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’ve been through it already, God damn you! You’ve already sent someone in; you keep asking me to go over the same fucking story time and time again! What do you want to know that I haven’t already told you? What—what is there left to explain?”
Private Reece, DN 38401, slumped as his voice trailed off and his passion and anger slowly left him, draining from his body to be replaced with a sense of despair over what had happened. For the second time that day, he began to recall the events of June 21st, 2189. His face grew stony and featureless, and his voice became cold and mechanical as he once again started to ring off a soulless list of events.
“We got up that morning, the whole unit. As usually happens. Met in the mess hall. As usually happens. Hicks came in later, and—”
“That’s Sergeant Hershel ‘Hicks’ Cohen, of Union Aerospace Corporation’s 7th Marine unit, correct?” The interruption came from darkness, the interviewer hidden in the flickering shadows given off by the dying light strip clinging to a cold, damp concrete ceiling.
“The Ba’al Shem Tov himself, holiest man I ever met. Now, don’t interrupt me again, it’s bad enough I’ve to tell you shits this same story time and again without you stopping me every two minutes. Now, old Hicks came in, same as always, with his fire and brimstone and his Abraham and Isaac. Book of Ezekiel, I think it was. Then Exodus. The man knows that shit inside out, damn it. Thing was, he took twice as long about it that morning. Said something about needing God twice as much as we had before. A new mission had been called in, he said. Some unmarked vessel was heading into a private sector, wouldn’t respond to System Navigation. It was a simple boarding mission, but we’d be going in alone. No backup, none of that stuff. Go in, and either convince the pilots to pull out of private airspace, or coerce them to do so. Nothing over and above what we’d done before, really. Didn’t take us long getting kitted out, since we were going in pretty light. Couple of laser carbines, couple of flash-bangs, bio-scanners, bit of field kit, that’s it. Hell, we were in the intercept craft before Hicks had even finished praying.
“How many of you were sent on this mission?” Again came the questions, the faceless man in shadow seeming little more than an inquisitive voice without form.
“The whole squad, nine of us, then Hicks. Ten in all, then.” The reply was almost instantaneous, coming at exactly the same time as it had the last time Reece had been over the story. He knew what the next question was going to be, as well, as he’d already heard it before too.
“Why, then, were only five bodies recovered?”
“I’ve told you people. Several times.”
“We still don’t quite get it, Private. It was a derelict vessel; you have even stated as much yourself. Ten men boarded it, so why have only five bodies and your sorry carcass been found? What did you do with the others?”
“God damn it, you piece of shit, I’ve already fucking told you this before! It was them! They got them! They took them! They—they took them—I don’t know where—”
Reece once again let his rage leave him. He knew it would do him no good here. This wasn’t the line of duty, this was some dull, grey block of cement and steel, buried so deep even God couldn’t see it. Some UAC boss had obviously gotten wind of what had happened, and jumped to the wrong conclusions. Rational conclusions, admittedly, but wrong nonetheless. He needed to be calm to convince them of the truth, he thought to himself. Patience is what wins in a conflict like this.
“Ah yes, the ones you described earlier.”
“Yes! Those—whatever the fuck they were—that I told you about the last time! What the fuck do I have to tell you, what do you want to know now?”
“Now, Reece, calm yourself. We just want to know how you came across these creatures, these . . . ‘gene stealers’? Resume your tale again; please.”
With a deep sigh, the irate Reece once again resigned himself to monotony. Slumping forward over the unforgiving steel table, he continued his played-out narrative.
“We got in the intercept craft, buckled up, and took off. At roughly twelve hundred hours, Sector Mean Time, we reached the intruding vessel. An old space barge, from the twenty-one-hundreds, I think. Definitely looked a long way past its time. We boarded her pretty easily; it seemed to us like no one was expecting us showing up like that. So we got on board, checked our scanners for any sign of life, give us a sense of numbers. What’d we get? Jack shit. The God-damned things weren’t even working. Ten of them, and not a one of the things would so much as switch on. So we figured we’d split up and search the place. Three groups of three, keeping in touch with radio. One starboard, one port, one dead ahead.”
“Wait, I don’t think you’ve ever mentioned that before.” The voice sounded puzzled, as though it were thinking intently to itself as it spoke from behind the shifting shadows. Reece stared fixedly at the half-shapes he could make out from the dim corner the figure sat in, wishing he could discern some semblance of an expression on that concealed face.
“Mentioned what, splitting up? I’ve told you before that we broke into groups. How else do you think we got separated? It’s nothing new.”
“We knew you split up deliberately. Aerospace Marines don’t just get lost like that. Nevertheless, this ‘three groups of three’ thing, that’s new. What happened to the tenth man?”
That last part sounded almost like an accusation, Reece thought to himself, one aimed directly at him. He sat up straight in his seat again, assuming an almost commanding air that would seem impressive in other circumstances.
“I see you’re not a military man, then. The Union Aerospace Corporation advocates a strict protocol for all operations its Marine Corps operate. Boarding actions are no exception. Ten man squads, that’s including a squad leader. Leader stays at the point of entry, provides a fall back point for immediate disembarkation. Remaining men split into groups of three and spread out. As you can expect, that’s how it happened.”
“So Hicks stayed with the intercept craft, alone?”
“Yeah. Well, not alone. He had the One-Zero-One with him. You know, one of those automated lasers, the sentry drone things. Saved our lives on our last mission, clearing out a derelict cruiser of those God-damn insect things. But that’s neither here nor there. He was staying there with the intercept, and we’d already fanned out, started checking out the ship. I think he was the first one killed, if you want my opinion. Those drones track infra-red, you know, the heat from a body or whatever. So they don’t start shooting wildly when a pipe falls or something. Course, it can’t track what isn’t warm, right?”
“You think that Hicks died first?”
“Can’t be certain, but yeah. He stopped responding over the radio pretty soon after we had all split up. We figured at the time that he was maybe taking the time to say a few prayers or something, knowing him. Didn’t pay it any heed—it’s what we’re used to; it’s how he is. The group I was in went off to the starboard side of the ship. I say starboard, it was what we assumed to be the starboard. You know those old freighters; it’s a bitch trying to tell up from down, let alone left from right. Well, it’s myself, Carpenter and Meyer, and we—”
“Wait,” came another interjection. “DN 38407 Sean J. Carpenter and DN 38407 Leonard Meyer, correct?”
“Yeah. Why does it even matter? You already know who was and wasn’t on that mission. Now, we got to this pretty big room, maybe twenty feet each side. Looked like some hot-shot officer’s cabin, maybe. Pretty luxurious, leather furniture, you know the kind of thing—but all the electronics, the microwave, the video screen, the heating, the vent’s fan, all that stuff, it’s torn to shreds; wires and scrap everywhere. Looked like one Hell of a fight had gone on, except the funny thing was that leather suite hadn’t got as much as a mark on it. You ever sit on one of those?”
“No,” the shadows replied stoically.
“Well they take a beating pretty easy. Hell, even if you sit down too hard on one of them and it’s not going to forgive you. So in all this crazy brawling that must have gone down, this suite didn’t take a single good hit. I don’t know, that struck me as pretty weird. There’s me standing wondering about some leather chairs, and the others were more interested in finding the liquor cabinet. It’s strange sometimes how the mind works, isn’t it? Well, there was none—liquor, I mean—or else they just couldn’t find it. It was when we were just about to move on that we heard those sounds.”
“Sounds? What sounds are they?”
“Hard to describe, really. Have you ever seen two big dogs fighting? They’ll go at it no matter how badly they’re hurting, ripping strips of meat off of each other till you’ve got something like a dead skeleton with a slaughterhouse ham standing over it. Sounded like that, sort of, all growling and wet tearing—”
Reece trailed off again, his face grown pallid and gaunt. He gagged and threw his head into his hands, allowing the cold beads of sweat to roll down his forehead before he composed himself and continued.
“Suffice it to say we followed the noise, fingers on triggers. Wasn’t much left when we got there. We knew it was Schneider—DN 38422, Gottlieb Schneider, before you even ask—from his boots. The guy always took good care of them, you see, polished them nightly. I think you guys verified it anyway, though, from his blood, yeah? Wait, no, don’t go into it any. Chuck and Patton came running in not long after us, they’d obviously split up further when they left us. We all just stood there for a while, agog. It was so, so—so fucked up. Can’t really put it any other way, to be honest with you. Looked like he’d been thrown in some kind of machine or something, the ones they use for turning cats and dogs into hamburgers. Completely ripped to shreds. There was blood everywhere, so much you could taste it, but through it all, through that haze of gore, Chuck swore he could see a trail in the mess, footprints or something. They looked like hooves, he said, and I didn’t doubt him for a minute, as strange as it seemed—he’s the biologist, and he knows what it is he’s talking about, after all. We took a minute to gather our wits about us, and set off to follow whatever it was that had left that crimson trail. We followed it for a good ten, fifteen minutes, before it finally faded too much to see. I guess it was a testament to just how much blood was spilt in that room. By the end of the trail, we were thoroughly lost, having disregarded all attempts to keep a bearing in our heads—however, no one wanted to backtrack towards that chamber of horrors, so we tried to call Hicks over the radio, to figure out where we should go, but his end was dead. I think that was when we first started worrying about him. For all his faith and preaching, he’s a damn fine leader. If he knew what was going on, he’d be all over that radio, barking out orders and making sure everything was under control. He wouldn’t be sitting quiet like that, radio turned off. We tried getting touch with the other group, too, but to no avail. We were on out own, it seemed. First thing we decided to do after that was to stick together. No way in Hell were we splitting up again, not after what had already happened. We figured it was best to follow all the left turns we could, hoping it would lead us to the prow or some other point we could work from to get back to the intercept craft. Can’t remember how we decided which way was left to begin with, though, but it ended up working out somehow—we made it to some sort of control room in the prow soon enough; a massive chamber full of flickering screens and walled with those huge old, foot-thick crystal glass windows, the kind even a stray laser shot could shatter. I could see how they kept using them as long as they did, though—the view was stunning, just awe-inspiring. Have you ever seen the night sky whilst standing in the middle of it? Nothing I’ve ever seen in my life has ever made me feel so blessed yet so utterly insignificant at once. We all stood there, I don’t know how long, watching those stars and planets twinkle and blink. I even forgot about what had happened to Schneider, forgot everything but the black and silver vastness before me. The solemn silence was eventually broken by the faint crackle of a radio—Chuck’s, I think. It just sort of spluttered to life for a few seconds and died again, but in the interim we all managed to make out one word, screamed two or three times. ‘Ambush’. The rest was distorted nonsense, a hiss of static and the chatter of laser fire. We couldn’t hear anything echoing down the corridors, so it couldn’t have been close, but we knew it was the last unit, and we were in no condition to go hunting down whatever it was that was attacking them. We would have dug in where we were, but there was no way all that glass would hold up in crossfire. We were left with a bit of a dilemma, then, but we opted to scout out the place for a good defensive position.”
“You seemed quite sure that you would be attacked. Why?”
Reece didn’t like the sound of that question. Could the man across from him really be so oblivious to good strategy, or was he trying to trip Reece up with all of these pointless questions? He let the question hang in the air for a few moments before he resumed his narrative.
“You don’t leave it up to chance. If there have already been at least two attacks across the ship like that, what in God’s name would lead you to think you’re going to be safe to blunder about the place unprepared? Anyway, you found the bodies. You know what happened to them. Same as what happened to Schneider. Think we wanted to go out like that? No way. We found a nice position a few rooms down the corridor, looked to me like it was a canteen or a mess hall—but one for the officers. No way a ship that size has a room that small for the whole crew. We barricaded the doors with the tables and chairs that were sitting, and built a few ramparts with the rest of them. The guys were content to leave it like that, but damn it, I’ve seen some action on the moons of Ygmarl, against those blasted gene-stealer things, so I made sure the vents were safe, and blocked them with whatever I could. That’s where those scaly bastards usually attacked from, you see, and I wasn’t taking any risks. It all seemed too familiar, you know? The empty corridors, the shredded victim, and the ambushes—I didn’t know what we were dealing with, but it was working like they worked. So we dug in, and we waited.”
“I understand you didn’t have to wait long.”
“No. Not too long. The first one came pretty soon after we’d finished setting up, maybe ten minutes afterwards. We must have missed a vent shaft, or he’d been hiding in the room with us already. It came from out of nowhere, this hissing, clicking purple storm cloud of tooth and claw. Thank God for those barriers we’d set up, or we’d have been done for—it just about got through the first one before we tore it apart in a hail of gunfire. What was left of it, none of the others would even go near. I knew right away what it was, though. It didn’t look like the ones we’d seen on Ygmarl. No, they had faces like squids or something, looked like some sort of cuttlefish dragon things. The overall shape was the same, though. Chitinous exoskeleton—well, maybe not an exoskeleton so much as armour plating, I don’t know. Either way, it was covered in this shell of reddish-purple coating, running down its back, with protrusions here and there looking like a spinal column running down the middle. Six extensive limbs sprouted from under this shell—four arms ending in razor sharp dagger claws, like bone bayonets made for cutting prey to ribbons; and two muscular legs, hoofed and powerful, built purposely for running and leaping with blinding speed. The face—God—that repugnant face. It was like looking on a twisted mockery of all that mankind has thought of as handsome through the aeons. A long, sloping brow studded with a small bony crest, two horribly deep-set eyes which may have once flickered with a sickly yellow hue, a shriveled reptilian nose, and a maw full of impossibly sharp teeth, arrayed in perfect rows and columns for the utmost efficiency. Even in death, its lolling pink tongue, a full two spans long, twitched and shuddered in its final spasms, trailing sticky drool across the rusting floor. This stellar demon was overall a grotesque parody of the shape of man, hunch-shouldered and grinning as it prowled endless tunnels and corridors for its next meal. It was the ultimate predator, a natural killing machine born only to murder and feed—and we were trapped on this drifting hulk with no clue as to how many of the beasts lurked around us.”
“You are aware that the creature you have just described accurately resembles the fabled corporaptor hominus, correct?”
“God damn right, I am. I’ve faced more of those critters than any man should ever have to, between Ygmarl and that blasted freighter. Why, have you recovered any of them from the ship?”
“I should think not, Reece. The corporaptor has long been proven a hoax, as has the supposed infestation of them that was reported in the colonies of Ygmarl. Now tell me what really happened on that ship.”
“Damn you! They were there! Those beasts, those star-devils, I saw them with my own eyes!”
Reece exploded in a torrent of anger, pounding the rough concrete wall beside him until it ran scarlet from his bloodied fist. When he finally calmed down, he resumed his tale with his teeth gritted, determined to finish it without further interruption.
“We left that one, the first one, alone on the floor. When the others realised that I knew something about the creature, I recounted to them my experiences on Ygmarl, back when I worked security for the UAC’s colonial program. I told them everything I knew, about how they seem to be able to work their way through foreign tunnel or vent systems without hesitation, how they can cross a room before you can draw your rifle, and about the worst blasphemy of their existence—the drones. See, they don’t just butcher. No, they’re smarter than that. They have these glands, or something, I’m no biologist, under their throats. I’ve seen them use the things. They’ll spew some kind of tumour, some fleshy mass, down some poor soul’s throat, and it grows inside him. God only knows what it does in there, or how it does it, but that bastard’s not under his own control any more. I’ve seen how they get on—absent minded, or a bit slow, like you’d expect from someone who’s maybe hung over or something. That vacant, staring look, you know? They can act pretty normal when they need to, though. God damn, they could even charm their way out of the electric chair if they had to. I knew as soon as I told the guys about that, that I shouldn’t have done so. I’d doomed us, you see, to paranoia.”
“Paranoia?”
“Yeah. Everyone started blaming each other for bringing them to that dump, that ‘grave-maker’, as they called it. Patton was the first to really snap. He didn’t go violently, like I’d have expected, but decided he couldn’t trust any of us any more than he could trust the creatures roaming around. Hell, he said, he couldn’t even trust us enough to believe there were even any more of the critters. So he just hoisted his rifle on his shoulder and left, clambering through the blockade we’d made over the walls. I figured it was best to let him go, and the rest agreed—he’d be a liability to us if he stayed, maybe even turn on us if he got any worse. We just fixed the barriers once he’d gone, and said a quick benediction for his soul. We knew it was already accounted for, one way or another.”
“This fellow, Patton. He appears to be one of those whose body was never recovered. What, in your mind, happened to him?”
Reece paused. In his mind? Was this another accusation? Reece knew fine rightly what happened to Patton, and why his body was never found—why none of the others he shared that last shelter with were ever found again. There was no way this shadowy voice in the corner would believe him, though, after the doubt and scorn he had already shown so far. Then again, given the amount of time Reece had already spent holed up in this dingy interrogation cell in his old UAC barracks, he figured he had plenty more time to kill. To kill . . . Poor choice of words, he reflected.
“You want to know? Fine, I’ll get to it. Wasn’t long after Patton left that the fists started flying. Chuck and Meyer got to yelling at each other, really screaming. They’d both gotten pretty fixated on the whole hive drones deal, and they each kept accusing the other of having that horrible sickly yellow glint in their eyes. I tried to calm them, tried telling them it was just the light in the room, a trick of the mind, anything—but it didn’t work. They just weren’t going to back down. I had to throw myself down when Meyer swung his huge ham of a fist back, I knew what was coming. After he broke Chuck’s jaw the two seemed to calm down, or at least back off a bit. Carpenter just sat there the whole time, huddled as close as he could get behind one of the upturned tables, rifle held firmly in his hands. I could see he was close to losing it too. Didn’t matter in the end, though, since it never got that far. Chuck was still holding his jaw, bleeding pretty badly, when there was a thunderous hammering on one of the barricaded doors. When the handle was repeatedly turned and a faint murmur of words could be discerned, Carpenter approached it, motioning to us to get behind cover and keep our guns pointed straight at the entrance. He pulled a table or two back from the door, and tried peering under it, through that little sliver that usually sits away from the floor. He must have been able to make out what was out there, as he relaxed noticeably and pulled the remaining barricades away. He had only just stepped clear of the doorway when it swung open forcibly—and who stepped in but that son of a bitch Patton, looking a bit worse for wear, but for all the world, left all in one piece. We let down out guns at the sight of him, and the tension in the air quickly cooled. Hell, we were just glad to see the bastard again, since we’d all figured he’d already been done for, you know? He took a few slow steps into the room, and Carpenter began to replace the barricade—or, he would have, if Patton hadn’t knocked him on his ass with a casual back-handed swipe. Meyer sprung to his feet and was about to barrel charge Patton for it, when we realised what had happened. Patton just stood there, dazed, completely out of it, staring blankly with those beady yellow eyes.”
Reece shuddered at this point, evidently not happy to be recalling the events he had witnessed. The man across from him merely waited, knowing the spooked marine would soon resume.
“I think I was the first to react,” came the continuation. “I reached for my rifle, brought the thing to bear, but I just froze. It wasn’t that I couldn’t bring myself to shoot him—no, I’ve had a hand in more field executions than I really care to count. It was something else. A multitudinous clicking and skittering, echoing down the forsaken hallways—and that God damned door left without a barricade. I was still standing there shocked when the screeching tide erupted into the room, all screams and fangs and slime and claws. Chuck was quicker than any of us, diving behind something and loosing his whole fuel cell into the writhing mass of chitin, the laser volley barely making the faintest impression on the roiling sea of bodies. I don’t know why, but they stopped, as one, behind Patton. Only a few ventured beyond him, leaping at the poor cover Chuck was cowering behind, and pouncing on the shell-shocked form of Meyer. I think it was then that I went down. I just about stayed conscious on the ground long enough to see three of the bigger specimens pinning down that burly fucker, Meyer, while a fourth spat that repugnant, dripping cancer down his throat. He was still putting up a fight as they were doing it, struggling against steel muscles and razor claws, but to no use. I slipped out of awareness in a pool of my own vomit—there’s no way you can stomach something like that. I think they must have gotten Carpenter and Chuck, too. I guess they figured I was dead when I was lying there. Can’t see what the use is, though. Killing some of us and turning the rest into mindless zombies? There’s probably more to it than I can grasp.”
At this, the voice coming from across the room finally showed a hint of emotion in its words.
“You’re lying, Reece. We know you’re lying. There were no aliens on that ship. It was as derelict when we found it as it was when you did. There were no alien corpses, just those of Herschel Cohen, Gottlieb Schneider, Seamus Cameron, Michael Bean, and Lyndon Hamilton. Men you served with. Men you murdered. You did it. You killed your squad members!”
Reece finally erupted at this. He jumped from his seat, rolling back one sleeve of his fatigues, turning his forearm towards the stoic shadows.
“Look! Look at this, then, you piece of shit! What kind of wound is this, then, if I did it myself?”
“Guards! Take this man away to a cell. He is to be executed at dawn, for five counts of murder and four of suspected murder.”
Reece consigned himself to his fate and fell listless as he was dragged from the cold, grey chamber by two armed wardens, evidently waiting just inside the room the whole time for such an occasion. It was only as they opened the door to bring him out that it was lit properly for the first time since he’d been there. The last sight he had before being marched to his execution was of the face of that dour inquisitor in the inky blackness that had dragged his own death warrant from him. Though the man’s face showed no emotion whatsoever, his beady yellow eyes seemed almost to laugh. |
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