Dominant Species (26 page)

"Removable freezers." Ridgeway spilled the conclusion mechanically. "Insertion and extraction took place down on the Island. Pull a tube completely out of the wall and handle inserts and extractions down below." Given a large volume of passengers, the idea had merit. Slower to be sure, but each sleeper could be handled with the utmost care.

Ridgeway gazed at the bloodstained wall. Whoever slept in tube 2437 had not been removed with care. The door had been literally ripped from its hinges. Dark bits reminiscent of leather or beef jerkey hung from the jagged metal edges.

Not leather, he realized, strips of flesh. Meat scraped off when some poor soul had been dragged out through the half-opened door.

An irregular piece of curved shell lay on the floor among the bits of broken glass. Badly stained, Ridgeway almost missed it. He knelt and carefully rocked the fragment to break it free from the crusted floor.

The smooth outer surface was covered with a random crosshatch of scratches. In contrast, the inner surface was deeply furrowed, the uneven ridges spread out in a leafy pattern. The frayed edges of the fragment looked to have been worked over with a bench grinder.

"Looks like a piece of ceramic, a bowl maybe." Ridgeway concluded, "Somebody took a dremel to it and scraped it all to hell."

"It's not a bowl, it's a plate from somebody's skull." Even without the flattening effect of ComLink transmission, Stitch's assessment came through with the detached efficiency of someone describing a carburetor. "Probably parietal, left side, unless I miss my guess."

With a start, Ridgeway realized that he had left his video feed in transmit mode. He held the curved fragment steady between his thumb and index finger. "Take another look Stitch. Whatever it is, it sure isn't bone."

"I said it's a piece of somebody's skull Major, I never said it was original equipment." The medic's tone remained clinical. "It's an artificial plate, probably some kind of biopolycarbonate. See the branching indents along the inner surface?"

Ridgeway flipped the piece and looked at the pattern of twisting organic depressions. "Yeah, I see ‘em."

"They're called meningeal grooves. They make room for the blood vessels that run along the outer surface of the brain. Cranial reconstruction has come a long way from the days of metal plates. For a while the big thing was hydroxyapatite, a combination of calcium phosphates. It's a major component of human bone and got around some of the rejection problems. Ultimately though, we gave that up in favor of laser-cured polymer extrusions manufactured right off a 3D scan of the patient's head. That's what you're holding now."

Ridgeway looked closely at the damaged fragment as Stitch continued. "They don't machine those things at all. Each one is built up, a particle at a time, using the 3D model as a template. By the time it comes off the cradle, there's not much to do but sterilize it and drop it into place. That's why the grooves on the inside have such an organic look, they're modeled from an actual scan of the patient's brain."

The oily taste of revulsion began to form in Ridgeway's mouth. "So why is this thing chewed all to hell?"

Stitch grimly confirmed his commander's insight. "I think you hit the nail on the head Major. If I was making a forensic analysis, I'd say that the damage looks consistent with teeth of some kind scraping the meat from the bone."

Taz took another step back, fingers flexing on the forestock of his CAR. "So you're saying that something dragged this poor bastard out of cryo and ate him like a frozen dinner?"

"It sure looks that way." The medic's voice remained stoic, but Ridgeway knew Stitch well enough to recognize the curtness that masked emotion. The evidence suggested a ghastly reality. The helplessness of anyone in cryogenic stasis had long been established as a core taboo, even in times of war. Fucking with somebody on ice just wasn't done.

Ridgeway looked at the scrap in his hand. Gnawing on their frozen brain was way out of bounds.

"Bloody hell Majah, we've gotta frag these fucking bastards."

Drawing a deep breath through clenched teeth, Ridgeway gripped the mangled piece of skull. He turned towards Taz and jabbed the younger Marine in the chest. "The only thing we have to do is get the hell out of here. I don't understand how a ship warps into a planet or what they woke up to when they got here. All I know is it's my job to get five Marines home. My war is with the roof of this cave."

Taz flexed his shoulders once and turned away from the CryoTube and its grisly remains. "Shit Majah, I know. It's just that…"

Ridgeway's prodding hand opened and settled on the young man's shoulder. "I know, I know," he leaned in, his words little more than a forced whisper. "I'd like nothing more than to fry whoever did this." Ridgeway paused as Taz slowly nodded in concurrence. "But right now I've got the lives of five Marines to account for and that's the mission."

The young Marine visibly settled as his CAR rocked once more to a firm port arms. "Rojah that sir." But as armored fingers flexed repeatedly on the pistol grip, Ridgeway could see that Taz was far from comfortable letting the issue end there.

"All right," Ridgeway spoke firmly, his command voice returning, "head to the far side of this tier and stay one-eighty from me. Stitch, you stay ninety degrees off our axis on Three, no bunching up. When I roll, we all roll, got it?"

"On the way," Taz growled as he trotted quickly around the tier. Stitch flashed a thumbs-up and adjusted his own position.

As a cold resolve settled upon him, Ridgeway quietly set the fragment inside the open tube. He turned away from the mangled door and advanced around the ring in a clockwise direction. Stitch and Taz matched him step for step, guns at ready.

Ridgeway moved carefully, scanning the walls with care. Tier Two was darker, the shadows of upper tiers splayed across its walls.

As he walked, Ridgeway could see that literally thousands of CryoTubes made up the wall at the Tier Two level. Tier One looked much the same. Making a quick estimate of tube density per ten meter section of deck, Ridgeway calculated the total at roughly eight thousand cryogenic suspension chambers.

Eight thousand. A ripple of discomfort crept up Ridgeway's spine. How many of the sleeping passengers ended up as undigested bits scattered across the floor?

The likely answer grew all the more obvious as he completed his circuit around the tier. While only one in ten showed signs of forced opening, sections of Tier Two looked like a charnel house. False teeth and glass eyes were just some of the inedible parts found scattered on bloodstained floor. Small broken crowns gave mute witness to the fact that even teeth had been consumed. A stainless steel hip joint lay beside the gnawed remains of a pacemaker. Ridgeway turned to the rail and breathed deep, trying to fight down the bile that bubbled at the back of his throat.

Gone, all gone. An old sense of tragedy clawed at his heart.

Ridgeway had slogged hip-deep in bogs of mud and broken bodies at Chungan Swamp. Soldiers who had signed up for the job, who went into a fight with their heads up and a gun in their hands His jaw clenched painfully as he looked back at the detritus that littered the floor. But this wasn't combat, and these weren't soldiers.

Something beyond the scale of the tragedy festered in Ridgeway's mind. His imagination grappled with the thought of being torn from the all-numbing cocoon of cryogenic sleep. Just the shock of sudden chamber decompression could prove fatal. He had seen all too well what could happen to a man when his CryoTube came apart. It wasn't pretty.

But with some eight thousand attempts, Ridgeway reasoned, a fair number must have survived extraction. They would have lurched violently into awareness as their minds struggled to reconnect senses with conscious thought.

The sense of hearing was always the first for Ridgeway. His longest stint in cryo had been eighteen months, a year and a half of suspended animation in which he did not age or think or dream. His first memory of retrieval was a distant hum and the clinking of metal. Voices drifted down to his brain, questions he could not understand. Then warmth, the dull realization that he was immersed in hyperbaric fluid that suffused his cells with both heat and oxygen. Light followed, flickering blobs of brilliance and shadow that resolved slowly into human forms, familiar faces that smiled and spoke in comforting tones.

His eyes flashed once more to one of the mangled doors. A woman's face stared silently from a small rectangular screen set into the face of the door. Brown hair, hazel eyes, a harmless face that probably went unnoticed in even a small group. Sherry Chalmers, age thirty-seven. PhD in biophysics.

What was the last thing you saw Sherry Chalmers? Ridgeway's gut felt like it would twist its way into his heart. Did you get lucky and just die in the black void of stasis, or did you fight your way back far enough to realize the crunching sound that filled your ears was something chewing on your bones?

"Dammit," Ridgeway spat as he punched the hanging door. Hinges cracked and the heavy metal hexagon fell to the floor with a loud clang. The snap and clatter of Marine weapons echoed from points all around the sphere. Dan Ridgeway could only stare at the empty tube.

Too late for you Chalmers, too late for anybody with the shit luck to have ended up in one of these frozen food lockers.

"Two hours, two centuries, civvies waiting on me are in trouble." He regretted the muttered words as he spoke them, rejecting the illogical self-pity from which they arose. Whatever happened here took place long ago. He could help his Marines here and now, he could get them home.

Still, he growled with quiet savagery, let so much as one of these fuckers show its face... Ridgeway gripped the forestock of the CAR so hard that it creaked. He would show them how armed humans fought.

"Major," Merlin's voice popped over the ComLink. "I think you oughta see this."

"On the way." Ridgeway turned, thankful to be drawn away from the remaining bits of Sherry Chalmers. In a rush he vaulted the rail on Tier Two and clattered down the inwardly curved wall to the tier below. A single makeshift ramp extended from the edge of the sphere to the coastline of the Island. Oversized floor plates had been scavenged from somewhere and placed in drawbridge-fashion across the moat of cables. Judging from the angry hum that resonated up through the fog, the addition was mandatory.

With Gatling poised, Monster stepped aside and allowed Ridgeway to pass. As they brushed shoulder-to-shoulder on the footbridge, the larger Marine's deep baritone muttered in Ridgeway's ear. "The shit just keeps getting weirder."

Great, Ridgeway thought as he acknowledged Monster's comment with only a curt nod.

Turning sideways, Ridgeway shimmied between two monoliths of angle-iron and electronics. Hubs, routers and miles of cable formed a thick web that filled the voids between dozens of video screens in each wide rack.

Merlin sat at what was clearly one of the original consoles, although two complete bridges of additional equipment had been layered on top. From the center of the console, Ridgeway could see fifty, maybe seventy-five monitors. Screens of every description hung crowded along the framework.

Merlin didn't look up from his work. His fingers tapped in a furious blur on the keyboard as he spoke. "Well, we're damn sure at the center of things. Half the ship has been jury-rigged into here. It's like they didn't want to have to leave the room, but your guess is as good as mine as to why. I did figure out one thing though; nobody is running around making repairs on this tub."

The statement struck Ridgeway as non-sequitor. "I don't follow; you said that you didn't--"

"Not somebody," Merlin cut in, emphasizing the last syllable, "some thing. Well, more like a few trillion things. Look."

An armored finger pointed to a monitor on the first overhead bridge. It showed a room filled with large air-handlers. Sparks flickered intermittently from an unseen short above one of the turbine-style blowers. The overhead lights stuttered occasionally, but maintained enough light to see the room clearly. Nothing appeared to move.

"Empty right?"

"Looks like it."

"So who's doing the welding?"

"Welding?" Ridgeway's eyes snapped back to the occasional rain of glowing orange dots.

The image zoomed in at a stunning rate as Merlin rocked a control switch. "Check this out."

The camera view dove in on the source of incandescence, resolving on a small broken flange.

"Sonofabitch." Ridgeway's tone was suddenly quiet.

"You see ‘em, don'tcha?"

Ridgeway squinted at the tiny silver specks that flowed across the metal flange like wet sand. Sparks popped among them. "But I thought--"

Merlin jumped in again, "I know, we all thought the same thing. Medical nanites designed to fix the human body. But we didn't get the half of it. These little suckers can fix anything. Hell every one of these monitors is a different repair in progress."

Ridgeway's hands settled on his thighs as he sat back into the chair.

In the moment of extended silence, Merlin continued. "Think about it Major, it's like they used to say about the pyramids. Given enough manpower, you can build anything. Well, if a million of these suckers can repair a damaged lung, what can a billion do, or a trillion? Shit, medical repair is just one application of the technology."