Dominant Species (29 page)

Merlin looked up from the console where the words SAFETY LOCKS DISENGAGED burned brightly beneath his fingertips.

"We read you loud and clear Major."

CHAPTER 30

Dan Ridgeway slogged through the lake at a determined pace, his armored legs churning through the sapphire liquid. Monster and Taz flanked him to the right and left respectively, matching his aggressive stride. The three Marines drove towards the far shore, leaving Papa-Six, and in fact the entire ship, far behind.

And two Marines as well. Ridgeway frowned at the thought, but he told himself that the decision still made sense. Stitch was all but immobile and Merlin would watch the medic's back while the rest of the team cleared the way.

At least one thing had changed in their favor, Ridgeway noted. Restoration of power had produced yet another unforeseen side-effect. As the engine pumped out heat in abundance, the fog around the ship had literally tripled in density. Instead of a waist-deep layer that highlighted the Marine's passage, the Londonesque fog now devoured them, masking their movements within its great amorphous boundaries.

He was grateful for the concealment and the speed it allowed them. Darcy was still far ahead, keeping watch on the cavern exit. Given the durability of the alien species, Ridgeway didn't want his sniper to tangle with one by herself, much less with several. The sooner they regrouped, the better.

The fog thinned as they left the lake behind. On bare rock they struck a balance between speed and the amount of pain their damaged limbs could withstand.

Ridgeway scoured the jagged terrain ahead. Most of the cavern's inner surface was made of bare, irregular rock. His night vision peered deep into the gloom where a forest of jutting stone extended boundlessly.

Darcy was somewhere among those rocks. Even now she would be using the powerful scope to burn across the expanse of cavern. Motionless against a rough terrain, the sniper's camouflage would render her almost invisible. If one of the creatures appeared anywhere but on top of her, the first clue it should have of her existence would be a bolt of molten uranium through the skull.

With luck, Ridgeway hoped earnestly, that first fiery clue would be its last.

As he jogged steadily, Ridgeway glanced at his companions. The tower-sized Gunnery Sergeant kept pace with a fierce determination. With every jarring step the crack in his shoulder would flex and trigger a fresh dagger of agony. At Stitch's insistence, Monster had quietly locked out some thirty percent of the mobility of his left arm. Inducing a degree of rigidity to the armor at both the shoulder and elbow, the tactic allowed the carbon sleeve to support his arm and act as something of a cast. The measure was a subtle one, but doubtlessly a profound relief.

Taz was another story altogether. Sporting a severe concussion and a shopping list of cracks and contusions, the scrappy Marine held together remarkably well, a small miracle considering his dangling act from the balcony. Judging from his uneven gait, the injured hip had been badly aggravated. Taz mimicked Monster's lead, but he was anything but stoic. The loss of his rifle was driving the Aussie to distraction.

The missing weapon sat uneasily on Ridgeway's mind as well. Lost somewhere in the battle of the CryoSphere, it seemed likely to have fallen into the moat around the Island. But transponders in each primary weapon had long been standard equipment for the Corps and no amount of scanning could pinpoint the CAR's location. Either the drop into the electrified cryogenic soup simply slagged the weapon altogether...

Or it had been carried off. Ridgeway grimaced at the thought. From everything they had seen, the oversized creatures lacked the comparatively small digits needed to pull a trigger. But the prospect of a covalent weapon in the hands of the enemy was a sobering one.

While a tactical consideration to Ridgeway, the loss hit Taz like a slap in the face that spun him into a whole new level of incendiary malice directed at the alien species. If there was one way to truly piss off a Marine, it was to mess with his rifle. Though perhaps less dramatic than the attachment felt between Darcy and her Hammer, each Marine has a personal relationship with his service rifle.

"We're gonna slag the whole bloody lot of ‘em, you know that?" The Aussie's statement was more affirmation than question, spoken to nobody in particular. The sentiment was re-expressed every few minutes with varying degrees of color. As he jogged along, Taz's fingers flexed energetically on the magnum pistol, steadily milking the grip. "Oh yeah, they're fuckin' dead."

The muttered monologue faded out before once again expounding on the details of their imminent vivisection, although Ridgeway was certain that point would resume anew in the next few minutes. And it might have, had Darcy's voice not broken the silence of their advance.

"I've got blood."

Without breaking stride, every weapon in Marine hands snapped up, the barrels locked ahead toward Darcy's location. Between the darkness and the sniper's ECM, they couldn't actually see her, but the TAC displayed a familiar icon that marked her position. Ridgeway noted the display. Four hundred meters and closing. The sniper hid along the shallow wash they now followed, just on the edge of a traversing ridgeline.

That they could see the terrain at all was another improvement. The volume of light that poured from the revived ship had illuminated a great deal of the cavern, although this far away the Marines had engaged night vision to enhance the diminishing glow. The real advantage was the ability to move without searchlights.

The sniper expanded her report with a small note of professional pride. "I've got a good spray pattern, solid hit. Too dark to make out the color but from the shine I'd say it's fresh. No body, but I'd bet my rifle that it couldn't have gone far."

Ridgeway picked up speed. Dead opponents were not a concern, but wounded ones could be very unpredictable. Ridgeway was the only one who gave voice to the question. "What's your threat assessment?"

The Com hung silent for a long moment. Ridgeway knew that Darcy would be scanning the area once more to insure that her next words were accurate.

"I am negative on threat, Major. The ground drops off just past this point, sloping down fairly steep with a lot of intervening stalagmites. I've got a crevasse just ahead, maybe another hundred meters from here. Can't see how deep but the sucker is wide, easily three hundred meters at this end."

"Good. We're on your position in two mikes."

"Roger that, I'm pushing ahead to the rim."

Moments later, the Marines crested the small ridgeline. As the sniper had reported, a distinct splatter of gore decorated several meters of stone floor. A significant puddle of liquid had formed just beyond the point of impact.

"Looks like LT put the bloody Hammer to one of ‘em," Taz muttered, his voice thick with obvious pleasure. "From the gut-pile I'd say she right turned the pommy bastard inside out."

Ridgeway knelt and considered the scene in silence, mapping the physical evidence against his knowledge of catastrophic injuries. As he absorbed the image, the event played out in his mind.

You never saw it coming. One second you're crawling along, then it's flat on your back with your guts draped out of a steaming hole.

Though it had lain here for some time, the lack of a corpse meant that the damned thing had managed to crawl away. His eyes looked up and scanned the perimeter. It would not have gone far.

A wide smear of fluid streaked away from the puddle. Intermittent splotches zig-zagged through the rocks ahead, the erratic path of a dying beast drunk with pain.

Ridgeway raised his hand, two extended fingers making a rapid circle. The Marines fell into a tight circle, weapons bristling in all directions as they crept forward.

Ridgeway spotted Darcy only a few meters ahead, wedged tightly behind a large outcrop of rock. The rifle was at her shoulder and she peered silently downslope. Without a word the sniper extended her right hand palm-down, moving as though gently patting a dog's head.

Ridgeway stopped instantly and squatted low, ducking into a shallow vale as each Marine sought his own point of hard cover. He eased himself into a seated position and leaned back against a broad slab of near-black stone.

Darcy remained on the scope, wrapped in subtle shades of obsidian and granite. Had it not been for the motion of her hand, it would have been easy to take her for a statue carved from the very rock upon which she leaned.

Ridgeway caught the crescent of orange that gleamed along the curve of her faceplate. The glimmer might have been unnoticeable but for the dull, monochromatic surroundings. It took half a heartbeat for Ridgeway to realize that the sniper had trained her weapon on some new source of light, something that came up from the ground.

He pushed himself up to peer over the rim of the chasm.

"Uh-uh," Darcy whispered urgently as her hand snapped into a tight fist. "Ghost me."

Ridgeway grunted as he caught himself. Whatever lay ahead, Darcy didn't want to risk being observed. He eased back and, with a soft mental push, allowed the sniper's senses once more to become his own.

In the flicker of synapse, a set of graduated reticles bisected his view, testament that he once more gazed through the scope's powerful optics. That much he expected. What he saw through the scope left him stunned.

The chasm stretched down for several hundred meters, a jagged highway of sharp ridges set row upon row that gave the intervening space the look of a demented trench warfare exercise. The tunnel snaked downward, leading to a warm orange glow that pulsed steadily from the far end.

Unbidden, the crosshairs tracked down to the end of the washboard passage. At the base of the slope it dumped out into a cavern room of moderate size. The texture of the walls inside seemed odd and it took a long moment for Ridgeway to realize why.

The whole cave is lined with machinery. Equipment flowed up the walls and across the ceiling. Glittering streams, like fiery veins, appeared to flow among the cluttered patches of hardware. Wide channels of ember-red branched endlessly throughout the blackened hollow. For a moment Ridgeway was struck with the irrational thought that he was somehow inside a huge artificial heart.

"It's Escher drawn by Geiger." Darcy offered with what seemed an uncertain balance of amusement and revulsion.

The ruddy glow cast the scene in an eerie, hellish hue. But something about the pulsing light seemed familiar, although completely out of scale. Ridgeway shifted his focus from the target and scanned the data that ringed the scope's view. Visible light, barely twenty percent amped. The answer, Ridgeway realized, lay a little lower on the scale.

"Go thermal."

The sniper responded immediately and pushed the scope to resolve waves in the ten micron range. The even-hued scene blossomed in artificial color as the imaging system displayed minute changes in the heat that radiated from every point within the scene.

It took Darcy only a moment to recognize the pattern. "Shit, the whole thing is one big IR array."

"Yeah," Ridgeway said quietly, following evidence to the inevitable conclusion. "So whatever they are, amid all that hardware is flesh and blood as we know it."

"Well, you are what you eat," Darcy drawled quietly.

As revolting as the image was, Ridgeway had to concede the logic. He wondered if one species could assimilate the genetics of another. Maybe the Ascension's crew wasn't eaten so much as cannibalized for parts. He tried to picture the muscles entwined along steel bones. Had they been grafted on or grown in place?

"That could explain the silver in their blood," Darcy muttered absently. "Maybe they just chowed down on somebody who'd been on the table." Her offhand comment lacked any real conviction.

Ridgeway groped for a reply as the crosshairs tracked to the brightest heat source in the cavern, a collection of equipment that glowed in the artificial tones of thermal imaging. Through digital sleight of hand, Darcy merged the visible and thermal channels, producing a layer of detail and surface texture.

Quick to offer her conclusions, Darcy pre-empted the prior line of conversation with a businesslike analysis. "Roughly twelve meters high, heavy steel construction. Lot of moving parts, it's definitely serviceable. Looks like some of the old oil rigs we used to have back home."

"Close." Ridgeway replied softly. He'd seen units just like it on the frozen plains of McFarland's World. Unlike oil derricks that drew liquid from the planet's core, these sucked heat. "Geothermal Rig. They're mining for heat."

As he stared at the unwieldy machine, Ridgeway recalled Monster's first report. Maybe two klicks down to hit the magma plane. The hardship inherent in drilling through cold stone was staggering. He shook his head, that's one hell of a mining op.

"Bet that took a while." Darcy muttered, as if reading Ridgeway's mind.

A while indeed, Ridgeway assessed, noting with equal focus that the only visible dig went down instead of up. Disappointment welled, its growing weight tugging at his resolve. Dispair threatened to drown out any last shred of hope when he was struck by epiphany.

"They aren't locals."

Darcy was caught by surprise. "Come again?"

"These things, they can't be indigenous. They came here from somewhere else." Excitement gathered in Ridgeway's voice.