Dominant Species (30 page)

In contrast, Darcy exhuded skepticism. "How the hell did you get that out of a drill rig?"

"Think about it. We have an experimental colony ship that blows a gasket. It vanished from point A and ended up here at point B."

"I'm with you so far."

Ridgeway continued. "Up till now we figured the crew opened the door and got jumped by something native. But if these things had evolved down here, they'd be used to the cold. The fact they need heat, and that they had to go to such artificial lengths to get it, means they came from somewhere else."

"Maybe they came in with the Ascension." Darcy remained guarded.

"Huh," Ridgeway chuffed. He hadn't considered that option and pondered it for a moment before his head shook abruptly, "I don't see it. The Ascension blinks out of near-earth space and skips straight here. Where did they pick up an alien life form?"

"Shit, I don't know. That's a Merlin question." Darcy exhaled sharply. "OK, let's assume you're right and they're tourists like we are; what does that get us?"

"Well, I'm betting they didn't come through Cathedral like we did, so that suggests a second tunnel." He paused, his brain clicking at high speed. "Then there's the mining operation itself. They have a shitload of gear down there, maybe enough demo to blow the roof. Either way, my money says the way out begins here."

Resignation gave way to determination and Ridgeway the commander resurfaced. "Darcy, go visual, light amp thirty percent. Pull back to frame the whole scene."

The image seamlessly slid back to provide a full view of the area below. Artificial rainbow tones gave way to the ember and black starkness of the cave. The callsign seemed obvious as Ridgeway added a new marker to the TAC. To the right of the shimmering waypoint, a single word glowed softly.

HIVE.

Ridgeway stared at the long downward ramp and plotted a course through a stealthy approach. Somewhere in the Hive was the key to going home. All they had to do was go in and find it.

In the distance, a dark shadow crawled across the orange hued ceiling. The crosshairs tracked up to the blob of darkness cast by an unseen creature that scuttled somewhere within the room like a giant roach.

The sniper's voice echoed softly in Ridgeway's ear. "Welcome to Bug Central."

CHAPTER 31

Hie eyes closed, Stitch swallowed the wet lump that clogged the back of his throat. The wound in his thigh throbbed fitfully, showing disdain for the paltry dosage of painkiller. While the option to wrap himself in a soft blanket of drug-induced haze was seductive, Stitch could not afford the mind-numbing effects of morphinol. Given their current situation, that could easily become a permanent nap.

The medic tried to adjust himself in the chair, using his arms to lever his body upright. The shift, though minor, was enough to trigger a fresh assault on his senses. Pain shot up from his leg and twisted his bowels into a knot.

"SonofaBITCH!" The curse hissed between his teeth as the medic screwed his eyes against the pinwheels of light that sparkled on the edge of his vision. His fingers dug into the chair and he counted the seconds as the flare burned away.

"You all right?" Merlin's voice was soft on the ComLink, one of the few sensory inputs that came without an added degree of suffering.

Stitch unclurled just enough to force the reply. "Peachy."

Merlin's legs, the only part of the engineer that stuck out of the under-console cabinet, wriggled to the sound of clinking tools and the cyclic grind of a ratchet.

Leaning back, Stitch drew a measured breath, wary of a secondary tremor of pain. His attention flickered back to Merlin. "So how's it going?"

"You mean compared to five minutes ago?"

The medic glanced at his chronograph and noted that in fact, six minutes had passed, but he got the message. Merlin's efforts to get the surviving monitors back online were critical to perimeter surveillance. Constant disruptions added nothing to that progress, but minutes dragged out endlessly when measured as the gaps between gut-wrenching pain. Stitch was dying for a distraction.

The medic drummed his fingers on the chair and reminded himself that regardless of his shape, he was there to watch Merlin's back as much as the inverse. His hand closed tightly on the submachinegun, thankful for its reassurance as he scanned the tiers overhead. Only curls of lingering smoke drifted among the balconies.

The sweep completed, Stitch accessed his own medical status and frowned for reasons that had nothing to do with pain. His report to Ridgeway had been abbreviated to say the least, in a civilian world a failure to disclose at this scale would constitute malpractice.

So sue me, the medic groused inwardly, we've got bigger worries.

Unfortunately, the undisclosed aspects of his condition were rapidly becoming a real problem. The heavy pickaxe did not miss the femur as Stitch had inferred. The sharp metal tip carved an ugly furrow through the largest bone in his body. And while the femoral artery wasn't severed, enough collateral vessels were torn to present a serious threat of death by internal hemorrhage.

The armor squeezed his thigh in a python grip, the unrelenting pressure its own source of discomfort. Plasma packs served to replace some of the lost fluid but only a couple had escaped Jenner's scavenging. Stitch was engaged in a very short war of attrition.

"How long do you think it'll be before we hear from the rest of the team?" The words were past Stitch's lips before he could bite them off.

Something metallic dropped, clattered and rolled to a stop, the string of sharp sounds trailed by a weary sigh that echoed from within the cabinet. Stitch winced and turned his face from the verbal scathing that never materialized. The bangs and scrapes from within the machine resumed amid an undercurrent of low mutters.

A long moment ticked by before fear of further nuisance drove Stitch from his chair in spite of the pain. He braced himself on the console and limped to the last standing bank of monitors. The array of screens stood black and dead. Switch boxes and amps littered the crannies between every dark rectangle.

Stitch studied the snarl and tried to divine some sense of order. A gut-cavity full of twisted intestines was easier to understand. His gaze fell on a boxy component made of grey metal, its corner-edges adorned with strips of yellow and black-striped tape. Among a smattering of inert lights, several buttons ran across the face of the device.

Stitch extended a finger and aimlessly poked a button, hardly surprised when nothing happened. He sighed, shifted his weight uneasily and punched a second button to no effect. Piece of shit, he muttered as he poked a third.

"What the hell are you doing?" Merlin's voice was edged with irritation. "I've got all of the camera feeds unhooked so don't fuck around with anything, all right?"

"Shit," Stitch huffed as his head rocked back. "How ‘bout I just climb in one of these fucking freezers, would that make you happy?"

"Is that an option?"

"Oh screw you," Stitch snarled as his finger stabbed angrily at the last button in line. The device hummed sharply and the rack of screens flared to life.

"Whoa!" Stitch snatched his hand back as though he had grabbed a viper. "Hey Merl..."

"That's it." Merlin's legs thrashed as he twisted free of his confinement. "Listen, if I can't get a live feed back online we can't see shi--"

The engineer froze as his facemask locked on the image that spanned the entire block of monitors. He rose slowly to his feet as Stitch limped back. The two stood side by side when Stitch pointed at the wall of monitors.

"Well if that isn't live, what the hell is it?"

A dark figure stared from the screen, nearly lost in the shadows that surrounded him. He wore badly stained coveralls of an indeterminant color layered with patches of frayed fabric and worn duct tape.

Above the nametag, pieces of unkempt beard hung down across his chest, the tangle of grey cleaved by scars that crossed the figure's neck and jaw. His cheeks carried a deathly pallor, so free of pigment that Stitch could see the blue web of capillaries beneath the translucent tissue. Below his creased brow, splotches of blood mottled the sclera of one eye, streaking the jaundiced orb with red. The other eye was missing, Stitch noted, or simply lost in the deep shadow.

Before the figure, a small glass cylinder sat framed by two weathered hands. The left lacked a thumb while the right was over-sized and mis-shapen. The appendage seemed bound in a pebbled leather instead of skin.

The figure spoke, the voice thin and raspy. What might have been a human voice was boosted by something decidedly synthetic. "Shipwide systemic failures continue beyond our diminishing ability to repair. Progressive thermal shutdown has crippled the nanotech. Drive failure has finally become a foregone conclusion. Our supplies are exhausted, our food..."

The figure drifted into a lengthy silence as gnarled fingers nudged the glass cylinder. The vial held a dark, faintly emerald hue. Tiny lights blinked softly from one silver endcap.

"Abrupt cryonic failure grows epidemic and even the most--" he struggled for the word, "dramatic, extraction efforts have proven catastrophic. We are left with the unavoidable strategy of genetic consolidation." His lip curled back as he spoke the last two words with unmistakable distaste.

Stitch felt the ripple of gooseflesh across his arms before he consciously registered the motion along the figure's torso. Something slid beneath the ruined shirt, a serpentine ripple that oozed out of the camera's view.

"You see that?" Merlin's voice was hushed.

Stitch swallowed, his throat suddenly dry as he nodded slowly, unsure just what he had seen. A forboding chill coiled around his spine as he stared at the screen.

White digits burned at the bottom right corner, the columns incrementing sequentially from the right. 772:02:23:16:49:00. Stitch reached out and traced his finger along the line of numbers.

"Timecode," Merlin said. "tracks the runtime of the recording."

"Yeah, I know," Stitch replied, but something is screwed here." He tapped the screen, fingertip tracing the numbered pairs from right to left. "Seconds, minutes, hours--"

"Then days, months, and," Merlin stalled, motionless for a moment before his head tipped slightly to one side. "Three digits?" He muttered as he pointed to the leftmost group. "That oughtta be four digits, for the year."

Stitch turned slowly and asked "What if they didn't know the date?"

"I don't follow."

"Your rift," Stitch turned to Merlin. "Your hole-in-space theory. You said that it could also be a hole in time right? Maybe forward, maybe backward?"

"Yeah..." Merlin drew out the single word as he turned back to the cluster of screens.

"So a hundred and sixty years ago a ship has a very bad accident, one that throws it to the far side of nowhere. What if you got bounced to someplace where you couldn't see the stars? Your ship is fucked all to hell, you don't know where you are, you don't even know when you are. What do you do?"

A long silence ticked by before Merlin answered. "Start over, count from day one."

Stitch nodded again, his eyes fixed on the digits 772.

Days, weeks, months... years.

CHAPTER 32

Ridgeway watched silently as Taz oozed through the break in the rocks. Although the gap was narrow, the fact that both Ridgeway and Monster had made it through vouched for its navigability.

The forward edge of the Hive stood only a few meters away and the orange glow grew brighter with every step. Already the long midnight valley gave way to scattered puddles of shadow that grew like moss on the back of every red-hued rock. The Marines were forced to follow an increasingly serpentine path, leveraging the most from intermittent splashes of darkness.

Thus far, the gambit had worked. Three Marines now crouched behind a slab of stone pitched sharply up from the floor. Ridgeway was on point with Monster almost prone just behind him. Taz trailed Monster by several meters, spreading their line.

The last of the group was far behind, looking down from high ground. Several times already, her one-word directions had caused the advancing trio to freeze, hugging the shadows until the path ahead was clear of movement.

Ridgeway was glad to have the cover as he peered over the final crest, barely a meter tall, that separated the Marines from a shoreline of humming machinery. He fired a pair of hand-signals at Monster and Taz, then eased his left leg over the low wall of stone. His belly and chest pressed flat against the crest as he slid over the obstacle.

"Hold it."

Ridgeway froze at Darcy's terse command, snarling at the damned poor timing. He was trapped in the open, too far advanced to pull back, yet an agonizing arm's length from the cover of a thermal inverter just ahead. Willing himself into stillness, Ridgeway called on his own chameleon to fuse his image with that of the surrounding rock. He hoped it would be enough.

Glancing back, Ridgeway saw Monster's gauntlet tighten on the grip of the Gatling.

Not a good sign.

A metallic clatter grew audible over the dull thrum that pervaded the Hive. The sound of a dozen kitchen knives tapped an oddly cyclic pattern across a hard, unyielding surface. As Ridgeway listened, the noise grew louder with every heartbeat.