Deathstalker Rebellion (15 page)

“Interesting,” she said finally. “We hit this ship with everything we had. When its shields went down, the outer skin of the hull, or whatever the hell this stuff is, took the full brunt of disrupter cannon firing at virtually point-blank range. Solid steel would have melted and run like water, where it didn’t immediately evaporate. But I can’t find any trace of heat or structural damage.”

“Self-regenerating?” said Silence, and the Investigator shrugged.

“Maybe. If it is, it’s far beyond anything we’ve got. And why just repair the walls? Why not seal over the hole?”

“Because they knew we’d be coming, and they wanted to control where we landed,” said Silence. “The word trap suggests itself to me. Suggestions?”

“Blast a way through to the interior,” said Frost. “I brought enough shaped charges to blow a path through a small moon. Once we’re inside, we’ll see if anyone comes to complain about the noise.”

“If you’re going to start messing about with explosives, I am getting myself and my men out of here,” Silence said firmly. “I never met an Investigator yet who understood the concept of subtlety when it came to explosives.”

And then he broke off and looked sharply at the wall beside them. Two of the thick white cables were twisting slowly apart to form a tunnel leading deeper into the ship. Frost leaned in cautiously, her suit lights illuminating the tunnel as far as they could. It seemed entirely empty. Silence tried his suit’s sensors, but they weren’t picking up anything. As far as they were concerned, the tunnel might not even have been there.

“Silence to
Dauntless.
You picking up anything on your end?”

“We’re patched into your suits’ comm signals, Captain,” Cross murmured in his ear. “We can see everything you can. But long-range sensors have nothing to add I can say we’re not picking up any life signs yet. We’ve heard from Golgotha starport; they’re still too busy putting themselves back together to be able to offer us any help. The good news is that the six starcruisers who went chasing off after the Hadenman ship apparently lost contact with it. They’re on their way back. Should be here in just under an hour.”

“Well, that’s something, I suppose.” Silence turned to Frost. “Your call, Investigator. Do we go in?”

“Into a possible trap, possibly crammed with murderous aliens? Of course, Captain. Nothing to be gained standing around here.”

“I had a feeling you were going to say that. All right, lead the way. Marines, stay close behind us. Be ready to fire at a moment’s notice, but exercise caution. There’s always the chance we might find the missing personnel from Gehenna
Base in here somewhere. I’d like to get them out of here alive if at all possible. Lead on, Investigator.”

Frost stepped carefully into the tunnel and moved in step by step. Silence and the marines moved after her. The cables making up the tunnel’s inner walls were smoother, thinner, but just as unyielding to the touch. Their white color had thin blue traces in it, like veins. Silence increased the magnification of what he was seeing, and the wall seemed to leap toward him. The cables were pulsing slightly in a regular rhythm. He stepped the view back to normal and touched the wall with the tips of his steel fingers. The built-in sensors detected no warmth of life, only a faint stickiness. The walls were rounded, like the floor and the ceiling, as though he and his team were walking through the bowels of some enormous beast. And maybe they were at that. Silence glanced back over his shoulder, to see how the marines were coping, and only then realized that the tunnel had closed itself off behind them. The cables had fitted together again, thick and impenetrable. Silence quickly alerted the others and then spun around to see for themselves. Frost was all for going back and blasting it with her disrupters, but Silence stopped her.

“Let’s follow the tunnel first. See where it leads. We can always come back and blast it later.
Dauntless
, have you followed what’s happened here?” There was nothing but quiet in his ears. “Hello,
Dauntless
? Do you hear me?” He listened hard, but all he could hear was his own harsh breathing. “Investigator, see if you can raise them.”

Frost tried, and then the marines, to no avail. Frost growled something under her breath and then turned to Silence. “It’s not the suits. All the diagnostics check out. Something’s blocking the signal. We’re on our own, Captain.”

“Not for the first time. Press on, Investigator. I don’t think the occupants of this ship let us in just to hold us here. I think … they’re expecting us.”

Frost sniffed loudly and led the way on. And as they penetrated farther into the ship, the cables continued to open before them, creating more tunnel, and closing off behind them, to prevent turning back, so that Silence and his people moved constantly in a traveling pocket within the webbing.

The cables varied even more in size now, and there were other changes, too. The corpse-white cables swirled around
and over each other, tangled together beyond sense or meaning, some little more than a finger’s width. The floor was no different, and more than ever Silence felt like he was walking on a spider’s web, sending out rhythmic signals of where he was and where he was going. The impression grew stronger as all the strands grew increasingly sticky to the touch. It got harder to pull their boots free from the floor, and soon only the power of the hard suits’ servomechanisms kept them going. Strange lights pulsed within the rounded tunnel walls, come and gone so quickly it was difficult to decide what color they might have been. Sometimes Silence thought they weren’t any color he’d ever seen before. But still there was no sign of any construction or device, or any sign at all of whatever crewed the alien ship.

The tunnel puckered in suddenly from all sides, so that the away team had to crawl through on their hands and knees, one after the other. And on the other side they rose to their feet as they found themselves in a great, egg-shaped chamber, with a high ceiling and smooth polished walls. Dark shapes and oddities budded out from the floor and walls, carefully formed but enigmatic in meaning. Frost snapped out a warning not to touch them, which Silence for one found completely superfluous. He wouldn’t have touched any of them on a bet. For no reason he could put a finger on, his mind kept throwing up an image of himself stuck helplessly to one of the dark shapes, while the chamber filled slowly with digestive juices. He was sweating inside the hard suit, despite the cool air it was circulating.

They moved on through the vast chamber, stepping slowly and carefully, touching nothing, and finally left the chamber through another of the puckered holes. Beyond lay more tunnels, opening before them and closing after them, and more chambers studded with various shapes, none of them immediately comprehensible to the human mind. Until finally the away team encountered another, smaller chamber, and discovered what had happened to the missing Gehenna Base personnel.

The chamber was some hundred feet in diameter, the walls pockmarked in rows both vertical and horizontal, and a thin layer of vapor covered the floor, beading wetly on the hard suits’ armor. There was light of a kind, a harsh unforgiving blue-white glare that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. Long flat slabs of some
unfamiliar metal were scattered across the floor, held just above the vapor, and on those slabs, held firmly by some unseen force, were the remains of the Base personnel. Some were only parts: organs and limbs and faces. A dozen complete torsos had been messily vivisected, and from the few with heads attached and the expression on their faces, Silence had no doubt at all that these men and women had been alive and aware when the vivisection began. Anywhere else he might have felt sick, for all his experience, but right then he was too full of rage and fury to feel anything else.

“They’ll die for this,” said Frost in a calm, cold voice. “Every living thing on this ship shall pay in blood and suffering.”

The marines stirred restlessly, looking this way and that for something to aim their weapons at. Silence knew how they felt, but kept an icy firm control on his anger. “You can kill the aliens only after the specialists have squeezed every drop of information out of them, Investigator. Until then, I want captives, not corpses. Marines, remember your orders. Minimum force only, unless in life-threatening situations. Use your own judgment, but you’d better be prepared to back it up later. There will be a time for vengeance, but we must have the information this ship holds. We might have to face more of its kind in the future.”

“Don’t lecture me,” said Frost. “I know my duty.”

“Sorry, Investigator. Just speaking for the record. There’s nothing more we can do here. Mark this chamber’s location on your suits’ maps, and we’ll move on. We can send people in to retrieve the bodies later. Right now we have to find the control section. I want this ship immobilized and helpless before it can finish its repairs. I also want a good look at the crew, and more and more it seems the only place we can be sure of finding them is at the control center. They wouldn’t dare abandon that.”

He led the way across the chamber, moving carefully between the crimson spread-eagled bodies on the slabs, trying hard not to look at them. It was easier to control his anger that way. It seemed to take forever to reach the opening on the far wall, but as he drew near it puckered shut in a mass of solid, tightly packed cables. Silence prodded it here and there with his steel fingers, but it didn’t give anywhere. He hadn’t thought it would. He hit it once with his fist, and then turned back to the others. They stared at him silently with
their featureless steel helmets. Slowly, and without any fuss, the light was going out. The slabs with their grisly specimens began to disappear into rising vapor. It didn’t take much imagination on Silence’s part to picture the alien crew massing on the other side of the closed portal.

“Marines, I feel we are quite definitely now in a life-threatening situation. Feel free to shoot anything that moves that isn’t us. I’d like a few specimens left alive, just a few, so if anything runs, let it. Investigator, make an opening here.”

Frost aimed her armored right hand at the closed opening, and the disrupter built into the glove blasted a hole right through the tightly packed webbing. A sickly green light spilled into the chamber through a ten-foot-wide hole, and everyone braced themselves for an attack that never came. Silence and Frost edged forward and peered through the new opening. Hanging ends of ruptured cables hung twitching and jumping from every side, but showed no signs of knitting themselves together They pattered weakly against the hard suits, but did no harm. Beyond the opening lay a narrow milky-white tunnel with smooth, faintly glowing walls. It was barely eight feet in diameter, only just big enough to take the away team in their hard suits, and Silence couldn’t help wondering if that was deliberate. There was no sign of any enemy.

“I’ll take the lead,” said Frost. “This is Investigator business now.”

“Couldn’t agree more,” said Silence. “After you.”

Frost stepped through into the narrow tunnel, the gauntlets with built-in guns held out before her. Silence followed, and the marines brought up the rear. The floor of the tunnel gave disturbingly under their weight, as though it might rupture at any moment and spill them into whatever lay waiting below. But somehow it held. Silence pressed on and tried hard not to think about it. He’d lost all track of where he was in relation to the ship’s exterior. He wasn’t actually lost. The suit had kept track of all his twists and turns, and could easily lead him back. But he still didn’t know where he was precisely; he just had a strong feeling he was getting deep and deeper in, being lured remorselessly toward the dark heart of the alien craft. He checked his air supply, but he’d barely touched it so far. Theoretically the re-breather could keep him alive for up to a week. Under normal conditions.

He deliberately didn’t finish that thought and instead studied the tunnel walls to either side of him. They were flat and smooth, not cabled, more like membranes. They pulsed and fluctuated to no apparent purpose, and waves of pale color briefly tinged the milky white like passing thoughts or dreams. The passage was also narrowing, slowly but inexorably. Silence used his suit’s sensors to measure the diameter of the tunnel and compared it to the size it had been when they entered it. He frowned at the answer and calculated how long it would be before the tunnel grew too small for his team to continue on. He liked that answer even less. Four minutes, thirty-seven seconds. No buts or maybes.

“Investigator, marines, stop right where you are.”

They did so. Frost didn’t look back, but he knew she was watching him quite clearly on the inside of her helmet. Silence measured the tunnel behind him with his suit’s sensors and wasn’t at all surprised to discover that the tunnel had already narrowed beyond the point where they could pass through it.

“I was wondering when you’d notice,” said Frost. “It would appear the aliens have us where they want us. Shall I blast it?”

“What the hell,” said Silence. “When in doubt, make a loud noise. Let someone know we’re here, and we’re not at all happy about it.”

Frost aimed her built-in disrupters at the narrowing tunnel before her, and the milky-white walls split apart in a hundred places as insects beyond counting burst in on the away team. The bugs ranged in size from many-legged things the size of a fist, which swarmed all over the hard suits looking for weak spots and entry points, to huge bulky things with their own armor and vicious pincer claws. The tunnel was briefly full of flashing disrupter bolts, and insects fried as the tunnel walls blew apart, but once the guns fell silent the away team disappeared beneath a writhing mass of silent insect life. Tiny things swarmed over the suits’ sensors, and Silence was suddenly blind and deaf. He tried to brush the insects away with his powerful steel hands, but there were just too many of them. Warnings flashed up before his eyes as acid began to eat into his armored joints, threatening the hard suit’s integrity. Screams sounded in his ears as the insects invaded a marine’s armor and began to eat him alive. More screams followed.