His breath was more a whimper than a sigh. He started moving. One step. One step. One step. Pause.
Just a little further.
51
A SIDE TRIP
“Mister Pritchett?” Rollins’s voice came through clear as glass.
“Yeah. I’m here.” He bolted upright in his seat. He’d been drifting. There was nothing to do but listen to the rain.
“Mister Pritchett, do you have access to a video pad?” It took half a second to locate the screen from which he’d been reading.
“Yep. Right here.”
“Good. I’m sending you a compressed file. On that file you will find a schematic of the offices. They’re located in the largest building, in front of the barracks. Once you have those, I need you to locate the office of Tom Willis. He’s busy right now, and I need you to collect some samples you’ll find in the safe in his office.”
“In the safe? Won’t that be locked?”
“Come now, Mister Pritchett. I’m fully aware of your background. Even if I weren’t, I’m also providing you with the combination. I’ve taken the liberty of overriding the retinal and DNA securities. This is company business, after all.”
“You got it.” Crock of crap was what it was. She didn’t care about having the right to do anything. And he’d have bet his last paycheck that she’d acquired the combination without Willis’s approval. The good news was that he didn’t care. She wanted something in that safe, and he wanted his bonus.
“Mister Pritchett?”
“Yeah?”
“Arm yourself. There’s a possibility that the life-forms we’re looking to procure might be around in higher numbers than originally believed. If you should encounter one, I would suggest shooting first and worrying about the creature’s intent later.”
“You’re the boss.”
He took the time to arm himself. He also took the time to double check his armor.
He left the ship in standby mode, and locked it down before he left. No one was going anywhere without him.
52
The queen was dead.
Decker shook his head, trying to push the thoughts and images away. Still they came, unbidden and unwanted. The voices hissed and clicked in their alien thoughts and his mind interpreted them even as he tried to flee.
The enemy was still alive and the queen was dead. Their fury immeasurable. If they could have, they would have pursued the enemy, but they could not.
No! I’m not your enemy! Leave me alone! If they heard his attempts to speak back, to communicate, they did not react in any way he could understand.
The newborns were hatching, and they had to be protected. The enemy had proven to be as dangerous as their genetic memories had insisted, and for that reason the newborns had to be hidden away.
There would be no mercy from them. Mercy was as alien to them as their inhuman senses were to him.
* * *
They had already lost so much.
They moved among the nests and looked at the hosts. Some were conscious and some were not, that hardly mattered. Some were already giving birth, and others were close.
Then there were seven nests remaining. The past had taught them to be careful. They learned. They adapted. They survived.
The earliest of the new nests were no longer necessary. The hosts had served their purpose and their bodies were merely food now.
A new queen was already growing, carefully guarded and kept away from the enemy. She was taken down to the lowest levels of the hive to the great chambers where they had slept for so long, and remained untouched by the world around them as it changed.
* * *
The fear bloomed in his stomach and Decker shoved the thoughts aside. If he thought about the sheer numbers of the things he would truly go insane.
* * *
Two nests were gone, destroyed. The enemy still lived. The vile thing climbed away from the hive, and that was good. They would find him, and they would kill him.
They were careful with the new queen. She was so young, so fragile. She would grow strong, of course, but as with all things, time was a requirement.
Once she was secure, the ones who had seen to her safe escort turned their attention back to the enemy. It was close to the surface now, they could feel it crawling through the tunnels the hosts had cut into the ground.
They would follow.
The queen was dead. The queen was born anew. The queen would be protected, no matter what the cost.
53
PAYBACK
Karma was a bitch.
Luke Rand woke up not long after the monsters came and beat him into the ground. He’d tried to fight them, and they broke him. Three ribs and his jaw. He couldn’t close his mouth, and every breath hurt like a fire being set just above his stomach.
He was underground, in near-complete darkness. And when he didn’t think it could get any worse, they proved to him that he had no idea how bad things could get.
The area to which they dragged him was hot and damp, and covered in the glossy black deposits they’d been seeing all around the Sea of Sorrows ever since they’d arrived. He never guessed what they were. Never would have guessed, even if they’d given him a lifetime to figure it out.
The things held him down and when he tried to fight they effortlessly broke his right arm in three places. That pretty much ended his attempts. Still, that wasn’t enough for the things. Two of them leaned over him and vomited gray-black goo over his body. The stuff started hardening as soon as it touched the air, and they spread it with their claws and slathered him with it until he was encased in a silicon straight jacket.
Even if he’d had it in him to fight any more, the glassy webbing quickly became too solid for his battered body to fight against.
There were other people around him, some of them were conscious and some of them weren’t. He envied the ones who weren’t.
Then the crab thing skittered over, and climbed up to his head. He tried to scream, painful as it was, but quickly his cries were muffled as it wrapped itself around his face. It was rape. That was the only way he could think of it and he felt tears of humiliation at the very idea. His jaw was already broken, but the thing didn’t care. He tried twisting away, but he was glued down and the damned thing just didn’t stop.
After a while everything just flowed into a dull ache, and then the pain went away altogether. He thought he should wonder why, but it didn’t seem necessary.
Every bad thing he’d done in his life came back to him in that dark place. Stole a dollar when he was five. Stole a lot more than that when he was in school. He’d done some good things, like fighting for Aneki when the other kids tried to pick on him for being stuck in a wheelchair. But he’d also done his fair share of picking on the weaker ones.
There were people he’d done wrong, but he never thought it was enough to end up like this.
Those things were watching. He saw them moving now and again, and some of them were curled up in the blackness, lost in patterns that almost looked like parts of the walls of the cave. He had to look for them to see them at all, but he had time while he was stuck in one place, and thinking of all the bad things he’d done in his life.
He felt like shit about Decker. The man knew him for what he was, but he still stuck with him.
He felt like shit about a lot of things.
He didn’t think he could feel any worse.
* * *
The pain came back in his broken ribs. It hammered his insides and moved around his heart and, oh, damn, but the pain was a living thing. It tore at his chest and then into his sides. His broken ribs were enough to make him howl past his broken jaw and bloodied lips.
The pain got worse, and worse again. So much worse.
In the end he couldn’t think of a thing he’d ever done to deserve that much pain.
In the end it didn’t matter.
Karma was a bitch, and didn’t care what he thought.
54
BURD
ENS
The communiqué from the home office was short and to the point. It was also exactly what she had expected.
Andrea Rollins rose from her desk seat and stretched. She had things to do.
She called the bridge. “Captain Cherbourg?”
“Yes, Ms. Rollins?”
“You should prepare the ship for departure. We won’t be here much longer.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And Captain?”
“Yes, Ms. Rollins?”
“Be prepared to deliver your payload.”
Cherbourg hesitated for a moment before responding, but only for a moment.
“Yes, ma’am.”
* * *
Decker set Adams on the ground as gently as he could, and then sat for a moment.
True to his worries, she seemed at least ten times her original weight—at least if he listened to the protests from his shoulders. By comparison, Elway seemed to have only gained a few pounds. He still hated Manning just a bit more for that.
“We get to the first level, are we going to try for another elevator or are we going to keep walking?” Muller asked. The question was a good one.
Manning looked down at the ground and shook his head.
“If this was a standard operation, we could take a truck back to the surface—there generally are ramps. But it’s not. They were still rebuilding this thing, and I don’t think they have an access road leading all the way up. So far these stairs have been clear of trouble and I like that, but it’s not a guarantee.” He paused to look around. “I am also very, very sick of confined spaces.
“When we get to level one, we don’t have a schematic. We don’t know the lay of the land. We don’t know our way out of this place.” He stopped talking, and seemed to be weighing the options.
Muller held up a hand and gestured for silence, one finger to his lips. Then he pointed to the stairs.
There was a sound from below.
Manning cleared his throat.
“So I think we have to consider which way is best, but I’m voting for exploring the first level. It’ll give us more room to defend ourselves, if we need to.”
As he spoke, he made several quick gestures. Muller nodded his head and moved, sliding to the edge of the stairwell and then carefully taking aim with his pistol. He tensed, and then Decker saw the tension leak out of the man’s thick neck and shoulders, a little at a time.
“I think we’re safe here.” He stayed exactly where he was, and slowly lowered his pistol toward the floor.
A moment later they all heard the wheezing voice.
“Oh, thank God.”
Manning recognized the voice.
“Willis?”
The bureaucrat was soaked through. His clothes were wet and clung to his bulk, his hair was pasted to his skull, and his face was a deep and unhealthy shade of red.
“Oh, thank you, God.” He was climbing on his hands and knees, having apparently given up on the concept of walking.
Manning looked at Adams where she lay on the ground. His eyes flickered to Decker. The backpack she’d been carrying was gone. The backpack with the medical supplies.
“Anyone got a little water for this man?”
Silent Dave came to the rescue and tossed over a small bottle of liquid, rammed full of electrolytes and sugar. They were standard rations for most outposts. Willis’s hands were shaking too hard for him to even hold the container. Once he’d calmed down, Manning opened it and handed it over.
“Sip it slowly.”
He needn’t have bothered. The man could barely even manage to sip. Still, after a few moments he had drunk half the bottle, and was breathing a bit easier.
“So, we’re screwed. We need to get to the surface.” Manning stared closely at Willis, who returned his look with a frown. “What’s the fastest way?”
“There’re elevators,” he replied slowly. “The main lift is ruined, but one of the others, maybe.”
“And you know where they are?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Then why the hell did you take the stairs?”
“Do you think I would have gone through hell like this, if I could get through one of the doors?” Willis answered testily. That seemed to mollify Manning.
“Well, finish catching your breath,” the merc said. “We can’t be here any more, and if what you say is true, the first level is our best bet.”
“Ms. Rollins said she’d send down a drop ship.” The words were almost mumbled. As soon as they were freed from his lips, Willis blinked as if slapped, and clammed up.
Decker felt the sudden shift in the man’s emotions.
Manning didn’t need to feel it. He leaned forward until he was close enough to kiss the man, and he spoke softly.
“Later, when this is over with,” he said, “you and I will discuss how long you’ve been chatting it up with Rollins. For right now, though, get the fuck up. We’re going to move.”
“Wait. What happened to the others on your team?” Willis spoke as he slowly crawled his way up to a standing position.
Manning bared his teeth. No one in their right mind would have called it a smile.
“I didn’t have any way to contact Rollins, you see, so things went badly.” He cast his eyes toward the ground for a moment, and then back to Willis. “What happened to the rest of my people—the ones who were down on level nine with you?”
Willis looked away.
“I don’t know,” he said. Then his voice went up an octave. “I panicked, okay? I went for the stairs as soon as the fire started.” He was lying. The man was a smarmy prick, and he was a lousy liar. At least from Decker’s unique point of view.
Then that crawling sensation slipped weakly across the engineer’s mind.
“I think they’re coming again,” he warned them. “But if they are, they aren’t close.”
The others made ready to continue to journey upward. Decker carefully slung Adams back over his shoulders, glad they weren’t going all the way to the surface, while Manning hauled Elway onto his shoulder and checked the clip on his pistol.
“Can you tell where they’re coming from?” he asked.
“No. It’s not that clear.” Decker shook his head. “Not yet, anyhow. And like you said before, I don’t know the layout of the place. If I did, it might help me pinpoint them a little better.”
Manning’s hand caught Willis’s shoulder in a fierce grip, and he bared his teeth again.
“Good news, then. We have our own tour guide.”
Willis didn’t look happy at the prospect, but he became more energetic as the energy boost ran into his system. Not energetic. Alert. He had probably been in a state of shock. Whatever it was, it enabled him to walk upright as they cleared the last flight of stairs, and reached level one. All that remained above them was the ground floor.
The door to level one opened easily.
This time Muller took the lead, looking left and right and then beckoning the rest of them into the corridor. The area was wrecked. Whatever had happened, it hadn’t happened easily. There were broken lights and signs of a struggle, and a few pieces of people left behind.
Willis’s eyes bulged in their sockets, but he remained silent.
Manning remedied that.
“Which way?” he demanded.
“There are elevators here—” Willis pointed. “—and elevators down that way.” They moved toward the first set of doors, and discovered the same elevators that the group had tried riding up before. So he turned and led them in the opposite direction. After a hundred feet or so, they found a passageway that didn’t exist on the lower levels.
“Where the hell does that go?” Manning asked.
“A new mining operation. It’s got a lot of junk in the way, but it’s got its own lift, and we used it to clear a lot of dirt and stone out of the way. The office and the compound are both in that direction, as well—up above.”
“How far down does the lift go?”
“This is it,” Willis replied. “This is as low as it goes. We found the main mining operation not long after we started here.”
Manning shot Decker a glance, and Decker nodded. It was damned convenient that they found the original site that easily.
Damned convenient.
“Let’s move,” the merc said. And they were off.
* * *
Muller stayed in the lead, and they moved quickly. Decker did his best to focus on the minds of the bugs, and to ignore the cold detachment that emanated from the parasites clinging to Adams and Elway.
He wanted desperately to put Adams down, but wouldn’t do that. Couldn’t do that. She was good people. And he suspected she would have found a way to drag his sorry ass anywhere he needed to be taken. He made a silent promise to her that she’d get out of this alive. He intended to keep that promise, too. One way or another.
Despite the earlier signs of damage and struggle, there was little to see as they moved forward. No more bodies, no signs of a struggle of any kind. Indeed, to Decker’s eye, it didn’t seem as if the shaft had been used in quite a while. That seemed weird for what Willis had called a “new” operation.
“No one’s dug here for some time now,” Decker commented. “Why did they abandon it?”
“We didn’t find enough trimonite to make it worth our while,” Willis said. “It was too far out of the way to use for storage, so we just stopped bothering with it.”
Ten minutes of walking got them to the elevator.
Manning looked to Decker.
“Anything?”
“No. Nothing.” He pushed past the background noise. “Nothing close by, at least.”
So Manning pushed the elevator call button, and double-checked his pistol again. Following his example, Decker checked the clip and the safety on the reaper.
Willis looked at the weapons with a mild hunger.
When the elevator chimed they waited for the doors to slide open and Decker found himself taking aim in that general direction. Anything coming out was going to get an unpleasant reception.
Sea of Sorrows Page 25