Hollow Space Book 1: Venture (Xantoverse)

by T. F. Grant

  “Yeah,” Tai said. “Thing is, we don’t know what’s in the air.”

  “It might be toxic,” Dylan explained to Sara.

  “Yeah, that too,” Tai said.

  “Huh?” Dylan sounded confused. “What else?”

  “Spores,” Kina said. “There may be spores. Guy came back from a hulk about a twelve orbit ago. Rip in his suit. Zombie spores got inside. Nasty things, take over the central nervous system. Had to burn him and about a hundred other people he had infected.”

  “Freck,” Dylan cursed. “This place is messed up, you know that, right?”

  “Yup.” Tai waited until Dylan stepped onto the gantry and continued forward. A few tense moments later, they all arrived on the other side. The door was already open, grinding as it swung on ruined hinges. Upon closer inspection, Tai noticed a strafing line of bullet holes. He pictured someone running down the gantry, frantically firing behind him.

  Getting used to the tense atmosphere, Tai pushed the door open and aimed his helmet lights into the velvety darkness. The beams caught a few glass reflections: operation screens set into a large console that seemed to arc around a large, open and circular atrium.

  “We’re going in,” Tai said. “Ki, follow up.”

  “On it.” Kina and her squad were covering the gantry. “What do you see?”

  “Just an abandoned control center of some kind.”

  Dylan moved past him, the comm line trailing between them. Tooize moved to Tai’s left, taking up the other flank. As a group they moved further in, casting their lights in wide arcs to take in the Old Station.

  Leafs of paper, stained and colonized by mold and some kind of orange fungus, littered the floor and the desk surfaces. The operation screens were cracked and shattered. Empty large-caliber shells dotted the place like small treasures glinting in the light.

  “Must have been quite the battle down here,” Dylan said, making his way around the right side of the control desk cluster.

  Tai estimated the room was at least thirty meters in diameter. In the center a hollow, transparent chamber extended up beyond their vision.

  “What’s that?” Sara asked as she, Kina, and Lofreal joined Tai and the others.

  “Jump tube,” Kina said. “I saw the Drifts talking over some pictures of one once. Apparently, they were how the Xantonians traveled from the planet to the station.”

  Tai stepped closer and leaned over a railing to point his lights closer in. “Freck,” he said, stretching his comm line. “Dyl, give us some slack, man.”

  “What is it?” Dylan asked, moving closer to allow Tai to move forward.

  “Look,” Tai said, pointing the barrel of his rifle at the base of the jump tube.

  Dylan said nothing as Sara gasped.

  Staring out at them, illuminated by the glare of the lights, were the empty eye sockets of a skull. Not human. The head was taller and the jaw lower. Surrounding the skull and painted on the inside of the tube like an exploded steak in a Quito-wave oven, deep, burnt orange gore and pieces of decayed pale-green flesh told a story of a painful death.

  Tai stepped forward until he was just a meter away. Only half the skeleton remained, cut off from below the long rib cage. It appeared just the poor bastard’s top half made it through the jump tube. But then as Tai looked further, he realized it wasn’t the only skeleton. Looking down the tube, he saw a bone pit filled with thousands of bones of all shapes, sizes and species.

  “That’s not pleasant,” Tai said, backing away. “Let’s find the elevator or stairs and get on with this. Longer we stand about the—” He broke off as a vibration traveled up his feet and legs. He turned around to see if anyone was moving.

  “What is it?” Dylan asked, his eyes wide with suspense.

  Tai looked down and realized he was the only one standing on the narrow section leading to the jump tube. “Anyone else feel the vibrations?”

  “No, not here,” Kina said as the others agreed.

  “Dylan, come stand by me,” Tai ordered.

  Dylan obeyed and stepped forward until he too stood on the same section. “Freck, I can feel it. It’s… I don’t know, pulsing perhaps? Must be coming from down there somewhere.”

  “You mean where we’re going?” Sara asked with a tone of complete resignation.

  “It could just be some old mechanism running; let’s not get carried away,” Tai said, more for himself than the others. Images of some tentacled beast in the levels below came to him. He was sure he saw tooth marks on the bones within the tube. It wasn’t just a convenient place to lay the dead. It looked like someone’s trash bin.

  “Tooize, lead the way to the left corridor out of here,” Tai said, pointing his beams to indicate the way. “We should find both the stairwell and the elevator shaft. If you see anything move, chop it down. I don’t want any messing around in this Godforsaken place.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Tooize whistled.

  Walking as a group, their weapons aiming to all shadows and crevices, they followed the big kronac out of the atrium and through a corridor. The walls shone glossily under the lights. Millions of small particles gave off a faint blue bioluminescence. Tai reached out and touched the surface with the tip of his finger. When he pulled it away, the substance stuck until it stretched and finally broke, the strands becoming gooey before retreating back to the walls.

  The whole corridor appeared to shift. As one, the sticky substance rippled and changed from a blue to a red glow. The group stopped, waited. Nothing happened. But Tai could feel that pulsing coming up through the floor tiles.

  “This place is frecked up,” Dylan said. “No wonder the Drifts had trouble getting people to come here.”

  “Correction,” Tai said. “They had trouble with people coming back.”

  “Oh, that’s just great for morale,” Kina added.

  “Better you lot realize the dangers and stay on alert. Keep moving. This shit is just some fungus or something. Quicker we get to the library, the quicker we can all be nicely tucked up in bed back on Haven.”

  That the Drifts had traded all this weaponry with Dylan told Tai that those shrubby little frecks knew more about what was here than they let on. Still, they must have been confident Tai and the others could do the job; otherwise why waste sending Dylan with all the arms?

  It didn’t ease his concerns, however.

  They continued on in a tense silence, following behind Tooize until they turned through a series of passages and came out to a small lobby, just large enough to accommodate all of them. The stairwell was at the left side while on the right they found the elevator.

  “Seems they had a little mechanical trouble,” Dylan said, stepping closer to the elevator and indicating with his rifle.

  Of course, Dylan’s dry wit played down the severity of this trouble. It went beyond mechanical, Tai saw. The doors were smashed in, crumpling the graphsteele as though it were just foil so that they no longer passed through the shaft. All around the pinch points were hundreds of smaller holes, uniform in size, with the diameter of a human thumb. They punched right through the door. Tai’s lights shone through to the rear wall of the elevator car. Dark, multicolored smears and stains stretched up the surface. Whatever was inside seemed to have been pierced by hundreds of points.

  “I think we ought to get some exercise and take the stairs this time. Good for our health,” Tai said.

  No one said anything beyond a murmur of agreement.

  ***

  Tooize whistled in alarm and fired off a three-second blast into the shadows as he led the group away from the stairwell. Smoke rose from the minigun. Nothing else moved.

  “What the hell was that?” Tai asked, raising his rifle to his chest.

  “Movement,” the kronac whistled. “Lots of it, small, en masse.”

  “I think you got ’em,” Dylan said.

  Lofreal, who had been quiet throughout the whole exercise, stepped forward and clicked on the pilot flame of the fire-lance. “I
don’t like it,” she said.

  “Everyone just calm down,” Tai ordered. He panned his lights across the lobby. They had come down to the tenth level, where the library was situated. But before they could reach it, they had to pass through one more corridor, and according to the notebook, they’d go by the chapel. At this point in the author’s experience, things started to go a little wrong. He spoke of visions and sounds inside his head, and his oft-repeated phrase about the buzzing.

  Tai could still feel that pulsing beneath his feet, but no buzzing. He thought it was likely there was some long-forgotten generator running somewhere on a backup system. Who knew what the Xantonians installed in their station before they went extinct?

  “Anyone see anything?” Tai said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nope.”

  “No.”

  “We go on. Tooize, lead the way. The chapel will be on your right. We don’t go in, understand? Straight ahead to the library at the end of this passage.”

  The kronac hefted the gun, pointed its spinning barrel into the darkness, and moved off. The group stayed in a close formation, scanning the deep, dark shadows as they moved through. All around them the stygian black smothered them as though it were a substantial entity, their lights only penetrating a few meters in front.

  Thirty seconds into their trek through the tight corridor, Tai saw them. At first he thought them to be an artifact of his night vision struggling to adapt with all the lights. “Wait,” Tai said, stopping the group. He kneeled down and turned his head to the side.

  There they were. Pressed into the corner where the floor met the wall, small arachnid-like creatures the size of his palm skittered between piles of… what were they? Prodding with his rifle, the soft bundle collapsed. Inside, dozens of the six-legged creatures with a black and red glossy carapace swarmed over bones and other small items wrapped in a weblike substance.

  Tai stepped back with a yell as hundreds of the little freckers swarmed toward him. He fired off the rifle, the shots embedding in the wall uselessly. “Lofreal, burn ’em!” Tai screamed.

  Lofreal grunted and stepped to the side, allowing Tai and the others to move back. She pointed the fire-lance down and pulled the trigger, dousing the corridor in a wall of flame. The light reflected off everyone’s steel-glass helmets. Tai closed his eyes against the sudden brightness. One of the arachnids leapt from the flames and struck his visor, its sticky, burning body smoking and steaming.

  Tai quickly realized it was burning through the glass! He thrashed it with the butt of his rifle until it hit the floor and twitched once before becoming still.

  “Tai, you okay?” Kina said over the comms among the burst of voices.

  “Yeah… I’m okay. Everyone else?”

  They answered in the affirmative. The flames from Lofreal’s lance eased, revealing the darkness again. Their helmet lights picked up hundreds of small, burnt corpses. Tai thought he could still see movement in the shadows, but knew it was just his heightened imagination. His brain tricking him into getting the hell out of there.

  Wasn’t happening. Gritting his teeth, he stepped forward. “Onward,” he said. “We’ve wasted enough time.” Every step seemed to elicit a thud or pulse from beneath. The station seemed as though it were alive. Somewhere in the dark depths, he pictured a gigantic black heart pumping evil through the arteries of the station.

  They came to the chapel. The metal door had a silver Mobius strip painted on its surface. It was rusting and decaying. From this point on, the walls were coated in that same weird slime as they’d encountered before. Tai knew this wasn’t going to be a chapel to the Free Church of Sanctity.

  “Why’ve we stopped?” Dylan said. “The library’s just ahead.”

  Curiosity was a total bastard. It had blighted Tairon Cauder since he was old enough to speak the word. He knew he should listen to Dylan. That was the sensible and right thing to do. He knew that going into the chapel would add undue risk to the mission, but he had to see. Had to see if the author was right or whether he truly was mad.

  “Hang there. I won’t be a minute. I just need to check something. Everyone be on alert.” Tai pressed his booted foot against the door and eased it open. It swung easily inward. Tai stepped into the chapel and gasped.

  The room stretched no more than about five meters wide and long. At the head was a narrow steel-glass lectern. Behind it, hanging on the wall… Tai looked away, blinked, but the image wouldn’t dissipate from his retinas… the shapes, the deformity, it shouldn’t be.

  “What is it?” Kina said. “Tai?”

  Backing out of the room, he pulled the door closed. “Nothing,” he lied. “We go to the library like Dylan said, and then we’re getting the freck out of here. Let’s go.”

  Without waiting for an argument, Tai stepped forward, with an extra pace in his step, heading for the double doors, wooden, like the ones at the Drift’s Great Library on Haven. Haven! It seemed so far away now, almost as if Tai had never actually been there. The taut, tense atmosphere of this place had warped time so that it seemed he’d been here forever.

  His heart raced until it matched his steps and, worryingly, the pulsing.

  “Just what is that?” Sara said as they followed behind him. “It’s not just coming from beneath us,” she added. “It’s all around.”

  She was right. Tai had noticed it shortly after looking into the chapel… Why did he have to be curious? Why couldn’t he be cautious like his mother? Considered, thoughtful, strategic. Oh no, he had to be that annoying little bastard who stuck his head where it didn’t belong, and now he would never get the image of those poor men and women out of his mind.

  Even now, standing in front of the library doors, he could see them: their bodies were punctured as they were nailed to the wall. But not with nails. Something else, something organic. They looked like snapped-off pincers of some sort. Rough and ragged at the end as though they had been ripped off some animal.

  It wasn’t even the puncturing that had struck him as so deeply disturbing; it was the formation of their bodies. A man and a women were woven together to form the infinity sign—the Mobius strip. An old sign belonging to the heretical churches of the Xantonians.

  And then there was the thing above it, looking down on them. An inanimate effigy…

  “We go through in pairs. Me and Tooize. Everyone else cover us. Shoot the hell out of anything that moves. I’m taking no risks. After two.”

  He pressed his free hand to the doors. Through the glove and travelling up his arm wasn’t the pulsing that he had become accustomed to. No, this was something else.

  Buzzing.

  “One… two.”

  Tai pushed open the doors. They gave easily and collapsed forward, breaking away from the hinges. They slapped against the floor, sending up hundreds of loose pieces of paper, obscuring their vision. The stacks loomed high into the darkness. Tai moved further in, gripping his rifle with both hands, bringing it up to his chest, readying to fire.

  The others rushed in behind him, taking the flanks.

  “Shit, man, look at all this,” Dylan said.

  The library was twice as large as the one on Haven. The stacks and tables were overflowing with books and papers. But as Tai swiped the flittering papers clear and stepped forward to shine his lights further into the reaches, he saw what they had come for.

  Three-quarters of the way into the library, and only just visible beneath their lights, Tai confirmed it was what Sharp-Thorn had told him would be here. Propped up on a pew and leaning over a table, the dead, inert trunk of a Drift. But not just any Drift.

  Sharp-Thorn’s clone.

  And beneath the leafless trunk, its enzyme book.

  “The objective is there,” Tai said, pointing.

  “Mine too,” Dylan added. “I’ve come for that.” He pointed to the enzyme book.

  “Let’s grab it and get the freck out of here, then.”

  Before they could reach their joint objective,
they stopped.

  Inside Tai’s helmet, he could feel and hear the buzzing. It was coming from all round.

  The others noticed it too.

  “It’s everywhere,” Kina said. “He was right… he was right all along.”

  “What is it?” Sara asked, an edge of panic coming through her words.

  Tai spun round, but couldn’t see anything. Then he looked up.

  “Oh… shiiiiit.”

  Sara screamed, making Tai wince. Covering the ceiling were hundreds of writhing black bodies, with two-meter-long pincers hanging below a secondary abdomen. Between each one hung tens of thousands of paper nests.

  “Void hornets!” Tai screamed.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Sara watched as the mass of creatures… void hornets, what the hell were they? And what kind of name was that? A nasty name for a nasty creature, her mind whispered back. She blinked, shook her head inside the helmet, and studied the creatures. The mass of creatures moved slowly, rhythmically, across the ceiling of the library.

  Her skin crawled at the sight of them, but still she looked. They weren’t moving purposefully. “I think they’re sleeping,” she said.

  Kina took a little while to reply. “Yeah, you may be right. They might be hibernating or at least asleep.”

  “At least the screams didn’t wake them.” Tai chuckled. It was not a nice sound. “Right, let’s move on. Kina, your team stays here to cover our exit. Tooize, you link to Kina. I’ll move forward with Dylan. Don’t fire unless they start flying. Maybe we can get in and out without them waking up.”

  “I should go with you,” Tooize whistled. “The trunk will be heavy.”

  “We’ll handle it. Better if you cover us from here with that minigun.”

  “I still—” Tooize began.

  “He’s right,” Kina interrupted. “Lofreal, cover our exit. Sara, you take the left flank. I’ll take the right. Tooize, take the center. Watch your arcs of fire. Be careful, Tai,” she said. “And be damned quiet.”

  “On it.”

  Tai and Dylan moved forward into the library, moving out of contact with the others.