Dominant Species (33 page)

For a moment the headless body clung to the skid as black fluids vomited from the severed neck. At least a dozen legs kept a deathless grip that dragged the skid from the air. Suddenly the portside rail tore away with a squeal and the body tumbled from sight, ripping floor plates and skirting as it fell.

Monster lay motionless on the deck, the curved lamprey head still affixed to his back. Ridgeway heard the continued chatter of drill bits and threw his shoulder into the vibrating mass of metal. Armored fists pounded the forward edge, crushing metal with every blow.

In a sudden lurch the head peeled free and swung up like a heavy car hood. Whirring carbide bits chewed the air scant inches from Ridgeway's facemask, slinging specks of blood and carbon.

The skid clipped a tower and Ridgeway was thrown to one side. The maniacal head skidded across the deck, cutters still spinning madly. Eyes wide with adrenaline, Ridgeway threw a brutal kick that drove the bloody cuisinart through the gap in the rail.

His chest heaving, he scrabbled to the prone Monster. The shock of what he saw stole what little breath remained in Ridgeway's lungs.

Frayed carbon fiber edged the gaping hole where Monster's armor had finally given out. Shards of broken blades and chipped plating wallowed in the blood that ran from the wound in thick rivulets. With Monster's TAC long disabled, Ridgeway had no way to know if the sergeant was dead or alive.

The skid nosed up and settled into a wobbling hover, Taz braced at the controls. Ridgeway met his gaze and flicked a thumb toward the ceiling. The engine revved in reply, climbing quickly. Ridgeway sagged against a metal framework, thankful for the growing separation from the Hive floor.

He tracked down to the glass cylinders that shone with a soft emerald glow. Magnetic latches had kept a solid grip on the cargo throughout the roller-coaster ride. As far as Ridgeway could see, no trace of green splattered the deck.

With a groan Ridgeway stood to his feet. The haze of pain that radiated from his battered chest was so severe that his stomach threatened to eject whatever acids it contained across the inside of his helmet. Searching for one good breath of air, Ridgeway rocked his head back. As he did, his gaze swung up to the ceiling overhead.

The Spider stormed across the top of the Hive, zigzagging the inverted cityscape with an abandon that defied its great bulk. Muzzle flash sparkled from its forelimb and wild fluorescent streaks rained down from overhead. Several rounds thudded into the skid where the unmistakable flare of covalence burned craters in the deck.

"Hang on!" Ridgeway heard the shout as Taz slammed the throttle. The skid surged forward, gaining meager ground against the Spider's considerable speed.

Ridgeway wasn't interested in a fair race. "Darcy, on the ceiling. Nail his ass."

The only reply was static that crackled on the open channel. Ridgeway spun to the bow and scanned the jagged rock along the valley entrance. His eyes were drawn to the pall of smoke that rolled from a blackened gap in the stone.

Taz shouted from the wheel of the skid, pointing frantically at a figure that crawled from the smoldering hole. The vehicle dropped abruptly, nearly slamming into the cave floor.

Ridgeway leaned over the bow, poised to hurdle the front ramp and drop to the floor below. Wind from the skid tore the dense column of smoke into whispy veils and revealed the near-limbless thing that dragged itself across the ground. Smoke, or the steam of boiled blood, rose in swirling trails from the blistered body. A charred arm reached forward and grasped rough stone to haul itself another inch. Amid the smoking mass, Ridgeway could make out an armored shoulder plate. Marine armor.

"Oh my God." Ridgeway watched in shock as the crusted hand clawed for purchase on the rock floor. Amid charred flesh a cluster of steel blades scratched across the unyielding surface.

"It's not her!" Ridgeway blurted as he groped absently for his rifle. "It's not Darcy."

Before his hand could close on the weapon, the skid whipped into a sharp tail slide. The engine howled over the crackle of brittle stone as the powerful gravitic cushion swept along the ground. They slid over the crawling form, adding the wet sound of crushed melon to the ruckus. The skid completed its pirouette and revealed a wide, dark slick of flattened machinery and gore.

Taz growled from the driver's seat. "Then its not alive either."

Though impressed with the quick solution, Ridgeway's gaze scoured the area. Darcy was nowhere in sight. The Marine stood frozen, his attention locked on an icon that stood out black and motionless on the TAC. The sharpshooter symbol floated silently over the open hole in the ground, a dark glyph against the rolling ebony smoke.

His throat went dry; the black marker was used only for body recovery. The tiny lifeline below the icon scrolled free of the peaks and valleys produced by a beating heart. A tremor rippled through Ridgeway's body and his legs wobbled beneath him.

An urgent shout dragged Ridgeway from his gutsick slide. The Spider's dark shape, clear of the Hive entrance, now closed with undiminished speed. Other shapes scuttled in its wake; dark, aberrant silhouettes framed against the fiery backdrop of the Hive.

Ridgeway fixed on the icon and swallowed hard. Black icon. Dead. The words barely cleared his throat. "We gotta go."

"But Majah, we can't just leave--"

Ridgeway spun face to face with Taz and stabbed a finger toward the great ship that glittered in the distance. "I said MOVE!"

A cold sickness closed like a fist around Ridgeway's guts as the barge banked and accelerated. He watched in silence as the column of smoke fell behind and faded into the all-consuming darkness.

CHAPTER 34

Stitch loped down the hall like a competitor in a three-legged race, left arm draped across Merlin's shoulder. His damaged leg swung stiffly with every stride, a useless slab of lead. The nerve block deadened the pain enough to endure the jarring evac, but loss of all control in the limb and hip left him a veritable cripple.

An unfamiliar burden bounced erratically against his ribs, the device wrapped in wads of stretchy insulation torn from a CryoTube. One hazard-striped corner of the metal box poked out of the coccoon and scraped along armored ribs.

Merlin gestured forward. "Break right at the next junction."

Stitch nodded brusquely and grunted through teeth welded by pain. Attached to Merlin like a siamese twin, he maintained the awkward stride-and-a-half gait as the two sought a route back to the turbolift, the Lobby, the way out.

The injury to his leg had ruled out a climb back up through the top of the CryoSphere. Instead, the two Marines found themselves in unknown corridors at the sphere's ground level. With luck, they would find a turbolift that could reach the Lobby floor. If not, Stitch would face a forty-story descent on a disintegrating femur.

Oorah.

"How ya doing?" Merlin barked the question, his own voice thick with strain.

"How do you think," Stitch snarled. "Wonderin' when you're gonna quit lagging."

Merlin's facemask pivoted around. "Anytime you're up for a race, you let me know."

"Cold day in hell when I can't outrun your candy assshhiiiit…" Stitch lost the words in a slur of profanity as he came down hard on the leg. His weight dragged sharply on Merlin's shoulder for several floundering yards before he found his stride once again.

The medic sucked a sharp breath and gasped, "Can't leave you behind anyway, Major'd have my ass."

"Damn straight." Merlin hitched the medic's weight further up on his shoulder. The pair hooked left at the next intersection and slammed the brakes amid Merlin's sudden curse. "Son of a bitch!"

Stitch doubted that the characterization did justice to the obstruction in their path. It looked like the Grand Bitch herself.

A tapered column of stone jutted up through the floor and extended well into the ceiling. Just a slice, Stitch realized, of a huge stalagmite, but wide enough to block most of the corridor.

Stitch looked back and forth before he slumped against a door in the right hand wall and struggled to cement his bearings. The door swung in beneath his weight and Stitch nearly fell in to the room beyond. He edged left until his hip found solid support on the doorframe, then bent forward and wheezed, "You figure this one." He threw a blind wave at the massive barricade. "Gotta catch my breath."

Stitch struggled for air as Merlin paced slowly down the hall. The engineer's fingers tapped rapidly against his thigh as he surveyed the dead-end. When his head rocked up toward the ceiling, the fingers froze. Stitch followed the gaze.

The bottom half of a tool cart stuck down through the ceiling, the remainder all too easily pictured sticking up through the floor above. Though juxtaposed, neither showed signs of damage. They simply coexisted.

Merlin reached up with one hand and tapped the cart, hard armor ringing on sheet metal. He gripped one of the castor wheels and gave it a solid push. The cart held fast, fused into the framework of the ship. "I never woulda believed it."

"Whassat?" Stitch asked breathlessly.

"The whole wormhole bit." He nodded toward the ceiling. "Shit gets unsolid, stuff overlaps. This thing falls through the floor and gets stuck halfway. This is what happens when good science goes bad."

Stitch bobbed his head in return. "Bitch luck huh? Zillion light years of empty space and these poor bastards intersect with a rock."

Merlin's hands settled on his hips as he took a step back and looked once more at the huge spike of rock that passed through the ship. "Guess it coulda been worse."

"How you figure?" Stitch could image few fates worse than the nightmare around him.

The engineer answered in a flat tone, his eyes never drifting from the obstruction. "Coulda come out inside a star."

Stitch fell silent, the recorded message still fresh in his mind. Survivors of the accidental jump found themselves trapped inside a ball of cold stone. Terraformers established a breathable atmosphere but with no sun and no soil, nothing grew. Years passed in an endless fight to keep the ship alive. Appearing in the core of a sun would have been fatal, but at least it would be quick.

"Would you have done it?"

"Done what?"

"Put everybody back in cryo," Stitch said quietly as he patted the device on his side. "Leave a few beacons like this one and hope the tubes held out till somebody arrived."

The engineer didn't turn, but answered as he paced around the stalactite. "Shit, I dunno." He shrugged and shook his head slowly. "Self-contained tubes, each one's supposed to last a couple hundred years. Popsicles don't eat, they don't need warm environments. As far as crapshoots go, it probably had the best of limited odds."

A shudder passed through the medic as he thought about the haggard narrator on the beacon's transmission. "I meant would you wanna be one of the guys who stayed out."

At that, Merlin turned and his head bowed with a sigh. "Somebody had to do it. Hell those guys kept shit working on this tub two, maybe three times as long as anybody would have dared hope. Nobody coulda guessed that it would go on that long."

"Immortality isn't all it's cracked up to be," Stitch muttered. "Not like that."

He drifted into silence as Merlin sorted through a pitifully small handful of supplies. "So what do we have left?"

Merlin took a knee and waved a hand over the sparse artifacts. "You're looking at it, three strips of LSC, two bricks of Therm and a wad of Detonex."

Stitch picked up one of the metal strips and turned it slowly in his hand. An unassuming piece of channel by all appearance, Stitch knew the angled titanium was lined with a very fast high explosive. When detonated, the Linear Shaped Charge would produce an explosive scalpel that could slice a steel girder. But three strips wouldn't go far against a ton of rock.

A deep tremor echoed from somewhere astern. Stitch handed the explosive to Merlin and hopped along the wall back to the intersection.

Another tremor, this one even deeper in tone.

Getting closer, Stitch realized, close enough already to make out the thump of rapid footfalls. He drew the MP17 and popped the magazine from its well, glancing furtively at the few remaining rounds. With a slap, he re-seated the mag. His eyes never drifted from the hallway as he spoke.

"Whatever you're gonna do Merl, do it now."

Merlin's voice came back quickly, flattened by a detachment borne of focus. "How far?"

"Hard to tell, but it's coming fast." He listened to the growing volume. The crack of a bursting door reverberated sharply.

"A minute, ninety seconds on the outside." Stitch heard Merlin curse under his breath amid the sound of sledgehammer impacts.

The noise from astern grew louder, close enough now for Stitch to make out the whine of pneumatic pistons. "Make that forty five."

He glanced over his right shoulder to see Merlin wedged into the narrow gap along the left edge of the hall. Light poured through from the far side but the opening wouldn't possibly allow them to wriggle through. Stitch's eyes flicked aft once more. "Thirty seconds partner, if we're gonna get through that thing we need to move now."

His fingers closed on the subgun's molded grip and drew the stock firmly to his shoulder. "Twenty!"