Dominant Species (24 page)

On the hunt now, the Marines ran a rolling overwatch that struck a lethal balance between speed and security. At each set of doors the first two would split, weapons swinging out as the others slid between them. When the group had moved fully past, the now rearmost two would merge once again into the back of the stack. The cycle kept eyes and guns aligned in every direction.

Discounting bulkheads, the corridor spanned nearly six meters from wall to wall, giving the Marines a little extra room to maneuver. Ridgeway ducked under a low-hanging section of ceiling and noted that any advantage could be quickly degraded by the endless piles of debris. Structural damage grew more pronounced as they traveled aft. Huge components sat crumpled where they had long ago crashed down through the ceiling; others jutted up through the floor.

With ingrained precision, Ridgeway maintained a knees-bent duck walk that allowed his torso to glide forward without bobbing. A level shooting platform meant greater first-shot accuracy; the shot that made all the difference in a close-quarter battle. Monster paced him on the left, his stride a bold lumber.

Ridgeway failed to suppress a momentary smile. ‘First-round' was a meaningless term to a Gatling gun.

The grin vanished as Ridgeway's left fist snapped up to shoulder height, freezing the Marines in place. The corridor ended just ahead at a wide set of double doors. Judging from their thickness, Ridgeway made them to be airlock doors-- heavy sealers used to divide the ship into separate airtight compartments in the event of a hull breach. They would be tough, possibly driven by pneumatic rams that could slam them shut in a heartbeat.

With the way things are fixing themselves around here, Ridgeway thought ruefully, that might be worth remembering.

The left of the two doors was badly warped and sat askew in the track, creating a wedge-shaped gap that extended from the floor to the top of the high doorframe. Through the triangular opening Ridgeway could see blue-white strobes in the darkness beyond.

Easing towards the barrier, Ridgeway held the CAR at arm's length and allowed the weapon's electronic sight to peek between the doors. Intense thermal and EM signatures danced erratically. Nothing registered as biological, a meager result but likely as good as Ridgeway could expect.

"Pretty torn up." A wary edge tainted Monster's understatement.

Ridgeway nodded slowly, listening to the hiss of a scalding gas leak that turned infrared imaging into a haze. "You could park a tank in that mess and not see it."

A clammy tingle crawled up Ridgeway's spine; the wedge-shaped gap threatened to act as a deadly bottleneck if a hostile lay hidden beyond. He scanned the damaged doors, assessing their integrity.

"Something's leaking in there, might be a flammable. We can't risk blowing the door." Ridgeway jerked a thumb towards his own chest. "Knock Knock, on me."

Monster acknowledged the order by wordlessly firing a combination of hand-signals down the line. Ridgeway watched the Marines flex outward from their positions, each dropping low against the walls to take advantage of available cover. Weapons swung to bear, and leveled at the bent door.

He sucked in a deep breath and counted off quietly. "On three, two, one."

Ridgeway burst forward, closing on the barrier in three strides. He planted hard and rotated his hip, driving his foot through the tight arc of a powerful back kick. The armored boot struck the damaged door like a battering ram. The topmost guides split away and the door groaned as it toppled into the room beyond. Ridgeway threw himself flat to clear the line of fire as the heavy door slammed into the floor with a crash.

Hugging the floor, Ridgeway counted a full three seconds without the sound of rampant gunfire blistering over his shoulders. He lifted his head and took an unobstructed look at the exposed corridor, dimly aware of his jaw going slack.

The long, wide hall corkscrewed axially as though long ago grasped at both ends and torqued by a giant. Wall panels had crumpled like thick sheets of aluminum foil. Less than ten meters beyond the now-open doorway, a massive girder stuck up through the floor at a severe angle. The beam sat at the leading edge of a catastrophic swath cut through the floor and far wall. Stunned curses blended behind him.

Ridgeway's gaze followed the girder all the way to the ceiling. Torn apart at the seams, the disembowled overhead plane hemorrhaged a torrent of cable and equipment. Electricity crackled throughout, raining sparks from a hundred locations. The hiss of pressurized gas whistled clearly now from somewhere deep in the wreckage. A thick haze hung in the air, steam mixed with the smoke of charred plastics. Water dripped from every surface.

"Well this sure as hell wasn't on the bloody tourist guide."

Ridgeway ignored the comment, his brow knit as he began the impossible task of picking a route through the chaos.

He turned to the sniper. "C'mon Darce, this guy couldn't have made it through this shit." Ridgeway gestured towards the helical tube of wreckage.

Darcy stood quietly as her head ticked left and right in short increments. Her hand rose to the side of her helmet, palm pressed firmly as her fingers splayed out over the curved upper dome. She sighed and looked back in the direction they had come, then forward once more. "I'm tellin' you Major, he's trying to get to something, a sphere..." she jabbed a finger toward the girder, "and it's that way."

Ridgeway stared at Darcy for a long moment, trying to make up his mind how much stock he could afford to put in her newly-found psychic powers. She had described several items along the path that once discovered had proved undeniably accurate, enough to convince Ridgeway that some connection existed. His concern was the level of confidence he could place on a nebulous link between Darcy and a suddenly mobile Rimmer. If she was somehow being fed bad data, the Marines could be marching into a trap.

He glanced forward, hard pressed to imagine a better environment for an ambush. The floor buckled upward and rolled to the right before it dumped into the gaping wound left by the girder. That very destructive piece of steel, sixty to eighty tons by best guess, sat squarely in their path. It bisected the corridor at a forty-degree angle, rising from the rightmost floor edge and extending through the ceiling high and left. A knotted shawl of cable draped along its length like seaweed from the prow of a shipwreck.

Darcy's voice echoed in his ear. "I'm sure of it Major."

Ridgeway grunted. He didn't like the choice but saw no other. "I'll take point. You keep everyone tight here, watch your six." His faceplate swiveled to hers as a curled index finger tapped his own temple. "You get anything, anything at all, you let me know."

Darcy nodded, extending her fist. Ridgeway rapped it solidly, then stepped through the open door. The floor groaned uneasily beneath his weight.

Ducking under a loop of cable, Ridgeway edged forward towards the jagged rip in the floor. Ahead and to the left he could see into the next room where the fissure continued fully across and beyond. The ceiling had been badly warped where the rising girder passed through it and into levels above.

Darcy's voice floated across the comm, "That took a helluva push."

Ridgeway glanced back to see the sniper stretched prone atop a pile of wreckage where the unblinking orb of a riflescope tracked his every move. The rifle represented the only support he could expect to safely thread the maze in the event of a sudden threat. The company brought a shred of comfort to a very uncomfortable world.

"Yeah," he replied as he stepped over a buckled floor plate and braced his right foot against a section of exposed bulkhead. "This damage isn't like anything I've ever seen." He leaned over a folded steel rod roughly the diameter of his arm. "I can't find any trace of scorching."

"Roger that," Darcy concurred. "I've got no explosive signature at all, no energy weapon residue. It's like something with really big hands just grabbed the boat and squeezed."

Ridgeway leaned on a twisted crossbrace as he clambered up onto the girder. A crevasse yawned below that passed through a couple of decks. He leaned forward to assess the depth.

Shit, that's some hole. The thought had barely crossed his mind when the duct crumpled with a short high-pitched squeal. Ridgeway pitched forward as a dark blur whistled up from below.

"Duck!" Darcy's warning cut sharply through the noise.

Ridgeway dropped to his knee as a snakelike tendril whipped over his skull, vomiting a cloud of white vapor. The Marine swung fiercely with the back of his fist but struck only air. His boot lost traction and he skidded hard on the metal beam. Off balance, Ridgeway's gauntlet flashed again and snapped on the bullwhip trace as it darted into range. Braided steel crushed flat in his grip, stifling the release of pneumatic gas.

Clutching the girder fiercely with his free hand, Ridgeway looked at the hose in his grasp. A silky voice chuckled in his ear. "Good thing it wasn't a snake."

"Har har," he replied slowly as he knotted the severed line. "I don't suppose you have anything useful to add?"

"Not unless you plan on wrestling something bigger than an air hose," Darcy chided, "If you do, you let me know."

Wobbling slightly, Ridgeway paused before rising once more to a low kneel. "Good to know you're backing me up."

"Always there for ya."

Ridgeway smiled in spite of himself as he shifted back to the immediate problem. A gap of some seven meters separated him from the far side of the metal canyon. Given the extent of the damage, he figured he'd need to cover another meter or two to reach solid floor.

Nine meters, Ridgeway considered, a tough jump from a narrow perch, but not impossible.

The twisted corridor beyond did not appear to harbor additional fissures like the one below him. Ridgeway's mind played out the crossing; a long dive into a forward roll would carry him beyond the bulwark of wreckage and back onto solid deck.

Hunkering down, Ridgeway coiled his body, hands clamped on the edge of the girder. Loose cables hung off to the left along the rise of the beam, tangled amid the tundra of floor plates and heavy grid panels. To the right, the gap beckoned.

Ridgeway's hands snapped open, his legs driving hard as Darcy's voice barked "Hold it!"

The words came too late as Ridgeway's powerful legs pistoned out, driving his armored form across the divide. He sailed over the mangled floor, over the huge elliptical coil torn from it's moorings. The gravitic coil for the floor ahead.

In mid-leap the Marine felt a sickening lurch of equilibrium as the direction of gravity shifted unexpectedly. His trajectory changed just as abruptly. Body twisting, he slammed shoulder-first off the side wall and down into the crevasse. Without so much as a curse, Dan Ridgeway tumbled out of sight in a blur of snapping cables and banging metal.

CHAPTER 27

Footsteps crossed the metal floor above Jenner's head, the slow tread of a predator. Though he longed to breathe, he didn't dare, and his lungs screamed for the air just beyond his clenched teeth. Instead he inched backward, wedging his body even further beneath the angled girder.

Jenner's belly growled, the sound of a disgruntled animal that moaned fitfully. He clutched at his gut, hoping to stifle the gastric tremor. Overhead, the footsteps suddenly paused.

ohshit. ohshit. ohshit.

A vibration ran down the girder, noticed only because his spine was plastered against the cold metal surface. One step, followed by a second. Someone was climbing onto the beam just a few feet overhead. A tremor radiated from Jenner's core and he bit down on his new lip, eyes screwed shut as a third footfall carried down the beam's length.

He almost cried out when the squeal of friction matched the sudden hiss of venting gas. Something heavy banged into the girder. Hidden in the darkness Jenner could feel the flurry of motion before the angry hiss sputtered into silence. Only then did he hear the voice, faint and muffled. Too deep for the girl, not deep enough for Monster. Ridgeway maybe, not that it mattered. Whoever found him, Jenner was sure he'd end up dead all the same.

At least it wouldn't hurt, he noted with resignation. Not much of anything seemed to hurt anymore.

Jenner glanced down at the ragged flap of meat stretched across his right forearm. Only a few hours had elapsed since the Sickbay ceiling collapsed without warning. A piece of falling metal had cut his arm open to the bone. Now it didn't even bleed.

Jenner's leg pressed against the warmth of a thick insulated cable. Reflexively edging toward the heat, Jenner felt the onset of sluggishness. He huddled quietly and drew his arms tight across his chest. Warmth was important, somehow it helped the healing. More a dawning conviction than a fact he could state with certainty, Jenner chalked the notion up as one of the many new instincts he had developed lately.

Maybe the voices told me, Jenner thought dully. Certain at first that the sounds in his head marked the erosion of sanity, Jenner had since come to accept the guttural noises as real. Voices, he concluded, growing louder.

They spoke in no discernible language, yet Jenner found himself able to divine their meaning with increasing clarity. For one thing they were hungry, ravenously so. They were also very, very angry.

Jenner's head bobbed and his eyelids drooped. Dim images flickered unbidden into his mind, visions blurred beneath the weight of time. He remembered the ship long ago, brightly lit, people crowding her corridors. He could recall the terrible violence that left her a crushed and twisted wreck. The darkness. The cold. The screams.