Evelyn opened her mouth to reply, but she realised that she could not think of a retort.
‘We don’t have time for this,’ Bra’hiv cut in. ‘One thing at a time. We find Kordaz and stop whatever it is the damned fool is trying to do. Then we deal with Andaim, understood?’
‘Deal with him?’ Evelyn echoed. ‘And what the hell does that mean, exactly?’
‘Whatever it means when the time comes,’ Bra’hiv snapped. ‘Let’s move out! Alpha and Bravo company, pick your men!’
Qayin peered at the general. ‘I don’t want Djimon down there and running away from a fight again.’
‘Go to hell,’ Djimon snapped at Qayin. ‘Only reason it all went south down there is because your guys started pocketing bottles of gut–rot to bring home with them!’
‘Was that before or after your boys ran like scared rats?!’
Sergeant Djimon made to approach Qayin but Bra’hiv stepped between them.
‘When we get back aboard Atlantia,’ the general growled, ‘I’ll give you both gloves and you can knock ten barrels out of each other while we all watch and clap. Right now, you get your asses down below and do your jobs or I’ll shoot you both myself and promote Evelyn instead, understood?’
Qayin and Djimon glared at each other, and then they both whirled and began barking orders at their men.
Qayin led Bravo Company off the bridge and down toward the landing bay deck, Evelyn hearing Bra’hiv giving orders to the Marines remaining behind to hold the bridge for as long as they could. She rushed down the stairwell, following Qayin’s huge form, and then joined the Marines as they jogged into the landing bay. Djimon’s men took up positions in the rearguard.
‘That’s it sergeant!’ Qayin called out as they moved. ‘You’ll get away quicker from back there.’
‘Secure that crap, Qayin!’ Bra’hiv growled as they moved. ‘Stand by, here.’
A tight knot of civilians was huddled around the shuttle’s open boarding ramp, jackets done up tightly against the cold and their breath condensing on the air in thick clouds. Evelyn moved across to them, counting them as she went, and immediately she came up short.
‘Who’s missing?’ she called.
The civilians looked at each other, confused, and then Evelyn realised something profound. The bitter cold of the landing bay was forcing people to stand close to each other, their chins and necks buried deep in their jacket collars as they tried to keep warm.
Kordaz could never have survived like that in the ship for months on end without some kind of warmth to protect him. Even with protective clothing the cold would have bitten deep long before the Atlantia had arrived. Kordaz could not have been weakened by months of cold when she and Qayin found him: he had been weakened by mere minutes’ exposure.
But if Kordaz had been warm throughout his stay then there was only one place he could have been hiding.
‘The engine bays,’ she whispered to herself.
She turned and jogged across to the landing bay entrance as Bra’hiv appeared.
‘Kordaz,’ she said, ‘he’s heading for the engine bays. It’s where he must have stayed when he was abandoned here.’
‘But that’s where the swarms are hiding.’
‘Yes,’ Evelyn said, ‘exactly, and they’re trying to expand outward from the bays. Kordaz isn’t trying to escape from us: he’s trying to contain the Word and keep control of the engine bays.’
‘He might just as likely be trying to free the Legion to overcome us!’ Qayin said. ‘We can’t trust a Veng’en’s motives.’
‘Like I can’t trust a convict’s?’ Evelyn challenged him.
Bra’hiv’s brow furrowed. ‘But if Kordaz was down there at the same time as the Legion…’
Evelyn nodded. ‘Then he had a reason to be down there. That’s why we couldn’t start the engines from the bridge: it must have been Kordaz who disabled them on site when we arrived to prevent us from escaping. He’s either trying to re–start them for us, or he’s trying to shut them down entirely to defeat the Legion.’
Bra’hiv hissed a profanity as he looked at his Marines.
‘We need to find him and fast,’ the general snapped.
‘He’s not all we need to find,’ said a soldier behind them. Evelyn turned to see Lieutenant C’rairn join them, his face sombre. ‘Councillor Dhalere has disappeared.’
‘What do you mean disappeared?’ Bra’hiv uttered.
‘Gone sir,’ C’rairn said, ‘she’s not on the bridge and she’s not here. Our portable scanners aren’t powerful enough to detect where she might be, but we’re certain she’s not for’ard of us, so…’
Bra’hiv seemed perplexed as much as annoyed.
‘What the hell does she think she’s doing? She knows what’s back there!’
Evelyn checked her ammunition. ‘Yeah, and she knows we’re planning to get out of here and leave the supplies behind. What if she’s playing the hero and heading to the holds to grab what she can before the swarms get out?’
‘All hands on me!’ Bra’hiv barked, his voice thundering across the landing bay.
The Marines dashed across to their general, their faces grim as they listened to him.
‘We’re heading aft,’ he said. ‘Fire teams on point, and I want at least two flame–throwers on hand in case we have to clean up.’
‘Who’s back there?’ Djimon rumbled. ‘Apart from the Legion?’
‘The Veng’en prisoner and Dhalere. He may have taken her hostage.’
‘Wait,’ Djimon said, ‘Kordaz was alone when we saw him on the camera.’
‘That doesn’t mean he’s alone now,’ Bra’hiv pointed out, ‘and if Dhalere went back to forage for supplies he may have come across her.’
‘We should leave them,’ Qayin said. ‘Kordaz is a Veng’en and better off dead, and the councillor’s plain crazy bein’ back there in the first place.’
‘You giving the orders now, Qayin?’ Bra’hiv challenged him.
‘Just sayin’.’
‘Stop sayin’ and start doin’,’ Bra’hiv ordered. ‘You’re up front. Move!’
Qayin shouldered his way to the front of the platoon as Bra’hiv checked his rifle.
‘I’ll come,’ Evelyn said. ‘With Andaim down you could do with the support.’
Bra’hiv looked at her. ‘You want to die or something?’
‘I can help,’ Evelyn insisted. ‘I can’t do much up here, but Kordaz talked to me. He might be more willing to compromise with me than a bunch of convict–soldiers.’
Bra’hiv flicked his head in the direction of the exit and Evelyn jogged to follow the Marines as they began descending the main stairwell down into the darkened, freezing bowels of the ship.
***
The cold bit deep into Kordaz, his limbs stiffening with each and every step and his eyes itching as the cold air dried them out. The corridor ahead was illuminated by evenly spaced lights in the ceiling, but a dense mist had settled to obscure the view ahead.
Kordaz’s uniform provided little thermal insulation, designed not for the cool atmosphere of a human vessel but for the tropical temperature of a Veng’en cruiser. He would have sprinted down the corridor but he knew better than to rush into what lay ahead.
He could hear the hum of the massive generators that lined the aft bulkheads of the Sylph, the resonation created by the huge engines idling behind them. Kordaz had known that to shut the Sylph’s engines down entirely would be suicide, and anyway he had needed somewhere for the Word’s Legion to retreat to, an alternative to hunting him down through the lonely vessel’s empty passages. Thus, the huge turbine generators turned at low revolutions, keeping the engines ready should they be needed, as they now were.
His sharp eyes caught sight of small scratches smothering the walls, like the lines left in the sand of a creek bed as the water shaped its contours. The scratches were formed by the flowing masses of Hunters, the nanobots that sought out biological life forms and consumed them with terrifying speed, as though they were a boiling fluid of acid poured onto living flesh and melting it into nothingness.
Kordaz had seen what had happened to the crew of the Sylph who were abandoned with him and his men. He had seen what had happened to his own brothers in arms when the Legion had surged upon them with merciless, precise and murderous intent. The humans did not have the slightest clue what was waiting for them down here and he knew that if the Legion were to escape, it would destroy them all. Shutting the generators and engines down and letting the entire ship freeze was the only solution now, regardless of what happened to him.
He slowed.
The mist swirled in faint eddies through the air ahead, a subtle but sure sign that something had passed this way in front of Kordaz. He gripped his plasma rifle tightly, steeled himself against his own fear as his race was so proud to do, and then took one careful pace after another down the corridor.
He had heard the Marine general, Bra’hiv, reporting that the Legion was moving out of the engine bays and advancing through the ship despite the bitter cold. The humans could not fathom how this was possible, but Kordaz could. The Word had not pursued him because he was but one individual in an entire, vast vessel: a target too small and too versatile to hunt down. But now there were many people aboard the ship, and the Word would have calculated with its soul–less and yet coldly precise mind that the gains were now worth the risk.
The Word acted in the same way as the vicious Seethe Ants that populated his homeworld’s dense jungles. There was no single brain among them, no definable centre of thought that controlled the masses in the way a captain controlled the crew of a ship. Instead they acted on mass impulse, based upon information shared among the whole, an isocracy of sorts that forged an unbreakable single–minded determination far stronger than the will of any human. Or Veng’en.
As one tiny bot learned a new route through an alien vessel or a new weakness in a prey and acted upon it, so that information was copied or otherwise acted upon by other bots within a close vicinity and radidly spread throughout an entire colony. By such means did the Legion alter its methods and tactics with frightening rapidity, as though a single super–intelligent mind were guiding it.
But aboard the freezing Sylph there was only one way for the Word to spread its tentacles now and he had to stop it.
It was the hissing he heard first.
It sounded like sand being poured onto a tin deck, the whisper of countless metallic legs rushing to and fro. Kordaz detected warmth permeating the air, the mist billowing and swirling in diaphanous whorls through the pools of white light ahead.
He edged further forward, the rifle pointed ahead of him as he saw a pressure hatch to the engine bays wide open before him. The illumination from the open hatch was bright red and contrasted sharply with the cold white lights of the corridor. Kordaz moved closer to the hatch and then he realised that it was not open at all, the handle still sealed firmly into its catches on one side of the frame.
Instead, the centre of the hatch itself was missing. The edges were smoothly curved, polished as though molded that way, the centre missing where the swarms had eaten through it to leave a perfectly symmetrical hollow through which he could pass.
Inside, Kordaz knew, were the generators, and then behind them the engine room with its immense exhaust vents, fuel lines and cloying heat. More of that warmth wafted into the corridor as he stood and peered into the gloomy red light of the generator room.
Slowly, carefully, he stepped through the hole in the hatch.
The hissing sound grew louder and he saw them.
The metal deck of the generator room was stained black, a glistening pool of what looked like oil that rippled and seethed before him. Kordaz took another pace into the room and watched as the oily lake receded before him, rippling back on itself like the black breakers of an ocean rolling in reverse, clambering over themselves to escape.
Kordaz did not fear the Infectors, the smallest of the Word’s vile instruments. He never had. Despite his genuine disgust when Evelyn had threatened to infect him in the sick bay, Kordaz knew that the Infectors could not hurt him. The highly toxic saliva and blood of the Veng’en was lethal to the Infectors: their tiny metallic frames dissolved in it long before they could gain control of vital organs, the bacteria–laden saliva an evolutionary trait that allowed Veng’en to bite prey and then follow them until infections ravaged and killed them. No, the Word had never been able to control a Veng’en in the way it had learned to control humans.
Instead, the Word had initiated an all–out attack on the Veng’en race.
What Kordaz feared was the
swarm
, the Hunters. The size of large insects, Hunters were programmed only to detect, consume or otherwise destroy all biological life. Kordaz glanced over his shoulder at the pressure hatch with the hole in it. There was no debris on the floor around the hatch, meaning that the door had been entirely consumed.
Infectors could achieve such a feat without difficulty, taking the raw materials of the hatch and building new Infectors from the metal, converting everything they found into new versions of themselves and thus swelling their ranks. But they could also build Hunters from the debris too.
Kordaz crept to the engineering panels on one wall of the generator room, and eased them open. Within, a series of ordinary circuit breakers were fixed in the
open
position where he had left them. Kordaz reached up and closed the circuits, reactivating the links to the engine controls on the bridge, and then closed the panels once more.
Kordaz looked around the generator room, his senses detecting movement in the far reaches of the shadowy, steam–filled chamber but unable to tell whether the movement was a threat or not. Then, slowly, he saw the shape of a human amid the darkness as it shuffled toward him.
Kordaz stiffened again as the man emerged into the dull red light.
It was hard to tell how much of him remained. His uniform was hanging in shreds from his emaciated frame and his flesh was likewise dangling from his bones like the tattered rigging of an old ship. Kordaz could see the shape of the man’s skull poking through the taut skin of his pale face, his eyes dull orbs in sunken sockets, scoured of the will to live.
A long groan of unimaginable misery laboured out of the man’s lungs as one painfully thin arm reached out toward Kordaz, skeletal fingers with hooked nails struggling to function. Kordaz saw the man’s greying skin ripple across his chest as the Infectors scurried beneath his skin, and the reason that the Word had been able to move beyond the generator rooms without succumbing to the cold was revealed: human hosts. The Legion was using the crew of the Sylph as a source of warmth while moving around the ship.