JOHNNY SCHULTZ
“We’re coming up on the first wreck,” the Penitence said. The ship had been in the middle of explaining the plot of Hamlet to me. Apparently, its former captain had been a Shakespeare enthusiast, and the Penitence saw something of itself in the tragic protagonist.
“Any signs of life?”
“The reactor’s offline. No comms traffic, not even a transponder signal.”
“Can you show us?”
The virtual text we’d been studying was replaced in the air above my console by a three-dimensional hologram. It showed a blunt-nosed freighter tumbling end over end through a cloud of broken hull plate fragments, expelled gases, and the twisted, desiccated bodies of its former crew.
“Did the Fleet get it?”
“Negative.” The Penitence increased the magnification. As the stricken vessel turned, the cause of its demise came into view.
“Jeez,” Addison said from the seat beside me. “That looks just like what happened to the Lucy’s Ghost.”
“Yeah.” I sat back in my chair and rubbed my chin. “Same bite marks.”
The creature that attacked this ship possessed teeth and claws of solid diamond. It could slice through hull plate as easily as I could chew my way through a well-cooked steak. I’d only seen it once, but that had been enough. For the rest of my life, the damn thing was going to haunt my nightmares. I could see it every time I closed my eyes: an impossible dragon surging out of the higher dimensional mists like something from a madman’s nightmare.
The Penitence coughed politely. “I’m picking up microscopic vibrations in the hull plates consistent with movement on the craft’s exterior.”
“Can you show us?”
The screen zoomed in on a section of the damaged ship, and I felt the hairs rise on my arms and at the back of my neck. A metallic carapace crawled on needle-sharp legs. Claws snapped at the vacuum. I jammed my hands beneath my armpits. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. For a moment, I was back there, in the corridors of the Restless Itch, running, hiding, seeing my crew picked off and dismembered by the pincers of these brutes.
Beside me, Addison whispered, “Holy shit.”
“Yeah.” My voice was little more than a croak. “I guess that settles it.”
When we had been attacked by one of the hypervoid dragons, several of these creatures had been left behind. They seemed to be parasites that clung tick-like to the monster’s hide, ready to detach and pick through the scraps and carrion it left scattered in its wake.
And I had seen them kill my friends.
“I believe the creature has seen us,” the Penitence said. “And by the way it’s flexing its legs, I think it intends to launch itself in our direction.”
“Kill it.” The words came through my teeth, but I hardly recognised my own voice. Addison turned to me, eyes wide.
The Penitence asked, “Do you wish to leave an intact corpse for study and dissection?”
“No.” My throat felt tight. I had to fight to push the words out. “Don’t leave anything.”
The Penitence juddered as three torpedoes leapt from their tubes. I held my breath as they curved in towards the drifting freighter. At the last moment, the crawfish-like parasite threw itself into space, claws reaching for us, but it was too late and too far away. The Penitence’s screens darkened as the three fusion warheads blossomed in a tight triangle, consuming the beast and the ship it had been crawling over.
A radiation alarm shrilled, but we were already backing away. The Penitence spun on its vertical axis and powered away from the expanding spheres of heat and radiation, skipping quickly into the higher dimensions, where the explosions registered only as a sharp but fading hiss, no louder than the background sizzle of the universe.
When we were safely away, Addison unstrapped from her couch and put her head in her hands. Her hair fell forwards.
“I hoped I’d never see one of those things again,” she said.
My hands shook with adrenalin, and my chest seemed full of helium; but these weren’t symptoms of fear. “Set course for the second wreck,” I told the ship. “And keep those torpedo tubes primed.”
It seemed I could only be afraid for so long. And on the other side of fear there existed only a cold, lethal calm. These creatures had come into my universe and taken away my ship and crew. And all I’d been able to do until now was run. But right here and now, the running stopped. When we’d first encountered them, all I’d had was an antique rifle. Now, I had a warship’s arsenal at my disposal. I could rain nuclear fire on the scuttling bastards from kilometres beyond the reach of their clacking pincers, and they wouldn’t be able to do anything but perish.
Captain Konstanz called. The Penitence put her through to me on the bridge.
“Are you okay?” She frowned out of the screen at me. “We’re registering multiple torpedo detonations. What’s happening out there?”
“We’re dusting the wrecks.”
“In God’s name why?”
“They’re infested.”
“Infested? You mean with the same things we found on the Restless Itch?”
“The very same.”
“Oh.” She tugged nervously at the brim of her faded baseball cap. “Oh, shit.”
“And both of them have bite marks around their engine housings.”
“So they were definitely attacked in the hypervoid?”
“Looks that way. Both of them hit amidships. Probably didn’t even see what hit them.”
Konstanz rubbed the bandage over her missing eye. “That’s not good news.”
“Certainly not for the crews.”
“Or for us.” She bit her lower lip. “I’d been kind of hoping the attack on your ship was a one-off, and that Bochnak was exaggerating the threat.”
“No such luck.”
“Yeah. We’ve travelled too far. The chances of this being the work of the same creature are pretty remote.”
I rubbed my chin. “So, if there are two…?”
“There are probably more.”
“Damn.”
Konstanz gave a bitter laugh. “You can say that again.” She sat back in her chair. “We’ve got the Fleet of Knives on one side and these things on the other.” She pressed her fists together, knuckle to knuckle. “And we’re right in the middle, getting squeezed.”
“What are we going to do?”
She looked at me from beneath the brim of her hat. “That’s rather up to you.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Trouble Dog strongly suspects the Penitence will choose to join the Manticore and fight the Fleet.”
“Oh.”
“Can you talk it around?”
I barely knew the ship. “I can try.”
“Explain what you’ve found. I’ll get Trouble Dog to send over everything Bochnak sent us on these creatures, and everything we have on what happened to the Lucy’s Ghost. Maybe that’ll be enough to change its mind.”