“We’ll take Xavi for Beth. That’s the deal. No more games. You have one minute,” the man named Alex replied, then he disconnected.
Gloria switched back to the private channel.
Xavi spoke before she could. “We’ll. He said we’ll, not I’ll. More than one in there?”
“Listen,” she said. “I’m going to transfer command to you.”
His eyebrows rose. “What?”
“Whether they take only you or all of us, they’re only going to let you near the bridge. If the scouts are really here, you’ve got to override the reactors and slag the ship.”
“Fuck that—”
“Think about it,” she urged, ignoring his defiant glare. “It’d be my decision normally but you have to shoulder the burden. We cannot let any fold technology get into Scipio hands.”
“We jettisoned the damn thing, remember?”
“There is data. Mountains of it. And there’s Beth.”
It took a second for the implications of that last comment to settle. “Now hold on—”
“The only valid response here is ‘Yes, boss,’ ” she said, grabbing his shoulders. “Do you understand what I’m asking of you? It’s over, Xavi. We both know what has to be done now, while there’s still a chance.”
Xavi’s lower lip twitched. His gaze bored into hers. Then, finally, he sucked in a breath and nodded. “Yeah. I understand.”
Gloria didn’t hesitate, lest she second-guess herself. She flipped through the suit’s menus until she found the function she was looking for. Transfer of Command. An action she’d never had to take in all her time as captain of a fold ship. In fact, she’d only practiced the procedure once, six or seven years ago, and held now only a vague recollection of the series of questions and security safeguards built into the action.
Words hung in space before her, written in amber letters. ACTION NOT POSSIBLE WITHOUT PHYSICAL PRESENCE ABOARD SHIP. CONFIRMATION FROM LEE, BETH, REQUIRED TO CONTINUE.
“Shit,” Gloria whispered.
“What’s wrong?”
“To do this either I have to be on board, or Beth needs to get access to a screen.”
From the look on his face, she knew he understood what it meant. If Alex Warthen declined to take everyone aboard, Xavi would have to free Beth or hope Gloria could physically get inside the ship. Both meant violence, more than likely, but nothing compared with facing the Scipios. “We’ll figure something out,” he said, yet the grim tone in his voice shook her confidence to its very foundation.
—
In the cocoon of the biome the explosion barely registered. Skyler thought he’d imagined it at first. A phantom noise, triggered by frayed nerves.
But the others had felt it, too.
“Samantha…,” Prumble whispered.
“She can handle herself,” he all but snapped in reply. Skyler closed his eyes and hissed out a breath, trying desperately not to let the situation get away from him. Once, while searching a facility in Japan for a datacube, he’d declared the mission a failure and ordered everyone out, only to find the object they’d come for at the last instant. An event, he recognized with sour amusement, that arguably put everyone on the path that led to this moment. And here he was, on the cusp of calling for a full retreat again. The plan had failed, as usual in a way no one could have predicted. Even Eve, with all her copious analytic ability, doubtless never considered Earth would beat them here. That the human race, on the brink of extinction, would recover so rapidly as to beat her to Carthage and fuck the whole thing up.
“Skyler,” Tania said, endlessly patient. She’d been with him, in Hawaii. Another mission that went pear shaped, only that time he’d resolved to see it through. The result had been success, but at great cost. The death of a good friend. Why could he never just win? Why did he always feel trapped between success or keeping those he loved safe?
For whatever reason the role of leader seemed to naturally fall to him, but as Skyler looked around the biome now, and thought of those present and those in danger elsewhere on the ship, he knew he could not live with any more deaths on his conscience.
“We have to wake Eve,” he said. It was the only option.
“I agree,” Tania replied, with a surprising amount of conviction.
Prumble nodded. “Situation FUBAR,” he muttered. “Not that I have a vote in this, but yeah, we need her.”
Exactly the affirmation Skyler needed. He turned and propelled himself toward the cave.
—
“I’m coming in!” Xavi shouted, despite the airless chamber. He’d switched to the public channel, no doubt for her benefit.
Gloria held her position just outside the umbilical, ready to rush in if something went wrong. She hoped it wouldn’t come to that. She hoped more than anything Xavi would distract them, and she’d slip into the airlock and transfer control. And then he would fly them out, and scuttle the ship, and that would be the end. A flash of light. No pain. No dissection at the hands of the fearsome Swarm. Just an instant of light, and a duty done. Not a bad way to go, all things considered.
As instructed, Xavi sealed the airlock behind him and, presumably, began the short drift out to the middle of the tube. Once there he would stop and await instruction.
Gloria fought to control her breathing. Every time she let her mind stray she saw only the vastness of space all around them, studded with the brilliant flares of scout drones decelerating to intercept their prize. Well, let them come. If she could do nothing else she could at least give them a fiery death.
“I’ve reached the center,” Xavi said on his radio. “What now?”
“We see you,” the man named Alex replied, again with the plural. “Turn away and push yourself backward slowly to this end. Keep your hands raised.”
No reply came. Xavi must have complied, but Gloria dared not look. She had been instructed to stay far away from the exchange. That impression must be maintained until the moment came to act.
A thought tugged at Gloria’s mind. Something she’d missed. It hovered like a gnat, just out of reach. Something about their initial flight from the Scipio hauler. They were tumbling out of control, and she’d vented some waste fluids to right the ship. So what? Why, she yelled at herself, are you reliving that now?
If she could vent waste, she could vent air. “Of course,” she whispered, and began to rummage through the control options available to her while off-ship. It took precious seconds, her being unused to having responsibility for the medical subsystems. Her usual medic had been left behind, along with the rest of her crew, to shed the weight necessary for this godforsaken mission. Gloria vaguely remembered her training on air quality, and the systems involved. “C’mon, c’mon.”
There it was.
Working fast, Gloria switched her channel to a private one with Xavi. She spoke softly so as to not startle him, and knew he would not be able to reply. For all she knew he’d already removed his suit, but she had to try. “Xavi, if you can hear me, keep your helmet on as long as possible. I’m going to depressurize the Wildflower for thirty seconds. If they’re breathing the air, they’ll be in for quite a shock, and you can use that to get the upper hand.”
Despite knowing he’d have no chance to respond, she waited. But only silence came. Gloria switched back to the main channel.
“—see that she is fine. Now, come through the inner door. Once you’re inside, Vanessa will go back out the way you came in.”
“There’s no time for this, friend,” Xavi said back to Alex Warthen. “The Swarm is already here.”
“Enough of that.” A series of muffled sounds followed, as the Wildflower’s inner door was evidently opened.
“Helmet off,” Alex said.
“I like it on,” Xavi replied.
“No bullshit. Take it off, now.”
“What’s the difference?”
“The difference is I can’t slap that attitude off your face if your face is covered. Take it off or my friend will shoot your
engineer. No more games.”
More rustling, and she lost her direct line to Xavi. He despised wearing a tab-comm on his neck, the Luddite.
Gloria swore, hoping he’d heard her instructions. At least he would know to hold his breath when the moment came, and not be surprised. She started to count to thirty.
—
The biome chamber came into view. Samantha powered forward, comfortable now with the suit’s intent-driven interface.
“Not too fast,” Vaughn said, his voice becoming garbled. “Can’t get more than a meter or so of range with the comm in this mode.”
“Keep up, then,” she said, and meant it though she tried to make it sound like a competitive jab. She pushed inside the vast room and spiraled around the topmost of the three gigantic translucent spheres. Her lamps swept across the curved edge. This ball had been set up to mimic the atmosphere and general topography on the Builders’ home world, a place to train and prepare when the time came. But then had come the plan to convert the ship into its chameleonic state, requiring a drastic rescaling. Three biomes could no longer be afforded, so Eve had converted this one to the storage of various materials, much of it toxic. It had since resembled a nearly opaque marble, so cloudy was the interior with gases and fluids. But now, after being powered down for so long, the air inside had frozen and formed into clumps of blue-white ice. The explosion must have spurred them to their current movement, giving the space an odd resemblance to a child’s toy snow globe.
“The hell is all that?” Vaughn asked.
Her lamp caught hints of the ground at the base of the third biome, until now hidden in cloud. Her breath caught in her throat. There was a biome in there, after all. Air, and ground, until now obscured by the clouds.
It was only a small patch of land, perhaps fifty meters across. But the landscape was wholly different from their quaint little forest campsite.
For reasons Sam could not fathom, Eve had built some sort of structure inside, vaguely tower shaped. The proportions were wrong, though, with a thin base that grew thicker toward the top, where chunks of squared material had been attached seemingly at random. The whole thing looked like it would topple at the slightest breeze. It was the base that drew her eye, though. Surrounding the tower were four smaller structures. Despite their wholly alien design aesthetic, their purpose seemed unmistakable: pillboxes. Gunnery nests. Defensive positions.
“I thought it was storage for toxic stuff,” Vaughn said.
“That’s what she told us.”
A shadow caught her eye. Between two of the pillboxes, a cave waited, so dark her lamp seemed incapable of illuminating the interior at all. Yet there was light in that utter blackness. Something glowed, steady and pale blue. Something that had not been turned off with the rest of the ship.
“If not storage, what’s it for, then?” He bumped into her as he tried to settle into a position beside her.
“How should I know,” Sam replied, with more bite than she’d intended. She jerked away reflexively, wanting more space, wanting to focus on their predicament and dishonest host, rather than cozy up. Vaughn held up his hands in a gesture that said “Excuse the fuck out of me,” and pushed himself back slightly. Sam sighed. Everything had to be complicated. The mission. The odd mix of people brought along. The timing of her first real relationship. Christ, she thought. She wanted to tell him to cool it until all this was over, but the opportunity never seemed to be there. Or some other part of her brain, the bit that craved his company, won out.
As usual, she said nothing. Not the time, not the place. She forced herself to focus on the cave inside this biome, just a dark patch obscured by the swirling frozen atmosphere. The blue glow had gone. Maybe she’d just imagined it. “Did you see that? The blue light?”
“No,” he replied, craning his neck, wiping one hand across the glassy shell. “Where?”
“In that little cave.”
He squinted. “Maybe you imagined it.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Sam said, her annoyance growing. “Whatever. I’ve got a lot of questions for Eve when she wakes up, that’s all I’ll say.”
“Above!” Vaughn shouted.
He shouldered her, causing the two of them to rocket apart. She lost control, spinning like a rag doll. Sam fired her thrusters to right herself, then turned to see the source of his sudden panic. Vaughn was all the way across the room, aiming one arm up toward the mesh ceiling.
The three biome spheres were stacked inside a giant cylindrical room full of all the infrastructure needed to support their existence, plus retrofitted stairwells for Eve’s human guests to use. Despite the state of null gravity, Sam had followed the path of the spiral stairs, which started above at a huge meshwork platform that served only as a gantry for access to various side tunnels that went off into the upper portions of the ship.
The floor had been silent, utterly dark, when they’d passed it and descended. Now the entire gantry crawled with movement.
A dozen of them or more, creeping in from the hallways that led out to points beyond. Scipio scouts. They all looked roughly the same: that mostly spherical core, studded with tentacle-like legs of varying length and width from various joints on the central body. The legs were tipped with shiny spikes that had circular indentations. Thrust nozzles, she saw, as one pulsed gas and launched into the room. Their movement was a mix of thrust and “walking” by puncturing the surfaces around them with their spiked tentacles.
Vaughn’s headlamp lit them, alerted them. All at once they erupted with light of their own, beams of every color that pushed through the grid of the floor and down and then swung toward her and Vaughn, focusing.
“Here we go,” Sam said, and unleashed hell.
Twin blasts from her beam cannons traced glowing lines along the underside of the grid-patterned mesh floor above. The scouts wriggled, dancing aside to avoid the glaring heat as the energy turned metal to globs of molten slag. The beams converged on one of the larger enemies, which seemed to pinch inward under the assault and then pop like a balloon. Tech and guts, blood and oil, erupted.
The little bastards were pissed now. Tentacles reached in through the gaps she’d carved. One of them heaved itself through and down toward her. It rocked sideways, a fireball roiling off its side. Tentacles and gore flew. Vaughn’s mortar round had slammed into it at a glancing angle, the explosion and ejecta flying backward. Another Scipio squirmed under the debris and fire, coiling its own serpentine arms around its body for protection. Vaughn’s next mortar tore it to pieces.
Sam focused her beams on another, accidentally carving away a pipe along the inner wall of the great biome chamber before searing a glowing line across the central eye of the alien craft. This one had the presence of mind to return fire. It shot its tentacles outward, wide, each curling in at the end to point toward her and Vaughn, like some perverted, weaponized starfish. Sam threw herself sideways, expecting a furious retaliation. But it wasn’t projectiles, or even beams, the creature threw back at her. It was the fog. The white-blue smoke that hardened into razor-sharp crystal forests. The thick cloud shot outward with fantastic speed, filling the space between her and Vaughn.
Sam, flying toward it, fired a burst from her thrusters to push back and away, wanting distance and time. She lost sight of Vaughn through the thick and growing cloud, which had already begun to solidify into the fine tendrils of glassy needles.
“To me, to me!” Sam shouted. “Protect the biome!” Skyler and the others would be suiting up, having seen the lights and heard the battle. She had to buy them time, or they’d be prisoners in there.
Vaughn made no reply. She glanced toward him and watched in horror as several Scipio scouts came sailing through the forest of shards, which parted like smoke to let them pass. The creatures went to where Vaughn had been, only he was gone. Where she’d last seen him there was a ragged hole in the wall, and the Scipios squirmed into it, disappearing into the darkness beyond.
“Vaughn!” she shouted.
—
The woman named Vanessa floated out of the umbilical, a dazed expression on her Latin features, though anger simmered behind her brown eyes. Her hands had been bound behind her back.
Gloria held a finger to her visor when their eyes met, compelling silence, and motioned for the woman to come to her at a section of wall about three meters from where the tube had been attached to the alien ship. She had no way to communicate with her, but Vanessa seemed to get the idea that she should tuck into the space beside Gloria and wait.
Satisfied, the captain pushed herself along the corridor until she reached the edge of the umbilical, and glanced in. The tube was empty. A straight shot all the way to the Wildflower’s outer airlock door. All she had to do was get inside. Within the hull her overrides would work. Thirty seconds of air removal ought to cover her arrival, she figured, before flooding air back into the ship. Thirty seconds to decide if she could help Xavi deal with their enemies, or start the self-destruct.
If she could get a good push, Gloria estimated it would take ten seconds to cross the space. If Alex or one of his accomplices glanced out the window during that time, the whole plan would collapse. And even if she made it, she’d basically slam into the door at the other end, which they would definitely hear within. Perhaps if she trailed her hands along the umbilical at the last second, she could slow down enough—
Stop debating and get in there! a voice in her head commanded.
In her time spent admiring, repairing, and ultimately commanding fold-ships, Gloria had learned to trust that voice. She pushed off hard, straight down the narrow white tube. She left her fear and doubt behind. Not just of what lay ahead, but also the infinite void beyond the thin umbilical walls, and the Scipios swarming in from all around them. She had to focus on what she could control. The part she had to play.
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