Dominant Species (25 page)

Struggling to think clearly, he wondered if this was all not just some horrible dream from which he would soon awaken. Maybe he was still in that dumpster on Los Gatos, strung out on Rage and having the hallucination of a lifetime. Jenner focused on the pinpoints of ember-glow burning brightly beneath the tattered skin of his right arm.

This shit's way too real to have crawled out of my imagination.

He prodded the wound with a fingertip. Very little blood seeped from beneath the clotted seam.

Quick little fuckers, Jenner mused, watching the dim incandescence of a microscopic repair crew hard at work. The question of raw material seemed less a sticking point since his second run on the table. Like the syntheskin bandage, patches of his shirt had been... eaten? Absorbed at least, and put to use in the repair process. A strip of living skin on his arm carried the shirt's pattern and color, even its fabric feel.

Tracking down the arm, Jenner looked at the new fingers that extended from his hand. He didn't need the medic to tell him that they weren't made of normal flesh and bone. Smears of plastic and fiber melded seamlessly with skin and nail. Apparently the bugs in his system had shed any reluctance about non-human materials. Jenner quietly imagined himself one day as a shambling heap of scrap plastics and textile fibers. The image drove a chill up his spine.

A train-wreck of sound erupted from above, plummeting quickly. Before Jenner could grasp the origin, it passed by, a grey blur that crashed down into the decks below. Shouts and the heavy tread of rushing boots stormed in, making no pretense of stealth. The activity centered on whatever, or more likely whoever, just fell through the torn floor.

Adrenaline surged in Jenner's veins. Under the concealing blanket of chaos he slithered forward and pulled himself quickly into an open crawlspace. Heading to starboard, he scrabbled through the wreckage, gathering speed as he moved.

Just gotta dodge the Marines a little longer, he thought with a sardonic smile. The others are almost here.

CHAPTER 28

"Major! You all right?" the voice echoed down the metal crevasse. "Looks like you hit a gap in the AG."

"No shit." Ridgeway cursed under his breath as he twisted his body in a hammock of rubber-clad cables. With every motion, water dripped in shifting streams. A loud pop cut the air just above his head and sparks showered down through the darkness like dying fireflies.

Caught your ass by surprise, didn't it? Ridgeway's lip pulled back in a sneer of self-reproach. In space, hitting an AG void would have extended his leap until he hit a wall or another source of gravity. But when the ship's AG failed here, the planet's gravity took over. Ridgeway had felt the sudden shift in mid-jump when the invisible force pulled his body abruptly off-course. The rest was just inertia; six hundred pounds of armored Marine didn't stop on a dime.

Sheer luck alone kept him from plowing into something lethal. As he tumbled down the gaping fissure, Ridgeway ping-ponged off the walls like a crash test dummy. Hitting an open source of high voltage could have ruined his day.

Then again, he reminded himself, hitting nothing at all could have been worse. Punching down through the ceiling of the Lobby would have really sucked. Ridgeway's brief thought took on a grimly prophetic air when he realized that he had no real idea what, if anything, was beneath him.

Another violent pop of electricity flashed somewhere to Ridgeway's left. White-orange sparks skipped like burning pachinko balls through the tangle of wires.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm moving," Ridgeway snarled as he pushed through a veil of cables. He peered out from the web and realized that he hung inverted, perhaps five meters above a curved metal ledge. The room beyond was too large to estimate from his current position.

With a powerful heave Ridgeway expanded the gap between the cables. A metal junction box, roughly the size of his helmet, tumbled free from the knotted mass. It dropped straight to the floor below with a loud bang, bounding once before it came to rest.

"Looks like the AG is all right down here," Ridgeway reported dryly, grunting as he twisted his upper body against the confining loops. Still another crack of voltage jumped just to the right of his head, the arc a vivid blue-white in color.

OK. That's enough of this shit.

With his left hand, Ridgeway grabbed a fistful of thick, rubbery cable. Drawing right hand to his chest the Marine snapped out a climbing blade and swiped viciously. The strands parted in a blur and Ridgeway felt himself slide free. His firm grasp arrested his upper body's descent and allowed his feet to swing beneath him. In a fluid motion, Ridgeway opened his left hand and dropped into a cautious kneel on the balcony floor below.

With a harsh electric crunk, hundreds of lights came on as one. Ridgeway's right hand instinctively swept back where his fingers closed on a familiar grip. The carbine swung up in his grasp as he quickly backed against the nearest wall.

"You coming back up, Major?"

"Negative," Ridgeway's voice held an odd note of awe. "We've got something here."

But I'll be damned if I know what the hell it is.

The walls of the room formed the curved inner surface of a huge sphere, easily a hundred meters in diameter. Ridgeway stood on the topmost of several balconies that wrapped fully around the room. The railed ledges, three in all, were evenly spaced along the vertical height.

Much of the sweeping wall was composed of hexagonal plates, each with what appeared to be a small window set in its center. Judging from the wide hinges and heavy lock-handles, the plates were pressure-seal doors. A rectangular LCD panel was affixed above each door, some glowing brightly while others flickered or remained dark. A number of the doors hung open and many oozed a soft white vapor that crept down the sphere's inner surface with ethereal deliberation.

In the middle of the room, a pair of heavy rails ran up to the centerline, pole to pole on the sphere. Ridgeway could see streaks of lubricant gleaming black against the steely silver. The rails passed through a heavy crane parked near the roof. The orange and black boom ended in an articulated forklift of some sort, but the appendage sported three heavy forklift blades instead of the traditional two. The opposing boom carried a sizable counterweight, presumably to balance the crane-arm at full extension. A coil of thick pneumatic line hung from the ceiling and looped lazily into the crane's motor housing.

Reversing direction, Ridgeway followed the lift rails all the way down to the floor. From his vantage point, the bottom of the sphere was a Sargasso of tangled wires thick enough to daunt the most aspiring engineer. Vapor seeping down the walls coalesced amid the cables, adding to the oceanic illusion.

An island rose from this sea, a mass of electronics roughly ten meters in diameter. CRT screens grew like barnacles in haphazard clusters, plastered atop the dead parts of older equipment. Even here, cables snaked through every gap, black rubber eels in an artificial reef. Ridgeway guessed that parts of the haphazard construct were held together with little more than baling wire and duct tape.

"Merlin's just gonna love this," Ridgeway drawled, gazing at the abstract sculpture of electronics.

As if invoking an ancient spirit by speaking its name, a resounding metal clang marked Merlin's arrival.

"Damn," the engineer grumbled absent-mindedly as he rose to his feet, "that's one hell of a way to--" He paused, voice dropping in tone as he scanned the sphere. "What the hell is this?"

"Damn good question," Ridgeway replied casually, still looking down at the floor far below. "I'm counting on you to figure it out."

Ridgeway pointed down to the hummock of machinery rising from the fog. "The Island," he stated firmly, indicating the new callsign. As he uttered the words, a matching reference appeared on the TAC. "Darcy thinks someone is inbound to evac the Rimmer from someplace called the sphere. Unless there's two of these, I'd say this is a good candidate. If they have a way in, we have a way out."

He turned to Merlin. "The Island looks like a command center of some sort. We need eyes Merlin, as many as we can get. These bastards may try to slip in and out on us. If they pull it off, we're screwed."

A much larger bang marked Monster's none-too-delicate arrival. Stitch and Taz followed suit and spaced out along the balcony. Noting a distinct absence, Ridgeway turned to Monster. "Where's Darcy?"

"Perimeter sweep," he replied, drawing a short circle in the air with his left hand. "Got one of her voodoo feelings and went to check it out."

A curse formed, then faded, on Ridgeway's lips. He thought for a moment of calling her back, reconsidered, then dismissed the thought entirely. Unable to comprehend her expanded senses, he had little choice but to trust her judgment. Time to work with what he did understand.

He stabbed a finger at each of the balconies in descending order. "Three, Two and One. I want Stitch up here on Three holding high ground, Taz at the far side on Two. Merlin has the Island." Almost absently rapping Monster's chest with the back of an armored fist, Ridgeway's voice softened. "You stick with Merlin and watch his back. If something is out there, anything, I need to know yesterday."

"We're already on it," Monster barked with a sharp nod. He spun on his heels and fired a flurry of commands as the Marines scattered around the sphere's inner surface.

Ridgeway took heart in Monster's relentless enthusiasm as the broad-shouldered figure slid Navy-style down a long metal ladder to the floor. It would take the very best that every Marine had, and a damn bit of luck besides, to pull their asses out of this. Ridgeway knew that he'd get their best. The luck worried him.

Coming full circle on his mental checklist, Ridgeway tapped a ComLink channel. "Darcy, how're we doing?" A long delay followed. "Darcy, come in."

Only a dull silence hung in reply. Ridgeway repeated the attempt across the team-wide and emergency channels to no avail. The sniper was missing from the TAC as well. Out of range, he reasoned, or behind some obstruction that blocked their transmissions.

While he was used to Darcy operating on her own, even a brief breakdown in comm gave rise to concern under these conditions. Ridgeway made a mental note of the time and set yet another stopwatch running in the back of his mind.

Drive system overload. Starvation. Darcy coming undone. Running into things that lived in frozen darkness. With a degree of morbid curiosity he wondered which timer would run out first.

Pushing the question from his mind, Ridgeway set out on a clockwise lap of Tier Three. He fired a quick wave to Stitch who matched his move on the far side of the same level. The medic nodded briefly in reply as the muzzle of the MP17 carved a slow, mechanical arc across the tiers below.

Due to it's position near the top of the sphere, Three was the smallest of the tiers. Ridgeway quickly walked the full circuit, examining the walls as he moved. Power-handlers and battery back-ups occupied most of the space at this level. Green indicator lights pulsed all around the tier, silent testament to the restoration of power.

"Looks like the backups are maxed on Three," Ridgeway noted aloud, sharing his observations on a teamwide channel. He opened a limited visual feed that could be viewed by the others in what amounted to a small window floating in their line of vision. The technique allowed them to take part in his search while they carried out their own duties. Often, a second or third pair of eyes would catch a detail missed by the first. Ridgeway looked at another set of gauges, fully recharged as the first. "This place must have been one of the first things to come back online."

"You got that right Majah," Taz muttered in response. "The short-term reserves on these cryotubes are juiced up as well. Assuming they were dead to begin with, that shoulda taken some thirty-eight hours at le-- Oh, buggar!"

On reflex, Ridgeway pivoted towards the sudden shout as Stitch leaned over the rail, subgun angled down aggressively. Planted solidly in the clutter of the Island, Monster stood back-to-back with Merlin as the Gatling swung up to cover the balcony above.

Ridgeway bolted to a wall-hugging staircase and slid the rails on heels and palms. He hit Two on the move, his CAR at high-ready by the time he got to Taz. "What have you got?"

Taz kept his back to the balcony rail. The barrel of his own CAR pointed at a mangled cylinder door. Disgust oozed from the Aussie's voice as he said, "See for yourself."

Ridgeway followed the line of the weapon to a door that looked to have been pried open with the jaws of life. The number 2437 remained boldly legible on the damaged plate. Along the door's perimeter a thick pressure gasket hung limp and rotted. Ridgeway could see that the thick glass viewport was shattered. Crumbled fragments glittered on the deck like dusty gemstones in a smear of reddish black.

The coffin-sized compartment was unmistakable. CryoTube. The tech was older, but fundamentally Ridgeway stood before the same kind of freezer the Marines occupied on long voyages.

But if these are cryos, Ridgeway puzzled, there should be med gear, thermal showers, stuff to offset cryogenic sickness. He leaned to his left and glanced down at the Island, then up at the room-traversing crane with its three-bladed lift. Turning back to the mangled door, Ridgeway ran his fingers across one of the slots cut through every other side of the steel hexagon. A matching set of slots framed the tube itself, doubtlessly running the full length of the unit.