Terminus (Fringe Worlds #1) (3 page)

Maker paused, remembering – the scene vividly coming back to him as if it had happened yesterday. His audience waited patiently, and after a moment, he continued.

“They must have had some kind of cloaking technology in their armor,” Maker said, “because we never had a clue that they were there when we first passed through that area on our way to the sick bay. It was the same story on the way back.”

“So you still weren’t picking up any life signs,” Browing stated flatly.

“No,” Maker replied. “But the whole area – lots of open space with very little cover – just seemed like the perfect place for an ambush, so we holed up in the passageway for a few minutes, even though we weren’t getting any readings.”

“But surely your sensors were detecting movement,” Browing insisted.

“There was no gravity!” Maker almost screamed. “There was all kinds of crap floating around in there! Any movement we picked up the first time we were in there was probably categorized by all of us as debris. So I’m sorry we didn’t initially make the decision to verify that everything moving around us was trash.”

Dr. Chantrey gave him a piercing stare. “What did you do?”

Maker made a vague gesture. “What could I do? The most direct path back to the shuttle was through that cargo hold. We could try to find another route, but there was no guarantee that we’d be successful, and whoever had set this trap for us would probably be lying in wait no matter which way we went. Plus, at the moment, there was a good chance that they didn’t know we’d been given a warning – that we knew they were there. So I ordered us forward.”

“Forward?” Dr. Chantrey muttered, almost incredulously. “Into what you knew was a trap?”

Maker shrugged. “I put myself into our enemies’ shoes. I figured that they wouldn’t fire until we were at our most vulnerable, which meant the center of the room. So we moved together as a unit through the cargo area. Just before we reached the center, I gave the word and we broke away, moving in five different directions and firing at the same time.”

“Firing at what?” Browing asked. “You just said you weren’t picking up any signs that anyone was there.”

“We assumed that, if nothing else, they had the high ground – the catwalks,” Maker said. “So before we moved out into the center of the cargo hold, we each picked a spot where we figured the enemy was most likely to be. When we split away from one another, we each fired at our respective target spots. At the same time, they began firing at us from what seemed like every direction.”

“And when you say ‘they’…?” Kroner asked, leaving the question open-ended.

Maker frowned in thought. “They were alien – insectoid, but not a species I recognized, wearing full-plated armor. And there were dozens of them.”

“But you said earlier you thought they were cloaked,” Browing said. “If so, how could you see them?”

“As I understand it, cloaking and stealth technology eat up a lot of power,” Maker said. “Based on that, my best guess is that they had to become visible after a certain amount of time, because at that juncture we could see them.”

“What exactly did they look like?” Dr. Chantrey asked.

“Bodily, I’d say they resembled ants,” Maker said. “A thorax, an abdomen, and six limbs, although they were bipedal. Based on the construction of the armor, the head had compound eyes, antennae, a proboscis, and inward-facing pinchers.”

“How did you get away?” Dr. Chantrey asked.

“The Marines with me were well-trained – the best. We each nailed enemy combatants on the catwalks, although it wasn’t clear how much damage we’d done. After that, we were firing almost non-stop, because they seemed to be coming from everywhere.

“One of the other Marines, Tandy, shouted a warning, then she tossed up a flash grenade. It blinded the aliens, bought us a few precious seconds, but after that it was a running firefight all the way back to the landing bay. By the time we got there, only two of us were left, me and Bennett, who was in bad shape – I’d practically been carrying him the last few minutes. One of the guys I’d left with the shuttle, Cho, opened the airlock door and started to come out. A second later, his body jerked like he was convulsing.

“It took me a second to realize what was happening, but it was one of the aliens. The damn thing had been lying flat on top of the shuttle, just above the door, probably just waiting for someone to come out. It had stabbed Cho with some kind of weird blade at the back of the neck” – Maker tapped the back of his own nape for emphasis – “right where his helmet attached to the rest of the armor, which is one of the major weak points. Then it stood up, jerking the blade free while at the same time causing Cho’s body to move out of the shuttle’s airlock, where it began floating.”

“Wait,” Dr. Chantrey said. “How was it able to just stand in zero-g?”

“The shuttle’s artificial gravity,” the general said. “It extends a little beyond the vessel’s exterior.”

Maker nodded in agreement, and then continued. “Before I could properly react, there was laser fire coming at me, originating from the last corridor that Bennett and I had taken to the landing bay. I glanced in that direction and saw a group of the aliens moving towards us, firing. I took my last flash grenade and tossed it down the corridor. It was almost a fatal error.”

“And why was that?” asked Browing.

“Because when I turned back towards the shuttle, the alien who had been above the door had thrown his weapon at me,” Maker replied. “While the insectoids coming down the corridor had distracted me, the one on top of the shuttle had tried to seize an opportunity and flung what I now saw wasn’t just a blade but more like a lance.

“As the flash went off behind us, I instinctively tried shoving Bennett to the side while leaping away myself. The result was that my feet lost contact with the floor and I found myself adrift. Even worse, the lance hit my shoulder. It didn’t penetrate my armor, but the blow sent me spinning, albeit slowly.

“Feeling like a sitting duck, I looked around for the alien. He was still on top of the shuttle, holding an appendage up to his face. I realized what had happened then. He’d been looking towards the blast when the flash grenade went off. He wouldn’t be as blinded as his buddies in the passageway, but I definitely had a few seconds. I drew my sidearm and fired. The alien went down.”

“You killed him?” Browing asked.

Maker shrugged. “I didn’t know at the time. I was spinning, so it wasn’t the best shot I ever took. Still, I was sure I’d hit him, although I had no clue whether he was out of commission. I drew my mag wand and fired a line at the shuttle. That helped arrest my momentum and allowed me to control my movement again. At that point, Powell, the other Marine I’d left at the shuttle, opened the airlock, wanting to know what the hell was going on.

“I told him that Cho was dead and that he needed to get Bennett inside and strapped down, then be ready for take-off. While he went about following my instructions, I got myself within the shuttle’s gravity, then began climbing up to its roof.

“The insectoid was up there, laid out. There was a scorch mark on the side of his helmet, so I’d definitely hit him, but there was no way to tell how badly he was injured – if at all – although he seemed to be unconscious. That’s when I noticed that his armor seemed different than that of his fellows. Whereas theirs just seemed to be purely functional, his seemed to have…decorations.”

Browing’s eyebrows shot up in curiosity. “What do you mean?”

Maker rubbed his chin in thought for a second before answering. “There was some kind of skull grafted on to the top of his helmet – some animal I’ve never seen before. And embedded in what I guess you’d call the breastplate, just below and encircling the neck, was a ring of other skulls. Some of them I recognized as belonging to sentient species, and at least one of them was human. But worst of all…”

Maker paused, still disgusted by the memory.

“Worst of all, what?” Dr. Chantrey asked after a few seconds, obviously impatient.

“Worst of all,” Maker went on, “the skulls – they looked
gnawed
on.”

He took a moment to let that sink in with his visitors. Even though the multitude of spacefaring races were of different species, they generally respected and treated one another with a certain amount of civility. It took an obscene, almost incomprehensible, level of barbarism to actually feed on another sentient life form. Basically, these alien insects were monsters.

“I didn’t have time to really dwell on that fact, though,” Maker said a few moments later, “because I noticed an odd device on the shuttle’s roof next to the alien. It was a metallic oval about a foot in length, with a digital display that was flashing some eerie symbols. I’d never seen anything like it before, but all of my instincts screamed ‘bomb.’ I picked it up and flung it aside.”

“You picked up something you thought was an alien bomb?” the doctor asked in surprise. “Weren’t you afraid it might go off?”

Maker looked at her as though she’d just asked the most foolish question he’d ever heard. “Doctor, have you ever seen an explosion in space?”

“Only on vids and holograms,” she said. “Not in person.”

“Well, I have,” Maker said matter-of-factly. “And trust me, you don’t want to. The explosion itself isn’t so bad; there’s no atmosphere, so you don’t have the same kind of blast wave you’d get on the surface of a planet. It dissipates pretty quickly. It’s usually the shrapnel you have to worry about. There’s no air resistance to slow it down, no gravity to pull it down to earth. Theoretically, it will go on forever – at that same initial high rate of speed – until it hits something. And you don’t want to be that something. That’s why we used our flash grenades, which only produce a blinding light, rather than the real thing.

“Knowing what an explosion could do, there was no way those bugs were going to set off the bomb in the zero-g environment of that derelict. More than likely, they were planning to remote detonate it once we got back to our own ship – assuming any of us made it.”

“So what happened after you tossed the bomb away?” Browing asked.

“Apparently I let myself get too distracted,” Maker said. “A second later, the alien next to me was up on his feet and I was fighting for my life.

“My immediate reaction was to go for my sidearm, but the thing was fast, faster than I would have imagined. It gripped the wrist of my gun hand before I could reach my weapon, then caught my fist when I swung at him with the hand that was still free.

“It was bigger than me – maybe seven feet in height – and heavier. Moreover, the way it was jointed made it difficult to use my martial arts training to break its hold. Fortunately, the armor kind of evened things out, but it’s difficult to fight hand-to-hand when your opponent actually has six limbs. Even worse, it was using its free arms – the middle set – to try to pummel me. It wasn’t totally ineffective, but it was going to take a long time to punch through my armor, if that was its intent.”

Maker chuckled softly at the memory, then sobered almost immediately as he remembered what happened next. “Then I felt a weird vibration. I risked a glance and noticed that my opponent was holding one of its free hands out to the side, like it was about to catch a ball or something. That hand was the source of the vibration. Suddenly, I noticed movement with my peripheral vision, and when I looked I saw the thing’s lance flying towards us. Somehow, it was calling that weird blade to it.

“Still grappling with the alien, I suddenly jumped up and kicked it in the face. Its head snapped back, but then it slammed me down on the roof of the shuttle. A moment later, it stood over me with the lance in its hand.

“It was about to run me through when the derelict suddenly began shaking like a leaf in a whirlwind. The movement jostled the shuttle, naturally, catching the insectoid off-guard.”

“What was it?” Browing asked. “The shaking, that is.”

“The sick bay disengaging from the derelict,” Maker answered. “Like the general said earlier, it could exist as its own self-contained habitat. Even more, it could actually separate from the ship. Therefore, before I’d left the sick bay, I’d killed the distress signal and then punched in the code for it to detach in ten minutes.”

“But in that case,” Browing said, rubbing his chin in thought, “why even fight your way back to the shuttle? If you knew there was a trap waiting for you, why not just stay in the sick bay and initiate the separation protocol?”

“No weaponry,” Maker said. “The shuttle at least had some mid-caliber cannons, but the sick bay had no offensive weaponry. It would have been a turkey shoot if our attackers had their own ship somewhere in the area, and I’d had to assume that they did.”

“So why bother disengaging it if you weren’t going to use it?” Dr. Chantrey asked.