‘We’re going to the prison,’ Foxx interrupted him.
‘We’re what?’
Betty guided the shuttle toward the prison, which was by now a brightly glowing star before them as it reflected the sun’s light.
‘Can you make it in there?’ Vasquez asked. ‘The prison’s on lockdown and we can’t make contact with any of the officers aboard.’
Betty flicked a couple of switches before her on the console as she replied.
‘All prisons have an emergency security breach code which allows rescue crews inside in case of riots, fire and so on, to evacuate personnel and prisoners. It’s a one–time thing but we’ll use the code and keep our fingers crossed.’
‘We’re almost out of time,’ Foxx said as she saw the prison looming ahead of them.
Betty nodded and gripped the controls more tightly.
‘Hang on, we’re going to be landing
real
fast.’
Sergeant Agry looked as though he was about to activate his plasma rifle and commandeer the shuttle. ‘We’re going to be heading back to Titan, is what we’re gonna be doing.’
‘A riot’s erupted and we have officers and civilians trapped inside,’ Foxx replied. ‘If we don’t get there soon, they’ll die.’
‘If we don’t get back aboard Titan right now her entire crew might die!’ Agry growled. ‘We have a duty to…’
‘Titan has other Marines aboard,’ Foxx insisted. ‘We have nobody to stand up to two thousand hardened convicts. If you want to get off then go, but we’re going into that prison with or without you.’
Sergeant Agry glared at Foxx, furious at the dilemma she was forcing upon him. Betty leaned around from the cockpit and her chortling tones filled the shuttle.
‘And you owe us because we did totally save your asses! Just sayin’.’
***
XXXV
The laboratory shuddered and the ceiling lights flickered sporadically as Doctor Schmidt leaned over the holoscope and peered into its depths at the sample of the entity confined within the quarantine chamber before him. The ship lurched and shook as it was bombarded with fire from the alien vessel, but Schmidt forced the distractions from his mind as he zoomed in on the tiny particles that made up the living being that had occupied the ship.
He had decided upon observing the alien vessel that the best bet for understanding the creature was to freeze it in motion. The alien ship was entombed in ice which was itself formed from or by the entity that had occupied it, and so now Schmidt had placed the sample into a vacuum chamber which he had then chilled to a frigid –262 degrees Celcius, not far off absolute zero and sufficient that all molecular activity would cease as any life forms capable of hibernating through such extremes hunkered down.
He could see the cells, tiny organisms suspended in a biological soup of some kind that even now his instruments were attempting to measure and define. The scope zoomed in deeper and Schmidt realized that he could see cellular machinery, the engines that powered all biological life, within the cells themselves.
‘Extraordinary.’
‘What is?’ Admiral Marshall asked as he burst into the laboratory, his face flushed with anxiety and the burden of command.
Schmidt did not raise his head to look at the soldier as he replied.
‘The cells from which this shape shifting entity are constructed appear well adapted to long–duration hibernation. I never seen such robust cells, even among the tardigrades and other hyper–resilient species.’
‘That’s fascinating,’ Marshall replied. ‘I’ll take a biology lesson later, just tell me how to kill the damned thing before it takes over the entire ship will you?’
Schmidt shook his head, ever in dismay at mankind’s inherent desire to systematically destroy everything in its path that it did not understand. Before them lay the very first example of an alien species that had, in its own way, attempted to make contact with humanity. Schmidt felt strongly that learning to communicate with it would be of more use than learning how to destroy it, but even he could not ignore completely the blasts raining down on Titan’s hull, all coming from another vessel controlled by the very entity he was trying to understand.
‘It doesn’t understand us,’ Schmidt opined. ‘It only reacted violently when we quarantined it.’
‘It acted against us when it boarded the ship without consent,’ Marshall shot back.
‘It may merely have been curious.’
‘Curious how to kill two Ayleeans?’
‘It may not view life as we do.’
The admiral lost patience and pointed a finger at Schmidt’s face. ‘All the more reason to ensure it can’t arbitrarily destroy that life, agreed?’
Schmidt looked at the admiral, and although he knew there was nothing that Marshall could do to physically harm Schmidt, that didn’t remove the fact that the doctor knew the admiral was right. He said nothing and peered again into the microscope and this time he noticed something odd. As he zoomed in, observing individual cells as though they were the size of grapes, he began to see a pattern that for a moment his brain could not assimilate. There was something about the shape, size and formation of the cells that…
Schmidt jerked his head back from the viewfinder, shock writ large upon his face.
‘What?’ Marshall demanded.
Schmidt didn’t reply as he turned and hurried across to a work station where a holo–screen still displayed the images of the bodies of the three Ayleeans, taken when they were still inside their escape capsules. He stared at the three images, and suddenly it leaped out at him and he raised one hand and slapped it across his forehead, a flickering storm of blue–white light rippling like waves across his projection.
‘The cloning,’ he said.
‘What about it?’ Marshall asked.
‘It’s so obvious!’
Before the admiral could ask another question, Schmidt pointed to the images of the Ayleean’s internal organs.
‘Look, do you see that scarring on that Ayeelan’s kidneys?’
Marshall nodded. ‘Probably from an injury of some kind.’
‘And now the one to the right?’
Hodgson looked at the other Ayleean’s image as Schmidt zoomed in, and he got it straight away. ‘They’re identical.’
Schmidt nodded. ‘My sub–conscious brain detected the pattern before but couldn’t assimilate it, and I’ve just seen the same thing in that microscope.’
A violent blast hit Titan and shook the vessel from bow to stern, the lights flickering on and off for a moment as the power supply through the ship was briefly compromised.
‘I’m gonna need an explanation here doc’, real fast!’
‘The cells themselves are cloned,’ Schmidt said, ‘perfect copies of each other.’
‘So what? We already know that it can make copies of living species!’
Schmidt hurried to the microscope and relayed the image within onto a holo–screen so that Marshall could see it.
‘Nature cannot clone biological entities with that kind of precision. DNA mutations, external factors, they all combine to create differences. Nothing natural could have cloned that Ayleean so completely, and so accurately, in so little time.’
Marshall’s expression became cautious, anxious even.
‘What are you saying?’
‘Those cells,’ Schmidt said, ‘they’re cloned in the same way. They’re perfect, identical copies of each other on a scale of billions. Only a machine could do that, or more accurately super intelligent, synthetic hardware.’
Marshall stared at the doctor for a long moment, unable to believe what he was hearing. ‘My guys are out there fighting microchips?!’
Schmidt stared at the screen as he replied.
‘It makes sense. The entity’s ability to hibernate for long periods of extreme cold, the reports coming in from your troops saying that heat melts and destroys them, its cellular structure that mimics biology: everything about this entity suggests it was created by some other species and then grew all on its own.’
‘Blasters are useless against it,’ Marshall said. ‘It breaks up and reforms. We need something more permanent, they’re already breaking through!’
Schmidt was about to head back in desperation to the images of the Ayleeans when something the admiral had said stopped him in his tracks.
‘Permanent,’ he echoed thoughtfully.
‘What now?’
‘We need something permanent,’ Schmidt said as he looked at an image on a screen nearby of the alien vessel entombed in ice. ‘We can’t freeze them quickly enough to halt their advance, it won’t work, but maybe ice is a form of answer to this problem.’
‘Less talk, more action!’ Marshall insisted.
Schmidt looked down the microscope for a moment longer and then he made his decision. ‘Captain, order your Marines to stop firing and retreat behind the bulkheads.’
Marshall grit his teeth as he replied. ‘Those things will eat through the bulkheads, all you’re doing is…’
‘Buying us a few moments,’ Schmidt agreed. ‘I need to formulate a hemostatic agent as quickly as I can, and distribute it through the ship.’
‘A what?’ the captain echoed.
‘A hemostatic agent, something to clog their flow,’ Schmidt replied as he hurried past the captain. ‘A glue!’
Marshall blinked. ‘You want to glue them together?!’
Schmidt nodded as he tapped controls at a work station designed for Holosap use and a series of robotic arms began selecting materials and fluids from ranks of rotating shelves in the laboratory walls, the soft whining of their motors just audible above the din of battle.
‘It’s how they combine and maintain structural cohesion, how they stick together,’ Schmidt explained. ‘We have plant–based polymers that we use to clog wounds in seconds. All I have to do is mix up a larger quantity and combine it with an adhesive gel and we can use it to stem the flow of the entity into the ship. The gel stimulates the clotting process by holding pressure in the cells and activates the accumulation of platelets, which bind to the cells to create a platelet mesh. The hemostasis accelerates the binding of the clotting protein, fibrin, to the platelet mesh, resulting in blood coagulation and a stable clot. In these alien cells, it should bind them together and effectively solidify them in place.’
‘Won’t they just consume it?’ Marshall asked.
‘I certainly hope so!’ Schmidt replied as he watched the machines whipping up a clear fluid before him.
‘But if they consume it then…?’
‘Captain, we have no other option!’ Schmidt snapped. ‘Hiding behind the bulkheads has already proven to be ineffective except to buy us time. Left to their own devices, these life forms will eventually reach us no matter what we hide behind, and we cannot ray shield every compartment inside the ship. Our best defense is to use their evolutionary processes against them while we still can. Order your Marines to fall back to the next bulkheads, wherever they are, and wait for my command and a supply of this gel.’
‘The next bulkhead is the lower loading bays,’ Marshall said. ‘If they break through that, they’re into the living quarters and…’
‘I know, captain!’ Schmidt snapped. ‘Please, do it now, for if they spread too far Titan will be lost.’
Marshall hesitated only a moment longer, and then he whirled for the bridge as he relayed the order to the Marines.
***
XXXVI
‘Hold the line!’
Corporal Hodgson crouched in Titan’s main corridor and fired as the glutinous biomass surged through breaches in the bulkhead before them and plowed like a slow–moving wave through the ship. Hodgson’s plasma rounds smashed into the entity and he saw glowing halos of melting material spill like rivers of molten metal onto the deck, only to be swamped by more of the mass as it advanced.
They had shut the bulkheads even as Gunny’s Marines had been cut off in the breach beyond and presumably had met their gruesome fate, consumed by the horrendous entity now forging its way through the ship. The massive blast–door bulkheads and limited ray shielding had held it back only for a few minutes before it had begun dissolving the solid metal, heating it up as it chewed through it as though it were acid, and then pouring through like a grim soup.
‘Fall back by sections, delta go!’
Hodgson bellowed the command and the front line of Marines leaped from cover as the biomass reached their positions, firing and retreating as they went. Their shots smashed into the advancing wave and lit it up in a fearsome haze of melting material, smoke billowing through the corridor around them and filling it with a blue haze that made it difficult to see their enemy.
‘Keep moving!’ Hodgson yelled. ‘Don’t let it get too close!’
As the smoke obscured the flashes of light from the plasma rifles so Hodgson saw the vague silhouettes of his men retreating before the unstoppable mass, and then something else loomed before them like a gigantic shadow that filled the corridor and he saw the Marines break and run toward his position.
From the whorls of blue smoke lunged a terrifying creature, a vast mass of razor sharp teeth and tentacles that probed blindly through the corridor until they grasped the leg of a fleeing Marine. In one terrible instant Hodgson saw the creature’s eyes, vague patches of black against a leathery skin that filled with color as the entity took the form of some unspeakable species, its bulbous head covered in fine hairs that swayed it seemed with its movements, long spindly tentacles that swept and coiled as they searched for prey.
Hodgson fired at the beast and saw his shot land on its lower jaw, the plasma briefly burning through into the creature only for its energy to be lost and the seething mass of particles close up around the wound.
The Marine screamed as he was lifted by the ankle into the air, turned upside down as the creature’s horrific skull lunged forward and the massive teeth crunched through his torso as though it were made of nothing more substantial than butter. The soldier’s agonized, keening screams soared above the din of rifle fire and Hodgson knew that his men would break before such a horrific sight.
The Marine line fell back toward the next set of bulkheads, the last before the creature would be able to enter the ship’s loading bays, a final line of defense between the crew and this grotesque mass of shape shifting cells.