Authors: Ian Whates
She didn’t turn, didn’t look towards the source of that call of alarm, that so familiar yet simultaneously anonymous voice. Her awareness was too focused on the progress of this liquid cloth to encompass anything else. It clung to her like a second skin. She felt it slide over her lips and teeth to coat the roof of her mouth, tasting metal and strangeness on her tongue, while at the same time conscious of it entering her ears and nostrils. She clenched her buttocks involuntarily as it slid across her anus. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe; she was drowning in liquid chrome.
Leesa came back to herself once more, disorientated for a split second before organic and auganic components slipped smoothly into mesh and reasserted stability. She was frightened by this loss of control. Two vivid flashbacks in a row, could she prevent a third? It must have been the very thing she’d been studying – the images of the cache chamber – that stimulated the second. A brand new memory completely unlooked for. Did she
want
to resist another vision like that even if she could?
She had no idea where in her life this latest flashback fitted, couldn’t relate it to any other memories at her disposal, but one thing Leesa was sure of: at least once before she’d been in a chamber much like the one on the monitors; a major find – enough to have made her and anyone else on that forgotten expedition wealthy beyond all reason. So why wasn’t she? Why, instead, was she an incomplete mentally-crippled amnesiac?
Because things had ended badly, that was why. She shuddered at the mental echo of that silver skin as it spread over her and into her, as it invaded every orifice. This might just offer her the clue she’d been searching for; once she had the time to consider it properly. Right now there were more immediate concerns. She stared at the images of the
Comet
’s crew exploring the cache with an increasing sense of dread. Things were about to go badly wrong, she just knew it.
Leesa tried to analyse her feelings towards this crew. She wasn’t one of them, not really – just a shipee as far as they were concerned, hired help along for the ride for this one trip only. From her perspective they were no more than a means to an end; her escape route from a bunch of killers hell bent on extracting revenge; not to mention a world where the search for her true identity had stalled badly. What did she owe any of these people? Nothing, not if you looked at it logically. And yet…
Anna had befriended her without hesitation, and Bren had always treated her decently enough, as had the captain, Pelquin. In fact, they all had. Even banker-man Drake, who seemed to have worked out far more about her than he had any right to; at least he had kept his mouth shut and hadn’t broadcast her business to the whole ship.
Maybe she had more of an emotional investment in this motley crew than she realised; enough that she didn’t fancy sitting around and watching them get smeared by some leftover alien tech, at any rate. With a sigh, and a silent question regarding her own sanity, she pushed herself out of the seat.
She was about to leave the bridge when she heard the scream.
Drake was beginning to think that Mudball’s concerns were unfounded. After all, Anna had made three runs so far and they had almost finished loading another pallet ready for a fourth, without any sign of the guardian acting against them. Perhaps it couldn’t. In the banker’s experience, once you were past the cache defences there was little the entities could do.
Mind you, this one had evidently managed to clear away the human bodies from the first incursion by Nate and his crew, and it had managed to rebuild some fairly formidable defences as well. Therefore it had the ability to affect the physical world to a certain degree at least.
So why was it holding back? Mustering its resources?
So far, the only moment of mild alarm since they’d entered the chamber had been when Bren let out a yelp. For a moment Drake froze, thinking this was it, but drew breath again when a string of profanities followed.
It turned out that an object Bren had picked up – an orb of silvered metal – had started vibrating vigorously in her hand. She’d cried out, instantly tossing the ball away, and was more embarrassed by her own reaction than afraid. “It felt warm, almost alive,” she said.
There were more of the gonks that Pelquin had presented to Terry Reese – a lot more – and Pelquin stumbled upon a bundle of wind sticks – a type of artefact Drake had encountered before. They didn’t just make the sound of a strong gale, they created one, in miniature.
The doc made perhaps the first truly interesting discovery. An oblong sheet of glass, with no frame; it was simply propped up against a stack of other artefacts. It looked like a mirror that was waiting to be fitted somewhere. Except that when you looked into it what you saw was the room on the other side of the pile that it was leaning against. Drake went across to look when he heard the doc’s initial exclamation.
“Cameras, mounted somewhere on the other side, do you think?” Doc asked as they both stood staring.
“Maybe,” Drake said. “Let’s see.” Grasping it on either side – the edges were rounded and the whole thing was deceptively light – he picked the mirror up and carried it a quarter of the way around the pile before once more resting it against the other artefacts. The view had changed to show, dimly, the rough wall of the chamber, which sat in shadow on the mound’s far side.
“Well I’ll be…” the doc said from beside him.
Drake’s favourite find, though, was a deceptively simple block of indefinable material, striped in caramel and cream and burnished like polished tortoise shell. It was small enough that he could grasp it in one hand. When he picked it up the block immediately started shedding bubbles; not from one or the other end but from all over – a cloud of tiny golden balls that rose leisurely into the air where they proceeded to burst. As each bubble popped it emitted a single clear sound; a different note for every bubble, it seemed, and, somehow, this didn’t result in a discordant racket but rather in an eerie melody. Drake shook it, releasing a fresh flurry of bubbles and a new song.
Even Bren stopped working and stared for a second. “Now that’s really something,” she said.
Nate had just used the lifter to move the first items onto what would be their eighth pallet when a sound that could only have been a scream issued from the tunnel. Everyone froze, except for Nate who appeared not to have heard.
“Nate, hold it a second,” Pelquin said, whilst Bren’s call of “Anna!” mirrored Drake’s instant thought.
A distant squeal of tyres followed by the screech of metal sliding along stone, and then nothing. Nate and Bren were the first to react, as the former abandoned the lifter and they both disappeared down the tunnel at a run, while Pelquin picked up the energy gun from where he’d left it while working. Drake would have been right behind Bren and Nate but a voice in his head stopped him.
Don’t! Stay put. The captain’s energy gun, you need to get rid of it; now!
Mudball had never sounded so insistent, so urgent. Drake didn’t hesitate, and he didn’t stop to argue with Pelquin, either. He snatched the gun from the startled captain’s grasp and flung it towards the tunnel that Nate and Bren had just sprinted down.
“What the hell do you think…?” Pelquin began.
He was interrupted by a bright flash and an explosion as the gun’s power pack detonated. The blast nearly knocked Drake off his feet.
“It’s the guardian entity,” he explained. “It’s finally hitting back at us.”
“How did you know..?”
But Drake was already past him, heading for the tunnel.
The blast from the depleted gun hadn’t been enough to bring the place crashing down around their ears, though the air was clogged with dust which, worryingly, seemed to be trickling from the ceiling. Drake wouldn’t have much fancied the chances of anyone holding the gun when it exploded, though.
I’d stop running towards the tunnel and find some cover, if I were you,
Mudball advised.
The comment was emphasised by a burst of gunfire from somewhere ahead: the chatter of a machine pistol being fired. Drake stumbled to a halt and tried to peer through the dust and the darkness but couldn’t make out anything.
What’s going on up there?
Before the alien had a chance to answer two figures burst through the murk, running at full pelt: Nate and Bren.
“Run!” Bren urged. “Take cover! We’re being attacked by bloody ghosts.”
On hearing the scream Leesa turned back to the screens, doing so just in time to see the wall of the tunnel loom ominously close on the buggy cam and then judder and spin alarmingly. Everything steadied for a second before the picture winked out altogether to leave a blank screen.
In that split second before the image disappeared, Leesa had seen something that made her blood run cold. A figure standing in the tunnel, caught in the beam from the headlights: an Xter.
Screw monitor duty! She turned and ran, going in search of a weapon.
Her thoughts raced as rapidly as her feet. The weapons locker would be sealed. She could try to force her way in using her aug but these were unfamiliar systems and that could take a while. Instead, she made for the captain’s cabin.
This was the first time Leesa had set foot inside the compact room and she was surprised by its retro grandeur. She had somehow expected a degree of austerity, clean lines and modern touches, but found instead quite the opposite. The bed boasted a multi-coloured cover – deep red, blues and purples with gold tasselled trim – and next to it stood an antique wooden bedside table. The small desk looked to be equally antique; and there was a pair of black wrought iron wall sconces –
wall sconces
for crying out loud – bearing virtual candles that had sprung to life as soon as she entered, bathing the room in uneven, flickering light.
It was the desk that caught her attention. A double-winged affair, with a stack of three drawers either side of the central well that the chair was pushed into, and a longer drawer stretching across the length of the chairwell just below the desktop. A single item stood on the top itself: a static picture; predictably of the
Ion Raider
, though a different image to the one in the corridor by the bridge. This was a photograph rather than a graphic representation, and the ship was on the ground. Leesa glanced at it and moved on. You’ve seen one Comet class ship, you’ve seen them all. She was more interested in the desk’s long drawer. By her reckoning it was the only one big enough. It wasn’t locked, opening readily at her touch – the captain clearly trusted his crew. Inside she found exactly what she was hoping for: the case that she and Bren had fetched back from Mokhtar’s shop on Brannan’s World.
A nebulous sense of urgency caused her to hurry. She took out the case, opened it, and picked up the needler. The gun felt awkward in the hand, the elongated barrel ensuring it was hardly the best-balanced of weapons, but she knew all that would change as soon as the barrel stand rested on something; only then would the gun come into its own.
The one thing that worried her was how much charge the weapon still carried. It had obviously been stored at Mokhy’s for an extended period of time – she had no idea exactly how long but presumably years. No telling whether it was even charged at all. She checked the display to find that it was; by no means fully, but hopefully enough.
Leesa was conscious of time slipping past, so, clutching the gun, she dashed from Pelquin’s quarters and along the corridor to the loading bay, taking the stairs in a series of rapid pigeon steps. She held the gun in her right hand, making sure to keep her grip clear of the trigger. There didn’t seem to be any holster and the barrel was too long for anything as casual as tucking it into her belt.
The loading bay doors stood open, ready for Anna’s next trip, and Leesa was soon sprinting over the surface of this unfamiliar world, drawing ever nearer to the ominous tunnel mouth while hoping that she wasn’t already too late.
There was shooting from somewhere ahead – presumably the cache chamber – the flicker-flash of gunfire starkly visible in the darkness.
Leesa found the buggy easily enough. It had ploughed into the tunnel wall, a glancing blow by the look of it and there seemed remarkably little damage. Anna still sat in the driver’s seat, blood covering the side of her face, eyes staring blankly. Dead.
That realisation saddened Leesa more than she would have expected. She hadn’t known the other woman long; perhaps that was half the problem: now she would never have the chance to.
Renewed gunfire drew her onward.
“Stop shooting!” Drake yelled from somewhere towards the far side of the chamber.
“Are you mad?” Pelquin countered, seriously wondering whether the banker had lost it under the pressure. Not that any of the rounds they’d poured into the Xters had made any difference as yet. The wretched things seemed to be impervious to injury.
“Shooting isn’t going to stop them,” Drake called again. “It’s not the Xters we’re up against. They’re dead, we know that. It’s the suits. The Xters were wearing powered suits and the guardian entity has taken control of them.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Oh for God’s sake,” Bren muttered from beside Pelquin. She fired off another round. The two of them had taken shelter behind a pile of assorted artefacts. “Zombie alien fucking space suits? Gimme a break!”
“I told you,” Drake called again, “shooting them isn’t going to work.”
“Yeah, well until someone figures out what
is
going to work, it’s all I’ve got,” Bren called back. For emphasis, she straightened and fired off another trio of shots.
This time, there was a response. Something slammed into their protective mound of artefacts. Pelquin felt the force of impact like a giant’s slap where his right arm rested against a multi-segmented something or other. It knocked him from his feet, even as his ears rang with the report of an explosion and shards of metal and jewels and shattered gizmos went everywhere.