by Isaac Hooke
I was about one kilometer up when I came across a missing rung. It had probably broken off some time after construction, because the robot workers certainly wouldn’t have missed it. The winds gusted quite strongly up here, and I supposed it wouldn’t take much to break off a shoddy component.
Still, that missing rung made me leery. How many more had fallen away farther up? What if a rung broke off while I was putting my weight on it, and I plunged to my death?
Curse all designers and engineers.
I wanted to turn back, but it wasn’t like I had a choice. I needed the oxygen inside this Forma pipe.
I reached past the missing rung, stretching my body, and wrapped my fingers around the next one. Straining because of the awkward position, I pulled.
Don’t break don’t break, I chanted in my head.
When my chin was level with the rung, I folded the gloved fingers of my other hand around it, then I shoved off from the lower rung with my boots and yanked myself upward.
The winds buffeted me extra hard, and the strap securing the rifle-scythe to my back decided to break just then.
I reached behind as the weapon fell away, and tried to grab it with one arm.
Missed.
I watched the weapon plunge. It became pin-sized in only half a second.
My eyes focused on the continent far below, and an incredible sense of vertigo filled me. The winds continued to gust, swaying me, and I froze up. My gaze was locked on the distant ground, which looked like an expanded version of a Heads-Up-Display map. My vision swam, and the continent turned round and round below me.
The jumpsuit wouldn’t cushion a fall from this height. The suit would puncture of course, but that was the least of my worries. All the bones in my body would break at the same time, and the impact trauma would pulp all my organs, including my brain. Especially my brain.
I was still only gripping the rung with one hand, and my entire arm was burning. Physically, that lone hand was incapable of holding on much longer, despite the strength-enhancement of my suit. I knew I had to get my other arm up there, helping out . . .
But I didn’t move. Couldn’t.
The winds gusted, trying to tear me from the ladder.
The ground below continued to rotate. As did the Forma pipe.
I became momentarily disoriented.
Where was I? In space? On a spacewalk?
My fingers slowly slipped . . .
I shut my eyes.
Fight on, Shaw. Fight!
Without looking, I slammed my other hand upward, and fumbled with my gloved fingers until I gripped the rung with both hands.
When I opened my eyes again, I was gazing straight ahead at the cement.
The vertigo was gone.
I pulled myself to the next rung.
And the next.
One rung at a time.
The moment of crisis was over.
Still, I’d lost my weapon.
I hoped it didn’t matter.
An hour later, I reached the entry shaft and pulled myself in. I paused inside the rim to catch my breath. I only gave the outlying landscape a fleeting glance, because I was worried I’d trigger my vertigo again.
Thirty meters above me the Forma pipe ended. When operational, the pipes belched a circular stream of oxygen from their upper rims. The expelled oxygen was visible as a heat haze of sorts, due to the temperature differential. I didn’t see any haze today however, which meant this Forma pipe had already failed.
That shouldn’t be a big deal—the tanks stored a month’s worth of oxygen. Still, I was beginning to wonder if the Forma pipes planetwide had been shut down.
The previous Forma pipe I had relied on for oxygen had mysteriously ceased operating two months after I started using it. My camp had been two klicks away from that pipe, so I didn’t see what had disabled the machinery. Maybe it had just failed on its own, from lack of regular maintenance. Or, more likely, one of the alien mists had sabotaged it. What Rade had called the Phants.
In any case, after I’d exhausted the failed Forma’s monthlong supply of oxygen, I set out for this next pipe.
And here I was.
I clambered on my hands and knees through the shaft, arriving at the hollow, cylindrical inner core of the Forma pipe. A ladder led down into the dark depths. There was no lighting, not in a failed pipe, and the stray daylight from the shaft only illuminated a short way inside.
I kept my focus on the topmost rung of the inner core, lest the vertigo return. I stared at that rung with trepidation, keenly aware of my missing weapon.
What if there was something waiting for me down there?
I turned on my helmet lamp. Suppressing the feeling of terror that was slowly rising inside me, I swung my feet over the ledge and onto the ladder. I almost expected a tentacle to latch on to my leg from the depths.
Making a point of not looking down, I started the descent.
The intensity of my helmet lamp was low—my suit power was reduced to ten percent by all the climbing—and only a small cone of light surrounded me. I could see the ladder in front of me, and the concrete walls in the immediate vicinity, but everything else was pitch-black.
It felt like I was descending into the dark heart of hell itself.
The climb took about an hour.
Since I never looked down, the floor came up rather abruptly. One moment I was lowering myself down into the empty air, rung by rung, then the next my heel struck solid ground.
I froze as the thud echoed up and down the pipe. When the sound faded, only dead silence remained.
I lowered my other boot and stepped fully onto the concrete floor.
Weaponless, I slowly turned around and scanned the area. I was ready to throw myself onto the ladder at the first sign of trouble, but all I saw were the various machines slumped about. Most of the machines were inactive, though weak LEDs did shine from a few of them. The illumination from my helmet was really dim at this point, so I couldn’t see all that far. Still, I was satisfied that the area was clear of any beasts (other than those found in my imagination) because they would’ve attacked by now.
As I had hoped, the servers that harbored the door sensor still had power, so I installed my SACKER privilege escalation kit. It used a brute force approach to crack the admin password, which could take anywhere from ten minutes to an hour.
Leaving the kit do its work, I moved off to one of the machines that still had a working LED. I retrieved the knife from my utility belt—so perhaps I wasn’t entirely weaponless. With the knife I opened up a side panel in the machine, revealing the terminals of a magnesium-ion battery pack.
At this point I was in far greater need of power than oxygen, so I retrieved the charging cord from my utility belt, and attached one end to the universal charge port on my wrist and the other end to the battery.
I sat down and rested while my main battery pack recharged. My helmet lamp grew stronger, but the darkness around me didn’t seem to recede. I was getting this creepy, tingling sensation at the back of my neck, like someone or something was watching me.
When my battery pack was charged, I disconnected and stowed the cord, then hurried over to the oxygen storage tanks. I just wanted to replenish my O2 and get the heck out of there.
I examined the nearest oxygen tank. What the . . .
Impossible.
The pressure gauge read zero PSI.
It was empty.
I moved on to the next tank.
Empty.
The next.
Drained as well.
The remainder all proved empty, down to the last one.
I didn’t understand it. The tanks were supposed to store a month’s worth of oxygen, even after the Forma pipe failed. There was no way every tank could be drained like that.
I opened the valve o
f the closest, thinking there was some readout malfunction, but the sniffers in my gloves detected nothing. I backtracked, opening the valves of three other tanks.
The oxygen was truly gone.
Someone, or something, had drained the tanks already.
No no no.
And that’s when I saw the beast.
It was crouched at the edge of my light cone, between two oxygen tanks.
One of the “crabs.”
Sharp spikes over a black carapace from which protruded eight pairs of legs, with pincers and crushing mandibles on all sides. About one meter tall by two meters wide. Black, semitranslucent skin.
I stepped backward, reaching instinctively for my rifle-scythe—which I didn’t have anymore.
I unsheathed the knife from my utility belt instead. The blade seemed pathetically small against the claws and mandibles I now faced.
The crab had remained motionless the entire time.
I kept still, waiting for the alien to make the first move.
The ladder was roughly ten paces away behind me. Could I make it in time? Doubtful.
Neither of us moved.
I don’t know how much time passed. Thirty seconds. A minute.
The crab still didn’t move.
Could it be . . . ?
I approached. Cautiously.
Keeping my eyes on the motionless creature, I knelt and retrieved a loose pipe. I took three more wary steps, then slowly lifted the metal tube toward the beast.
I touched the pipe to the crab, and shoved.
The carapace shifted lifelessly. I shone my helmet lamp directly onto the body: through the translucent skin I could see its three hearts.
They weren’t beating.
Yup. Dead.
I ran my helmet lamp over the thick cord that trailed away from the alien corpse. The cord led between the large machinery to a sinkhole in the concrete floor, about three times as wide as the crab itself.
I squeezed past the dead crab and carefully approached the opening.
Spent shell casings lined the perimeter. Some military personnel could read the marks on shell casings to determine the make and model of the weapons that fired them, but I wasn’t one of them. Nor did I have the necessary app for my aReal, unfortunately.
Slowly my angle of view increased until I found myself peering straight down the hole.
Inside resided more dead crabs. A whole bunch of them.
There was no host slug that I could see, but the bodies of the bigger creatures usually evanesced after death.
I crouched at the rim, letting my light illuminate deeper. I realized a cave-in blocked the tunnel’s lower recesses. Good.
I stepped away from the hole, edged past the dead crab, and hurried to the door sensor. The SACKER hadn’t cracked the administrator password yet, so I went to the ladder and sat down. There I waited, keeping my eye on the lifeless crab and the sinkhole beyond it. I was ready to vault up the ladder at a moment’s notice.
The moments passed, and I relaxed somewhat. Enough to ponder the puzzle of the missing oxygen, anyway.
There were no signs that the tanks had been punctured in any way. So the crabs hadn’t done it.
Still, something had drained the oxygen. Likely it was the same thing that had killed the beasts in here. The spent shell casings pointed to either another human being, or a robot. A robot wouldn’t need oxygen of course, but there was always the possibility that the Forma pipe had never been active in the first place, and the tanks had never filled.
Robot, or human being, I supposed I’d never find out. I only had five hours of oxygen left, and the next Forma pipe was about a week away.
As I waited for the SACKER to work its magic, my mind concocted fantasies: Rade had found a way to reach this planet, and he was actively searching for me, fighting his way from Forma pipe to Forma pipe. He’d been here in this very pipe mere hours before, and would soon return. When he found me, he’d take me back to Earth. Once there, we’d quit the Navy, and after we were deported we’d move to France and live out our lives in peace.
I had to laugh. It was a pleasant fantasy.
Unfortunately, Rade wasn’t coming for me.
No one was.
The chime of the SACKER kit informed me it had attained administrator access to the door sensor.
I went to the sensor and added my embedded ID to the list of recognized entrants, and the steel panels of the door irised open.
Queequeg was waiting for me outside, jumping up and down with his typical irrational excitement at seeing me.
“My weapon, Queequeg,” I said. “Show me where it fell.” I pantomimed the plunge of my rifle-scythe from the heights.
The animal led me toward the weapon in great exuberant leaps.
Despite the fall, the rifle-scythe seemed intact—all the tape and superglue had held up.
Now if only I could hold up.
“All right, Queequeg. Let’s go.”
Queequeg led me onward. I didn’t care where he went, just as long as it was away from here. His lope was ebullient.
I wished his joy was contagious. I really did. But it wasn’t.
Five hours of oxygen left.
Maybe I’d find another source of O2 somewhere.
Right. It would take a miracle.
I marched after Queequeg, unable to shake the sense of impending doom.
I’d already used up all my miracles.
CHAPTER THREE
Rade
The war that had hung over all our thoughts and deeds these past eight months, the war we had dreaded, the war we had never talked about yet knew was coming, had finally arrived.
It didn’t take long for the media to disregard the news lockdown. You couldn’t really hide disaster on a planetary scale, not when everyone and their dog had a camera.
It was all over the networks. Every station on the Net and Undernet. There was no escaping it: an entire moon had been invaded by an alien species.
Seemingly from nowhere, the Skull Ship had appeared in orbit above Tau Ceti II-c fifty-five days ago. It was a black starship about one-fourth the size of the moon itself, and vaguely shaped like a human cranium—the SK news media frequently referred to the ship as the “Great Death” in their commentary.
The orbital defenses proved useless against the alien vessel. The Skull Ship proceeded to power right into the crust, unleashing a black cloud that enveloped half the planet and inflicted an unseasonal blizzard on the only major city.
Tau Ceti II-c sent out an emergency distress call, which was nearly masked by the powerful EM interference from the Skull Ship. The combined naval defensive capabilities of the system responded to the call. SK capital ships, battlecruisers, battleships, destroyers, and frigates gathered near the moon for a unified assault.
The Skull Ship destroyed or disabled them all. It was equipped with some sort of coronal point defense weapon. Get too close, and the hull would erupt with a sweeping, superheated gaseous envelope, similar to the coronal discharge from a star. The eruption was capable of disintegrating anything in its path, from torpedoes to supercarriers.
On the moon itself, meanwhile, things were quickly going downhill. From footage pieced together by armchair broadcasters, a grim story emerged.
A deadly rain fell when the black impact cloud consumed the sky, a rain that disintegrated any people unfortunate enough to be caught outdoors. The survivors called the rain the Yaoguai—demons from the underworld with a particular bent for the souls of men. The rain also happened to turn most of the robots against the inhabitants, and the machines systematically hunted down the survivors. The rain became a blizzard, and when the storm lifted one week later, few survivors remained amid the melting snow.
All communications with Tau Ceti II-c ceased one month ago. The remote scans weren’t pret
ty. Shangde City was overrun, and the outlying farms and bases had been razed. It was unclear how many of the one million colonists had escaped. With its coronal weapon, the Skull Ship had incinerated many of the fleeing vessels, and destroyed the ship lots and ports.
According to surface probes, Shangde City was patrolled by robots and ATLAS mechs, and defended by automated anti-air weapons. The streets crawled with the infamous crabs and slugs my platoon had first discovered on Geronimo, with sinkholes leading to vast subterranean caverns below the city. The lower parts of the buildings were caked in black bulbs of Geronium-275, like the swollen protrusions of some disease. The snow was gone, and recent atmospheric readings returned by probes had indicated elevated levels of carbon monoxide and chlorine, which told us the invaders were terraforming the moon in some way.
In addition to the crabs and slugs, and the roving bands of robots, stagnant pools of glowing liquid had collected in some of the city streets. The Yaoguai. What I called Phants, because when I’d first encountered them on Geronimo, the alien entities had appeared as a ghostly mist. The Phants on Tau Ceti II-c were in liquid form presumably because of the more Earth-like atmosphere. The SKs reported that bullets went right through them. Explosions temporarily dispersed them, but they simply re-formed. My platoon had experienced exactly the same effects during our own brief encounter with the alien entities.
No one really knew what the Phants were yet. How sentience could be bottled up in some liquid or vapor was completely beyond our comprehension. Fleet scientists postulated that we saw only a small fraction of the entities, the tip of the iceberg so to speak, while the remainder of the beings resided in some higher plane or dimension.