The Chameleon

6.AUG.3911 (Earth Actual)

THEY WERE RELENTLESS, and legion. More and more arrived with each passing second.

Sam knew she couldn’t win. For each that she popped or cleaved in two, three more flooded in behind it. Worse, her beam weapons were wreaking havoc on the inner walls of the giant chamber. If she wasn’t careful she’d cut through Eve’s hull and cause all the air to rush right out. Not that the Scipios weren’t slicing through the hull right now, from every goddamn angle apparently, but she assumed because she felt no rush of air leaving the ship that the little fucks were being careful about it. She had no such luxury, not with Eve enjoying her power nap.

And then there was Vaughn. The great shimmering forest of razor-spines cut him off from her. She could try to carve her way through, but not with all these enemies coming at her.

“Vaughn, talk to me,” she said for the fourth time. He did not reply, nor had he since they’d been separated. She’d seen several of the Scipios peel off to deal with him, though, so she had to assume he was still in the fight, somewhere.

I guess I finally get that alone time I’ve been looking for, she thought, and decided to try a new tactic. So far the enemy was entirely focused on her and Vaughn, showing no interest in the forest biome a few hundred meters below. Well, good. She could lead them away, buy Skyler and the others some time to get suited and join the battle.

Sam powered upward, focusing on the enemies closest to a side passage just beyond the ruin of the mesh ceiling. She lanced them, dodging their swinging tentacles. Two went up in red-hot bursts, causing three others to back away momentarily. Sam ran their line and pushed into the hallway, turning as she flew to fire off some beams. The bastards took the bait, forming a circle around the entrance. Their tentacle arms angled around the edge and sprayed more of the white-blue smoke in. Go ahead, she thought, and continued on around the next corner. She’d work her way around the circumference of the ship until she found a tunnel leading aft, reach Vaughn, regroup, and work their way toward the biome. That was the sum of the plan she cared to have.

Another corner. She paused and waited, saw the cloud flood in behind her, and the hazy shapes of the Scipios following behind it. Sam held her arms forward and slammed twin rails of yellow-white energy into one of the spheres, watched it writhe and then explode. “Keep coming, you little twats. That’s right, I’m the one you want. I’m the one you tasted.”

She rocketed on, taking corners at random now. Almost random. The labyrinthine ship had been six times its current size when they’d first boarded, and during those first boring weeks of flight she’d done her best to memorize the layout. There’d been nothing else to do, really, except “cavort”—Prumble’s word. But then had come the plan to camouflage the ship. Tania’s plan, of course. Hide, sneak about. The ship was drastically reshaped and rescaled to make it work. Old design out the window, and Sam’s mental map right along with it. So she took the corners randomly, trying her best to generally head around to the side where Vaughn had disappeared.

And I’ve done a shit job, she thought, after a few minutes. She’d taken three turns in rapid succession, rolling over to see behind, and during one turn the whole ship had heaved to one side, with a deep reverberating boom to go with the sudden jar. She’d hit a wall, tumbled, then righted herself in a four-way intersection of identical halls. “Forgot the damn breadcrumbs,” she muttered, cursing herself for not scorching the walls as she went. Something, anything, to find her way back.

She waited, wondering what had slammed so hard into a kilometer-long ship that it had bucked like that, and wondering where the hell her pursuers were. Not pursuing, evidently, which only served to fuck up her plan even more. She was lost, no closer to finding Vaughn and worse, the enemy hadn’t taken the bait. They may even now be trying to crack the forest biome like an egg and slurp up the juicy prizes that waited inside.

Sam swore, and swore again, and then powered down one of the passages. She had to find something, anything, to use as a landmark. She promised herself that after all this was over she’d throttle Prumble for not putting signposts or color coding in his cheesy “luxury” hallway redesign—what he’d done to keep from going stir-crazy in those first few weeks aboard. Everywhere she went she saw gleaming metal walls and red floors. “Not helpful, you bastard,” she shouted, wishing the comms were back on.

Annoyance grew to irritation, irritation to anger. The ship was under a full-on assault and here she was floating blindly around like a dumb rat in a dumb maze and there weren’t even any treat dispensers.

Sam rounded a corner and saw a lone figure in a space suit. Only a glimpse. The person floated out of view, hadn’t seen her. She didn’t think so, anyway. Who had it been? She hadn’t seen much but the color told her it wasn’t a Builder suit. One of these newcomers, then? She laughed at that. Couldn’t help it. All our efforts, everything the Builders did to find us, the vast distances traveled in a time-compressed bubble just to get here when we were still young and healthy, and Earth beat us to it. In style.

She threw herself down the hall, stopped at the end, and peered around the corner. The figure was about twenty meters away and drifting lazily, not a care in the world. Sam forced herself to really look this time. The space suit wasn’t like what the newcomers wore. Theirs had been new. White with blue lines that formed the compression ribbing. This person’s suit was dirty, old. She’d seen it before and after several seconds it came to her. It was the kind of suit they wore on the orbitals above Darwin, back in the day. The security team that had captured her on Gateway…

Alex Warthen, she thought, her blood turning to ice. Had to be. He’d taken the newcomers’ ship hostage, and that was a Gateway officer’s garb. So what was he doing taking a lazy drift around the Chameleon?

Unless it wasn’t him. This thought made her mind churn. All those fuckers who’d taken the lunatic Grillo’s side before the final confrontation inside Eve’s key room. All those ass-kissing cretins who’d refused to stand up to the zealot. There’d been a whole squad in that final battle. And they’d lost, yeah, but Alex was clearly still around, wasn’t he? Who else had Eve kept alive? Sam had killed three or four of them herself. She’d never expected to have to deal with them a second time.

Eve’s going to have some serious explaining to do if she ever gets the chance. The ship shuddered again, though minor compared with the quake that had hit a minute before. Without realizing it Sam found herself following the figure, keeping her distance. She tried to remember who else had been there, who else she’d assumed had either died or gone back to Earth. Skadz, her and Skyler’s old friend and mentor, he’d declined to help Eve and departed. What if Eve had really kept him aboard, like Alex? Or there was Ana, the one whose arms Skyler had fallen into when Tania wasn’t around. Jesus, what if she’s actually still here? How fucking awkward would that be?

Sam stopped herself because the figure before her had stopped, too, and subsequently curled into a fetal ball, pounding its fists against its head. Well, okay then. A chance and she decided to take it. Sam fired her thrusters and powered forward, arms outstretched. At the last second she balled her fists and punched into the curled figure. The impact stopped her dead and sent the other careening into a wall where he—she thought for sure it was a he now—ricocheted like a billiard ball. His arms flailed madly, like an insect plucked from its leaf trying to find purchase on something, anything. He hit the other wall and managed to right himself.

Sam raised one arm and extended the business end of her beam weapon at the man’s head. Whoever he was, hopefully gun-pointed-at-face was a comprehensible gesture.

She saw his eyes then, and thought maybe not.

And then she recognized him. Jerry…no, Jared. Alex’s right-hand goon. The mate who’d chased her all around Gateway Station after her escape. Okay, that made a kind of sense. He’d been with Alex in that final battle, so of course he’d be alive and well again, too.

But those eyes…Sam had seen eyes like that too many times. The subhuman gaze. Madness. Murder. All comprehension beyond the primal, vanished. Jared was long gone.

“I guess that puts us past the negotiating phase,” Sam said, and aimed.

A metallic tentacle swept around her torso, gripped, and yanked her backward with incredible force. The Scipio had come up behind her, grabbed, and now drew her toward its waiting spike-tipped arms. Jared forgotten, Sam brought her hand up as the creature enveloped her in a multiarmed hug that would have crushed her if not for the Builder armor. She felt it harden in defense even as the slithering limbs of the enemy tightened.

Sam was eye to eye with the enemy. A grid of sensors that flared with blinding light in every color, dampened by her visor. Sam squirmed, cast her own gaze downward to see where her hand had ended up. Compressed next to her chest, aiming upward between her and the enemy. She couldn’t move her arm, but her hand was free. She twisted it, bent it at the wrist to get it out of the way, and willed the beam to fire. Some kind of alert went off in her head. Proximity, or something. “Don’t care!” Sam shouted, and tried again, throwing all her will into the urge to shoot. The beam complied. It drew a blazing yellow line between her face and the enemy, missing both, lancing upward to the wall.

One of the embracing tentacles took a direct hit. Severed in two, each end dripping with molten orange goop. The creature writhed, and for a second its grip loosened. Sam turned her arm at the elbow now and fired again. Proximity alarm. “Bullshit! Fire, damn you!”

It did.

Sam learned then the value of that alarm.

The creature shuddered under her, its spherical body aglow with energy that had to go somewhere. It went outward. The blast threw Sam bodily down the hallway even as shrapnel pelted against her from head to toe. The suit absorbed what it could, but it still felt like being stomped in an alleyway by a pack of hooligans. And the light, God the light! She saw nothing but white specks for a time as her body flew. Then came the collision. Her head against something, the ceiling or the floor, didn’t make any difference. It was hard and although the suit could absorb impact, it couldn’t do a bloody thing about dampening momentum changes. Her innards were ingredients in a shaker bottle. One Vodka Samhopper, shaken.

She did the one thing she could think to do. Gave the suit control. Steady me, she thought, over and over again. She felt the thrusters at her arms, hips, and feet spit and hiss as the suit complied. The dizziness went on, and on.

Then she blinked and could see again. The hazy shapes before her came into focus. Another Scipio, smoldering because it had no doubt been right behind its exploded friend, crashing toward her along the dark passage. Sam fired her weapon at it, a sloppy wavering shot. The dancing beam drew a line of fire across the inner wall and then across the girth of the enemy. It cleaved in two before exploding. More shrapnel pattered against her like hard, angry rain, but Sam was beyond caring. She fired again, through the smoke and wreckage. There had to be more. There’d always be more. She fired as fast as the suit would let her, the only restriction apparently being not to melt the bearer’s own hand, and even that was brought right to the brink.

The beams struck home. Melting, overloading. Scipios blown outward, reduced to slag and guts and chunks of techno-debris. Sam fell into a trancelike state, unleashing the death-heat on each that came through the growing cloud of battle debris. Hands came around her face. Gripped her head and yanked hard backward.

Jared, she’d totally forgotten.

He heaved her, pushing off against a corner, twisting her head in wild, random jerks. Sam had taken Krav Maga in her youth, learned how to handle opponents smaller, quicker, more cunning than herself. Her instructor’s words came sharp into her mind: Control the head and the body will follow. Jared, even in his virus-fueled insanity, knew as much, too. His fingers had an iron grasp of her and she could do nothing but scrape and claw. His diseased mind couldn’t give two shits about that. He pulled and pulled, taking her into an alcove. He slammed her into a wall and began to rain savage blows against her back and shoulders, neck and skull, all the while keeping one hand clasped around the back of her head.

Enough. Sam gritted her teeth, brought her knees up between her and the wall, feet planted. Pushed hard with both legs. Swung her head about wildly to break the grip. Twisted in the air like a swimmer making her turn. Jared reacted like any wild animal, no thought, just raw and savage combat. Neither paid any attention to the Scipio scouts as the horde of them slithered into the junction and surrounded their entangled prey, not caring which of them won or died.

In that instant the ship heaved again.

Heaved, and didn’t stop.