Project U.L.F. (47 page)

“Chris? Was that you?” Bobby called through to him. “What are you doing in there?”

“Nn…Nu…Nothing.” He blinked and saw again the two purple marks behind his eyelids. This was strange. Unnerving. He felt the rush of adrenaline rising inside him but he felt something else too, like he was being watched. Slowly, he turned back to the windows; there was a moon in each window now. Not pink like before. These were milky white orbs. That couldn’t be. This planet didn’t have two moons. Two suns, yes, but not two moons. He blinked again and saw the purple behind his eyelids but the white moons were still there afterwards.

He didn’t think it, just became consciously aware of the fact that the two balls of light outside were perfect. They were gleaming globes of white with no marks or imperfections. No branches crossed them, like they did the moon, which could only mean one thing. There were no branches in front of them, no branches between them and the window. They weren’t moons.

He felt the leg of his pants grow warm. He whimpered, partly in fear, partly in embarrassment from losing control of his bladder. “We’re in trouble, guys.”

“What kind of trouble?” Bobby called back.

“Big trouble.”

The white orbs swung away from the ship in unison, retreating a small distance before starting to swing back.

“Brace yourself!” Chris screamed.

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Wyatt pulled the ropes tight around the base of the chair. Kit was now firmly tied into it. “How am I supposed to sleep like this?” he complained.

Wyatt stood up, looked at him and shrugged. “Dunno. You figure it out. Besides, do I look like someone who really cares?”

Kit’s eyes filled with hatred. “You bastard.” He struggled in the chair for a while and then gave up. The ropes held him fast. Wyatt gave him a look of vague pity before leaving him.

The MedLab was vast, not unexpected given the size of the ship, but Wyatt wondered why it was so big. This was a mining ship command module, after all. They were only mining. If they followed standard mining protocol, what could they do to themselves to warrant all this medical equipment? There was lots of it, he had to admit. This MedLab was far better equipped than any of the U.L.F. craft he had served upon or now commanded, and yet miners faced none of the dangers that a U.L.F. team encountered. Bites, trauma, poisons, unknown diseases. None of it. That was the price they paid for being government–funded. he guessed.

Nebula IV. One of a fleet owned by Nebula’s mining company. They probably had money to burn. Millions of credits to allocate where and as and when they felt like it. In a way the deep space mining companies had a monopoly on any precious stone or ore they found, as long as they found it first. Who else was going to spend weeks to get somewhere to mine a commodity that someone else had already claimed as their own? They were laughing.

Wyatt looked around the Lab again. All this was just an extravagance, the best of everything, just to keep the workforce happy. The Government would rather let their workforce die. They’d rather have let him die, that was for sure. There were plenty more where he came from. Too many, in fact.

Kate walked past him, rubbing the back of her head with a towel. He looked her up and down. She was wearing dry clothes. Clean blue overall pants and a white T-shirt. He frowned. “Where’d you get those?”

“There’s a clothes store by the showers.”

“Well I’d better go get cleaned up too, I guess.” He looked at himself and scratched the back of his head.

“You can try,” Kate said. Wyatt looked at her questioningly. “Gon-Thok has found the hot water. It’s in its element. It’ll be in there for hours.”

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The first hit sent Chris sprawling into the instrument console. He slid off it and into the hole in the floor he’d just created. Behind him he could hear Par yelling and see Bobby on the floor, her face a complex of questions.

“What the hell was that?” Par shouted.

Chris struggled to get out of the gap in the floor. Wires snaked around his legs like tentacles. “I don’t know what it is. It’s outside!” Just as he got free the second hit shook the shuttle.

“Jesus Christ!” Par screamed.

Chris scrambled through the door to where Bobby lay. “Are you okay?”

She nodded. “Yeah, just a little shaken.”

“We’re all that,” he tried with a smile. He looked up. The shuttle door, which had been slightly ajar to allow in a cool draught of fresh air, was now wide open, knocked aside with the force of the blows. “We’ve got to get that closed. Whatever it is, it’s big.”

He started for the door but before he even got halfway an enormous foot landed square outside. The impact tremor alone shook the ship.

“Oh, shit!” Par looked horrified. Chris froze. Furball jumped from one chair headrest to another, chittering and screeching.

A nose came down level with the shuttle roof. A nostril bigger than Chris’s fist came into their view. They could hear it breathing. Could it smell them? The head came down lower still and a single milky eyeball the size of a human head regarded them with indifference.

“Shut the door!” Par yelled and with that the massive head rammed into the side of the shuttle and sent Chris sprawling towards the open entrance, dangerously close to a mouth that could have swallowed him whole. The head pulled away again.

“Quiet!” Bobby demanded.

“What?” Par couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He had already picked up his gun and was frantically checking the clip for bullets.

“Shhhh!” Bobby instructed. She turned to Par. “If you use that thing on it, all you’ll do is aggravate it. You won’t kill it, you’ll just injure it.”

“And what would you have us do, just sit here?”

She motioned Chris to join them. She seemed incredibly calm. “What do you see?” she asked him quietly.

“Huh?”

“Look at it. What do you see?”

“What do you mean?”

“You have to know what you are dealing with,” she whispered. “If we’re going to live, we have to understand how it lives. What it senses. Look at its eyes. What do you see?”

“Well…they’re milky white.”

“It’s blind,” Par said behind them.

“It hunts by sound,” Bobby confirmed.

Furball continued to jabber and squeal behind them all. Par looked at it with distaste. “Well in that case will somebody shut that thing up before it gets us all killed!”

The ship got rammed again.

“Why don’t you shut the hell up!” Chris hissed through gritted teeth. “Every time you open that big mouth of yours that bloody thing attacks us!”

“Don’t blame me, kid, it was probably your incessant banging that attracted it in the first place.”

“Oh, so it’s my fault, is it?”

“Well, it’s your fault that I have to play friggin’ hopscotch to get around this shuttle. Some kind of sick joke of yours, is it, knowing that I’ve only got one good leg?”

“Now hang on! I’m trying to save your life! All of this will be for nothing if this ship folds as thin as a piece of tin foil as soon as we enter space.”

The creature outside rammed the side of the ship again, bringing them both to their senses.

“Jesus!”

“Shut up, the pair of you!” Bobby flapped her hands at both of them. Quietly they both crawled to where she lay.

“What do we do now?” Chris whispered.

“We wait for it to leave.”

“It must have been what attacked the shuttle the first time. They must have tried to get away.”

“Swatted it straight out of the sky,” Par whispered beside him. “Just like I said.”

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Wyatt’s creature came for him. A creature of tooth and claw bursting through the undergrowth.

He sat up. It was dark. The MedLab’s reserve lighting was on. Strips of neon blue punctuated the black. He looked down and could see beads of sweat caught and hanging in his chest hair. He rubbed his face with his hand.

Kit was slumped in his chair, the ropes keeping him upright. He didn’t look comfortable but then Wyatt really didn’t give a shit. Gon-Thok had been convinced to spend the night in a hydration tank, used normally for treating the effects of hypothermia or extreme cold. Wyatt could see it through the glass, suspended in the water, the gills on its neck rising and falling occasionally. Kate was nowhere to be seen. She’d been on the examination table next to him, but now there was just an untidy pile of sheets. Where could she have gone? She didn’t know her way around this ship.

He swung his legs off the table and picked up the flashlight he’d found in one of the cabinets. He pulled his pants on as he walked, made a last check on Kit, and walked out of the MedLab. The walk would do him good, give him time to exorcise the nightmare. He could never go straight back to sleep. Not after that. Besides, he doubted she’d gone far.

He found her a short walk away. She’d gone up the nearest stairwell and found what looked to be a large common room or bar. Tables and chairs were scattered everywhere. The place was a mess.

She stood with her back to him, looking out at a semi-circle of what were once windows. There was nothing to see through them but the white rock. Some of the windows had smashed completely and small stones and rocks had spilled into the ship to collect in scattered piles on the floor. The rest were shattered, some missing large triangular shards which had been punched out by the pressure and which had no doubt shattered again on hitting the floor, the reinforced glass exploding across the deck. The fragments were as thick as ice cubes, just like the ones they had slipped in the drinks in here only hours before the impact. In places, water seeped in, collecting in little puddles, irregular black voids on the floor. Once in a while, a drop would disturb their perfect surfaces of liquid night and send silver ripples scurrying away to their edges.

This place wasn’t dark like the rest of the ship. The color of the rock seemed to give it a faint light, or maybe his eyes were just adjusted to the gloom now. He turned off his flashlight. “What’s up? Couldn’t sleep?”

She jumped, then turned to face him. “No. I just…I thought I was alone.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. I just noticed you were gone, so I uh…well,” he finished with a smile.

“And you?”

“Huh?”

“Couldn’t sleep?”

“Oh! No. I mean yes. I mean…I had things on my mind.”

“Me too,” she said quietly and turned to look blankly at the shattered windows.

He came up behind her. “Did you find your answers?”

She turned to look over her shoulder at him. “I don’t know.”

“What’s troubling you?”

She turned to look him squarely in the face. “Are we going to make it, Wyatt? Are we really going to make it home?”

“Why, sure.”

The hope drained from her face. She looked disgusted with him.