Dominant Species (20 page)

"Hey."

Jenner lurched at the sudden sound, arms flapping up to curl around his head. Wide eyes peered between crossed forearms at the fabric strip on the figure's chest that read REMUZZI, but the Marines called him Stitch.

"Take it easy." The Marine's voice held no trace of warmth, but he seemed genuine in his desire to keep Jenner alive; that alone set him apart from Taz.

"Shorry," Jenner slurred, lowering his arms. "Uh, howshit goin?" The attempt at smalltalk was feeble and his missing teeth and lip conspired to give him a pathetic, wet lisp.

The only reply was a bright penlight beam in Jenner's left eye. Sudden brilliance caused him to blink rapidly as the beam jumped to his right eye. Jenner tried to hold still, having no desire to draw the medic's ire.

If the effort was noticed at all, Stitch gave no outward sign. The medic proceeded mechanically through a series of examinations, listening to Jenner's heart and lungs, peering into the gaping skull-holes that had at one point been garnished with ears and a nose. Jenner yelped when Stitch pinched several of the pink finger-nubs that transitioned slowly from compressed-yellow back to a normally irritated pink.

"Pretty shcrewed," Jenner slurred, looking at the remains of his right hand.

"Yeah," Stitch nodded, his attention fixed on his task. "Hope you didn't spend a lot on piano lessons."

To his surprise, Jenner broke a brief, wry grin, his first in a long time. The no-bullshit attitude was oddly reassuring. "I heard you guysshtalking about the..." he paused and tipped his head towards the table, "about the machine. ‘Shupposed to be shome kinda miracle."

"I don't know about miracles," Stitch replied as he scraped a small bit of Jenner's skin into a shallow glass dish filled with something that looked like jell-o. "But it's the damnest thing I've ever seen."

"Sho what went wrong?" Jenner asked, wriggling the stubs on his right hand.

"That's what I'm trying to figure out." Stitch prepped a syringe, a process Jenner knew all too well. "The nanites, that's the little--"

"Bugsh?"

"Yeah, only they're not bugs, they're machines. Robots really, about the size of a human cell. No batteries, probably to minimize size. My best guess is that they convert body heat or run off myoelectric current."

Jenner self-consciously wondered if he looked as clueless as he felt. The medic might as well have been speaking Martian. Jenner's brow wrinkled as he tried to follow along.

Stitch must have noted the strain etched on Jenner's face because the discussion down-shifted abruptly. "Think of the table as a camera. It takes a photo of you, well, more like an X-ray. That tells it what shape you're in. Then it looks at your DNA; that tells it what you should look like if you were healthy."

The concept wasn't all that tough, Jenner thought as he watched the needle slide into his arm. He listened quietly as the clear syringe filled with a ruddy red fluid, noting what looked like tiny silver flecks in his own blood.

"The nanites can move stuff from one place to the next and weld it back together. If you get a whole bunch of ‘em working together you can patch up a lot of damage." The medic placed a small adhesive gauze disk over the puncture wound and pressed firmly. "What the little suckers can't do is make living tissue from nothing. You lost whole pieces of meat--"

"Like fingersh." Jenner interjected, once more flexing a maimed hand in the air.

"Yeah," Stitch said with a short nod that might have held a trace of sympathy. "The nanites could only pull so much from the rest of your body before the salvage op started to compromise other systems. You got back maybe ten, twelve percent of what you lost, but that's all the surplus material your scrawny ass had to spare."

"Shoulda eaten a shteak for my last meal," Jenner muttered sourly, "maybe a gutful of meat woulda got me another finger or two."

Stitch paused in the midst of transferring the blood sample to a small stainless steel device. "Huh," he muttered as his eyes tracked back toward the table. "There's a thought."

A furrow creased Jenner's disfigured face, as close to a scowl as he could manage. "Shitloada good that doesh me now," he spat, left hand raised to his face. He fought back a rising sense of dispair as finger stubs gently brushed across cratered nostrils.

Stitch didn't appear to notice. The glass vial in his hand tapped slowly on the stainless steel tray. "Might work," he said aloud. "Hit of midazolam would put you under." He looked down at the vial in his hand, absently tumbling the cylinder. "Yeah..."

As though he snapped out of a trance, Stitch blinked and looked up at Jenner. "Course we're kinda short on steak dinners and I don't think anybody delivers down here." The medic gave another short shrug, "Bummer luck."

"Only luck I got." The comment escaped Jenner's lips without a hint of exaggeration. The question that followed slipped out before he had a chance to reconsider. "You guysh gonna kill me?"

The medic's eyes snapped around, dark eyes that softened as he stood quietly wiping the syringe with a piece of cloth. "Look, we may be hardasses, but we don't kill people for no reason."

"Yeah, shombody oughta tell that ashole Taz."

The medic's eyes hardened. "If I were you," he growled, voice low, "I'd keep my mouth shut around Taz."

"Why? What the hell did I ever do to him?"

"We've all lost friends to Rimmers, some take it more personally than others. When you put on the uniform, you put on the history."

"That'sh bullshit, I never hurt any--"

Stitch cut him off, a stiff index finger snapping up to the gap formerly occupied by Jenner's nose. "Look, stupid, read my lips: no-body-cares." The medic emphasized the syllable as though talking to a small child. "If you've got any brains left, you'll keep your yap shut and ride this out. As far as I'm concerned you're an injured POW. That means you get my best treatment until you do something to jeopardize our safety."

Like what, slap you to death? Jenner felt weak and pitiful as he looked down at his ruined hands. Choosing only to nod his head, he remained silent.

"Good. So here's how it plays. If we don't find a way out of here we're all gonna die, you included. If you know anything about this boat or how it got down here, it could go a long way towards getting all of our asses back to the surface."

"Boat?" Jenner's head swung up and cocked over to one side. He blinked hard, trying not to appear lost as he groped for something intelligent to say. "Ish that why everything ish leaning?"

Stitch looked him squarely in the eyes as if trying to divine truth in a swirl of tea-leaves. Then the lanky Marine looked down at the instrument in his hands and sighed quietly. "Yeah, something like that."

Jenner gave a sudden start as the Sickbay door opened with a hiss. Four armored figures lumbered into the room, their feet clinging to the angled floor with reptilian surety. A sense of urgency crawled up Jenner's spine as his gaze settled on the word TAZ emblazoned on an armored breastplate.

Survival instinct gnawed at the back of Jenner's thinking. His ability to avoid contact was limited, and at some point he be stuck alone with the surly Aussie. Getting away from the Marines became increasingly critical in Jenner's mind.

He looked across the Sickbay to the table. As the medic's words played back through his mind, a glimmer of distant hope began to form.

CHAPTER 21

Razor-sharp crosshairs tracked slowly along the heavy chain, each link a flattened oval of grey steel nearly a foot long. Ice coated its length, the hazy crystalline surface clearly visible through the telescopic sight.

Small digits in the top center of Darcy's vision read 467m, the precise distance to the chain. A laser rangefinder served as just one piece of the complex weaponsight package. As range to target changed, the visible image area shifted to maintain a point of impact in the center of the reticle. Gone were the days of dialing in range and windage on scope turrets, or calculating holdover using black three-quarter mil dots spaced evenly along the crosshairs. Technology had given the mainstream sniper a tremendous edge in point-and-shoot engagement.

Anything but mainstream, Darcy relied on skill and knowledge over the infinite layers of gadgetry that forced its way onto the battlefield. "Gimmicks fail," she muttered with a faint smile, "trust your training." The axiom had been hammered into her brain throughout sniper school and remained a centerpoint of Darcy's existence.

Sliding her view down the massive hydraulic claw, Darcy absorbed and categorized details great and small. Although a solid-state drive stored digital reference images, retrieving a specific file could take time. Things in her mind were instantly available.

Size, shape, color, she ticked through the well-ingrained set of questions as she focused on the claw. Roughly four meters in diameter, shaped like a metal starfish, dark grey in color. A flash of red caught her eye, the triangular shape stenciled along the base of a heavy pulley.

Condition? The claw looked serviceable, no outward signs of damage.

Appears to be? Darcy zoomed in closer, the massive steel grapple filling her vision. "It appears to be one heavy sonofabitch." Opting for a more technical description, she tagged the marker as CRANE, HEAVY. The designation joined the numerous features scattered across the electronic range card.

Wedged in a narrow crevice near the Lobby ceiling, Darcy remained deathly still. From her vantage point she commanded a wide view that included Papa-Six, the Tower and most of the catwalks. She had committed the entire layout of the Lobby to memory, with a focus on points of entry. To the best of Darcy's limited knowledge, the gargantuan engineering bay still represented the easiest way in and out of the ship. Her hunter's mind told her that keeping an eye on the front door was a prudent idea. The path of any forseeable attack would lead through the cavernous metal expanse that stretched out below the sniper's railgun.

The exercise proved far easier said than done. The Lobby amounted to a steel canyon whose walls were littered with balconies and windows. Darcy's very organized brain was stressed to the point of numbness as she tried to collate the boundless volume of information. If bad guys started popping up, she could be facing a world-class Hogan's Alley.

"Draw a bead and make ‘em bleed," Darcy drawled with a measure of malicious anticipation, confident that she could make this particular shooting gallery decidedly inhospitable.

In retrospect, Darcy acknowledged, the odds of a shooting scenario seemed awfully slim. Whether fifty years old or fifty thousand, the ship struck her as little more than a dramatic, frozen tomb. Whatever brought the vessel down here, nobody survives for long in sub-zero cold with no light and no food. Darcy wasn't lost on the double-edged irony.

On the other hand, Monster's encounter was a disturbing anomaly. No matter how implausible, the possibility of survivors could not be entirely discounted. The ship was certainly big enough to hide another energy source deep in it's bowels. Beyond the ship itself lay an untold expanse of caverns with who-knows-how-many sources of geothermal energy. In Darcy's military experience, the only constant was uncertainty. She prepared as if for war.

The familiar routine felt good and offered a welcome point of focus. Despite long hours crammed in the aerie-like hide, Darcy suffered no aching muscles, no cramps. In point of fact, she felt pretty damn good.

What the fuck was that?

Darcy jerked back out of the scope, her attention snapping to the torn balcony hanging askew just overhead. On reflex her mind engaged the chameleon and the tangled hues of her surrounding spread across her like a rapid-growing mold.

Darcy's mind struggled to categorize the unexpected sound. Not a footstep or the tell-tale creak of a stalker's weight, the tone was more like a murmur. With a falcon's eye she swept the line of torn railing. Not even air moved between the broken bars of steel.

Sound warbled once more, dull and distorted, from somewhere near the ceiling. Fighting the urge to sit upright for a better view, Darcy slid backward in the crevice and drew the railgun close to her chest. Rolling slowly to one side, she rocked the heavy weapon skyward; the barrel a scant few inches from the wall. As the stock snugged into her shoulder, the scope engaged.

The ceiling was a chaotic mass of ductwork and pipes. Thick corrugated conduits snaked between angled girders of structural steel that measured meters across. Immense air vents dotted the ceiling in a regular, grid-like pattern. Each circular air handler measured roughly four meters in diameter, the louvered grates edge-on like the maw of a turbine engine.

Darcy eyed the network of composite fiber tubes. The immense air ducts criss-crossed the ceiling like an enclosed highway, a possible explanation of how something could have crossed the Lobby unseen. She tracked along the largest one in search of a missing grate.

An odd sensation tugged at her mind, a glimmer of déjà vu. She had not yet conducted a detailed sweep of the ceiling but the inverted field of equipment oozed an eerie familiarity. Through the scouring optronic eye, Darcy could make out patterns of corrosion running along metal plates, the crust of ice clinging to every crevice.

"Open grate," she muttered under her breath, "just behind a busted compressor." She screwed her eyes shut, focusing on the image that hung clear in her memory. The compressor's torn drive chain hanging loose from cracked pulleys. The number 41.