by Max Carver
But now the white-metal mask had taken the shape of Eric's face.
“I really hate that relic,” Eric said, looking away.
“You must maintain contact in order to maintain command,” Iris told him.
“Yeah, I get that now. So that decoy-ship plan won't work,” Eric said. “What else can we do?”
Everyone was quiet for a moment.
“I don't know, but we'd better figure it out,” Hagen said. “Because we have about three hours until we're in sight of one big ship filled with heavily armed hostile aliens. And they almost certainly know we're coming.”
Chapter Thirty
The Omicron Rex approached the gas giant Valentine at a constant speed, running on inertia only, all its lights out. Any observer projecting its course would find that it was not on path for either the gate marker or the spaceport a few hundred kilometers above it. Instead, it seemed to be hurtling blindly along a course between them, listing slightly, perhaps doomed to eventually be caught in Valentine's powerful gravity well and drawn down to be consumed by the red storms below. Currently, though, it was on course to simply drift past the ancient gate and the human-built orbital port, with no sign of changing direction.
Three of the spaceworms approached from the spaceport, swimming on winding courses that would make them more difficult to target, had the Rex attempted to fire on them.
The hulking asteroid-cutter remained silent, though, showing no response to the three approaching worms.
“I want to shoot them,” Bartley said. “This isn't going to work! We should open fire while we have a chance—”
“Keep quiet!” Hagen snapped.
“Earth-hugger,” Bartley grumbled. He kept quiet, though.
Everyone on the bridge watched as the large, spiky-armored worms approached. They spread out in three directions, inspecting the mining ship somehow, despite the giant blobs of solid metal encasing their heads.
“That one's trying to come inside!” Naomi pointed to a display. “How's that going to work?”
Outside, one of the big worms seemed to be sniffing around an apparent huge rupture in the mining ship's hull, revealing blackened machinery inside, as though an explosion had taken out the onboard refinery.
“That one, too,” Alanna said. “And it's a lot closer.” She pointed to a second worm, diving in close to the crew quarters where'd they been sleeping. It wouldn't be a long trek from there to the bridge.
“It can't just go through the wall, can it?” Naomi asked.
“Everyone, please,” Iris said. “Help Eric maintain his focus.”
Eric shook his head, still doubting the plan would work.
As it had turned out, the relic could change the appearance of the entire ship. Eric had to maintain skin contact with the ship's surface at all times, though, so now he was sitting barefoot at his console. Naomi had suggested that he should walk around in just his underwear, to be safe, but Eric had shot that idea down quickly.
They had altered the ship to look like a burned-out husk, a ghost ship on a course to nowhere. The apparent damage was based on the scars left by the wormfighters during the launch on Caldera. The idea was to convince the worms that the wounds they'd inflicted on the Rex had ultimately proved fatal, and the ghost ship had drifted this way ever since.
But now the worms seemed interested in diving through the apparent ruptures in the hull—which were nothing but illusion—and exploring inside.
Eric tensed, watching on the screen as a worm swam toward one of the ruptures, bracing himself to see what happened when the worm bonked into a solid hull instead.
That moment never came, though.
Instead, the worm continued right on through the hull as if the rupture were real, and swam on through the hallways of the miners' quarters as though the ship had no artificial gravity at all.
“It's coming for us.” Bartley raised an assault rifle he'd found in the ship's security armory.
“Hold still!” Hagen snapped.
“The relic's working,” Eric whispered. “I don't understand how...This is more than just a disguise. A lot more.”
They watched on displays as worms explored the refinery and the nuclear reactor, which appeared cold and dead, when in fact it was chugging along just fine.
“There's no way,” Carol said. “The illusion would have to be on every level—visual, auditory, thermal, tactile—”
“Just in case it isn't,” Hagen said. “Let's cut the chatter.”
Everyone went quiet.
Then a worm arrived on their bridge.
It was the one that had been exploring the crew quarters. It had made its way up a ladder well, down the corridor, and was now at the heart of the ship.
Eric felt his heart thundering in his chest, especially as the worm swam closer, in complete defiance of the ship's low but still-functioning artificial gravity. The blind metal helmet moved closer and closer to Eric.
Then the helmet split open, radiating out like the sharp petals of a steel flower opening in the sunlight.
He could see the rings of sharp teeth lining the worm's throat, and the swollen blood-red gums in which they were embedded. A puff of air clouded a flexible, clear membrane that Eric hadn't even noticed until the worm's moist exhale spread across it like hot breath on a cold window.
For a moment, it looked as though the thing was about to retract that membrane and slurp Eric down.
Then it continued onward, slithering across the bridge, past each and every one of them. Bartley tracked it with the rifle, despite a fervent and obvious head-shake from Hagen. Hagen froze as the worm stopped to inspect the commander's chair at the center of the bridge.
On one display, a worm had made it to the ship's hangar and begun to inspect the small research vehicles there.
Carol pointed to it, and Hagen nodded.
She touched an icon floating above her console.
One of the research vessels—already positioned in the launch airlock—sprang to life and rose from the floor. At the same time, the airlock's outer door opened.
The worm in the hangar charged after it, but the airlock was sealed, even within the illusion of the wrecked ship. It lashed in visible frustration, then headed toward the nearest rupture to pursue the escaping shuttle.
The worm exploring the bridge grew suddenly agitated, too, as though it had received a signal from the first. Its helmet closed back around its head as it turned and left the bridge.
Soon all three worms were outside the ship. Two of them accelerated away, pursuing the research vessel.
“Iris, the gate!” Hagen said.
Eric looked over at a clear pane where one of the faux windows was usually projected. Now it gave an unobstructed view into the first of Iris's two rooms, where she sat on a cushion, the Medusa-like tangle of cables connected to her head.
“Opening,” Iris said, her eyes closed, her voice almost too soft to hear, even amplified over a speaker.
In the distance, the thousand-faced gate marker began to glow. It rose up and out of the planet's rings, into empty space above it. White light traced each one of its thousand iridium-alloy faces, lighting up the dense symbols there.
Then the marker projected a sphere all around it, glimmering white, the color of iridium.
The sphere was the mouth of a wormhole, a multi-dimensional doorway through spacetime. Any object that entered it would be instantly transported light-years away, to another star system entirely.
The research vessel rushed toward it, the two worms following closer and closer behind it.
“What's that one doing?” Alanna pointed to the third worm, the one that hadn't pursued the shuttle. It had remained close to the mining ship instead, pulling into the space between the Rex and Valentine Station high above.
Now it fired three long cables, each tipped with a drill bit. Each one burrowed into the mining ship's front hull.
“Drill harpoons,” Eric said. “We have those.”
“It's
taking us for salvage,” Hagen said.
He was right. The space worm towed them aside, gradually changing their course. It was turning them toward the spaceport above, where the worms' big asteroid ship was feeding inside the orbital station's carcass.
The research shuttle, meanwhile, continued its approach toward the shimmering white mouth of the open wormhole. Carol had taken remote control of the shuttle, weaving it through the floating ice formations near the ring surface, dodging scrap-gun fire and plasma, weapons that shattered or devoured the ice that she was using for cover.
“Now?” Bartley asked, his hands on a pair of joysticks built into his console.
“No,” Hagen said. “Foster, draw them closer to the wormhole, further away from us...closer...and...now!”
The shuttle, which had seemed to be on approach to the wormhole, instead looped around it and flew headfirst toward the two worms.
When they'd prepared the research shuttle, Eric and the others had removed any unnecessary weight, including the seating and the life-support elements, to make the small craft as fast and light as possible. It was big enough to serve as a lifeboat for their crew. They wanted to trick the worms into believing the Rex was damaged beyond hope—useful only for parts and scrap—and the humans had abandoned it, making a desperate run for the wormhole in the small shuttle instead.
However, only two passengers had been loaded aboard the shuttle, and neither of them was a live human being.
They were two of the Rex's railguns, removed from their ports and welded into place inside the shuttle, where the seats had once been. Since a pair of worms had attacked the drone at the gate, Hagen had insisted they load a pair of guns onto the shuttle, rather than wait precious seconds for a single gun to reload.
“Good-bye, Norma Jean.” Bartley said. The holograms above his head showed targeting scopes on the two worms. “Good-bye, Marilyn.”
Bartley fired both shots at once.
The supersonic rounds shattered a pair of portholes as they blasted out of the seemingly unarmed shuttle, then slammed into the two worms hard enough to penetrate their armor. They were thermal rounds, and the worms exploded a second later, flinging armor plate and burned entrails across the starry sky.
“Good work, you two,” Hagen said. “Keep that shuttle hidden and ready for the next wave.”
“The next wave's already here,” Eric said.
Five more space-ready worms in spiky armor emerged from the spaceport's blasted-open underside. Three split off toward the research shuttle.
The other two new arrivals approaching the Rex and fired harpoons of their own, tipped with drills and magnets.
Three worms were now working together to tow the huge ship, undertaking the difficult task of slowing it down and changing its trajectory toward the hollowed-out space station above, where their mothership awaited, gorging itself on everything in sight.
“They're reeling us in,” Hagen said.
“And doing a bad job,” Alanna added. “We're going to hit the side.”
She was right. The three worms together still hadn't exerted enough force. The mining ship entered the interior of the space station at a bad angle. Instead up heading straight up toward the worms' big rock-coral ship, they were on a collision course with an inner wall, swinging toward a tangled mass of shredded, half-melted steel girders.
“We're going to crash!” Naomi said. “Hagen, do something!”
“Not yet,” Hagen said. “We don't want to blow our cover. Foster?”
“Busy, sir,” she replied. The display overhead showed the research shuttle that she was remotely piloting, leading the two new worms on a chase through the fields of floating ice. Her experience flying in urban warfare zones and narrow canyons was paying off.
“You have to slow down so I can lock onto one of the slimies,” Bartley said. “Come on, Foster! I want to shoot another one!”
“If I give you a chance to lock onto them, they'll lock onto us right back,” she said. “Besides, these guys lack finesse. Watch.”
Carol dove between two house-sized blocks of ice floating close together. One worm turned back, and actually seemed to shake its head once, unwilling to risk the narrow pass. It climbed over, looking for a way around.
The other worm followed her through, into the confined space between the ice formations.
Carol twisted hard as she emerged from the pass—she'd clearly scouted the area already, or else had reflexes like lightning.
Even so, she barely avoided the solid cliff face of rock-filled ice waiting on the other side of the narrow pass. She clung impossibly close to the vertical ice wall as she flew up along it.
Below her, the worm slammed directly into the ice cliff and cratered away deep inside it. Fissures spread up along the cliff from the impact site.
“Hell yeah, you Titanic'ed that sucker!” Bartley crowed. “Well, you and me together.”
“See? Lack of finesse,” Carol said. “Here comes the other one...”
Eric glanced away from their battle to the inner wall of the spaceport, which was still swinging much too close for comfort.
Above, two more space worms emerged from a large tunnel mouth on the hull of the coral-ship. They spat out more cables as they approached, grabbing and drilling into the asteroid-cutter's hull.
Working together, the five worms managed to straighten out the Rex's course inside the spaceport...more or less. The ship still dragged too close to the side, scraping against the sharp ends of shattered steel beams and columns as it passed them by. The damage was only cosmetic, but it was needless.
“Sloppy,” Hagen grunted. “Everything they do is so damned sloppy. Wouldn't take much to center us here, but they just don't care.”
The five worms pulled them up toward the worm mothership, which was more than twice the size of the size of the Rex.
“We're dead!” Bartley shouted, making everyone jump.
The projection above Bartley's console showed the second space worm, twisted and blackened, floating past hundreds of tiny bits of ice. The backdrop looked like a snapshot of a snowfall, every flake frozen in time.
Then the research vessel went offline.
“Yeah, that one shot us down, sorry.” Carol removed her immersion goggles. “But we got four of them.”
“Thanks to my future wife's brilliant flying,” Bartley said.
“I told you not to joke about that. It's not funny.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Bartley said. “I'm probably not your type anyway, am I right? Let me guess: I'm way too masculine for you.”
“It's not that.”
“But it's my only flaw.”
“I was married. Foster was my husband's name. Mark...died in a ship crash. An industrial accident. They gave me an insurance check. I just looked at it for months, every day, terrified to cash it. Like that would make it real. More than the funeral. Not that there was a body to bury. Maybe that was part of it. How can it be a real funeral when there's no body?”
“Well, now I do feel sorry as hell,” Bartley said. “I had no idea—”
“Yeah, it's not something I bring up every time I meet someone. He fought in the Colonial infantry. Heavy guns, heavy armor, boots on the ground stuff. He survived battle after battle, on planet after planet. He lived through the war, got a medical discharge. Then he worked for a salvage company. That was supposed to be the safe job. They didn't go anywhere until a battle was over and cold. He was part of a reclamation crew.”
Those words made Eric look over at Iris. Iris was staring at Carol, too; when she noticed Eric, she closed her eyes, and the glass panel to the gatekeeper cabin darkened. Then it reverted to showing a view outside, a fake window again.
“Speaking of salvage, it looks like the worm reclamation crew's coming for us.” Hagen pointed at a new clump of approaching worms, armed with drills and cutting lasers mounted on their backs. “They'll want to tear us apart like that spaceport. Take our metal...and our meat. Weapons, target now but hold
your fire. Rowan...take off the mask.”
Eric nodded. The mask had made him unable to speak when he was disguised as Loader. They didn't want to risk the ship's weapons not working while it was still disguised as a burned-out ghost ship.
He walked to the nearest bulkhead, which looked like it had been blasted open and then scorched by an electrical fire, though it was actually fine. He placed his hand against it and imagined peeling off the mask, separating the relic from the ship. He thought about how relieved he'd felt to remove Loader's face.
The relic flowed into his hand, having gathered itself up from all over the ship. It looked like an iridium cast of his face again. A moment earlier, it had been large and complex enough to disguise an entire starship, even against extremely close inspection. Now it was small and light enough to hold in his hand.
“Missiles!” Hagen shouted at the weapons console. Bartley had joined Naomi and Alanna there.
“Sending the missiles,” Bartley said. “This should be fun.”
On the screen, six winged Hammerhead missiles—not nuclear, but strong enough to punch a hole in most human starfighters—launched away from the Rex. Each small missile was programmed to fly into a different opening on the ship's rocky hull, hopefully following the suction tubes and conveyor belts deep inside before detonating on impact.
The missiles curved and swooped, each following its own path. Each disappeared into a different opening.
Eric and everyone else held their breath for a moment after the missiles flew out of sight.
Then the big rocky ship shuddered, belching small jets of fire from its insides.
“Fire at will!” Hagen shouted.
Since they were moving at low speed in a confined space, they avoided firing bolts of plasma that could end up burning their own ship. They opened up with railguns instead, quickly blasting apart three of the five worms that were towing them.
“Don't let it back up far enough to throw plasma,” Hagen said. “Rowan, hug it close.”
Eric had already jacked into the ship's system. He closed his eyes and took control of the array of giant mining tools.
First, he fired a drill harpoon, which burrowed into the worms' rocky hull. Four smaller drills would emerge from its sides to get it solidly anchored in the rock. A cable now connected the Rex to the much larger rocky ship.