Or was it?
“Jared,” Alex said. When he had the man’s full attention he continued. “Tell me what you see. Be very specific. I know your head hurts but think hard.”
His friend steeled himself, understanding at once. He took a long look at their surroundings. Jared described the pristine corridor. After escaping the spheres in which they’d been imprisoned, and finding their suits, they’d found their way out into a much different sort of area. Gone were the grimy, blank, utilitarian grays. The hallway they’d found resembled the interior of a luxury hotel, complete with recessed lighting and, inexplicably, a red floor, like that of Platz Station. “Exactly as I see,” Alex said. “So there’s that at least.”
“Good. One less headache.”
Alex pushed the woman ahead to his friend, then propelled himself past them both and on to the next junction. He picked a path at random and pointed that way. Jared floated the prisoner to him and took the indicated turn without question or complaint. Managing the pain, finally.
“What if she wakes?” he asked as he drifted by.
“Then we hit the traitor again,” Alex said. He jerked his chin in the direction Jared was floating. “Mind the corners.”
Jared gave a halfhearted salute as he passed, leaving Alex to wrestle with the limp body. He’d just managed to get her arms and legs straightened and her body pointed in the right direction when he realized Jared had returned.
His companion rocketed back to Alex’s position, taking a spot on the opposite side of the corridor. He pointed at his eyes, then down the hallway. Alex nodded. He moved the unconscious woman behind him and flattened himself against the wall. Jared was staring off down the hallway, his body coiled, ready to shoot forward or back as the situation demanded.
Ten seconds passed in total silence. Alex saw nothing. Finally, he glanced at Jared and made a rolling motion with one finger. What is it?
“Something floating up ahead.”
“Who? One of ours or theirs?”
“No,” the man replied. “A little, I don’t know, it sort of looked like a mechanical fish. Maybe some sort of automated camera.”
“She was chasing it when we found her. Was it moving or switched off?”
“It was moving.”
Alex digested that and weighed their options. “This is important, Jared. Did it see you?”
“I don’t think so, it was pointed the other way.”
“Right. Stay put. If it comes this way, stay utterly still until you’re absolutely sure you can grab it. Then crush it. Understand?”
Jared gave a single nod. “What are you going to do?”
“Move back to that intersection. We’ll take the other hall. I’d like to know more about just what the hell’s going on here before we have to deal with security drones.”
“Amen to that.”
The Chameleon
6.AUG.3911 (Earth Actual)
TWENTY MINUTES PASSED with no sign of Vanessa or the odd floating drone. Then thirty. Skyler glanced at Tania. Her eyes were pleading.
“I don’t like this,” she said. “Not at all.”
“Me either,” Skyler agreed. He floated over to the airlock and motioned for Vaughn and Sam to come back in. It took some time to close the outer door, cycle the air, and enter. Vaughn looked annoyed, but Skyler ignored him. “Thoughts?” he asked Sam.
“It’s a big ship. She’s probably chasing the thing through some corridor or another.”
“You don’t seem concerned.”
Sam shrugged. “I don’t know her well, but I know she can handle herself. If she needs help she will come back.”
Skyler couldn’t argue with that, but he felt no better.
“Can we get back out there?” Vaughn asked. “We should be ready to move.”
Skyler waved them off. The whole situation, here in the sleeping ship, rankled him. The not knowing. He drifted once again to the edge of the biome, where he and Vanessa had watched the little object go past. There was still nothing to be seen, though. Just the black, dormant innards of a sleeping alien starship.
Several more minutes passed. Then he saw it. The silvery oblong thing, drifting with a lazy purposefulness toward the lower decks. Skyler’s heart began to hammer in his chest. He waited, breath held, for thirty seconds, but Vanessa did not appear. She was no longer following the object, then. It took every ounce of will he had not to transmit. He pushed back to the others instead, passed them, all the way to the airlock. At his insistence Sam and Vaughn came back inside once again.
“What now?” Vaughn asked, annoyed. An elbow from Sam shut him up.
“It just went by again, heading aft. No sign of Vanessa in pursuit.”
Sam started pulling her helmet back on, already knowing what he’d ask. He said it, anyway. “Bring her back.”
“Will do,” she said.
“And if you see that little drone,” he added, “shoot the damn thing.”
Sam exchanged a look with Vaughn. He gave a thumbs-up to her, and she back to Skyler. Then, with a clang, she irised the inner door closed and they were out.
“What’s going on?”
It was Tania, come to the exit as well. Tim was with her.
“Back to the center,” Skyler told them.
“We heard—”
“I know,” he said, too terse. He took a measured breath. “Sam can handle it. Let’s keep warm and be ready to receive them.”
Prumble drifted over. “I have a better idea.”
“Which is?”
“Let’s move the heater over by the door.”
Tim shook his head. “Bad idea. Eve calibrated it very carefully, to ensure no radiation reached the outer hull. Moving it even slightly could have disastrous—”
Prumble cut him off. “If someone’s injured we should be ready to help, to warm them up.”
Skyler considered both points, and the politics of disagreeing with Tim while Tania stood beside them, and finally nodded to Prumble. “Let’s do it,” he said. At least they wouldn’t just be bobbing about, useless.
The four of them wrestled the heating pod off the lines that kept it suspended between the trees. They were pulled taut in order to keep the warmer centered and not floating around, and as such the task required precise timing. All four lines were unhooked more or less at the same moment, with each person careful to keep hold of their end. At Skyler’s repetitious commands they moved, hand-over-hand, toward each other, until finally they were all about a meter apart, the warm object between them.
He was just about to give the order to move it when gunfire erupted from outside the sphere. Three shots in rapid succession. Light flared with each, casting the outer biome chamber in successive white flashes and deep black shadows, all beyond the trees, like distant lightning.
Everyone froze, exchanging worried glances.
“Maybe they found the drone,” Skyler offered.
Prumble shook his head. “That was gunfire, Sky, and neither Sam nor Vaughn nor Vanessa has a gun.”
Another shot rang out, closer than before.
“Suit up and get to the hatch!” Skyler roared, already off, his guideline dropped. The orb-shaped stove would be adrift but so be it. He flew toward the airlock, his aim only slightly off. He hit the clear biome wall about five meters from the target and grappled with it, managing to deflect himself more or less in the right direction. He hit the trampled soil in front of the exit shoulder first, grunting. His fingers scrambled for purchase and found it in the form of a clump of long grass.
The airlock door opened. Sam and Vaughn came in, backs to him, arms held out before them. Sam fired off a beam of plasma, though her target was blocked from Skyler’s view. He pushed himself toward the rack of helmets they’d rigged beside the door, partly to finish suiting up and partly to let the others inside. Sam kept firing until Vaughn managed to get his bearings and iris the door shut.
“What the hell’s going on? Is it the enemy?” Skyler asked, leaving his helmet t
ilted open for now.
Sam floated by the door, one hand on a rung beside it, the other rubbing at her shoulder.
It was Vaughn who spoke first. “I shit you not, there’s people out there.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Humans,” he said. “In space suits. And the bastards are armed.”
The words left Skyler reeling. “What…where did they come from?”
His thoughts turned instantly to the worries Vanessa had expressed days before. Hidden areas within the ship. Unexplored corners.
“What about Vanessa?” Tania asked.
Sam shook her head. “Didn’t see her. We went up the way she did, couldn’t find her, decided to come back and get more of you to form search parties. That’s when we saw them. Or rather they saw us. We were ambushed.”
“How many?” Prumble asked. Straight to business. Straight past the bombshell that other humans were aboard the ship.
“Two at least,” Vaughn said.
“Vanessa’s still out there,” Skyler added, to no one in particular. “They might have her.”
“That’s why we came back in,” Sam said. “I could have killed them easily with the firepower in this suit, and their weapons are no match for our armor.” She was still rubbing her shoulder. “But if they have her…I didn’t want to risk…”
“You did the right thing,” Skyler said.
Prumble cleared his throat. “Of course, now we’re trapped in here. Tactically a very bad place.” Sam bristled, almost spat a reply, but stopped at Prumble’s held-up palms. “I would have done the same thing. Just an observation.”
“He does have a point,” Skyler said. “Only one way in or out of this ball. I’d feel better if we weren’t on the wrong side of a choke point.”
“Skyler.” It was Tania, hands clasped before her as if pleading. When she spoke, though, her voice was even. Steady as a rock. “We have to consider how they came to be here. From inside, or out, they evidently didn’t get the memo from Eve that we’re supposed to be minimizing radiation. For all our efforts, they might lead the enemy right to us.”
There was too much happening at once. Skyler weighed all the angles, but found he could only think of one thing: Vanessa. Nothing else mattered until they knew more. “Let me try to talk to them,” he said.
“Fuck that,” Vaughn growled. “They fired first. If they have her—”
“They shot at human-shaped things in Builder armor.” That calmed him, if only a little. “I won’t actually leave the airlock, okay? Still, you two be ready to unleash hell if they’re not in a talking mood. Agreed?”
Vaughn, angry and frustrated, only scowled. Sam spoke for the pair. “We’ll be ready.”
At the inner airlock door Skyler took his helmet off, attaching it to a hook. He braced himself for the cold, but nothing could prepare him for the frigid space as he stepped inside. His nose almost instantly went numb, but he couldn’t help that. He wanted them to see he was human.
Skyler moved to the exterior door, centering himself in its one small window, his breaths fogging the glass. His eyes began to itch, forcing him to blink rapidly. The space outside the airlock door consisted of a stairwell that went both up and down, curling around the interior wall of the greater biome room that housed the three giant spheres. “Hey!” he shouted. “Cease fire! Let’s talk!” And then again in Spanish and Dutch just for the hell of it, feeling a bit of a fool for assuming they would understand him at all.
“I don’t know who you are,” he added, “or what you want, but we mean you no harm. If you can understand me, signal.”
Silence.
“Soon, if you don’t mind,” he added, teeth chattering. “It’s cold as hell. I can’t wait for long.”
Several seconds ticked by. Whether they could hear him or not he had no idea. Eve had not left the ship in total vacuum, filling it instead with a weak atmosphere that would help dampen any residual heat. But how thin he wasn’t sure. He turned to Sam, ready to motion her and Vaughn out, when a light came on. Above him, toward biome two. Skyler held up a hand to shield his eyes from the beam, trying his best to keep the rest of his face visible so they could see he was a real person.
“Let’s go inside and talk, huh?” Skyler said toward the light.
The light was joined by another, and seconds later two people in space suits he did not recognize were floating just outside the airlock. One of them made a wheeling motion with their hand: Open the door. He took as deep a breath as he could and complied, knowing they would not enter the airlock if he went inside the biome first. That would be idiotic, the very definition of walking into a trap.
When the opening became wide enough, the male of the pair came in. He went straight to Skyler and pressed a gun against Skyler’s temple.
“No sudden moves,” a man said in perfect English, through a speaker on his suit. An Aussie by the accent. “Face the inside. Hands where I can see them.”
Skyler complied.
“Tell your friends to back off and keep their hands up, too,” he added.
With a nod toward Sam, she reluctantly raised her arms and backed up, making room. Prumble, Vaughn, Tania, and Tim followed her example.
The outer door closed and then the inner opened. Skyler drifted into the biome proper, grateful for the warmth. He turned slowly in the air to keep himself facing the newcomers. Prumble’s hand at the center of his back stopped him from floating across the entire space.
“Who’s in charge?” the man said.
“I am,” Skyler said, with an authority he still did not quite feel. “Skyler Luiken, and my crew. Now who the hell are you?”
“Call me Xavi,” the man said. He paused then. Skyler could just make out his face behind the glare of his helmet light. He was looking slightly away, as if listening to something on his internal speakers. “Skyler Luiken? You really expect me to believe that?”
“I don’t care much what you believe, but it’s the truth.”
The man raised his arm, the one that didn’t hold a pistol, and tapped it to the side of his helmet. The headlamp temporarily brightened, like a camera’s flash. It left Skyler’s vision whited-out. Vaughn cursed, as did Prumble.
“That’s really him?” Xavi was saying, in a low voice. “You’re fucking sure, mate?”
Skyler glanced at Tania, found her staring at the newcomer. “What did you do with our friend?” she asked him.
“No idea what you’re talking about.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Suit yourself.”
Skyler inhaled, trying to draw patience from the air. “One of ours is out there. She went out to investigate what I presume are remote cameras you floated in here, and she has not reported in. We have to find her.”
He shrugged. “Well, we didn’t see her. You’re really the immunes? Holy fuck, mates. Our engineer is a big fan. Knows all about you. All that history.”
“History?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you mean, history?” Prumble asked, in his booming actor’s voice.
“You left almost two thousand years ago!”
Skyler had known this, deep inside. What he had failed to do was accept it. The person standing before him was a human being circa A.D. 4000 or so. The implications tied his stomach in knots. Were he in gravity he might have sunk to his knees.
So much time had passed!
Everyone he’d ever known, save those who’d come along, were gone. Skadz, his oldest friend, the first immune he’d met after the apocalypse, long in the ground. Ana, the woman he’d loved and lost when she decided to remain on Earth, to shun the Builders because of all the grief they’d caused. Not just to humanity, but to herself, too. He’d never get the chance to apologize, to truly explain why he’d not remained at her side.
And on top of all that, he was considered history. History.
Another thought came to him. Worse than all the rest.
Tim spoke, voicing the realization
Skyler had come to. “Are we back at Earth?”
“Oh God,” Tania whispered. “Eve lied to us. We—”
“Nah, hang on, mates. You’ve got it the wrong way around. We came to you.”
“Impossible,” Tim breathed.
“Not impossible,” Xavi said with a hint of pride.
Skyler held up a hand. It was too much. He had Vanessa to worry about, not to mention the mission. Fuck, he thought. This bastard has been transmitting with total abandon. “Enough. There’s no time. We need to get everyone into this room and seal it before the Captors become aware of our ship. Everyone, including our missing friend.”
“I’m afraid it’s too late for that,” a voice said.
Skyler craned to see past Xavi.
Another space-suited Earthling had drifted inside. A woman. “I’m Gloria Tsandi,” she said. “Captain of the imploder-class OEA vessel Wildflower. Xavi, stand down. They are not our enemy.”
“What do you mean, ‘too late’?” Skyler asked, though he already knew. These people weren’t other passengers of Eve’s. They’d intercepted the sleeping ship. In other words, he realized with cold certainty, they’d ruined everything. Eve had shut down, they’d run dark, then this captain had come along and spoiled the ruse. He tried to keep a growing sense of panic in check. He needed facts. Information. And he needed it now.
“Our ship was damaged by the Swarm Blockade,” Gloria replied. “We were about to self-destruct, then we saw you. Or, this thing you’re traveling in. So we came aboard, on the impossible hope we might find something we could use to get home, or at least delay our pursuers.”
She spoke with a slight, vaguely Kenyan accent. More than that, she spoke with a remarkable calm given the situation. Skyler found himself impressed, even a bit jealous, at her cool demeanor. Her actions, on the other hand…“You brought them right to us.”
“Oy. What crap. How were we supposed to know?” Xavi asked.
The woman glanced at her crew member. “Go find their missing crewmate and return here. Keep me posted.”
Injection Burn Page 16