“Would it really hurt to let two lousy people escape?” BeBob groaned. “We didn’t even belong here in the first place.”
Rlinda was already sweating in her half-assembled suit. After seeing the nematodes make short work of the fallen Roamers down there, she knew the thick fabric would offer little protection. Those sharp teeth sent a shudder down Rlinda’s spine, but she had no intention of letting either herself or her favorite ex-husband be turned into worm food.
All business, moving as swiftly as she could, Rlinda turned BeBob around, checked his suit diagnostics and his air supply, and pronounced him fully green. “Now you check me out.” She backed closer to BeBob.
With a mechanical sigh of surrender, the lift finally ground to a complete stop, and it was still far from the top.
“That’s not good,” BeBob said.
“You’re the master of minimizing.” She tried to calm her breathing, but the skittering, thumping sounds of the worms grew louder from below, making her sweat even more. She was embarrassingly close to panic. “Hurry up!”
Nematodes ripped through another floor segment, and Rlinda had to jerk her feet away from the jagged mouths. BeBob checked her diagnostics, squinted at the readouts, then ran his gloved hands over her padded garment. “Enough foreplay, BeBob! Is my suit intact or not? We have to blow out of this chamber.”
“Want me to take shortcuts? You’ll be the first one to complain if your suit pops open in the vacuum.”
“My suit won’t help if those worms chew a hole in it, either.”
He adjusted something, then made a satisfied sound. “There, you’re good to go as soon as we put our helmets on.”
She popped the helmet over BeBob’s head and gave it a quick clockwise twist to seal its collar. “The lift shaft is probably jacketed and pressurized, with an emergency sphincter or two. Up top I assume there’s another airlock leading outside.”
BeBob said something, but his helmet muffled the words; when he pushed a suitcomm toggle on his chest pack, his voice came through a speaker in the collar of Rlinda’s suit. “—the way Karla Tamblyn is blasting everything down there, she might have cracked something open. If the shaft collapses, we’re screwed.”
Rlinda studied the roof of the lift chamber, finding the emergency access hatch. “BeBob, we have a wide selection of ways to be screwed. That’s why I want you out on the roof. I’m tired of these critters trying to eat our toes. I’ll bend down and cup my hands so you can step in them. Use my knees if you want, and open that access hatch so we can climb out.”
“Me? Shouldn’t I be lifting you up? You could go first.”
“Thanks for being a gentleman, BeBob, but I’m twice your weight. Even though Plumas has low gravity, let’s not get cocky.”
With a crash, the gathered nematodes bent another floor section until the opening was big enough for one to push its gelatinous red body through. Its skin membrane pulsed, and the protoplasmic body core thrust forward, squirting the creature halfway into the chamber.
Rlinda stomped on its head with her full weight, bursting its body membrane and leaving it jiggling on the floor. Only seconds later, two others fought to squeeze through the same opening.
With a worried glance at the oncoming swarm, BeBob quickly stepped on Rlinda’s knee and put his other foot in the cradle of her hands. She boosted him up so he could fumble with the hatch. “At least it’s an analog mechanism. No electronics or control sequence.”
More nematodes began to work their way through, crystalline jaws snapping closer to Rlinda. Holding BeBob steady, she couldn’t move to squash them with her boots. She kept glancing down. The worms were almost through.
“BeBob, you think you could—”
He worked frantically until he snapped the latch and pushed open the trapdoor. “That’s got it.” She gave him a solid shove, and BeBob sprang upward in the low gravity, shooting most of the way through the hole in the roof. Catching himself on his elbows, he hauled himself up.
No longer needing to support him, Rlinda landed a swift, hard kick on the nearest nematode. It retracted briefly, then lunged forward again. Her second kick didn’t bother the creature as much, and some of the moist slime clung to her boot. From the grotto below, Karla Tamblyn’s dark energy drove the nematodes beyond any sensations of pain. “It’s getting harder to discourage them.”
On top of the lift, BeBob flopped flat on his stomach, stuck his helmeted head back down, and extended his hand. “Come on. I’ll pull you up.”
Rlinda didn’t see any other way. She grasped his gloved hand in her own, bent her knees, and counted, “One—two—three.” She sprang with all her strength. BeBob managed to tug her through the hatch up to her waist. She barely fit. Rlinda’s feet dangled and kicked while she struggled upward. BeBob seized her shoulders.
Unhindered now, nematodes tore apart the floor plates, chewed other access holes, and slithered like a nest of snakes into the chamber. Rlinda yanked her legs up and out of the way just as diamond teeth snapped at her heel. She climbed onto the roof and slammed the hatch back down with a clang. “Talk about a can of worms!”
Now that they were on top of the lift, Rlinda tilted her helmet back to see the dizzying height of the shaft above. “I really hoped the elevator would carry us a little closer to the top.”
“Look, rungs!” BeBob pointed. Like the ridges of an endless centipede, alloy bars had been implanted in the shaft’s jacketed ice wall.
“You’re kidding.” She imagined Roamers hauling themselves hand over hand up the shaft just for the exercise. “Do I look like an athlete to you?”
“You look beautiful to me, and you always have.”
Rlinda rolled her eyes. “I never pegged you as one of those daredevils who gets hot and horny when his life is on the line.”
“I thought I was being romantic.”
“Save it for when we get to the Curiosity. Once we’re away from this place, I guarantee you I’ll be in the mood. Come on, get moving!”
Below, the nematodes squirmed into the lift chamber, writhing on top of each other, then using their slime adhesion to crawl up the walls. They hadn’t yet figured how to get to the roof, but it would be only a matter of minutes.
BeBob gestured toward the rungs. “Ladies first.”
“You want to look at my big butt during the whole climb up?”
BeBob turned his helmet away as if embarrassed. “Actually, I was thinking you’d do a better job of opening the airlock at the top, and I wanted to give you first crack at it.”
“Hmmm, practical and romantic. Tell me again why I ever divorced you.”
“Because we couldn’t stand each other at the time.”
Rlinda had divorced quite a few men, but Branson Roberts was the only one for whom she still carried a torch. “Right. I like it better this way. Why mess with a good thing?”
She grabbed the rungs and started to climb. BeBob secured the crossbar on the roof hatch, though it would take the worms only a short while to chew through the metal itself. The thought was enough to give Rlinda some incentive. Though she made good speed in the light gravity, within five minutes she was puffing loudly into the echo chamber of her helmet. The suit’s recirc and cooling systems worked overtime.
Feeling vibrations through the shaft wall, she imagined Karla’s continuing mayhem in the grotto below. Though the Tamblyn brothers had caused them plenty of headaches, Rlinda would have helped if she’d had the option. But this was a mess of the Roamers’ own making; she and BeBob had no part in it.
High above, she could see a necklace of lights marking the top of the shaft and the waiting airlock. Huffing, she grabbed the next rung, then the next, and the next. Her muscles ached, and her lungs were on fire. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d exerted herself so. BeBob climbed steadily behind her.
When she heard tinny thumps far below, she realized that the nematodes were battering against the roof of the lift chamber; through sheer numbers, they knocked open the ha
tch and began boiling out onto the roof. Exuding gelatinous slime, the nematodes adhered to the smooth shaft wall. They squirmed like caterpillars, circling around the borehole—and climbing fast.
She paused to glance down, saw the red nematodes gaining ground. “No need to look, Rlinda,” BeBob called. “Just assume they’re getting closer. If you hear my scream and then a crunching sound, you can be sure you’re next.”
She pulled herself nearer to the surface and freedom. The Roamer environment suit carried a kit of useful tools, but once she got to the top, Rlinda would still need time to finesse the airlock. Doubts began to pile up in her mind, brought on by fear. What if the airlock had a fail-safe system that disabled in the event the lift chamber was not sealed in place, or if the doors at the bottom of the shaft weren’t properly sealed? She didn’t even want to think about that and concentrated only on climbing. Climbing. Her mind was already planning how she would fudge the airlock controls. There had to be some sort of emergency egress mechanism.
Rlinda reached the top so unexpectedly that she was startled to find no more rungs. The inner airlock door was sealed, as she’d feared, and the control panel wasn’t one of the standard models. She yanked out the tools clipped to her suit and went to work. When she exposed the controls, she found handwritten notations on all the wiring. “How am I supposed to figure this out?”
BeBob kept climbing, a dozen rungs beneath her. “As fast as you can—that would be my preference.” Then he yelped.
The closest nematode reared up just below his leg, and BeBob kicked hard enough to knock it loose. The creature’s slimy adhesion wasn’t strong enough to hold, and the invertebrate dropped down the shaft. But seven other nematodes were chomping their way up after it, with plenty more behind those.
She didn’t see any way she could decipher these controls and cycle the airlock in the time they had available. She did, however, understand the standard automatic-purge routine. She made up her mind. “Wrap your arms around one of those rungs, BeBob, and hold on.” She dragged the blade of a screwdriver across the circuitry to short out all safety interlocks, then manually cracked open both the inner and outer pressure doors.
With a thump of decompression, the air inside the shaft was sucked out like a cold beverage through a straw. Hooking her boot around one rung and her arms around another, Rlinda held herself in place as evacuating air rushed past. BeBob clung just beneath her.
Far, far below, at the bottom of the shaft, an emergency seal door clanged into place to protect the inhabited underground grotto, and sphincters closed off the shaft at several levels. At least something was still working properly.
The shaft’s air geysered out, pulling the bloated scarlet creatures from the wall. The nematodes shot outside into the hard vacuum like wet tendrils of phlegm. Once they hit the freezing emptiness, their skin membranes could not hold their internal pressure, and they exploded.
The tug of wind lasted only a few seconds until the shaft was drained. Rlinda reached down to grasp BeBob’s hand, pulling him up, and the two of them climbed through the jimmied airlock door. Outside they saw shelter huts, piping, wellheads, several large water tankers. And the Voracious Curiosity.
Rlinda laughed with relief to see her ship, then looked down at the splatters of crimson ice and shredded worm bodies. BeBob bounded past her. “No time for sightseeing. That woman could crack through the crust at any minute.”
She didn’t need to be told twice. Within moments they got themselves aboard, and Rlinda coaxed the engines to life. “The Curiosity’s still pretty battered, and it looks like those Roamers never got around to fixing everything. But she can fly.”
“Then let’s fly!”
And they did, leaving Plumas mercifully far behind.
48
GENERAL KURT LANYAN
After the demolitions techs blew open the launching bay, the Goliath gaped open to vacuum. General Lanyan’s first group of armored trainees used maneuvering packs to swoop through the cargo doors. Time to get to work.
“Think of it as a pest-control mission, everyone. We’re going in to clean out an infestation.” The patter of responses in his helmet sounded uneasy, but professional. These kleebs had signed up for military service in time of war. In their bunks at the EDF training base, they had dreamed of seeing real combat. Now they were going to get it, in spades.
Even before the assault group had anchored themselves against the recoil, they unleashed covering fire against any compy resistance. Once the trainees locked magnetic boots onto the deck and stabilized themselves inside, they methodically completed the sweep with projectile guns.
The remaining Soldier compies in the bay didn’t have a chance. Metal and polymer shrapnel drifted out into space.
A voice clicked in Lanyan’s helmet. “We are secure.”
While EDF guards were stationed at all access points leading from the large bay deeper into the ship, Lanyan launched the second phase of the recovery operation. Hundreds of armed trainees in reinforced suits disembarked from the cavalry ships into the Juggernaut’s empty bay and set up their beachhead.
Lanyan needed to get these unseasoned soldiers ready for the hard task ahead of them, but he didn’t intend to give them an overly realistic scenario. These newbie commandos would get weak knees.
“Bear in mind that just because we’ve killed the engines doesn’t mean we’ve won,” he transmitted through his helmet comm. “This Juggernaut is crawling with Soldier compies, and you can bet your asses they still mean to hijack these ships. According to our database, two hundred and forty-two clankers were placed in service aboard the Goliath. The crew probably managed to take out a good number of them, but there’ll be plenty left for us.”
He strode into the bay, still talking. “In addition to the guillotine command that shut down their engines, I’ve already input a command string in the Juggernaut’s computer to lock down all lifts. That means the remaining compies are bottled up on individual decks.”
“General, can they overhear this chatter?”
Lanyan scowled at the cadet. “Not unless you’re dumb enough to be on an open channel, soldier.”
“No, sir, that would be against regulations.”
He gestured with a gloved hand. “We’re going to clear this whole bottom level and use it as our staging area. We’ll show the damned machines what it means to be methodical. Once we scrape the launching deck clean, I propose a direct assault on the bridge. We can’t let the compies keep working on the systems or we might lose the whole ship again. Once we capture the bridge, then I’m in control, and it’s all over except for the bookkeeping. We can clean up the rest of the walking scrap metal at our leisure.”
He reminded his trainees to check their weapons, prepare spare rounds of ammunition, and adjust charge packs so they could swap out depleted components in half a second. By the book. When a chorus of shouts announced that the primary sweeper teams were ready, Lanyan instructed them to reanchor themselves to the deck. “When we open the door, there’s going to be an outrush of air. You don’t want it to bowl you over.”
Simultaneously, point men cracked open the access hatches that led from the bay to the interior of the ship. An invisible storm swept past them and spurted into space as the entire bottom deck emptied of atmosphere. Air was easily replaceable. Human soldiers were much more difficult to come by.
A dozen or so Soldier compies had crowded against each hatch, preparing to fight, but the sudden decompression gust took them by surprise. Many lost their balance; some were sucked out through the open hangar doors. A barrage of projectile fire blasted the rest back.
“Take them out of the defensive equation,” Lanyan lectured. “Just like in your lessons back at base.”
Now that the deck was open to space, wispy steam curled from beneath closed cabin doors. Splatters of blood froze to iron-hard paint on the walls as the remaining moisture boiled out of the crimson smears.
The sweeper teams split up according to the mis
sion plan. Before suiting up, all of Lanyan’s people had studied engineering diagrams of the Goliath. Any recruit whose memory was faulty, or who simply couldn’t think straight in a panic, could call up projected diagrams on a backlit display within their helmets.
Now the pumped-up kleebs ran forward, yelling into comm lines at the top of their lungs. Unaffected by the vacuum, Soldier compies emerged into the line of fire. Lanyan felt a satisfying recoil against his shoulder armor as he fired his projectile rifle. A depleted-uranium slug drove the nearest clanker backward with enough force to topple two of its companions. Normally, no sane soldier would fire such powerful projectiles inside a spaceship: Superdense slugs could easily puncture a hull or shatter a porthole. Right now, though, Lanyan didn’t give a damn about a few pinholes or cosmetic damage to the Juggernaut. Those things could be fixed.
Lanyan’s trainees continued to fire. Destroyed compies clattered aside while others emerged to take their places. “They keep coming, General!”
“So keep shooting. The reason the damned clankers succeeded in the first place was that they took our people by surprise. This time there’s no excuse.”
Lanyan barked at them to stay in formation as he moved down the corridor door by door, opening each chamber, destroying Soldier compies hiding inside bunk rooms. This mission reminded him of his younger days, when he had trained for urban warfare, prepping EDF soldiers to raid rebellious colony towns that had thumbed their noses at the Hansa Charter. But fanatic rebels were a lot softer than compies. . . .
Human bodies lay strewn on the floor or stuffed into closets and storage chambers. When the greenhorn soldiers looked at their dead comrades, Lanyan knew they were ready to puke into their faceplates. He had to turn that emotion into vengeance. “Compy butchers! Are we going to let them get away with it?”
“Hell no, sir!” One of the recruits next to him opened fire with a yell, knocking down three compies coming down the corridor.
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