Armor by Tempus4_2000
NOW:
“Angela: there are two of them in the corridor ahead, distance 25.129 meters,” whispered the soft, sibilant voice in my mind. “They are armed with Breen Model CR-121 disruptors, half-charged. Use caution…we have consumed a great deal of energy in the last hour. We are both injured. I do not know how much more of the weapons’ fire I can safely disperse.”
I nodded–an unnecessary gesture, considering that Skarpam knew my every thought and emotion before I could even speak, and I its. I felt a wave of the same tired amusement I had been putting up with for the last six years, and I absently scratched at my chitinous left shoulder pauldron. I had boosted far too hard for too long, expended so much energy over the last few hours I had lost many pounds of weight in the form of muscle, forcing Skarpam to compensate for the changes in my body. The formfitting symbiont finally finished readjusting the fibers which laced it to my body surface, and the itching faded but didn’t stop entirely. But then, it never did. One of the many disadvantages of my condition.
The armor sensed my intent, and a diagram of the corridor ahead formed in my mind, with the two massive Boskone soldiers clearly delineated. Skarpam quested with its prodigious senses, and I saw the boredom and exhaustion of the one on the left…he was very young, hideously tired, running only on battle-stimulants, and as desperately ready for this debacle to be over as I was. I immediately designated him as “Youth” and made a mental note to spare his life if I could, and rode the wave of annoyance coming from the mind of Skarpam at my reluctance to take life, even the life of an enemy–especially since the armor-symbiont was also dead-tired and hurting, and desperately needed a fix of fresh, raw protein, and lots of it…
I cut our shared thought short and mentally rebuked the symbiont, and its irritation deepened. No, we were NOT going to have a repeat of last year…
Skarpam sensed the one on the right, the one in charge, and we both drew back in unpleasant surprise. Physically, he was nearly as tired as his subordinate, but he was older, far sharper, colder than cometary ice and much, MUCH more focused on his duty. He was riding the crazy-wild surge of Boskone battle-drugs, bored out of his skull, waiting eagerly for something to happen along that he could kill for the sheer fun of it, or for his superiors to order him to slay the prisoners in the cell behind him. Him I mentally dubbed Hardcase. His strength of will was nearly overpowering, and Skarpam and I both shuddered at the overpowering waves of sadism that rolled off of him like a thick stink.
We wouldn’t be doing him any favors this day. Given the level of sheer willpower he possessed, there was no real way to put him down that didn’t involve killing him, but at least I wouldn’t be losing any sleep over it. Youth was so tired and distracted, however, that we could work our magic upon him, and at least delay his entry into the melee long enough to deal with Hardcase.
Good. Neither of them was yet aware of the trail of death I had left behind me on the way down here.
“Angela: highlighting armor rupture-points,” whispered Skarpam. Abruptly, I saw how their modular, mass-produced battle-armor was put together, and saw how the plates moved against each other and thinned over three spots on the torso seams to allow for easier movement. When they turned their torsos, the armor plates thinned still further, though still covered by their phaserproof meshing. It was thin enough there to allow a precisely-aimed projectile–or a small armored fist, moving nearly as fast as a bullet–to cave it in. Two of the three spots were over bone, one covered nothing essential except muscle, but one of them overlayed a nerve-nexus which would incapacitate a Boskone if damaged…and one of them would be an instant kill, as it was located directly over their heart. I glanced down at the depleted phaser in my hand, and then discarded it. I wouldn’t be needing it.
I gave my assent, and then we began. Together we concentrated, and sent our combined power down the corridor.
Youth, the one not yet hardened by years of cruelty, felt drowsy waves of fatigue pulsing gently over him like a warm, soft blanket. SLEEP, Skarpam and I whispered silently in his mind. Sleep…
In my mind’s eye, the one place Skarpam and I shared fully, I saw the soldier shift uncomfortably, saw him start to nod off. He tiredly thumbed the selector-pad on his gauntlet, which pumped another load of neo-epinephrine into his bloodstream, but he already had so much in him that the little bit extra didn’t help much. He hadn’t slept for days, had been longer than that without a decent hot meal and a good bunk, and the only sure cure for fatigue is rest.
Skarpam and I whispered a soundless, wordless lullaby into the back of his mind. He couldn’t sleep–the battle drugs wouldn’t let him–but Youth slowly sank into a mindless stupor, gradually losing awareness of anything except how so very, very tired he was and how much he wanted to go home. He swayed slightly on his feet, and then his armor’s servos locked his legs in place, keeping him from falling. He was as close to asleep as he was going to get. Perfect.
Hardcase glanced over at the slight “chink” of locking servos, noticed his half-asleep subordinate, and barked something my translator couldn’t make out. He pulled his hand back to backhand Youth, even as my heartrate suddenly leaped by a factor of ten and the world around me slowed to a crawl.
…and then we sprang from around the corner, and my booted feet slammed into the opposite wall. 25 meters…
Skarpam and I weren’t Joined sufficiently well to be able to merge into one sentient being, would never be able to Join as was natural for his kind, but after long years of practice, we were able to smoothly coordinate our actions. The key was to think about it as little as I could as I simply acted, and let my other half handle everything else. I provided the guiding impulse, told us where to go, while Skarpam forced my arms and legs to pump fast fast FAST, making the ten thousand and one minute cellular adjustments per second that a hurtling human body needed to make in order to make it react a hundred times faster than nature had designed it to. The air around me felt like cold molasses, crawling across my skin and clinging like glue to my bare breasts. As my feet struck the opposite wall the muscles of my/our legs were already pulling taut, absorbing the impact and then returning it with interest, only at an angle. I bounced off the wall, spinning in midair to land with a crouch on the opposite wall, absorbing the impact with hands and feet…20 meters…
Hardcase heard the impact of my body, spun around with Youth’s dereliction instantly forgotten, and saw a human woman, nearly naked but for the plates of leathery stuff clinging to her torso and limbs like some bizarre dominatrix-fetish costume, leap off the wall with unbelievable speed and tear down the corridor towards him. His great tree-trunk of a rifle came up oh-so-slowly, and he fired…
Skarpam sensed the shot-location a split-second before it could blow me in half, and I was suddenly leaping again, spinning in the air to push off of the ceiling with gloved hands and booted feet, bouncing over the beam. Youth started from his stupor at the sound of weapons’ fire, but he was disoriented, and would be for a another second or two. An eternity. Far faster than a human, he threw his own rifle up and fired, but the shot went wide of me, missing by nearly a meter. As good as a mile. I sprang as Hardcase fired again, hitting the opposite wall with enough force to hold me in place for a moment as I sprinted parallel to the floor…10 meters…5 meters…
Even as Youth got his bearings, and Hardcase tried to track me with barrel of his rifle, I left the wall, hit the floor, and bounced across the last five meters separating me from the two, flipping in midair to slam feet-first into Youth’s armored chest, shattering his armor at the weakest point. I felt the young Boskone’s ribs splinter under the impact of my heel-spur, and he went down, unconscious, as his nervous system misfired. Youth was out of the way and alive, at least. I spun and used the last of my momentum to kick the disruptor-rifle out of Hardcase’s hands, and was almost incinerated as the rifle fired as it left his grasp, the beam grazing the side of my head. Skarpam howled in anguish as it bled away the energy before it could kill us both, and our singularity of focus faltered momentarily. The stink of my burning hair and Skarpam’s chiton filled my nostrils, and parts of our skin blazed hotter than the surface of a sun as it cooled.
A pair of long vibroblades slid out of each of Hardcase’s armor’s wrist sheaths and locked, and he came at me a good deal faster than I had expected, taking advantage of my moment of lost initiative. I sidestepped, grabbed his arm, feeling the blades penetrate and then grate along the ulna of my own left forearm as I did, twisted it until I felt things popping inside of the armor, and used the force of his own charge to hurl him ass-over-teakettle upside down into the wall with all of my strength. Ancient stone crumbled along with his armor, and I glanced down at my spurting left arm to see Skarpam’s fibers knitting themselves into the severed tissues, instantly sealing the wound. The arm hurt, would continue to hurt for days, but I was still completely functional.
Hardcase roared in rage and came back up with inhuman speed, his vibroblades out and singing, and there was no way a human could have met that charge or avoided it…yet I did. I came forward just as fast, body twisting impossibly as I ducked under and between his bladed forearms, and drove my armored fist, now covered with sharp spikes and far harder than titanium, straight into the thin spot in his torso’s armor, directly over his heart. Our vectors added together; a half-inch of duranium steel alloy caved in and my hand kept going, ribcage cracking and driving splintered bones deep into his heart. I found myself face-to-helmet with him as my arm sank deep. His yellow eyes were wide and staring with horror and agony, fangs dripping with his own blood, mouth working soundlessly. He coughed, and blood sprayed his faceplate, hiding that awful staring face from view. His weight slowly settled onto mine, and suddenly I was all that was holding him upright.
I stepped back, pulling my gore-slicked right arm from the hole in his chest, and gently allowed his body to fall to the floor. The bizarre time-compression of symbiont-boost ended as my nervous system’s clock-speed dropped to near-normal, and the solid reality around me sped up, physically snatching me up and jerking me along with it so hard I actually stumbled. My former sense of my body blazing with sheer, unholy, balls-to-the-wall POWER crashed and burned as waves of pain and fatigue–both mine and Skarpam’s–swept over me, and I swayed on my feet, only the armor-symbiont keeping me upright.
Meat…raw meat, we needed fresh protein and fats, right NOW…my mouth salivated in spite of my instinctive revulsion, and it was all I could do not to fall onto the corpse of Hardcase, to rip open his armor and gorge myself. I felt giddy and faint with hunger; we had expended far too much energy getting into this place, dealing with the mercenary soldiers outside, trusting our combined strength and ability to absorb damage to protect us, and now we were paying the price. If we remained here much longer, Skarpam’s shaky control over its own instincts would falter. Skarpam’s kind were natural-born samurai, sworn with every fiber of their being to die before they harmed an innocent or allowed an innocent to come to harm…but the enemy soldiers here were fair game. I would wind up doing something that I’d regret later. Again.
I felt my hands shudder, successfully fought the urge to lick my bloody hands clean, and instead forced myself to crouch down on rubbery legs to inspect Youth. The Boskone male was still unconscious, his lips and chin smeared with yellow blood–he had bitten clean through his lower lip when I had kicked him. I winced in sympathy, even as I tore out his armor’s power cells and manacled his wrists. One arm was badly broken, I saw, painful, yet not fatal. I dropped a beacon on him and slapped my combadge, pinned to a plate of chitinous armor under my left breast. The unconscious soldier disappeared in a sparkle of lights as he was transported to the brig of the USS-Agamemnon, where he would wake up in restraints and hurting like a bastard–but at least he would wake up, unlike the fifty or so others I had already encountered and neutralized. I sensed Skarpam snorting derisively at my sentimentality, and snorted right back. At least this time it said nothing. I knew I would be hearing about it later.
The armor plate on my left cheek itched madly as it fought to repair itself and my own disrupted tissues with its own depleted resources. I ignored it. I’ve had a lot a lot of practice. Instead I forced myself to focus through the fatigue and studied the massive door, noted that it appeared to be keyed to voice commands. Dammit, we killed Hardcase much, MUCH too quickly… I heard a cacophony of voices from inside the room beyond, felt the varied emotional states of dozens of innocents inside, survivors from the starliners that the Boskone had illegally siezed, all of them scared and sick and praying for a miracle. I decided to give them one.
I stood up on legs that were none too steady, shut out the aetheric clamor and hefted Youth’s massive rifle. “STARFLEET!” I roared. “GET AWAY FROM THE DOOR AND TAKE COVER!!” I waited for several seconds until Skarpam’s senses reported that the people beyond had all taken cover, then fired, and the door exploded.
On feet I could no longer feel I stepped carefully through the smoking hole, and looked through the settling dust and ash. Instantly our senses expanded, instantly counting five hundred and eight people of a dozen different species, scared, injured, dirty and malnourished, but alive–and Admiral Perry’s face among them, just as dirty and tired as them, but grinning from ear to ear. I noted that quite a few of the prisoners were staring at me in various degrees of stunned shock as they took in my near-naked form, breasts and groin exposed for all the world to see (clothing interfered with Skarpam’s camoflage ability and its senses, as well as irritating its hide), my torso and limbs covered only by chitinous armor over my vital areas, my naked flesh smeared by blood, covered with cuts, scraped and punctured and burned and bruised in a great many festive colors. Take a picture, it’ll last longer, I thought absently, numbly, my world fading down into an exhausted fog as the last of my energy faded.
I clumsily tapped my combadge, babbled something to the ships in orbit above, and reality dissolved into sparkles as the Enterprise, Agamemnon and the rest of the task-force in orbit beamed up the survivors using their mass-cargo pads, all the people thought lost for months to their families and worlds. And then I was falling, to be caught by the strong, warm hands of Admiral Perry and a dozen other people, the only things now keeping us from collapsing to the deck. My benefactors gently lowered me to the deck; medics and doctors moved among us, scanning ex-prisoners, and I felt Skarpam commandeer my mouth and jaw as it made my report for me, its master, its lover, its jailer and its prisoner both for six years now, too tired right now to do anything more than lie there, insensate and mute.
I heard Dr. Crusher calling for people to move back, give me room, and I smiled a loopy smile up at her as she ran her tricorder over my nearly-nude body, even while another medic threw an ultralight emergency blanket over my body. She looked beautiful through the fog of exhaustion, angelic almost, and I said so, my lips slurring out the words drunkenly. She grinned, said something I couldn’t understand through the roaring in my ears, put the first of a long series of analgesic, antihistamine and antibiotic hyposprays to my neck, and I felt the cold pulse at my carotid shoot through the rest of my system as the drugs finally, mercifully took effect. Even the omnipresent itch everywhere Skarpam touched faded into the background; antihistamines always made the symbiont sluggish, but he tolerated them for my sake, at least at times like these. The smell of meat–repulsive, wonderful, fresh, bloody meat assailed me–bless you, Dr. Stona, I thought absently, as I surged to my feet, my hands unconsciously grabbing awkwardly for the gargantuan platter of massive, blood-warm beefsteaks and fresh, wriggling Klingon gagh she would have told Crusher to have waiting on me. And then I went away for awhile to revel in the glow of our shared triumph while Skarpam bolted the awful stuff down as fast as it could cram it into my mouth, giving us both what we now needed to survive, the two of us innocent and uncaring of the looks of shock that rolled off of the faces of so many of the strangers around us as we gorged. They didn’t know us. Fuck ’em. Let ’em all stare if they wanted.
Skarmpam. My lover.
My prisoner.
My jaile
It really hadn’t started out as a bad day. .
I’d rolled off the bunk at 0630 hours on the dot, as per my usual routine, giving me enough time to wake up as slowly as I wanted. Two cups of coffee, white, with enough sugar to send an elephant into a diabetic coma. Cheese danish. Time enough to read a couple of letters from home, shower, change into my duty uniform. Report for Alpha Shift in Engineering at 0800 hours, get a short report from the last guy at my post, and spend the next three hours doing paperwork that I had let pile up for the past week. I’d spent long years honing my proscratination skills into an art form, usually letting the million and one crap reports that every division of Starship Operations churns out by the ton, pile up for days until I finally threw myself at the heap at the last second. I usually work best under pressure, anyway.
Lt. (j.g.) Angela Espinoza, Angie to her friends, Angel to her parents. And my first non-Starbase posting, aboard the USS Agamemnon. LCARS certified on starship mainframe systems, all versions up to 3.2, Computer Technician class AA-2, with certification on sixteen non-Federation computer architectures and operating systems. I could rip apart the mainframe of a Romulan Warbird in three hours and rebuild it blindfolded, not that I’m bragging. I was exactly where I wanted to be, doing what I liked. My first posting off a Starbase, three months out of 223. A normal life in Fleet. Border patrol, escapist vids to the contrary, is usually dull. Most normal people like it that way. I was bored out of my mind.
The transmission came in at 1132 that morning, a distress call, fragmentary, from a vessel of unknown design right on the border, apparently unpowered according to long-range scans. There had been no response to hails, and indications were that the vessel had been fired upon. There were no known interstellar powers in sector 279-B that were worth the name, but the areas beyond the border were little-explored. Sometimes bad things happened.
And as we drew closer, it was confirmed that the vessel had, in fact, been atttacked. There were faint energy signatures all over the place, indicative of heavy disruptor-fire. Nothing more recent than several days, from the looks of things. No new warp-trails in evidence, no one nearby, not even an indication of a cloaked vessel. And no life-signs at all that registered on shipboard scanners, except the kind of weak, diffuse readings you get from the occasional scavenging insect. Risky, true enough, considering the kind of damage the starship had suffered, but the ship was still holding an atmosphere, albeit a cold one. We wouldn’t need e-suits, and the few pathogens that a transporter biofilter couldn’t screen out were usually so nasty that a suit was about as much protection against them as a paper bag over your head. So they needed some people to go over and have a look at it, maybe find some clue to who had attacked these people by pulling the data from whatever passed for a mainframe over there. If someone out here in the sticks had decided to start slaughtering random passerbys for no readily apparent reason, or if there were a war brewing out here, Federation authorities needed to know. And when Commander Banks asked if I wanted to get my feet wet, I jumped at the chance. The first rule of any military organization is to never, ever volunteer for any job.
I was young. And dear God, was I stupid.
I stared incredulously at the readout on the portable generator. “Who the hell uses three-phase DC current to run a starship?” I murmured to myself. The induction port it had tried to interface with had blown as soon as the generator had switched on, without even a warning that the power was incompatible. There was nothing left of the powerplant to salvage, and the emergency batteries were almost flat. There were no provisions for broadcast power, so there was no way to run a power-beam from the Agamemnon. The air was thin and cold and smelled of old, dead meat, but was still breathable–but there were so many breaches and holes in this ship that the only thing holding an atmosphere inside were the airfields, which would fail in less than a day unless we could power up the ship. The gravitrons were still working, but at less than one-seventh of a standard gee.
“The people who built this crate,” said Tricia Carter, buried in a conduit a few feet away. All I could see of her were her feet, as she tapped them together unconsciously. Technically, I outranked her–by a whole three weeks. “And if you think that’s bad, you ought to be doing my job. Metal wiring and dead critters galore…” she trailed off, and a few seconds later I heard a tiny, insectile squeak and then a crackle. “Add one more headstone.”
“Uh…I’ll think I’ll stay here, thanks,” I said, scanning the induction port again, and trying to ignore the faint nausea cause by the weak gravity. Trish chuckled. Several hours ago, I had managed to distinguish myself by evacuating the remains of my breakfast as soon as I had caught a whiff of the air. So far, no one had mentioned it again, but I didn’t want a repeat of the performance.
The derelict was obviously a vessel of war, a fighter-carrier of some sort, judging by its size and the number of small craft it carried in its bays– and judging by the numerous jury-rigs and getbys in its systems, it had been without regular dockyard maintenance for a long, long time. The scoring and welds that littered its space-hull bore mute testimony to years of running fights and battle after battle under the worst conditions imaginable. Neutron-dating showed the vessel to be nearly a century old, but while primitive in certain respects compared to Federation technology, the designers had wrought well. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what these people had gone through, much less how they’d managed to keep this monstrosity running for so long.
Medical teams were sorting the thousands of bodies on the lower decks of the derelict–and, heartbreakingly, many of the victims seemed to have been children and elderly, shot with flamethrowers and bullets and some sort of heavy plasma cannon, many of them while prone, kneeling or in the back while running. Hulking soldiers of some sort, all of them wearing heavy biotech powered-armor of some sort, had died on their feet by the hundreds. And my job, here, was to try and reconstruct their computer systems and pull the data from whatever this thing used for memory cells…and find out from whom or what they had been running. We were presently in the hulk’s primary computer core, a huge, echoing chamber filled with stacks of meter-wide cubes of coldware photonic processor-blocks, which we were in the middle of resurrecting. The emergency backup batteries for the core were located one deck below us, which had, unfortunately, been destroyed during the insane running-battle when the ship had been boarded. We had spent the last four hours piecing together the network as best as we could.
“Stupid crazyquilt chunk of pieced-together–there,” drifted out from the conduit. “Okay, try it now. I think it’ll hold.”
I connected the generator’s leads to the input put and keyed the generator to full power. Instead of a shower of sparks, the lights in the chamber began to burn brighter, and several status screens on the nearest mainframe bank–the only one that was intact–blinked on. The rest of them sported numerous blast marks and bulletholes, and remained dark and dead. I studied my tricorder and hunted for the right frequencies, until I found the network link. The protocol the system used for communication was sophisticated, but not impossible to decipher. I tried keys until the system reported a match.
“Check. We’ve got juice, and the core is up.” I tapped my combadge. “Lt. Espinoza to Commander Banks.”
“Go ahead, Lieutenant.” said her voice, echoing through the chamber. “Got some good news for me?”
I smiled. “As a matter of fact, I do,” I said. “We’ve got nearly one-fourth of the computer core up and runnning, which is about all that we’re going to be able to repair. The rest is dead. We’re opening a link now.”
In theory, any computer could do the work of any other computer, and did; starships were bewilderingly complicated, and so by necessity were mostly automated–there was no other way to make warp-driven starflight possible. The warp-core itself was the single most complicated machine most sentient species would ever build, and required trillions of miniscule adjustments every second to create a stable warpfield at any speed faster than Warp One. The minimum speeds and sheer amount of digit-crunching goes way, way up from there if a ship’s crew engages in ship-to-ship combat at the same time, raises shields, uses transporters, or wants to run holographic systems, life-support and everything else from replicators to toilets. Federation vessels wrung every last gram of power from their computers by building them solely with superconducting picometer-scale, quantum-effect processors, encasing them in FTL fields, and slaving hundreds of thousands of tiny parallel CPU’s together at once.
These people had taken a different path; the processors in these mainframes were far bulkier and slower, but biologically-based, relying on superfast chemical switching driven by high-energy lasers instead of streams of electrons. What they lacked in speed, they made up for in sheer power and flexibility. Only the Breen were known to use anything similar. Unfortunately, this also made them extraordinarily cranky, and they needed a constant stream of nutrients to maintain them–nutrients which had been in short supply, lately. Memory was stored in a similar way. It was anyone’s guess as to whether or not any data remained intact.
Alien text scrolled in colored columns across the status screens as the mainframe blocks rebooted. The tricorder beeped, struggling to convert alien code into something compatible, sending kiloquads of information back to the Agamemnon for processing. “C’mon, baby, boot for momma,” I purred, willing the alien computer cores to come back to life. Trish Carter clucked over her tricorder like a mother hen, clearly not liking what she was seeing.
And then the system ground to a stop and an alarm sounded. I studied the screen of my tricorder, while Trish was bent over the nearest mainframe, studying the alien readout and comparing the results with her own tricorder. On each status screen, three lines of vertical alien hieroglyphics flashed in red. My tricorder displayed a translation:
ERROR 00244: LOCAL PROCESSOR NODE CORRUPT. ERROR 21101: CATASTROPHIC ERROR. DATA TANKS NOT FOUND. ERROR 00013 OPERATING SYSTEM NOT FOUND. ABORTING RESTART. CONTACT SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR IMMEDIATELY
“Well, shit.” I muttered. Trish pulled the cover off of the master processor block and began scanning its guts. She sighed.
“What was that, Lieutenant?” came Commander Bank’s tinny voice.
“Looks like we’re not going to be able to get anything from the computers over here after all,” I sighed.
“They’ve been without nutrient flows for too long. If we can break them down and get them over to the Agamemnon, we might be able to rebuild them…or at least reconstruct the data in their memory banks,” murmured Trish thoughtfully. “There’s nothing we can do over here–huh…weird.” She studied the readout a bit more, perplexed. “Angie? Run a life-signs scan with your tricorder, would you? I can’t confirm if what I’m seeing is a glitch or not.”
I reset my tricorder and opened up the lifeform-sensor window, and started with a low-level passive scan, the kind that picks up the RF energy generated by anything with a nervous system. In a second it began sorting everything it picked up. I screened out our own bioreadings, then those of the techs, security and medical personnel around us, then anything that could be attributed to the occasional pest-animal or vermin. Last, I excluded the faint ticks of bioactivity from the biological components of the malfunctioning computer cores.
I was left with a single, weak life-reading combined with an anomalous energy-emission, a few hundred meters away to the north of our present location, maybe a deck or two down from us. From what I could tell, it corresponded to nothing in either the tricorder’s own memory, or the records I compared it to from the Agamemnon. Nothing humanoid, anyway. “Lieutenant Espinoza to the Agamemnon,” I said, a sense of excitement rising inside of me.
“Go ahead, Lieutenant,” said the voice of Agamemnon’s XO, Commander T’len.
“I’m getting some weird readings about 230 meters away from my position,” I said. “Mark 225.6 by 122.3, bearing 127.3. Could be something alive, maybe even a survivor…” Someone that could tell us what happened, maybe even who was responsible for this massacre. Children shot in the back as they tried to run…
“No. There is too much interference from the derelict’s engine section, but if the reading is as weak as you indicate, it might not be detectable at this range,” said the duty officer. “We cannot beam you any closer for the same reason. Commander Banks is dispatching a medical team and a security detachment to check the area you indicated. The area is apparently still holding an atmosphere, but we do not know for how much longer. Be careful.”
“We’ll meet them there. Espinoza out,” I said. We hastily grabbed our tools and left together.
The forensics teams had not yet explored much farther towards the stern of the hulk than the computer core, in part because we had our hands busy dealing with what we had found so far, but mostly because half of the rear decks appeared to have collapsed in on themselves when the alien vessel’s structural integrity fields failed. We climbed over piles over debris, trying not to open ourselves up on the jagged spars and broken supports, which protruded from the decks and bulkheads. Our breath plumed in the thin, frigid air; there were more bodies, mostly buried in the wreckage, all of them desiccated in the cold and dry. We panted and gasped as we climbed, struggling to drag in enough oxygen to breathe. Every twenty yards or so we dropped a flare to help guide the medics who were only a few minutes behind us. At one point, we were forced to use our phasers to burn our way through several emergency bulkheads, which had snapped closed when the hull had been breached, and were now too warped in their frames to open.
We lowered ourselves through a gaping hole in the deck and found ourselves in what looked like part of a maintenance tube, relatively unobstructed as far as our torches could tell. But less than a hundred meters away I saw the telltale dim flicker of a forcefield, and beyond that, I caught a glimpse of starlight. The tube ended in massive hull breach, severed by a colossal weapons burst from this monster’s attackers. I flipped open my tricorder, and sure enough, I saw that the field was weak and porous, the area still contaminated by residual radiation. We would have to decontaminated back on the Agamemnon. Trish and I pulled our breathing masks out of our pack and pulled hem on.
“How long do you think that field will last?” I asked, pointing at the field.
Trish consulted her own tricorder. “Eh…we’ve got a few hours yet. It’s hooked into the batteries, and we’ll get power to the whole mess up and running by day’s end. But I definitely wouldn’t hang around in here any longer than I had to.” She studied her screen, tracking the anomalous reading we had been following. “It’s right there, near the end…”
Carefully, we picked our way along the bent and warped tunnel towards the forcefield, until a massive pair of legs came into view, at the source of the odd reading. And as my torch fully illuminated the prone figure lying on the twisted and buckled deckplates for the first time, my hopes of finding a survivor vanished.
Most of the bodies found aboard the derelict sported burns, deep slashed and the gaping holes left by high-powered projectile firearms; this one, though, looked as if it had been exploded from the waist up. Rags of the same tattered leathery stuff many of the soldiers appeared to have worn as a carapace, some sort of biotechnological armoring, were scattered everwhere, filled with ragged holes and charred in a dozen places. Evidently this one had thought to make his last stand here in the tunnel, and whoever he had been, he had died hard. The deckplates here were melted and scorched, and alien blood had been burned into the metal of the bulkheads for meters around. One dessicated arm remained, its six-fingered hand still clutching at its weapon. I tapped my combadge, turning away from the awful sight and trying to fight my rising gorge. Trish studied her tricorder, an odd look on her face.
“Lieutenant Espinoza to Commander Banks,” I said. “I think that we scratch off that anomalous reading–”
“Angie? I’m picking it up again,” said Trish, interrupting, her voice full of surprise. “It’s getting stronger–what in hell?!”
I whirled around at the shock in her voice, and saw what she was pointing at.
The corpse was moving.
Then, as reason asserted itself: No. Not the corpse. The armor.
“Lieutenant? What’s going on there?” came Banks’ voice through my combadge. “Is something wrong? We’ll reach your location in around three minutes…” I knelt closer to the corpse, putting aside my revulsion, and began scanning.
“There’s some activity–we found the source of the readings,” I said. “The armor this alien was wearing, it’s still–”
“ANGIE! GET BACK!” cried Trish.
Suddenly I cried out and fell backwards, as a bolt of sharp pain lanced through my chest. I gasped and clutched at a thin tendril, barely thicker than a human hair, now sunk deep into my sternum. In the harsh white light of my diogen torch I could see blood starting to soak the front of my uniform tunic, looking black against the gold of the fabric. I sobbed brokenly as I pulled frantically at the thin filament, but the thing simply pulled through my fingers, as strong as steel wire, attached to the nearest chunk of alien bio-armor. I screamed again as I felt it inch its way farther into my chest, and my heart juddered as it sunk in. My jaws locked open as the purest torment I had ever imagined feeling in my life blasted through me, leaving me unable to scream or even breathe. Trish was screaming, and I heard the Commander yelling through the combadge, demanding to know what was going on. Trish grabbed at the tendril and added her strength to my own, and I felt the horrid thing pull out slightly, blood spurting up…
And then there was a bright flash, and through my torment I saw Trish fly backwards, slamming into the bulkhead. I heard her cry out, and the smell of charred flesh wafted into my nostrils as several more of the slender tendrils buried themselves in me, anchoring themselves in my flesh. And then my abused body found its voice again and I was finally able to shriek in terror and agony and all thoughts of Trish vanished as first dozens, and then hundreds, of blossoms of howling white-hot fire appeared across my body, slicing through me like a saw. Blood was everywhere, spattering the deck and the walls, and I felt scrabbling tendrils clawing at my skin everywhere, at my face, my neck my scalp, my back and spine. I was dimly aware of my uniform shredding into pieces as the thing tore it to shreds and ripped frantically at my skin, and I tried and failed to crawl backwards, my bloody hands slawing at the sharp deckplates as I fought to escape the ferocious, hellish onslaught.
I felt the pain building to a crescendo, felt it surpass my most nightmarish expectations and keep right on going, and in the face of unspeakable violation I retreated as fast as I could. And then the worst violation of all, as I felt something huge and unfathomably powerful ram its way into my mind, clawing at parts of my soul I had never even imagined existed…
…/burningpainterrorrageterrorragemustdefendprotectohcreatorthey’rechildreninnocentsdyingprotectthemNOIFAILEDIFAILEDIFAILEDIFAILEDNO!!!/ and from somewhere far, far away I felt myself shrieking with enough fear and pain and whitehot grief for two souls, even as the last of my consciousness broke down and fled howling under the assault. The last thing I was aware of before the dark mercifully descended was the sensation of my my arms and legs spasming painfully and my bleeding body flopping like a marionette as it fought to rise from the deck under its own power…
…And with my fusion to the nervous system of my new host, I regained my full senses at last.
Something was wrong–I attempted the melding, only to find the host was wholly without consciousness. I could not will it back to awareness, and as I probed cautiously, I drew back in startled shock as I discovered that this one lacked even one of the tens of thousands of neurological port types with which I was equipped to interface. I could not meld! Even worse, in my frantic haste I had critically damaged the hostbody while interfacing. My resources were depleted by my long hibernation, the energy it had taken to keep myself alive; I could not repair it or myself without access to fresh protein, and there was none.
I HAD FAILED! WE HAD BEEN DEFEATED, AND MY CHARGES WERE DEAD! The grief which poured through me at the knowledge that my masters had been slaughtered along with those whom we had been pledged to defend since our Merging at the murderous hands of the Enemy was abruptly supplanted by the scorching fury at more strangers pouring into the conduit! More invaders!
Along one bulkhed, a lone invader scrabbled away mewling, the one I had dimly sensed earlier, who had attempted to interfere. Its hands were damaged by the weak plasma bolt I had been able to manage. It was unarmed and crippled; I elected to ignore it, in favor of the eight others who had entered the conduit. One of them gabbled something at me in a language I did not know, and without the host’s conscious brain, I could not translate it. It was no doubt an attempt to take advantage of my disorientation, and so I ignored it. Through the fog of pain, confusion and fatigue in my mind, I poured my remaining strength into a vicious punch to the creature’s upper thorax, and was exulted as bones shattered and organs collapsed under the tiny fist of my new host. The Enemy went flying, even as I attempted to harden the support-struts of my left arm into blades. More pain raved through me–the appendage had been avulsed when my previous host had been murdered!
Too many, I was too slow and weak! I attempted to Boost, and was rewarded with a wave of weakness instead. Not enough energy remained in my cells! I tried to Boost again by pulling the needed energy from my host, and it responded with glacial sluggishness, its reserves draining with phenomenal rapidity. I felt muscles and cartillage pull and snap under the strain, bones fracturing with unnatural stress, but I could spare no time to repair them now. I punched another Enemy in the face hard enough to collapse its mandibles and was moving to deal with the others when a blast of icy pain slammed into my host’s back, driving us to our knees. I spun as fast I could, but in the confined corridor there was no place to dodge. Three more stun-blasts caught us.
I could not dissipate the energy fast enough. Darkness came to claim me, and I sank into oblivion along with my host…