Authors: Michael E. Marks
Monster rounded the first junction, hot on Merlin's tracks. A door to his right stood open and smoke rolled out in thick gouts. Merlin's voice echoed through the flames. "We gotta put this fire out-- NOW!"
Monster shifted his vision to infrared and the smoke faded. A brilliant glowing blob broiled just ahead, burning intensely. Quickly scanning to either side, Monster's gaze fell on a large dark cylinder hanging on the wall. He stuffed the Gatling into its holster, snatched the extinguisher and squeezed down on the handle. The upper arm snapped like a scrap of balsa wood.
"Dammit!" Monster snarled, his eyes flashing back to the blaze. He clutched the cylinder with both hands as though to strangle it, shoved it into the midst of the fire and squeezed. The cylinder crumpled and burst apart in a thunderous release of halon and dusty-yellow powder.
Oxygen ripped from its lungs, the fireball collapsed on itself. Monster stepped back, still clutching the crushed tank as Merlin reappeared, an extinguisher of his own in hand. Merlin pulled up short, his head leaning slowly to one side as he looked at the smoking equipment. With a chuff he tossed the unused extinguisher aside and turned back to the console, wiping soot off the display.
"Shit Gunny, this isn't good."
Monster leaned in and looked down at the panel where color-coded bar graphs bounced up and down like a stereo system at a rock concert. Clearly not the heartbeat of a machine running smoothly.
Merlin tapped a pair of dancing orange columns. "Containment field." He leaned back and turned to face Monster. "Orange and climbing. If we hit red, the fail-safes take the core offline. Then it's back to the deep freeze."
"And if they don't?"
Merlin looked up and paused for a moment. "Imagine the surface of the sun."
The imagery was clear. Monster's voice dropped even lower than normal. "How long?"
Merlin shrugged. "Shit, Gunny. Hours, days, it's hard to tell."
"Not good enough," Monster barked forcefully. "I need to know what kind of timeframe we're looking at."
Merlin looked back at the console as his fingers tapped rapidly on the plexan surface. He stared at a series of gauges before reaching up as if to scratch his jaw, armored fingers tinking off the shell of his facemask. The hand dropped. "I'd give it no more than seventy-two hours. If she cycles down I don't think she'll stand up to another jump-start."
Monster bristled. "Don't you ever have any GOOD news?"
"Gimme a few minutes. I'll see if I can cut some of the power running aft, maybe lighten the load. If the drive doesn't have to work so hard, it oughtta hold out longer."
Monster gave a quick thumbs-up and stepped out of the way, his mind rapidly revising their timeline.
Seventy-two hours. His brow knit behind the armor mask.
Ships don't just appear in caves, he reasoned, so there had to be some kind of tunnel leading up. It would be a hell of a climb back to whatever remained of the Cathedral, but in seventy-two hours they could be a long way from the ship. At that point, as far as he was concerned, the ship could freeze or cook off to its heart's content. "Nothing here but dead steel anyway," he muttered.
Stepping across the black grated floor to a pair of wide double doors, Monster planted himself in the portal. The doors led into an access corridor that ran the length of the drive system, some hundred and seventy meters at least. From the doorway Monster had an unobstructed view down the hallway aft, and another fifteen meters forward where the corridor dumped into the Lobby.
A good vantage point. He could watch over Merlin while the corporal struggled to keep the crippled ship alive a little longer. Monster appreciated the scope of that task. He guessed that kilometers of fiber-optic cable alone lay between here and the Sickbay. In terms of volume and complexity, the ship was literally a city in a can.
A city without citizens, Monster thought uneasily, wondering yet again what had happened to her crew.
According to Ridgeway, the question of when had emerged to rival the question of what. Merlin's theory about the stalactites opened a lot of questions. There was an unmistakable antiquity about the ship, a sense of permanence as it lay here in it's frozen grave. Monster didn't have to work hard to imagine the ship sitting here when the planet was young.
Monster brusquely dismissed the line of thought. The last thing he needed was to get prosaic about the bizarre situation. Life broke down into scientific fact and tactical reality; nothing else. Still, the uneasiness lingered.
Monster found himself less disturbed by what he could see than what he couldn't. Nameless gut reaction had become an intuition upon which Monster had long come to rely. That intuition told him something was wrong about this place, even more wrong than the obvious. Although he'd never admit it, the ship gave him the creeps.
Shifting his weight, he stared down the long canted hall. In the broken light, the interior was a frozen study in overlapping greys and blacks. Nothing moved except the lingering curls of smoke in the air.
He glanced back at Merlin and unexpectedly felt a quiet flash of pride. The young Marine was busting his ass under shit conditions; no complaints, no excuses. That was the Marine way, and that made it Monster's way.
"Any less would be human," Monster recited the fragment of his own mantra, "and humans could be beaten." The core belief that Marines were more than human was hammered into them from day one, an innate conviction that allowed them to persevere when lesser men gave up. Set aside all technology, Monster believed with conviction, and the man who wins is the one who simply refuses to die.
Monster had been born to the role. His size and strength quickly established him as a superman in the eyes of new recruits, but there was far more to the role than physical presence. It demanded discipline and a can-do attitude, consistency in a world where things changed in the thud of a bullet. Monster loved it like nothing else.
Merlin popped up from his work and his head swiveled through a four-point check of the room.
Monster grinned. Perimeter sweep on regular intervals, just like clockwork. Getting so buried in one task that you lose track of what's around you, tunnel vision, put a lot of good men in the ground. Taking a page from his own book, Monster scanned the corridor once more.
Nothing but darkness loomed down the aft hallway, irregularly-spaced lights dimming along the gradual fade to black. Swinging his attention forward, Monster swept the length of the cluttered wall just in time to see the Lobby doors smashed from their frames in a thunder of crushed metal.
"Shit!" Lurching back into the doorframe, Monster's right arm snapped down and engaged the barrel cluster of the Gatling. Safeties disengaged with an electronic click as he finished the draw stroke and brought the machinegun to target.
A mass of tangled wreckage now obscured the Lobby doorway. Pieces of angle-iron and grate steel lay strewn across the floor. Amid the wall of debris, Monster recognized a large yellow number 7 hanging askance beyond the door.
With a metallic scrape, Merlin slid like a base runner through the door, passing beneath the Gatling as he skidded into the hallway. The engineer's CAR was shouldered, a familiar ascending whine crisp in the cold air.
"Aft," Monster barked, directing Merlin to watch their flank. The collapse was likely caused by one of his own Marines, but a diversion wasn't out of the question. With his TAC scrambled, Monster had no way to know. As if in confirmation of his worst fear, something shook within the mass of metal.
"Major!" Monster barked across the comm.
"I copy, go." The wreckage shook violently as Ridgeway's voice replied. A piece of metal tube rang like an over-struck tuning fork.
"Need a Team Sitrep Major," Monster's muzzle snapped to a piece of vertical diamondplate steel that trembled with increasing fervor. "I need it now."
"Stitch is here with the Rimmer, Darcy's on recon up top and Taz is on patrol--"
"Shit." Monster yanked the Gatling a few degrees off-target. "Where?"
"Aft, then down your way, why?"
Bolts along the edge of the gridded metal panel snapped and skittered across the floor like chrome dice. The plate dropped out of sight with a guillotine blur, revealing a crushed limb. Pieces of metal, slick with blood, gleamed in the dark recess.
"Dammit Taz!" Monster's outburst spilled out across the open comm as he bolted forward. He slammed into the mass of metal and drove with both legs. "Told you..." he snarled as he heaved up against the wreckage, "to watch the bridges."
Metal groaned and the framework shifted upward. Monster dropped his shoulder beneath the rising lever and threw the full strength of man and armor into the lift. Sheet metal tore with a warbling pig-squeal.
"Crikey Gunny, what the hell are you on about?" The Aussie's voice on the Com was clear and calm, tinged only by a note of irritation.
Monster froze, the sudden silence broken only by a dull metal creak. His gaze fell to the crushed, bleeding limb just inches from his knee as he spoke in a husky whisper. "Where are you?"
"Thirty-nine starboard aft, right where I'm bloody well supposed to be. What the hell did I do now?"
The dark shape lay still, oozing a reddish fluid that Monster had first taken for blood. Closer now, he could see a metallic sheen to the liquid as it dripped in thick clots down an erratic staircase of broken metal. Buried in leathery skeins lay a mangled chain of cables and pistons. Monster felt the tension drain from his body.
Shit. Just fucking machinery, he thought with a sigh. Not one of my Marines. He shifted his stance and began to lower the weight supported on his shoulders.
The broken thing snatched violently and drew back by half its length, twisting like a metal snake. In the dim light Monster caught the flash of curved steel blades that flexed finger-like in the shadows before the limb thrashed once more and disappeared, yanked back through the far side of the heap.
Monster lunged back and the pile fell to the floor with a smash. Through the crush of collapsing steel, Monster could hear an erratic pattern of footfalls rapidly vanishing into the distance.
CHAPTER 20
Jenner gingerly clamped a flexible water bottle between his palms. The three remaining digits on his left hand were too tender to be of any use. He raised the bottle to his mouth, careful to avoid brushing the fissure in his lower lip, another piece of meat lost to blackened death.
Squeezing the bottle between his flipper-like hands, Jenner closed his eyes and let the cool droplets trickle down his throat. He focused on every swallow, hoping to stave off the dark nightmare images that played through his mind.
A metallic clang from across the room caused Jenner to flinch and the translucent bottle slipped from his grasp. It fell to the floor, bounced twice and rolled away.
Shit, Jenner cursed inwardly, realizing that the ongoing noise was just the doctor rummaging through a box of equipment. He felt a short wave of relief. The doctor didn't scare him-- not like the other one, the one with the hellish eyes.
Jenner shuddered, a tremor in his guts that spread quickly to his hands. He wrapped his arms tightly about himself and tried to will away the shakes. Despite his best efforts, Jenner's mind reached unbidden to the amber-eyed Marine.
Killer's eyes, Jenner told himself.
All the Marines struck him as hard characters. Hell, even the girl is scary, Jenner admitted, but Taz was frightening in a way that Jenner had never known.
He wants me dead, and not just the way that a soldier wants to take the fight to the enemy. Jenner mulled dismally, the bastard is looking forward to killing me like a little kid looks forward to opening a new toy.
Despite his abysmal state of mind, Jenner was surprised to find that dying itself had lost most of its menace. His recent memory was a twisted blur of cold and suffering. Nightmares hung just behind his closed eyelids, fitful dreams of drowning in living quicksand.
He wondered if his mind had suffered more damage than his body. Even in the worst of times, his grasp on reality, no matter how shitty that reality was, had always seemed solid. That had been before the voices began, dark mutterings in a language he didn't know but somehow understood.
The voices brought images of things that turned his stomach, scenes that played out like distant memories. Jenner couldn't begin to grasp what it all meant. Mystery voices, hallucinations, to Jenner they were all signs of a collapsing mind.
As a matter of self defense, Jenner tried to rivet his attention on the world around him, to focus on what was real. Briggs was dead, that much was real. The Truck was gone as well, blown all to hell. The exercise was not helping -- everything he knew was gone.
Hell, he whimpered inwardly, half of me is gone as well.
Jenner vomited the first time he saw himself in a small metal mirror. Lacking a nose, both ears and half a lip, his head looked like an animated skull. Wide chunks of his scalp were missing, flesh tones visible between irregular patches of brown hair.
I look like a chopped car, he reflected miserably, wheels missing, doors gone, hood ripped off. How many of the cars that he swiped as a kid ended up stripped to the frame? His fate struck him like some kind of cheap, karmic joke. Dying would simply bring this whole shitty story to a close. Fucked up life, fucked up career-- now I'm just plain fucked altogether.