Following is a novella, a piece of Fan Fiction loosely based on DOOM, the Video game. Loose enough to avoid a lawsuit, but not loose enough to be called original. It started as a movie script in the mid 90’s, when I was still playing the game. But, I converted it to novel when I discovered that I couldn’t draw storyboards. I stopped work on it as soon as I heard that an eastern European production company bought the rights to produce the movie. Now that everyone’s seen how bad the movie was, I don’t feel so bad about putting my version out. What follows was my first attempt at writing since college- even before my technical writing projects. Final editing not even done, yet. Comments and criticism welcome. Kudos if you actually make it through the whole thing.
Chapters:
1. Phobos
2. The Test
3.Static
4. Valaran
5. Mazes
6. Revelation
7. Terms
8. Rendezvous
9. Outbound
10. Descent
____________________________________________________________________
On most days, the simple, simple ‘idea’ of his career could preoccupy Albert for several hours at a time. Many years of training in advanced physics, multiple bachelors’s degrees, a master’s thesis that became famous in the field, and now relegated to the monotony of being a secretary and errand-boy; this gave him fitful nights.
And, Albert was now in the hall, during lunch.
Every knew implicitly not to travel up the hall during lunch. The press of hungry bodies was enough to crush a man who walked too slow. But, he found himself fighting his way up the crowded hall, too once again find Dr. Iverson. This was the old section of the station, and the paging system here had recently become one of the many victims of the great sewer leak, as it had become known. Usually, Albert would consider himself just it’s most recent victim, another extension of the many victimizations obviously he’s endured. But, oddly, being forced to physically find Dr. Iverson at the most busy time of day, he didn’t reflect on the inadequacy of his career, as he normally would. Trivial matters seem to fade under the most dire of circumstances.
A mass of lab-coated-scientists and various staff in all manners of protective gear push their way through the dimly-lit rats-maze of rooms and halls. A large, black, transporter robot carried a large crate on his forklift arms. He, and his cargo, were both too large for the cramped hall. People and robots alike hug the walls to let him pass. It speaks a constant stream of electronic “Excuse Me-Pardon Me” ‘s as it passes through the corridor. Albert ducks into a pipe-way to keep from being crushed, then moves on.
The hallways in Phobos station were more then adequate 35 years ago. Then, only fifty people were stationed there. The old laboratories were bright and close together. Voices echoed cleanly through the corridors. If you sat quietly for a moment, you could tell where every was simply by listening. Polished tiles covered over airtight metal panels; concrete floors were made from the remnants of blasting the holes in which the base sat. Even real wooden doors were donated by some philanthropist-hardware manufacturer in Moscow. All of it harkened back to the school labs of centuries before. The familiar atmosphere made the idealists that created the Ninth solar research station feel a little less lonely, more like a community, more like home. Soon, they grew to make it their home. Children ran through the halls and visitors gawked at the achievements they made. Even though station nine was built and maintained by the military, it was chartered to be free of military intervention: pure science for the benefit of mankind. Thirty-five years later, the benefits seemed more theoretical. Visitors gave way to cargo haulers, and the sound of children had faded long ago. Now overcrowded, the dim halls echoed more like a concentration camp than a community. Albert Munsing was the lead laboratory technician the variable-isotope plasmas project. This meant he was, in effect, a 37-year-old page for Dr. Sven Iverson, the lead researcher of the variable-isotope plasmas project, and the head of the Phobos solar research station.
Dr. Iverson held onto one end of a rubbery piece of metal. Alice held the other end. Iverson groaned while attempting to stretch the piece into two clamps underneath a laser sight. Alice suddenly lets go. The metal shoots out of Iverson’s hands and into the various robot-parts stored across the room. He studies her somberly as pieces of droids slide to the ground. “Don’t we have robots for this kind of thing?”, she says, frustrated. He flops into a nearby chair.
“Not any more.” Sven replies, motioning to the broken mass on the floor.
Albert skids to a stop in the hall. The clouded glass of the door in front of him gave-off a faded, sickly glow, lit by the antiquated lights within the room. Albert bounced up and down impatiently.
“Open!”, he shouts blankly to the door. “Open!?!….Oh Shit.” Albert looks down and rolls his eyes.
“I hate the old labs” he mumbles to himself, reaching for a rusted door knob. The lab door flew open.
“Albert! Wonderful! How good is your grip?” Iverson exclaims.
“Sir, there’s been an accident on B-level. You have to come with me.”
“I don’t hear any alarms”
“You wouldn’t. The paging system…”
“Oh damn, that’s right. Alice…” he said turning back to her, “Keep working on this.” She looks at him incredulously and puts her hands up. “How the Hell……!” she began to yell as they ran out of the room. Albert and Sven could barely hear her yelling as their way through the halls and up to a lift. “The north-side B-section is locked-down. 900-1500 are totally depressurized.”
“What happened?”
“It’s room 1158: the matter regeneration lab! Something shot out of containment and then everything locked-down” Albert opens the hatch to control center. “That’s when I got you.” Several technicians and a single man dressed in a formal military uniform look up at them. “Sven!… 6 floors of sections of A and B sections are now contained. 10 People are not accounted for. I don’t suppose you have any ideas what happened here?” the man in the military uniform barked as he pointed to an observation window, looking high above the complex. Dr. Iverson stopped abruptly, staring through the window. “Oh my God. What did they do!?” he whispers.
Below, Phobos’ familiar rocky and tortured landscape stretched to the horizon. The smoke from a broken conduit catches his eyes. He focuses on it, shaking his head in disbelief. Two stories of metal were missing from the side of his base. A sliver of space station, once housing countless experiments, now were nothing but vacuum. An enormous wedge of space cut into the station, as if someone simply took a slice of apple pie. No Bodies, no twisted metal, just a slice. And at it’s apex, the remains of room 1158. The military officer dispatched emergency crews as they watched in horror. “I don’t suppose you know what they were doing in there?” the military officer asks. “Of course, but this should be impossible…simply impossible” Sven shakes his head, staring out the window.
It had been 8 months since the matter regeneration accident. Colonel Joseph Wills still remembers the names of the dead. Every time Sven mentioned the MDT Project, he would recite all six of the names to himself. “Janet Baker, The 2 Shen’s: Shen Liu & Shen Lee, Kyle Wiel, Daniel Tervantes, and that maintenance guy…Bernie….Bernie something.” He didn’t remember all the names every time, and it angered him.
‘People have died here before’ he would remind himself. ‘Stop being foolish.’
But, these people represented this project, and he did not like this project. Sven would try to justify it to him- “Their ill-fated discovery allowed the experiment to take place. It will change our view of the universe for millennia to come!”
‘Grand pile of crap, ’ he would mumble to himself.
It wasn’t the fact that it required personnel from every department. That was Sven’s purview. He was in charge of personnel and their allocation. And what he wanted, he got. It wasn’t the fact that the power used by the experiment was more that they’d ever tried to use before; he was assured it was within specs. It wasn’t even the risk of exploration for science. He and Sven had taken chances before. It was the scale of the thing: never with this many people, never with so much power, and never with the possibilities this could have. The secrecy around the project was as enormous as the project itself. And then once again, there were the six. “You seem fidgety” Sven was looking at Joseph inquisitively.
“I am fidgety” Joseph said. “You know, I don’t really like this.”
“You Approved it. You helped design it!”said Sven.
“60 seconds to full condenser charge,” a technician monitoring a bank of computer screens chirps. He sat with 10 excited colleagues in an observation booth overlooking a massive room. Far below, thousands of plasma and electrical conduits came together and rose hundreds of feet into the air. On top, a small room housed a glowing chamber. Even from the distant control room, the technicians could feel the power. Men and robots move about the vast space on scaffolding and hover platforms taking readings of the chamber. Emergency beacons blink and the lights in the room dim. Everyone moves back from the chamber.
“Well, you have 60 seconds to change you mind, Joseph”
Joseph looks at him accusingly and says, “We’re going too far. ‘Applied interdimensional physics’!?! Shit!” He wrings his hands and stares at the chamber. “You don’t open a door without having some idea of what’s on the other side, Sven.”
“Less then a minute away, and now you bring this up?” Sven barks, beginning to scowl at the control panel in front of him. He suddenly looks up with a grin and whips around. “A ‘door?’ You fool! You were there for the research at every step. This is the next logical one.” He pauses, studying his old friend. “What?… Are you afraid something will walk out?” He chuckles at Joseph. “Always want to be the ‘Colonel’, huh Joe? Finally get to go to war with something?” Sven looks back into the chamber. “The ability to generate infinite amounts of sustainable power for almost no cost, and you’re afraid the boogy-man! We’ve taken the precautions, now we take the risk. That’s how it works. “
Joseph turned to the chamber. “For the advancement of science and mankind”.
Sven looked over his glasses the Colonel and grinned. “Sure”, he moans.
“Condensers and full charge, Sir” the technician says.
“Go ahead”
Far above, 2 bolts of plasma shoot from plasma condensers in the ceiling and bathe the chamber in a brightness unbearable to look upon. Men in pressure suits scramble across high scaffolding to exit hatches. A blue and green core begins to swirl inside the gleam of the chamber. Sven squinted from behind the glass, and a faint grin grew on his lips. His great experiment had begun.
The Spanish hillside wasn’t familiar to Jack Greives. The green rolling hills, rocks and shrubs, it’s stark beauty make the situation even more alien to him then floating through the vacuum of space. His mind wandered to those hillsides in the distance as he crouched behind a battered remains of a concrete wall. Crumbled masses of gravel and iron rebar ready to snag the unwary passer-by. In the hills, listening to the wind, he watched the sheep, he smelled the grass. A mortar exploded some distance away, and he was back behind the wall, sitting on a broken rock. ‘My 5 second vacation’, he thought. Today was a long day in a long career. And, now he began to worry how short it may become. He pulled a clip from his flak jacket and shoved it into the rifle. He like traditional cartridge rifles, not the new plasma systems his men had. Firing a bullet seemed to have more meaning when killing a man then simply ‘emitting a beam’. “…make it less of a game, then it will seem more real. You don’t want to start thinking this is just a game..” he would tell them when they asked about it. His eyes wandered over the people couching with him behind the wall. 6 of his own men, and 5 civilians. “Shit! Six men left. This wasn’t a rescue mission. We’re not set-up for this.” he pondered.
“How far away is the transport?” one of his men asked
“I’m having them extract us just over that bunker. But the new ship is still 20 minutes out.” Jack responded.
“I…I don’t think we have 20 minutes, Major’”
“The terrorists don’t know where we are…yet. Any way, we’re not done here. This base is now officially overrun. You know what we have to do.” Gunfire ricocheted in the distance.
“Sir, Javier and Roberts set the charges, but the transmitter is still on Roberts. Parker had the backup, but they have him. And, I don’t think we can get back into to the filtration center where Roberts went down.”
“We need that transmitter. That is the only objective now. We can’t worry about the rest. These terrorists can’t be allowed to have this base. Not even for twenty minutes.” Jack’s eyes told Corp. Mackey the seriousness of the situation.
Pvt. Lewis looked at them. “What are we storing here?”
“Something unpleasant.” Jack looked through a hole in the wall. He got out his binoculars and peered into a rubble-filled entrance underneath the building.
“We should wait for the transport, right? They’ll have the entire code list. They should be able to trigger the charges.” Mackey pleaded.
“Like you said, we don’t have 20 minutes. Anyways, you know how Shankland wired things. The chances the ship will have an ‘Shankland’ code are….” Jack didn’t look up when he paused. “Mackey, take Blainey and Lewis and get into the service center. The emergency entrance is just over there. The insurgents won’t be interested in the utilities, so resistance should be light. Go silent. Filtration is actually against this wall, up 2 levels. Roberts went down on the scaffolding above tank 5. Go through the service hatch to avoid the main entrances. See?” He points to a map on the data pad.
“We got it”
“Habir and I will be behind that wall there to give you cover if you come back hot. And you will. Get back out here, and we’ll blow this thing. If something goes wrong..You’ve got discretion. Do what you need to.” His hand was on Mackey’s shoulder. “Sig! Danvers! You’ve got these people. Once you see the transport, get everybody and run like hell behind bunker over there. The bunker should protect the ship long enough for you to get everyone on board.
“Yes Sir!” they piped
Jack and the team got up. The battered civilians nervously began to stand, not knowing what to expect next. A young lady began to cry.
“Ready!?” Jack yelled. “GO!”
Mackey and his team bolted from behind the wall. Jack and Habir followed. Halfway across the tarmac, the teams separated. Mackey’s team jumped through the rubble and under the entrance’s cover. Jack and Habir raced behind the crumbling wall and pointed their weapons toward the entrance. Jack looked back at the wall and could see Danvers looking through an opening at him. Jack gave him a thumb’s-up. Inside, the team raced through the corridors of the entrance room. As they passed an old storage locker, a small red light near the floor caught Pvt. Lewis’ eye. He stopped and looked back. The faint light from outside reflected off the little silver antenna hanging from a beaten metal box hurriedly glued to the wall. A red light began to blink. “What the fuck is this?!” The others stopped and looked back. Mackey’s eyes got big. “A Proximity sensor!” They had just started to run when the ceiling came down on them with a large crash. Outside, Jack heard a faint explosion. Habir looked at him quizzically. Suddenly, the wall protecting the civilians exploded. Bodies flew into the air. Dust and rocks blew into men with the grenade launcher on the ledge overlooking the far side of the service bunker. Habir stared in shock “Oh my god!”. Jack turned, raised his weapon, and fired. The launcher fell from the catwalk, smashing on the ground. Below, several men raced around the corner of the bunker an began firing at Jack’s wall. Jack and Habir crouched and began firing back with all they had. Men raced from the other corner of the center and began to fire. Habir turned to keep them at bay. “We’re in trouble!” Habir yelled.
“Get ready to go!”
The ground began to shake and plasma fire exploded at the corners of the service bunker. Men were on fire. Some ran back inside. Some dove behind whatever they could find, and kept firing. The transport ship was early. From his cockpit, the pilot could see 2 troopers trapped behind a wall. “Keep on those corners. Watch the balconies” He ordered his gunners. The big ship swung around the tarmac and began to hover a few feet above the cement behind Jack and Habir. Green bolts of plasma flew over their heads. Blood began flowing from Jack’s hand. He couldn’t move his arm. He didn’t have time for this. “Move!” He yelled. Habir jumped and ran back towards the ship. Jack followed just behind. Through the heat and dust, and feet from the hatch, Jack could just make out a hole that suddenly appeared in the back of Habir’s jacket. He fell to the ground. Jack grabbed his jacket and pulled him to the ship. The crew pulled pulled Jack and Habir’s limp body on to the floor. In the hail of gunfire, the ship lifted off and away from the base. “Charges are set, but we couldn’t get the transmitter…”A medic pulled the helmet over Habir’s face, walked away. Jack couldn’t speak. “A tactical satellite is in orbit, major. We have orders to disintegrate the site from space once we’re out and Cordova City is evacuated,” sergeant Bowers barked. Jack looked up to Sergeant Bowers’ ancient and battle-scarred face. “Major…Where are the rest of your men?!” The medic began working on Jack’s shoulder. Jack looked down. His eyes got heavy.
“Gone. No one else.”
Bowers gritted his teeth in disgust. He motioned to the pilot and the ship pulled-away from the base. Jack leaned his head against a pack on the floor, surrounded by the deafening blast from the engines, and tried not to feel the lead being pulled from his arm.
“What the..” Jack sits up and grabs his arm. No blood. ‘Of course, no blood. Fuck’ he thinks. He looks across the bed at her. ‘She didn’t wake-up. Good…I must be getting better.” He laughs to himself as he slips out of bed. ‘4:00am. Close enough.’ He stares at the smooth bare shoulder peeking out from the comforter. “15 years and I can’t think of anyone else. I don’t deserve her.” Since accepting the “Promotion” to ComControl, he didn’t think of Cordova quite as much. Now she sleeps the whole night through, as well.
A long shower was a usually a luxury, even on off world bases. Here, though, water wasn’t a concern. Time didn’t even seem a priority. ‘I should be thankful’ he thinks. ‘Leeds is a nice city- a safe place. She deserves this posting more than me.’ He looks into the mirror, drinking a cup of water from the sink, and stares. “How’d I get so old?” The steam from the shower seemed to fill his head. The apartment was small for a family home, but adequate for Jack and Sarah. For base accommodations, it was actually decadent. They had to sell much of their furnishings in the last move, but were still able to keep much of the antiques. The feel of real wood roughened by time, the way light meanders around hand-made glass, it gave Jack a small sense of security and permanence. A reminder that not everything becomes lost. He listens to a Chopin piano concerto as he lays out his uniform in the living room. “The gray officers dress for United Military Command” he ponders. “No fatigues anymore. Just another day.” The smell of coffee fills the air, and the Chopin suddenly stops. “..with the vanguard Solar freighter coming into spaceport yesterday…” a voice blares from the speakers. “I don’t think you like my music” Jack says. “I do. I just like knowing what’s going on, too” said Sarah. She walks over to him and he turns to kiss her. “Not ready yet?” she asks.
“No. Still have some time.” He watches the suit, as if expecting to stand and go to work for him. “Are you happy here?” he says to her.
“With Katie in college, this is fine.” She walks to the couch, and smiles. “Actually, it’s wonderful.”
“And you aren’t sick of all this, yet?”
“Are you kidding!? Years and years of wondering if you’re coming home at all. And now, Lieutenant Colonel of ComControl. All the girls were so impressed. I like being the wife of the Lieutenant Colonel of ComControl. That’s like Commander, right? God, Jackie… This is the payoff after all those years for me!”
He walks over to her, slowly. Suddenly , shoving her on to the couch, he jumps on top of her as she screamed. “..A Commander’s Wife!?!…” He tickles her relentlessly. “A status symbol? Is that all I am to You!?” She grabs his arms. She recovered from laughing, and hugs him around the waist. “I don’t think either of us should be concerned about status”. Her smile fades. She closes her eyes and hugs him harder. He looks down at her blonde hair and strokes it, “Gotta go.” He walks back to the uniform and begins putting it on. ‘You still thinking about quitting?” She flops over the back of the couch, watching him. “No, Not any more.” He thinks about the new uniform. “Anyway, you did notice that ComControl has an on-site Colonel? Really not much for me to do. The ‘Commander’ title doesn’t quite mean as much here. Anyway’s, that the wrong branch.”
“Ya, Ya… ‘Colonel’ No one else knows that.” She chirps. “God…You say that like they put you here just to keep an eye on you. It’s been over a year since…” she paused, “ ..we got here. They trust you.”
“Sure they trust me; they just don’t like me.”
“You should be used to that. I don’t even like you.”
“I know. Give me a kiss.” She came over to him slowly, kisses him, and walks to the kitchen. “You missed a button” she says. He turns to the mirror by the end table. “Oh. I guess I did.
ComControl officially has 212 monitoring stations, one for each communications base in the territory. But if you include the ones no one is supposed to know about, it actually numbers 300. There is one monitoring tech to every 2 stations. Stations are manned in 8-hour shifts 24 hours a day. Every day. This is 150 techs at any one time, and one coffee cart. You do not leave the station to get coffee. A service bot brings it to you. If you must use the restroom, you must arrange someone to cover your station until your return. Just under 1000 people in the world are familiar with ComControl. And these people are some of the most highly scrutinized military personnel on the planet because they are personally responsible for the entire military communications and reconnaissance network throughout the solar system. They represent the very lifeline to Earth for every industrial, military and scientific outpost on every planet. It is a very large, highly secure, office, deep inside the Leeds Base of the United Military Corps, on the English countryside. And it’s always eerily quiet. Just dim hum of high voltage and whispers. It was enough to make a librarian uneasy. Lt. Colonel Greives never got used to it.
Jack Greives could sit in his glass office just above the terminals throughout the room and see almost every technician. Unfortunately, that meant, they could see him as well. This meant his meeting with station 114’s operator was painfully public, in spite of the thick glass. Publically private meetings have a tendency to lead to rumors. And, oddly enough, rumors tend to spread quickly in a communications center.
“How long ago was the last transmission?” Jack said
“14 hours since last traffic.” TechOfficer Bagley responded.
“And nothing on lightwave, right?”
“Lots of outgoing requests from here, of course, but nothing in last 2 days. We’ve had proper alignment three times from direct satellites since then, but nothing”
“What about the carrier wave, again?”
“We got a spike for a second, now it’s gone too.”
Jack sat back in his seat and squinted.
“Any carrier communications from the techs?
“Sir..uh..we’re not allowed to perform background communication with…
Jack shook his head. “Anything on carrier, son?”
Bagley looked down sheepishly. “No. It’s dead. I can’t find anything at all”
“And this is now…”
“Now down 2 hours sir.”
“Alright. Thank you. Keep monitoring the base. If anything turns up, and I mean anything, page me immediately. Understand?”
“Yessir”
“Ok. Go On”
Bagley stops at the door and turns back to the Lieutenant. “Sir….it’s just that Phobos has a good track record, and the other Mars stations…”
Jack cuts him off. “Yes, Yes… I know. There were far worse stations around. And, the other Mars stations are transmitting just fine, so there was no local anomaly, or an attack. I’m well aware of all this. Anyway, how do you know anything about other stations?”
Bagley nervously steps in place, as if trying to get his footing on a moving floor. “I…uh…honestly…”
“Go on, Bagley. We’re going to check into it, don’t worry. It’s 9:00, and time for me to see the Colonel, anyway.”
“Yessir.” Bagley quickly walks out.
The Colonel’s office was down the hall behind the communications room, and was very private. He waited outside the door. It slid open. “Jack! Come on in. I’ve just finished taking to Colonel Forrester in Weapons Development. Ever met him?”
“No, don’t think so.”
“Interesting character…don’t know if I’d want him playing with guns, though. Have a seat.” He takes a sip from his cup. “You look concerned. How’s our throughput?”
“Our throughput is up. I’ve dispatched a team to Oregon to check on that bad remote from yesterday…but we’ve got a bigger problem. It’s SRS-9, Phobos, sir. We’ve lost contact.”
“I Know. I’ve been keeping up on it.”
“Really?
“Up and down ‘bout a half-day now, yes? Not even on direct lightwave. Very disturbing.”
“We just lost the carrier signal now, too.”
Colonel Hayes took another long drink. “Damn.”
“I was thinking of sending a team.”
“I’m assuming there’s no other problems in the area?”
Jack nodded. Hayes turns away and leans back in the soft chair. “All maintenance is supposed to be scheduled beforehand. Even in emergencies that carrier should only go down for 20 minutes- MAX! Did you know, each base has parts to completely rebuild the system in 4 hours, if need be? And that still wouldn’t affect lightwave linking, if they had to use it. No. No..” Jack considered the old man as he rocked. “I don’t want another Lunar 9 problem.”
“Lunar 9? That’s… an industrial station?”
“ Couple years ago. It’s a Loraiac Mining’s research station headed by a Colonel Cheseney- a real piece of work. Their transmitter would go down every couple of months. Few hours at a time. Went down for a whole day once. Said they had to replace entire system. In the annual inventory report, they’d been ordering tons of replacement parts.” Jack raised an eyebrow. “That was it.. we sent a military site survey. Maintenance wasn’t done. Nothing documented. Horrible. They were selling the replacement parts to, well, whoever. Cheseney was given an early retirement. Very early. The station head had to be removed… forcefully, if I remember.” Jack started squinting again.
“Alright. Poor maintenance agreed, but removing a Colonel? Seems..uh..”
“You know these transmitters are our only link to the outposts. This is earth’s eyes and ears to the system. They all act as military deep space sensors. Even the Scientific and industrial bases- though we don’t tell them. The government doesn’t play games with their care. That’s why we build them like we do, no compromises. We expect the same from their caretakers.”
Jack nodded. “Do you know anything of what’s going on at Phobos?”
“Uh…let’s see…” He flipped through several screens on his computer. “Phobos is military but has a scientific charter. Started as an old seismic research landing. I think about 300 staff, maybe couple hundred projects at any one time. Huge facility now. Huge. I met Colonel Wills a long time ago. He seemed like a very pragmatic fellow. Doesn’t make sense.” He paused. “Jack, I’m sending you personally to sort this out.”
“You’re serious?”
“Very. I’ll have an assault team and technical crew ready to go. I think the gun ship… ‘Valaran’.. is in space port”
Jack snickered a little. “An Assault team? When?”
“Well.. Do you have any spare underwear in your desk? 167th LaGrange has been on-surface for 6 months. We’re afraid they’ll start shooting civilians for fun, soon. They’d probably land on the roof to pick you up if it meant getting out-of-atmosphere faster. Go home and get ready. I’ll have a car pick you up at 20:00 hours tonight.”
“Still seems a bit like overkill.”
“Possibly. But, sometimes those scientists need reminding who station they’re living in. It may be a scientific charter, but I hear it can get pretty cold on Phobos without a nice, big base to sit-around in.”
“Yes Sir.”
“I want to be very clear, Lieutenant. Put the fear of God into them. Stop this problem before it becomes commonplace.”
“Of course. But, Wills outranks me, you know.” Jack stood.
“You work for ComControl…and that carries more weight than any rank. You have the whole Corps behind you- right up to the Command General.” Hayes pulls a small datapad out his desk. “One more thing…” he adds. “That conversation I had as you were coming in….a small request..” Jack leans against the wall and looks his Colonel over. “Yes?” he says, suspiciously.
“Colonel Wills has an item that needs to come back here. And, since it just so happens that you’ll be there, I thought you might like to pick it up. If you don’t mind, obviously.’
“A box of chocolates?”
Hayes looks at Jack over his glasses. “A rather large box, yes.” He hands the datapad to Jack. He studies it for a moment.
“A metal cutter?”
“Is that what it says? Well, yes…OK, a metal cutter, among other things.” Hayes says under his breath.
“Wait a minute …’WDD: ProjX140 ‘….This is a military designation. ..‘Weapons Development Division’ ..uh…Colonel?…”
“A little delicacy if you don’t mind, Lieutenant”
Jack began grinning. “You said this was a scientific-charter base, yes? No military applications or all hell breaks loose when everyone finds out.”
“Uh…yes, but no one will, Correct?” Hayes adds. Jack stops grinning. “Look Jack, this happens a lot more than you realize. It comes across as a delivery from one officer to another. The base commanders use great discretion when working on projects like this. They only use personnel that are eager to work on these types of things. And, yes..even with all their complaining, you’ll always find researchers more than willing to work on weapons systems. Nerds like blowing-up stuff too.” Hayes said.
“How big is this thing? Won’t someone notice?”
“No..No. It’s small arms; one prototype, actually. Hear it packs a hell of a punch. Maybe… a bit more than allowed in codes of standard military practice, but that’s not my problem. In his last contact, about a month ago, Wills said he’d have it ready in a couple weeks. Should be no problem to get it now. “
Jack handed the pad back to Hayes. “Not a problem, Sir. I’ll get ready.
“Very well. Remember, Jack: Fear Of God himself.” Jack smiled at Hayes’ enthusiasm toward the abuse of scientists. “Dismissed, Lieutenant.”
Jack nods. He walks out of Hayes’s office and directly to station 114. Bagley looks up, startled. “Sir?”
Jack leans over and lowers his voice. “You say last transmission was 14 hours ago? So, the last transmissions are still in the buffer. Correct?”
“Yes Sir…I guess. Why?”
“Transfer what’s left to a card and give it to me.”
“Uh..Sir..I don’t have access to the buffer. That’s restricted.”
“Not with this.” Jack handed him his ID. Bagley looks around nervously and inserts the ID into the console’s reader. He began typing. “Wow. I didn’t know that this was even possible.”
“You still don’t.” Jack says.
“Yessir.” He hands Jack his ID back along with a small chip.
“OK. It’s all there. Are you sure this is…you know..”
Jack spoke very plainly. “If I say it’s OK, it’s OK. Thank you.”
“Sir.”
Jack walks into his office and grabs a datapad. He inserts the chip into the side. The unit beeps and displays a listing of the last messages sent from the Phobos station. He glances around at the technicians working in the room. Putting the datapad with the chip in his case, he quickly walks out.
Alone, bag half-packed, and slowly sinking into the overstuffed leather chair, he watches the faces on the data pad. Listening for clues, Jack drinks the last of the coffee left from the morning. “….Gregory, he didn’t even tell us when this project would be over. I’m stuck taking electromagnetic field readings all day while all my butterfly hybrids die off. What a fucking waste. It’ll take me months to breed enough again….” Jack flips through the messages. “…where I don’t know. We’re not supposed to talk about it. Mom, I was happy with this when we were just doing laser communications, but this…I tell you, I’m sort of frightened. Dr Iverson tell us it’s just a test chamber, but I swear to God, I thought I saw something in there last night. It was weird….” The front door clicked and swung open. “You’re home!” Sarah said with excitement. He swung around in the chair to look at her. His mouth was open, as if to say something, but the words wouldn’t come out. She saw it in his eyes as she set down the bags. He was leaving again.
Jack looked around the cabin at the soldiers. 167th LaGrange was a good team. Even the techs were good soldiers- a rarity. They’d been flying for 3 days. Now only ½ an hour left till touchdown. He scrolls through the listing of messages. Of the hundreds he read, none told him what he wanted to know, only hints. They were landing soon, and he needed answers. “Dr Iverson- to CERN’ this looks good”, he thinks. The pad begins to play. “Albert, I don’t care what Dan’s dead dolphin told you, 199 or 212; It doesn’t matter…”Jack grimaces. He notices the message was a response to another message. “I think I’ll get a little more out of that one.’, he thinks. “ ‘Prof. Albert Crick, CERN’. Interesting.” Jack punches-up the message.
“Sven! What he hell are you doing?! They’ll take that station away from you for sure, now! I love you like a brother, but I swear, if you hadn’t gotten that Nobel prize, I’d think you were retarded. I put your model through the computers here. Not those junk systems you’ve got on that shithole station. I’ve got 212 extra permutations! 212! That’s just a couple more possibilities then you told me to expect. Particle teleportation is one thing, but your meddling outside the model now. You should listen to that Colonel of yours. He’s not just another Corps muscle head. He was in my classes in California. He would have made a passable researcher if he hadn’t gone to the Corps…”
Jack fidgeted in his seat.
“..You should listen to him. I understand you not submitting this to the academy, but your wrong about why. Oh… They WOULD do it, don’t kid yourself about that. They get all starry-eyed when it comes to the possibility of sending troops somewhere, instantly. But they’d wouldn’t do it with the protocols you want. And hell, if Corps got a hold of it, we’d loose a large chunk of Michigan to…Who knows where!” He paused. “Now don’t get angry..I sent the model to Daniel Harris. Only as a Hypothetical! He doesn’t know anything, so don’t get briefs in a bind. He ran it through that dolphin-neuron computer monstrosity in the psychic research lab he’s got there in Texas. I know you don’t like him, Sven. But, he’s really solved some odd problems for us before. He mailed me back yesterday. He wouldn’t give me numbers’s yet. All he said was, it made the computer ‘Nervous’. You know how that hippie talks. Final results in a week, I guess. I don’t know how you make… a computer…nervous, but you can add that to your list of accomplishments… “
Corp. Vance Daniels, team leader of the 167th for many years, leans forwards. “Hey, what’s on that thing?” he asks.
“Clues, I hope. “ Jack responds.
TechSpecialist Sholstein looks up. “Still any word from Phobos?”
“Nothing. No contact for over 4 days. No activity visible from long range satellite, either.”
“Don’t sound like no repair mission, now” Pvt. Sommerby spoke accusingly.
“Stuff-it, Al” said Daniels
Jack turns-off the datapad. “According to the Corps, officially this is still a site survey and repair mission.”
“I hope you don’t mind I we still pack our ammo.” said Daniels.
Jack smiled. “Please Do.” He looked up. “Pvt. Sommerby…Why do they call you ‘Al”?” The crew giggled, childishly.
“My name’s Alecia. My team is just made of all assholes!” she said.
“And that’s just how Dagger likes it.” pipes TechSpecialist McAllen.
“Keep it up Ghostie, or I’ll feed you your fucking fingers!” Pvt. Dagger Reeves was becoming upset, again.
“Keep talking. Just a few clicks, I can make your retirement disappear.” McAllen says.
‘Fucking hackers.” Pvt. Grill says under his breath
“You son of a bitch!” Reeves jumps up and grabs McAllen , hauling him into the air. McAllen doesn’t move a single muscle, except for a wide grin at Dagger “Go ahead. I don’t need fingers to type” He turns his head and winks at Alecia. “Ugh.” She rolls her eyes as he looks back at Dagger. “Does that turn you on, Private?”
“Fucking freak!”
He drops McAllen and sits down. A voice blares through the speakers “Hello, Children? Just for your information, we’ll be landing in 5 minutes, in case you’re interested.”
“Deadstick will probably set us down on the main platform again. We’ll have to walk to hell an back just to get to the transmitter” Complained Tech. Barney Jules.
“You see Lieutenant, all techs are pussies.” Grill adds.
Pvt.’s Sommerby and Boggs start to complain. “Hey, screw you Tapper. My pussy could kick your ass or any tech’s ass- any day!”
“Hell yea”, Boggs adds, laughing.
Jules shakes his head. “Sorry! Shit. How’d we get involved in this?” Sholstein through up his hands. “Corporal, I’d like to file a complaint against the female members of the team for threatening my ass!” The entire crew began throwing things at each other.
It was obvious to Jack that this crew had spent too much time on Earth. They were giddy now to finally be back to work, and it made Jack a little nostalgic. This quickly passes, and he hits the intercom. “Pilot, this base has a port right next to the main dish. Set us down there.” The entire group looks at him. He releases the intercom. “I’d kind-of like to know how the transmitter looks before I start complaining about it.”
The Valaran drifted toward the large asteroid as surface of Mars rushed past, far below. A reddish hue seemed to fill the cockpit as they approached. Jack could see up the corridor and through the glass of the cockpit: Phobos’ dull and pitted surface, and in the distance, a bright white gleam on the horizon. The sun reflected from it’s towers and windows. The ship slowed and spiraled down towards SRS9. On the far side of the Phobos station, sunk deep in to the ground, a massive dish appeared surrounded by smaller antennas. “Lightwave Array- point 2. Swing left on next pass. Port…. number 3.” Co-pilot said. “Don’t see it” Pilot responded. “Pad should be…..Right there!” High above the dish, a small platform jutted from the side of the base, a sheer rocky ledge supporting it.
“Got it. Retry command for clearance.”
Co-Pilot Sonny Wilson looks over at his captain. “You’re already landing!”
“You should always try to be official.” He says, winking at Sonny.
As the ship spun, Jack makes his way to the cockpit. He saw the Lightwave dish spread-out before him. “Hmm..I don’t see any damage.”
“Good! Those outdoor repairs take forever. Take a seat, sir. Ready to touchdown.” the pilot says.
“I’m still not getting anything from control. But….the auto dock is working!” copilot Wilson announces.
“Good, deadstick! We won’t have to break-in this time.” Vance shouts back to the Captain.
Wilson considered the panel before him at the giant craft gently touched the pad. “How come the auto dock works if the comms are down? They both use the same transmitters, right?”
Capt. Potts and Wilson look back at Jack. “That’s what were here to find out, isn’t it?” Jack said, grinning.
The team stood up, grabbing their gear as the docking tube extends from the ship. The dock port lit up as it approached, and with a loud ‘clunk’, secured itself to the tube. Jack leads them down the tube to the airlock. Vance touches a pad on the wall. “Pressurized.” he says. The airlock door slides open revealing an inner chamber. They pack inside, waiting for the inner door to open. Jack stands in front of the team, at attention, for the mass of surprised people standing on the other side of the door. With a loud hiss, it slowly swings in. Vance holds his gun up. The loading bay is sparsely lit and dust covers the floor. A handful of open crates litter the football field-sized room. The air is dense and stale, and not a soul there to greet them as they enter. Grill pops the generator on his plasma rifle. It begins to glow. “OoooKaay….What the fuck?” he says. They file around Jack, who had stops just after the hatch. He puts his hands in his pockets as he looks around, staying out of Vance’s way for the moment. Vance motions two of them down the room. They nod, and run off. Boggs jogs half-way down the access hall next to Jack. The rest spread out. Vance looks at McAllen and points to a box on the wall. He nods and runs to it, rifling through his bags as he goes. He pulls a series of wires from his bright yellow datapad and plugs them into the box. Vance and Jack follow, eyeing the opened crates as they go.
“Section power at 12%…internal comms, offline, I think…..Uplink offline, but we knew that…..I can’t get hardwire data. Hardwire power, but no signal…” his voice seems to fade off. “Give me a minute.”
“Coil Feedback?!” Jules yells from beside a nearby crate, gun at the ready.
“Almost looks like it! You got extra fuse cell’s- big ones?” McAllen yells.
Jules ran over and dropped an object into McAllen bag, then runs back to his position.
“12% power?” Vance asks.
“Yea. Uh..Well..these old stations, you could only control power distribution in blocks. If you set to what they called ‘Minimum’, you get exactly 12 %. Someone intentionally diverted power from here for something. Looks like they weren’t using it much, anyway.” Copilot Sonny Wilson was checking the seals on the airlock. He came over to them. “These guys have to be overdue for supply shipment. Last time I was here with Deadstick, this place was packed with crap. I don’t think it ever goes ‘unused’.”
McAllen looks at him dismissivly. “Well, you explain this, then.”
“I don’t…Listen, All I know is that these rear docks get used more then the main dock. This is the supply queue for the entire station. Usually the ‘main’ dock in A section is used for just personnel transfers, tours, bullshit….”
“..Site inspections.” McAllen said mockingly, typing on the datapad. Wilson turns back to the airlock, annoyed.
The rest of the team assembles around them. “There’s no one around, Sir” Grill states. Vance looks around. “What about the rest of you?” They shake their heads. He looks at Jack “Well Sir, your orders?”
Jack scratches his head. “Well, I was hoping not to get this suit dirty.” They laugh, trying to break the growing tension. “Corporal, first thing…lets get this transmitter up. I think that’s the main access to the Lightwave and transmitters, right?” he said, pointing over Vance’s shoulder.
“Damn, that was easy!” Vance motioned for McAllen to get on it. “Boggs. Go with him. Keep your eyes open.”
“Yea, don’t take your eyes off him!” Dagger yells. McAllen gestured obscenely as he runs off.
“Send a team to Utilities. It’s a long way, but we need to make sure this station isn’t about to blow-up on us. Also, if there’s staff here, that’s where they’ll be. I’m go up to Main dock to look for anyone, just in case. Then, I’m heading to command to meet with the Base commander, a Colonel Wills. I want to take one of your techs with me, if we have to coordinate repairs from there. Also.. I you to want to check out the labs. I know it’s a lot of area, but…” He looks at all of them, trying to decide what to say. “Something odd was going on here. Everyone was working of some large experiment. I don’t have any solid information, but… just see what you can dig up.”
“Does everyone have datamaps?” Vance looks around as the team shakes their heads in agreement. “Alright… Tapper, Johnny, Dagger…you take utilities. Al, Tag, you’re with me. Jules..go with the Lieutenant. Keep your comms open. If you find anyone, check in immediately.”
“About that, sir…” They all turn to look at Jules. “..I was looking over the specs of this base. Some of the old sections use concrete walls made from blastings of the Phobos’s surface. I’m not sure if our comms will work all the time without the internal network. The direct signals may not make it.”
“Well…isn’t that just a nice pile of shit.” Dagger says happily. The rest begin to mumble.
“OK, Jules….But that concrete isn’t used all over, right?” Vance tried to be reassuring.
“Well, no, of course not.” Jules said.
“So, if you can’t make contact in one spot, just try keep trying in another. It should only take a few meters of walking to get out of the dead spots. Make sense?”
Jules nodded. The rest seemed relieved.
“OK. Lets move out! And you!” Vance points at the Co pilot. His eyes got wide. “The captain says the ship’s good to go?”
“Of course.” he said, worried.
“Fine. So, you stay in the ship! I promised you last time, we will leave your dumb ass behind if you wander off again.”
He throws up his hands. “I’m going Sir!, I’m going!” quickly backing towards the airlock. As the others run off, Barney and Jack look at each other, standing aimlessly in the deserted bay. “Jules is it?”
“TechSpecialist Barney Jules. Sir.” He stood at attention.
“Well, lets go for a walk. Sound nice?”
“Not really, sir.” Jack turns, and they head up the access way to section A.
“How much you want to bet on my repair time?” McAllen asks Boggs as she wanders around the area. “How much you want to bet that I care, Hacker.” He fiddles with the equipment in his bag laying in front of a console, containing one too many impacts from crate loaders. “This thing’s been through hell.”
“Don’t they usually keep these consoles in their own rooms, or something?”
He looks up at her from underneath the keyboard “Yea, but this place is pretty old. Probably got away with a lot of violations here.’
Sonny jogs up behind them. “Hey. See Ghostie’s back up to his ass in crap again.” McAllen doesn’t respond. By that point, he was almost completely inside the console, save for his feet. Chickey Boggs looked at the co-pilot with a sneer. “Vance is going to yell at you for being out here again. Go polish your flight stick or something.” He put his hand on the back of her neck. “Can’t polish anything without you.” He kisses her on the neck. She passively turns away toward one of the open crates; He follows. McAllen peeks out from underneath the console before sliding out. Seeing them pressed together against a broken crate lid, he yells “Aren’t you supposed to be watching my ass?”
“Sonny’s is cuter.” She looks over at him. “There’s no one here anyway! Calm down, ghostie.” McAllen stood and flipped a switch on the front of the console. It hummed loudly and came to life.
“Holy shit! That was fast. This a new record, yea?” Sonny shouted.
“It’s not over yet.” McAllen pointed-out.
Frustrated, he begins typing on the console. Suddenly, he stops and turns away. He sets his bag down in front of a large round opening in wall nearby, and removes some parts from the bag. “Boggs, I’m going up the main access shaft.” Sonny looked at Chickey. “That’s funny.” he said quietly . ”I was thinking the same thing”. She smiles at him and bites her lip. McAllen shakes his head. “Bull..fucking..shit..” he mumbles as he climbs up the narrow incline. 200 yards away, the shaft to the lightwave dish and transmitters pierce the moon’s surface. McAllen wasn’t going quite that far. He climbs over cables from the console that line the access shaft. Many yards from the entrance, he comes to a junction box, and opens it. He pulls a black rod from it, playing with it in his hand. He slips a 5-pound fuse cell from his vest and inserts it into the contacts. The conduits in the shaft begin to glow. The datapad beeps, sensing the change in the base.
“DIAG COMPLETE. ALL SYSTEMS POLLED=ACCESSIBLE. UPLINK AVAILABLE. BANDWIDTH=100%. LIGHTWAVE AVAILABLE=+4MIN.”
He reads the screen, then leans back against the wall of the narrow shaft, scratching his head. ‘One bad fuse?’ He thought. ‘Nothing’s wrong here. What the fuck?’
He looked down the shaft. He could just make out Sonny’s bare bottom staring back at him up the hall. His pants lay crumpled around his ankles and Boggs’s naked legs were wrapped tightly around him. Dust rose off the abandoned crates as they bounce. “Well, at least they made it out of the ship this time.” he mumbles to himself. ‘Lets have a little fun before going home’ he thinks. Taking an adapter from his pack, he clamps it around the terminals inside the box, and places his datapad on top. He checks down the shaft once more, and begins typing.
Bagley gave the night tech a nod as they exchanged seats. He wasn’t looking forwards to another day in front of dead terminal 114. He fights to stay awake. Suddenly, a humming tone comes from the console. The frequency display fills with lines. ‘Hmm..Hmm..Hmm. Beep!’
“Oh Fuck!” Bagley blurted out as he grabs the volume control, turning it off.
“What was that?” Tech Andrews asked inquisitively, sitting in the chair just behind Bagley. “I’ve never heard it make that noise before.”
Bagley looks back. “Don’t you have to use the bathroom?”
He ponders it a moment. “No, not really”
“How ‘bout some coffee, I’ll buy!”
“It’s FREE. And I don’t like Coffee. HEY- That’s Phobos, isn’t it?”
“Watch your own damn screen!” he barks, scowling at Andrews. Interim director, Lt. Colonel Harrodsworth passes Bagley’s console. Andrews whips around to his own desk. Bagley leans back from the console and tries to appear as nonchalant as he could; exchanging polite smiles as he passes. Bagley starts breathing again, slowing moving one of the monitor screens back revealing a large black screen beneath. “‘Carrier Wave Telex? What the hell is that?” Andrews asks. “Alright, if you’re gonna sit here, at least try to be cool!,” Bagley whispers. On the screen, a line of words appear: “DIAGBROADCAST: PHOBOS9 ON-LINE” “Shit! It’s running!” Bagley exclaims. He quickly starts to type. ’COMCON: BAGBOY HERE. WHATS UP?’
“GHOSTIE: ALL GOOD. NO PROBLEM HERE.”
“BAGBOY: WHAT THE FUCK?”
“GHOSTIE: FUSE BAD- ONE CHANNEL. REPLACED. ALL GOOD.”
Bagley and Andrews looked at each other. “BAGBOY: NO-REALLY.”
“GHOSTIE: NO SHIT. NO ONE HERE TO REPLACE. CANT FIND STAFF”
Lt. Colonel Harrodsworth began walking back down the hall.
“BAGBOY: LOTSA EYES, GOTTA GO”
“GHOSTIE: EOL”
Bagley and Andrews try to look busy. “Bagley, is it?” Harrodsworth demanded. “Yessir.” Bagley responded. “Any word from Phobos, yet?” Bagley paused.
“No, sir. Nothing” Andrews flashes Bagley a look.
“Page me first sign, alright?”
“Yessir.” As the Lt. Colonel walked off, Andrews whips around in his seat.
“What was that about? What are you doing?”
“Listen, as of right now, we have not officially received any communications from Phobos, get it? As far as I’m concerned, it’s your ass, too. So, just shut up. When the Lieutenant wants to send an actual a message, he will!”
Andrews sat back. “YES SIR!” he said mockingly.
Jules followed the Lieutenant through the administrative halls in supply, trying not to step in the greasy skid marks on the floor. “That Boggs girl..she looks a little small for a trooper.”
Jules grinned. “I know. She doesn’t get a lot of shit for it now. Used to, though. She’s got 4 medals for sniping. That shut a lot of us up.” Jack looks back at him. “Really?”
“Yea. Paint her up, give her a zip gun, and a pair of running shoes, and she could take out a whole platoon. Guess she was a college biathlon champ or some shit.”
“Impressive. Would have never guessed” Jack pops open the door of an office that still had the lights on. No one at the desk.
“Still can’t handle being shot at, though. Sort of freaks-out.”
“She’ll get over it.”
Jules looks up at him and grins crookedly, hopping over an abandoned pallet jack.
“Or, not.” Jack looks around. “Here.”
They pass a small, dark, glass office. “Starlight Intercontinental Finance..Always here for you. Haven’t seen that in a long time.” Bolts bind the door and a fine layer of dust covers the handles.
“Maybe not always here. I haven’t it heard it called by that name since I was a kid. Shit, this place is old.” Jules starts lagging behind, trying to take in all the details around him.
“By the way, where’s your captain?”
Jules speeds-up to Jack. “Deadstick? He doesn’t get off the ship.”
“What?”
“Deadstick hasn’t gotten off the ship in 5 years, I guess. He sort of came with the Valaran. And we didn’t have a dedicated pilot with our team, so…”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. We’ve been stuck on Earth for ever, but they always keep him doing ferry service, deliveries, little shit. They keep offering- he keeps taking it. Whatever, you know?”
“How can you live on a….that’s nuts.”
“I guess he sneaks off when nobody’s looking, but you can’t tell. Didn’t you smell something funny when you first boarded?”
“Yeeeessss…but I didn’t want to mention it.”
“That’s what you get.”
“You have a very strange team, techofficer.”
“Luckily, it’s not mine, I just work here.” He paused. “Sir, we really should have seen somebody by now, don’t you think?”
The cafeteria was unusually messy and quiet. Jules kicked napkins on the floor as they walked. “No project keeps people from eating” He blurts out. They stop at one of the tables. Jack loosens his collar and picks up the Datapad. “This was the main cafeteria, alright.” he said. He hit the transmitter on his communicator. “Tech McAllen, come…” He looks at he corner of his pad and stops. “What’s wrong?”. Jack holds the pad up to Jules. In small type in the corner of the screen were the words UPLINK AVAILABLE. “Looks like that tech got the transmitter working pretty fast. He should have told us.” Jack said.
“He can be that way sometimes. That’s why he gets so much shit.”
“I see.” Jack begins accessing the communications system from the pad. ‘Lightwave 0-USERS’, ‘ENABLE’. “What are you doing, sir?”
“Time to check in with home, son”.
A loud page sails overhead in the ComControl bullpen. Bagley’s voice seemed shaky, but terse. “Lightwave TRANSMISSION FOR COLONEL HAYES, Lightwave TRANSMISSION FOR COLONEL HAYES “ Hayes burst from the bathroom, tripping and pulling on his pants as he makes his way to his office door. “Computer! Open Lightwave transmission!” Jack’s static-filled face appears on the office wall. Hayes sat on the corner of his desk. “Greives. Damn! We’ve got a lot of people that will be happy to hear from you!”
‘Thank you, sir. Listen, something’s going on here.”
“Having problems with that base supervisor. Listen, don’t give him any slack…”
“I haven’t seen him.”
“What?”
“The transmitter apparently wasn’t that badly damaged. We just haven’t found any of the staff yet.”
Hayes blinks. “Well… look, I saw the reports that all staff were reassigned to this one experiment… certain areas are bound to be a little deserted…”
“I know, but we haven’t found one person, not even a janitor. We’re doing a search of the entire base now; haven’t gotten to the main test chamber or Ops yet, though.”
Hayes slid slowly into his chair, stroking his beard. “This is damn strange… I’ll leave this to you for now. Contact me when you get some answers, Jack. Immediately.”
“Sure thing. Look, could you do me a favor? Try to track-down a Prof. Albert Crick at CERN laboratories. I’d like to know exactly what was going on here; I’m thinking he might have something useful to add.”
“You know him?”
“No…Looks like the base supervisor did.”
“Reading transmissions again?” He chuckles. ”Alright… By the way, the Prime minster has ordered an extraction team be sent to follow you in 48 hours, just in case”
“What do you mean? We don’t need extraction. We just got here.” Jack picks-up an abandoned fork from the table and begins fiddling with it. “And… What the hell is the Prime Minister getting involved with this for. He never listens to Corps!” he stops. “This is about Cordova isn’t it!? Damn them!”
“No, Jack…Jesus Christ! You know everyone here has full faith in your abilities. Anyway, the prime minister doesn’t know anything about that. No one at the corps is talking.. this isn’t about you anyway.
“Fine. What is this about?”
“Well this..You know, he does listen to the academy. And, someone there is talking about our little repair mission.”
“Talking… about what? What are we supposed to find?”
“Officially- Nothing. Unofficially.. no one seems to be taking us seriously. I’ve got the top brass asking questions. It’s the prime minister’s staff that’s being fishy. I probably wouldn’t have gotten off the ship.”
“Oh Great!” He throws the fork on the floor. Jules looks up at him.
“I know, I know. Just hold on…” He paused. “Listen, You keep looking. How about I contact you soon as I find something.”
Jack rubs his forehead, feeling another headache start. “Yes, Sir. Greives out” The pad went blank. He looks at Jules.
“I said this was no Survey Mission” Jules says.
“No you didn’t.” They continued through the cafeteria, looking around the corners with a bit more suspicion.
The busy hallways of the Phobos labs were now eerily quiet. Pvt. Sommerby, Corp. Daniels, and Pvt. Tagliano walk through them, looking for any sign of life, and find only dust. In the dim light, they notice evidence of haste; a broken bottle, papers on the floor, an overturned chair, but not a single person. Vance detours down a adjoining hall. After several hundred rooms, Paul and Alecia grew tired of turning door handles. Alecia turns to Paul, giving him a devilish smile. “Well..” Paul started, “we don’t get the chance on bulkheads, that’s for sure. Might as well have some fun now!” He grins and turns to the door on his side of the hall. She turns toward the battered door next to her. “GO!” she yells. They both kick-in their doors together. Wood chips and shattered glass fly into the labs. Their guns drawn, they jump into the labs. No one to be found- on to the next door. They kick their way through two hallways when Alecia stops, looking up at Paul.
“Hey Tag, this is kinda’ fun!” she says.
“No shit! You always have the best ideas.”
Far behind them, they hear heavy running footsteps. “Don’t kick the damn doors!” Vance was yelling as he came down the hall. “What the hell are you guys doing? We’re going to have to fix all this shit!”
“Why !? There’s no one here to complain except you!” Alecia tried to be indignant. Paul knew it was better to just stand there and be very quiet.
“When these guys get back from whatever experiment they’re running, don’t you think they’re going to NOTICE A DOZEN MISSING DOORS!?” Vance was angry, which was rare.
“I don’t think there’s anyone here.”
“I don’t care what you think. You’re not A FUCKING GORILLA! Open the doors just like this, and just peek inside each room!” He reaches out for the nearest door and turns the handle. It swings open with a faint creak, and hits the wall inside. All three of them stop for a moment. “Uh…what the hell?” Paul tries to spit out the words as he looks at the object in the corner of the room. “What… the fuck is that?”
They slowly enter the room, guns drawn; the autolights flicker on. Sitting forgotten on the table is a large open jar across from them. Metal electrodes dig into the sides to the jar- more hung from its lip. Wires hanging from the electrodes lay strewn across the dirty floor to a flickering computer console, it’s batteries slowly draining. “It’s just a simple plasma experiment, like the kind we did high-school. Magnetically contained plasmas, curved into a rotating mass, about the size of a soccer ball?” They look at Paul suspiciously. “..Then the teacher made you calculate it’s half-life..with..or under.. EM field of a certain amount of joules….You guys did that too..yea?” Vance and Alecia then look at each other and shrug. “It’s a parlor trick- that’s it”.
“I don’t remember anything from our science class looking back at us.” Alecia says, closely holding her gun.
“Yea, Tag… Somehow, this is a little different. That’s no plasma.”
The ball gave the glass container an odd blue glow. In the jar, looking back at them, they could just make-out a suggestion of a face deep inside the ball. It seemed to speak, though there wasn’t a sound in the room. The void of its eyes stared in to space. Though there was movement, there was no life. They watched the vessel, transfixed.
“It’s… a hologram..a projection?” Alecia finally said.
“You don’t put a projection in a jar…” Paul said.
“Why does it look like it’s talking?”
“That got to be some sort of optical illusion”
“Do you think it’s …toxic, or like…contagious? Radioactive?” she asked
Paul walks closer to the jar, his nose inches away from the glass. Vance reads a clipboard sitting on the computer. “No lid….I guess if it was toxic, they’d put a lid on it.
Vance lifts a page on the clipboard. “Looks like they were pumping it full of metals. Trying to change…an EM signature?”
Paul looks back at him. “EM signature… Is it putting-out a EM field?”
“I guess”
“Wow. Maybe that’s why it’s floating.”
Alecia hadn’t moved from behind them. “It floating ‘cause it’s in water, Tag.”
“Water?! No water in it. Vance look here…” Paul pointed to the side of the vessel as Vance bent over to see.
“…just above the bottom. It’s not touching. See it?”
Vance squinted. “I don’t see…Wait..this is in water, you dope.”
“Don’t look at the front, look here… next to the crack in the glass. ..Here….Oh..Shit. It is water. Never mind.”
“Tag,” he said softly, trying to concentrate. ‘Don’t push on that crack…”
Paul pulls his finger back, just as the crack crept it’s way up to the lip of the glass container. “Uh…whoops.” Paul said, much too calmly. Alecia’s eyes become very large. “OH…SHIT!” Vance yells as the container cracks in half, spilling the blue mass and the water that surrounded it all over the table. Alecia screams “CATCH IT!” Vance jumps back as the ball slid toward him, and off the table. Paul slips as he tries to catch it himself, but it bounces off his arm. Vance dives forward, his hands outstretched for the orb. Only inches from his grasp, the mass strikes the floor with a muffled thud, and splits open. Bluish mud inside spurts out over Vance’s outstretched arms. He turns his head away, squinting. “OH GOD- GET THIS CRAP OFF OF ME!” Alecia and Paul stand back, looking at him with shock.
“Nice catch! What is that smell?”Alecia says, trying not laugh.
“That’s… disgusting.” Paul adds, glancing over at Alecia and hoping she wouldn’t start laughing.
“You fucking did it!” Vance blurts out while trying to stand- slipping in the goo. “Oh!…It’s all over my arm!”
“It’s all over your leg too.” Paul said, throwing him a rag from the computer desk. Alecia turns away, now unable to contain her giggling. While looking at Alecia, Paul puts his hand over his mouth, trying desperately to look as if he had to cough. His toothy grin gives him away. Vance looks up from the mess at the two of them. “OH…What the Fuck!?” He throws the rag at Alecia, finally getting up from the floor. With a renewed determination and slightly soiled pants, Vance walks out of the lab and down the hall, not looking at either Alecia or Paul. They follow behind, checking the rooms as they go, trying with all their strength to not start laughing again.
The service conduits ran beneath the complex to all it’s modules. The tunnels were damp, cool, and poorly lit, but were the fastest ways to get to some distant sections on foot. The utilities module was almost a half-mile of tunnels from section I, the supply dock. Pvt. Grill and TechSpecialist John Sholstein followed Pvt. Dagger Reeves through the tunnels, hopping over cables and pipes as they go, trying not to trip. Sholstein looked at his datapad every few seconds. Dagger stopped suddenly. He turns around, looking at John. “Listen…, Utilities was almost a direct line from the dock, the hall is straight, you can’t get lost. Stop fondling that fucking map!”
“But, there that little jog, here, and it says we’re here…”
“There IS NO OTHER TUNNEL! If we turned here, we WOULDN’T EVEN BE ON TE MAP! Put it away!” He turns back down the hall and begins walking again. Grill chuckles at them. “You know, I actually outrank you!” John shouts at the back of Dagger’s head. He quietly slides the pad into his vest pocket and quickly follows, convinced that the argument was not yet over. They pass a large hole in the wall leading to yet another tunnel. The cables and pipes ran into a large junction box, and split off down the hall. They slow to squeeze around the box. Sholstein stops for a moment, catching something out the corner of his eye. “Hey…are those sparks?” Reeves and Grill turn around and come over too him.
“We’ve got to keep..moving.” Reeves looks down the darkened tunnel. “Is that coming from the floor?”
“Let’s check it out. It’ll just take a second.” John runs down the hall. Reeves and Grill glance at each other, mildly frustrated.
“You know, I’m sick of running through these stinking caves- I don’t wanna have to run through more for some fucking short-circuit, or some crap..” Reeves complains.
“Dagger, you whine like a mule sometimes. Besides, this ain’t any short.” John looks down at the electrical conduit at his feet. They gather around the gaping hole in the cables. Sparks pop and hiss as they watch. “I don’t get it…Did it explode?” Grill asks Sholstein, dancing in place to avoid the sparks. Dagger looks at Grill and shakes his head. “Pretty clean cut, huh.” On the floor, a large chrome harness lay next to the gap. Dagger kicks it towards Grill. He picks it up. “Whoops. Someone cut it?” Grill said, looking up. “Where are we? Where does this tunnel go?”
John looks at the metal in Grill’s hands. “Yes, private. This is.. I think.. a clamp harness, for a bi-metal conduit sectioner…”
“..An emergency kill-switch. This cable was cut- in a hurry. ” Dagger added, with a grin.
“Yup. Where the hell does this go..” John takes the datapad from his pocket and begins typing quickly. “Section F….Wow. Only one room. Look.” He hands the pad to Dagger. Grill looked over his shoulder at the map.
“It’s a whole section, it can’t be one stinking room…” He concentrates as he looks around the little map. “‘Low-atmosphere Lab’? This is a fuckin’ laboratory!”
“But why would they cut the cables? Why not just shut it off with the junction controls?” Grill asks.
“C’mon Tapper, we’re not here to fix some old lab. I ain’t going down there any way. Too fucking dark.” Dagger grew impatient.
John Sholstein looked at him and raised an eyebrow. “Fine.” He began walking back up the tunnel to the junction box. Dagger throws his gun around his shoulder and follows with Grill. They pass up John as he stops next to the junction box to tie his boot. He watches them pass and quietly slides-out the retaining bar to the box. The access door falls to the floor with a loud thump. They whip around, looking at him. “You guys might want to see this” he says.
“Holy Shit! The whole thing is fused together!”
“Yup. Look, the control circuits are fried, too. Check out the metal drippings on the side of the box…” John leans inside, Dagger peeks his head around the corner. “…This power came from the lab. If it had come from the grid, all this other cable in here would be on fire. “ John hops out of the box and looks at Dagger inquisitively.
“Didn’t the Lieutenant say the scientists were working on a big experiment, or something?” Grill spoke nervously.
Dagger leaned against the side of the box and crossing his arms. “Well…go ahead.”
John sighed and shook his head, grabbing the communicator. “Sholstein to Daniels, come in.”
Vance hopped of the bottom of a ladder between sections B and D, just coming into the new areas of the facility. Paul and Alecia walk back to him. “Hey, they finally found someone!” Alecia said. Vance presses the button on his arm. “Go ahead, Johnny.”
“Sir, were about half-way to Utilities. We found a blown conduit leading the something called a Low-Atmosphere Lab. Looks like it took out some control systems too.”
“Overload?”
“Kind-of. The system overloaded, but not from the grid. The cable damage was…It looks intentional, sir.”
“Plasma fire?”
“No sir. There’s heavy equipment down here. Looks like it was cut.”
Paul gave a surprised look at Vance when Jack broke in. “Sholstein, this is Lieutenant Greives, did you say the overload was not from the grid?”
“Sir, the damage in the junction box seemed to show a massive surge from something in that section. This wasn’t some short circuit.. The contacts were actually welded all the way down. Looks like a huge power source was sending power back into the grid, sir. As a matter of fact the lines are still sparking, that’s how we found it.”
Jules looks back at Jack from the elevator console he was slowly dismantling. They exchange suspicious looks.
“He thinks there’s a active power generator in that lab? Right now?” Jack asked him, without keying his mike.
“Johnny wouldn’t know a huge power source if it was plugged in his ass.” Jules said jokingly.
“If those lines are sparking, there’s still power coming from that section. You guys continue down to utilities. We’ll check-out that section for the base staff.” Vance said.
“Yessir!” John releases the communicator and looks at Tapper and Reeves. He throws-up his hands and says “Well..Lets Go!” Walking away from the damaged junction box, he thought for a moment about that kind of drastic action, cutting a heavy cable, and how difficult it would be to repair. Being a TechOfficer, he would obviously be interested in such details, unlike the rest of his team. He catches himself being self-conscious of the fact he was worrying about these little details. We wondered about what kind of decision that had to be- to take such emergency measures. ‘Why couldn’t they have prepared for this?’ he thought . “This was an emergency.”
“What was an emergency?” Grill asks.
“Eh?” John looks up at Grill, not realizing he was thinking out loud.
“Don’t listen to him Tapper. The freak’s just talking to himself again” Dagger explained.
John stops. “Oh…Fuck you, Dagger.” He pauses for a moment to look back through the dark at the harness laying on the ground. He turns and runs a bit to catch-up with Reeves and Grill, no longer comfortable with letting them get too far ahead.
“Can you get that thing to go up yet?” Jack asks impatiently, peering through the grated floor into the darkness below. “It’s an electrical short on the upper floors, feedback is killing everything off above level 4, I just need to…” Jules begins to plead.
“Listen, we’ll take the stairs to command, if we have too. I don’t care about the elevator. Not really sure I want to really get back on that thing after what just happened…” Jack rubbed his shoulder, more out of pride than pain.
“It’s 10 floors up! Anyway, I’m wiring the car to run independently, ignoring the call system. It’s just gonna be a minute…” The panel at his feet begins arcing tiny bolts of electricity to the floor grate below him. As he looks down, panel beneath the floor explodes in to flame, sending electricity and metal shards into the floor grate. The grate gives way, and Jules falls through the hole into the dark below. Jack drops to the floor, as the electricity shoots through his legs. Staggering to his feet, he could still feel the electricity tingling throughout his body. He runs to the hole and grabs the edge, looking through the smoke and darkness. “Jules!” he shouts. He could just make out Jules’ body, laying motionless on the floor below. He runs down the hall to an access hatch, and climbs down to the service floor. A thick, rancid water covers everything, making the floors slippery. The only light filters through the floor grates from the level above. He hugs the walls to keep from falling.
“Jules!” He yells. “Are you OK!?”
He reaches for Jules’ leg as he kneels down beside him. It was twisted back, but not broken. He reaches around Jules’ neck for a pulse. He lay face down in the water, unmoving. Jack grabs his side and rolls him on his back. A section of the floor had cut into his side. Jack looks down at the wound and puts his hand Jules’ face to feel for a breath.
“Y..Yo..Your ha…hand stinks” Jules fights to say.
“Shit! I thought you were dead!”
“No…not yet. W…What’s that smell?” Jules blinks and opens his eyes.
“It’s the crap down here. It’s all over the place. Especially you.”
Jules begins to fidget. “Don’t move! You fell on some metal grating. Give me a second.” Jack fumbles through Jules’ pack for a medkit.
“Great. If I don’t get it from… the shrapnel, it’ll be the infection.”
He pulls out some gauze and lays it on Jules’ chest. He pulls the soiled tactical vest back from the shrapnel sticking out of Jules side. “Damn.”
“What is it?”
“If I take this out….Hold On.” Jack grabbed the communicator. “Vance, Come in. Corporal, this is Greives.. Come in. LaGrange team, come in.” Jack hears only static.
“We’re too low. The electrical charge probably isn’ helping much either.” Jules says with a defeated grin.
“Alright. Try not to move, it’s not very deep. This will still probably hurt like hell, though.” Jack grabs the shrapnel and slowly backs it out, pushing it to one side to check for damaged arteries. He throws the metal shard to the floor and pushes the gauze into Jules’ side. “Here. Hold this. Don’t pass-out on me”. He tears a section off Jules’ jacket, tying it around his waist, packing more gauze underneath as he tightens the fabric. “O…Oh SHIT!” Jules yells. “Stay still. It doesn’t look like you’re bleeding out.” Jack looks at his face. “Lucky kid; You didn’t hit anything major.” Jack wraps his belt around the fabric and holds it for a minute. Pulling back the gauze, he sprays wound compound from the pack on the gash. Jack stands up. “It’s not bleeding too bad…Keep your hand on it. Don’t try to stand yet- let the spray take effect.” Jack walks over to the hole in the ceiling, then down the hall towards the access hatch, considering his options. He glances back at Jules.
“I told you not to get up!”
“It feels better standing.” Jules leans against a water pipe, gripping his side. “How’d you get down here?”
“Ladder hatch back there. I don’t think you’re going to manage it.”
Jules looks at the smoldering hole in the wall that used to cover the elevator’s circuits. “Probably not.” He thinks for a moment . “Actually… this might help us. “
“I… really don’t think it does.”
“No…look..” Jules strains as he walks to the rusted elevator door. He leans against it and picks-up a piece of shrapnel off the floor. “That was main power to the car that just exploded. The car’s now on batteries. All I need to do now is trick it into coming down here…” He slid the shrapnel into the door jamb. With a click, the door to the empty shaft slides open. “…and were home free. You’ll see. Grab those cables hanging down there.” Jules leans against the opening, fighting the pain. Jack reaches into the open shaft and pulls the cables over to Jules. He takes a knife and cuts one open. Then, pulling a jumper from his pocket, he clamps it to the open wire. He plugs the other end into his datapad.
“Huh, it still works!?” Jack said, surprised.
“ Yea, these tech pads handle almost 10,000voltz. They aren’t the ones they issue everyone else.” He types on the pad. “All I have to do is send a signal to the panel to run the car to it’s bottom limit, which hopefully is right here.” Jack leans back and considered Jules carefully, impressed with the young man’s resilience. High above, the car creaks to life and begins it’s long descent. Quickly, Jules yanks the jumper from the cable and lets it fall back into the shaft. They watch as the car descends and comes to a decisive halt at their feet.
“Impressive!”
“I know.”
“We’ll go upstairs and have someone take you to their medical center.” Jack tells him.
Jules grabs Jack around the shoulder as he helps him into the elevator car. The bright lights of the car made Jules blink a little. Jack looks down at him. The sticky water covered his face and his bleeding wound.“You really look like crap.”
“Yessir.” The door quickly slides shut. With an overburdened hum, the car rose to the command center.
Copilot Sonny Wilson stood aimlessly in front to the rations locker behind the cockpit. The small compartment above the bright green switch began to hiss and gurgle. Steam filled the chamber behind the little glass door. Sonny took in a deep breath and smiled. Coffee began to fill the cup inside. He turns to sit down in the cockpit, pushing a large lever on the control panel forwards. A noise comes from the loading bay. He turns around as he gets up from the pilot’s seat. “The reactors are at full power. So, you’ve got 8 minutes. Are you still seeing that drop off?” He hears footsteps in the bay, but the captain doesn’t respond. “I said were at full now. Is that emitter still reading low? Captain?” He ducks as he steps from the cockpit hatch. “I’m making coffee, if you….” He rounds the corner to the bay and suddenly stops, seeing something that shouldn’t be there. It stood facing the bulkhead, pulling at a flak-jacket hanging there with it’s sharp claws. Spiney bones poked through it’s dark, leathery skin, ripping at the air as it moved. Cracks in it’s skull held heavy, black eyes that now survey the shaken copilot. The muscled creature was unlike anything Sonny ever seen before. As it turned towards him, he almost didn’t notice the small grey helmet in it’s hand. The it still held the face of Pvt. Boggs, her eyes open, a tiny trickle of blood dripping from her mouth. He reaches for his sidearm. The creature growled and swipes the arm from Sonny’s body, kicking him to the floor. The creature reaches down, grasping Sonny by the neck, and slams him into a bulkhead until his bleeding head split in two. Sonny’s body goes limp. The creature stashes the copilot’s body in the nets above the bay, just next to Captain Potts’ dismembered torso. The hissing of the coffee maker catches the creatures attention. He makes his way to the cockpit, finding the new lights and smells too intriguing to ignore.
The sun had begun to set on the horizon. Through the windows, the dim sunlight danced off the white and chrome walls of the command center. Indicator lights on the walls popped off and on; but most were dark. Data terminals under the great windows blinked with activity, but no one sat witness to their labor. Jack and Jules stood in the elevator doorway looking suspiciously at the abandoned control center. Jack pursed his lips and punched the wall. “Mother fucker.”, he spat, shaking his head. “Well…” Jules said, carefully sitting down in front of one of the terminals. “…I guess the base in now officially fucked.” He looks up at Jack. “There isn’t any situation where staff would leave a base command, is there?”
Jack looks around. “Nope. Someone has to be here 24 hours a day. Especially a station this old, this un-automated.” He paused. “Check that terminal…See if monitoring controls have been transferred to somewhere else.” He turns and hits some switches on the indicator panel on the back wall. Jules began typing. “I don’t….Nope. Everything’s still run through here.”
“Damn it” he says to himself. “Jules, begin status check of all the major systems.”
Jules turns-on another console. Sitting easing into a wobbly chair, he wheels himself in front. “A lot of the security sensors are down. Whole sections are blind. I don’t think anything is depressurized…must have had some major damage recently, though. Some of these systems are routed strangely. Nothing is in standby..Nothing’s shut down, shit. Yea…I’ve got overload alarms, under power alarms, recycler alarms, pumps…what the…?” He leans toward the screen. “…we’re reading minimal power here, too. That’s why. Uh…Utilities are down, we’ve got no power?”
Jack turns away from the military supply locker he found, pulling out a black tactical vest. “That’s not right…Everything’s still lit. It’s putting out some power.” He pulls the jacket around him, but it only comes to his hips. He quickly drops it on the ground and returns to the locker, thinking he saw an old assault rifle.
“No. Well…yea, obviously. Wait. “ Jules smacks the side of the monitor. “I don’t know about these readings. Give me a minute.”
“Listen, I’ve got to call this in. Sit tight. See if you can locate any people- start with the labs and bays.” Jack turns down a short corridor behind the elevator. In a narrow room, a communications control bay flickered with life. He sits down in front, and begins to type. In moments, Colonel Hayes face was looking back at Jack from the console.
“Lieutenant…What have you found?”
“Sir…this is bigger than some discipline problem.”
“What happened?”
“I just made it to command. It’s abandoned. Most of the station is abandoned. I’ve got teams searching for the staff, but no one’s checked in with anything. Internal sensors are not operational- hell, a lot of the station is in the same condition. “ Hayes sat back in his chair. “ I don’t feel comfortable with this, Colonel. I’m doing a half-assed S&R with a technical crew and no scanners.”
He considers it. “Not a single person? Bodies?”
“No. We haven’t searched everywhere yet, but…It’s not like they’re working on something. Everything is left like they just walked away- even the cafeteria! It isn’t right. Did you get anything from that guy at CERN?”
“ I’ve tried to get him several times. I left a message, but I guess a military inquiry isn’t a high priority for these people. I’ll keep trying.”
“Thanks.”
“Listen, the extraction team is still on countdown. That means you have less then 2 days to get some solid info and get out of there or they’re a go. I’m assuming the station is intact, and reactors are normal?”
“Reactors read offline, but we’ve got power. I think it’s a sensor problem. A team is on the way to utilities, but we didn’t read any radiation. The station itself..we really can’t tell yet. No breached ports, though. No attacks by the looks of it. I really don’t know, sir.”
“I hate to say it, but you may have to consider that this a biohazard containment situation. I’ll have to inform the General of this. I’ll prepare to send a full containment team with the extraction group, if that’s what we’ve got. If we have too, we’ll sterilize the site. Standard protocol, alright? They’ll either land at the main dock and unload emergency team or blow the site from space. Either be there to meet them, or be the hell off that rock. Understood?”
Jack smiled. “I guess so, Sir. It’s just that…biohazards make bodies. We don’t even have that!”
“Jack, I’m sorry about this. This was supposed to be a simple repair mission, Nobody truly expected this to become a problem.”
The smile drained from Jack face. “Why else send me, right?”
Hayes looked directly into the screen. “Jack, is really what you think? I don’t know hat impression you were under, but you were NOT sent there.” He paused. “I requested you for ComControl, Jack. You stood there and took it at the hearing. We all know it. But you stayed. I wanted someone who could stand up in front of the brass… and not blink.”
“I…didn’t know.”
“It’s not for you to know! I knew if you could take that, you could command here. The politics of communications can be…complex.” Jack smiled. Hayes smiled back. “You’ll see.”
“Thank you, sir. I’ll contact you soon as I have something.”
“Same here, Lieutenant. Hayes out.”
The screen went blank. Jack slowly walks back to the command area and looks out the window. Jules glanced over at him.
“So, you found a beautiful nurse to take me down to medical.”
Jack smirked. “Not quite. I did find a deactivated loader bot at the end of the hall. But he’ll only take you if you’re bolted to a pallet.”
“I’ll pass, thanks.”
Jack looks over at him. “How you doing?” Jules rubs his side. “To tell you the truth, I’m feeling OK. Pretty good, actually. It’s not even bleeding anymore.”
“…and for all the time we worked together, Dr. Iverson has always been very careful in his studies. As to this test you’re referring to, I don’t have any actual data..” Professor Crick tried to be polite, while Colonel Hayes tried to not get angry. “Anyway, isn’t communications a military concern?” It was getting harder for Hayes to maintain his composure. He grabs the side of his desk and pulls himself toward the screen.
“Professor, You need not be concerned with the communications problems. I’m only interested in this particular experiment they were running. We need to make sure there wasn’t any …”
“Colonel, like I said, I’ve known Sven for many years. He is an excellent and experienced researcher. If he’s running this study, you can be sure it’s completely safe. I honestly don’t think they’re having any actual problems, beyond their ‘comms’.”
Hayes regards the screen before him as he taps the desk, impatiently. “Thank you for your time, Professor.” “Well sir, if you….” The screen goes blank as Hayes disconnects the feed, cutting the professor off. Hayes leans back, stroking his chin. Lt. Colonel Harrodsworth hurriedly enters Hayes’ office.
“Lieutenant, good. Get me the General…”
“Sir, we can’t raise Phobos, again”
Hayes stopped and stood up. “That’s it. Send that extraction team now, Lieutenant!”
The coffee should have started to go cold, but heat from the plasma ducts above were keeping it abnormally warm. With the reactor at full power, and the ship at idle, various systems began to overheat. Without Captain Potts to shut it down, the engine test had gone on for almost 12 minutes now, 4 minutes past critical. The creature found the blinking lights of the cockpit displays hypnotic, like nothing it had seen in the base. A buzzer sounded from the console, annoying the creature. It pushed a control bar out of the way and broke the loud buzzer. With a thump, the buzzer smoked, and went silent. However, now many other indicators now lit up and began to make noise. A yellow glow came from outside the cockpit window covered the side of the creature’s head. It turns to look at the braking engines coming to life.
Jack stood by the window. “Well, guess it’s time to tell everyone the news… What…. the… hell!?
Far across the base, he saw the a landing pad perched on the lip of the communications dish. On the pad, the engines of their ship glowed. Sparks flew from it’s stabilizers, and it dragged itself closer and closer to the edge of the pad. “Jules..Do you see this?!” he yelled. The docking tube, bending and straining from the stress, snaps, sending a burst of air and flame into the void. Alarms sound in the control room as the ship’s rear stabilizers fall off the pad. The ship stops for a moment, teetering on the edge. “Sir! Low-Pressure readings in the hangar. We’re venting atmosphere! I’m not reading status on the dock bulkhead!”
“Close the hatches in that section you can get access to! Quickly!”
He runs to the base transmitter console and presses the microphone controls. “Pilot! Cut your engines. Captain Potts- This is Greives. CUT YOUR ENGINES!” He grabs his communicator. “Vance! It’s Greives. Come in!” Far below, Vance and Paul, kneels over a disfigured corpse underneath an air vent in the main hall of the research section. Alecia tries to keep watch, gun in hand, as they poke at the body for identification. She tries not looking back at it, but it becomes too intriguing. It’s grotesque features make it seem less than dead and more like a fake; a damaged movie prop. The smell, however, left no doubt. The voice that suddenly blared from their radios made them jump. They look at each other in amusement, as Vance squeezes his communicator. “Sir..we found a body…”
Jack cuts him off. “Vance..Get everyone back to the dock. The ship….Oh my god!…”
The engines glow hotter and hotter. The ship begins to slowly skid again. Sparks shoot from the belly of the craft as it drags itself along the rear edge of the pad, cutting cables and shields as it moves. Slowly, the cockpit of the ship rose upwards, and the ship slips off the edge of the pad into the communications dish. Jack froze as the ball of flame erupts from just beyond the edge of the loading bay. Far in the distance, pieces of the dish fly into space, destroying towers and cables that once powered it. He looks down at his datapad. “UPLINK UNAVAILABLE” it reads.
Vance looks over at Tag and Alecia. He pressed his mic. “Commander?”
“….The ship…it’s destroyed! It backed-off the platform and fell into the dish. Get back there, now! We’ll try to send out repair bots and repressurize the section from here.”
“Wh…What?! It backed off the platform?!”
“Get your teams down there now!”
“Acknowledged!” Vance yells as he and Paul jump to their feet. Alecia was already half way down the hall. Vance squeezes the communicator button. “Tapper!…..” Dagger and Tapper looked at each other, totally confused, having just made it to utilities. Tapper grabs his communicator. “We’re on it!” John came jogging around a large chemical tank. “What the hell did he say about the ship?!”
“I don’t know about this one, Dag.” Tapper said, opening the hatch back into the service conduits. Dagger shook his head as he grabs the ladder. “We just fucking got here…I knew this was gonna go to hell.” He climbs down. “I could just feel it”. As Tapper reaches the bottom, Dagger was already running down the darkened hall. Tapper takes a few steps when he notices John isn’t behind them. He looks up- John wasn’t even on the ladder. “Dagger! Johnny’s not down yet!” Dagger stops. “Fucking get him!” he yells. Tapper climbs back up the ladder as Dagger runs toward him. Dagger looks up and waits. “Hey Guys…C’mon!” Gunfire echoes through the air. “SHIT!” He yells, and grabs the ladder. Suddenly, Tapper crashes through the hatch above, landing on top of him. “Aarrgh! Get your gun out of my ass!” Dagger screams, fumbling for his own weapon. Dagger pushes himself off the ground as Tapper fires through the hole, high above. “What the fuck?! Where’s John?”
“They got him!” Tapper knelt down, focusing his sights on the very edge of the hole. “There’s someone…” he begins to shake. “..FUCK! There’s things up there. People.. But..FUCK!”
“Why are we shooting at them? Where is John?” Dagger points his gun towards the hole, too.
“They fucking grabbed him! They’re coming…” Tapper sees the head of a man peer over the edge. He fires. Soon more faces appear, scarred and expressionless. They reach for the ladder.
“HOLY SHIT!” Dagger yells as he fires. Bodies fall through the hole, nearly missing them. “What the hell is going on?!”
“Dagger! Move!” Tapper yells as one of the bodies on the floor struggle to reach for them. They begin to back down the hall as the rotten and disfigured men tumble through the hatch, and then rise from the ground. As the mutants move closer, Dagger sees the remains of the clothing covering shattered bodies- Phobos staff uniforms. “TAPPER?! What is this shit?!”
“They were eating him! Fucking eating Johnny! They had their hands in his head…His fucking skull!” Tapper pulled his sidearm, firing both guns together. “Keep firing, Dagger. Let’s GO!” Tapper yells, firing at the crowd as he backs down the hall. He turns and notices Dagger staring deep into the conduit behind them. His eyes adjust to the dim light. He could just barely make out the junction box at the low-atmosphere lab conduit, several hundred yards in front of them. In the dim light, he thought he saw something move.
“Activate a repair drone. We’ve got access to that at least, right?” Jack turns to Jules as he powers-up the console in front of him. “I think there’s a couple in that hall we went past, just after the entrance to the bay. Here! I’ve got’em.” A control stick pops-up from Jules’ console. Far below, A lifter bot jerks forwards and comes to life, emergency lights blinking through the halls. It ducks out of it’s alcove along the loading bay’s wall, and with it’s large, booming steps, walks toward the damaged port.
“I’ll repair the door.” Jules says, concentrating on the flickering screen. Jack works quickly to restart fire and emergency systems in the halls near the bay. “No. Hold on…Transfer control over here and activate another bot. I’m going outside.” Jules shoots a confused glance at him as he switched the robot’s control to Jack’s console. A small screen lit up in front of him as a second lifter made it’s way out of the alcove. The lifters make their way to the port entrance. Jules stops his bot at the massive door, still propped open with broken pieces of their ship’s docking tube. The lifter grabs the door, and pulling it open. “Ah. See it? Right at the bottom. I’ll have to grind that piece off.” Jules starts the robot’s metal cutter and extends it towards the door. Jack maneuvers his lifter past, stepping into the vacuum of the landing pad. Over metal shards and broken plastic wires, Jack fights with the controls to keep the lifter steady. It walks to the back edge of the pad overlooking the massive communications dish spreading towards the horizon, hundreds of feet below. It peeks over the edge. “Cmon…Cmon.” Jack mumbles. Hoping to see someone, the pilot, a tech, anyone, clinging to the edge in their space suit, he zooms the lifters cameras around the wreckage. “Maybe someone’s trying to make it back up the sides toward the pad.” Jules doesn’t respond. Far below, smoke and dust rises from the cracked-hull of the Valaran, it’s radioactive core slowly burning into the dish. Jack pans the lifter’s cameras around. There was no movement in the twisted metal. Nothing. Jack lowers his head into his hands and rubs his forehead. “Fuck.”
The communicator crackled. “We’re under…under attack! Fucking Mutants!” The communicator popped with the sound of plasma blasts and gunfire.” Vance, Alecia, and Paul were just coming down the hall from the old labs, half-way back to the loading bay. Vance stops and grabs the communicator. “Tapper! Attack from what ?! What is your position?” No response. “Tapper! What is your position?!”
“E-section conduits. 200 meters past Junction 115….Fucking mutants!…” He stops.
“Tapper. Say again. What’s going on?!”
“It’s the base staff! They’re changed…..they’re trying to….” The communicator goes dead again.
“Tapper!? Tapper!” Vance yelled. “John! Dagger! Anyone come in!” Paul looked at him, unsure which way to run. “Lieutenant, are you receiving me?
Jules looked over his shoulder at Jack, shocked. Jack stood behind him looking at the small screen in front of them. He squeezes the communicator. “Vance. I read you. Proceed to their location now. Don’t try to get to the loading bay.”
“My people are still in there! What’s going on?!”
Jules looks away from his screen, clenching his fist. “Vance….those men are down. 4 Down. Get to Tapper’s team. That’s an order!” Jack looks at the console in front of Jules. On the screen, a small black and white image flickered. McAllen’s feet protruded from a gaping hole in the top of the main communications console. Below, another body lay crumpled-up in front to the emergency hatch.
Alecia, Vance, and Paul, run as fast as they could through the maze of passages to E section. Paul skids to a stop as he rounds a corner. He reaches down into an alcove containing an access hatch to the service conduits. Straining as he cranked the rusted handle on the hatch, the others watch impatiently for him to finish. Paul throws open the lid and they drop through the hole. Reaching the floor, He races through the corridor with his gun at his shoulder. Vance and Alecia follow, fighting to keep up. The corridor was silent save for a faint clicking down the hall. Paul rounded the corner of a junction and suddenly stops. He raises his hand and they all crouch down. Bodies cover the floor; burns from plasma fire cover the walls. Down the dim hall, they make out the shape of one solitary figure leaning over something on the floor, pulling on it over and over. They inch forward, silently stepping over the smouldering body parts that lay there. Suddenly, it looks-up and charges them. The light from Paul’s gun lit it’s face. “What the hell..?!” Vance whispers as he sees the mutant charge them. It’s puffed skin and it’s vacant bleeding eyes made Paul shudder and freeze. At the last moment, he pulls the trigger and it falls to the floor. Paul didn’t move. “V…Vance!?..WHAT THE FUCK?….”
“I Saw!, Tag. I saw! Just chill!”
Alecia looks down at the bodies around them. “My God! They’re all like that!”
Paul staggers forward a little, waving his gun at the shadows. “What is this shit, Vance?! Where’s Dagger?”
“I don’t know what’s going on. Nothing else is moving- start searching for our team!”
They make their way slowly down the hall, turning mangled bodies as they went. They come across the object their attacker had been kneeling over, just a moment ago. “My god- it’s Tapper! What was it doing to him?” Vance looks down at the discharged power-packs laying around the private’s body. The hole in his chest exposed the ribs over his heart- the muscles between stripped back and torn. He kneels down, inspecting the wound, then looks back at the mutant that attacked them. “It…was eating him..” Vance said, confused. Alecia, her eyes fixed on the body, steps back. “D..Dagger?” she says. Paul looks down the rest of the hall. Bodies carpet the floor, all the way to the faint light of the Utilities hatch at the end of the conduit. “What kind of hell is this?” He whispers. Alecia stops short and falls to her knees next to Dagger’s body. “Vance!… Vance….Dagger’s dead. He… he..” She winces from a pain. Vance stood over her, putting his hand on her shoulder. “Wh…Why!?” She was shaking. Vance pulls her up, and they continue down the corridor.
Jules hurriedly stuffs all the emergency supplies and ammo from the shelves of the supply room behind the control center. He pulls some tactical gear from the lockers and tries to put it on again, when the communicator vibrates with Vance’s agitated voice. “Sir, we’ve found our team… and what looks like a lot of the base staff.”
“Go ahead, Vance” Jack responded, wrestling with the ill-fitting tactical harness stuck to his back.
“We’re too late. They got the team. There’s no one left.”
“What the hell!…” Jules shouts.
Jack raises his hand at Jules. “Vance, what the fuck is going on?! Who got them?”
“The base staff appear to be…mutated…in some way. Looks…like…radiation burns, maybe something more. Some of these people are missing parts, others have parts I’ve never seen before..” Vance paused. “I think it’s time you tell us what the hell is really going-on here.”
Jack and Jules looked at each other, confused. “Vance, I got here the same time you did. If I knew anything more, you would know by now. Alecia runs to Vance yelling “Fuck him! Fuck this! He’s trying to get us killed just like those others…Don’t you tell me you don’t know..Fuck!” Vance puts his hands up to push her away. “Tag!” Vance yells. Paul runs over and pulls her away, trying to calm her down. Vance waves them back. “Shut-Up. Shit! Just a minute!” he yells. “Vance, are you there?” Jack’s voice crackled through their communicators, echoing down the conduits. “Yes. Yessir.”
“Listen, Vance, We’re going to figure this out. We’re going to do it together. You read me?”
Vance looks back at Alecia, still fuming. “Alright. OK….Look, I don’t think there’s anyone else down here. No movement. But, It’s a bad position- we can’t stay in these tunnels. What’s our next move?”
“Control is still blind in the conduits, especially in that sector. Where are you now?”
Tag finds a plaque on the wall. He shows Vance. “Conduit 181, says: 12-E”
“Hold-On, Vance.” Jules hands Jack his datapad and they crowd around it’s little screen. “Hey, is this…?”
“Yes. Perfect. I think they’ll want to know about that.” Jack says to Jules.
“I think you’re right.”
“Vance!” Jack shouts into his mic. “Get out of those conduits and to the junctions of West Main corridor and hall C-45. Should be just above you. There’s an emergency tactical supply room there. Your military ID codes should unlock it, if the base’s files are current. Get what you can and make your way to command. We’re going to try to regain control of the station from here.”
“Sir, I’m going to the hangar. I need to find my crew.
Jules hung his head. “Vance, there all gone. Please. There’s no one left. Anyway, the entire bay is depressurized.” Jack pleads.
“I’m going there. I.. have too.”
Jules shakes his head. “Alright. Meet us in command 17:00 hours. Be careful.”
“Yessir.” Vance waves to Alecia and Tag. They climb the nearest ladder to the light of the halls above.
“Down Here!” Tag shouts, running down the hall. Alecia throws the ladder’s hatch shut with a loud clang. Vance glares back at her. “What the hell is wrong with you!? “ He says. She shakes her hands at him. “What’s your problem now?”
“ I don’t feel like having any more of those things know we’re here! This OK with you?”
Vance stands in front of her, not backing an inch. A proper response for Alecia usually involved combinations of yelling, physical abuse, and gunfire. And with Dagger dead, a proper response wasn’t likely. Dagger and Alecia been together for 3 years, and he was the only one who could keep her calm. Tag starts to back-up. She stands, wiping the sticky residue from the hatch off her hand, and slowly walks past Vance. “Yes…sir.” Tag, surprised, exhales quietly and leads them down the hall.
“I don’t see..uh…Yes! Here it is.” Tag began banging his clearance codes into the access pad on the door to the tactical storage room. “What the hell is wrong here? Hold on.” Vance and Alecia stop glaring at each other long enough to harass Tag.
“What’cha do, Tag? Forget your code?” Alecia chirped, without looking at either of them. She leans against the wall. Paul tries not to respond or even look at Alecia, now being in easy weapons range for her. Fearing he’d spark some terrible reprisal, he quietly takes the abuse. Vance watches him for a moment; his tapping on the pad becoming more and more pronounced. “If your codes won’t work, none of ours will. Here, give me your datapad.”
“No surprise. Just look at this dump- bet you nothing’s been updated for years.” Alecia said. She was starting to spit her words.
“Vance… what the hell are you doing?” Tag watches nervously as Vance tears off the back of his datapad and pulls out some of the fine wires coiled inside. “That my map!!” He yells. “Cut it out!”
Vance pulls the faceplate from the wall and twisted wires from the inside, binding them to the wires he pulled from the datapad. It beeped and buzzed alarmingly as he continued. “Where did you learn to do that?” Paul asks.
Vance smirks. “Around.” He types on the pad.
“He learned it from McAllen. That’s why he keep’s him around.” she says, accusingly.
“I wish I could explain how understanding I’m trying to be, for your sake.” Vance stares at her as the door suddenly clicks and slides open. A cloud of dusty, stale air wafts into the hall.
“Wow. That was pretty good. But, why did you have to use my datapad?” Paul asks.
“What? And ruin my own?” He hands what was left of the pad to Tag and walks inside.
“Fuck! What am I supposed to do now? My maps were in there?”
“Well, Tag, just don’t wander too far off , huh?”Alecia says, smiling as she slid her arm into a loaded tactical vest hanging on the wall. Somehow her smile was as chilling than horrors they witnessed in conduits below, and it made Paul uneasy.
Working mappad in hand, Vance, Alecia, and Paul work their way back to the hangar. Their pace felt too much like a funeral march, so Vance begins to jog. “Double-time, kids! No draggin’ ass!” Alecia and Tag glance at each other, and run to keep up. “Sir, should we be heading back to command now?” Paul spoke, breathlessly. Vance didn’t answer. The extra gear didn’t weigh much, but it seemed to get heavier the closer they got to the hangar. ‘Why the hell am I tried so now?’ Paul thinks to himself. ‘Sometimes you really don’t feel like arriving at your destination, I guess’.
The entrance to the hangar was one floor below. The stairs at the end of the hall ran the length of the entire hangar, seeming impossibly far away. Alecia shakes her head as she runs. From the corner of her eye, she notices an old door that wasn’t on the map, and suddenly stops. Above her, a faded sign read: ‘Supply Hangar- Observation & Logistics.’
“Vance! Tag! Look at this.” She shouts.
They jog back as she opens the rusty metal door; she stops in the middle of the small room. Vance turns the corner. “Alecia?” The red emergency lights from the control panels slowly blink on and off, reflecting off her expressionless face. Through the large window hatches, they saw their team on the floor far below; McAllen’s legs hanging helplessly out of a large hole in the display of the transmitter’s main junction console. “I don’t think that’s how you’re supposed to get in there.” Tag states, without humor. A quiet repair drone stands next to the door, unmoving. What was left of Chickey was strewn across the windswept floors, finally resting in a tiny pile in front of the port’s emergency door. No one could see her head. “Deadstick and Sonny were on the ship?”
“Time to go.” Vance says.
He turns and walks out of the room. Alecia doesn’t move- staring blankly out the dusty window. Tagliano puts his hand on her shoulder as he starts toward the door. “Fuck this.” She whispers. She doesn’t even look at him as she turns and runs out.
“This channel works. Plug in.” Jack backs away from the screen. Jules looks up at him from underneath the dismantled control panel. “That should be utilities. What do you see?” Jules asked. The odd, blue flickering on Jack’s face from the screen made his expression seem that much more unnerving.“I don’t think we’re going to take a walk down there any time soon.” He flips through the camera selector on the screen and looks down at Jules. “Try the next channel- please.” Jules scoots back underneath the console. Jack heard a faint zap. “Ow! Shit, shit, shit.” Jack peeks at Jules’ legs sprawled out next to him, kicking the floor. “You OK?” The monitor begins to blink with a strange, pulsing static. “Hey! I think that’s it….Let me see” Jules shouts, pulling himself up. “Yup. That’s the one causing the feedback. Watch this…” He pulls a wire out of the bag and crimps it into an exposed buss on the floor. The consoles in the room come to life in a whirr of beeps and buzzes.
“Alright! Lets see what we’ve got. Check automation and see if you can get the supply dock repressurized again. I’m going to try to find everyone else.”
Jules stood up, stretching his back. “You mean you didn’t see everyone in utilities?”
“There were a lot of…people?…milling around…” Jack sat down at a working terminal a few seats away and began surveying the base. “Let see what we’re dealing with here….Whoops.”
“What?”
“I think we’re being followed. Look.”
Jules looks at the monitor. Small black and white images slowly crept around the screen. The ravaged bodies of men and women move tables and knock over the chairs of the main cafeteria. They both gasp when that see the spinney creatures that were herding the mutants like sheep. “What the hell is that?!”
“Look at the arms on that thing! I don’t want to find out.” Jack blurts out.
“How are we going to get out now?”
“I don’t know, yet. How much ammo did you bring?” Jack asked.
“Not that much.”
“I guess we’re not going to the main port, then.” He paused. “ Isn’t there a 3rd dock…”
“Yes! That’s right. Lab dock….but it’s pretty far off. Don’t know how many of those things we’re going to run into. Though, it’s not like we’ve got a ship now, anyway”
“We will.” Jack flips through several of the working cameras and stops. One camera was damaged, but a grainy image still flickered on the monitor. “Jules…this feed isn’t marked. Take a look at this.”
“What the hell is that?….Um..This is coming from that lab Sholstein was going on about.”
“Is that…moving?” A long metal bridge stretches into the center a massive enclosed room. At the end, a platform is perched high above the ground, and a heavy cylinder floats just above it, five stories tall. A great light swirled between them, like a giant spark between two wires. For a moment, the middle of the light faded, revealing something. “Is that…clouds?” The camera’s image suddenly gives-out. Jack smacked the monitor.
“Clouds? That’s a good one.” Jules looks back at Jack’s contorted face. “Sir, these old camera’s get easily overloaded. You give them too much input, they start sending back all sorts of ‘staticy’ artifacts before they burn out.”
Jack leans back in the chair, dropping his arms in his lap. “Don’t put too much faith in the details you see in this old crap.” Jules continued.
“OK, Jules. You’re the expert.” Jack says, suspiciously.
“You’re the one who said ‘Clouds’.”
Jack want back to switching cameras, carefully surveying the station. Jules tries starting the control systems in the damaged loading bay. “I don’t see too much in the other sections. Looks like, what mutants there are, seem clustered together in large groups…” Jules looks up for a moment, thinking he heard an unusual sound from the adjacent room, but nothing was there. Jack leans back in his chair. ”.. but still not enough to account to the 400 people that were stationed here. I figure about only 40 or so left in utilities, looks like 30 here, but I don’t know how many Sholstein’s team encountered…..“ Jules could hardly hear him over the humming coming from the room. He finally asks,“Do you hear that?” Jack stops. “Yea..What the hell is that?…It’s In there.” He and Jules slowly walk into the other room, following the odd sound. “Here..No. Wait, Jack..It’s here. Hold on…” As Jules reaches for one of the panels, a loud bang suddenly blows a hole through the panel, throwing Jack to the floor. All the consoles go dead. Shrapnel from the panel knocks Jules over a chair; the burning metal cutting through his vest. He grabs his stomach and yells. Jack slowly turns over and shakes his head. Jules reaches for the shard sticking out of his side.
Jack’s eyes focus on him. “Shit-NO JULES!. Don’t pull it….”
Jules wrenching in the pain, pulls the smouldering metal from his stomach. Jack stumbles to him and holds him down. “You idiot! Shit…” Jack rips a piece of his jacket and holds the rag to Jules’ wound. “F..Fucking.. ..ceramic..rectifiers..Fuck..ing..rec.. rec..” Jules’ voice trails off.
“Just relax” Jack presses on the wound as he looks Jules over. As he ties a strap around Jules’s waist, he notices Jules’ old wound had healed with a thick brown skin, like a shell. He slowly pulls-back the rest of Jules’ shirt. Dark brown ridges line his abdomen. The skin began to peel away in tiny spots, revealing a brownish shell underneath. The spots spread towards his chest. Jack pulls his shirt back down. Jules’ breathing slows down and he looks up at Jack. “You keep getting hurt, eventually I gonna stop fixing you up.” Jules smiles and places his hand over the wound. Jack sits back down on the faded carpet and leans against the damaged panel. “When did that start?” pointing at Jules’s chest.
“Since the elevator. I think I becoming a giant cockroach.” Jules says, smiling.
Jack watches him carefully, not responding. Jules props himself up on a leg of the overturned chair, holding his side. “You know, Vance still thinks you’re full of shit.” Jack looks down and smiles. “He still thinks you know what’s going on here.”
“And what do you think?” Jack says.
“I wish..I wish you were full of shit. Then I could believe they probably know all about this…whatever this is… and have a cure. I’d know that when we get home, they could probably just give me a shot… and it’d be over. A quick fix. I could probably get some time off for his.” He snickered, wiping his forehead. “I could take Alison hiking in Colorado or… go see her folks in Brisbane, even though I hated it there.” He gasps for air, then relaxes.
Jack regarded him for a moment. “I don’t think there’s a quick fix for any of us now.” He rubs his neck vacantly. “How do you feel?”
Jules looks at the wound. “It hurts, but.. It doesn’t feel like it’s bleeding. Actually…” he removes his hand from the hole and stares for a second. “Holy Shit!” Jack rises and walks to his side. “Let me see” he says. A black, fibrous patch was woven over the wound. “What else can you Do?” Jack asks.
Jules stares at the patch on his side, as if waiting for it to talk back. “This just gets fucking weirder.”
“COMMANDER. This is Vance.” His voice cuts through uneasy silence of the powerless command center. They both jump at the sound. Jack grabs his communicator shaking his head. “Vance! Thank God. What’s your status?”
“We’ve just started our way back to command. No survivors at the dock.”
“Yea. We know.” He pauses. “Hold you position, Vance. There’s a large group in the main cafeteria that’s cut us off from that section. Although, we don’t know precisely where they are now. We had partial power here a minute ago. Now, I’m afraid we’re blind again. We’re thinking of making it to the lab-access dock and contacting extraction team to pick us up there.”
“Sounds good ,Sir. You should know, we located duty roster sign in the controller’s office. Everyone was posted to different duties in one lab. There are also a bunch of transfer requests here, all going tho something called the Low-atmosphere facility. That’s where everyone is assigned, and it’s where Tapper’s cut conduits were going. “ Jack began typing on the datapad. “I’ve got it”
“If there’s anyone still trapped here, that’s probably the first place to look.” Vance added.
Alecia looks at Vance and asks, ”But, why would they blow the power to the facility that they’re working in, then stay there?” He takes his hand off the mic.
“I’m not going to bring that up. We’ll be searching this shithole of a station for weeks! What we need is down there, and I’m fucking going!” He says to her, angrily.
“We need!? We’re going to fucking die here! We’re no S&R team now! Have them fucking send one for that….”
She struggles as he grabs her by her tactical harness. Paul looks at them, completely befuddled. “You listen..I’m not going to loose all my people just to go home with a big question mark on my ass like that fucker in command! I’ll rip that lab apart myself before I go home with nothing but a bunch of body bags…”
His communicator crackles with Jack’s voice. “We’ve seen at lot of these mutants now, and a few other things you should probably try to avoid running into. But, it’s not enough to account for all the staff. You may be right, the rest are down there. But, the fact is, if anyone is left… I’ve got a feeling they’re all in the same condition as..”
“Us?” Jules whispered. Jack glared at Jules and waves him off.
“…as.. the rest of the staff roaming around. “
Vance looked at Alecia and Tag. “We’re all fucking going down there.” he says to them. Alecia and Tag look at each other in amazement. “Fine..after we get Jules and the Lieutenant.” Paul offered, hoping to calm Vance.
Vance stops to collect himself, then squeezed his mic. “Sir, we have another problem. “
“No kidding”
Vance paused. “Have you noticed any unusual biological effects from being here? Physical or emotional changes, sicknesses, or anything?”
“What the fuck, Vance?!” Alecia yells, looking nervously back and forth at Tag and Vance.
Jules picks himself up off the floor, rubbing the scars on his side. Jack looks at him, inquisitively. Jules shakes his head and shrugs. “Fucking tell him.”
“Well..Jules is exhibiting some remarkable… physical… symptoms.” He lets go of the mic. “Symptoms?” he whispers to Jules.
“Whatever.” Jules responds, sheepishly.
Vance, Alecia, and Paul all looked at each other, their eyes wide in disbelief. “Say again, Sir?”
“Symptoms. Mutations- specifically.” He thinks for a moment. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we all don’t start showing some affects sooner or later.”
Alecia stared at the twisted body of a decomposing creature on the floor, it’s leathery skin turned black and soft. She grips Dagger’s skull ring on her hand. “Kill Him! Kill Him Now!” Alecia yells into her mic. Vance grabs her and pushes her to the floor. Jules jerks back in surprise. “Jesus-Christ, Alecia!” Tag yells.
”Al…I’m right here. I can actually hear you , ‘ya know.“ Jules responded, despairingly.
“I don’t think she likes you much.” Jack says to him, shaking his head.
“She never did”.
“Commander…” Vance started. Alecia jumps up and storms off down the hall. She leans her forehead against the wall. “Jules.. How bad…?” Vance had difficulty asking what needed to be asked.
Jules hit his mic. “I’m fine. I just look…well.. Bad, I guess.”
Vance thought about how best to sound diplomatic, then glances at Alecia. “Commander, it’s your discretion, of course. But keep in mind, All the mutants we’ve…encountered… so far have been extremely violent.” Jules grimaces and walks away. Jack chuckles under his breath. “ I’ll worry about Jules, corporal…” He smiles at Jules as he turns. “..You worry about Sommerby. Clear? We’ll see you at the lab dock.” He lets go of the mic and looks at Jules, who now had his head in the hole of the blown access panel. “It’s really busted now.” he says. Jack grabs the old assault rifle from the table and slings it around him. “Let’s go. We’ve got a long walk ahead of us.”
It fought through the throbbing mass of others who crowded around the strange object. Some watched in fear, some in curiosity, some in desperation. It clawed it’s way to the bright light and stepped through. Driven foreword by a memory of the path, and the food that hides there, it holds it’s breath and walks off the platform. It’s weight made the scaffolding bow and strain, but the vacuum of the room kept the danger quietly secret from the creature. He moves to the glowing metal door and sensing his presence, it slowly slides open. He steps inside the small room, and waits. He no longer fears being trapped in the small room, remembering what would happen next. The hatch behind him slides shut, and the room fills with stale air. Another door clicks, and slides open. It creeps past the pile of rotting food on the floor, their faces slowly caving-in, and notices a new smell. Far in the distance, faint sounds of metal, voices, and movement make it stop. It steps out of the flickering light of the chamber that filtered through the observation windows, and patiently waits.
Endless corridors only seem to lead to others. Running while trying to not be heard; ever-watchful for whatever may lurk around every turn; the hike to the lab dock began to take it’s toll. Jules’ pace begins to slow after’s only a half hour’s walk. His mappad began to blink. “Sir…hold on a second.”
Jack turned. “You alright?”
“My pad is wigging out.”
“That’s OK. It’s mostly a straight shot from here anyway, If I remember.”
“I just need a second to check..check this out. Don’t wanna get lost.”
Jack smiled. “OK. Over here. You do look a little…or maybe a little more… sick than before.” Jules didn’t look up. “I need a break anyway. ” Jack says to himself.
Jules leans against an alcove in the wall of the dim hallway. Breathing hard, he slides to the floor. His datapad blinks, beeps, buzzes, and goes black. “Whoops. I think my little elevator trick may have drained it. Your’s work?”
“Uh, it hasn’t worked since I fell on it in command. Sorry.”
“Here, let me see it.” Jack pulls the pad from his jacket and hands it to him. Jack sits down on the floor across from Jules, watching him work. “You know.. We really don’t need it. It’ll be OK.”
Jules paused for a second, still not looking up. “Fixing stuff…helps me relax. Just be a minute.”
Every time Jack turned around, Jules seemed a little different. Jules clenched his fists, trying to concentrate and force blood into his fingers. Jack watched him nonchalantly, trying his best to calm the techofficer down. “You mentioned you a girlfriend, Alison, I think…”
“Yea, she…” he stopped. “She worked here- lab assistant or something. Last time we talked she said she was shipping out last week for home. We had just been ordered here, so I just missed her again. Fuck! This board is damaged!” Jack leaned back and watched as Jules tore the back off his datapad, pulling out wires.
“Jules..”
“Uh-Huh” he said, concentrating on the sparking wire in his hand.
“No transports have left here for 2 weeks. It’s been almost a week now since ComControl lost contact. “ He watched Jules intently, angry at himself for bringing it up. He didn’t stop working or even look up. “I’m sorry, but if she was scheduled to leave last week, she’s still…”
“I know.”
Grieves had spent time with the best soldiers in the corps. Looking back on the resourcefulness of the TechSpecialists embedded in each unit, he tended to tell other officers he met how amazed he was by them. Being in the infantry for so long, he noticed techs didn’t always garner much respect in their respective troops. Over the years, he found that they, too, were soldiers- in the finest sense of the word. But this was a strength he wasn’t used to seeing. “How long did you…” Jack couldn’t find the words.
“I knew something was wrong before we left. Everything else has been just…confirmation.”
Jack watched him silently, with a small sense of awe, as he went about trying to combine their broken equipment together. Jules sat on the floor, unsuccessfully balancing Jack’s disemboweled pad on his knees while moving its wires over his techpad’s electronics, hoping to find a sign of life. As Jack took a drink from the canteen he brought, he notices Jules was no longer fighting to keep a grip on the second pad. As he watches, Jules flips his pad with one hand, using a screwdriver to attach a small panel to the display with his other hand. At the same time, he strips extra wires he’d pulled from his bag to link the pads together with his other hand. A repairman’s ballet of skill, speed, and unusual dexterity. ‘An impossible dexterity.’ Jack thinks. He leans forward and squints. In the dim light, he could just see the shadows of 4 thin hands reaching out from Jules’ shirt.
“Uh….Jules?…”
He looks up, becoming annoyed with the interruptions. “What?”
“Now that’s a good trick.”
He notices Jack’s expression, and looks down. “What the…Arrrrgh! Holy shit! Holy Shit!” Jules drops the equipment on the floor and jumps up, beating himself frantically. The four small limbs protruding from his stomach wave in uncontrollable panic as well. “Get it off, Get it…!”
“Oh fuck.” Jack says to himself as he races over to Jules. He grabs most of his arms and wrestles Jules to the ground. “You’re going to fucking hurt yourself!” He held Jules until his screaming turned to tears.
“Quiet…Quiet…It’s going to be OK. “
“I..I..don’t want to go home like this…I don’t want to die like this…” Jack held him for a while. There was nothing left to say that could calm him.
“DOWN!” Alecia and Vance yells at Tag. Bullets fly over his head, as he ducks. Turning back down the hall, he sees a running mass of mutants, numbering fifteen or more. Tag opens fire with the plasma rifle. The hall lights-up with flaming bodies, but he mass still moves toward them. Vance feels a hand grip his neck and he whirls around. A fist grips his gun. The mutant throws Vance into the wall, but he keeps hold of the thing’s wrist. Vance’s head smacks the control to the arboretum’s door. It swings open, pushing them together as they fight. Out of the burning mass, a spiney creature with black eyes pushes toward them, the plasma cutting it’s skin. Tag and Alecia fire and advance on it. It pounces toward Tag, slashing him as he forces the plasma gun into it’s mouth, holding it to the ground. Alecia fires at point blank range when Tag pulls the trigger. The creature’s head light’s up and disappears in a fiery explosion that knocks Tag to the ground. Alecia jumps back, shooting into the creatures body. Tag looks back to Vance just in time to see him hit the mutant in the head, sending him off the arboretum’s platform with a single kick. Tag surveys the hallway; all quiet save for Alecia’s yelling and shooting. He looks back to Vance. “You’ve been working out?!” he says, breathlessly.
“He was light.”
“Sure.”
“Alecia!” Vance yells, looking down the hall. “Save your ammo!”
“Muther-fucker!…Piece of fuckin’…shit…” Vance and Tag watch her as she beats the lifeless body with the butt of her gun. “The..um..2nd military locker is just over here. Maybe you could do that door trick again?“ Paul asks.
“Go on, Tag. I’ll get her.” Vance says. Neither of them moved, however, still transfixed by Alecia’s continued abuse the corpse. “Ass-sucking… faggot..pile of…”
“Yea. You go get her.”
Vance slides an angry look to Tag as he runs off. “Alecia…?” Vance says quietly, walking toward her. He tries to avoid the small pieces of the creature flying through the air.
“..shit! …..What!?”
“You want to get some more ammo, or do you want to just beat everything to death?” She stops long enough to take a breath. He edges closer to her. “Al..” he says quietly. “..we all want revenge, but we’ve still keep our heads on.” She starts to talk. There wasn’t a hint of emotion in her voice. “You can have the revenge. That really what you wanted anyway.” She pauses. “ I want to leave now. I want to go home.” She follows Tag down the hall.
Vance watches them go. ‘Fucking go home.’ He says to himself. He was holding his arm again, almost without noticing. He checks to see if they were looking back at him, and slowly pulls back his sleeve. The glove he’d been wearing to hide his hand was difficult to pull off. The skin had become scaled and hard. The greenish color seemed to follow his pulsing arteries to his chest. It felt tight, like steel tendons were working his body. His leg felt the same, but he didn’t want to look. He moved the arm around, like wielding a new weapon. ‘It didn’t look.. sick’, he thought to himself. But, it definitely wasn’t ‘him.’ He didn’t feel sick, either. He knew he should, but there was no pain, no vague numbness of a limb ready to die and fall off. The fluid from the jar from the lab was changing him, and he knew it. He felt healthy, powerful, and more…
“Vance! The door’s busted into! Vance? What are you doing back there?” Paul yells from the armory doorway, far down the hall. Vance pulls his sleeve down. “I’m coming. See what you guys can find, anyway.” As he runs up the hall, he wonders about Jules. He plays Alecia’s reaction to hearing about Jules through his head, again and again. She was now watching him jog towards the armory. Thoughts crept into his head about choices he might have to make regarding her and the objectives of the mission.
Jack walks back to a restroom entrance near a rusted emergency access hatch. Jules steps out. “I tried to pee. I’m not…not going to try that again.” Jules couldn’t look Jack in eyes. “Er..OK” Jack said softly. He fought to suppress the instinct to imagine what just happened. He grimaces and looks at the restroom sign. Jules was now looking like some new species, rather then someone just suffering from some horrible disease. Jack tried not to stare. “Well, since we’re here. I’m gonna use this, too.” He stops in the doorway, and looked back at Jules. “You didn’t..uh, leave anything in there, did you?” Jules leans against the wall and slides to the floor, sneering at Jack. “We shouldn’t stay here too long. I think we still have 8 sections to go.”
“Scared?” Jack asked.
“What?! No Sir!”
Jules fiddles with the bag as he sits alone in the hall, trying not to think about Alison. ‘What could she have gone through?’ ‘Could she still be here?’ He grabs his head and closes his eyes. ‘I hope it was quick’ he thinks, beating his head with his fists. A funny whisper drifts through the air. His head whips around and he peers down the little dark hallway beside the bathroom entrances. He checks the sign. ‘ “Steam Distribution” A dead end,’ He thinks. ’Nothing should be in there.’ Jules stands and walks toward a bend in the corridor, his hand on his gun. He peeks around the corner. Nothing. In the tiny light coming from the main hall, it was difficult to see the walls, but he could tell they were slippery and warm. Almost soft. He pulls his hand away. “Steam leaking for way too long.” he says to himself. The moisture in the air grew thicker as he proceeded around another corner.
A room opened before him. Movement. He crouches down near the entrance. At the far end of the room, there was an odd blue light. Something was slowly waving around it, but was too far away to tell. The light drew him into the room. “What is that?” he mumbles. “Oh Shit!” Jules realizes he’s standing in the middle of the room like a deer in a car’s headlights. He quickly looks around and dives behind a small control panel near the wall. His eyes slowly adjust the low light, and he spots a tube. It extends from the wall opposite him, and appears to be much like the wall itself, leathery and filled with black veins. It pulsates with a palpable thump he could feel through his shoes. The tube drops high off the wall to a bloated mass on the slab in front of him. It is a man, or what is left of one; stubby arms and legs quivering, blackened, shrunken genitals, eyes rolled back in his bald, pockmarked head. The massive tube covers his entire face. From within a thousand pounds of black-veined belly came a dim light, which seemed to pulse with the tube. Jules raced to him when he noticed the other slabs in the long room. Each held a woman and a tube connecting her to the wall. Crouching, he watches far down the room for any sign of movement. Sliding behind each slab, he makes his way down the room, unseen. Their bellies stretched and skin sweating, each one seemed to be in different stages of pregnancy or labor. Dirt and filth covered their bare bodies, tubes ran down each’s throat, their thighs covered in dark blue foam that seemed to spill down to the floor. None were strapped down, but none could fight back. Some moved their eyes, but none would notice him. Some had died and rotted away. 15, 20, 25..He began to loose count.
“What the fuck is going on here?! I’m fucking losing his mind!” He touches the wall. It gave way, then pushed back. He falls back against one of the slabs in surprise. It was warm. It was alive. ‘This isn’t a wall- this is.. skin!?” He jumps back into the middle of the room in horror, then scampers behind another slab on the far wall. With his eyes, he follows the tube from the wall that stretches across the ceiling, and down to the woman on the slab next to him. He peers over the legs of the women, down to the blue glow at the end of the room. Five mutants huddle around the glow near the pipe manifold. They don’t look up. Jules holds on to the slab and kneels down carefully aiming his weapon. As he kneels, he notices an odd tattoo on the left leg of the woman- a hovercar with flower wheels. “What a stupid tattoo”, he thinks. He touches it with his fingers, caressing the leg.
‘Why do I know this?’ He stops. “Alison!” he yells.
His horror almost making him shout. He grabs her head- her face was soaked with sweat. She forces herself to focus her eyes, and begins to struggle for her life. The tube in her mouth stiffens. ‘Shhh..no…no, baby…It’s me! It’s me! Please…” He grabs her arm and stroked her pale cheek. “Don’t you see..It’s me.. Jules…Jules………Jules. Oh God Allie…” She sinks back into the slab and begins to cry. She struggles to grab his hand. “Oh God, No. I’ve got to get you out…” Suddenly, Alison’s grip tightens; her back, arching. “What…what’s wrong!?!” Her eyes roll back and she goes into a seizure. Jules pulls out his knife. He starts to cut the tube in her throat when the acrid smell of rotted blood and sickly-sweet chemicals overcame him. Fluid gurgled from between Alison’s legs and a blue glow backed-up into the tube from her body. Again he imagines a whisper faintly speaking his name. As he turns back, his eyes are bathed in the hypnotic blue glow at her feet. He begins to rise to peer over her belly. He doesn’t notice the five eyeless mutants standing in front of him, at the foot of the slab. He drops the knife, and falls into the corner, still holding her hand. The two in the middle lean forward to pick up the mass between her legs. None of them notice the man on the floor next to the slab. The rest surround the two holding the blue glow, pawing it. They patiently walk to the back of the room. He looks back at Alison- she was unconscious. From behind her slab, he peered across the room at the group huddled around a small table. They were picking-up something from the table and slowly eating. A thought travels through his head. ‘They looked like monks, not ravenous animals. This is different. This…is a holy thing.’
A strange blue glow rose from the table, like the one in Alison’s bed. Once again, his name drifted through the air, and the air pressed against him, carrying him to his feet. Her hand drops from his grasp. Forgetting the feeling of her touch, he walk toward them. They stops eating and separate, giving Jules a space at their table. A face spoke to him from the middle of the table, and the words make him blind. The horror filled him. “Breathe!”, he thinks. And, as suddenly as it started, the horror was gone. He reached for the table and joined their feast, and never remembered to breathe.
“Where the fuck is he?!” Jack groaned. He just jogged back from the access door to section 117, where they were headed- it hadn’t been touched. Jack had already looked back down the hall where they had come from. The bag was on the floor, right where Jules was sitting. The contents of the bag had spilled on to the floor. He stood in front of the bathroom surveying the abandoned hallway and it’s many doors, closets and halls. Jack was not at all interested in playing hide and seek. “Jules?…. Jules!” Jack found the yelling in whispers was somewhat difficult. He fills and takes the bag, walking toward the next junction again. He fiddles angrily with the bag’s ties as he walks. Jack glances back, and there stands Jules in the middle of the hall. “Shit! Where were you?” Jack asks, worriedly. He starts to jog back to Jules. When Jules doesn’t move, Jack stops short. “Jules?” Jules clenches his fists, and tries to unclench his teeth. “R…Ru..nnn”
“What?!” Jack exclaims.
“R…Run.”
The 5 rotted and blind mutants drag themselves from the access hall next to Jules, and file around him. Jack backs away as Jules’ eyes turn black, and the group begin moving down the hall. As they grow closer, Jack runs for the section hatch and pushes the heavy airlock door shut. As it closes, he throws the service handle and breaks the bolt, sealing the mutants inside. He leans his head against the massive door and pounds the metal in frustration. They claw at the metal; their scraping filled Jack’s ears. He now understood, it was only a matter of time for all of them.
He jogged through the maze of corridors for what seemed like an eternity. Jack turns the corner from section C and stops. A name plate above the door of the crew quarter made him blink.
“ Room 200
Cmdr. J. Wills
Corps. SRS-9″
He glances around for anything lurking nearby. ‘Well, what the hell.’he thinks. Jack forces the door and peers inside, gun at the ready. The quarters were unusually tidy, as if they hadn’t been used in a month. He closes the door behind him and checks the bathroom and bedroom. He starts slowly; side tables and desk drawers- pulling out anything looking important. He moves to an antique filing cabinet in the bedroom. ‘Transfer records..Purchase drafts..crap …crap…coil schematics….schematics? Fuck.” His conversation with Hayes in ComControl suddenly comes back to him. He glances half-heartedly around the bedroom. Looking into the main room, he notices a large silver briefcase next to the door. ‘Too large to be just papers.’ he thinks. He grabs it and throws it on the table. It opens with a quiet ding. “Wow. How the hell do you even hold this?” he says out loud. Catching himself, he stops and listens for any movement outside. Nothing. He closes the case. “This isn’t why I’m here.” he whispers. The communications console still blinked as it’s power slowly drained away. He smiles and sits down in front. The panel politely offers him the response that all messages were restricted. “…This is a command-encrypted message for delivery to Colonel Forrester Corps-WDD only. Any attempt to….” Jack pulls his ComControl badge from his pocket and inserts it into the console. It abruptly stops talking, and began beeping softly. The screen read: “ComControl access level one granted. Good Morning Lt .Colonel.”
“Good morning. Decrypt and play message now.”
“Decrypting message 1842- Command Encryption12- ComControl Override 01 accepted…” The video screen comes to life. The polite face of the missing Colonel appears before Jack.
“Hello, Raymond. I’m sorry for taking so long since talking to you last, but with all that’s gone on here… Please understand. We basically finished the prototype just in time. Everyone was pulled to work on the I-D project so fast… I’m finishing some of the wiring myself. Your people are going to have to do some of the environmental testing- I didn’t have time before the experiment started. Just temperature cycling and moisture seals…” Jack pauses the playback, thinking he heard movement outside. He crept towards the door and peeks outside- a steam vent opens down the hall and quickly closes. He shuts and locks the door, knowing full well that it wouldn’t do much good now.
“Computer- Resume playback.”
“..Nothing major. I left schematics and details in the case. Even started on a manual…It won’t be finished.” He chuckled. “The I-D project started full scale this week. So, everyone’s on it now. Oh…by the way…I can’t stress enough that you CANNOT share this experiment with brass. Actually, the way this is going, It’s better if you had no knowledge of the project at all, yes? When this is all done, I think we could all share in some plausible deniability here. Iverson is very protective of this one. Any hint that military wants a piece in the early stages and I’m sure he’d shut it down. Actually he’d end it and probably burn all the materials- even if it meant his career. He’s that adamant it be kept out of military hands, for now at least. I really don’t blame him for the attitude after that horrible mess on Europa. I’m asking you not to push this…we’ll get the technology sooner or later. If we let this run it’s course, we’ll get it fully developed and we won’t have to go through the PR mess of breaking a scientific charter.” Jack leans back in the chair, fast forwarding.
“..That seems to keep him honest….Just imagine it, Ray. Aiming a beam at an attacking ship, and it just disappears. No messy plasma fire, no dogfights, no debris. Change the field a bit, and the ship ends up at the other end of the system. Modify the field a bit more and I could step from a door in Section A and end up in a bathroom at Heathrow. We could explore the universe in a single lifetime. Reverse the field, and explore another universe. This won’t be just a weapon, it’ll change everything. We could make the fleet obsolete. Now you see why these guys are practically pissing themselves every day. “
Jack got up from the console and started going through the files again, letting the recording play. “I’ll admit, you got me thinking the last time we talked. You remember that time on Lunar 4, You and I, and that cadet…Perry, was it?…. We were finishing-up at that atmospheric scrubber. You opened the hatch to leave, and that mouse ran into the room. We chased that stupid mouse for 3 hours before we got it. If that thing had gotten into the clean-room membranes… Christ!. The entire facility would have been shut down…for a mouse!” He laughed. “You know…now every time Iverson gushes over how great this will be, I think of that stupid mouse. I can’t explain it to anybody here. Sometimes when you open a door to leave, something else can come in. I don’t know, Ray. This just seems like one hell of a risk, you know? Sven is so worried about us contaminating the experiment, it makes me laugh. Contamination is inevitable. Hell, it’s the whole point of this, right?” Jack puts his hand on his communicator to call for Vance, then stops- listening intently to the screen.
“ …Also, why should we believe the other dimensions would be devoid of life? Ours isn’t. For once, I find myself hoping we are the contaminators. If it’s the other way around…shit. Lets just say I-D has been giving me some misgivings… ” Jack shut-off the console. ‘That bastard.’ He thought. ‘He knew all along.’
“Corporal, Come in. Vance! Do you read me?” Jack shouts into his mic.
“I’m receiving you sir. Got a small problem here…”
“Corporal, Meet me in the Observation center of the low-atmosphere complex.”
“Shit..We were near there a while ago!”
“I know. I’m halfway there myself.”
“I was hoping we’d get there before extraction. Maybe you can tell us what’s really going on here.” Vance paused, but Jack didn’t respond. “ Anyway… we just made it to the section C junction and there seems to be a large portion of the base missing. I don’t think there’s a quick way of getting to the lab dock for us. ”
“Missing? Well, nothing would surprise me at this point.” He opened the door and glanced around the hall for a moment. “Corporal, you should know, I think some people knew what we were being sent into before we left, but I wasn’t one of them. Personally, I don’t feel like leaving here with all these people dead for nothing, and I have a feeling you might be thinking the same thing. You really want some answers, Vance?”
He looked at Alecia “You better fucking believe it, sir.
“Contact me when you get close.”
“Yessir!” Jack picks-up the silver case and walks through the opened the door. He doesn’t bother to closing it behind him before running down the hall. Jack rounds the corner across from section 80. ‘I find myself hoping we are the contaminators. ’ Will’s last words still echoed through his head. ‘The son-of-a-bitch knew something would happen.’ he thought.
“Here the sign: Section 80. I’m at the hatch to Observation Center.” Jack fiddled with the control pad. “It’s got power.”
“I see it. Don’t open until we start firing or you’ll get cooked for sure. Ready?” Vance whispers.
“Just waiting for you.”
“Roger.”
He lets go of the mic, listening to the sounds of cracking bones and scratching around the corner. “Ready guys?” She looks up at him with a grin and nods. Tag shook his head and moves to the middle of the hall. Vance takes a deep breath and jumps around the corner, firing as his feet hit the floor. A leathery creature falls with a loud thud. Vance and Aleica stop running forwards, and back away. Tag stops in the middle of the hall, slowly looking up. The beast had looked away from the body of the mutant on which it had been feeding, and turned it’s massive horned head towards the body of the spiney creature. A snarl comes from it’s enormous mouth as it rose from the floor. 10 feet of muscle and bone stood just meters away from Tag. A disembodied arm drops from it’s grasp. It lets out a terrible roar, shaking the plating on the walls. From it’s outstretched hand, a green glow emerges, swirling and growing. “Oh..my..god!” Alecia tries to scream. As Vance raises his weapon to fire as the beast hurls the mass at Tag and him. Vance jumps. A burning leg and arm fall to the floor, all that was left of the private. Aleica begins to fire as Vance falls onto the barrels piled in front of the hatch. They barely had time to notice that the hatch on the other side of the hall had failed to open.
Jack was stood in the middle of the empty hall facing the observation center. The flickering light from the chamber came through the tall glass of the Observation center . Light dancing off the walls, makes it hard to see. He slowly walks down the hall, looking for the junction that Vance and Alecia were hiding in. He turns the corner. “OK. Where the fuck are they?” Suddenly, a hand grabs him from behind and throws him to the ground. He turns and recognizes the bloody, stained stripes of an Corps uniform. What was left of Colonel Wills charges at Jack. He kicks Wills’ leg, breaking it in two. It stumbles back, growling. Jack jumps backwards into the wall. Dozens of mutants pile through an open hatch just past the junction, running towards him. Jack scrambles to his feet with the gun. Pulling the trigger, he mows through the crowd bearing down on top of him. He yells as he fires, throwing the bodies off of him as they fall. They came from all over now, trying to crush him, tearing at him. The barrel of the gun glows red from the heat of the bullets.
Vance leans over a fallen container and fires his rifle into the beast’s chest. It seems to only annoy it. The old containers were no match against the fire thrown from it’s hands. But, with nowhere to run, Vance stays put. Aleica stands directly in front of the beast, laughing hysterically as Vance fires. “Are you nuts!?…Fucking Do it!!” he screams at her. She raises her weapon and fires a single grenade- point blank range. It stuck in the beast’s belly; he stands his ground. The beast and Aleica both look down at it. ‘Whoops’ she thinks. “Get out of there!” she yells, diving back around the corner. The beast reaches for the object lodged in it’s gut. It suddenly explodes, throwing the beast to the ground and covering Vance in it’s entrails. They look down the hall. On the floor, the beast lie scraping grooves in the steel floor with the giant claws in it’s fingertips. Even with the gaping hole in it’s abdomen, it tries to rise. “Just stay down, Vance.” Alecia fires another grenade into the beast, pinning it to the floor. It explodes into flame. As the dust settles around them, Alecia looks at Vance, puzzled. Vance stumbles to his feet, grabbing Tag’s plasma rifle laying nearby. He hits the control pad on the wall behind him. The hatch rolls open. No one. “Where the Fuck is he?” she asks. Vance raises his hand. Faintly, they hear the sounds of gunfire. They look around for a moment, then look at their feet.
Jack surveys the floor around him as he leaned against the wall. “Well..there’s the rest of ‘em” he says to himself. “Fuck- where did those two go?!” he thinks. He threw the rifle down, and reloaded his sidearm. The rifle now red-hot and completely out of ammo, it was just a pile of scrap. Stepping over the bodies, he notices the small pieces of concrete and metal flaking off the ceiling above him. “Hmmm. That was an explosion I heard.” He grabs the case and makes his way to the Observation Center door, touching it. As it opens, he peers around the ceiling brace to the balcony above. Vance, leaning over the edge of the balcony with his gun, grins and shakes his head. “Is it the Lieutenant?” he hears Alecia ask in the distance. “Are you OK, Sir?” Vance says.
“Oh fine, Corporal. But, I have an idea.”
Vance and Alecia begin to climb down the ladder from the balcony. “What’s that, Sir?”
“When we plan an offensive, lets try to be on the same floor.”
Vance shakes his head and smiles half-heartedly, hopping from the ladder. “Yea”
Jack notices the corporal’s terseness. “What happened?”
“We just lost Tag… up there.”
Jack pauses. “I’m sorry.” He motions them over to the control room. “Lets’s talk.” Vance starts to walk along with him when Alecia slips off the ladder and falls to the floor, landing on her butt. The datapad with the map bounces to Vance’s feet. “I think from now on Al, I’ll carry this.” He picks up the pad. Alecia scowls at him as she rocks back and forth on the floor. Jack and Vance walk across the room to an area surrounded by consoles and computers. Alecia struggles up to follow. Three stories of observation windows to the Low-Atmosphere Lab make it difficult for them to see the consoles clearly. The shining of the chamber, far off in the middle of the great room, gives everything an eerie glow. As she passes the door to the hall, she notices the pile of bodies lining the floor. “You were busy!… Hey this hall looks just like the one upstairs!”
“Watch the door, Al..” Vance orders.
At the end of the room, Jack fiddles with one of the terminals, looking for current readings. Vance stays close. “Jules?” he asks, quietly. Jack doesn’t look up. “No.” he says. Jack chewed on his thumbnail as he browsed the lab’s logs. He suddenly stops and glances up at Alecia, standing absently in the corner of the room near the entrance. Jack says to Vance, “Are you… OK?” Vance carefully lifted his held his arm. Modestly pulling on his sleeve, he uncovers a small patch of deformed skin that covers his body. The hardened scab had become brown and modeled. Small white spikes had begin to push their way through the skin near the wound. Vance did not want to look again. “It was a tiny cut I got moving the crates when we first landed. Then, we had a little accident in one of the labs. I got covered by…who the hell knows what. And, now its spreading. You?” Jack pulled back his torn collar. Vance could see the scrape that wrapped around Jack’s neck- the veins starting to turn black. He looked back to Jack’s face. “Not spreading?”
“Not yet. How about her?” Jack spoke, quietly.
“Well.. physically, I don’t know. She hasn’t shown me anything. But… she’s losing it. Bad.”
“We’re all losing it. These things wandering around aren’t the enemy. Time is. You happen to notice what we’ve been shooting at was the base staff? I have a feeling the only difference between us and them is the amount of time we spend here.”
“Not all of them.” Vance said, unsteadily.
“What?”
“We came across something…..else.”
“Upstairs?”
Vance nodded.
“Christ, . I wondered what that grenade was for. Not one of those spiky- things?”
“A little bigger.”
“Oh? Don’t suppose you’ve got any extra rifles?”
“Here, take my old one. I thought that’s what you might have had in the case, though.”
“Thanks. The case?..No just something for my boss.” Jack slings the weapon around his shoulder as he looks down at the console in front of them. “These readings are incredible! Subsystems online, Mains are off, but the chamber is at full power.” He paused. “Tapper said the conduits from service were blown- intentionally. So, there’s no power to that chamber, right?”
“The power? If the reactors are down, no power should be going anywhere… Hey! The lights, the doors, these consoles…How come we have power here? ” Vance looked puzzled.
“Vance, The chamber is supplying the power. To everything!”
“So…It’s some sort of reactor?” Alecia quietly starts inching toward them, trying to concentrate.
“No. No. It’s not a reactor, It’s not self sustaining.” Jack responded.
“So where is the power coming from? Just tell me what the fuck….” Vance began to get agitated. “…Maybe it’s time we got that explanation, Sir?”
Jack rubs his forehead again and looks up ant Vance, now standing over him. “I think we both deserve one, Vance. I went through the base commander’s logs. That’s some great experiment…” He points to the glowing pillar in the center of the chamber. “…that’s what happened to these people.”
“I don’t understand…This is like a virus, or something. It’s infectious.”
“Actually, that might be just another effect.”
Alecia looks away from the door. “When we were in the labs, I saw plant experiments. Hybrid vegetables in sealed jars. Even the plants looked fucked-up. If it were…like a bacteria… how could it get in there, too?” Vance sneers at her, waving her back to the door. “That makes sense. There is a pathogen all around us, but it’s in more places then it could possibly be if were just spread by the staff, or the air, or whatever.” Jack said. He types on the keyboard. “Here it is…These readings show a massive surge of energy- broad spectrum- when they powered-up this last test. This spectrum probably continues past what these sensors could even see. I’m willing to bet what happened to everyone here was a result of that surge. The pathogen affecting us isn’t the cause of this crap, but just another effect of the surge. These people were essentially dead once the experiment started.”
“I still don’t understand what that is.” Vance pointed to the chamber.
“Vance, these people were studying interdimensional travel. That chamber isn’t an experiment. It’s a door. I’m going to assume that your friend upstairs came from the same place the power is coming from.”
“A door?! Jesus! To Where?”
“Now, that’s the right question”
Vance shakes his head in disbelief. “We’ve got to shut it down!”
“It looks like these people tried.”
“Oh Shit… Now what?” he pleaded.
Jack stared into the glow for a minute. “There’s nothing we can do here”
“Nothing! My men dead for nothing?!”
“I know we got a raw deal, but…we’re just a couple of soldiers! Think about it. Are you actually under the impression either of us can do any more than all these engineers could? And they knew what the hell they were doing.” He stands-up form the console. “Look… in 4 days, an extraction team will contact us and land at the main platform. We’ll hold-up in section A until then. Lots of places to hide there once we clean it out. OK? ” He looks at Vance and Alecia for some sign of approval.
“We’re not going to the lab dock?” Alecia asks
“Going to be too hard to find a way around. Anyway, I think we should put as much distance between us and….that.”
“I don’t know what else to do. I’m not thinking straight.” Vance shakes his head, rubbing his temples. “This can’t be it!”
“There isn’t anything else. We have to go” Jack tells him.
Working around the recreation center wouldn’t be easy, but going through wasn’t an option. Alecia quietly slid the rear door open, so as not to be noticed. She quickly stepped to the side, behind an overturned table. Inside, twenty mutants tore at the beast in the middle. It ripped their bodies apart, setting some on fire. But the mutants still pushed forward, tearing, gnawing, and finally pushing the beast over. ‘Maybe we should leave them to their workout.” Alecia said with a smile, quietly backing out and closing the door. “Shit. We’ll have to go up to the plasma splitter just to go around.” Vance typed a path on his pad.
“Radiation is dangerous. We’ll have to get through fast. How about through here.” Jack says, tracing a line with his finger on Vance’s map.
“Better then using up all our ammo here….Alecia!” Vance shouts at Alecia as she slides the door open again. She aims her weapon at the beast, now standing again. He grabs her, shoving her down to the floor.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?!” he says.
She pushes herself up, her neck twitching awkwardly. “Felt like shooting something..”
“I think they heard us…Let’s move.” Jack says, worriedly.
They creep across the hall to a maintenance port hatch and quickly pop it open. Vance and Alecia quickly make their way up the ladder in the narrow shaft as Jack locks the hatch below. “We’d better move fast- I thought I saw something come around the corner as I locked-up.” All of them reach the manifold room as the hatch below explodes in fire, sending smoke and debris up the shaft. A giant horned head peers around the bulkhead of the hatch as they slam the door at the top. “Too close!” Vance said.
The plasma manifold room wasn’t an actual room, but a great bulge in a long series of conduits that wove their way through the base, like a long bobsled track. The bulge contained a manifold for controlling plasma flow to all areas of the base. It also held several control stations and platforms attached to the wall, seemingly perched above the vast expanse of conduits below. With almost no station power, the room was only dimly lit by the plasma, making the conduits appear as if the extended into the blackness forever. They lightly step across the top platforms toward level 4’s radiation door, uneasy from the sight.
“Don’t fall off.” Vance tells Alecia, smiling wryly.
She looks over the railing. “W..Where does this go?”
“Technically, all over. Smaller conduits supply everything. But this shaft is only a few hundred feet before it splits, I think.”
‘“Only? You’re joking, yea?”
“Help me with this hatch.” Jack pulls on the lock bar on the door, but rust jams the lock. They hear a clanking sound coming from the hatch leading back to the recreation center. “Maybe a little more effort…please” he mumbles as they pull. With a loud thunk, the radiation door opens to reveal a large storage room leading across a smaller section of the base. Broken boxes and bottles litter the floor as they move around the shelves. Alecia turns a corner and the room opens up to reveal a large area of fallen shelves. In the center, several spiney creatures herd a hundred mutants toward a far airlock. They turn to look at her.
“Oh…. Shit!” Alecia yells.
The entire mass swarmed upon them like bees, creatures and mutants alike. “Vance! Concentrate on the brown-ones. We’ll get the mutants.”
They open fire as they fall back through the shelves .“There’s…too many! ” Vance yells to Jack.
“Sweep across your left then get back to the door!”
The mutants push over the racks, grabbing at them. Vance climbs on top of one toppled rack and pouring plasma fire into one of the creatures’ heads. Jack and Alecia turn and crouched down in front to him, slowly starting to advance. Jack’s rifle goes silent. “No Ammo!” He pulls his sidearm and fires. The mass breaks through and pushes him back. Vance fires several lines of plasma into the mutants, but they are too fast. Jack tries to push them back, but the crowd edges him back around the shelf, and into the manifold room falling over the railing. Alecia sees him fall and screams. “No!!” Alecia and Vance fall back to the wall near the radiation door, destroying the mutants that broke past them. They glance at each other, and slowly begin to move toward the angry mass of deformed flesh. Within minutes, the crowd thinned as bodies piled high. “Ha!…There’s only a dozen left! You muther-fuckers!” Alecia yells. Suddenly, the sound of plasma fire ceases. Vance looks down at his weapon.
“Uh oh. Power’s Dead.”
Alecia stops firing for a second. “WHAT!? NOT YOU TOO!” Vance drops the weapon and grabs a jagged piece of metal from the broken shelves, jumping into the mutants. “What the hell are you doing?!” She screams, now firing again. Scaley spikes push out of his thick skin. He rips through the rotten bodies of the mutants as they grab for him. He grips one by the neck and rakes his arm across it’s neck. It’s head falls to the floor. The few remaining mutants jump towards Alecia, some dying as they fall. Vance, blood covering his body, looks back at her. Alecia fights one of the mutants for her gun. It grabs her by the neck, and pulls her close. Vance runs up behind it’s body and plunges his fist through it’s lower spine. Black blood spurts out of the wound and covers them both. It’s body falls to the floor as Alecia falls to her knees, stunned and gasping for breath. Another mutant grabs Vance from behind. He throws it into the ceiling. Looking around, he scours the wretched bodies, laying two and three deep in some places. Nothing moved.
“V..Vance..No. “
He looks at his arms. Through his bloody clothes, he could see the spikes, now covering both arms, flesh still clinging to the serrated edges. His ballooned arteries flushed with a faint blue glow as they pumped. He felt more powerful than any time in his life; And he was. He turns back to her, now with fear in his eyes. “What…. the hell is g..going on…” She looks up at him, holding her stomach with both hands. “What happened!?” He drops to his knees and catches her as she falls forward. Panicked, he looks over his shoulder at the body that lay in front of her. He pulls the body over. He could not breathe as he sees the gaping hole in the back of the mutant. The metal grating of the floor below shown through the wound. He looks down at his arm, black blood covering it from his defeated adversary. Then he notices his fist, bright red and dripping with Alecia’s life. Blood trickles from between her clenched fingers. Her eyes roll back as blood begins to drip from her mouth.
“NO!!” he screams.
The yelling, gunfire, and banging from the hatch far above kept Jack from passing out. Blinking, the underside of a platform slowly came into focus, nearly 20 feet above him. He staggers to his feet and picks-up his sidearm, lying a couple meters away. “Lucky you didn’t gown the shaft” he says to himself, and then notices there’s no ladder to climb up. “Fuck.” he says out loud, limping down an access tunnel. Finding an open stairwell near the section exit, he slowly climbs back up to level 4. Now on level ground, he picks up his pace once realizing how far he needs to backtrack. He finds the storage room.
“Vance! How…Oh no.”
His voice trails off. Vance held Alecia in his bloodied arms, bodies all around. He looks, up at Jack, crying. Jack was taken aback by the sight, but they had no time for questions. Far off, he could hear the movement of hundreds of feet on metal floors. He grabs his case and Vance’s shoulder, whispering “We have to go. I’m sorry. C’mon.”
Running through hall after hall, the machinery, grates, and pipes gave way to tiled offices and remains potted plants. Faded paint on a bulkhead shown the mark ‘Section A’. The entry room with the main port was only minutes away. Jack looks back. Nothing followed. “Over here!” Vance shouts. A small office just beyond the emergency air lock looked as if it hadn’t been touched for months. He slides the door open and jumps inside. Jack runs up and guards the door. “It’s clear.” Vance says. Jack enters and pushes the door until it locks closed. Just past the rear door, a window overlooked the lobby to the main port. He locks the rear door, throwing the case on the floor.
“Perfect.” Jack states. “We just might be able to hide here.”
“Hey, a refrigerator. We’re saved!” Vance jokes. ‘Didn’t you say A section was filled with a group of mutants?”
“I think we just killed them.” Jack slides to the floor.
“Oh.”
“You rest a bit. I’ll keep watch and wake you up in a while.”
“I’m not tired. Really. “
“Yea, nether am I.” They both laugh. As they rested, and uneasy silence grew between them. Vance fidgets to get comfortable on the floor. His spikes scrape the tile. Jack takes a bottle of water from the refrigerator. He opens it and sniffs, then puts it down. “Don’t drink that.” he tells Vance.
Vance watched him rest a minute, then spoke. “You know, when we got here…I mean… you have a, not a reputation, but like a…a…”
“..a History?” Jack interrupted. “You can’t possibly want to talk about that , now. I thought we were getting along so well, too.”
Vance smirks. “Yea.. A History.” He pauses then laughs to himself. “And, all I wanted to do is prove that I wasn’t like you. I thought, sure, you could have left those guys there, but nobody knows for sure what happened. I.. was a fool. I wanted to show you how soldiers really worked, and shit”
Jack doesn’t get angry, staring intently at his shoes. “Lot of people know what happened there. I got caught in a bad situation with some bad intelligence.” He glances up at Vance and smirks. “The funny part, at the inquiry, they got all the information they wanted from me, made their judgements, and that was that. It was over, as far as they were concerned. But, it was afterwards, the whispers, slow promotions, and odd assignments; all the stuff that doesn’t get written down. That how you find out where you really stand in the corps. I think… It’s just easier on everyone to have someone to blame. Blame doesn’t need facts, it just takes the need for blame. It’s simpler. It creates closure for people.“ He throws the bottle of rancid water into the sink above his shoulder. “Kind of strange, but none of that seems to matter much anymore.”
“It means everything. Everybody thinks you have something to hide. Man, you got sent on two doomed missions. Nobody has luck that bad. If this…” Vance waved around. “..this is how shit usually goes down in UMC, then I guess….I guess I won’t be jumping to conclusions anymore“ He rubbed his head and they look at each other.
“Jules said he wished I was full of shit. It would mean I’d really know what was going on, and know how to fix it. My wife says I’ve got nothing to be ashamed-of; nothing to hide. Maybe. But, I’ve got nothing to be proud of, either.”
“Like hiding that mark on your neck?” Vance said smirking.
“No use hiding that now, Huh? “ Jack smiled, and rolled back his collar, feeling the jagged black scar running down his shoulder. “Hmm. Not spreading too much. By the way, how did you keep Alecia under control after you started to.. You know?”
“Why?”
“Well.. The way she reacted to just hearing about Jules, I wouldn’t think she’d hesitatie to shoot you…at least when she finally saw…”
“They didn’t know. Neither of them. It was only after I…” His voice trailed off as he peels off what remained of his stained and shredded gloves. “..after..she…” He tries to force the image of her face out of his head. He stops and looks Jack in straight in the eyes. “You know…It’s not just.. ‘this’.” Vance said, waving his scaled arm through the air. “You know that. Whatever this is..it gets in your head. I..I didn’t want to believe it until I held her in my arms and watched her die.” He scoots-down a bit, staring into the tiny office next to them.
“ I’ve spent the last 6 hours looking over my shoulder at her- waiting for her to pull her gun on me. I wanted her to give me a chance to defend myself. Like…a chance to eliminate the threat.” As Jack watches him talk, he fights to get the image of Jules trying to fix the datapad out of his head. “I was sure she didn’t know I was infected. But, there’s always the chance I’m wrong, you know? Maybe she did know, and was just biding her time. Waiting for me to let down my guard.” He pauses. “This is what it’s like, sir. This is how this feels. It’s a little whisper in the back of the throat, somthing telling you to be suspicious of everyone. And …when… I put my hand through that thing’s guts and realized she was… standing there, right there, I…was…” He stopped and thought for a moment. “Relieved? For a moment I was relieved. Then, I remembered what I was doing. I wanted to shoot myself, gouge out my own eyes, something.” Vance sat there, expressionless as he talked. “I understand it, now. Those feelings …are still here. Jack- it’s not a whisper anymore… it’s a scream. “
Vance clenches his fists and wraps his arms around himself. “I’m not going to make it. I can feel it.”
“You made a mistake. It’s battle- those things happen. Regardless, you had the right to be suspicious of her. She wasn’t quite all toghther, you know? The rest, it’s just blown out of proportion..just crap. Don’t let your head play tricks on you now. We’re almost through this now.”
Vance looks at him. “Jules isn’t dead, is he?”
Jack stands up, glaring down at Vance, and walks to the door. “You…you’re not Jules.” he says, peeking out the window.
“Jules was like everyne else here. You said it yourself, just a matter of time. My time’s soon.”
Jack stood silent for a moment.“Get some rest. My last order for you.” A thin smile finally travels across Vance’s face, and he leans against the door of the warm refridgerator. Jack stood by the door and thought about Cordova. Vance closed his eyes.
The retro engines had been shaking the Olympus for almost 5 minutes, but the crew were not shaken at all. They had become accustomed to their new ship many missions ago. “We’re 10 minutes out, sir. Still no response. Static level is unusually high, though. We need to be closer. “ the captain says.
Commander Dullis’s image flickers on the lightwave screen. “There may not be anyone left. Nuke the site if all you get is static. Do not land. There’s reason to believe we may have a NBC hazard here. Your orders are to destroy the site.”
“What if we get a response? What about the Valaran?”
“If anyone is there, they’d be on the Valaran and on their way home, Captain.” He thinks for a moment. “Confirm the Valaran’s location, just in case. As for any signals..” He pauses. “If you can pick anyone up, you should know, you’ll be in quarantine at the orbital platform for a week.” Off camera, the Co-pilot glances at the Captain, and shakes his head. “Understood, Sir.” the captain responds, and closes the signal. He looks at the co-pilot. “Well, keep trying”, he says. “Why doesn’t he want us going down there?”
“You know we always find the best stuff when they want us to stay away. Keep checking that signal” the captain responded.
The rations he lifted from Vance’s vest pocket didn’t seem to help pass the time, and he didn’t want to wake Vance for more. “Too quiet” he thought. Their communicators had been crackling more then normal. He lowers the volume on his own, then reaches for Vance’s.
“…to base? Phobos base, Come in?…Valaran..what is your location?…LaGrange, come in?.. “
“Shit!” He yells, pulling his hand away in surprise. “Vance…Vance! Wake up!….It’s the ship!”
“Couldn’t be…” Vance rubbed his eyes. “You said 4 days.”
“That’s a Goddamn ship…Listen.” He grabs the communicator. “This is Lt. Colonel Greives. Can you hear me?… Come in?” He looks at Vance, grinning from ear to ear in a vaguely unnatural way. “Don’t smile like that.”
“Wh….why?”
“You’re starting to look creepy.”
“Colonel..” The tramsmitter crackles.”…This is the transport UMC Olympus. We read you. Where is the Valaran? What is your location?”
“They’re early?” Vance asks.
“Valaran is destroyed. Dock at the main port. Do not disembark! There’s… hostiles in the base. We’ll come to you. Clear?” Jack tried not to sound impatient.
The captain looks at the co-pilot, bewildered. “Did he say ‘Hostiles’. The co-pilot presses the mic. “We read you. ETA 10 minutes. Olympus out”.
Jack and Vance jump up and gather their gear. Jack cracks the door and peaks around the corner. “We better be ready to pull-out fast.” Vance watches him, but doesn’t move. “I’m not coming with you.” Jack looks back it him, frustrated. “Vance, Corps isn’t here just to rescue us. And, they’re not here to do an investigation. They’re going to blow this base to hell. You know that!”
“Yea? So what? You said this base isn’t even powering that door. The base doesn’t matter. You can’t destroy a door that doesn’t even exist in our fucking universe! Bomb all you want, that thing will still be there.”
“So what? What the fuck does that have to do with us?” Jack looks at him suspiciously, then realizes what Vance had been planning all along. “You idiot! It’s not all up to you! Bullshit!. They can do something…Bullshit. They can close that door! We’re going Home!” He drops his gun and looks at Vance pleadingly. “They can cure…’this’.” Vance’s new complexion now covers his jaw.
“You can’t believe that anymore. “ Vance mumbled.
Jack rubs his head in consternation. “What..do you want to do? I’m not leaving you here just to get blown-up.”
Vance looks down at the silver case at Jack’s side. “What’s in the case?” Jack smiles and ponders the situation for a moment. He kicks it to him with his foot. “I think you’ll like it.”
They both look at each other. Jack reaches out his hand. Vance takes it and holds tight, saying “You know, I have to do this. I’m the best man for the job.”
“God save your soul, Corporal”
He watches Vance run down the access way back into the main building, the case in his hand. He stops at the hatch and turns back to Jack. “Lieutenant! So…you’re 0 for 2 now from what I hear, right? Better get a desk job!” Grinning, he jumps through the hatch as it closes. Jack turns back towards the loading ramp shaking his head, trying not to be amused.
Vance stands in the airlock to the Low-atmosphere chamber. He puts on one of the space-suits hanging there and looks down at the large metal case laying on the floor. He opens it. A data pad lay on top. He turns it on. “X140 v.92, Beam Weapon for Marine Special Ops Deployment against armored targets. Manual, Pg1 of 1050.” He looks up and shakes his head. ‘No time to read a novel,’ he thinks. He was surprised at first, suspecting maybe Jack had played a trick on him. Neatly packed in foam, the thick, boxy silver plate looked like a broken piece of some other device, unfinished and forgotten. He pulls it from the foam and underneath he finds 2 black pistol grips bolted to the bottom. A combat sling drags on the floor. He flips a switch. A ominous hum from it’s generator vibrates the grips with power. A dim red glow shown through an clear plate in the front. It was like no other military weapon he ever seen. He felt uneasy picking it up. Closing his visor, he walks to the airlock. It lets him pass into the lab. Stepping over the bodies, he walks along the catwalk to the chamber. As he looks down, he finds the rest of the staff of Phobos 9. Hundreds of feet below, the power conduits snaking to the central tower lit the floor with an eerie glow. Piles of arms and legs- the bodies of the Phobos men and women, piled 10 deep in places, littered the floor. Not a space suit in sight. ‘They simply walked out the airlock!’ Vance winced and looked away, staring into the flickering chamber in front of him. He walks into the open room at the top of the tower, trying to forget the image below. He stood at the chamber’s threshold with the weapon. His skin began to itch. He doesn’t even look back as he steps.
Jack limps up to the airlock where the Olympus had docked. Two guards run down the ramp and pull him in. Helping him to the bench, a MedTech immediately begins checking his wounds. She fights with the band around his arm. A grizzled voice comes from above him: “Where is the rest of your team, Lt. Colonel?” Jack tries to make out the familiar face of in the bright light of the cabin. “Lt.Colonel ….Greives? Let me guess.. no others left?” said Corp. Bowers angrily. Jack turns away in disgust. “No. No one” He pauses. “Wait….list corporal Vance Daniels as missing.” Bowers throws a datapad in his lap. “We’re going to deploy lightwave link soon as we’re out of atmosphere. United Military Command General and Colonel Hayes want you to brief them immediately, before we nuke the site.”
“Phobos doesn’t have an atmosphere.”
Jack spoke vacantly, staring at the hatch as it seals. Bowers leaves without saying a word. Jack slouches back on the bench as she pokes at the odd-looking wound on his shoulder. He was fast asleep as the base explodes, far below.
The pit was steep, and the reddish pellets of sand made it slippery. Vance’s eyes couldn’t focus, so he lay in the sand for a moment. His skin burned, sticking to the pressure-suit. His muscles felt like ripping from the bone- he tried to catch his breath. As his eyes cleared, he could see a the pillar of light far in the distance. Coming from high above, It bore into the sand. He looks up to see a massive iron disk, floating a thousand feet in the air, the light shooting from a smooth metal arm sagging below. Dozens of arms are perched underneath, shooting beams in many directions. One passes directly overhead. He rolls on to his belly, and peers over the lip of the pit. The beams pierce the ground for acres around, making other pits in the sand. In the center, a single massive beam shimmers like marble, just like the chamber on Phobos. “On Phobos…” He thinks. “No Phobos any more- I hope”. Looking closer, the sand appears to move. He sees twisted and broken creatures creeping and dragging themselves towards the light. Then he spots them- the lumbering shape of something horribly familiar . “Oh No. Hundreds.” He whispers to himself. A mass of beasts swarm towards the central beam. He grabs the gun, and rolls on his back, below the edge of the pit. He thought of the one they killed from the observation center; he thought of the shock in Alecia’s eyes just before she died. He squeezes his eyes shut for a moment and imagines rolling hills, green countryside, and home. Charging across the sand, he yells at the top of his lungs. Balls of fire shoot past him from the hands of the enraged beasts. As he squeezes the triggers, the gun screams and shakes. It explodes in wide beams of blue plasma, cutting through the beasts as they charge him. Their bodies drop into charred pieces on the deep sand. As he falls into the raging hoard, he wonders, “We may just have ourselves a fair fight.”
The End
