Expendable Heroes, page 13
“Why do I bother with clowns like you?” Jack turned around and went back to the dark opening.
“Because you need me?” Rollo jumped down the remaining steps to the buggy and unloaded a couple of packs.
Jack had no snippy reply, because they did need each other. Jack was not a snippy person either. He’d probably worked in a position where he needed to manage people.
Steven, Rollo and Luciane carried the packs from the buggy up to the overhang where they were at least out of the rain.
Jack had gone into the open entrance.
His footsteps sounded hollow in the darkness beyond the open door.
“Hey, Jack, where are you going?” Luciane asked.
Jack’s voice drifted out of the opening. “Having a look around. This place is weird.”
She went in after him. Steven and Rollo followed her and plunged into complete darkness.
It took a while for his eyes to get used to the dim light.
They were in what looked like an entrance portal. The floor was smooth, the walls and ceiling made of plain dark stone.
Down a set of steps, a passage led into the depths of the building. A greenish light at the end reflected in the smooth surface of the floor. It was too dark to see anything else.
“Wow,” Luciane said. “I bet these aliens are nocturnal. I can’t see a fucking thing.” She turned on her light and directed its beam over the glass-like walls.
“Have a look at this,” Jack said.
Down the bottom of the steps and to the left stood a box-like thing with a slanted panel on top. It emitted the flashes of blue light they had seen earlier.
“What the hell is that?” Rollo asked.
He went over for a look.
“Don’t touch anything,” Steven said.
“What do you think I am?”
“An electrician, and in my experience, electricians are always touching the wires with their bare hands to see if they’re live.”
“I don’t—”
“I’ve seen far too many electricians do that. Just don’t. Who knows what—”
A bright flash went off at the top of the box.
Jack jumped away. “Idiot!”
Rollo shouted and stumbled backwards. “I didn’t touch anything, I swear.”
“Whatever. We’ve well and truly advertised our presence now,” Jack said. “Let’s keep going before we have an entire alien army at our heels.”
“Wait, what’s that?” Luciane said. “Do you guys hear that?”
They stopped.
She was right. A soft sound drifted from down the passage. Rasping, like someone who has lost their voice. Or a mortally wounded animal.
The hairs on Steven’s neck stood up.
“Something’s alive in here,” Luciane said.
“Let’s get out,” Rollo said.
“Weren’t you going to kick alien butt?” Jack said in a mocking tone.
“Not when we’re cornered in a fucking alien warren.”
“If they were going to corner us, wouldn’t they already have done so? This creature doesn’t sound too healthy.”
“Let’s just have a look,” Luciane said. “I have a weird feeling about this.”
She started walking further into the building. Steven followed her. The floor was so smooth that in places it looked like he walked on the surface of water, and as if there was something underneath the floor. Shivers crawled over his back. “Everything is weird about this construction. Do you think Jeremy knew this was here?”
“He better not,” Jack said. “Or I swear if we make it out alive, I’ll wring his neck with my own hands.”
Steven grinned. “I want to stay alive just so I can witness that.”
They walked down the passage following the sound. The floor was incredibly smooth, made of glass-like material, but when Steven touched it, it felt warm so it couldn’t be glass. Yes, it looked like you could see through the floor into a space underneath.
Luciane turned into a side entrance and the moment she went through the door something big hit her from the side.
Luciane flew sideways. She scrambled up and jumped across the door opening. “Stop! Stop!” she yelled. “Put that weapon down.”
Steven inched ahead so that he could see.
A single light in the room backlit a human-looking figure, although a very thin one. A woman, he thought.
Rollo had come in after Steven. He swore in a low voice. “Oh, fuck.”
When Steven entered the room, he found it hard to make out what he was looking at in the dim light. Rollo directed his light into the room.
Yes, he had been right, the figure was a woman, old and wrinkled, with long, tangled white hair and dark blotches on her skin, which was so pale it was almost translucent. He didn’t see any pink furry growth. But maybe those blotches were remnants of healed sores?
She held a long metal bar ready to swing at anyone who came close.
Her eyes were wide like an animal caught in search lights. How long had she been in here?
She wore improvised clothing consisting of random bits of fabric, held up in weird places by bits of rope. She was alone.
Her eyes were wide and her mouth open.
“Who are you?” Luciane asked.
The woman tried to speak but only a rasping sound came out. This was the sound they’d heard in the hallway.
“You have to speak up. I can’t hear you,” Luciane said.
“Get… out! Or I will kill you.”
“No, we are here to help you,” Luciane said. “We’re from the ship in orbit.”
She looked again and blinked.
“I don’t think she can see a lot if she’s been sitting in the dark in here,” Steven said.
She turned her head from one to the other, still swinging the stick in front of her.
“It’s all right,” Luciane said. “We won’t harm you. We’ll take you out of here. What’s your name?”
“Nina…” Her voice sounded rough.
“Nina Welsom?” Steven remembered the name from the log. One of the scientists.
She nodded, holding her hand to her throat. “I shouted… so long… so hard. Wanting you to hear me.”
“We haven’t been here long. We came from the next valley where the base’s buildings are.”
“I mean—over the radio.”
Steven stared at her. “Wait. That interference we kept having, that was you?”
She nodded. “The equipment I have is… not very good. I tried to make it connect to human radio, but it’s still not very good. I was in charge of the radio at the research base. This alien thing in this building… I modified it as much as I could. And I put a plea for help on a loop.”
Damn it. That was why they’d had so much trouble reaching the ship in orbit. This woman had been using alien technology to try to contact the ship. It was the source of the interference.
“But we’re here now.”
“The recording was a warning.”
“Why did you want us to stay away?”
“This place… it’s a trap. But you’ve already fallen into it.”
“You mean you can’t leave? We opened the door and left it open.”
“No! Don’t! They will come in.”
“Who?”
“The ones who… were changed. They don’t know me anymore. They just want to kill. That’s why I attacked you.”
“We were attacked when we came in.”
“They’re waiting out there for the door to open. When it’s open, they try to come in.”
“Wait, these are your fellow settlers you’re talking about?”
“They’re not people anymore.”
“How many are left?”
“They sent twelve people,” Jack said.
“One is near the buildings,” Rollo said.
“We got one at night,” Luciane said.
Nina looked down. “I had no choice but to kill two.”
“And three just now,” Steven said.
“That makes four still unaccounted for,” Luciane said.
“But if you left the door open, they will be inside the building already.”
“But they are not.”
“Not yet. Or we haven’t noticed it yet.”
“Or they’re not going to come in, ever,” Steven said.
They all looked at him.
“Why are they so desperate to come in here anyway?” Luciane asked. A visible shudder went through her.
“The same reason you came,” Nina said.
Steven frowned at her.
“Yeah, because of the ascent craft. They might have ceased to be human, but somehow they still know that it’s the only way off the world and they still want to escape and force me to stay here.”
“You could have left earlier. Is the craft operational?”
“I think most of it is, but it gives some warnings that I don’t know anything about, but I haven’t been up there for a while, because as soon as you go outside, they attack. But most importantly, I can’t fly the craft by myself. We all got basic training but I’m not a pilot.”
“I am,” Jack said. “We’ll get out.”
“But they’ll stop us and there is something wrong with the craft.”
“We can fix that,” Rollo said.
She gave him a dubious look. Confused. Shell-shocked by the events.
Jack asked, “What is this building? Who made it? Are there aliens? Is it safe here?”
“Oh, we’re safe, sort-of.”
“But? There are aliens?”
“There are. They built this place, but it’s very old. The very first creatures came here a long time ago and got bogged down with those horrible plants. The sap gets into everything. You spend every hour of the day simply keeping yourself and your equipment clean. And that is if it doesn’t infect your body, because if it does, that’s the end of you.”
Rollo’s face held an uneasy expression. “But we’ve just received treatment that makes us immune.” Although he had received treatment after he’d already been infected.
“We never had anything like that.“
“But you seem to be immune.”
“It just never affected me. I would get the welts.” She held up her arms to show the red blotches, but they were on healed skin. “But they would disappear again. That was just me. The others were terribly affected. It grows… Right through your body. And it also affects equipment.”
“We can clean everything for the short time we need it.”
“The problem was that I didn’t have the crew to fly the craft. We made the mistake of using it to come here when some of us were already infected. We wasted precious fuel we should have spent to get out, but at the time, we were still committed to our mission. We didn’t believe we were in as much trouble as we really were. I mean, how destructive can a single plant species be anyway?”
“Very destructive, as it turns out,” Steven said.
“Yes. We underestimated the situation. By the time we realised what was going on, it was too late. Everything was destroyed by those plants. We’re trapped just like the builders of this structure.”
A chill went down Steven’s back. “Wait—they’re trapped? You mean there are aliens alive in this building?”
She nodded. “There is one. Gork.”
“Gork? Is that a name?”
“I gave him that name. It’s the sound he makes. I guess I don’t know if he’s a he either, but having the name helps, to be honest.”
“And what is he?”
“Some kind of soft-bodied creature that needs a lot of water. He’s alone. He can’t leave. I can’t leave. We depend on each other.”
“How?”
“His kind were already here. They have food that has kept me alive. I was starting to lose hope but now you’re here, maybe we can get out.”
CHAPTER 20
Nina accompanied the group to the room where she had lived.
She walked stiffly. From memory, Steven didn’t think she was as old as she looked. It was the plant poison that had done this to her. For some reason she hadn’t been as badly affected as the others but it had still damaged her.
Steven wondered if Jack had taken any of the antidote medicine and could give it to her if there was a moment.
The room was very basic and—as most rooms inside this structure—rather dark. A tiny light in a corner came in as the sensor detected movement. Steven recognised an emergency light as was contained in the survival packs that exploration crew often got handed to them.
She had rolled out a sleeping mat in one corner. It lay on top of a collection of sacks that looked like balloons filled with water. Those didn’t look like anything human explorers would receive.
A square box stood in the middle of the room. She used it as table for a pot of water, a tiny pan and a single burner camp stove. There were also some packets of transparent material containing dark-coloured flakes. One was open. Luciane picked it up and sniffed.
“Urgh.” She pulled a face.
“Unfortunately, I can’t offer you tea or biscuits,” Nina said. “Food is tight enough. I have some supplies, but they’re not going to last very long with five people.”
“What is this stuff?” Luciane asked, holding up the packet.
“I ran out of the supplies we brought. But there is a store room downstairs that contains mountains of this stuff.”
“Yeah, but what is it and where does it come from?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it alien?”
“Probably. Gork eats it, too. Maybe he and his fellows brought it. I don’t know.” And when Jack gave her a horrified look, she added, “Look, it kept me alive all this time.”
Barely so, and maybe that was the reason she looked much older than she was.
“You can have some of our food. We should have enough in our packs,” Steven said. “At least for a few days it might take us to fix the craft.”
“You said fellows? But there was only one alien, you said?” Jack said.
“There is now, but at first there were more of them, but for the past few months, I’ve only ever seen Gork. I don’t know what happened to the other ones. I guess the same that happened to my companions. They went mad. They killed each other. Or they ran off and disappeared in the jungle.”
“What happened to your colleagues?”
“Leo was the first one to die. He went nuts and killed himself in the forest when we were still at the base. At least that’s what we think happened. We only found his body and it was already growing roots. The others came with me here, but the signs that they were infected were already there. They fought terribly. Big arguments every night. They did things that made no sense. We were going to establish a new base here, but very soon we discovered that those horrible plants just follow you around. They spoil everything. We spent to much time weeding our plots, trying to grow food, trying work the field. It’s just impossible. It would drive a person mad even without the poison. So sadly, they’re all gone now. They went mad and did stupid things. They roamed around the forest for a bit, but they were no longer human. They would try to get in and would attack each other. Sometimes, I could see them at the lake, but eventually they stopped coming. They probably suffered the same fate as Leo: the plants grew inside their bodies. You might have killed the last ones.”
Steven shuddered. “You said there are other creatures here?"
"Well, Gork is here by himself, but there used to be more of his kind.”
“What sort of creature is he?”
“A kind of soft-bodied creature… like an octopus. He doesn’t like the light. When we first came to this building, there were a bunch of them.”
“Were they aggressive?”
“I thought so, at first, but now I think they were desperate. They recognised in us another living being and kind of… wanted us to stay, out of solidarity or similar reason, so they tried to stop us leaving. But we realised this too late and they’re all gone. They were… I wondered if they were more afraid of us than we were of them. They wanted to keep us on the top floor. We… we weren’t really in a state to fight them, with Shrivi and Mona and Thomas…” Her face contorted briefly. “And also Simon, in the state they were in. It was a wonder no one got killed in here. We were too busy surviving to study aliens. They lived downstairs and we didn’t see a lot of them until I was left alone, and Gork was alone.”
“What about…” Steven hesitated. He and the team had a running joke about were-tigers, but she wouldn’t know what he meant by that. “We noticed evidence of attacks on some of the items we recovered. Like the buggy and the armour of one of the people.”
“Attacks?” she frowned.
“Yes, deep scratches and punctures of metal. Like the marks were made by a large cat or something.”
“That happened recently?”
“As recently as a few months ago. We saw it in the plating of the buggy and the armour of one of the people we… found.”
She blew out a breath. “Where we landed the ascent craft, it’s a small beach inside a round… structure. It sits on a tongue of land that juts into a pond where the water pools before going over the waterfall. It’s why we chose the location. When we landed, we found… a trapdoor, for want of a better word. There were scratches on it, and there was… a skeleton in the water.”
“What sort?” A chill crept over Steven’s back.
“A very large animal with frightfully big claws. We took pictures, but unfortunately they’re likely to have been lost. I still have my pad but the charge ran out ages ago and it’s so humid in here that mould grows on everything. It’s probably broken.”
“They could restore the data at the Marmoset,” Jack said.
Nina’s eyes widened. “What did you say? The Marmoset? Is it in orbit?”
“Yes, it’s the ship we arrived on.”
“That’s the Merlin company’s mothership.”
“They told us that the Space Settlement Authority was in control.”
She gave a hollow laugh. “They might wish they were. No, Marmoset is Merlin Company. It has the company leadership on board. There is also the Lemur and the Ocelot. Harmless names of cute animals but don’t let that deceive you. These are the people who sent us down to do science, but never told us that they’d already lost some teams.”
