Polestar Omega

by James Axler

  “What is that?” Echo said.

  They all stopped and listened.

  The sporadic shooting and the screaming continued, but it wasn’t happening on this level. It was somewhere far above them.

  “My guess is, it’s your folks fighting muties,” J.B. said. “And vice versa.”

  Echo blinked at him uncomprehendingly, as though he had spoken to her in a foreign language.

  “Follow it,” Ryan said. “Let’s see where it’s coming from.”

  The Armorer took the lead, with Jak and Ricky close behind. Ryan gently pushed the whitecoat onward. Krysty brought up the rear. As they advanced, the noise grew louder and more distinct. In the flickering overhead lights, the hallway ahead of them ended in an impassable deadfall of ceiling and walls. To the left of the blockage was a pair of elevators. The doors stood fully open, but no cars were in evidence—the shrill sounds of terror and pain poured out the gaping black holes.

  Ryan stepped to the edge of the floor and looked down the nearer shaft. He could just make out a few feet of the thick cables before they disappeared into the pitch-darkness; the elevator car was neither visible above nor below them. The other shaft was likewise empty.

  “Why are the doors open if the cars are gone?” Krysty asked.

  “We need to light a torch,” Ryan said.

  “I have a flashlight,” Echo said, reaching into the side pocket of her lab coat. She handed it to him. “Everyone carries light in case of a power failure.”

  Ryan played the beam over the door frame, which was deeply scratched and battered. The doors looked as if they had been first bent open, then rammed all the way back into their slots. They were wedged tight.

  He cast the beam over the cables, then turned it up the shaft, past the ladder rungs that ran in a channel along one wall.

  “Bad,” Jak said. “Triple bad.”

  “What is it?” Krysty asked, pushing closer to see what the light revealed. “What’s happened?”

  “Look up there,” Ryan said. The beam bounced off a jumble of drooping gray strands that zigzagged from the cables to all sides of the shaft. The erratic web went up and up, as far as the light could reach. “The spidies broke open the doors,” he said, “and climbed the cables like it was nothing.”

  “Homing in on the heat, of course,” Krysty said. “But how did they get out of the shaft?”

  “If they can tear open the doors from the outside,” Ryan said, “they can do it from the inside.”

  “Like opening a can of beans,” J.B. stated.

  “Not alone,” Jak said, pointing at the channel in the wall.

  Ryan turned the flashlight on the rungs and looked closer. Gobs of milky goo dripped from the metal bars. It was sucker adhesive. No doubt about it, stickies had followed the spidies to the higher levels.

  “The muties have split up,” J.B. said. “The ones that could climb went up the shaft. The ones that couldn’t manage the cables or the ladder must have doubled back to the stairs before we got here.”

  “At least we know where most of them are,” Ryan said. “And where the rest are headed.”

  A single sustained scream broke through the howls of agony raining down from above. It got louder and louder.

  Then a heavy object hurtled past the elevator opening, tearing through the spidies’ tangled webs. The breeze of its passing brushed against Ryan’s cheek. As the object plummeted downward, vanishing into the blackness of the shaft, the long wail continued, growing fainter by the second, until he couldn’t hear it anymore.

  “Was that a norm?” Krysty said.

  A second later, another scream from above separated itself from the background noise and quickly built in volume.

  Jak leaned into the space to look up. Ricky jerked him back as a body cartwheeled past.

  Ryan held an afterimage in his mind of a wide-eyed, gape-jawed man trailing long strands of flapping spidie web from neck, arms and legs. The unbroken shriek of fear faded into silence.

  “They’re jumping to their deaths,” Krysty said.

  “Better than facing a band of stickies unarmed,” J.B. stated.

  The first two suicides were just a prelude. More screamed past in groups of three and four, arms and legs flailing as they tumbled into the dark. It appeared that the colonists were lining up to make their last leap.

  “No, no, no,” Echo moaned, burying her face in her hands.

  The sight of the falling bodies had shattered the whitecoat’s facade of denial. If she thought the muties wouldn’t hunt down her people, she was wrong. If she thought the colonists could easily defeat them, she was wrong. If she thought there was no worse fate than being crushed by an icequake, she was wrong about that, too.

  Even so, true to form the whitecoat could not accept any of the blame.

  “What have you done to us?” Echo screamed in Ryan’s face. “You are the monsters! You are the worst monsters of all!”

  Krysty stepped up and slapped her so hard in the mouth that the blow dropped the woman to her knees. “‘Monsters’?” the redhead shouted down at the sobbing woman. “You brought us here against our will. You tried to kill us. We’re just doing what comes naturally. We’re fighting to survive.”

  “I think she got your point,” Ryan said. “We still need her help to get to the other side of the redoubt.”

  Krysty’s emerald eyes flashed. “Then she’d better get busy, or by Gaia she’s going down that shaft headfirst.”

  “There’s no time for this,” Ryan said as he helped Echo up. “We have to get up the stairwell before we lose our edge.”

  He didn’t have to explain the need for speed. The colonists were still recoiling from the surprise attack and the muties’ capacity for unthinkable violence. The intermittent blasterfire spoke to individual, not concerted reaction. Once the people of the redoubt recovered from their initial shock and gathered arms to defend themselves, they could repel and wipe out the muties with sheer firepower.

  When that happened, all bets were off.

  Ryan and the companions ran as fast as they could, retracing their path to the landing, then started up the stairs again, two at a time, pushing themselves unmercifully. He kept Echo in front, and when she faltered after a dozen floors or so, he grabbed her by the arm and dragged her after him until she got her feet under her again. Because the yelling and the shooting got louder with every landing they passed, it felt as if they were on the verge of jumping into a bottomless pit, too. But the goal was to get above the floor where the muties were waging a one-sided war and find a higher, uncontested floor with a clear route to the far side of the redoubt.

  The main level sign came into view over the steps, then the landing door, which had been ripped from its hinges and cast aside. It lay tipped across the flight of stairs leading up. The screaming that came from beyond the emptied doorway was nonstop, punctuated by the crackle of rapid, single-shot blasterfire.

  “Keep going!” Ryan said to J.B.

  The Armorer turned, jumped the fallen door and raced up the steps. On the landing above, he abruptly stopped, raised the Beretta and fired twice in quick succession at the higher floor. As he ducked back around the bend of the stairs, a flurry of gunshots rang out, slugs chipping at the concrete wall and ricocheting around the stairwell. “Enforcers coming down!” he shouted. “Lots of them! Back up!”

  Ryan waved the others toward the main level entrance. They had no choice in the matter. They had to retreat through the doorway or fight a running battle down the interminable flights of stairs with six bullets left—and heading in the wrong direction for an escape. As he ushered Krysty past him, he realized the colonists’ plan was tactical textbook: the men in black were coming down the staircase to attack the muties from the rear and trap them between two fields of fire.

  J.B. leaped do
wn the steps and raced for the doorway. “Go on!” he said to Ryan as he sighted in on the turn of the higher landing. “I’ll hold them off.”

  “You’re not going to hold them for long. Dammit, J.B., don’t press your luck. Fall back and we’ll regroup. We’ll figure this out, somehow. I said none of us were going to die here, and I meant it.”

  “Ryan, go!”

  As he turned from his old friend, the Beretta barked once.

  Incoming blasterfire blazed at his back. It slammed into the landing wall and zinged off the foot of the door frame. Ryan broke into a dead run.

  The corridor before him was wide and well-lit. The floor was littered with torn-apart bodies, the white-painted walls streaked and spattered with blood and what had to be feces—there was nothing brown in the redoubt, no mud just concrete and ice. Overhead, at the joins of ceiling and walls, spaced along the length of the corridor were human forms bundled in gray fuzz. The spidies, already topped off with fresh meat, had cocooned their victims in silk and stuck them up there for safekeeping.

  No one was fleeing toward him to escape. The muties appeared to have taken complete control of the passage, wiping out everyone in their path. Jak, Ricky, Krysty and Echo waited for him at the corner of an intersecting hallway. The screaming and gunshots came from straight ahead. “What’s down that way?” Ryan asked Echo.

  “The center of the complex, the rotunda, meeting hall,” she said.

  Ryan looked down the crossing corridor. It was narrower, and there were doors on either side as far as he could see. “And that way?”

  “The housing areas,” she said. “That’s where most of us live.”

  Ryan saw movement across the hall, from right to left. A stickie scrambled after a smaller creature, out one doorway and in another. They were there one instant, gone in the next. The stickie’s prey wasn’t a stumpie; it was too small for that.

  It was a child.

  Ryan didn’t think; he simply reacted. Jak had to have seen the same thing he did. As Ryan sprinted down the hallway, the albino matched him stride for stride. They hit the door together, bursting into a large room lined with rows of bunk beds. The stickie had the little boy trapped in a corner; it was so focused on its fun that it didn’t even bother to look back at them. Every time the child tried to dart away, the monster easily caught him and threw him back in the corner, playing with its dinner like a cat with a slobber-covered mouse. The boy, who looked to be about four, stood terrified, fingers of one hand in his mouth, his dirty face streaked with tears.

  “Hey!” Jak shouted as they came closer.

  The stickie turned and looked at them with its dead, shark eyes. It snapped its needle teeth, hissing.

  The boy saw his opportunity and took it. He shot past the mutie’s outstretched hand and ran straight into Ryan’s arms. The stickie whirled and rushed them, the suckers on its fingers and palms dripping milky glue.

  Jak lunged into the creature’s path, throwing his left arm across the front of its neck. He locked down his grip and hauled back, lifting the mutie’s feet off the floor, then driving with his full weight, face-planted it on the concrete. While the stickie helplessly flailed, Jak slid his hand down over the top of its hairless head, and plunged his index and middle fingers into its eye sockets to the second knuckle, in the process enucleating both its eyes. The stickie squealed like a teakettle.

  With a knee jammed between its shoulders, Jak savagely jerked back and up. There was an instant of hesitation as the creature’s neck reached its limit of arc, then the entire frontal bone of its skull, from the eye sockets to the coronal suture at its peak, came free with a wet pop. Jak sent the cup of red bone spinning across the floor.

  “You go hide,” Ryan told the little boy. “Hide someplace small and safe where the muties can’t reach you and stay there until after the shooting stops. Do you understand? Wait until the shooting stops.”

  As the child nodded, Ryan pushed him in the direction of the door, but he immediately took off the other way; evidently he had a hiding spot already picked out. The boy ran down the aisle between the rows of bunks and disappeared.

  Was it hypocritical to save one child when he was the one who had set the monster machine in motion? Was it sentiment on his part? Some primal instinct? A combination of the two? Did it really matter if in the end all the colonists were going to die anyway when their redoubt came crashing down on them? He knew he was only responsible for things in his control. And he could control keeping the boy from being torn to shreds while still alive. He hoped the fates granted the child a cleaner death than that, if not a longer life.

  When they rushed back to the intersection they were met by their companions’ concerned expressions.

  “Where did you go?” Krysty asked.

  “Yeah,” J.B. said, “what was all that about?”

  “Nothing,” Ryan said. “It was nothing.”

  Jak shrugged.

  A torrent of sustained full-auto blasterfire brought the conversation to an abrupt end. The roar of muzzle-blasts drowned out the screaming and wailing of the redoubt residents. Volleys of bullets whined down the main corridor, sparking off floor, walls, ceiling.

  The tide had turned.

  It took only a few seconds for the furious display of firepower to take effect. The muties that could manage it fell back in a panicked retreat. A huge spidie came lurching past the intersection. Three of its eight legs had been shot off, two on one side. Its once bulging abdomen had deflated into a hairy rag that dragged the floor. Ripped by countless slugs, it left a trail of thick blood, as yellow as pus. It was a big target, and the shooters at the far end of the hallway had it zeroed in. Autofire clipped off its eyestalks, and two more of its legs were turned into stumps. The dying spidie collapsed onto its chest, unable to rise as its brothers and sisters shambled past, soaking up their own overdoses of lead.

  Under a hail of bullets, a mob of stumpies hurried past the intersection, still carrying the torn-off human limbs they had used for clubs.

  A pair of them took multiple rounds through the back. Their hairy potbellies burst open, and they skidded face-first into the fallen spidie. With spilled intestines tangled around their feet, they kicked their short little legs and howled into the floor.

  Ryan turned to glance back at the others and saw a strange look come over Echo’s face. Desperation transformed into determination. Before Ryan could take a step forward, she was already moving for the corner.

  “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” she cried.

  Ryan grabbed for her and missed. Then it was too late.

  She thought her lab coat and its status would protect her, that her people would hold fire and save her. Once more, she was wrong.

  “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” she cried, waving her arms over her head as she ran toward the blaster muzzles.

  Her body was blown backward by dozens of overlaid bullet strikes; her head disappeared behind a puff of glistening red vapor—part blood, part brains, part bone. She crashed hard onto her back and did not move.

  From other direction Ryan heard a familiar voice shout at him. J.B. was scrambling for the intersection, head lowered, legs driving, using the bodies of dead spidies for cover.

  “They’re coming,” J.B. gasped as he rounded the corner. “The men in black are coming!”

  Ryan saw the slide on the Beretta was locked back.

  They had no weapons, and no way out.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Doc reached into his duffel and handed Mildred one of the submachine guns and fresh mags for her handblaster. He took a stubby, flat blackblaster for himself, as well. It was heavier and the balance in hand was much different than his treasured LeMat revolver, but it came around quick to point, held three times the number of rounds and could be reloaded in a snap. Though he was deeply alarmed at the turn o
f events, he was careful not to let his feelings show on his face. Given enough time, he was certain they could surmount all obstacles and find their companions, even in a frozen, tumbledown maze like this, but there was no guarantee they would find them all alive.

  “What do you think happened here?” he asked as he shouldered the gear bag.

  “Some of the muties could have escaped through the cracks in the floor,” Mildred said, looking around. “But all the cages are open. I’ve never heard of a mutie who could turn a key, let alone know what a key is for. My guess is that Ryan and the others let them out as a diversion.”

  “Risky decision if the muties in question were of the less than docile varieties.”

  “Doc, I think we can be sure what was caged here was anything but docile. The deep scoring on the bars of the cells looks like it was made with teeth or claws, or both. And that white stuff looks like stickie adhesive. If I know our friends, they’ll be following in the muties’ wake. To find them we have to follow the trail of bodies, too.”

  They left the zoo and returned to the main corridor. The tracks in the dust all led in the same direction. Farther along under a flickering light, a large, crumpled form rested against the foot of the wall. They advanced past a closed door on the right, and approached the slumped shape with weapons at the ready. When Doc saw the scalie’s massively caved-in skull, he knew it had to be dead. He reached down, and, avoiding the splatter of gore, carefully laid two fingers on the back of its hand, which was scratchy to the touch like a lizard’s skin.

  “Still warm,” he said. “I would venture our companions went that way.” He pointed down the hall with his blaster.

  “You never disappoint, Doc,” Mildred said. “As always, a firm grip on the obvious. Let’s find...”