Deathstalker (36 page)

“Set up the force shield,” he said harshly, turning away from the wall. “Once we’ve opened this thing up, I don’t want anything getting past us and out into the city.”

The marines came forward and bustled around setting up the force field generator, glad to be doing something they understood. It wasn’t much of a generator, put together from parts they’d been carrying in their backpacks, but it would produce a force screen big enough to cover any hole they could hope to make in the Vault wall. The last marine finished his task with a little flourish and pressed the activating stud. A glowing force wall appeared, sealing off the team and their part of the wall from the rest of the city. They just had time to relax a little and look at each other confidently, and then the generator shorted out and the force field collapsed. Smoke curled up from the generator, and a few of the braver marines batted it aside with their hands as they looked the generator over, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. Frost looked at Silence.

“Great start.”

“Can you fix it?” Silence said to the marines.

“Doesn’t actually appear to be anything wrong with it,” came back a quiet, tentative voice. “I think it’s just being too close to the Vault that did it. All my instruments are going crazy. The readings don’t make any sense at all. But you can forget about the force shield. There’s no way we can hope to fix this down here.”

“How about the tangle field? That uses a lot less energy.”

The marines stepped suddenly back from the generator. The solid frame was melting, running away in long shallow streams of plasteel. Silence looked at it numbly. That stuff had a melting point in the thousands. Any heat strong enough to melt the plasteel should have been more than enough to reduce the entire team surrounding it to ashes. Frost stepped forward and prodded one of the melting streams with the tip of her sword. The steel tip steamed, but seemed unharmed. The Investigator pulled back the sword and sniffed the point tentatively.

“Interesting,” she said finally.

“Anything else you’d like to add?” said Silence after a moment.

“Not right now,” said Frost. “I’m going to have to think about this.” She moved away, frowning thoughtfully.

“You do that,” said Silence. He looked back at the marines. “Set up the disrupter cannon. Make sure you’ve got a good field of fire for the guns. Now it’s more important than ever that nothing gets past us.”

The marines set to work again, assembling the cannon from their packs. Stelmach moved in beside Steel.

“Do you really think they’re going to work any better than the generator?”

Silence shrugged. “Damned if I know. But they’d better, or we’ve come all this way for nothing. According to the first team’s record, it’s going to take both of those cannon to make a hole in that wall.”

“We don’t know why some things work and some don’t,” said Frost, moving back to rejoin them. “We could lose anything at any time. Our guns, our lights …”

Stelmach shuddered suddenly. “Imagine being trapped down here in the dark.”

Frost shrugged. “Wouldn’t bother me.”

No
, thought Silence,
I don’t suppose it would, at that. But
even an Investigator needs to breathe
. “Let’s not panic ourselves, people. The first team had their difficulties, but it wasn’t failing tech that killed them. The Sleepers did that. At least we’ve got the battle espers and the Wampyr, both of whose strengths are non-tech in origin. Speaking of which; espers, get over here.”

They drifted over to stand before him, dull-eyed and listless. Silence looked at them sternly. “I’m turning off the esp-blockers. You’re no use to me as you are now. Shield yourselves as best you can, but when we open up that wall, I want everything you’ve got trained on whatever comes out. Got it?”

The espers stared at him like children awaiting punishment. One of them looked at him with something like anger in his eyes.

“You should never have brought us here, Captain. We don’t belong here, any of us. It’s not a human place, with human limitations. There are things out there in the darkness that we dare not look at. If you expose us to them, we’ll die.”

“If you don’t stop whining and get your act together, I’ll kill you,” snapped Silence. “You’re battle espers, dammit. You’re supposed to have been trained to handle things like this. Now brace yourselves.”

He gestured to the marines to turn off the esp-blockers, and for a second nothing happened. And then the esper who’d spoken took a deep breath and stepped back a pace, and his head exploded. Silence cried out in disgust and shock as blood and brains spattered his uniform. Another esper began talking swiftly and urgently in a language no one recognized. The remaining espers huddled together as though for comfort, eyes closed, concentrating all the power of their unusual minds to protect themselves. Silence felt something like guilt stirring within him, but pushed it aside. He didn’t have time.

“Are you stable now? Can we proceed with the mission?”

The espers nodded slowly in unison. One of them glared at Silence. “Do it. Do it while you still can. It knows we’re here.”

Silence turned to the marines manning the two disrupter cannon. The gleaming solidity and power of the guns reassured him. There was enough power there to blast a hole through a starship’s hull.

“Everyone stand clear. On my order, fire both cannon. Now!”

The two guns fired as one, the brilliant energy beams almost blinding in the gloom. Crackling energy played across the steel wall of the Vault without damaging it. And then slowly a door opened in the wall, twenty feet high and a dozen wide, swinging reluctantly back as though the sheer pressure of the guns had forced it to reveal itself. The energy beams snapped off, and everyone stared breathlessly at the darkness beyond the door, now half ajar.

Silence’s hand tightened round his gun till his knuckles ached, bracing himself for a flood of ravening alien life, but there was nothing, nothing at all. It was very quiet now that the cannon had stopped firing. The only sound was the massed breathing of the expectant contact team. And then a single alien leapt out of the doorway, and blood flew on the air as it tore into the team with an insane fury.

It was huge and awful, but all Silence got was an impression of glistening scarlet armor and jagged steel teeth. It moved among them, fast as thought, ripping and tearing a path through the marines with its teeth and claws, picking marines up and throwing them away as though they were nothing. Everyone was firing their guns, but the alien was never where they aimed. It was huge and fast and deadly and it seemed to be everywhere at once. Disrupter beams blazed across the narrow space, cutting down two marines and one of the Wampyr. And then the battle espers hit the creature with a wave of psychokinetic force, holding it in place through the sheer power of their minds. It looked like a nightmare in spiked bloodred armor, vaguely humanoid in form, its heart-shaped head lacking anything like a human face or expression.

For a moment everyone was still, and then the Wampyr swarmed over the alien, trying to pull it down with their superior strength, but already the hold of the espers was weakening. Without the esp-blockers to protect them, the city was just too much to bear. The alien turned its inhuman head, and beams of crackling energy burst from its mouth and eyes, blowing people apart in sudden bloody explosions. It gestured sharply, and new spikes thrust out of its armor, transfixing the gripping Wampyr. Black blood spurted from their mouths, but they didn’t scream and they wouldn’t release their holds. Shrapnel exploded from the bloodred armor,
blowing some of the Wampyr away like bloody pincushions.

“Mindburn the thing!” yelled Silence, but the espers couldn’t hear him. Blood was running from their noses and ears and eyes, trickling down their straining faces like crimson tears, and their hold on the alien suddenly vanished. It shook off the remaining Wampyr as though they were nothing. Frost stepped forward, took careful aim with her disrupter, and shot the creature in the head at point-blank range. The energy beam ricocheted from the scarlet armor and glanced off into the darkness, leaving the alien untouched. It took the last surviving Wampyr in both hands, ripped off its head and threw it away, and chewed at the bloody neck like a child with a treat. And then it turned and looked at Silence and Frost standing together and smiled a bloody smile, like a demon from some cybernetic hell.

Silence glanced quickly about him. All the Wampyr were dead, and Stelmach looked to be in shock. Only two of the espers were still standing, and seven of the marines. Silence felt sick. It didn’t seem possible that so many could have been killed so quickly. Frost put away her gun and pulled an incendiary grenade from her belt. Silence put a restraining hand on her arm.

“Use that grenade at this range, and the backblast’ll fry all of us. Plus, there’s no guarantee it would even work. That ugly-looking bastard shrugged off energy beams easily enough.”

Frost smiled briefly. “I was going to make him eat it.”

“Not a bad idea,” said Silence, “but we’ve still got one last card to play. Stelmach! Time for that secret weapon of yours!”

The Security Officer stared at him blankly, his eyes wide with shock. Silence cursed briefly. He started toward Stelmach, and the alien threw aside the Wampyr body it was holding and started toward him with slow, almost casual steps. It knew he had nowhere to go. Silence fired his disrupter, aiming for the glowing eyes. The energy beam glanced harmlessly away. Frost hefted her grenade and lunged forward. The alien slapped her away with a backhand sweep of its overlong arm. She crashed into the steel wall of the Vault and slumped dazed to the floor, the grenade falling unactivated from her hand. Silence gripped his sword
fiercely. The alien’s smile seemed very wide and very bloody.

And then Stelmach activated his secret weapon, and everything slowed right down. A glowing golden field formed around the alien, and it froze in its tracks, mouth still stretched in a crimson grin. A draining cold surged through Silence’s bones, and it took all his strength to move away. His thoughts grew slow and sluggish, and then he had Frost by the arm and was dragging her clear off the field. After a moment, she was able to help him, and the two of them stumbled back to join Stelmach by his quietly humming machine. Life quickly came back to them, and Silence nodded to the Security Officer.

“I’m glad I brought you along after all. What the hell is that device?”

“Stasis projector; puts anything into stasis from practically any distance. Eats up power like crazy, but this was pretty much point-blank.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” said Frost, her voice perhaps just a little shaken, “but I thought the whole point of a stasis field was that you couldn’t project it? You set it up where you need it, and then turn it on or off.”

“Not anymore,” said Stelmach.

“And,” said Silence, just a little touchily, “how come that projector’s working when nothing else is?”

“This little beauty is based on different technology,” said Stelmach. “The same technology that produced the new stardrive. Need I say more? No, I didn’t think so. Apparently this technology is somewhat sturdier than our own. Perhaps even compatible. … Even so, I recommend we get the alien upstairs and under wraps as quickly as possible. Just in case.”

“Hold on just a minute,” said Silence. “Why didn’t you use the damn thing the moment the alien appeared, instead of waiting till most of us were dead?”

“Right,” said Frost, dangerously.

“Ah,” said Stelmach. “Basically, the techs who provided me with this device weren’t actually one hundred percent sure it would work. In fact, they seemed to think there was a small but significant chance that the whole thing could detonate rather dramatically once it was turned on. Which is why I put off using it until I absolutely had to.”

“No wonder they wouldn’t tell me what it was,” said Silence.
“If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have let it on board my ship. Ah, hell, the alien’s all yours. Get it out of my sight.”

Stelmach manipulated the controls of his projector, and the alien floated slowly forward, hovering barely an inch above the floor, buoyed up by the stasis field. The Security Officer moved cautiously forward, steering the alien ahead of him, and the two of them disappeared into the darkness that led back to the surface. Silence gestured for four marines to go after Stelmach and his prize, and then looked around to see how many of his people had survived the alien’s attack. He was saddened but not surprised to find he had only two more marines and one esper left in his team. Everyone else was dead, their bloody remains scattered before the opening in the Vault wall. He shook his head slowly. So many dead, just to capture one of the creatures. … The thought took hold of him suddenly, and he took a step toward the door in the wall. This time, Frost grabbed him by the arm.

“Way ahead of you, Captain. Now that the Vault’s opened, where are all the other Sleepers? There were thousands of the things in the first Vault. Even so, I don’t think just casually walking into the Vault to take a look is a good idea.”

“All right,” said Silence. “What do you suggest?”

“We’ve got one esper left. Let him work for his pay.”

Silence and Frost looked at the single surviving esper, and he looked back at them with a bitter resignation. He was tall and slender, with a tired, washed-out look, colorless blond hair, pale blue eyes and a surprisingly firm mouth. Silence reminded himself that this man had survived when his fellow espers hadn’t.

“You don’t have to do this,” he said quietly. “You’ve done more than enough already, and I’ll see you’re mentioned in my report. But we have to know what’s going on in that vault, and you’re all we’ve got.”

“I know,” said the esper in a voice too tired even to be angry. “In the end, it always comes down to me and my kind, doesn’t it?”

He moved toward the Vault wall without waiting for an answer and stopped just inside the doorway. His back straightened with a snap, and a shocked gasp escaped his lips. Silence stared after him, and the esper waved him back without looking round.