XVI

Lieutenant Moe 'Mojo' Jones sat impatiently in the cockpit of the dropship poised on the front of The Eden, a wafer thin sheet of plastic in his hands as he flipped through the pages on the electronic magazine he'd borrowed off one of his fellow pilots before embarking on this fruitless journey. The shackle had been put in place a few minutes ago, shortly after he'd lost contact with the squad, and he'd tried to adjust the gain on the communication array of the shuttle, but nothing had worked. Residual fallout from the EMP wasn't uncommon, and he'd returned to the magazine, thinking nothing off it, with the buzz of the bridge from The Vengeance playing in the background of the small cabin as they went about the task of syncing up the two cruisers: nothing for him to take any interest in.

He threw the magazine down in the small compartment beside his seat and returned his attention to the entrance into the bridge, frowning at the faint orange flashes that seemed to emanate within the cavernous opening. Frowning, Mojo tried to adjust the signal again, but still drew a blank. Maybe if he moved in closer?

Adjusting his harness and grabbing the controls, Mojo disengaged the magnetic clamps attached to the landing struts, gently brought the craft up, then nudged it forwards, bringing it closer to the opening.

As he did so, one of the readouts surrounding him flashed red and emitted a pulsing alarm: Mojo knew the ship well enough to know that it was the emergency recoil for one of the umbilical cords. He sat up in his seat, watching as one of the main lines snaked lazily through space and back towards the open hold and expecting to see one of the Marines attached to the tether coming in to view. Some unexpected glitch: maybe an error with one of the air regulators? Instead, the end of the line scrolled into view, and Mojo cut the engines, hovering above the hull and less than ten meters from the opening.

It was dark inside, the orange flashes had stopped shortly before the automatic recoil had been initiated, but Mojo could see the barest flicker of movement. He hit the controls for the lights mounted just below the main Gatling gun under the cockpit, the brilliant white light illuminating the bridge and the bloody shapeless blobs that floated in the breached chamber. Nothing else moved in the bridge other than the trails of gore.

"Fuck," he growled, keying his microphone into another frequency as he tried, once again, to reach the team in the bridge. Either the gory remains were one of his team, or the sensors on the ship were wrong, and the explosive decompression had taken out some poor, unfortunate bastard that had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He didn't know which option he'd prefer.

Still unable to raise any of the insertion team, he keyed in a direct line to the bridge of The Vengeance.

"Vengeance, this is shuttle Alpha-02, something's wrong with the operation."

"Copy that, Alpha, are you sure? Shackle remains in place, we're syncing up the craft to ours now. Ex-fil your team now and return to base for decon."

"Exfiltration is a no-go, I can't raise them on any channel… and there's something wrong with the bridge. Patch through to my nose-cam, see what I'm seeing."

"Copy that, Alpha, patching it through… Christ, what's that?"

"Looks like blood to me," Mojo responded. "Only thing is, I don't know who it belongs to. One of us, or one of them."

There was a lull in the communication, a brief murmuring away form the pickup, then a new voice came on.

"This is Commander Thorn, who am I speaking to?"

"Mojo, sir… ah, that is, Lieutenant Jones. Shuttle Alpha-02."

"Okay, that's fine. Can you see anyone in the bridge, maybe something the camera can't pick up? Further back, anything… anything at all?"

"Ah," Mojo nudged the craft closer to the opening, as close as he could without compromising any safety margins. He made a visible effort of peering into the bridge, as is Thorn was checking on the job he was doing. "No, nothing."

"Umbilical cords?"

"One came back in on its own, under an emergency recall from the operator's side. The other two are still out there."

"Reel them in," Thorn commanded. "Slowly."

Mojo keyed in the remote sequence, activating the winches in the hold and watching as the remaining two cords slowly coiled back into the open hold of the craft. He watched in silence, holding his breath, as the ends of the cords came in to view.

One line had been severed by a blade, the tip ragged and frayed, while the other was attached to a shapeless hunk of meat partially cased in the shell of a suit, the tattered stumps oozing blobs of crimson and scarlet. Mojo blanched at the sight, remaining silent as the corpse slipped from view and into the open hold.

"That was one of ours," Mojo announced, unnecessarily. "Chuck, I think."

"Wasn't decompression, either," Thorn muttered. "The bastards can survive in vacuum."

"Sir?" Mojo was more than confused. Who was he talking about? Nothing could survive in vacuum, the bloody chunks of Marine that were floating in the bridge and now in the cargo hold were a testament to that fact. Despite what Thorn was saying, Mojo figured that decompression had something to do with it.

"Nothing," Thorn snapped. "Close up and pull out of there. Return to base and get decontaminated. And keep clear of that opening."

"What about Marcus and Harper?"

"They're dead," Thorn said, matter-of-factly. "We can deal with their corpses once we get back to Gamma and get this infestation under control."

Infestation, Mojo mused silently as he grudgingly activated the controls again and slowly swung the dropship around, turning the flank of his craft on the bridge and sealing up the cargo ramp, pulling away from The Eden and returning home. Surely he means infection…

The dropship skimmed the surface of The Vengeance as he followed the curve of its hull, returning to the airlock on the underside leading to the hanger and keying in the automatic launch sequence. Flushing the cargo hold with oxygen, he unsealed the door of the cockpit and clambered down a short flight of stairs into the vacant hold. Large enough to carry an APC, the hold looked enormous when it wasn't loaded: it wasn't very often Mojo ferried anything other than APCs, equipment or even a fully-loaded squad of Marines ready for action. The single limbless torso lying on the deck rolled back and forth as the dropship slowly lifted back into the hold of the mother ship and entered the faux gravity field, pools of blood that had previously floated in the hold spattering the deck all around. The ship shuddered as it came to rest in its mooring, and Mojo activated the cargo ramp, gripping the hydraulic support struts as they slowly lowered the ramp. The corpse toppled and slipped across the desk, tumbling to the ground outside the shuttle and rolling to a stop at the foot of the ladder. Mojo was quick to grab a sheet of tarpaulin from the side of the craft and drape it over the torso, taking one last look around the cargo hold of the craft before exiting.

He failed to notice the foetal shape of a coiled creature lurking behind the winching system the three umbilical cords were attached to. A creature that unfurled itself from its hiding place as Mojo left the craft, looking around its surroundings as the throbbing engines of the dropship whined and died.

Its life had been short, but it had never known an existence without its brethren, the hive, around it. Following its journey in the small shuttlecraft, though, it felt… distant: alone. For the first time, the constant activity of the hive was nothing but a distant, ethereal murmuring in the background of its mind. It couldn't understand what had happened to others of its ilk, all it knew was that it was alone, and that a new instinct had kicked into life in itself; an instinct to spread itself through the ship, to consume the life around it and create more of itself. Where there was one, there should be many.

It crept closer to the lip of the ramp, hissing softly to itself as it tentatively extended its senses into the busy landing bay outside the craft, its wide range of sensory apparatus buzzing with the information it was pulling in; the sounds of busy craft around it, the taste of the men and women around it, and the bioluminescent energy they radiated pulsed like a welcoming beacon. It knew from its time nesting in the bridge of The Eden what these humans were capable of, however: that its brethren had been slain by others with their weapons and that there would be plenty of these in the craft it now resided in. It would need to be careful as it went about its business.

To go about creating more, it would need a queen: a matriarch figure to be head of the hive, and its role as the pro-creator was clear. Establishing a nursery, the heart of the new hive and the inner sanctum where generations to come would be birthed, would be its main task, and a task it would not undertake lightly. Extending its senses as far as it could, it knew the coast was clear, and it scuttled out of its hiding place, clinging to the outer hull of the dropship and following the contours of the craft as it clambered around onto the roof, pressing its body close to the pylons and missile pods of the vehicle that had been folded over on itself when the vehicle had docked. It kept itself low against the olive-hued skin of the craft, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. Just like its queen, it had no concept of time as a man did; it simply lay in wait, biding its time until the perfect opportunity arose.

Around it, the hustle and bustle of the hanger continued, men and women strapped into yellow exoskeletons that the creature knew it needed to be wary of, a genetic memory inherited from its parent and her traumatic battle with one such machine.

It waited, silently, pushing its bulk back into the recess of one of the engine intake valves, maintaining a low profile until the room became less active. And then…

It pulled itself to its full height, crouched once more then propelled itself into the air, clawing at the ceiling and scrambling along the slick surface, crashing through one of the grates covering the air ducts and vanishing into the network of conduits that burrowed through the length and breadth of the ship.

0

Thorn watched from his command post on the bridge as details of armoured and armed Marines ran through the ship – his ship – and took up positions by airlocks along both sides of the craft. Originally, he'd planned to double the guards around the docking clamps on one side of the craft, but with the sudden and unexpected fact that the creatures he was facing could survive in vacuum, and in fact seemed unhindered by the lack of atmosphere or gravity. While a small contingent of his Marines were specially trained in zero gravity operations (of which he'd lost three already) the creatures seemed to have a natural flair in the harsh environment, and he wasn't prepared to put his people in any unnecessary danger. Instead, he'd opted to spread his men thinner across the craft, making sure all possible routes in and out the craft were secured, with several other squads placed at regular intervals along the length of The Vengeance to provide backup and immediate relief to any potential breeches that may occur from one of the creatures trying to burrow their way in.

The loss of the three men from the breeched bridge wasn't enough to fluster Thorn, but it was enough to make him reconsider his original plan, which had caused Cray no end of pleasure to see him squirm.

"Things not working out, are they?" he said, barely suppressing a smug grin.

"Everything's under control," Thorn was more than confident in his approach to the situation, waving to one of the holographic displays that showed the front of The Eden and the shattered window entering into the bridge. Since he'd pulled the dropship out of there and positioned a pair of camera drones at the bow of the ship, nothing else had happened in the opening. He had a number of other sensors running along the hull of the vessel, an early warning to any creatures attempting to run up to the craft and knock on the door. So far, there hadn't been any activity.

"You've coupled us up with a ship in quarantine, and potentially exposed everyone on board to a dangerous alien life form. Don't you know anything about ICC Quarantine Laws? You should pull away from the craft, scuttle it and wait for backup."

"You should shut up," Thorn warned, glaring at him. "ICC Rulings may have some weight in a controlled system, but way out here, in the Outer Rim, it's my ruling, and I made the call, with company backing. We break off from the fleet and return to Gamma, and I don't have to explain anything to you."

"You're in over your head, Thorn, and you're dragging the rest of us down the same way," Cray said, hauling himself to his feet and standing over Thorn, looking down on him with a heavy scowl on his brow. "Whatever the fuck these things are, it's only a matter of time until they get aboard this ship, and the next thing you know you're up to your ass in killer cockroaches and your name gets slapped with a court martial. You wouldn't even be able to command a rowing boat, let alone a military frigate."

"Lieutenant Cray," Thorn rose to his feet just as Cray had, refusing to be intimidated. Pushing his chest out and fixing an icy glare on him, Thorn choked back a growl before leaning in close, lowering his voice as he spoke. "You presence here is by no means a pleasant experience, and it's only through sheer dumb luck that you're here, and not over on The Eden with the rest of your men."

"The rest of my men are dead," Cray reminded him.

"Then you would be dead with them," Thorn countered, clenching his jaw as he kept his voice low. "And I would be a happier, I'm sure Stevens would be happier, and your father wouldn't have a miserable piece of shit mooching off his family fortune for another forty years."

Cray, blustered by the outburst, was lost for words as his mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water, but Thorn wasn't going to back down now. The company of the insufferable man over the last couple of days had slowly been grinding him down, and he'd finally had enough.

"There's higher ranking officers on this bridge who don't question my orders, don't second-guess what I'm saying, what is it that gives you the right to presume you know better than me? You treat everyone with contempt, even Stevens who's proven himself to be an asset over on The Eden, and to perfectly honest, I don't know how he's served with you for so long and not tried to do something like, I don't know, shoot you?"

Thorn's eyes flicked over to one of the Marines standing by the entrance and he gave a nod, watching as he broke away from his post and positioned himself behind Cray.

"The brig?" Cray asked with a smirk.

"I've got bigger things to worry about than a weasel taking up valuable men to watch over him in the brig. Your quarters will do, we'll lock the door and I'll monitor it from the security feed. And consider yourself lucky this time, Cray. If I had the choice, I'd give you a carving knife from the galley and send you over to The Eden through one of the docking clamps. I doubt you know how to handle any cutlery other than the silver spoon stuck up your ass that you were born with."

Cray fumed silently as he spun on the spot and made his way to his quarters, aware of the Marine escort but refusing to acknowledge him or the fact that he'd effectively been put under house arrest. His room wasn't that far from the bridge, and he grudgingly entered the entry code and stepped into the room, listening as the door rolled shut behind him and the electronic lock was purged of its access codes, sealing him in the room. He knew that if anything did happen to the ship, he would at least be safe from any creatures sealed up in here, and if the order was given to abandon the ship, then all locks would spring open and he could walk free. A free ride.

He sat on his cot, smoothing out the sheets then unfastening the buttons of his uniform and stripping down to his white vest and jockeys, folding his clothing and placing it carefully at the foot of the bed. Thorn was right about a couple of things, though: had he been aboard The Eden when everything had happened, he would more than likely wound up dead, or worse… food for the baby monsters, maybe. And as much as he was loath to admit it, Thorn did seem to have matters in hand, as far as the security of the ship was concerned.

He lay back on his cot, closed his eyes, and drifted into a light, dreamless sleep that his aching body welcomed. Although he hadn't been in the combat himself, his muscles were tense and strained, as if he'd been exerting himself in the midst of the battle and not the lower ranking non-coms that were doing the brunt of the work, and he felt he was overdue the rest from the hours he'd been on duty, if not on standby.

He roused himself after a couple of hours, the juddering snort of his snore as he teetered on the brink between a light nap and deep sleep startling him awake as his eyes flickered open and he sat bolt upright. Looking around with bleary eyes, he rubbed at his jowly face and picked the crust of sleep from his eyelashes, hauling himself from the low bed and padding over to the small ration rehydrator installed in the corner of the room. He stabbed the controls with his podgy finger, retrieving a plastic cup of water, which he drained before tossing the cup aside.

"Hot as hell," he muttered to himself, trudging to the enviro-con panel and trying to turn the cool air up.

It was already on maximum, but it didn't feel like it.

Cray thought about contacting Thorn for a moment, asking if he'd disabled the environment controls for his room, but decided against it. If he had, then the bastard would love seeing him sweating and pleading for help. And if he hadn't? Well, he had other things to keep his mind occupied, like turning the conjoined ships around, so fixing it would be the last thing on his mind. He was sure he could handle it and sort it out himself.

He pried at the edges of the console and pulled the panel from its housing, looking at the wiring behind the flat black controls. Nothing seemed out of place: blue wires linked to blue contacts, red to red, green to green; no wires looked burned out, no fuses smoking. He replaced the panel and looked at the ventilation grille at the foot of his bed, placed his hand before it. It was definitely spewing out warm air, despite what the readout said. Frowning, he removed the catches from the grille, retrieved his datapad from his uniform pocket and activated the screen, using it as an improvised light while trying to make out the details of the shaft that ran parallel to his room. With the grill removed and his head in the darkness of the duct, his features illuminated by the dim glow of his pad, Cray could hear different sounds from around the craft: muted conversations, dull thumps that could be patrols or the straining engines of the ship, and the distinct hum of the air recyclers that continuously scrubbed the air of any impurities and re-circulated them.

The shaft the hole opened up to was large enough for Cray to fit his head and shoulders in, and if he squeezed, he could also get a hand into the confines of the tunnel with him. The walls of the shaft were neither cool nor warm, but wet, as if coated in something like lubricant or resin. An unfamiliar smell permeated the tunnel, like oil mixed with melting rubber, and as he pulled his hand away, he could see thick strands of the secreted resin joining him with the wall. It was the source of the smell, and also seemed to be responsible for the warm air that was rushing into his cabin: a larger block of the material, whatever it was, had blocked off the tunnel further up the shaft where it had started to coagulate and congeal. Whatever air found its way through the blockage seemed to have the coldness of the breeze stripped by the shapeless mound: did that mean it was a conductor, or an insulator? Cray couldn't remember, he wasn't a technician in any way, shape or form, but he bet that if he could displace the mound, he would get the cool air redirected to his room. He pulled himself from the opening, looked around the room for something that he'd be able to use to prod and poke the mound, and came up with the metal leg from a chair he quickly managed to break apart by hitting it against the floor.

"Is this long enough?" he mused to no one in particular as he went to return to the entrance to the shaft.

The muted darkness of the shaft seemed to shift, and Cray froze. Did the craft have a population of rats? Since the crew had stopped using the freezers for deep space travel so much following a research paper that stated prolonged periods of time in stasis actually had a destabilising effect on some internal systems, the rodent problems that had plagued settlers and explorers in the times of Columbus and Polo some seven hundred years ago had returned once more. It wasn't unheard of to have nests of over fifty or sixty vermin aboard any given spacecraft at any time. He peered into the shaft, prodding the organic mound with the broken chair leg, tried to hammer a hole into the obstruction, but the mound had hardened and formed a toughened shell, impenetrable to his attempts at breaking through.

Muttering under his breath, he turned his back on the hole and went to grab the grille to replace it: if there were rats aboard, he didn't want to have them swarm through his quarters. He was resigned to the fact that he wouldn't be able to fix it himself, and would have to see if he could arrange something with Thorn. He spun on his heel, grate in hand…

And dropped it as a dark creature before him almost poured out the opening, limbs unfurling from the confined space is it squeezed itself through the impossibly small opening. With its armoured torso glistening and its jaws slick with mucus, it took a smooth, effortless step towards Cray and wrapped the six digits of one of his oversized hands around his neck. The cold chill of the creature felt unreal to him: he'd expected it to feel smooth and slick, but instead the coarse texture of its palms irritated his skin, covered in ridges and calluses that rubbed against him. He tried to step back from the creature, his vocal cords freezing while his bladder relaxed and warmed his leg with the stream of urine that escaped from him. For a moment, he could smell the strong scent of his own waste, then it was masked as the creature advanced and clamped its second hand around Cray's face, cupping his chin and wrapping its long digits over his face, pressing against his lips and nose, filling his olfactory senses with a stronger concentration of the dizzying combination of oil and rubber that had lingered in the shaft. The alien rolled Cray's head from side to side, almost as if inspecting its catch, then leaned closer, its thin lips rolling back over impossibly sharp teeth and its jaw opening, like a lover moving in for a kiss. In the depths of the dark creatures cavernous maw, Cray could see the glimmer of a second set of teeth, dripping wet with the same thick saliva that oozed down its pointed chin.

Despite his predicament and his obvious impending death, Cray actually felt a smile flicker across his lips. He knew that Thorn would fuck up eventually, and he was right: here was conclusive price that linking up with The Eden had been a bad idea, and opened up The Vengeance to potential infection. His smile quickly faded as he suddenly wished he hadn't been present when Thorn was wrong.

The creature wrapped its tail around Cray's waist, held him tight, and it lunged, the piston-like ramrod of its inner jaw smashing through his skull, boring through flesh and ripping at the pink yolk within his skull. The devastating blow had been enough to instantly kill Cray, but the creature held tight to the limp body with both talons and tail, retreating to the opening of the airshaft and squeezing its malleable form back into the tight confines of the ductwork and pulling Cray's form with it, impartial to the sounds of flesh tearing and bones snapping as the oversized man was dragged through the limited spaces of the tunnels, to a larger junction where the creature had started the slow process of building its new hive.

Had Cray been alive, his eyes would have seen the irregular patterns that covered the walls, the looping structures that resembled internal organs made external and covered in hardening resin, and the large puddles of condensation that pooled around the base of the hive material. But he wasn't, and his glazed eyes stared vacantly at the floor where the alien finally and unceremoniously dumped him before beginning the process of reforming and transforming the dead body.

Already, the survival instinct of the alien was at work, the urge to prolong its existence by increasing its numbers driving it onwards as it rearranged the body of Cray, snapping what few bones remained intact as it reshaped the corpse into an ovum-shaped mound of carrion and dripped its reconstructive saliva on the mound. While the saliva itself would only serve to harden the mound into a solid shape much like the rest of the hive, the creature knew instinctively that the barb of its tail, normally used to incapacitate potential hosts, could also introduce elements of its DNA into the corpse. Nature would always find a way to survive, and though there was no queen present in this new hive, the transmogrification of corpse to egg would provide the seeds of a new colony of the demonic creatures.

The lone creature alive in the shafts, aware that the spore it had infected the corpse with, returned to the larger of the walls it had reshaped, clambering onto its perch amongst the swirls and curves of the redesigned nest and rested, its senses focused on the growing egg and the immediate area around it. From that egg would come the parasite; from the parasite, the queen; and from the queen, the hive.

The alien was her protector and procreator: it, too, would need to change to adapt to its role to survive, for without it, there could be no others.