Authors: Vaughn Heppner
“Do you, or he, have any thoughts
as to why it did that?” Maddox asked.
“Ludendorff had many ideas,” Dana said. “The one he finally fixated upon was the sentinel wishing to dissect the individual
for study.”
“Why did
the professor pick that idea in particular?” Maddox asked.
“I wondered the same thing,” Dana said. “Why not as reasonably believe the sentinel tried to save one
of its own species? Suppose the computer, or whatever the aliens used in lieu of one, finally malfunctioned. It tried to save the corpse, believing that it was really trying to save one of its own, bringing it to the ship for resuscitation. The starship is old. One would suspect failing systems. The marvel is that the vessel runs at all.”
Keith shifted in his seat. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but if the sentinel is picking us up to run tests,
I think it will have a way to subdue those it catches.”
“
Very good, Ensign,” Dana said. “I pointed out the same thing to the professor. He assured me he would figure something out when the time came.”
“Did
he tell you what the something was?” Maddox asked.
“No.”
Maddox grew uncomfortable. “What’s your plan for our defeating this possible subduing agent?”
Dana fixed her bloodshot eyes on him. “I did a lot of pondering. I finally realized the solution.” She pointed at him. “
You’re going to defeat the subduing agent, Captain Maddox. You have guns and a fighting crew. As I said, I’m also hoping that after six thousand years something over there has fallen apart. If not, the subduing agent will likely defeat us.”
“
If your hope is true,” Maddox said, “—that the ancient starship has fallen apart—it may not be much help to us against the New Men.”
“First things first,” Dana said. “We’re not on the
starship yet. Now you know my plan for getting us aboard. Are you willing to attempt it?”
Maddox sat back
. She was right. It was a crazy plan. “One thing bothers me,” he said. “Back on Earth, Brigadier O’Hara spoke about needing people with the right brain patterns. She said the professor had spoken about it.”
“I don’t recall that,” Dana said.
“Then why did the brigadier and the Lord High Admiral say that?” Maddox asked. “Cook had me gather the people I did due to those supposed patterns.”
“I have no idea,” Dana said. “Maybe it was subterfuge on their part, something to throw off the enemy if they learned of it.”
Maddox doubted that. It would have to remain a mystery for now. “I’m willing to attempt your plan, Doctor, or the professor’s plan as you say. What about the rest of you.”
One by one, the others agreed t
hat any attempt was better than none.
“Then we’d better hurry,” said Dana. “The sentinel will be here soon
enough.”
Captain Maddox floated outside the scout, staring in grim anticipation. The plan had sounded saner sitting in the wardroom. Out here, doubts began to assail him.
Th
e entire venture had been a desperate gamble from the beginning. The operation showed the Star Watch’s—humanity’s—weakness against the genetic marvels, the so-called New Men.
He kept wondering what group
had fled the Oikumene to travel into the Beyond to create
better
men and women. If Star Watch knew the answer, it might help unravel the mystery. It might reveal a weakness in the supermen. What had Per Lomax told him? The New Men came as gods in judgment of old-style humanity.
Growing progressively s
leepier, Maddox blinked in an effort to remain awake. If the enemy were gods, he had to become a godslayer. This lunatic plan of acting as corpses had to work.
Ever so slowly, Maddox turned his head. The others drifted nearby in their vacc-suits. Dana had explained it. She would override the robo-doctor, injecting them with a hibernating drug, simulating death.
Each of them wore a medikit around their waist. When something attempted to peel off his spacesuit, the medikit would inject the wearer with stimulants.
Maddox’s final
hibernating injection would come soon. He had taken stage one aboard the
Geronimo
. Afterward, he had carted the comatose people into the outer bay. Opening the hatch, Maddox let decompression eject the crew in a tumbling mass. With a thruster-pack, he glided into the void after them. He’d gathered the sleeping crew, bringing them to a central area.
Now,
Maddox watched
Geronimo
drifting away. The red giant blazed its fierce starlight, casting the system in a red nimbus.
Under the computer’s guidance, t
he scout came alive. Its thruster port glowed orange and then red. A moment later, blue exhaust poured out for several seconds. That shoved the Patrol scout toward the ancient vessel.
Maddox
watched sleepily, imagining that
Geronimo
went to investigate the prize. Ah, what was this? His eyes blinked rapidly. Another light flared into existence, one farther away. The dot of light grew, and so did a pinpoint object.
In time, a
chill swept through Maddox. He saw it then: the ancient sentinel. It was coming, growing in size.
A hoarse chuckle reverberated inside his helmet. The annihilator came to investigate the foreign object
s. What would the alien starship do to the scout and then to them as
corpses
?
A purple beam slashed through the void. The tip touched
Geronimo
. In a flash of destruction, the scout exploded as metal rained in all directions. Water, coolants, bedding material, electronics and computer pieces all flashed into the void as tiny hot objects. Like that, their workhorse, their home these past months, was gone.
Did the scout travel far enough
away from us? Are we safe from the blast radius?
Maddox tried to turn his head to see
what had happened to the others. The muscles in his neck refused his mental commands. The medikit must have already given him the stage two injection. His eyelids were becoming too heavy to keep open.
Time blurred for Maddox even as he fought to remain awake to see what would happen.
Oh! What was this?
Maddox saw a vast shape gliding through the interstellar night. Blue lights dotted the vessel, showing the twin disc
areas.
It’s here.
The sentinel has come to investigate. Does the starship wonder about our so-called corpses?
The giant warship slowed. A
section in one of the large discs slid open. Light poured from it. Then something thin slid out. An alien shuttle—if that’s what it was—began to nose toward them.
Maddox
strove to stay awake to see this marvel, but he was losing the fight. What would the alien craft do to them? He almost overrode the medikit to give him the stim now. An instinct warned him that would be a deadly idea.
I’ll trust the geniuses, Professor Ludendorff and Doctor Rich. I hope they guessed right. I’m too young to die. I want to live. I want to defeat the New Men
…
***
Maddox’s eyelids flickered. He felt groggy despite the apprehension weighing on his chest.
Why am I feeling so—?
With a start, he realized he’d heard a scream of pure agony. That’s what had focused his lazy thoughts. It sounded like Doctor Rich.
Maddox strove to open his eyes, to wake up. Another scream put goosebumps
on his arms. By a sleepy force of will, he lifted his eyelids as if they were lead shutters. The sight horrified him.
Doctor Rich lay on a
lumpy upright pad with tubes stuck in her body. Blood surged through the tubes. He guessed the life essences pumped out of her body.
Maddox made a croaking noise
of outrage. The blood pumped into a container that was rapidly filling.
Even as he watched, thin flexible cables attached themselves to Doctor Rich. They jolted her
with electricity or something similar. She screamed once more. Blue webs of energy snaked across her body, making her arch upward. A hat of some kind sat on her head. Cables led from it to a pulsating bank on the nearest wall. No, on the wall was a mass of what looked like alien flesh with quivering nodes and more cables or tentacles slowly waving in the air.
With an inarticulate bellow,
Maddox strove to move his arms. He could not. A cool portion of his mind forced him to look down. Crisscrossing bands of alien material strapped him in place.
A
fierce and feminine roar of determination caused Maddox to look to his left. Meta strained against the bands holding her down. Her muscles were rigid with strain with veins popping up from her skin. Then, one after another, the bands around her body snapped off.
“Free me!” Maddox
shouted. “Get me out of here!”
Like a wild beast, Meta leaped to him. By her
floating movement, it was clear she was weightless. Meta crashed against his pad, her knees striking his chest, knocking the wind out of him. As he gasped to breathe in the smoky atmosphere, she intertwined her fingers around a thick band across his pectorals. With a heave of strength, she ripped it loose. She did it again and again, tearing off the other bands, freeing him.
As Maddox sucked down air,
the most bloodcurdling scream of all erupted from Dana Rich.
In a fluid motion,
acting with lethal rage, Maddox drew his gun. He fired bullet after bullet into the pulsating half-alive proto-flesh on the wall, the one in charge of all those tubes. Meta did the same thing. Each shot blasted its noise against his ears. Each slug exploded chunks of flesh from the alien mass. Vile jets of steam hissed from the flesh. The thin cables that had electrified Dana flew off her cot and began to thrash back and forth.
“Keep
shooting!” Maddox shouted. He leaped at Doctor Rich, sailing toward her. A tentacle-like cable slashed toward his face. He caught it, and the thing struggled with him.
Audibly panting, Meta reloaded her gun and continued to fire
into the main mass. The smell of gunpowder had grown thick in the chamber.
The
tentacle in Maddox’s grip flailed with less power than before.
“Empty every bullet you have into it!” Maddox shouted.
“No,” Dana moaned. “Don’t do that. You’ll kill us if you do.”
Maddox’s focus snapped
onto the doctor. Her eyes were wide and staring. Drool spilled from her mouth.
“I’m so tired,” Dana said. “It’s taken
too much of my blood.”
“Why
did it do that?” Maddox asked.
“To f
eed,” Dana said. “It’s hungry, very hungry.”
A feeling of loathing came over Maddox. With a manic grasp, he
tore the cap off the doctor’s head. He ripped tiny leads from it attached to her scalp, and blood drifted in the air. Then he pulled the larger leads off her flesh, freeing her from the proto-flesh. In the zero gravity, he manhandled her away from the torturing pad.
Blood oozed from her
many wounds, floating away from her in tiny globules.
“Quick,” Maddox said in a loud voice. “Help me save her.”
Perhaps sensing his intent, Meta holstered her smoking gun. Together with Maddox, they applied bandages to the many wounds. Once the bleeding stopped, Maddox ordered Meta to free the others. They watched with openmouthed horror and drooling sleepiness.
The Rouen Colony woman applied her strength yet again, freeing each of the crew from their restraints.
“The doctor’s too pale,” Valerie said. “We have to use our medikits.”
Maddox nodded for her to proceed.
Valerie used a higher function on her kit. She gave the doctor a direct blood transfusion. It turned out Sergeant Riker had the same blood type. So, he also gave Dana a transfusion.
The room stank of alien stenches
, gunpowder and blood. More vapors and a dark oozing substance extruded from the fleshy mass on the wall that seemed to operate the torture chamber.
Maddox looked around. He couldn’t spy any hatches
out of here.
“What do we do now?” Keith asked
as he panted.
“Good question,” Maddox said.
Dana’s eyelids flickered until she finally focused on him. “I know what to do,” she whispered.
“We’re listening,” Maddox said.
“The…the creature communicated with me,” Dana said. “It’s so terribly lonely.”
“You can tell us
all about that later,” Maddox said. “For now, I want to know if we’re on the shuttle or in the starship.”
Dana frowned
at the question.
Maddox explained
to her what he’d seen before passing out.
“Oh, yes, the shuttle,” Dana said. “
I see what you mean. We’re on it or in it. The creature is too afraid to move into the sentinel. It’s been waiting for reinforcements.”
“What
do you mean?” Keith asked with his eyes wide and wild. “You’re telling us this…
creature
has waited for reinforcements for six thousand years?”
Dana nodded
weakly.
Maddox felt cold inside
as ruthlessness and despair battled within him. “Is the alien ship filled with these life forms?” he asked, indicting the quivering flesh.
Dana stared at him. “Do you mean the ship or shuttle?”
“The starship,” Maddox said, “our goal.”
“
No, I don’t think so,” Dana said. “This one invaded the sentinel or was part of a combat group. It was or is a medical creature.”
“How do you know any of this?” Maddox asked.
Gingerly, Dana touched the bandages on her scalp. “It communicated directly with my brain. You should have left those in place.”
“It was draining your blood
!” Maddox shouted.
Dana shuddered.
“Is that thing—” Maddox jerked his thumb at the mass of alien-flesh beginning to ooze off the wall—“flying the shuttle?”
“I don’t think so,” Dana said. “I have the feeling the sentinel is flying it.
The creature merely intercepts those the starship tries to rescue.”
Maddox fought for calm.
“How do we get out of this room?”
Dana frowned as she looked around. Finally, she pointed at the barely quivering flesh. “We have to peel that thing off,” she said.
“The hatch is behind it.”
“We’d better put our vacc-suits back on,” Sergeant Riker said.
The suits lay scattered on the deck. “We don’t know what’s in the rest of the shuttle, if it has more air we can breathe.”
Maddox glanced at his
aide. The sergeant looked shaken, and the man gripped his arm where the medikit had drawn blood.
“Good idea,” Maddox
told him. “Let’s suit up, people. We’re alive, and it appears we might have the freedom of the shuttle. Now is the time to make the most of it.”
***
Peeling away the shuddering warm flesh might have been too difficult without their suits on. The hatch was smaller than those on the scout, but it was large enough for them to squeeze through.
What looked like crusted slime coated the deck plates. It crackled as their boots crunched over it.
“We can call them the
slime aliens
,” Keith said over his short-speaker.
“Are the
re more of them aboard the shuttle?” Meta asked Dana.
The doctor shook her helmet. She wheezed over the headphones. Meta and Valerie helped her
along the short corridor.
“No,” Dana whispered. “Use the other hatch.”
Maddox released his grip on the one and forced the other. It opened into a narrow control room with a triangular window in front. He and the others piled into the chamber. What might have been tentacle slot buttons on a panel glowed with various colors.