The creature went wild…
It began to swing at anything that moved. The pirates nearest to the beast were literally diced by the furiously whirling spike covered clubs. In a short time, the floor became a mass of shredded corpses, twitching and gibbering, with the Morgenstern standing victorious over the heap of minced flesh and bone looking like Satan himself. Those pirates fortunate enough had retreated, back towards the airlock, out of reach of its terrible arms. Trenchard and Pugh were the last out of the storage room on the opposite side. Pugh stared at Trenchard, his face ashen, terrified out of his wits.
‘What is that thing?’ he shouted.
‘One of Papaver’s experiments,’ Trenchard shouted back.
‘What do we do?’ Pugh asked urgently.
Trenchard looked around him. ‘The pirates seem to have its attention for now. How strong do you think this hatch is?’
Pugh nodded in understanding and the two men slipped through the hatch, closing and locking it behind them.
CHAPTER 20 “TRAPPED”
On the other side of the thick hatch, the sound of battle was reduced to the distant and muffled screams of the dying. Trenchard turned to address the troopers as he scratched irritably at the long scar that ran from his neck down towards his chest.
‘Someone find some welding gear or a plasma torch. I want that hatch welded shut and a whole pile of heavy stuff pushed up against it,’ he shouted. ‘Double time. Move!’
Several sweating troopers rushed off in different directions to find what they could.
Pugh turned worriedly towards Trenchard. ‘Papaver made that?’ he asked in astonishment.
Trenchard shrugged. ‘It must’ve been one of his prototype weapons that didn’t work properly. You can see why he mothballed it here, frozen in the middle of nowhere. Imagine if the insurgents got hold of that and dropped it off in the middle of a major city on Earth? How many people do you think it would kill before they could stop it? Imagine if they could duplicate it, make an army of them? It would make the space elevator disaster look like a picnic in the park.’
There was a long, uncomfortable silence.
‘Bullets don’t seem to have any effect on it. What do we do?’ Pugh asked. Worried at the best of times, he was now as white as a sheet.
Trenchard snarled. ‘We kill it.’
‘How?’ Pugh gasped in amazement. ‘…and if we do, won’t Papaver be upset? Won’t he want it back?’
Trenchard railed. ‘I don’t give a flying fuck what Papaver wants! I’ll give him back the pieces in a bag if necessary. This mission is under my command and out here my word is fucking law! If that abomination gets out of that room, it could wipe out every living thing on this space station. These troopers are my responsibility. We kill it and then we piss on the remains and set fire to them, got it?’
‘Aye Sir!’ said Pugh, grinning a little, ‘but shouldn’t that be set fire to it and then piss on the remains, Sir?’ He asked with a wry smile on his face.
For a moment, Trenchard smiled. He was finally getting through to Pugh. Their relationship so far had been troubled at best. Trenchard knew that there was genuine warmth in Pugh’s grin. Pugh was finally starting to trust him, if only a little. By now a trooper had found some welding gear and was diligently melting a seam around the hatch. Several other troopers were hauling heavy gear down the corridor to barricade it.
‘If only we could get a good look at it,’ Trenchard said, thinking out loud.
Pugh’s face suddenly brightened. ‘The omni, it’s still in there!’
‘Right,’ said Trenchard, bringing his wrist communicator up towards his mouth. ‘Trenchard to Noir. Are you still reading me? Over.’
Commander Noir was pacing back and forth across the control room of the Might of Fortitude. Her brow was furrowed and her expression dark. She looked up as Petty Officer Hall at the communications console called out.
‘Commander! Captain Trenchard is calling, audio only.’
‘On speaker!’ commanded Noir.
‘…to Might of Fortitude. Repeat. Trenchard to Might of Fortitude. Are you reading me? Over.’
‘I’m reading you loud and clear Captain. What is your situation? We lost track of you with the omni. Over.’
‘Our sleeping guest woke up,’ Trenchard explained.
Noir looked shocked. ‘Baise-moi!’ she swore under her breath.
‘It’s running amok in the storage area. We’ve managed to barricade it in for the moment, but I don’t think it will last long. Is the omni still operational? Over.’
Noir looked over to Kittinger for confirmation.
He nodded. ‘We’re still receiving the signal but there’s a lot of smoke in there. It’s hard to make anything out.’
‘Right,’ came back Trenchard’s voice. ‘Get the omni as close to the thing as possible. I want a broad-spectrum scan. I want to know everything there is to know about that thing. We have to find a way to stop it. Call me when you have something. Trenchard out.’
Noir walked back over to Kittinger. ‘Can you single out the creature from the pirates?’
Kittinger shook his head. ‘Not visually, there’s too much smoke and movement. The motion scan is off the scale.’
Noir thought for a moment. ‘There was a small life sign from the creature’s head when we performed the initial scan, probably human tissue of some kind, maybe brain tissue.’
Kittinger looked up at her, appalled. ‘It’s cybernetic? Is there someone’s brain inside that thing?’
Noir gave nothing away. ‘Switch to thermal. The creature should be the only one with a tiny heat source at around head height.’
Kittinger nodded and obediently operated the controls.
Inside the storage area the Morgenstern stood still, surveying the scene. The pirates had hurriedly retreated through the airlock and locked it behind them. Their comrades inside the room were all slain and splashed across the floor. Entrails and blood covered every surface like a gory Jackson Pollock painting. Their deaths hadn’t been clean. The tactical programming in the Morgenstern’s software was trying to decide what to do next. The Airlock was strong, reinforced and locked. It scanned the room and located the inner door. Before it could budge, it spotted movement. The small, triangular omni-bot hovered out of the smoke towards it and hung in the air, just in front of the creature’s face. The Morgenstern studied it quizzically with its crescent shaped eyes. It could detect no life signs. There were no obvious weapons on the floating device.
Pain…
There was no threat.
So much pain…
The two robots stared back at each other like a child staring at a chimp through a glass wall at the zoo.
Random images flashed through the creature’s mind. Memories and experiences from a woman’s life flickered across the thoughts of the creature like moths against gaslight. The memories sparked new pathways across redundant circuit boards. A little girl played on a red bicycle. She fell off and grazed her knee. Her mother comforted her. A boy kissed her lips for the first time at the school graduation dance. Now a grown woman she felt the surge of rocket power as she left the Earth for the first time and headed into space. The feeling of the powerful engines exploding beneath her was exhilarating.
Then the images changed, became darker and more intense. The woman was on a dusty planet with orange soil and a purple sky. A city in the desert stretched out before her. There was a name… “Belatu-Cadros”. A crowd charged the gates of the military base. Barrels rolled towards her. Her riot shield was simply useless. There was a searing explosion and then blackness…
‘Come on. Just a few more minutes,’ Kittinger whispered under his breath. He was feverishly operating the controls in front of him, taking every scan possible.
Noir leaned in. ‘Are we there yet?’ she asked in a hushed voice.
‘Nearly… nearly!’
The memories sparked again in the swirling black smog of nothingness. A man’s face peered down at
her. He was holding a surgical device. He spoke as if she was dead already. He cut into her flesh. She felt every slice, every tear. She felt the numbing, uncontrollable intensity of pain…
The Morgenstern zoomed its optical receptors in on the omni-bot for a closer study.
Revenge…
It saw the scanner sphere in the centre of the triangle. Someone was watching it. That gave them a tactical advantage.
Kill!
The crescent shape receptors flared bright red. The Morgenstern suddenly swung its mighty battle club through the air and obliterated the tiny omni-bot in one foul swoop. As the broken pieces hit the nearby wall and crashed to the floor, the Morgenstern turned its mighty body and started to stomp towards the inner door.
Flesh!
‘Damn!’ Kittinger swore, as the signal from the omni-bot went blank.
‘Did you get enough?’ Commander Noir asked urgently.
‘One moment,’ said Kittinger, desperately scanning over the results. After a moment, he turned to Noir and said, ‘I’d like the Chief Engineer to look at this.’
‘Right,’ said Noir, looking up. ‘Guardian. S.E.O. Sivia to the Control room immediately,’ she ordered.
Trenchard and Pugh were waiting in the corridor outside the store room for the results of the scan. The hatch was now welded shut and a reasonably large pile of equipment was stacked against it. Suddenly, there was a mighty thump from the other side of the doorway and several thick spikes pierced right through the solid metal hatch.
‘Jesus Christ!’ shouted Pugh. ‘What’s that thing made from?’
Trenchard shook his head. ‘No idea, but it’s one tough son of a bitch! It must have finished with our pirate friends and now it wants more.’ Trenchard turned to address his troops. ‘Prepare grenades and get ready to fall back to the next intersection. I want the hatches welded shut after us as we move. Maybe we can buy some time.
‘But why is it just killing indiscriminately?’ Pugh enquired. ‘What’s the use of a weapon that you can’t control?’
Trenchard thought for a moment. ‘Most probably it would have been designed to be dropped behind enemy lines and kill anything that moved until it received a signal from the attacking force to turn it off,’ he postulated. ‘Either that or the thing’s simply knackered! It’s probably malfunctioning. There’s a good reason it was decommissioned and locked away in the arse end of nowhere.’
Pugh screwed his face up. ‘But if it was decommissioned, how did it suddenly become activated again Sir?’
Trenchard glared back at Pugh. ‘That’s a bloody good question.’
Captain Bird, the mighty Raven, was standing on the bridge of the pirate battle ship watching what remained of his crew return across the hull of the space station. A fully space-suited pirate rushed onto the bridge, sweating and exhausted. He stood shamefacedly in front of Bird.
‘Report,’ said Bird curtly.
‘It’s no good Sir,’ said the pirate between pants of breath. ‘The robot has been activated and there’s no way of stopping it. We’ve already lost thirty men and now it’s gone after the United Worlds troopers.’
Bird nodded. ‘Very well; we’ll have to abandon the mission. Shame...’ Then Bird turned and stared pensively at the image of the Might of Fortitude on a screen in front of him. ‘Still,’ he began thoughtfully, ‘it would be nice to return not completely empty handed, wouldn’t it?
In the control room of the Might of Fortitude, Noir, Kittinger and Lieutenant Commander Devinder Sivia were studying the data received before the omni-bot was crushed into oblivion.
‘Can you make anything out?’ Noir asked.
Sivia pursed his lips and scratched at his turban covered head. ‘The basic frame and power source is similar to the shifters and loaders used in cargo stations,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I can’t make sense of the covering though, it’s something new. It’s probably a prototype formula from Papaver, it’ll still be classified.’
‘What about the head casing?’ Kittinger queried. ‘Maybe there’s a weakness there?’
Sivia shook his head. ‘The organic component is encased in a special plasti-steel formula. It’s the same stuff they use for observation windows aboard luxury cruise liners. You can make a window twenty foot across out of the stuff and it’ll withstand bullets, grenades, asteroid hits. You might as well try and break through a steel wall with a tooth pick.’
‘There has to be something!’ complained Commander Noir.
Sivia suddenly raised both eyebrows. ‘Hang on, there’s an interesting result from the thermal scanner. Look here!’ he said, pointing to an area on the display in front of them.
The scan was a thermal image of the creature. The hot areas appeared in white through red and yellow to cold areas in green and blue. There was a small area on the creature’s leg that was so dark blue as to be almost black.
‘That part of the outer skin is still frozen from the cryo-tube that it was discovered in; it must be a manufacturing fault in the skin.’
‘So what?’ shrugged Noir.
‘Soooo… the motion scanner shows that area to be completely static. Frozen stiff! The outer skin is obviously susceptible to temperature change. If you lower the temperature…’
‘It’ll become stiff and immobile,’ finished Noir. She walked over to the communications console. ‘Noir to Trenchard. Come in please.’
Trenchard was running again. The Morgenstern had almost made it through the first barricade. Shredded metal lay in ragged ribbons on the floor around a gaping hole in the welded hatch. Most of the troopers were already through the next hatch and standing by to weld that one shut too.
As Trenchard ran, he drew his hand up towards his face. ‘I’m a little busy right now Commander! Leave a message at the beep…’ he shouted into the microphone.
Trenchard looked towards Pugh, who was the other side of the hatch. Pugh nodded. Trenchard pulled a grenade from his harness and turned towards the beast. The thing glared at him as it struggled to pull itself through the jagged hole.
‘Hey, you ugly twat!’ he shouted.
The creature raised its head instinctively towards the noise.
‘Catch this, you son metal of a bitch!’ Trenchard shouted, throwing the grenade straight at the thing’s head.
Trenchard leapt through the hatch and it was slammed shut a millisecond before the grenade exploded. The whole station shook and the lights flickered momentarily. Instantly, two troopers began to weld the next hatch shut.
Trenchard held up his communicator again as he caught his breath. ‘Right then Commander Noir. What’s up?’
‘You have to freeze it Sir. It’s susceptible to extreme cold!’
‘Cold?’ repeated Trenchard.
Trooper Cox jostled past Trenchard, manhandling a large piece of equipment over towards the door and throwing Trenchard’s concentration momentarily.
‘Careful there sonny!’ he snapped, before turning his attention back towards Pugh.
‘How the hell are we supposed to freeze the damned thing?’ he snapped. ‘Fire extinguishers? Chemicals?’
Pugh thought for a moment. ‘We are in deep space Sir. If we could get it near an airlock…’
There was the abrupt sound of tearing metal and a piercing scream. Trenchard and Pugh spun around. The Morgenstern had already reached the hatch and instantly begun to tear straight through. Cox had been placing the heavy equipment next to it and had been caught across his right arm by the deadly spikes. He fell to the floor, clutching his arm in agony as blood poured through the tattered shreds of his uniform’s sleeve. Trenchard instantly grabbed Cox and began to drag him away from the door. McGagh rushed to the door, picked up a heavy metal bar from the barricade and began to beat the creature fiercely about the arm until it pulled back through the hole. Red light from the creature’s chest spilled through the opening, illuminating the trooper’s frightened faces.
Pugh turned towards the troopers. ‘Ten rounds incendiary through that hol
e, now!’ he screamed.
A helmeted trooper stepped forward; removed his armour piercing magazine from his rifle and clicked into place one that contained incendiary rounds.
‘McGagh, move it!’ Pugh ordered.
McGagh dived out of the way just before the trooper raised his rifle, took careful aim and fired ten rounds, straight through the torn metal hole and into the creature’s chest. The rounds could be heard impacting and exploding on the other side of the door. Fire burst forth from the jagged maw and the creature retreated momentarily from the searing hot flames.
Trenchard gently pulled Cox’s helmet off and threw it aside. He looked into Cox’s terrified eyes and spoke as seriously as he could. ‘Brace yourself son, this is going to hurt like hell!’
Cox nodded, his eyes streaming, scared stiff. Trenchard undid the Velcro cuff of Cox’s sleeve and peeled back the shredded cloth which was sticky and soaked with blood. Cox winced and moaned in agony. His arm looked like it had been mauled by a lion. The muscles hung limply in shreds from ivory white bone that shone through the tattered flesh. Trenchard fought to keep his lunch down. He had seen serious injuries before but he never got used to the sight of someone’s insides.
‘Field kit!’ Trenchard called urgently.
Stofan rushed over with a plastic box of medical supplies. Trenchard hurriedly opened the box and took out a small vial, some antiseptic fluid and a bandage.
‘Brace yourself,’ he said gently to Cox, who nodded as bravely as he could manage.
Trenchard stabbed the vial onto Cox’s arm, injecting an anaesthetic. Then he opened the bottle of liquid and poured the entire contents all over Cox’s arm. Cox writhed and screamed in agony as the antiseptic stung every severed muscle and nerve.
‘Hold him!’ shouted Trenchard.
McGagh and Stofan dropped to their knees and steadied the struggling young man as the anaesthetic began to work.
‘Steady there Jez mate!’ said McGagh in a surprisingly comforting tone for the usually hard-faced Irish man.
The Space Navy Series Books One & Two: Including the Kindle novellas Josiah Trenchard and the Might of Fortitude & Josiah Trenchard and the Morgenstern Page 18