‘Yes,’ Schmidt nodded. ‘Only two of them are actual Ayleeans. The third is an imposter, a clone. That’s how these things get aboard ships: they lay in wait for rescue by a third party. They’re already aboard us, captain. They’re inside Titan!’
‘Secure the quarantine unit!’ Marshall roared as Schmidt vanished from sight.
***
XXIII
The Marines outside the quarantine unit burst in through the security doors to see the bodies of two Ayleeans lying still strapped to their beds, their eyes wide and lifeless, their tongues hanging out of their gaping mouths. Detective Foxx followed Admiral Marshall at a run, Vasquez and Sergeant Agry leading them as they sprinted down to the unit and followed the Marines inside.
Doctor Schmidt was waiting at the entrance as the Marines waved them forward.
Foxx eased her way to the quarantine unit entrance and peered through the hard–light walls. One of the beds was vacant, the restraints dangling from either side and no sign of the Ayleean who had minutes before been strapped in place.
‘How the hell did that thing get out of those restraints?!’ Sergeant Agry boomed, his voice like a broadside of cannon fire that echoed around the corridors outside as he confronted the Marines.
‘It didn’t,’ Corporal Hodgson replied, his chin held high as he stared into the middle distance. ‘Nothing came past our position, admiral. Check the visual feeds, the scanners, anything. We all were stood right here.’
Doctor Schmidt stared through the hard–light walls as he surveyed the interior.
‘Maintain the security perimeter,’ he said softly. ‘Don’t shut down the quarantine.’
‘It’s too damned late!’ Marshall raged, glaring into the cubicle. ‘It’s gone, whatever the hell it is.’
Schmidt shook his head. ‘That’s what it wants us to think.’
Foxx frowned as she looked again inside the quarantine unit. The bed was most definitely empty, and the other two Ayleeans were likewise obviously dead. The rest of the unit was clean: no materials or instruments, nothing behind which a creature of the mass of an Ayleean could possibly hope to hide.
‘That’s not possible,’ she said. ‘It was big, it couldn’t be hiding. You think that maybe it’s using some kind of cloaking device?’
Schmidt shook his head slowly, completely absorbed by whatever it was he had deduced as he stared into the quarantine unit.
‘Have you ever heard of Sherlock Holmes, detective?’
‘Of course,’ Foxx replied. ‘Not everything was lost in the wake of The Falling. Most digital archives survived. He was a detective created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a British author.’
‘Correct,’ Schmidt replied. ‘One of Mister Holmes’s most famous teachings was that once you’ve ruled out the impossible, whatever remains must be the truth, no matter how improbable.’
Foxx took a breath and looked again at the quarantine unit, protected by its cuboid hard–light walls, capable of preventing even bacteria from passing through and infecting the rest of the vessel.
‘Okay,’ she said finally. ‘Nothing can get out of there and the Marines said that nothing came past them, so whatever we picked up along with these two dead Ayleeans from their ship is, according to your logic, still in there.’
‘Correct,’ Schmidt agreed. ‘Thus, it must be hiding somehow.’
‘There’s no room,’ Betty pointed out as she joined them, ‘and nothing to hide behind.’
Schmidt smiled. ‘One does not need something to hide behind, when one is hiding instead in plain sight.’
Betty frowned, not understanding. Then a security officer hurried up and from his optical implant was beamed a holographic projection, a recording of the events inside the quarantine unit before the death of the two Ayleeans.
‘Ah,’ Schmidt nodded as he watched the feed, ‘as I suspected.’
Foxx watched in horror the holographic projection suspended in thin air between them as the third Ayleean’s body parts disconnected and crawled like gruesome snakes onto the bodies of his companions and forced their way into their skulls, penetrating their brains and their throats, killing them within seconds.
‘What the hell?’ Vasquez uttered. ‘Did I just see that?’
‘That’s nothing compared to what it must have done next,’ Schmidt said.
The Marines and the admiral gathered around the projection in silence as they watched with morbid fascination to see what the bizarre creature would do next.
Foxx watched the feed as the Ayleean’s body, still lying in silence on its bed but without any arms, suddenly faded as all markings upon it seemed to drain like watercolors from an image, the body becoming opaque and pale as though it were little more than a lump of clay. Then, the Ayleean’s entire body slowly began to disintegrate before their eyes, slithering out of its restraints and spilling toward the deck like some kind of foul liquid. It drooped off the bed, thick like oil but partially translucent as it began to break up into bulbous pools of ooze on the deck.
Foxx watched, a bolt of nausea lodging in her throat as she watched the mess spread out and become increasingly translucent until it suddenly was invisible. The glossy film it left on the deck became matt, and in a matter of a few seconds the former Ayleean was utterly invisible.
‘Shape–shifting?’ Vasquez gasped, his voice dry. ‘Man, the Ayleeans never manage to pull something like that off. What the hell is that thing?’
Admiral Marshall moved closer, his jaw clenched and his hands locked tightly behind his back.
‘It’s history,’ he growled. ‘Corporal Hodgson, have decon’ units sent down here to scour that unit of every microbe and bacteria.’
The Marine turned to carry out the admiral’s orders but Schmidt shook his head.
‘I would not do that, captain,’ he suggested.
Marshall turned to the doctor. ‘This isn’t a case where your “all life is sacrosanct” attitude is going to work out, doctor. That thing is a living predator and if it gets out of that unit it will destroy this ship and its crew just like it did those of the Ayleeans. It dies, here and now.’
‘If it dies,’ Schmidt replied.
Marshall winced.
‘They just wiped out an Ayleean warship, doc’, case you hadn’t noticed!’
Schmidt’s voice remained calm.
‘They may be biological but they may also be machine, and they may be a little of both. Cleansing this unit using the technology at our disposal may not achieve anything. A being as advanced as this one won’t simply be wiped away by a blast of ultraviolet light, captain. Their survival techniques, honed perhaps over millennia, will likely outstrip our weapons by a considerable margin.’
Marshall squinted into the unit for a moment. ‘Then what do you propose we do with them, oh Great Doctor? Tuck them in with a bedtime story?’
Schmidt thought for a moment and then nodded. ‘That’s a fabulous idea.’
Marshall’s expression collapsed in dismay. ‘Seriously?’
‘They need to be studied, in depth,’ Schmidt insisted. ‘We can’t effectively defend ourselves against something that we do not understand. Our best course of action is to capture some of this material, or whatever it is, and subject it to a rapid study to understand how it operates and how we can build a defense against it that will prevent Titan from ending up like the alien vessel out there, which I might remind you is covered with countless billions of tons of material of the kind we have here.’
Foxx realized what Schmidt meant. ‘The ice around the alien ship,’ she said. ‘The damage, the deaths of the crew, it was all caused by this stuff?’
‘Most likely,’ Schmidt confirmed. ‘It uses metals for fuel and thus it requires sustenance, which means it can also be starved. I suspect that its ability to mimic an Ayleean was born of consuming the crew of the warship after its attack.’
‘Then what about the other two who survived?’ Vasquez asked.
‘Cover,’ Schmidt replied. ‘Two of them in escape capsules, the chance to infiltrate another vessel, or victim, whatever you might wish to call us. The Ayleean ship was in effect a Trojan Horse. Whatever this stuff is, it’s alive and we need to understand it as fast as we can.’
Marshall ground his teeth in his jaw for a moment before he replied.
‘How, and how long?’
‘I don’t know,’ Schmidt said, ‘but right now we must consider this vessel, the Ayleean ambassador’s ship, Polaris Station and the orbital prisons as quarantine zones. We cannot afford to let this material spread any further than it already has.’
Vasquez looked at Foxx. ‘Nathan and Allen are still on Tethys Gaol.’
‘Can we get them out?’ Foxx asked Schmidt.
‘No,’ Schmidt replied apologetically. ‘Until we know what’s really going on here, nobody can go anywhere. Everything is to be locked down until I can figure this out, understood?’
Marshall nodded as he spoke to the XO, Olsen, via his communicator.
‘Implement the lockdown and maintain the block on all communications channels coming in and out, even if we break the alien jamming, and inform the Ayleeans of what’s happened via light signals, standard protocol. Right now, we’re not going anywhere so just pull us back from the alien vessel and I want fighter patrols out to one hundred thousand kilometers. No vessels move unless we say so.’
‘Aye captain.’
Foxx turned away as Vasquez moved alongside her.
‘Nathan, Allen and Reed are stuck in that prison and we still haven’t heard from the DA’s office planet–side.’
‘There’s nothing that we can do,’ Foxx replied as they walked. ‘We can’t even get off this ship and head back to New Washington to follow up on what we’ve learned. If Reed really is being framed, then whoever’s behind all of this will want them dead as soon as possible along with anybody else who’s been sniffing around the case lately.’
They looked at each other for a moment.
‘Detective Samson,’ Vasquez said. ‘We gotta warn him!’
‘And my partner’s over there in Tethys in the middle of a riot,’ Betty snapped. ‘We’ve got to get over there right now!’
Foxx rubbed her temples with one hand.
‘We can’t contact Samson and we can’t help Nathan either. Whatever’s waiting for them, they’re going to have to face it all alone.’
***
XXIV
Tethys Gaol
Nathan heard the whoops and jeers of murderous delight as he and Detective Allen were guided along the gantry behind Xavier Reed, the miserable threesome escorted by a phalanx of heavily armed sticks.
Nathan quickly realized that compared to the block itself the other sections of the prison had been somewhat luxurious. He instantly felt the heat inside the block, close and heavy, stained with the odors of sweat and urine and other bodily fluids he didn’t even want to think about. Inmates jeered at them, threats echoing back and forth across the block as they were shoved by the sticks into a cell. Nathan turned and watched as the sticks slammed the heavy gates closed and walked off, leaving the three of them inside.
The cell was small, just two thin mattresses on blocks of poured concrete stained with the filth of ages, and it seemed as though the very walls were ingrained with the stench of compacted humanity, pain and despair that seemed to leech from the bodies of each and every convict who had ever haunted the corridors.
Nathan stood at the cell door and tried to ignore the hoots and cat calls echoing across the block from the other cells. Neither Nathan nor Detective Allen had been wearing restraints when they were led onto the block but he knew that too was likely for effect – the warden wanted to let every single con know who and what they really were: yet more policeman on the block, temporarily imprisoned alongside some of the most dangerous men ever to have lived.
‘Welcome to my world,’ Reed said miserably as he slumped onto a bunk.
‘This wasn’t what I had in mind.’
A low latrine and a steel mirror completed the interior of the cell, Reed allowed no special belongings or anything that could be used to make the cell feel more like home. However, despite this the ever–innovative prisoners had used dye stains from the bedding to fashion crude drawings on the walls. Nathan could see years’ of faded artwork marking the walls despite valiant attempts by the authorities to remove them. Some were remedial scrawlings, others remarkably adept, others still touching – a lifelike sketch of a girlfriend looking out of one wall, the image of a daughter from another.
On the back wall Nathan could see a series of long lines drawn on the crumbling surface, each line marked with what looked like numbers, the bizarre drawings seeming almost architectural in design.
‘I look at them a lot,’ Reed said as he sat on his mattress. ‘It’s a sad truth but I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’m probably never getting out of here alive.’
Nathan sat down opposite Reed.
‘The hell you’re not. I didn’t come all the way out here to sit in this cell and give up. You’re innocent, Xavier. You know it, I know it and even the San Diego DA is going to know it in a few hours. They’re not going to let the warden keep you here for much longer.’
‘And yet here we are,’ Reed replied with a weak smile. ‘You and I both know that the warden’s not going to let us leave. I try not to be paranoid but I’m pretty damned sure that whoever set me up for this probably has the warden in their pocket too.’
‘That’s unlikely,’ Nathan said. ‘The warden is just high on his own power trip.’
‘That doesn’t mean that somebody isn’t trying to get Reed iced as fast as they can,’ Allen pointed out. ‘They must know about the investigation into his conviction by now, and if so they won’t want Reed getting released or the case being officially reopened.’
‘They almost succeeded’ Reed asked. ‘The crew that runs this block has already made it pretty damned clear that the first chance they get, they’re gonna come down on me. They’ve already tried once.’
Nathan clenched his fists and fought off a brief wave of fear and despair, Reed having been inside for several days and likely better in tune with the mood inside the block than Nathan.
‘Then we’ll be ready for them,’ he insisted. ‘You’re not on your own now, remember? And we’ve both got a damned good reason to survive this.’