She walked alone in a landscape as barren as the one the Rhino had been driving through. A few rock formations and mountains in the background looked familiar. There was no sign of the Rhino.
Instead, she wandered alone. A glow drew her toward the horizon. No longer hindered by pain in her joints or muscles, she sprinted for it. This must be it. This was the NTC ship they were headed toward.
She crested a hill, and the light from the ship hit her with an almost palpable force. Shielding her eyes with her hands, she climbed toward the intense glow. A warmth spread from the ship, and she let it envelop her until her eyes adjusted to its brightness.
There, sitting before her, was a ship like the Sunspot. There was no damage evident. Big white letters emblazoned across its side announced: Secundo Casu.
Her vision tunneled.
This was the ship Hoffman had taken to Mars.
Hope sprang fresh within her once again, like rain after a fire. It washed away the ash of loss and vanquished the smoldering remains of despair. This wasn’t the colony, but it was the next step toward it.
Near the Secundo Casu was another ship, smooth curves and azure highlights along an ebony shell. No more than a tenth the size of the biosphere ship, it fit snugly against it, nearly camouflaged by the shadow of the NTC ship.
Out of the smaller ship came spiders. They trailed between the NTC vessel and the small ship like ants carrying cargo.
My God, Sophie thought. We’re headed right into a trap.
Every nerve in her body lit up with a million lightning strikes scorching under her flesh. She clenched her eyelids closed, repeating a silent mantra to take her back to the others. She had to warn them.
Red flashed beneath her eyelids with every stroke, and her muscles quivered. Her eyelids burst open, releasing her into the real world, and she gasped for breath.
She’d beaten the nanobots’ hold on her.
At least, this time.
Sweat rolled down her forehead, and she shot upright. The tang of cryostat fluid once again swamped her nostrils. Faces appeared around her, calling her name and dabbing at her head with rags.
Everything swirled until she pressed a hand to her forehead. She forced herself up against the hands.
“No,” she said, swatting them away.
She lurched to the front cabin, where Diego and Ort were at the driver’s controls. Her knees buckled and twisted. She felt drunk.
“We have to stop,” she said, the words coming out in a slur. “It’s a trap. We have to stop.”
“What?” Diego asked, looking at her with an incredulous, cockeyed gaze.
She tried to swallow. Her tongue was swollen. When she tried speaking again, it was as though she was talking through a mouthful of cotton. “We have to turn back. The Organics are there. They’re at the Secundo Casu.”
Emanuel put a hand gently on her shoulder.
“We have to stop,” Sophie said, facing him.
“We are stopped,” Diego replied.
Sophie turned to look out the viewscreen. The world was still bathed in the blacks and greens of the night vision overlay, but there was something out there.
She blinked several times to make sure it was really the ship from her vision.
“That’s Secundo Casu,” Diego said.
Sophie stepped closer to the windshield. It’s existence alone was a miracle, untarnished by Organic claws or firearms, looking as brand new as it must have when it departed White Sands. Her eyes flitted across the terrain, searching for the aliens. But there was nothing out there. No spiders carting cargo back and forth. Not even any tracks.
“Calm down, Sophie. This is Hoffman’s ship,” Emanuel said. “The colony has to be close, and if this ship is fine…”
Holly and the kids pressed up into the cockpit area, smiling for the first time that day.
But Sophie couldn’t bring herself to feel any joy at the sight in front of her. Something told her this was wrong—that this was still a trap, that the place they had come to seek salvation from was the home of the aliens.
— 14 —
The spider’s claws slammed into the Sunspot’s bulkhead next to David. Tremors shook through the bulkhead, making Jeff nearly lose his precarious handhold. They were so close to the top of the wall, and now this spider threatened everything. His oxygen alarms were beeping at him, and David was holding onto the wall by one hand. With a short screech, the spider bent over the side, climbing down toward David.
Its mandibles clicked together and blue saliva roped from them, spraying the two boys as it shrieked. The scratch and scrape of other spiders responding to this one echoed down the other corridors. More were on their way.
Jeff was nearly out of oxygen. His brother was dangling by one arm. And the spider was inching closer.
Everything Jeff had fought for was about to go to waste. All the promises he’d made his dad about protecting his younger brother seemed like nothing but a handful of lies now. Maybe it was his dad’s fault for expecting too much. How were two boys supposed to survive against aliens like this?
Or maybe it was Bouma’s fault for leaving him and David to defend the Sunspot. And maybe it was Emanuel’s fault for letting them leave to go to the turret, even though it wasn’t a good spot from which to defend against the oncoming Organics.
The spider screeched again, the sound something close to metal scraping against metal. All its globular eyes sparkled in the flash of Jeff’s helmet-mounted lights. It seemed to be telling him he had lost. That he and his brother were nothing but a meal.
Prey was prey, and the first item on the menu was David. Blaming other people wouldn’t stop the alien from going after his kid brother.
Jeff summoned every bit of resolve he had left, straining to ignore the incessant alarms and the spiders clattering and shrieking throughout the ship. He didn’t know what was going to happen next, or how they would escape the oncoming horde. He just knew he needed to take out this single spider.
One of Bouma’s lessons surfaced in his mind.
Learn to compartmentalize.
Take things piece by piece. Rather than trying to run all the way across a football field for a touchdown in one play, focus on the first ten yards. Then, when you’ve made it that far, figure out how you’re going to go the next ten yards.
That’s all Jeff needed to do. Compartmentalize. They would make their escape one step at a time. The first step: kill that spider before it killed David.
Jeff reached across his back with his free hand. One of his boots slipped as he did so. Chunks of charred metal flaked away and pinged against the deck far below. He could feel his other boot threatening to slip, too. He didn’t stop reaching until his fingers hit the device he’d been trying to reach. Yanking the EMP grenade off the strap slung over his shoulder, he activated it and tossed it upward in one fluid motion.
A flash of light cast aside the darkness of the corridor, blinding Jeff. In his mind’s eye, he saw the next step. Still hanging onto the wall with one hand, and his boot gradually coming out of place, he slung his pulse rifle off his shoulder. Aiming with one hand wasn’t accurate, nor was it recommended. It went against every ounce of marksmanship training Bouma had tried to instill in him. But Bouma had also told Jeff that improvisation was just as important as the rules, and a good soldier knew when to improvise.
He improvised now. The pulse shots went wild, arcing up along the wall and slicing toward the spider. Best as he could, Jeff took control of his sporadic aim as though he was clumsily wielding a huge knife.
The alien didn’t see it coming. Shots plunged through its flesh. Globs of blood spewed out, and chunks of armor sizzled with each impact. The spider paused for a second, as if shocked. It seemed to have no idea its shields had been deactivated.
But its surprise didn’t faze Jeff. He riddled the monster with rounds until its mandibles stopped moving and its legs curled up.
Jeff nearly hooted in victory, but the cry died on his lips. The alien fell from the bul
khead. As it did, a stray leg caught David, knocking his other hand free from the bulkhead.
“Jeff!” David said, eyes wide.
Jeff swung toward David and, using every last bit of air he had left in his system, stretched for his brother.
Their gloves connected, but, lubricated as they were by the spider’s spilled blood, David nearly slipped through his grip. Jeff had been looking for someone to blame for this disaster, but in the end he could only blame himself. If he dropped David, that would be on him. No one else.
He grabbed David’s hand as tightly as he could. He could practically hear the bones in David’s hand crunch, but he didn’t care. A little bit of pain was worth a life.
The spider’s corpse smashed against the deck below, leaving a crater in the bent metal. The legs and thorax broke apart, slime-covered fragments spraying across the floor.
Jeff swung his brother closer to the wall.
David’s fingers trembled, but he found a handhold.
Together, they climbed. The frightening chorus of other spiders grew with each meter of progress they made.
Jeff’s heart beat even faster. Each beat was another gout of oxygen lost. A nervous sweat formed over his palms, and he could feel it soaking through his socks.
Stay calm. We’re almost there.
He repeated that mantra over and over as they climbed, trying to drown out the alien screeches. It didn’t work, but he did manage to control his panic enough to finally make it up the wall and onto the top deck. Once there, he finally saw the door of their target: the armory.
The door hung off its hinges, charred, just like everything else. Jeff lunged for it. Each step he took sent up a puff of black dust, and he left a trail of footprints in the charcoal dusting the deck.
He grabbed the lip of the hatch. His muscles burned, both from the strain and the oxygen deprivation. The door wouldn’t budge.
“Let me help!” David said.
The boy grabbed a handhold. Together, they peeled back the door, leaving a deep gouge in the mangled deck. Their helmet-mounted lights flooded the space, giving it a stark white glow. Dust sifted from cracks in the bulkhead. Benches along the floor had been ripped from their struts and tossed about the space. A few mangled rifles lay in the corners, and a handful of empty magazines were strewn about.
While charred flakes of plastic and paper still floated about the space, it was mostly empty.
David picked up one of the busted rifles and Jeff surveyed the room. The few rifles left were damaged.
His mouth went dry, and he gulped. The warning lights on his oxygen alarms were flashing. One percent. He felt both defeat and relief—a bittersweet drink.
“Emanuel and the others must’ve escaped, and took everything with them.”
“And the oxygen?” David asked, looking lost in the middle of the empty armory.
Jeff ran to the back of the space. He tore open the reinforced locker where the oxygen canisters had been stored.
His entire world seemed to fade away. His fingers trembled, and a heavy weight dragged itself through his torso.
This couldn’t be happening.
“No, no, no,” Jeff said. “No, no, no.”
David said what Jeff could not. “It’s empty.”
***
The dark side of the moon wasn’t so dark after all. Lights illuminated a base the size of a city. Noble pressed his hand against the side of his orb.
All around him, the other prisoners from the ship were being transported via an assembly line of belts that reminded Noble of a massive treadmill. His orb, too, sat on one of these belts. The cigar-shaped ships had dropped them off here some time earlier, and then the belts had clicked on, sending the hundreds of orbs toward a pyramidal structure at the center of the base.
They were still a few miles away, and Noble stood with his arms folded across his bare chest, shivering. The force field on his orb was down, but a faint shimmer revealed a nearly invisible field surrounding the conveyor belt. Even if he did escape his orb, there was nowhere to run.
As far as he knew, even with the Organics here, there wasn’t oxygen on the moon. He would lose consciousness within thirty seconds outside the force field, which was clearly designed to protect him and the other aliens.
Noble pivoted to look for Ribbit. The creature was directly behind him, curled up inside its orb. The bloody crusts around the slits in its cracked hide moved up and down with each breath. It was running out of time.
The sight transported Noble back to the GOA, where he had sat in his comfortable leather chair for months, watching as Earth and all its living creatures died. He felt the same hopelessness now that he had felt on the submarine. Watching humans, animals, and now aliens, die made him want to scream.
The sound of his own voice startled him before he realized he was, in fact, screaming. Now he started to wonder if he really was losing it. But he was the only one making any noise. The aliens on the conveyer belts were all silent in their orbs. Those that had eyes had them focused on the pyramid.
Noble stopped screaming to watch the approaching structure, just like the rest of the prisoners.
The entire building appeared to be over five hundred stories high, much larger than any skyscraper on Earth. The smooth blocks making up the exterior were massive rectangular pieces, all of them glowing the familiar cool blue characteristic of the Organics.
But it wasn’t the size or the glow that came as the biggest shock—it was the construction. Aside from that light, everything about it hearkened back to the ancient pyramids in Egypt, and those built by the Aztecs and Mayans in South America.
He remembered the ancient alien theorists that believed those structures were constructs by aliens.
If they could see what I’m seeing now…
A streak of blue light shot out of the tip of the pyramid and lanced into the darkness of space. Noble’s orb vibrated, and a violent banging followed as the light vanished in the black.
About a mile ahead was an opening at the base of the structure, through which the conveyor belts were feeding the orbs into the pyramid.
Noble stepped away from the wall, realization setting in. Had the Organics brought them here to preserve them, or were they doing something more sinister?
He scanned the base that surrounded them. On his left, an airfield supported a dozen winged aircraft with dorsal fins. To his right, three white domed structures protruded out of gray hills. Spiders and Sentinels moved in and out of cave-like openings, much like ants coming and going from an anthill. If he had to guess, they were some sort of barracks.
The aliens skittered along the conveyors, mandibles opening and closing at the view of fresh meat. Hundreds of claws kicked up a cloud of dust as the aliens came to watch.
A drone patrolling the pyramid shot over the minions. Two more drones followed, and then a fourth, which circled the pyramid, leaving long arcs of blue light residue in the air.
The conveyors clanked and vibrated as they drew closer to the vast structure rising above them. Noble stepped up to the wall of his orb to take a look. Roots was suspended from the top of its orb, its branch-like arms waving.
He was spooked, just like Noble was.
Another flash of light exploded out of the pyramid tip like a volcanic eruption.
The vibration once again rocked the conveyer belt, nearly knocking his orb off the track. The outer wall touched the force field with a sizzling zap. Noble flinched and moved away from the charred skin of his orb.
Four sinewy figures suddenly glimmered between the two conveyor belts at the entrance to the pyramid. The multi-dimensional entities stood like ghosts, watching the orbs enter their celestial palace.
The same voice he was used to hearing spoke in his mind.
Your sacrifice is for the good of all species. This is a significant honor. You have completed a remarkable great journey to be part of this, Captain Rick Noble.
Another blue flash burst from the top of the pyramid. Roots rea
ched through its orb wall with its twig arms, and Ribbit managed to make it up onto both legs, wobbly, but standing to watch.
The great realm of light requires sacrifices to keep the realm alive. Today you are part of the great realm.
Noble blinked with realization, the same realization his other alien friends had apparently come to at that moment. They weren’t being preserved in some sort of Noah’s Ark. They were being sacrificed to some alien god.
***
Emanuel checked the biomonitors again. While Bouma, Diego, and Ort were scouting out the Secundo Casu, he and Holly were charged with looking out for any incoming Organics, and watching Sophie and the kids. Sonya was set to alert them at the first sign of any Organic ships or ground forces moving their way.
So far, it seemed their strategy of driving nonstop had given them a comfortable distance from any Organic scouts. But for how long? The Rhino was just a needle in a haystack, but the aliens had more advanced technology.
He worked on repairing one of the portable RVAMPs that had been damaged in their flight, knowing the aliens would find them eventually. Sophie sat across from him, working on a tablet. He could not help but imagine what the nanobots were doing inside her. How they were multiplying and taking over. When would they overthrow Sophie’s mind and alert the rest of the Organics to their position?
A shiver washed through his flesh.
What if that’s what she was doing right now? What if the woman he loved was betraying them even as he sat across from her, working to help save their lives?
She would never do that.
Emanuel cursed himself for thinking that.
“What are you working on?” he asked, looking between the wires sprouting from the RVAMP.
Sophie lowered the tablet and sighed. “I’m trying to reprogram the OCT.”
Emanuel wasn’t sure what she was trying to do with the handheld optical coherence tomography machine. The device used coherent light sources, like lasers, to create three-dimensional images of objects through the angles at which reflected light was scattered. It didn’t use ionizing radiation to capture these images, like an X-ray, but its reliance on light sources meant it could only probe a few centimeters under a person’s skin. It was useful in identifying blood vessels and things like subdermal tumors…
Orbs IV_Exodus_A Post Apocalyptic Science Fiction Survival Thriller Page 18