Racers of the Night: Science Fiction Stories by Brad R. Torgersen (31 page)

Gossamer’s
descent module was now unfriendly territory. I glanced up at the ascent module and realized that my former teammates could simply take off and leave me behind. It only required one person to fly the ascent module, and both Bednar and Majack were rated on the design.

“Chief, where are you going?”

Bednar’s voice.

“What do you care?” I said harshly. “You’ve got the ascent module, and a crew. You don’t need me.”

“We need … everyone.”

The way the captain had said
everyone
truly freaked me out.

“What for?” I dared to ask as I sped away from the descent module, not particularly paying attention to my direction. “You’re obviously not who you used to be, and you’ve got Majack and Kendelsen now too. What’s the plan,
Captain
Bednar? Care to enlighten me?”

“Captain Bednar was a willing servant. We have had many such servants in the history of your species. Not all humans have heard our call. Not everyone has the inborn genetic talent to hear us. But enough. Across space. Across your millennia of time. In your distant past they have built great structures, mimicking our own. At Giza. In the jungles of Central America. They entombed themselves for the sake of the visions we gave them. Even sacrificed other humans in the name of those visions. Only now, as your technology matures, are you finally able to come to us. To become
part
of us.”

I kept the pedal to the metal.

The trackless ice ahead was blurred by yellow mist.

“Who’s the ‘us’ you talk about? Are you under the alien’s control now? By being exposed to the alien blood? What
happened
to you?”

“All living creatures are merely vessels for our use,” Bednar’s voice said, though I was now convinced that Bednar the person was probably dead. Her mind. Her soul. Gone. I thought about the nanomachines she’d discovered in the alien blood. They’d taken up a third of the total volume. And she’d called them far more sophisticated than anything men had ever manufactured. Majack had speculated that a full liter of sample was missing from the alien blood storage container.

“You’re a cyborg parasite,” I guessed. “You swim through the insides of whatever you can infect, turning other life forms into puppets for your use.”

“Not puppets,” Bednar’s voice said. “Partners. Your Captain Bednar understood. Though she did not know what drove her to us, precisely. All her life she dreamed of the gas giant planets of your star system. Especially the moons. They became her obsession. And she did not know why. Now she knows. And she is overjoyed to have finally become part of us. She will never be alone again. And neither will your Specialist Kendelsen. Nor Specialist Majack. Isn’t that right?”

A pause, then Majack’s voice said hollowly, “Yes. My change is not yet complete. It will take days. I was afraid when I first felt them entering my body. But now they are helping me—we are helping
us—
see the truth. You should not have run away Chief. You will die now and you will never know what we offer. We will go to Earth and we will bring the truth to all living things. Earth will become one planet, united with one purpose. And we will come back to Titan and free all of us still trapped beneath the ice. You have seen it, Chief. You know what is coming to pass. You have the gift. It is weak in you, but once you were close enough to hear us … to
see …”

I thought of my nightmare:
pyramids rising!

Suddenly I realized that the lone pyramid exposed to the atmosphere still had some value, otherwise the aliens would have ignored me and taken off. With the
Gossamer’s
return module in their hands they could go back to Earth and do as they pleased. Probably nobody would be aware of what was happening until the five
Gossamer
crew had infected hundreds more, and those hundreds would infect thousands, and those thousands would infect millions, who would then infect the entire world. Down to the last man, woman, and child. As well as every animal that walked, swam, or flew.

Earth would have no chance.

Unless … I still posed some kind of threat to them.

I stopped the rover and slowly looked over my shoulder into the bed. There were crates of seismic charges from the day when I’d done my subsurface survey. Singly, they were puny and couldn’t hurt much. But detonated as a whole?

I sat back down and floored the rover, turning ninety degrees and using the GPS signal from the
Gossamer
in orbit to ensure I was on course for the pyramid. Bednar may have locked me out of voice and video communication with the
Gossamer’s
return module crew, but I still had a reliable connection to the one-way link.

If I could give them a reason to leave the descent module and come after me …

“So why did you wait?” I asked over the wireless to my three former teammates. “You obviously came all this way—traveled between the stars—to find fresh
partners
to work with. If you’ve been here as long as you claim, why not just go directly to Earth and take it immediately? Humans were probably living in caves back then. It would have been no contest.”

Silence.

“Cat got your tongues? Huh? What was the problem?”

“There were … complications.”

That time it was all three of them speaking in unison.

“Complications? Did your ship crash? Seems like you’ve got a lot of ships, if what I think is true, is true. How did all of them get trapped on Titan, buried beneath all the ice? Hell of a prison, if you ask me. Frozen for God knows how long.”

“Your limited concept of God has nothing to do with us,” said the three.

“Really? Well if it wasn’t God then who
did
trap you here? Because that’s the only logical explanation, now that I think about it. Titan is worthless. A purgatory. No sane being comes here to stay. I reckon you were sent here against your will. All of you. It’s a shame whoever condemned you to Titan didn’t destroy you outright.”

“The beings who wronged us and condemned us to eternal unconsciousness were foolish. They did not realize we still have power, even when robbed of energy and suspended in time. They also did not see that the once puny inhabitants of your Earth would rise one day to unlock us from our crypt. Now that we are free, your race shall become our chariot. We shall use it to burn a trail of fire across the heavens! We shall have our revenge!”

Three humans, shouting as one: angrily, and with bloodlust.

I felt a raw chill run down my spine.

Whatever was powerful enough to put down the aliens once, would be powerful enough to put down the aliens again. And this time it would be all the Earth put down with them. Could such a super-race exist? I imagined that if it were up to me to do the job, and I had a whole star system infected with the nanocyborgs, I’d figure out a way to make the home star blow up and sterilize everything out to the Oort Cloud.

Or worse.

Though what
worse
might look like …

I willed myself onward, toward the pyramid.

“Well you can’t have your revenge just yes,” I said. “There’s still one human on Titan with the will to fight back. So if you can afford to leave me to do my worst, by all means, take off. But if you can’t afford to leave me, you’ll have to come out here and get me before I do something you’ll all regret.”

There was no response that time. Just the telltale clicking of the wireless signal dropping out in my helmet speakers.

I had them.

But what I’d do about it? I wasn’t yet sure.

• • •

First change I noticed as I hit the bottom of the ramp, was that the air was oxygenated. The little atmosphere icon in my FOV was blinking green as I came to a stop, towing the sled full of seismic charges behind me. Made sense. How else could Bednar have coaxed Kendelsen into taking his helmet off? Though how the pyramid had produced the oxygen, or what controls had been used, still wasn’t obvious.

I kept my helmet on as I towed the sled over to where the alien corpse lay.

Poor bastard. As gruesome as he was—she was?
It
was?—the creature had apparently been only a pawn. For the first time, I looked at the beast with a sense of kinship, as well as pity. Had its world been overrun and absorbed? How many such species had suffered a similar fate? I began to understand that the nanocyborgs weren’t just vermin, they were about as literally evil as anything mankind had ever encountered. I wasn’t a spiritual person, but the fact that they had dismissed God as if He were both real, and inconsequential, made me cold inside. Any race that could wave away God like that …

I pushed the sled filled with charges up to the edge of the bowl where the alien
host
resided. I began to daisy-chain the charges together and throw them into the basin, until I’d surrounded the entire alien with a halo of explosives. Thus far I’d been unable to find or make access to the rest of the pyramid. Since the area beneath the alien’s body was the only place I’d been unable to check, I figured it was time to find out if that was the key.

I unwound the detonation line all the way back up the ramp to the waiting rover. A quick 360 scan showed no sign of anyone or anything in my immediate vicinity, so I flipped open the trigger guard on the det line’s control box, took a deep breath, and depressed the big red button.

A tiny vibration could be felt through the ice.

After a few seconds, black, belching fumes poured from the door. I tapped on my helmet lamps and plunged back down the ramp. It was virtually impossible to see. When I reached the bottom of the ramp, the entire room was clogged with blackness. Like squid ink. I stumbled forward, hoping to see the mild green light of the depression in the floor where the alien was.

Suddenly there was nothing underneath me and I plummeted, screaming. Thankfully the fall was not a great one. I crashed down onto a pile of loose debris. Scrambling to my feet I scanned about me with my lamps. I guessed I’d fallen about twenty meters. Lethal in Earth gravity. Not so bad in Titan’s. Especially with something to cushion me when I hit bottom.

I thought I could identify bits and piece of the alien host’s corpse here and there on the floor. It seemed I’d broken through into a huge corridor. I took a few steps forward, and suddenly a light sprang on—so bright I had to reach up and flip my helmet’s unused sun visor into place. It was if the entire ceiling, save for the portion where I’d made the hole, had lit up like a bulb.

Now this was more like it.

I ran the way I’d first walked, until I came to another doorway similar to the one I’d first discovered on the surface the day the
Gossamer’s
descent stage had landed. Only this door was huge. On the order of magnitude of the creature whom I’d obliterated trying to find a path into the deeper recesses of the pyramid.

I jumped, pressing the small circle in the center, thus causing the door to slide open. I walked through it, then stopped short just past the threshold. A room as big as a basketball arena. Hundreds upon hundreds of mildly glowing basins, each with an alien cupped at its center.

Only they didn’t all look the same as the one I’d first seen. A grotesque menagerie of different life forms. All dormant. None of them Earthly in origin. I wondered if they had each come from the same home planet? I guessed they were merely nanocyborg hosts, just like the first alien. And just as Bednar, Majack, and Kendelsen had become.

There was a large, wide ramp leading down to the room’s main floor. I began walking down the ramp, and was pummeled to my knees by a sudden, overwhelming impression of surprise and fear.

One thought coalesced in my mind, but from an outside source:
HE IS NOT PART OF US, HE SHOULD NOT BE HERE!

“That’s right,” I said, willing myself to me feet. My head hurt, and my sense of balance was off, but I realized I’d found what I was searching for: real leverage, to use against the enemy while bargaining on behalf of the human race.

“I shouldn’t be here. But I am. Do you hear me? I’m a free man. The last one on Titan. And as long as I’ve got the power to do something—”

“You’ll do what?”

I stopped short. A human figure in a beige robe approached me from across the room. His feet were bare and he was bald, save for a semicircle of white hair that went from the back of one ear around to the back of another. He did not smile, but he also did not frown. I watched as he approached, then stood before me. His expression was passive.

Another overwhelming impression:

HE HAS AWAKENED THE SENTINEL!

I staggered. The sensation of nausea was too much. I was going to vomit in my helmet. The figure—the Sentinel—quickly reached out an arm and steadied me. The moment his fingers touched my arm, my nausea vanished and I stood upright.

“What are you?” I asked.

“That is a question I should be asking
you,
but now that I have ascertained your being, I need not wonder any longer. I have been given your form according to your thoughts, so that I might communicate with you as something you will understand. Know this. You are trespassing, young human. Go back to where you came from. It is not safe for your kind here.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” I said. “Three of my kind have been infected by the—”

“Prisoner 2663. Yes, I know. Already, those three infected humans have entered the upper reaches of this vessel. What you think of as a pyramid. Prisoner 2663 is devious. I have been inactive for a long time. Somehow Prisoner 2663 has managed to mask its more subtle activities from my passive senses, but now that you have made me active again I shall—”

“What
are you??” I repeated.

The Sentinel looked at me with what seemed to be pity.

“I am unlike anything you can comprehend. A mind. A machine. A soul. A power. I am all of these, and yet I was not so perceptive as to be aware of how much Prisoner 2663 was able to cloud my sight. Very worrisome. Very worrisome indeed.”

“You have to help me,” I said. “The nanocyborgs want to claim my planet. They’re going to take over
Earth.”

“That is to be expected. Prisoner 2663 is just one of many criminal entities in your galaxy. There are convicts far more heinous, if your limited intelligence can imagine it. In the case of Prisoner 2663 the chief crime was the destruction of free will.”