Dominant Species (23 page)

Merlin reached out and tapped the nameplate as if for emphasis. "The Ascension? One of the biggest disasters in spaceflight history?"

A tickle of memory burned in Taz' mind, followed by an even greater sense of irritation. "Oh what, the bloody ghost stories they tell to scare witless cadets? I'd sooner believe in the Gravity Faery."

"Oh she was real all right." The somber voice from behind startled the hell out of Taz and he spun around.

Stitch stood framed in the breached wall, backlit in wavering shades of blue. The medic nodded to Ridgeway as he approached. Stepping into the light, Stitch reached out with one hand, pausing briefly before he touched the polished metal surface. He exhaled forcefully as if he had been holding his breath, then looked at Taz.

"She was a colony ship back in the day, biggest one we ever built. Crew alone ran four thousand, with some ten thousand colonists. She had terraformers, manufacturing, heavy construction, the works."

"Some of the top scientists of the day as well," Merlin chipped in, "engineers, geneticists, real cutting-edgers."

"We are talking about the same bloody brainiacs who blew their own bums to bits, right?"

Stitch shrugged, then looked back at the plaque. "That was the official line. Sensors picked up a huge emag event at the launch point. Rescue ships hauled ass out there but all they found were pieces of wreckage floating in space. Just scraps, not enough to prove what happened or where the rest went."

"Went? It bloody well got atomized."

"Maybe not," Merlin's voice had become energetic, "at least it sure doesn't look like it now. We read about it back in Marine Engineering, you know, study what went wrong so you don't make the same mistakes. Most of the theories ran around the drive system. Conventional wisdom always said that it failed to maintain a stable warp bubble and just imploded in its own little black hole. But this," he placed his own palm on the plaque, "this changes everything. Geez, you think about every wild theory that got floated out, unstable wormhole, temporal rifts." He turned, holding up both hands. "Hell, this could re-write everything we know about physics."

"You're missing something," Monster interjected. "That accident happened what, maybe a hundred and fifty-some years ago? You said yourself that this thing's been down here a lot longer than that. And how'd the Rimmers get a hold of it?"

"I'm not sure they did, Gunny." Merlin gazed down at the plaque once again. "I'm beginning to think the Rimmers didn't even knew it was here."

"Come again?" Ridgeway prodded.

Merlin took a deep breath, hesitant only for a moment. "What if one of those crazy theories was right? Imagine something like a brief wormhole or a rift in space-time."

Four impassive facemasks stared in silence.

"Oh shit," Merlin groused under his breath, "didn't anybody go to science class?" Before anyone could answer, Merlin held up his hand. "OK, look, simplified physics. We're all good with three dimensions, length, width and height, right?" He continued amid a series of nods. "Right, so time, duration, whatever you want to call it, that's a fourth dimension. We can travel in any direction through the first three, and only one way through the fourth."

"A rift." Merlin held up both hands. "You tear a hole in space and for lack of a better explanation, you can fall through that hole here," he wriggled the fingers of his left hand, "and blink, you end up over here." The right hand mirrored the gesture.

"Nice trick," Monster muttered, "but how do you steer?"

"That's just it. So far this stuff is all theory. Nobody knows what would actually happen. According to a number of theories, you could end up not only any place... but at any time."

"What, like pop out in the middle of the sun?" Monster's tone conveyed the obvious disdain for such an outcome.

"Or the middle of a planet," Merlin stated firmly. "That explains the stalactites-- they didn't grow through the ship, the ship appeared in the middle of them."

Oh crikey, Taz sighed and shifted his weight. Scientific mumbo-jumbo gave him a headache and he was relieved when Ridgeway cut through the boring ramble.

The Major's voice was sharp as he turned to Stitch. "Why aren't you in Sickbay with Jenner?"

"I told you this morning I was gonna scout around for any med supplies that might have been overlooked. I left Jenner..."

Any relief Taz might have felt evaporated as Stitch turned to face him, an index finger rapping his breastplate.

"with you."

CHAPTER 25

Darcy stood in the Sickbay door and stared at the carnage. A section of the left wall was missing, revealing a maintenance corridor beyond. The ceiling was ravaged as well, an elliptical hole torn into the room overhead.

The sniper studied the edges of the damage. It looked as though someone had carved the ceiling and walls with a hot knife. A downward smear of the ripped metal marked the direction of the blow.

That's some big-assed knife, Darcy mulled. The slab of missing wall measured an easy three feet in thickness; the mangled ceiling had been even thicker.

These factors made the flattened smear on the floor all the more difficult to understand. While the rough oval footprint encircled the mangled wall and ceiling, the volume of crap on the floor could not have been five percent of what had fallen from above.

She looked down carefully. The layer of debris was compressed into the floor itself. She could see no sign of heavy metal having been dragged from the room, no scrapes in the smooth floor outside of the damaged area. A huge hydraulic press might just as well have slammed down on the floor above, crushing everything beneath it.

Amid the slick of dull greys and shiny silvers, a splatter of red glistened vividly at one edge of the impacted floor. The blood trail curved away from the damage and angled out the door.

Fresh, Darcy noted, her boot sweeping the nearest droplet into a crescent streak. Whoever it was couldn't have gone far.

The hiss of a turbolift preceded the sound of boots rushing up the hallway. Darcy reached across the doorway and grabbed the opposing frame to block the five Marines who rounded the corner. A flurry of curses filled the air.

Ducking under Darcy's arm, Ridgeway took one measured step into the room. His helmet tracked slowly across the damage.

Darcy knew what would be going through his mind. Explosives would be the first assumption, discarded immediately on the lack of scorch marks or frag damage. Heavy equipment would be next on the list, something capable of pounding a section of ceiling and wall down into the floor.

Not pounded, she now understood. Pulled.

"What the hell happened here Darce?"

She casually pulled the rifle to her shoulder, the railgun aimed over the center of the damaged ellipse. "Watch."

Before anyone could yell the gun roared and a heavy bullet streaked from the muzzle on a razor-straight tail of ionized air. Straight for several feet at least, when it crossed into the damaged zone and hooked down like a rock and slammed into the floor. Not a fragment of spalled metal splattered from the impact.

"I'm not the math whiz," Darcy said dryly. "What do you figure Merl, twenty, maybe twenty-five G's?"

Merlin responded with a long, low whistle as he slowly edged around the right side of the room. He paused at half a chair that lay next to a smear of grey plastic and slivery chrome flattened into the floor. With a short snapping kick he launched the remains of the chair into the ellipse. As it crossed the edge, it crumpled into the floor, splattering flat as though stamped with incalculable weight. He exhaled softly as he drew out the single word. "Shit."

"Yeah, no kidding," Darcy quipped, her tone laced with sarcasm. "Y'think maybe when you chopped through all those safeties that you mighta cut the ones that regulate the artificial gravity coils in the floor?"

Merlin's fingers tapped along his thigh. "Guess so, but I wasn't expecting AG to be an issue." He moved along the right wall and slid under a console to the open panel where he rummaged through the wires. Fishing out a heavy cable, Merlin wrapped a loop around either hand and yanked. The cable snapped with a brilliant arc. "That ought to do it."

Darcy looked at the room and noted no visible difference. "Fine, you walk in there."

Ridgeway's head snapped around and fixed on her for a long moment before he grabbed another chair and tossed it into the zone. It bounced along the pebbled floor until it banged into the far wall.

"OK, but how do we know it's going to stay off?" Making an effort to lose the attitude, Darcy posed the question with a flat sincerity.

"Shit LT, I don't know how it came on in the first place." Merlin pulled the two ends of wire farther apart, wrapping one in a wadded cocoon of black tape. "I'll make sure the power here is squared away, but I don't have a damned idea why half the shit on this boat is doing what it's doing. It's like it has a mind of its own."

"Maybe the bloody Rimmer done it." Taz moved abruptly into the room, swinging wide of the damaged floor. "Set it like a bloody trap." The Aussie's CAR was tight to his chest as he swept along the wall in an aggressive forward hunch.

"Our boy isn't here." Darcy watched Taz stop dead in his tracks as she pointed to the stains on the floor. "He's hurt, but he's mobile."

Monster stooped and gathered a handful of empty wrappers from the floor. "Looks like our food went with him."

"Dammit, the sonofabitch rifled med as well. Bloodpaks are gone, some other shit too." Stitch fell silent as he rummaged through the plastic bin that had become their impromptu warehouse for medical supplies.

A silence fell over the room. No food, practically no first aid and now a confirmed hostile wandering loose. Jenner had graduated from a pathetic pain in the ass to an overt threat.

Darcy turned silently and followed the blood trail with a hunter's eye.

Left at the door. A crescent of red spots swept up the right wall. Right arm, she concluded, swinging as he turned the corner. The irregular splatter width spoke of arterial spray, pulsing with every beat of his pounding heart. She smiled grimly as she noted the width of the pattern. Nasty cut, he won't get far.

The sniper moved slowly down the corridor, projecting herself into the wavering trace that marked Jenner's escape. He'd swung left for a couple paces, then stumbled back to the right, banging into the wall. She ran her fingertips across the wide smear that marked the collision.

Fear, pain, left hand trying to staunch the hot liquid that bubbled from the wound. Not the misshapen stump of a frostbitten limb but a complete hand, corded, misshapen fingers that gripped fiercely. Had to get to the sphere. They'd find him there, take care of him. Take him home--

"Darcy!"

The sniper's eyes blinked rapidly. Ridgeway stood in the hallway behind her, his voice sharp.

"Sorry Major," she muttered. The vivid image dissolved as she turned back towards Sickbay.

Ridgeway planted himself in her path and folded his arms across his chest. "You coming apart on me Darcy?"

Fair question. She'd been wondering the same thing ever since her unwanted daydreams started playing in her head in high-definition. But something about the visions seemed inescapably real, not like some lunatic hallucination. Her brow furrowed behind her mask. Let's hope not anyway.

"I'm OK," she gave the assurance with all the confidence she could muster. "I know it seems like I've had a couple of, I dunno, moments, but I think there's something to it." She hesitated, chewing her lower lip. Then it spilled out.

"Look, I think I'm wired into this guy. I don't know how or why but I'm getting a read on him. He's on his way to meet up with..." she shook her head, "with somebody who can take him home."

Darcy quickly raised her open hands. "Don't ask me to explain it, but I think I can find him."

Ridgeway stood motionless, regarding her for a long moment. "You know how this sounds."

Darcy sighed heavily, the edge in her tone resurfacing. "Of course I know how it sounds Major, I may be seeing things but I'm not stupid. You're worried you've got a looney-toon with a railgun on your hands. Should you pack me off to a psych ward? Shit, maybe so, but we don't have a psych ward or very much else right now. What we do have is something out there," she jabbed a finger aft, "something more than one fucked-up Rimmer. And whatever they are, they're coming."

She leaned forward, her voice now icy. "It's your call Major, but I swear to God we're gonna need every gun we've got, and we're running out of time."

CHAPTER 26

Ridgeway's eyes moved constantly as he advanced through the steady downpour. The AG wasn't the only thing that had brought itself back online, a fact he noted with a frown. Environmental control was fighting to bring temperatures up all across the ship, slowly transforming tons of ice into a relentless rain. Erratic patter in a dense haze played hell with motion sensors.

A thread of neon danced along the sheen of a narrow puddle as voltage crackled from a cluster of torn cables. Grumbling under his breath, Ridgeway stepped over the ambient hazard, motioning to the next Marine in line.

One more down, only a million or so left to go.