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Black Phoenix

Page 23

by B. V. Larson


  “You can tell he’s an ex-guest,” Scarn said to Jamison. “‘Never negotiate when you can extort.’”

  Jamison ignored him. “We have strags to deal with.” Officious though he was, there was a bit of tiredness in his explanation. “It could get dicey. Stand right there.”

  He went to a nearby gurney and picked up two pressurized backpacks and handed one to each of them.

  “Get into these. Your job is a simple delivery. Take these blood-concentrates to Deck 5.”

  Turtle interrupted him. “Deck 5? Just use the lift system. You’ll be there in no time.”

  Jamison and Mellax glanced at one another. “There’s been a power outage.”

  “The guests cut the power?”

  “That would seem likely.”

  “It hardly matters,” Scarn said. “Deck 5 isn’t that far.”

  Turtle looked at him like he was crazy.

  “Deck 5 is just two levels away from where Neva and her crew are working,” Scarn explained. “They’ve been working against the clock to re-align the personality structures that these aliens have been exploiting.”

  “You know the way then,” Mellax said, thumping the pack in his puffy pink hands. “There’s a cluster of survivors there who need these. It’s an emergency.”

  “Got it,” Scarn said. One glance at Turtle, and they both knew they were thinking that Neva could be one of that cluster.

  With no further comment, they both slid their arms through the straps, tightened, and adjusted them.

  Jamison frowned, puzzled by the change in attitude.

  “We have a friend in that vicinity,” Turtle explained. “We’ll do it.”

  Dr. Mellax advanced and stood behind each of them. He made further adjustments to the straps until they were quite snug. “This is all the blood concentrate we have, so it’s quite valuable.” Dr. Mellax then stepped around in front of them and smiled. “There you go,” he said. “We’ll trust you not to sell these… because I’ve locked them onto you.”

  Scarn’s eyes darted side to side for two seconds before he grabbed the straps and yanked and strained at them. The pack rode him perfectly.

  “Save your energy,” Jamison said. “Those straps are steel nanofibers, a prisoner-grade material. People at the other end have the code to open it. Here’s the deal: You have two things to do. One: Don’t die. Two: get these concentrates to the people on Deck 5, Sector Blue.”

  Dr. Mellax did final checks and adjustments to the settings on the backpacks, then he declared them ready to travel.

  “I’m assuming we’ll be armed,” Scarn said.

  “Fully.”

  “And how many of these strags are out there?”

  “I’d guess there’s a hundred left. Only the crew decks will be infested, unsurprisingly.”

  “A hundred left…” Scarn said. He didn’t like the math.

  “What we’ve found was that they’re only dangerous if you don’t see them coming, so with two of you, that shouldn’t be a problem. Just like dodging hostiles back in your garbage-eating days. Keep watch, and they’re not that hard to kill.”

  From a lab table, Dr. Mellax picked up a flat carton and handed it to Jamison, who opened it, removed two zeta shears in holsters, and handed them to Turtle and Scarn. They clipped them onto their belts.

  “Check the charge,” Jamison said.

  They each removed their weapon.

  “Two-fifty.”

  “Same here.”

  “Good. Now, each of you should be able to kill a hundred apiece. Here,” Jamison said, turning Turtle around. “See this?” he said to Scarn, poking at something on Turtle’s pack. “These green numbers—power, pressure, cooling, viability, all at a hundred percent—but you can expect a few points fall-off.”

  He roughly turned them both around and showed Turtle the same thing.

  “The blood will be good for six hours,” Jamison said, “so don’t get killed and don’t take your time. If one of you does get wiped, it would be appreciated if the survivor could salvage the blood pack. We all on the same page here?”

  Turtle turned to Scarn. “Are you sure we know what we’re doing?”

  Jamison led them back across the infirmary to the doors. “Those things move fast,” he said, “so keep your eyes open, cut ‘em up, and don’t piss around. People are waiting for this stuff.”

  They had now been ushered out the door and into the main passageway. Cadets kept watch in both directions.

  “Good luck!” Dr. Mellax said. “We’re depending on you.”

  Everyone flowed back inside, and the doors shut. The locks snapped in place behind them.

  Chapter THIRTY-FIVE

  “This is bullshit, Scarn,” Turtle complained. “I can smell it. Serious frigging bullshit.”

  They both held the zeta shears up near their faces as they watched in separate directions. When they breathed, the plastic tanks on their backs made small scraping noises against the wall.

  “They’re throwing us to the strags,” Scarn said, “using up a few worthless breathers first.” His heart was pounding, but it slowed a bit after he took a deep breath. “They’ve got us by the short hairs, and they think they know what we’re going to do.”

  “We’re going to get the blood to Deck Five, right?” Turtle asked. “Neva could be one of those who need it.”

  “We’re going to Five, but we’re not going to do it the way they think. For starters, Lance Graff is on Deck 28. We can collect and take a break on our way. With a whole new government and captain, UT may not pay us any wages, but Lance will.”

  “We have to get there first, Scarn,” Turtle whispered. “If we’re not as tough as they think we are, we’ll be in trouble.”

  “If they depend on people like us to bail them out, what does that make them?”

  They both froze at a distant dragging sound. It was something rough being pulled over metal.

  “Scarn?” Turtle said in a hiss. “I think something is coming from my direction, down at the corner. If it’s a strag, help me out. I’ve never fought a bioengineered monster before.”

  They listened and thought they might have heard slow steps.

  “Loosen up,” Scarn said, “you’ll move faster.”

  They breathed as quietly as they could and pressed themselves flat against the wall. Whatever came around the corner, they would be the last thing it would see.

  The footsteps had stopped. In Turtle’s tunnel vision there was only the white passage background with the whiter edge of the corner, and in his tense hand was the cool handle of the zeta shear. His universe had narrowed to these things.

  A blur of brown swept from around the corner and lunged straight at them. Its four grasping arms spread like a two-meter-wide X.

  Turtle yanked the trigger of the zeta shear and diced out the left side of the creature. It moved so fast that parts of arms and a leg tumbled and then slid up to them. Scarn turned and diced the remaining half and then spun back around to guard the opposite direction.

  The passage was again silent, and another section of the wall had been splattered with black strag blood. Wet pieces of meat and exoskeleton had been blown three or four meters back down the passage.

  “Smells like it’s already been dead a long time,” Turtle said. “It wasn’t too hard to kill, was it?”

  “I don’t like how fast it was.”

  “Did you see the head? Those eyes?”

  “Huge eyes…. They can probably see better than we can.”

  They stepped around and over pieces of the strag as they headed to the drop-shaft. They walked softly, dipping beneath door windows and covering for each other as they crossed intersections.

  “Something coming,” Turtle barely whispered.

  They pressed flat, as before, watching both ways.

  “Be loose,” Scarn said. “My life is in your hands.”

  “Shut up.”

  After a pause and some rustling, there was the distinct sound of footsteps.<
br />
  Ready to slice apart some racing, grasping thing, Turtle’s trigger finger was hooked in position, ready... but not ready for the man who peeked around the edge.

  “Don’t kill me! I’m human, see?” He stepped out and waved his open hands over his head. “See?”

  He let his hands drop to his sides as he stepped carefully toward them.

  The man was clearly a guest. No one else had a paunch aboard Tarassis. He was a short guy with a high, rounded stomach and a vertical shock of black hair. In a retro style popular with some UT functionaries, he wore brown slacks and shoes, a white shirt, and suspenders.

  Both Turtle and Scarn relaxed.

  “Gad damn,” the man said, “are we the only ones left? I’m from legalistics.”

  Turtle wasn’t paying him any attention. “My shear is empty,” he said to Scarn, holding in his hand like it was a small dead animal. He pointed to the charge indicator which displayed a green bar. “It says a hundred percent.” He pulled the trigger a few times. It made quiet clicks and nothing else. “Maybe it jammed.”

  “I’m from legalistics,” the man repeated. “Are you guys Security?”

  Scarn checked his zeta shear and pulled out an internal piece. “Look at this. Mine’s been tampered with so it would read a full charge.”

  “Hey? You guys? Is something wrong?”

  “If they’re trying to kill us,” Turtle said, “why’d they give us the blood to carry?”

  “I was in legalistics, but now I’m in reality!” The man seemed to be quite upbeat.

  “Be quiet,” Turtle said.

  “Reality is—”

  “Shut up,” Scarn said malignantly.

  The man fell silent.

  “With no firepower, Scarn, we can’t be out in the open. Either we get some guns or we hide in a module till other people kill them.”

  “I know legalistics has a bad reputation,” the man said, waggling his head, making his hair wave, “and they make us spend our days finding little ways to take advantage of the workers, but now that’s all behind me.”

  Turtle and Scarn looked at him with some curiosity.

  “Today,” he continued, making a smoothing gesture with his arms, “I got my mission. Today I saw one of those bugs grab a friend of mine and spew him out, right down to his spine, and you know what? That did it. When—”

  “Let’s go,” Scarn said to Turtle. “I have an idea.” They walked away.

  The man followed them, never pausing:

  “When I saw that, I suddenly considered my own personal non-existence, and you know what? Everything is....” He seemed awestruck. “...amaaazing!”

  “Great attitude,” Turtle said. “Where are we going, Scarn?”

  “External ship repair storage area, straight ahead, at the corner. Should be a yellow sign on the door. Sometimes they have dangerous equipment.”

  “From now on,” the man was saying as he followed after them, “I’m going to be a nerve ending to the world. Now I see humanity both as the measure of existence and as utterly inconsequential. Both things are true! I’m just a grunt lawyer, sure, but now I’m feeling the feelings that great people have felt.”

  Scarn turned to tell him to shut the hell up, but when he turned, his voice died in his throat and he hesitated. He tried to speak evenly to interrupt the man’s glowing wonder.

  “Sir?”

  The man kept talking, “...that there’s no point besides being. Being here. Being here now!”

  Behind him, an insectile strag had stalked around a corner and slid up behind him like a nightmare of silence. Just two meters away, it lifted two grasping arms high and extended two grasping arms low. Its head was no more than a mount for the two fat eyes that were fixed in their direction.

  “I’ve never felt this way,” the man said, “in my whole life.”

  “Mister?” Scarn said in a low voice. “Stop talking.”

  He didn’t stop and the thing behind him eased closer. The ends of its grasping arms flared into blossoms of gaff-hooks.

  “Mister?” Scarn said just above a whisper... “Run!” he shouted the word.

  He and Turtle sprang backwards and ran.

  The man in the brown slacks and suspenders looked puzzled at their bolting away. His head was cocked a little to one side when the strag hit him flat in the back. It dug in deep with its hooks.

  Turtle and Scarn got to the end of the passage, hit the door of the storage room and pulled it open. They took three seconds to look behind them at the amazed lawyer.

  While the thing held him tight, the man’s face went white as his shirt. His eyes and mouth opened wide, and from between the two bodies, chunks of the man’s spine and innards piled between their feet. Fluids sprayed off to the sides and up the passage walls in neat parabolas.

  Impulsively, Scarn aimed his zeta shear and pulled the trigger for half a dozen dead clicks.

  “Shit.” He threw it down, and pulled Turtle into the storage room after him.

  Locked inside, they caught their breath. A dim emergency bulb glowed overhead.

  “Okay,” Scarn said. “We’re looking for something lethal. Check the shelves, boxes—everything.”

  There were four shelves around the four-meter-square room, mostly filled with unidentifiable spare parts. Scarn opened the larger cartons around the edge of the floor.

  “Wish us luck,” Scarn said.

  After half a minute, Turtle lifted something, grinning. “Welder.”

  Scarn suddenly began tearing open another carton. “Rivets, bore rivets, charge packs—”

  “Bore rivets?” Turtle said.

  Scarn finished tearing out the packing and held the thing up like an award.

  “Bore riveter,” he said. The yellow sticker on the barrel read EXTERNAL STATION USE ONLY. It wasn’t that big: a tube the length of his forearm with a shoulder harness and a boxy magazine with five penetrating rivets.

  “I always wanted to use one of these.” He flipped the harness over his head to his shoulder.

  “Use extreme caution near exterior walls,” Turtle read. “You had a problem with that once before.”

  Turtle was checking over a portable welder when the strag hit the door like a hundred kilos of fist.

  Scarn pulled the ear protectors out of the box, jammed them in his ears—Turtle saw this and used his fingers—and when the strag hit the door again, Scarn fired the bore riveter through the middle of it, at low chest-height. The concussion in the small room knocked out some of their breath.

  The hole was big enough to see that the strag had gone down.

  Scarn chunked in a reload and opened the door. The rivet had blown out one side of the creature’s torso and had gone on to disappear through the hole it had blown in the far wall. In its death frenzy, the strag had flailed its hooked arms into a tangle and still worked its legs as though it were running. It wasn’t dying slowly.

  The welder Turtle held was the size of a long hand gun with its power pack hooked at his waist. He stepped forward and took a moment to get the distance right, pressed ON, and the white dot sliced off the thing’s two bulbous eyes.

  The strag kicked a few more times, shivered, and went still.

  “Two down,” Scarn said. “Ninety-eight to go.”

  They moved out into the passageway.

  “We’ll be dead if we use the drop-shaft,” Scarn said, “so I vote we go for the janitorial modules.”

  He led the way with Turtle watching behind.

  As they traveled, Scarn kept talking. “Turtle, there’s something I need to tell you.”

  “Don’t. That sounds like a last will and testament kind of thing to say.”

  “You know how when you like women you develop a financial weakness? Well, just in case, I have a secret stash. Nine hundred creds—it’s under my sink.”

  Still watching behind them, Turtle glanced at him. “Under the sink? Scarn, you’re such a trashlife poor-boy stereotype—some synth cleaner has probably already stolen
it.”

  “Well, if I get spewed, you know where it is—or was.”

  “Stop saying ‘spewed.’”

  In five minutes, they came to the janitor’s module, and Scarn was jimmying the lock when he heard Turtle gasp.

  When he turned, he saw another strag twenty meters away.

  “No more than hundred on the whole ship my ass,” Scarn muttered.

  The thing spotted them and charged, coming full speed at them with its grasping arms spread in a wide X and its fat eyes cocked forward on its short neck. It seemed like Turtle wasn’t paying attention, melting out a section of a wall, warming and melting part of the ceiling—

  Scarn braced himself, ready to put a rivet through the thing when Turtle finally brought the welder beam diagonally down through the strag’s shoulder and out the upper part of its leg. He then waggled the beam-tube and sliced the still-running legs into chunks. They hit the floor and rolled past them.

  “You have the basics of that thing figured out yet?” Scarn asked, watching both ways.

  “Sorry.” Turtle wiped his forehead with the back of one hand. “Got it now.”

  They passed another room of ship repair supplies and found two bore rivets but nothing else. They got as far as the next janitor’s module, but Turtle was a bit slow again, and he didn’t hit the strag till it was three meters away. Sizzling strips of bioengineered meat slid up and slapped over Scarn’s shoes.

  “Maybe hit ‘em a little sooner?” Scarn suggested, scraping his one foot clean with the other.

  “Right. No problem. I’m getting it now.”

  They passed through the next two decks with no strag encounters. These were guest decks, but everyone seemed to be in hiding. Every deck they passed through had areas heavily crudded with gore both human and otherwise. It was impossible to pass through it without stepping in what had once been someone. They said nothing about this to each other.

  Once they were on Deck 28 where Lance Graff resided, doing their best to move in silence, Turtle whispered, “I’ll bet he won’t answer if he’s in there. If he does, I wish I didn’t have to look at him. He’s a closet skag-hole, Scarn. He’s probably got some horrid new thing sewed up inside him.”

 

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