Injection Burn

by Jason M. Hough

  This one, though, the giant, had three Scipios inside, two seated below and one atop, its head behind the lens or scope at the front of that protrusion. She’d melted right through it, the gore dripping away, revolting her.

  Sam had no time to be disgusted, couldn’t afford it. The image would haunt her later, but right now there was still death to be dealt.

  The two other pilots, or whatever they were, had begun to shimmy out of their little interior sacks that served as their seat and display screens. They wiggled and thrashed, muscles not up to the task. Sam wondered if they’d ever been outside their larger casing before, and almost felt sorry for them.

  “Jump!” someone shouted. It was Vaughn. Her heart swelled. She leapt and used her thrusters to push herself ten meters up into the shaft she’d just come down.

  Vaughn’s mortar round finished the job. The whole nasty lot of them went up in a thunderous explosion that swept over Sam’s legs. Her suit took the heat and shrapnel impacts in stride.

  She fell back to the floor, landed hard, grunting from the sudden spike of pain in her calf. The sight of Vaughn made her forget that. He’d been in the adjoining hall, barricaded behind the remnants of a bulkhead that had collapsed. Smoke and bits of fallen enemies were everywhere.

  “Miss me?” she asked him.

  “Duck,” he replied.

  Sam blinked, confused, then dropped to the floor. He fired at the wall behind her, where another Scipio had begun to crawl through a gap cut in the scarred surface.

  Sam fired into another one that swept in next. The thing shook under the intensity of her brilliant beam, rocketing backward into some kind of machine room on the pillar of fire. Ten meters in it slammed into a bulkhead and exploded. Next to it, Sam saw the black of space beyond yet another nasty gash in the hull.

  “This is much easier with the lights on,” she said.

  Vaughn, opposite her, said nothing. From his body language, though, she could tell he agreed. His motions were fluid, precise. Just like when he sparred with her. Separated they were formidable, but together? She suddenly regretted pushing him away.

  The glowing path Eve had assigned her ended here, at this teeming mass of Scipios that had flooded in through a gaping wound on the Chameleon’s hull, all of which now lay dead.

  “Look at that hole,” Vaughn said.

  Sam nodded. “They’re getting desperate. Less like surgeons, more like butchers.” Eve, the vessel itself, evidently no longer interested them, it seemed. It was the little human vermin squirming around inside that they wanted.

  Another popped in, easily dispatched. It was several seconds before the next came, and it fell with an almost casual blast from Vaughn.

  Sam actually had time to catch her breath. “Is it me,” she asked, “or are they getting easier to kill?”

  “I was just thinking that,” he replied, then added, “I mean, even Tim was kicking serious ass back there, and it’s not just the armor.”

  “Hmm,” Sam said, a lance of fire from her arm slicing through the tentacles of a fresh scout.

  “You don’t sound happy.”

  “Starting to think ‘trap,’ ” she said.

  “You had to go and say it,” Vaughn replied. “Dammit, sweetheart, can’t we just have some fun?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Apology accepted.”

  Sam decided it was time for answers. “Eve?”

  “Yes, Samantha.”

  “Path ends here. What now?”

  “Hold this position.”

  “Why are these things so easy to kill all of a sudden?”

  The ship took a split second to reply. “I’ve been fine-tuning your weapons since first waking. The default configuration was based on centuries-old data on the makeup of Scipio materials, tensor geometry, interior layout, tactics—”

  “Blah blah okay, all right. Got it.” She glanced at Vaughn.

  He shrugged. “Explains Tim the Barbarian, at least.”

  Sam laughed.

  With no fanfare the glowing path appeared again, tracing a line back up the shaft Sam had jumped down to get here. In addition, a clock appeared on her visor. Three minutes, twelve seconds. “Eve? What’s this timer?”

  “The other reason for your success, Samantha. The bulk of the Swarm has retreated, regrouped, and have now begun a coordinated assault. The next wave of craft will no doubt have altered their defenses and weaponry based on what they have learned of you.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Shit.”

  “Indeed,” Eve replied. “Your path leads to a critical area of the ship that will need to be defended at all costs. Please make your way there now. The second wave of the Scipio Swarm will arrive in exactly three minutes.”

  Sam shot a glance at Vaughn. She saw in his eyes the same determination and energy that she felt. Her equal.

  So what if he was a little too eager, a little too willing to laugh at her jokes and treat Skyler and the others exactly as she did?

  On the nights they could lie together, limbs wrapped around each other, sometimes she or he would erupt into laughter as memories of how they met were conjured. He, her jailor. She, the prisoner. Using him, seducing him. Focused entirely on escape. “Love conquers all,” he’d joked one night, a week ago, when this “how we first met” story came up.

  “Let’s go, love,” he said, bringing her back to the moment.

  “Yeah,” she replied. “Be careful.”

  He narrowed his eyes, one eyebrow darting up. “Christ. Don’t you say that. The moment we start being careful is the moment they win.”

  “Fine. Be smart, then.”

  Vaughn seemed on the verge of further calling her on her sentimental crap, but in the end he relented. “Better. Now c’mon. Time to move.”

  —

  Skyler’s path led through a wall where a tiny hole had been punched, presumably, by one of the smaller enemy craft. Wide enough to crawl through were he of a mind to do so, but he was in no such mood.

  He placed his hands on either side of the hole and willed energy, recalling Eve’s overly long speech on the various capabilities of their armored suits. The beam weapons were great and all, but not when you feared who or what you might cut across on the other side of an obstacle. From his hands, a red glow lit up the dark corridor for a few seconds. Then came the punch. Power flowed out of his hands, knocking chunks of the wall inward and at the same time flinging Skyler backward. His suit compensated, stabilizing him just before he slammed into the opposite wall. A much wider opening now existed in front of him. Debris had exploded inside, creating a cone-shaped pattern of ejecta across a floor of black tiles.

  He knew those tiles. This was Prumble’s penthouse suite. After coming aboard, each passenger was given a small cabin—little more than Eve’s weird approximation of a bed—and no one had done much more than slept there. Except Prumble. The clever bastard had noticed Eve’s ability to reshape portions of her interior to accommodate the humans, and then spent one entire night guiding her “hand,” so to speak, on the shape, scale, and aesthetic of his personal space. The next morning he’d invited everyone in for a chat, which was of course just a ruse to get them all to marvel at the opulence he now resided in. Prumble assumed the others would all do the same, and he could gloat for being first to the idea. Instead Skyler had put him in charge of coming up with a common, human-friendly look and feel for Eve’s labyrinth of hallways and rooms.

  As a minor act of revenge Prumble had modeled the ship after Platz Station. Still, it was better than the drab gray monotony Eve favored.

  After Eve’s last and final reshaping, before being camouflaged, space had finally become a premium, and so now all that remained of Prumble’s luxury penthouse suite was a small living area. It lay in disarray, as if hastily abandoned, reminding Skyler of the countless hotel rooms he and Sam had scavenged beyond Darwin’s aura.

  Chunks of the walls and floor had been destroyed, and not from Skyler’s abrupt entry. Four small Scipios wer
e in the process of devouring the room. That’s how it looked, at least. Their tentacles were wrapped around bits of chrome railing, or clutching torn halves of black leather cushions. All four had stopped their—search?—of the room when the wall had exploded inward. All four were now staring at Skyler, insofar as these little octopus-like constructs could stare.

  “They are gathering DNA samples,” Eve said in his ear.

  “Say no more,” he replied, and started shooting.

  His first blast took two in one shot, like piercing meat on a skewer. Glowing holes remained when his beam weapon flickered to a stop, and the Scipios fell to the floor, lifeless. The other two did not advance on him, though. Unlike every enemy he’d so far encountered, these turned and fled.

  Presumably, these two had found what they’d come looking for.

  “Stop them,” Eve urged.

  Both enemies swept their tentacles backward, streamlining their profiles. Half their limbs puffed gouts of propellant, which in gravity made them hop across the floor. The other limbs sprayed some kind of ultra-foamy fluid. The bubbles grew to the size of party balloons, and then hardened, forming a lattice. Skyler fired toward one of them, but when his beam struck the bubble lattice the bluish edges only glowed. White then orange then red, spreading away from the point of impact. Absorbing the heat and distributing it.

  “They are compensating,” Eve said.

  “Time for a change of tactics.” He surged through the wall and bounded up to the edge of the bubble wall. Skyler punched at the surface of hardened orbs. They shattered like the thinnest glass, or some kind of delicate sugar sculpture.

  He took a step back, held one arm up across his brow to shield his visor, and ran forward, then leapt, the thrusters built into his suit powering him forward. The bubbles shattered all around him, raining a fine bluish crystalline powder in his wake. How sharp these were he had no idea, the Builder armor kept him fully protected.

  But their sharpness was not the problem. It was visibility. “Eve, help. Which way?”

  In addition to his glowing path, two new indicators appeared on his visor. The fleeing enemies. They were smart enough to have diverged. “I’ve dispatched Tim to intercept the other,” Eve said, and one of the blips vanished.

  “Tim? Really?”

  “His ‘head count,’ as you call it, is second only to Vaughn’s at the moment.”

  “Well…that’s a surprise.”

  “Follow the other, it is more or less on your path already.”

  “Understood.”

  Skyler smashed through the odd material in his way simply by ignoring it. He rocketed ahead, trusting in the path Eve had given him. The Scipio DNA scavenger had fled through the same hall the crew had used to move between their cabins. Spacious before, it all felt claustrophobic now, more so when filled with a froth of shimmering glassy bubbles.

  The Scipio was ten meters ahead, rounding corners in the same instant Skyler caught sight of it, always one turn ahead. And Eve was right, it did seem to be moving on the same path he was. Almost uncannily so. Did it know?

  “What’s at the end of this path, Eve?” he asked.

  “Me,” she said.

  —

  She felt as if trapped in a small capsule dangling from a long cable.

  This was, as it turned out, exactly her predicament.

  The tentacle poking through the hull wiggled and groped, searching like a snake’s tongue through the portions of the Wildflower it could reach.

  Gloria stood on a bulkhead, Alex Warthen just across from her.

  Far below, at the bottom of the ship, Beth and Vanessa cowered in dark corners. The Scipio’s tentacle arm was closer to them, and slapped about just centimeters from their tucked-in legs.

  Vanessa looked utterly dazed. She’d only just regained consciousness when the intense acceleration had hit, then vanished, then returned as something like Earth normal. And now this intruder, and the expectation that more were right behind it. Vanessa was in no shape to fight it, and Beth certainly looked to be far into the grip of fear.

  “We have to get it out of here,” she heard herself saying.

  “The ship only gave me one shot,” Alex replied, holding up his arm. “Wait, where are you going?”

  The idea came into her mind as if someone else had thought it for her. She didn’t even wait for the full scope of it to form, or the risks. Somewhere inside she knew this was her only chance. She leapt, crossing the hollow central spine of the ship diagonally, down one level to the medical bay. The tentacle poked through a gash in the wall just a meter away, but it had caught the scent of the two women cowering below. Gloria didn’t know how long that would last. She had one chance at this. Before leaving Earth, the Wildflower had been all but gutted to reach the mass requirement for the Mark 5 imploder, but essential gear had been nonnegotiable. Gloria clenched her teeth as she rummaged, the station mostly unfamiliar to her, usually crewed by her medical officer. Third drawer down she found what she was looking for. Gloria gripped the handle of the blade and whirled. Her eyes locked on where the tentacle emerged from the hull. She leapt at it and stabbed with the surgical knife, careful to hold the blade sideways.

  In midair she thought suddenly the plan was total folly. A surgical knife against the vacuum-worthy metallic alien limb that had punctured a meter of heat and radiation shielding. What the hell had she expected to happen?

  Just before impact, though, her body remembered what her mind had forgotten. The switch on the blade’s handle. The ultracap-powered rapid-heating filament that ran the length of the razor-sharp blade, for instant cauterization. The tip of the blade glowed like an ember just before it slid into the Scipio’s tentacle. It sank all the way to the hilt.

  Gloria let out an involuntary scream as she at once tried to catch the tentacle lest she fall, and also to cut sideways. The blade cut through so easily it sliced its way out the side of the limb and came free from her hand. She’d only cut through a quarter of it, but that was enough to get the monster’s attention. In scantly more than the blink of an eye the tentacle swept back through the ship and out through the gash it had made.

  If not for the state of acceleration Gloria would have been sucked against the inner hull. Instead she fell away, landing hard on the deck of the mess one level below, knife clattering against the floor somewhere nearby. The fall knocked the wind out of her and she rolled, curling into a ball and coughing as her lungs tried to reclaim some air. She could hear, above all else, the terrible sighing of air escaping into the vacuum. The last thing any starship captain wants to hear.

  Then, abruptly, it stopped. Gloria forced herself to roll onto her back, ready to face the new tentacle that had surely taken the place of the last. But there was no replacement. There was Alex Warthen, his back pressed against the opening in the hull. Held there by the vacuum. He glanced at her, his grin a perfect expression of “I can’t believe that actually worked.”

  Gloria laughed, despite everything. The change in his expression sobered her. This wasn’t some great victory. This wasn’t the end. Another tentacle would punch through, if not an entire Scipio. They were truly lost; it was only a matter of time.

  “What now?” Gloria asked him.

  Somehow Alex managed a shrug, the minute motion causing him great pain. “See to your friends. Then set that self-destruct, would you? I think you lied about it earlier, and I’m glad, but now? I don’t want to become a meal for these creatures.”

  She nodded at him, held his gaze for a second, then rolled and found the ladder that led down to engineering.

  Beth and Vanessa were seated side by side, Beth with one arm around the woman from history.

  With shaking hands, Vanessa reached up and raised the visor of her helmet. Then she gave a slight, almost imperceptible nod.

  “Gloria,” came a voice. A woman’s voice, from Vanessa’s suit, though Vanessa’s mouth had not moved.

  The ship spun about, still dangling from the almost severed umbili
cal. Probably another Scipio grabbing on to the hull. The sudden motion tossed everything not secure about the cramped space.

  “Gloria,” the suit said again.

  “I’m here,” she said. “Who am I speaking with?”

  “I am Eve, the Builder. Alex Warthen is not responding to me. I have an urgent task and you are the only one who can perform it.”

  “How is it that he’s even here, Eve?” Vanessa suddenly blurted out, not quite as incoherent as her posture let on. “He died. I saw it happen.”

  “There is no…explain,” she said, her voice cutting out briefly with a burst of digital noise. “Hear me, Gloria…to the airlock.”

  Vanessa’s arm raised as if of its own accord, her index finger pointing upward at the door that led outside.

  “The airlock? What do I do when I get there? Eve?”

  Several seconds of dreadful silence passed. Gloria shook her head, and began to tap through the menus on her interface that would send the Wildflower up in a nuclear inferno.

  Finally, the alien ship spoke. “Sever…umbilical when…reaches precisely zero.”

  A timer appeared on Vanessa’s mask, writ backward but readable enough, counting down from fifty-three seconds.

  The Wildflower

  6.AUG.3911 (Earth Actual)

  THE WILDFLOWER SWAYED back and forth as the scouts crawled across the outer hull, seeking a way in. The motion slammed Gloria Tsandi into a wall, bringing a hairline crack across her visor. The sight of it caused her breath to catch in her throat, her heart to flutter. That visor was the only thing that would keep her alive if another hull breach occurred. The ship still held some air, but for how long?

  Alex Warthen was still pinned to the hull, blocking the existing hole. His limbs spasmed now and then, weak and pitiful.