The main problem had been getting into the armory, which was no more than a small locked closet inside one of the ship’s storage holds that held a few “just in case” weapons and ammunition that the ship’s designers had put in as an afterthought. But he didn’t have to use his knowledge of astronomy, physics, or engineering to open the armory. Some problems yield themselves quite satisfactorily to the judicious application of a crowbar and hammer.
After that, moving through the ship had been a nightmare. He hadn’t gone through all the compartments, of course, but from what he’d found so far, Aurora had become an abattoir. He had vomited after stumbling across the first butchered bodies, and periodically had been beset by dry heaves ever since. He had never seen a dead body before, let alone one of someone he’d known and worked with. Some bodies had been decapitated. The heads were strewn about the deck, expressions of terror forever fixed to their faces. Some bodies had arms or legs hacked off...
He shuddered, then went down to one knee as he felt his gorge rise again.
“Lieutenant?” Anna asked worriedly, putting a hand on Amundsen’s shoulder.
“I’ll be all right,” he said hoarsely, trying to regain his composure. A genius in many ways and aware of the fact, he had never claimed to be a leader of men. But he realized that he had a responsibility now to these two younger almost-officers. While his rage at what the aliens had done was as fierce as ever, he wasn’t on a quest for vengeance anymore. He had to try and look after these two. And find the captain. “It’s just...” he shook his head and chuckled mirthlessly. “Never mind.” He forced himself to stand up. “Come on, let’s see if we can get to the bridge and find the captain.”
They made their way back to the stairs leading up to the next level, only to find another pair of aliens standing halfway up the steps, as if they had been expecting the humans.
Amundsen reacted instantly, bringing the rifle to his shoulder and sighting down its length at one of the alien horrors, but he never had a chance to pull the trigger.
One of the aliens already had her hand on her collar, touching it just so as Amundsen raised his weapon to fire.
The last thing he saw was a blinding flash of white. He hit the floor, unconscious, the two midshipmen collapsing beside him.
CHAPTER THREE
“Sir? Captain, are you all right?”
McClaren heard the voice as if from far away, through a dull ringing in his ears. He tried to open his eyes, and was rewarded with a thousand hot needles lancing into his optic nerve. He hissed with the pain.
“It’ll pass in a minute, captain,” the voice said again, closer this time. Chief Harkness. “You must’ve gotten a big jolt,” she went on quietly, her hand on his shoulder. Her touch felt very warm. “Fucking alien bitches,” she suddenly spat.
He smiled grimly. Whatever had happened to the ship, he was glad Harkness had made it. This far, at least.
“How many,” he asked her, squinting up into her worried face. “Do you know how many of the crew...are okay?”
For a moment she didn’t answer, but looked up at someone else. His eyes followed her and found Amundsen, kneeling at his other side.
“Twenty-three survivors, sir,” he said quietly. “Including yourself.”
McClaren couldn’t hide his shock. “Twenty-three? Out of a crew of two hundred eight?” They helped him sit up. The aliens had gathered the human survivors in Aurora’s main galley.
Amundsen was only grateful that it hadn’t been the lower galley where he had been forced to abandon Raj Kumar. The ship’s XO was not among the survivors, and Amundsen had seen enough in the rest of the ship to know what must have happened to him. “Yes, sir,” he said. “That’s all. Everyone else is...” He shook his head slowly.
McClaren didn’t have to hear the word to know that all the other men and women of his crew were gone. Dead. Amundsen’s haunted eyes told him that they hadn’t gone down easily. He remembered the swords that the aliens who attacked the bridge had been armed with, and imagined the havoc that such weapons could cause in the close quarters of a ship. Fucking alien bitches, Harkness had said. He couldn’t have agreed more. “Get me up,” he ordered. Harkness and Amundsen helped the captain to his feet, where he stood, swaying. His inner ears were playing tricks with his balance, and he smelled the sharp scent of ozone. But his vision was clearing, and he took a look around the galley.
The members of his crew, what was left of it, all stood to attention. Marisova and the rest of the bridge crew. Yao and two of the midshipmen. The half dozen sailors from the forward survey module. Another half dozen from the engineering section. Harkness. Amundsen. And himself.
Then he saw the blood. The left side of the galley was covered in it, with pools of it among the tables. He stared at the streaks and sprays of crimson that stained the dark gray deck tiles and the white walls. Even the ceiling. So much blood. He couldn’t tear his eyes away.
“They allowed us to move the bodies, captain,” Amundsen explained, nodding toward the four aliens who stood wary guard at the galley’s entrance. “Six crewmen were cornered in here. We...moved the remains into the storage closet in the back and covered them.”
McClaren turned back to Amundsen. That was when he noticed the blood on Amundsen’s uniform. On his hands and arms. On his face. McClaren imagined, knew, that this is what the entire ship was like. It had become a slaughterhouse. His stomach suddenly dropped away into a bottomless abyss, and he felt his sanity starting to follow down after it. No, he told himself desperately, trying to reassert control of himself. No! The crew needs you. You’re not taking the easy way out. You can’t.
Forcing his eyes shut, he blocked out the horror for a moment. He took a deep breath to calm himself, but the smell of blood suddenly poured through the stench of ozone he had been smelling. The coppery scent threatened to overwhelm him, and he started to lean over, about to vomit.
He suddenly felt a steadying hand on his shoulder again, squeezing tightly. Chief Harkness. He covered her hand with his, squeezed it tight in return. He willed away the tears as anger began to replace despair.
At last regaining his composure, he let go of the chief’s hand and turned back to his crew. Back to business, he told himself. “Does anyone know if the engineering crew was able to destroy the navigation computer core?”
“No soft wipe was performed, captain,” Petty Officer Yao told him immediately, his eyes downcast. That would have been his responsibility had the order been given. He knew intellectually that there was no way he could have wiped the core after the aliens overwhelmed the electrical system, even had he been given orders to do so. The order had never come, but he felt a sense of shame nonetheless.
Beyond that, Yao was not even sure how he had survived to be here. After he had told the two midshipmen to run, he had turned back to fight the aliens confronting them. They surprised him by refusing to fight him as a group, only singly. But after he had managed to kill two in a set of fierce sword fights, the last one had somehow paralyzed him and rendered him unconscious. He remembered nothing else until waking up here, maybe fifteen minutes ago.
“There was nothing you could have done about that, Yao,” McClaren reassured him. “If anyone is to blame, it’s our blue-skinned hosts.”
“Captain,” Amundsen interjected, “I went through the computer core compartment before I met up with the midshipmen,” he nodded to Anna and Ichiro, who stood next to Yao. “The engineers weren’t able to set off any charges because of whatever the aliens did to our power systems. They opened the core manually and tried to destroy the primary crystals. Some of them were destroyed, but...”
“There would have been far too many to destroy in such a fashion in the moments they had before the enemy arrived,” Yao finished for him. He had spent more time in and around the primary computer core than anyone else in the ship, and he knew better than most the futility of trying what the engineers had done. But he gave them great credit for making the attempt, and said a s
ilent prayer for their spirits. He and Amundsen had talked briefly before the captain woke up from the stun he had received, and the computer core had been their first topic of conversation. The younger officer had described the carnage he had found in the compartment, where three young engineers armed only with basic tools had fought against some of the alien warriors. The engineers had died, but they had taken one of the aliens with them, a long screwdriver shoved through her neck. The alien’s killer, a young woman Amundsen had barely recognized, lay dead beside her, the alien’s knife still buried in her chest. “They will have destroyed some information,” Yao went on, “but the chances are great that most of the navigation data remains intact. The system is holographic and redundant. Critical data is stored and phased across multiple crystals.”
“People,” McClaren told them through gritted teeth, “the aliens must not be allowed to retrieve our navigation data. We cannot allow these...things to discover where we came from.” He swept his gaze over the blood stains left on the galley walls and floor. “We can’t allow this to happen to our home planets-”
“Captain,” Harkness interrupted softly, “look.”
McClaren turned to see half a dozen warriors enter the galley, taking up positions next to the four already standing guard. They were accompanied by four more aliens who wore no armor, but simple white robes and collars around their necks. Aside from their mode of dress, they looked identical to the warriors. Looking more closely, he noticed that these aliens didn’t seem to have claws on their hands. Then he took a close look at what each of them was holding.
“What the hell is that?” one of the crewmen behind him said, a thread of fear twisting through his voice as he saw the same thing that McClaren had noticed.
Each of the robed aliens held an amoebic mass of what could only be living tissue. Roughly the mass of a grapefruit, each of the gelatinous blobs was dark green and purple, slowly writhing in their bearer’s hands.
McClaren felt an immediate visceral revulsion toward the things, and almost in unison the humans stepped back, away from their captors.
The warriors took that as a cue to move forward, spreading out with their swords held at the ready to deter their captives from doing anything rash. Two moved over to one of the young female ratings from engineering, roughly grabbing her arms and dragging her toward the waiting robed figures and their undulating pets. She screamed and struggled, kicking fiercely at the warriors’ legs. One of them raised her sword hand to smash her in the face-
“Stop!” McClaren boomed. The aliens may not have understood the word, but they certainly seemed to understand a command voice when they heard it. The warrior about to strike the woman paused, turning to look at him, as did the others of her kind. McClaren calmly walked over to them. “Let her go,” he said quietly, gesturing at the young woman the two warriors held. “Take me instead.” He pointed at himself.
The warriors paused, still holding the woman, when one of the other warriors standing near the robed aliens spoke. “Ka’ana te lath.” The young woman was immediately released, and her captors looked expectantly at McClaren.
“Go on, Ramirez,” he told the woman, “get back with the others.”
“But captain...” she whispered hoarsely, her frightened eyes darting to the robed aliens and what they held waiting for him.
“It’s okay,” he reassured her with a confidence he didn’t feel. He glanced at Amundsen, and the younger man nodded sadly. You’re in charge now, lieutenant, he told himself. But he didn’t trust his voice to speak the words aloud.
With that, he turned and walked toward the galley table the four robed aliens had gathered around. One of the warriors stopped him, then in a few swift motions with an incredibly sharp knife cut off his uniform, even his boots. The robed aliens gestured for him to lay on the table, and he did so, the cold metal burning against the skin of his naked body. Then the four robed aliens gathered around him and one of them began to knead the mass of pulsating tissue she held.
The crew watched in horrified fascination as the alien worked the strange tissue like it was pizza dough, expertly kneading, pressing, and twirling it until it was no thicker than a piece of paper, but large enough to cover McClaren’s entire body. With one last twirl, she let go of the thing, and it settled through the air to land on him.
As the hideous shroud touched him, McClaren suppressed a scream. It wasn’t because the thing was causing him pain, because it wasn’t. But he felt such a primal wrongness as it touched his flesh. It was cool and slimy against his skin, covering him from head to toe, and he desperately held his breath, because the thought of that thing falling into his mouth was a nightmare come to life.
Then he felt it start to move. It began to wrap itself tighter about him. It wasn’t constricting him, but seemed to be making a better fit for itself, like a self-shaping glove. He even felt it somehow working its way under him, insinuating itself between his body and the table. The sensation of being completely encased in oozing, living slime was hideously unpleasant even before it began to probe his nostrils and ears. Then it started on his eyes, forcing itself between his tightly shut eyelids. Nothing being sacred to this alien horror, it pressed against his anus, even the opening of his penis.
Between that and his burning lungs, McClaren had had enough. He tried to move his arms to clear the thing from his mouth and nose, but any movement he made was futile: this thing seemed slimy and malleable, but when he tried to move it hardened like concrete. He was totally immobilized.
He willed himself to hold his breath until he was unconscious, but his body betrayed him. With a soundless scream on his lips, he opened his mouth wide as his body forced him into a last-ditch attempt to gather in some air. As if it had been waiting for this, the thing rushed into his mouth, then down his throat as the tendrils invading his nostrils suddenly pulsed through his sinuses, then expanded down his trachea into his lungs.
On the verge now of blacking out, McClaren was sure he was going to die. Absolutely, positively sure.
But as the slime entered his lungs, the strangest thing happened: the urge to suck in huge breaths abated, and the stars that were forming in his vision as his brain ran out of oxygen disappeared. He wasn’t breathing, but he was clearly getting oxygen now. The slime was somehow doing it.
Then he felt a sensation of pleasant warmth. It wasn’t localized to one spot, but was throughout his body. He’d never felt anything like it before. It was as if someone had taken a magical heating pad that didn’t just lay on a part of his body, but actually became a part of it, warming and massaging every cell. He was afraid to admit it, but aside from a brief flare of hot pain in his lower back, this part of this bizarre experience was actually pleasant.
Suddenly he became aware that he could move his arms again. Not only that, but his eyes seemed clear. He blinked them open to see the four robed aliens looking at him attentively. He held up one of his hands to look at it, and saw the last traces of slime as it sank into his flesh, as if it had melded with him on a cellular level. He ran his hands over his chest, his upper thighs: the slime had disappeared. Right into his skin.
He lay there for a few more moments before he felt a tremor in his chest. The terror suddenly returned, with visions of some nightmarish apparition bursting from his rib cage, but fortunately he was disappointed. Another moment of increasing discomfort passed, and then suddenly the entire mass of slime forced itself back out of his lungs, oozing out of his mouth.
“Agghhh!” he gagged as the thing’s keeper retrieved it. He had no idea how the whole thing had managed to get into his lungs. It was as if it had somehow penetrated his body like some sort of biological scanning device, then gathered in his lungs for convenient extraction.
The robed alien, who seemed distinctly more pleasant than the warriors, gestured for him to get up. He made to return to the others, but she gently stopped him. Standing behind him, she ran her hands professionally (he had no other word for it) along his lower spine. Then sh
e gripped one of his hips and put her opposite hand on a shoulder, gently pushing him forward, apparently trying to get him to bend forward at the waist. He did so, and after she ran her fingers over a few of his lumbar vertebrae, she gestured for him to straighten up, which he did. She exchanged a few quiet words with the warrior who had spoken earlier, and then gestured for him to return to the others.
As McClaren rejoined his elated crew, who pointedly ignored his nakedness, something struck him as odd: his lower back, where he had felt the surge of painful heat earlier, now felt fine. Better than fine. It felt perfect. And he knew that it shouldn’t, because he had a very mild case of arthritis in his lumbar region that the ship’s surgeon had warned him would ground him at the end of this deployment. It didn’t interfere with his duties, and consistent exercise helped keep it at bay, but it was a constant source of mild discomfort. Now it was gone. And the robed alien had known it would be; that’s why she examined that particular area. Somehow, that blob of slime had communicated to her whatever it had done, or seen, in his body.
The fucking alien bitches, as Harkness had called them earlier, had completely cured him.
* * *
The warriors looked on as the animal who was dominant convinced the others to come to the healers without further struggle. One by one, and then in groups of four, they came to be tended. The healing gel was the only instrument used by the healers other than some specialized potions; it was the only instrument needed. A product of forced evolution millennia long past, the gel was at once an organism unto itself, yet also a part of the healer to which it was bonded. It had no intelligence of its own, yet could perform the most complex tasks to heal or repair another organism, even a completely alien species.
In Her Name: The Last War Page 6