***
XXXIV
CSS Titan
Gunnery Sergeant Jenson Agry crouched in a corridor on Titan’s port hull and checked over his shoulder to see the twenty Marines under his command taking up positions either side of the corridor behind bulkheads, their rifles trained ahead, Corporal Hodgson leading them. Every man was encased in heavy black body armor and mask, a “
zero–zero”
battle suit optimized for combat in zero gravity and temperatures.
A single bulkhead separated the troop from the breach in Titan’s hull beyond, wrought by the attack from the alien vessel and where the alien drones had penetrated the ship’s interior. Agry was not a man who was easily shaken, having survived two full tours in the Ayleena Wars, but now he knew he was facing something for which no human being could be completely prepared, and it was the lack of knowledge that bothered him. The briefing he’d been given by the admiral was precisely that: brief.
‘All in position,’
came the report from his corporal in his implanted microphone and earpiece relay.
Agry watched the bulkhead for a moment longer, checked the magazine on his plasma rifle one last time, and then waved his men forward.
Two Marines hurried past him, one covering the other as he placed a small device over the bulkhead’s locking mechanism. Designed not to destroy but simply to override, the device would open the bulkhead and let the Marines get a good look at whatever had infiltrated the flagship of the fleet.
The Marines scurried back to their positions and Agry heard the sapper’s voice in his ear.
‘Doors open in three, two, one…’
A moment of silence passed and then the doors clanged heavily as the massive braces and latches disengaged. With agonizing slowness, the doors began to creep upward as a billowing cloud of super cold air was drawn into the vacuum beyond the doors, the atmosphere vanishing in a whirling vortex of vapor and ice crystals as Agry and his men peered into the shattered hull beyond.
Agry saw what looked like huge steel girders and braces that had been bent by the force of the impacts of the colliding fighters, signs of molten metal frozen by the vacuum of space into bizarre sculptures like gigantic metal trees and flowers. Through the metallic forest sparkled clouds of debris all turning and shifting at once like a million tiny stars glistening before them in the darkness.
‘It’s in there somewhere,’ Agry murmured. ‘Stay on your guard.’
Slowly, he crept toward the gaping maw of the hull, noted the faint glimmer of light coming from Saturn’s glow outside the ship and heard the groan and thump of plasma fire raining down on the ship’s hull to reverberate through the superstructure.
The shifting whorls of vapor faded away into clouds of ice crystals, further obscuring the damaged section of the hull as Agry reached the bulkhead and peered into the darkness. The hull breach was twenty or more meters in width, and he could see all three layers of Titan’s thick hull plating blasted inward one after the other by the repeated impacts of the enemy drones, like a gigantic metallic flower embedded in the side of the ship. Beyond was deep space, Saturn’s pale glow cast through the cavity to dimly illuminate the interior of the ship.
Agry waved his men cautiously forward and they crept into the cavity, moving silently from cover to cover as they advanced. Agry pointed at two Marines and gestured for them to stand guard at the bulkhead as the rest of the team advanced. The two Marines instantly engaged a ray shield over the bulkhead to replace the blast doors and prevent any of the alien material from entering the ship proper.
Agry eased himself up onto a shattered gantry and crouched in silence as he watched his men disperse, their movements causing the clouds of tiny pieces of debris to coil in whorls around them like flotsam in a dark ocean. As he crouched watching for the slightest movement ahead of his men in the darkness, so his eye caught upon a discrepancy in the debris around him. Titan’s massive hull braces lined the interior of the hull like the ribs of some unspeakably large creature, but as Agry’s eyes cast across them so he noticed what looked like an extra one poking out of the shattered plating above them, its jagged tip glinting like metal and yet looking almost like ice as the light from Saturn beamed through the hull. Admiral Marshall’s briefing shot through his mind and two words blazed through his awareness like plasma blasts.
Shape shifter.
‘Enemy, high! Fall back!’
Agry’s cry had barely broken out of his throat when the immense brace suddenly shifted position, coiled up like a snake and then lashed out with terrific speed toward the Marines. Agry swung his rifle around as the jagged form shot across the hull, stretching out like some angular arm of ice, and he fired a single shot that slammed into the brace’s mid–section amid a burst of plasma that flared like lightning in the gloom.
The brace shattered in two but it kept moving as the Marines below Agry all opened fire at once upon the bizarre projectile. The form broke up further amid the blasts but then several of the sections landed near the Marines and split up, rolling and writhing and crawling and moving in ways that Agry could barely discern in the brief seconds it took them to swarm in among his men. Like liquid metal droplets running down a window they lurched across the girders and gantries toward the Marines.
Then the screams started.
Agry fired again as he saw the objects splinter into millions of tiny forms, like clouds of razor blades that flickered and flashed and scythed their way through the soldiers’ armor in a blurred frenzy of motion. The armored suits of several Marines were scythed open and escaping blasts of pressurized air burst in clouds of vapor into the vacuum as the Marines trapped within their coffin–like suits were sliced to pieces by the lethal clouds.
‘Fall back!’ Agry yelled again.
The Marines all began backing up toward the bulkhead from which they had entered the breach, firing as they went at the clouds of lethal splinters all travelling under their own momentum toward the Marine’s positions.
Agry saw four of his men reach the bulkhead and cry out for the ray–shielding to be opened.
‘Hold the line!’ Agry yelled. ‘Maintain fire!’
The soldiers turned and began firing wildly again, but their plasma blasts simply broke the clouds of splinters up into smaller groups that kept moving toward them.
Agry knew that the devices must eventually become too small to power themselves, but he could not think of a means to break them down sufficiently to render them useless except by continuously blasting them.
He turned his rifle on the nearest cloud of particles and fired, saw the searing plasma blast crash through it and leave a trail of what looked like thousands of glowing embers as the entity was scorched and incinerated, but the rest of the cloud burst aside from the shot and then closed in behind it like a school of fish avoiding a predator.
‘There’s too many of them!’ Corporal Hodgson yelled as he fired shot after shot into the clouds of debris now swarming toward their position in front of the doors. ‘We can’t shoot them all!’
Agry looked over his shoulder at the ray–shielding and he knew that he could not afford to open the barrier and have the bizarre life form follow them through. He looked at the whirling clouds of particles now bearing down upon them and he knew that there was nowhere else to run.
His mind churned with desperation as he sought some means of evading this bizarre yet lethal predator, and then he recalled Doctor Schmidt’s words from the sick bay.
The organism in the main quarantine cubicle will be aware that a sample of its being has been taken, but this much smaller sample will no longer be aware of what or where it is.
‘Down!’ he yelled. ‘Head down into the ship and take them with us! We keep running, we can keep breaking them up until they lose cohesion and awareness!’
The Marines broke from their positions and leaped out into the void, firing in pairs at the writhing coils of material pursuing and reaching out for them like gnarled fingers of fluid that seethed within themselves as though made from boiling metallic water. Agry pushed off from his position and plunged down with them to land heavily on a ledge of shattered deck plating, his weight drawing him down fast enough toward Titan’s Higgs generator to escape the pursuing horde.
‘This way!’
Agry yelled at the remaining Marines to follow him as he jumped downward from shattered deck to shattered deck, putting more and more distance between them and their pursuers. The clouds of writhing entities wound their way through the shattered decks above them, plunging through the beams of light cast by Saturn as Agry hit the lowest deck exposed to the vacuum of space and saw that there was nowhere else left to run.
He whirled and saw against the interior walls of the hull a bulkhead hatch still sealed against the damage.
His Marines landed all around him, their plasma rifles firing in absolute silence in the vacuum but the light from the blasts illuminating the cold black metal around Agry as though he were standing below a thunderstorm raging through the darkness of the night. He dashed across to the fire hatch and keyed his communicator.
‘Delta Company, request immediate hatch release, Deck Four, zero–five–one–four–charlie!’
The communicator crackled in response and Agry turned, his back to the hatch in case it opened as he fired up at the advancing clouds of tiny beings threatening to consume them alive.
‘Communicators are down!’ Corporal Hodgson yelled. ‘We can’t get the hatch open from here!’
Agry fired again at the cloud of particles raining down toward them, and he knew that there was nothing else that they could do.
‘Take as many of them with us as we can!’ he roared.
*
Foxx peered out of the windshield of the shuttle at Titan’s vast hull as she heard the request crackle again across the communications channel.
‘Delta Compa.., request immediate…, release, Deck Four, zero–five…,charlie!’
‘That’s a Marine company,’ Vasquez said. ‘Sounds like they’re in trouble.’
‘Deck Four,’ Betty said as she surveyed the vast hull. ‘You know where that is?’
Vasquez pointed down at one of the huge gashes in Titan’s surface, a black maw filled with spiralling clouds of debris.
‘There, right there! They must be inside! We’re close enough that their transmission is breaking through all the interference.’
The shuttle turned, Betty guiding the craft into the ragged chamber forged into Titan’s hull by the aliens’ attack. The shuttle descended into the gloom, and almost at once the spacecraft’s running lights illuminated a roiling cloud of particles below them that looked like some kind of typhoon or tornado that swirled as though alive over a small platoon of Marines trapped in the lower decks.
‘They’re cut off!’ Vasquez said as he saw the Marines.
‘And we don’t have any weapons,’ Foxx pointed out as the whirling funnel of beings twisted away from the shuttle’s lights.
Although there was no discernable form to the funnel before them, somehow Foxx instinctively knew that it had detected their presence and had turned to face them. Its shape suddenly mutated once again, folding in upon itself as it suddenly formed a smaller, shuttle–like shape complete with shadowy markings similar to the one in which Foxx, Vasquez and Betty sat.
‘I think it’s seen us,’ Betty said.
The shuttle stopped to hover in the cavity, suspended it seemed amid the debris as the curious entity began advancing toward it.
‘Now what?’ Foxx asked. ‘We can’t shoot it!’
Betty gripped the controls with a grim smile. ‘Like I said, you don’t need weapons to defend yourself, young lady.’
Even as Foxx wondered what on Earth Betty was going to do, the shuttle below them morphed again into what looked a little like a Phantom fighter, and then it shot up toward them on a direct collision course.
‘Time to leave!’ Foxx shouted.
Betty twisted the control column and the shuttle flipped over inside Titan’s hull, and as it did so it brought its engines to bear on the advancing mass.
‘Full power!’ Betty yelled.
Foxx lunged across the console and slammed the throttles open, and she felt the shuttle surge ahead as its powerful engines blasted the cloud of entities behind them. Foxx whirled and saw through the rear display screen the
Phantom
–shaped vortex light up in a bright orange glow as billions of tiny forms were superheated and incinerated in an instant as the shuttle’s engines fired and it blasted clear of Titan’s hull.
She saw the plasma rifles of the Marines open up once again, and she knew that they would have enough firepower to blast whatever remained of the entity. She reached across and grabbed Betty by the shoulder.
‘Go back for them,’ she said.
‘I thought we were up against the clock?’ Betty asked.
‘We are, and we’ll get through Tethys a lot easier with a platoon of Marines at our backs!’
Betty’s lips twisted into an ingratiated smile as she turned the shuttle around, the battle still raging all around them as they plunged back toward the gash in Titan’s hull. Betty eased the craft in alongside the hull as Vasquez sealed the interior pressure hatch behind them in the cockpit, sealing off the main hull as Betty opened the boarding hatch.
The Marines made instantly for the shuttle, bursting from the interior of Titan’s battered hull and swarming inside.
‘That’s it!’ Vasquez said as he watched the soldiers enter the craft, ‘they’re all in!’
Betty shut the hatch and bled air and pressure into the shuttle once more as it accelerated away from Titan toward the prison. Foxx watched a display screen as the pressure, temperature and atmospheric levels returned to normal inside the shuttle’s main hull before Vasquez reopened the pressure hatch and saw eight Marines staring at them with exhausted and relieved expressions on their faces. One of them was the
Gunny
, Sergeant Agry.
‘That was timely,’ he said in a characteristic understatement. ‘That thing’s aboard and we likely haven’t finished it off. We need to get back aboard Titan and…’