by Dan Worth
‘How do they…?’
‘Take their victims? The Shapers possess the ability to exploit the Heisenberg uncertainty principle via the same process we use in our translation drives though they have refined the technology to a much greater degree. Though they cannot translate agents inside the skulls of their victims – since such a process would cause the victim’s head to explode under the sudden pressure caused by the appearance of so much additional mass - they are able to place their agents nearby. The agent will be transported in an infant form only a few centimetres in length and then typically wait until the intended victim is asleep or otherwise incapacitated. It will then enter the host body via a suitable orifice and burrow its way into the creature’s brain which it then ingests, devouring the host’s memories and assuming their personality for the purpose of concealment. However in a scenario such as this, the agent will begin to use the host’s body to manufacture swarms of control parasites, modifying the host’s internal organs via the application of nanotechnologies that even we do not fully understand in order to produce hundreds, if not thousands of these parasites, which, if their intended victims are unable to fend them off, will burrow their way into their skulls and attach themselves to the brain stem, turning them into mere puppets of the nearest agent.’
‘Are they… are they aware of what is happening?’
‘Quite possibly yes, though they will be unable to do anything about it. They are restricted to merely spectating as their body is taken over. Brain death eventually occurs, though the parasite is able to keep the body functioning indefinitely. Removal of the parasite has never been successfully achieved.’
‘And the ship is full of these things?’
‘Yes, it seems so. The electro-magnetic weapons we employed in disabling the ship will have had a temporarily disorientating effect upon them, hence the slow response, but we should expect them to make every effort to repel us.’
‘And the likelihood of any survivors?’
‘Not good. Even if anyone did succeed in evading the initial take-over of the ship, they will have been overpowered and killed by the others or forced to undergo implantation.’
‘So what now?’ said Anna. ‘What are we doing here if there’s no-one to rescue?’
‘We should still proceed to the bridge,’ said the Lord Protector. ‘We should attempt to retrieve the ship’s logs. This vessel has been to the Shaper core systems, and any information we can glean will be of use to us. We should still also attempt to retrieve examples of the parasites, instead of destroying them totally.’ The last comment seemed to be directed at Anna. ‘We should also try and capture the controlling agent and then once it has been removed we can scuttle the ship.’
‘Then what are we waiting for?’ said Isaacs. ‘Let’s get moving before all of those things wake up and come after us.’
As if in answer to his warning, a low creaking groan issued from the depths of the ship. Isaacs saw Anna bring her weapon up to a firing position.
‘Just the ship cooling down,’ he said. ‘With the power off, the temperature’s starting to drop. It’s just the sounds of the hull contracting.’
‘Yeah,’ said Anna uneasily. ‘I knew that.’
They trudged onwards into the bowels of the ship. The shadowy walls seemed to close in on them as the sounds of distant movement began to reverberate down from distant parts of the ship. Shuffling footsteps, running feet and dragging sounds echoed through the corridors. Isaacs and Anna kept a death-grip on their weapons as the ominous sounds began to come closer and more distinct. The Nahabe seemed on edge too, the deaths of their comrades no doubt fresh in their minds, their weapons twitching to sweep every corner and entrance for the enemy.
At last they reached the equipment lifts at the centre of the ship’s superstructure. Here, four main corridors converged around a central hub containing the large equipment lift and four clusters of smaller personnel lifts. Isaacs approached the control panel of the equipment lift and slapped his hand against it. With main power out across the ship the device was deactivated.
‘Nice plan by the way,’ he said drily to the Lord Protector. ‘Didn’t you guys figure that these wouldn’t be working after you fried the ship’s systems? I take it your suits are too bulky to take the stairs?’
‘Yes. However we can draw power from our suits to charge the primitive energy cells contained within the lift’s drive system. Two of us will undertake this task whilst the others stand guard.’
‘And how long will that take?’ Anna asked, conscious of the noises approaching out of the darkened spaces of the ship.
‘A few moments, please be patient,’ the Lord Protector replied, signalling to two of his warriors, who detached themselves from the group and set about removing access panels from around the lift shafts. The others formed a protective circle around them, weapons trained outwards.
‘Movement approaching from the aft section of the ship,’ rumbled one of the Nahabe armed with heavy weapons. ‘I’m detecting changes in heat and air pressure indicating the presence of a number of bodies.’
Isaacs peered into the gloom and saw what he could only describe as a mob walking steadily and calmly towards them. The remainder of the ship’s crew appeared to have raided the armoury and grabbed whatever they could find. Men and women with fixed expressions of calm determination walked towards them armed with all manner of military grade weapons, and when those had run out they had resorted to cutting and welding tools and even knives from the ship’s galley and lengths of off-cut metal from the maintenance bays.
‘Join us,’ echoed a voice over the ship’s public comm. system. ‘Join us, you poor pitiful creatures. What a thing it is to know such bliss, to belong so utterly to the whole.’
The mob began to run as one towards the waiting Nahabe and their human companions, who raised their weapons in unison and began to fire.
They were relentless. The weapons of the Nahabe scythed through the first rank of attackers like a hot knife through butter. Men and women were cleaved in two, blasted apart and burned and they still kept on coming, crawling and dragging themselves across the floor with bloody hands and the spurting stumps of limbs whilst those behind leapt over them, firing wildly with whatever they had to hand, snarling with animalistic fury amid the screams and howls of the fallen. Others with heavy weapons held back, clinging to the cover offered by doorways and bulkheads as they laid down supporting fire.
Isaacs and Anna sheltered behind the massive armoured forms of the Nahabe, using them as cover as they picked off those that the holy warriors had missed, unloading high velocity rounds into the crawling, snarling, blood slicked things that had once been the officers and crew of the Casilinum. Lead, depleted uranium and energy beams pulverised flesh and bone as rounds pinged off the armoured aliens.
The corridor had become a charnel house. The smell of burnt meat and cordite mixed with that of blood and the offal from spilled bowels. The Nahabe stood firm amid the carnage, inviolate, invulnerable to the storm of bullets and energy beams and the mangled, wretched things that still flung themselves at them with knives, cleavers, plasma welders and axes.
It had all been a diversion.
From the corridor leading to the ships bows, a blood curdling scream issued from a dozen throats as a mob of armoured humans began to charge. They were the ships compliment of Marines, attired in heavy combat armour for use in boarding actions. Armour that was now hung with belts of explosives, demolition charges, armour piercing and frag grenades.
Isaacs was the first to spot them. He wheeled around, cried and pointed at the approaching forms and began firing. The first man fell, his right knee spouting blood as the lower leg was blown off by Isaacs’ bullets. Before the man had hit the ground a dozen beams of energy caught it, setting the now screaming, suited figure ablaze. It slid forward, the polished surfaces of the suit providing little resistance against the smooth floor. The explosives he carried caught and detonated.
Isaacs could
see or hear nothing for a moment. His senses completely overloaded he fell to his knees as another and then another suicide bomber was ripped apart prematurely by their own charges. He felt the hot blast buffet him, flinging him against the curving wall of the lift shaft, saw Anna lying on the floor, screaming with rage and fear, still firing, her face and clothes spattered with blood and viscera. He looked forward and saw more figures stagger and fall and bloom into explosions.
One made it through the firestorm. A single figure, blown forwards by the blast from one of his comrades, sailed through the air, arms windmilling. Isaacs saw the lone survivor as if in slow motion through the shell shock and disorientation. He raised his weapon and shot him clean through the head in mid air. At such close range the rounds burst the man’s head like a ripened fruit and the corpse, now almost decapitated save for the shattered eggshell of helmet and skull, thudded heavily to the ground and slid to a stop amid the pools of blood and body parts.
And then there was only the sound of sobbing. After a moment Isaacs realised it was him. He staggered to his feet, wiping blood from his face and clothes and pulled Anna up from the deck. She leant against him, her gun limp at her side.
‘Is that all of them?’ she muttered. ‘Jesus Christ, tell me we got them all.’
‘Not all,’ said the Lord Protector. ‘There is still the command staff to account for. We will find them, up there.’ He gesticulated with his blade arm towards the doors of the equipment lift, now slowly opening.
The ride up in the lift gave them all time to take stock of the situation, reload their weapons and prepare for whatever might be waiting for them on the bridge. Luckily, save for minor injuries and some superficial damage to the Nahabe’s armoured suits, the remaining members of the group had all escaped relatively unscathed. The Nahabe had also managed to salvage some of the parasitic creatures from the dead, wrenching the vile, writhing things from their bloody burrows and storing them in stasis containers for safe keeping within sealed compartments inside their armoured suits.
The lift rose, haltingly, as the Nahabe continued to feed power to its systems, until eventually it shuddered to a halt on the bridge level deck. Isaacs and Anna checked their weapons and held them ready as the doors slid unevenly open. The Nahabe too, floated poised and ready for anything that might be waiting for them.
There was no-one. They had arrived at another corridor hub identical to the one that they had just left. The main corridor to the bridge stretched off ahead into the gloom.
‘No-one here,’ said Anna. ‘Looks like we got them all down there. Either that or they’re all holed up on the bridge.’
Something moved at the corner of her vision then, a speck of darkness against the half-lit wall panelling. Then another, and another, and then swarms began to scuttle from the cracks, crevices and shadows along the floor, walls and ceiling until all available surfaces had come alive with them. They were all disappearing into the doorway that led to the ship’s bridge. The sounds of millions of tiny appendages and the rustling of crystalline carapaces created an eerie susurration in the quiet of the ship.
‘Jesus,’ said Isaacs. ‘Looks like we found the nest alright, and I never could stand cockroaches.’
‘We must go onward,’ said the Lord Protector. ‘Into the nest.’
‘We must?’
‘Yes.’
As they advanced, several of the Nahabe began to hose the scuttling Shaper creatures with arcing energies from their weapons that cleared swathes of the tiny constructs and left them twitching on the deck. Isaacs swore he heard each one give out a little enraged scream as it was fried. Yet as thousands were removed, thousands more scurried to take their place in the torrent of biomechanical insectoids. After a while, the scuttling creatures parted to let them through and then followed them, ever watchful, a sea of compound eyes glittering.
Still they advanced, into the darkened doorway that led into the bridge. As they entered, the lights from the Nahabe’s suits began to pierce the gloom and reveal a shape; a sculpted form that stood in the centre of the bridge and rose from floor to ceiling. It was indistinct and amorphous, until their lights played directly upon it. Anna gasped, Isaacs heard himself cry out in horror. They had found the command staff.
Half a dozen human forms were visible within the twisted mound of alien machinery that had fountained out from the body of the ship’s former captain who sat at the centre, still fixed into his command chair by the mass of gleaming technology. His body had become bloated with alien devices that swelled and pulsed within him, creating new orifices into which and from which spilled the vile parasites that had infested the ship. He had been transformed into a living factory for the creatures and they swarmed across his body. Fused to the disgusting mass were a number of bridge crew, who, infected with parasites, had willingly joined with him, allowing the machinery to envelop and absorb them. A tangle of machinery plugged into their skulls linked their brains to his through twisted, tangled crystalline pathways to form a processing node that now controlled the ship. From this node an almost organic mass of tendrils, roots and arteries snaked across the bridge until they linked into every system. Doubtless they now wound throughout the ship through conduits and pathways to invade its every corner.
The swarm of parasites was beginning to cover the distorted horror like flies on a rotting corpse, when suddenly it moved. The thing was trying to form words with what remained of the captain’s vocal chords whilst at the same time the same words issued from the ship’s comm. system.
‘They say ignorance is bliss,’ said the sibilant voice. ‘But true bliss comes from knowledge. Join with us. Do not resist. Join with us and experience such joy as you have never known.’
‘Pitiful creature,’ said the Lord Protector. ‘You are an affront to all sentient life in this galaxy and an insult to the memory of those whose bodies you have corrupted. We are the Order of Dead Suns. We carry with us the memory of those stars you extinguished in the past and the lives of those whose who cry for vengeance. Go tell your masters that we have returned before we dispatch you to the abyss!’
‘The abyss?’ said the voice. ‘You know nothing of the abyss. Why don’t you let me show you…?’
Isaacs saw movement outside beyond the slab-like bridge windows, the merest hint of a shimmer against the stars that began to resolve itself into the form of a Shaper vessel. Though still some distance off the bow Isaacs could tell that this vessel was several orders of magnitude larger than either of the two he had seen previously. Its arrival had not gone unnoticed by the two Nahabe gun-spheres as space between the three vessels was suddenly filled with coruscating energies.
The Shaper node had taken advantage of their momentary distraction. From the corner of his eye, Isaacs saw questing tendrils begin to snake downwards from the ceiling above them. Dodging aside he brought his rifle up and sprayed the nearest ones with bullets, severing them.
‘We have to leave!’ cried Isaacs. ‘Now!’
‘We do,’ said the Lord Protector. ‘But first….’
The Lord Protector moved forward and using his blade arm, sliced through the mass of alien machinery surrounding the captain’s head. Manipulator arms grabbed the violated orb which now screamed wordlessly as it was wrenched free. A panel in the Lord Protector’s armour opened and the head was safely stashed inside. Then as one, the Nahabe aimed their weapons at the bloated ruin that had once been the command staff of the CNV Casilinum, and opened fire with everything they had.
The retreat to the shuttle was little more than a desperate rout. Isaacs and Anna were pulled along by the Nahabe as they charged back the way that they had come, back down the equipment lift that moved with painful slowness, back down the corridors to the airlock, pausing briefly to salvage the bodies of their comrades and drag them into the waiting shuttle.
The craft’s airlock was barely closed when it catapulted itself across the void between the Casilinum and the gun-sphere Blessed Nothingness amid the storm of energies
and radiation that now began to lash the dead ship that they had left behind them.
Gradually the cruiser began to die, its hull torn open in a hundred places and battered by the guns of the Nahabe vessels. They focused their energies on the vessel’s power-plant, burrowing down through hull plating and bulkheads until they reached the casing of the main reactor and emptied its contained energies into the void. The blast ripped the vessel apart in a flash, the superstructure and bow section, now partially molten from the blast, began a long erratic tumble as it was rent by secondary explosions from energy cells and ammunition stores detonating from the sudden intense heat.
Isaacs and Anna saw none of this as the Nahabe shuttle almost crash landed into the docking bay of the Blessed Nothingness.
‘My ship!’ Isaacs cried as he picked himself off the deck. ‘What about the Profit Margin!? What about Anita?’
‘Your ship is safe,’ said the Lord Protector. She jumped back to Port Royal as soon as the Shaper ships arrived. Now we must leave this place and tell others of what we have learned.’
‘Well what the hell did we learn!?’ cried Isaacs. ‘Your men died and all we got was a handful of bugs!’
‘They will be useful to us in time. But you yourselves learnt something this day,’ said the Nahabe, looming over him. ‘You are the first humans to see that the Shapers can be killed. We also know that any ship that was under Cox’s command in Hadar cannot be salvaged. That, I think, is a valuable lesson for anyone.’
Isaacs and Anna nodded weakly in agreement.
‘Now we must leave this place,’ said the Nahabe. ‘Other ships are approaching and we will be outgunned. But the holy war has begun, my friends. You should remember the first moment that you struck back against the enemy. The tide will turn.’
Chapter 34
Chen tensed herself as the Churchill burst out of hyperspace dangerously close to the Chiron asteroid base. The irregular mountain of rock floated in the shadows out here at the limit of the sun’s glare. The sentries had been waiting for them. The darkness was immediately punctured by flashes of light and piercing beams from dozens of automated weapon emplacements in orbit around the base that lanced and tore at the carrier’s heavy shielding.