Xenonauts: Crimson Dagger (12 page)

Burning. Everything was burning. His thigh, his abdomen. He couldn’t bring himself to look. The smell of melting skin was indicative enough.

Get to one of the capsules!
Eyes blinded by tears, Mikhail fought to pull himself toward the closest capsule. The first time he put any weight on his damaged shoulder, he collapsed with a yell.

The red lights continued to flash—the pulse was ceaseless. Once again, Mikhail focused on the capsule. Whimpering, he clawed at the floor with his good arm. Slowly, he dragged himself forward for almost a foot. Then pain struck again, and again, his arms gave way.

He was in the same position as the creature that had invaded his mind—crawling desperately toward his escape pod, trailing blood. This was why it couldn’t set the self-destruct sequence itself. It would have never made it from the bridge to the capsule in time.

Again, Mikhail pulled himself forward. Again, Mikhail screamed, and again, his body failed him. He wasn’t even a quarter of the way across the room. He may as well have had a kilometer to go. He realized he was going to die.

You have eight apples. If you divide them equally into two, how many apples does each side have?

His body offered a final attempt at movement, accompanied by a final shutdown of his muscles. He had nothing left. His fingernails scraped against the floor, resulting in no progress despite the effort. But he exerted the effort.

Can I go play in my room?

No. You are supposed to be sick today. An obviously exaggerated claim.

There were four apples. She was smart enough to know. She just needed to try.

The floor vibrated. A low rumble emerged through the halls. The core was overloading. Reaching forward, Mikhail strained to move again. But his consciousness was already fading.

She was so beautiful. The first time he’d held her, he was in love. It grew stronger every day.

Mikhail’s body went limp. He laid his forehead on the floor. The overload began.

Papa loves you, Kseniya. He loves you so much.
Hand trembling, he reached shakily into his pocket to pull out his wallet. He kept a photo of her there. He wanted to see his daughter one more time. See those brown eyes and that smile one more time.

But there wasn’t enough time.

The detonation vaporized the spacecraft and extinguished all life within a five-mile radius. The rocky lowlands offered the troops outside no cover against the blast, and even if it had, there’d have been no time to reach them. The shockwave was simply too fast. In a span of five seconds, thousands of men perished.

Captain Mikhail Kirov was the first.

* * *

NINA’S HEART POUNDED. The curvature of the Earth grew more and more defined with each passing second, the darkness of space looming above the capsule as it rocketed skyward. Despite its breakneck speed of ascent, no effects of g-force or inertia could be felt within.

Pushing back her hair, Nina looked frantically in every direction. Buttons flickered and flashed, displays with hieroglyphs shifted and scrolled. It was overwhelming.

Blue gave way to black, and the hue of the planet Earth dimmed beneath the brightness of the Milky Way. Then, as suddenly as the capsule had accelerated, it stopped.

Weightlessness ensued as Nina lifted off the surface of the chair. Each strand of her hair took on a life of its own, swaying from side to side as if she was floating underwater. Eyes widening and heart calming for the first time since the ascent, Nina stared out of the window.

Stars. Brighter than she’d ever seen them from her world below. Purple ribbons stretched across the expanse of deep space, the arms of the galaxy vibrant and limitless. Amid the blackness, there was sheer beauty. Sheer beauty.

Nina was breathless.

Something jetted out of the console directly beneath her—some type of instrument attached to a metal stalk. Starting back, she shrieked as it hovered in front of her face. There was a whir. The instrument head pivoted up and down her body, a flicker of red light pulsing as if she was being scanned. The instrument stopped. Its head rose back to her. Silence.

Suddenly, an unearthly thumping noise, even louder than the pulse in the crashed spacecraft, wailed inside the capsule. The instrument retracted—the stalk was sucked back into its housing. With a lurch, the capsule plummeted back toward the atmosphere. Sweat fell from Nina’s brow; hyperventilation hit her. Faster and faster, she zoomed straight down.

Only when it had fallen all the way back to the crash site did the capsule slam to a dead stop, momentum nonexistent within its spherical housing. The capsule tilted forward until Nina fell out of the chair and tumbled against the glass, staring straight down at the massive crater where the spacecraft had once stood. Once again, its surface opened.

Nina was released several meters above the ground. Gone was the mire that had existed there earlier, the mud blown away by the explosion of the alien spacecraft. What met Nina was glassed rock and uprooted earth. No amount of knee-bending could break the impact. As she slammed into the surface, her legs snapped at the shins. She wailed in tortuous agony. Above her, the capsule closed, righted itself, and shot into the sky.

Only the rain provided a sense of motion to the desolate wasteland that had once been the landscape of Kirkjubæjarklaustur. There were no troops moving. There were no vehicles. There was nothing. The crater stretched beyond the original width of the spacecraft, reaching to the very hills that Nina, Mikhail, and the strike team had initially trekked down. It was as if the Apocalypse had rained down upon the tip of southern Iceland.

Moaning hoarsely, Nina rolled her neck to the side to shield half of her face from the rain. Her legs were twisted across the rocks, the blood from her compound fractures staining the pools of water around her. Jaw trembling, she went numb. The subtle motion of her breathing was the only indication that she was alive. But she was alive.

In the hours that followed, American and Soviet forces converged on the crater. They found no traces of the spacecraft that had once been there, nor of the reptiles that had so staunchly held off the American offensive. They found no evidence of the alien presence at all. But they did find a woman, exhausted and soaked to the core, sprawled out in the crater. A woman who was never supposed to have been there at all.

Nina Andrianova was carried away from the scene, placed on a gurney, and taken to a military hospital in the heart of Kirkjubæjarklaustur. Despite the size of the explosion, the hospital was virtually empty.

There was no one else to treat.

6

Friday, April 25rd, 1958

1800 hours

Two days later

“NINA.”

Slinging her sniper rifle from her shoulder, Nina waited for the now-drenched Kirov to approach her. “Nina Andrianova, captain,” she said. “I apologize for not being at my post.”

“Nina?”

Kirov leapt back as soon as he picked up the flashlight. Steadying herself on the mud-slicked floor, Nina followed the captain’s gaze—right to the alien face. Her heart nearly stopped.

The man clapped his hands loudly. “Nina!”

Nina’s eyes jolted opened. “Behind you!” she shouted. Then she went still.

She wasn’t on a ship. There were no aliens around her. Everything was quiet. Her gaze focused on the bald-headed man looking down at her, who glanced briefly behind him to see if anything was there. Nothing was. Laying her head back, Nina’s heart settled.

The man, middle-aged and wearing a white lab coat, looked back at her. “Everything all right?” He was American.

Closing her eyes, she nodded her head. She was in a hospital bed, not a spacecraft. No weapons were firing, no aliens attacking. She was safe. “Yes,” she whispered.

“Can you tell me your name and date of birth, please?”

It was standard medical questioning. “Nina Yustina Andrianova. Umm.” The man, whom she could only presume was a doctor, patiently raised an eyebrow. “August 14th, 1922.”

Leaning closer, the man studied her. “And what’s the last thing you remember?”

Eyes narrowing, she thought back. They’d entered the spaceship through the hole started by the dig team. But the dig team was dead. What happened inside the ship? “I remember…” Extraterrestrials. They were fighting extraterrestrials. Reptiles. But what else? “…we split up, into two teams. The Soviets and Americans.” Forehead wrinkling, she tried to think harder. But nothing else came.

“When you woke up, you said, ‘Behind you.’ Does that mean something?”

“Behind you,” she repeated quietly. Why had she shouted that? When she moved her arm to touch her forehead in thought, the man quickly stopped her.

“No, no, no…just lay still.”

Again, Nina whispered, “Behind you.” She had no idea why she’d said that. She barely even remembered shouting it, even though it was scarcely a minute earlier. Rolling her head to the side, she opened her mouth to begin saying, “I don’t know,” but stopped as soon as she saw her surroundings. This wasn’t a hospital. It was a tent. A massive, barren, white tent. The bed and medical equipment around her were the only things present at all. She moved to sit upward.

Once again, the doctor stopped her. “Don’t. You need to lay still.”

“Where the hell am I? Why can’t I feel my legs?”

“You were injured in the explosion. Your legs have been numbed.”

Her eyes widened. “The
explosion
?” Memories flashed through her mind.

She and Mikhail charged into the bridge on the three-count. Weapons raised, they immediately searched for targets. None were there.

All of a sudden, Hemingway grabbed her. He slammed her head against the console. She toppled over as everything spun.

Mikhail didn’t see the robotic guardian coming—he was too busy looking at her, making sure she was secured in the capsule. Beating on the glass slit, she screamed.

“Behind you!” She blurted the words out again. The bald-headed man flinched. “Mikhail! Where is Mikhail?” Nina lurched up—then she saw them. Her legs. They were gone below her knees.
“Oh my God!”

The man grabbed her again. “Miss Andrianova, please, lay still!” Her eyes were panicked, her breathing relentless. She was hyperventilating. Looking off to the right, the man screamed, “I could use a little help, here!” Immediately, two large soldiers emerged from a slit in the tent wall. They sprinted toward the bed, grabbing Nina as soon as they reached her. As they forcibly held her down, the bald-headed man injected her in the neck with a needle. Seconds later, Nina’s squirming stopped. Eyes rolling back, she went motionless.

Jaw setting, the man took a step back. “Let it be known that at 1802 hours, the subject had to be sedated. We’ll try again in twelve hours.” The two soldiers nodded.

From a speaker situated in the corner, a garbled voice emerged. “Six hours.”

“She won’t be awake in six hours!” Sighing, the man rubbed his head. “And give me some
damn
straps next time!” When the voice didn’t reply, the man looked at one of the soldiers. “This is your post for the next twelve hours. If at any point she wakes up, let me know immediately. She shouldn’t, but…you know.”

“Yes, sir.”

He nodded at the other soldier. “Let’s go. Palmerston’s turn again.”

Away from the room but observing through a small black-and-white monitor, a goateed man sat back in his chair. Picking up a pencil, he scribbled something on a notepad.

“You heard the way she said that,” a thick Russian-accented man said behind him. “She remembered something.”

“Yeah, well,” answered the man in the chair, an American. “We don’t know that.”

Leaning against a desk, the Russian nodded. “I’m telling you. That was realization.”

“The realization that she doesn’t have feet.”

“Give her time.”

Slowly, the American’s stare drifted to another monitor sitting further away. In the center of its display, hands clasped on his lap in a solid white room, Thomas Palmerston sat idly. “That thing he said they saw. That had to be her. Except they saw it happen twice.”

The Russian pointed at Nina’s monitor. “The way she asked where Kirov was. She was expecting him to be alive. She didn’t ask about anyone else.”

“Think he was in the other one?”

“If he was, where did he go?”

Shaking his head, the American signed. “We’ll find out soon enough. Or we won’t.” In the other monitor, Palmerston looked across the white room. Seconds later, the same man who’d spoken to Nina appeared next to him. “His story hasn’t changed in forty-eight hours. If we don’t get anything else from him today, I’m gonna recommend we send him home.” Rising from his chair, the American turned to the exit.

The Russian raised an eyebrow. “Do you think that is safe?”

“Oh yeah,” answered the American with a nod, “it’s safe.” Walking through the exit, he stopped briefly to glance back at his counterpart. “He loves his wife and kids.” Without any more words—only the exchange of an understanding nod—the American left the room.

* * *

Ten hours passed before Nina’s eyes cracked open again. As the haziness faded, she was able to make out the form of a man sitting several meters away in a chair, his attention focused on what looked like a newspaper. He was unaware of her, at least for the moment. Closing her eyes to keep her consciousness a secret, she waited for her mind to find clarity. It didn’t take long.

She remembered everything. The bridge of the spacecraft, the self-destruct sequence. Shooting Hemingway from behind. The mad dash with Mikhail to the escape capsules. Seeing the guardian attack him from behind, then her capsule soaring into space.

Though she didn’t know
where
she was, she knew
why
she was there. She knew why the bald-headed man was asking her questions. She knew why she wasn’t in a regular hospital. She was the sole survivor of a mission that never officially happened. If there were any answers to be found out about what took place inside the spacecraft, only she could provide them. Only she knew the truth about the strike team’s fate. About the trek through the downpour and the ambush of the dig team. About the aliens and weaponry they’d faced. About the unveiling of Nikolai Lukin and the courage of Sevastian Tyannikov, and about Hemingway and his honorable Green Berets. About the man who’d led them, trusting every one of them to do their jobs while doing his better than any of them. Whose six-year old daughter would never see him again.