked to his left arm, aimed wildly in the air around him as he tried to wipe off the liquid. Vapor drifted up from the fingers on his right glove. “No!” Gunny yelled, but he knew it was too late. The gloves, the least armored portion of the suit, were already dissolving. The kid had maybe ten seconds before his suit lost integrity.

  The marine was in full panic, the rifle firing wildly as his fingers tightened on the trigger. An errant flechette round streaked just past Gunny’s shoulder. Another detonated a mere meter from the skiff. He reached Lyke and batted the rifle from his hand. The weapon spun away from them into space just before Gunny’s HUD flashed with a red squad warning. Lyke had lost compression.

  Gunny screamed at him over the mic, but there was no response. The chest and shoulder area where the first droplets of silver liquid had hit were now dissolving. He could see the strands of Atmo-steel weave beneath the quickly disappearing outer shell. The kid was dead and there wasn’t a fucking thing he could do about it.

  Lyke’s arms twitched before wrapping around his throat, as if applying pressure could somehow keep the vacuum and near absolute-zero temperature from filling his suit. They twitched three more times before his body went still.

  Gunny mag-locked himself to the gunwale, his arms outstretched to the dead marine. The skiff vibrated again and again from Wendt’s fire, but he barely noticed. He couldn’t see the look of horror he knew lay beneath the helmet, nor the heavy layer of frost that undoubtedly covered the dermis. The boy’s eyes, probably as wide open as his mouth set in a scream, would be little more than solid, frozen rocks.

  “Fuck!” Gunny yelled. He kicked the body from the skiff and turned to face the attacker. That’s when he saw Taulbee open up. The creature had given up attacking the skiff and was trying to dig itself into the deck. Between Taulbee and Wendt, the thing didn’t have a chance.

  Gunny pointed his rifle to add to the cover fire when a part of the creature’s circular body broke apart in a shatter storm of black flakes and silver droplets. Coiled strands of shimmering liquid escaped its body and drifted toward the skiff. Wendt started to yell, but Gunny was already in motion.

  He kicked off the gunwale and headed to the pilot chair. As his body flew by the cannon mount, he realized he was going too high. He was going to float right by the front of the skiff and into space beyond it. He flipped his magnetics to full and braced himself as his feet dragged him to the skiff’s deck.

  His bones vibrated from the impact and he grunted in pain. Without sitting down, he made a block connection to the skiff’s controls and fired the aft thrusters. The skiff bolted forward just as the silvery ropes flew past where Wendt’s head had been.

  “Gunny!” Taulbee yelled.

  “Here, sir,” Gunny said in a less than even voice. He took short sips of air, doing his best to keep his panting from the comms.

  “Status?”

  “Fucked,” Gunny growled. “Lyke is dead.”

  “He’s dead?” Wendt asked over the channel.

  Gunny was silent for a moment, waiting for the LCpl to say something else, but he didn’t. Gunny turned the skiff in a wide arc until its fore pointed once again at S&R Black. Taulbee’s SV-52 hovered a few meters above the hull and less than two meters from where the creature had met its end.

  The creature’s body, tethered by one attached arm that had penetrated the hull, slowly floated upward until its ragged, pulverized middle seemed to dangle at the end of the remaining appendage. Gunny ground his teeth.

  They hadn’t killed it fast enough. No. He hadn’t been fast enough. He squeezed his eyes tight for a moment, doing his best to ignore the volcano of acid churning in his stomach and the sense of loss and failure threatening to shut down every nerve ending in his body.

  “Wasn’t your fault, Gunny,” Taulbee said over a private connection.

  He said nothing for a moment, wishing he could flip up his helmet and rub the tears from his eyes. “Thank you, sir,” he said in a clipped voice. “Doesn’t help much.”

  “No,” Taulbee said. The lieutenant’s voice sounded as monotonic and lifeless as his own. “Can we retrieve his body?”

  Gunny checked his cam feeds until he saw the silhouette of Lyke’s suit slowly tumbling toward Mira’s aft. “We can, sir,” Gunny said. “I just don’t know how much of that acid shit we’d have to deal with. Might be a contamination hazard.”

  Taulbee hissed. “I’ll grab it,” he said. “In the net. We’ll bring it back and figure out what to do.”

  “Very good, sir,” Gunny said.

  “Get back to the ship, Gunny. We have work to do.”

  “Aye, sir,” Gunny said.

  Taulbee broke the connection. The SV-52’s lights flashed over the skiff as Taulbee rotated the craft in the direction of Lyke’s body and slowly accelerated away.

  Get your fucking shit together, marine, he told himself.

  “Wendt,” he said.

  “Aye, Gunny?”

  “We’re getting the fuck out of here. Keep sharp.”

  “Aye, Gunny.”

  He stared out at S&R Black. The ship glowed like a beacon in the darkness, its exterior floodlights still raining down photons around the abandoned spindle.

  Lyke died for nothing, he thought.

  The skiff trundled slowly back toward the ship as if in a funeral procession.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  When Kali had been 13, her father had taken her to the Schiaparelli Crater Mine where he worked. It was the first time she’d ever stepped into one of the massive complexes built below ground. The SF Gov/Atmo co-owned site had tunnels and caverns nearly 1 kilometer beneath the crater’s surface. She begged and begged for him to let her see one of the mine shafts and the platforms where humans and AIs worked together to find and collect precious resources.

  He had. And when she saw the darkness stretching beneath one of the platforms, she’d suddenly become aware she was below the planet’s surface, millions and millions of metric tons of rock and sand waiting to break the supports and rush down atop her, to crush her, pulverize her, and grind her into microscopic bits.

  She’d nearly had a panic attack, but she managed to hide it from her father. At least long enough for her to make it back up to the main complex before excusing herself and expelling the contents of her stomach into a toilet.

  Her father, an SFMC marine, helped guard the facility as well as rescue any personnel that might become trapped or injured in the mine. From that day on, she’d been terrified if he was late coming home from work. Not to mention if there were news reports of cave-ins or casualties at the mine. Every time one of those came over the holo-stream, she just remembered the yawning tunnel and the evil darkness that had threatened to sweep over her.

  This ship, with its endless corridors, reminded her of that tunnel. And although the science section didn’t seem to consume their light the same way the rest of the ship had, the childhood memory started bouncing into her thoughts whenever she closed her eyes.

  Their safe haven was behind them. Every step she took brought them closer to the next room, and every step kicked the memory to the top of her consciousness. Kali bit her lip until it hurt, images falling away as bright pain shot across her nerve endings.

  The next room, she thought. The next room could be better. It doesn’t have to be as doom-ridden as the last. Hell, there might be another comms station they could use. Or maybe some explanation of what the hell was going on here. A sneer crossed her face. Yeah, she thought, and maybe there’ll be a unicorn!

  “Everything okay, Boss?” Carb asked.

 
Kali flinched. “Yeah,” she said, doing her best to keep the fear out of her voice. “Why’d you ask?”

  Dickerson cleared his throat. “Because you slowed down,” he said.

  “No,” Kali said. “Everything’s fine. Hatch is just up ahead.”

  “Copy,” Dickerson said.

  Great, Kali thought. Focus!

  Her lip throbbed and she noticed the coppery taste of blood in her mouth. Yup. That was really going to help her talk later when her lip was swollen to the size of a mouthguard.

  Kali pressed forward, her helmet lights illuminating the recessed hatch for the decontamination chamber. She stood from her crouch, wincing at the sensation of her knees and back popping. When this is over, she told herself, you’re going to spend an entire day in the tub back at Trident Station. Right. Like getting back there was ever going to happen.

  Shut up and move, she said to herself.

  Kali cleared the corridor ahead as best she could before pivoting to face the hatch. Through a block command, she activated her left-side camera and put the feed on her HUD. She had to focus on the hatch, of course, but if there was motion on her flank, she was damned well going to see it.

  “Dickerson? Cover the rear. Carb, watch my flank.”

  “Aye, Boss.”

  Kali sighed with relief as Carb moved behind her. Why did she feel as though the ship’s walls were closing in on her? Or that the illumination from her lights was dimming?

  Her eyes flicked to her O2 supply. She was still in the green, but with her broken HUD sensor, the damned thing could have said she was full and she couldn’t trust it. Not enough to bet her life, anyway.

  “Dickerson? What’s your O2 status?”

  “Uh.” He paused for a moment. “Thirty minutes until redline. But that’s probably because we’ve been taking it slow. We get into another few firefights, I doubt it will last that long.”

  “Copy,” Kali said. It was a good point. She’d asked Dickerson because of the four of them, he easily consumed the most oxygen. Wasn’t always a good thing to be a large man. “Okay. If we don’t find an O2 station in this room, we’re heading back to that safe area.”

  “Aye, Corporal,” Dickerson said.

  The walls seemed to cave in toward her and then elastic band back into reality. Vertigo sent shivers down her back and made her stomach crawl. She closed her eyes, tried to tell herself it wasn’t real. Hell, she felt like she was floating off the deck. She opened her eyes again. The walls elastic banded again. Harder. The images of reality shimmered and then solidified.

  She stared, her body completely frozen with terror. A moment passed. Then another. She shook with a start as if coming awake during a bad dream. Her eyes flicked to her side cam. Carb had dropped her rifle from one hand, the weapon’s barrel pointing at the deck. Her helmet lights, however, were pointed directly down the corridor. A check of her rear cam feed showed her Dickerson, frozen like a statue, his rifle auto-locked to the palm of his hand.

  Kali tried to speak, but all she managed was a single drawn-out syllable. After clearing her throat, she finally found her voice. “Squad? Did you see that?”

  Dickerson snapped out of his paralysis, the rifle immediately back in his hands. Carb had done the same.

  “If you mean,” Dickerson stammered, “the goddamned walls moving around, yeah.”

  After a moment without reply from Carb, Kali frowned. “Carb? Did you see it?”

  “I—” Her voice broke off into silence.

  “Yeah,” Dickerson said, “she saw it.”

  “What about you, Elliott?”

  “Saw the floor and left corridor,” he said. “The rest of you fuckers got really stretched and then snapped back.”

  “What in the void?” Dickerson said.

  Yeah, Kali thought. What indeed. Or better yet, “why.” They hadn’t experienced this on their journey to the bridge. Unless, she thought, it’s been a gradual change. So subtle we didn’t even notice until now.

  She tried to remember how wide the corridors had been before they started their way to the science section. Had the ship’s corridors seemed to close in on them over the past hour? She didn’t think so. But she’d started feeling more cramped and claustrophobic, that was for sure.

  “What do we do now?” Dickerson asked.

  “Let’s check the room,” Kali said. “If that effect is just in the corridor, I want to get out of it as fast as possible.”

  “Copy that,” Carb said. “I—I don’t know what the fuck that was, but I don’t want to have it happen again. Damned near puked in my helmet.”

  “No, shit,” Dickerson said.

  Kali managed a grin. At least they’d all experienced the same sensations. Something in common anyway. She couldn’t describe what she’d felt, as if her mind refused to call up the memories. She hoped for their sake, they hadn’t experienced it too. Not like that. But she had a bad feeling that’s exactly what froze all of them in their tracks.

  “Okay,” Kali said. “Dickerson get up here. You’re the corridor detail. Both you and Carb,” she amended after a moment. The jumble of thoughts racing across her mind made it difficult to focus, to think. Too many questions, too much fear. She bit her sore lip, and the thoughts disappeared in a red haze. Kali shook her head, another bright bolt of pain rocketing across her skull. Her vision gradually cleared. “I’m going to open the hatch. You two take up positions three meters in either directions. Give this thing some room, just in case.” After the two marines acknowledged the command, Kali hunted for a manual release, but found none. If she wanted in, she’d have to cut in.

  It had taken three beam-cutters to cut through the last one. She knew their last cutter didn’t have enough power to create a large enough hole. Maybe she could make one large enough for her or Carb to crawl through. Maybe. But definitely not Dickerson. Not only that, she told herself, but cutting through had taken a long time. They’d have to head back to the room they’d just left soon for more O2. In other words, they didn’t have time for this.

  She was about to step back and call it when her eyes caught sight of a recessed panel in the hatch frame above her. She partially demagnetized her boots and the weightlessness immediately made her stomach drop. Kali waited just a beat before tapping her toes on the deck.

  She floated higher toward the panel. Reaching out, she activated a mag-glove on the hatch frame and stuck fast to the metal. Pushing on the frame cut her forward momentum and kept her from moving into a horizontal position. She tapped the panel with the fingers of her free hand. The metal slid down, exposing a bright red crank. “I think this is the manual release for something,” she said. “Or maybe a power generator.”

  “For something,” Carb echoed. “I don’t like the sound of that, Boss.”

  Dickerson’s voice broke through the comms, flat and devoid of emotion. “Think that’s a good idea, Corporal? We need to find out what’s in there that bad?”

  She was about to reply when the world shrank in on her before popping back to normal. When she caught her breath, she could only whisper. “See that?”

  “Shit,” Carb said, “I felt it. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  Dickerson groaned. “Goddamnit. We have to get down this corridor to get to the port-side escape pods.”

  Kali brought up the schematics. She stared at their position on the map. “Backtrack,” she said. “We head to the safe room, get more O2, backtrack to the three-way branch, and take one of them.”

  Elliott snorted. “And what fresh hell are we going to find?”

  “I don’t know,” Kali said. “But I don’t think we want to go that way. We’d risk the phenomenon getting worse.”

  “Copy that,” Dickerson said and sighed. “With you, Corporal.”

  “Good. Let’s move.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Black watched Private Lyke die. Black watched the heroic efforts to save the marine. Black analyzed Taulbee’s, Gunny’s, and Wendt’s speech patterns. The AI
detected loss, frustration, and depression in their voices.

  Black hadn’t had the chance to know Private Lyke apart from their encounters during his training. Private Niro, who’d died shortly after they’d begun operations on Mira, had also been new to the company. Black had memories of missions before her transformation, or evolution, but her interactions with the majority of the new recruits had been little to none.

  For a few nano-seconds, Black replayed all her memories of both Niro and Lyke. Even she was surprised at how few there were. She shunted the memories off to short-term storage and performed quick scans of the area around the ship. Gunny’s skiff would arrive in the cargo bay in fifteen seconds. Lieutenant Taulbee had fired a net around Private Lyke’s corpse. She wasn’t certain, but thought it likely Taulbee would have to abandon the corpse again. The body would almost certainly have residual acid that could contaminate the ship.

  Black opened a channel to the cargo bay and watched Nobel, Copenhaver, and Murdock work on the beacon sled. The three of them would shortly have to vacate the cargo bay once Gunny arrived. She sent a warning to Nobel’s block to let him know. The other marines weren’t aware of Lyke’s death. Yet. Black would monitor their reactions and file them for further stress analysis. The company’s survival might soon hinge on the marines’ ability to push away grief and regain their focus. Not just for their own safety and the success of the mission, but for her survival as well.

  She crafted a short status update for the Trio and fired it at Neptune. She duplicated the message and sent it to Mickey, the Pluto Exo-observatory AI, as well. If the Trio didn’t get the message from her direct beam, then hopefully they would get it from Mickey. Three light-hours away from Neptune, the likelihood of a message getting lost in stellar noise was higher than she liked.