When Apollo’s navigation system failed, the ship could technically have broken out anywhere. The relationship between hyperspace and realspace is not a direct one: a journey of ten light-years might take an hour in one direction and two in another, and a timing error of thousandths of a second can account for spatial displacements in the millions of kilometers. Hence the enormous complexity of the navigational computers, and the awful consequences should they fail.
The ship’s systems did, to their credit, make every attempt to ensure the survival of the crew. Even in the midst of a cascade failure they managed to send Apollo from one universe to another largely intact, rather than as a cloud of free and extremely fast-moving molecules. Not only that, but in a supreme effort of mechanical will they had held the breakout back just long enough to get the ship within range of a gravity well. This was the result of a deeply imbedded emergency protocol, one programmed to allow a vessel stricken with hyperdrive failure at least a fighting chance of survival. A ship lost in deep space, between the stars, is little more than a complex metal coffin.
That, though, was the limit of what Apollo’s systems could do. And it was hardly their fault that the system they had dropped the ship into was about the least survivable they could have found.
For one thing, the system was full of Wraith. By some minor miracle Apollo had broken out on the far side of a planet to the massing fleet, and at roughly the same time as a Wraith cruiser had jumped in to join its fellows. So far, it seemed that none of the alien ships had detected Apollo’s headlong emergence into their staging post, which was hugely lucky for Ellis and his crew. The battlecruiser was crippled. It could no more fight the Wraith than it could escape them.
The other flaw in the ship’s choice of destination was the solar system itself. The emergency protocols might have found Apollo a gravity well to drop into, but there were no habitable worlds rolling around that well. The star shining at the heart of the system was small and hot, far younger than Earth’s sun and racing towards a much earlier grave. It had planets, but none that could support life in the conventional sense; these were gas giants, jovians, titan worlds without land or water. If any terrestrial planets had formed around that hot little dwarf, the gas giants had long since swept them to dust.
Of the four jovians, the third from its sun would have been the most recognizable to terrestrial astronomers. In many ways it was much like Jupiter — like that world, it was sheathed in a thin curtain of crystallized ammonia, banded by storm systems and dotted with vast convection cells. It also shared a composition with that giant world, in that it was almost ninety percent hydrogen under the ammonia, with the remaining tenth a soup of helium, sulphur, phosphorous and complex hydrocarbons. And much like Jupiter the planet had a thin interphase layer of water clouds, at the point where the crystalline tropopause met the hydrogen-rich stratosphere.
This was Apollo’s hiding place, and had been for the past forty hours. Hovering like a bug between the hydrogen sea and the sheltering ammonia sky.
There was almost no light in the water layer. While the ammonia clouds were a mere skin in relation to the planet’s bulk, they were still fifty kilometers thick, and heavily reflective. Every few hours a convection cell would spin close enough to stir the cloud layer near the ship and send dull shafts of ruddy light spearing in through the gloom, but for the most part Apollo drifted in darkness. Even its running lights had been shut down to conserve power.
Had the lights still been active, Ellis knew they would have dimmed disconcertingly whenever the drain pulse hit.
The pulse was impossible to ignore now. When he had first noticed it, the dimming of the lights had been an almost imperceptible flicker. But it had been growing more serious ever since the breakout, slowly but inexorably, the power dipping lower with every pulse. It was as though the ship had a heartbeat, although a failing one.
Apollo was dying. And it came a little closer to death every forty-one seconds.
On the bridge, the pulse was impossible to miss. The lights were dim anyway — the ship was still on emergency power, and the darkness only made the regular drop in voltage all the more obvious. Most of the bridge crew had taken to using laptops and PDAs, rather than Apollo’s instruments. At least that way they could keep working for longer than forty-one seconds at a time.
Sharpe had two laptops taped to her control board, and was using them to constantly monitor the ship’s position. It was a complex job; juggling the navigation computer’s wildly inaccurate timings, trying to manually recalibrate them between each pulse, resetting the readings on the two laptops against each other and the board continuously. Ellis wondered how she’d managed to keep it up for so long.
Still, it was time for another status report. “Sharpe?”
“A moment, sir.” Her fingers rattled over the keys, hands dodging between laptop and control board and back. Ellis saw her pause, look up slightly, and as she did the lights dipped. The hum of the aircon stuttered, then picked up again as the lights brightened. She knew when it was going to happen on reflex now.
They all did. It was like a water-torture, a continuous drip that wore into the senses, hour after hour…
Ellis forced the thought away. “What have you got?”
“We’ve dropped another two hundred meters, drifted six hundred bearing zero niner four. There’s a current close by, sir. We’re going to need a correction burn within the next twenty minutes.”
“Okay, set it up.” The burn, a series of thruster bursts intended to keep the ship safely in the water layer and away from any convection cells or storm currents, would have to be carefully timed. When Apollo had first entered the jovian a burn had been allowed to carry on through one of the power drains, and the results had almost been disastrous. A thruster had jammed on during the pulse, and almost sent the ship spiraling into the hydrogen layer. “Meyers? Any visitors?”
“Nothing on passive, sir.” Meyers was using a PDA to keep her data calibrated, but even with that help she had only the most limited access to the ship’s sensor suite. Much of it had been damaged or completely misaligned by the breakout, and those segments that still functioned could barely be trusted. It was all Meyers and Sharpe could do to keep the ship in place, let alone track what was going on above the ammonia clouds.
Ellis nodded, then closed his eyes briefly as the power dipped. When it was over he got up. “Anyone got any good news?”
“Maybe, Colonel.” That was Copper, the tech who had opened his scalp on a panel when the ship had broken out. He’d been patched up by a medic a few hours ago, but the bandage taped to his head had spots of crimson soaking through, and he was pale in the dim light. Ellis hoped he’d be able to deliver his good news before he collapsed.
He crossed the bridge to join Copper and the rest of the tech team, behind the tactical map. “Okay, what have we got?”
“Compression, sir.” Copper had a laptop open on one of the systems boards, and he swung it around to show Ellis what was on the screen. “These are the recorded data files from all the onboard systems — security, sensor logs, pretty much everything.”
Ellis bent to look more closely at the screen. “All this stops at the breakout?”
“Yes sir. We got jolted so hard that we lost most of the recording systems, but auto-recalibration should have set them back up before there’d been any loss.” He reached up to touch the bandage lightly, and winced. “Of course, we know that —”
The lights dimmed. Ellis sighed, waiting until the pulse was over. That, of course, was the reason Apollo was still crippled after all this time. All the systems needed for tracking down the ship’s multiple faults had not only been hammered out of true by the violence of its return to realspace, but any attempt to recalibrate them had been rendered futile by the constant pulses. Every forty-one seconds, many of Apollo’s systems returned to their factory default settings.
So far, all attempts to track the source of the pulse down had failed for that precise reason. Gross physical searches could only achieve so much. The ship’s technicians needed accurate data.
As the lights came back up, Ellis straightened. “But you think there’s something you can do about this?”
“I think so. Mischa’s been working on a compression routine that will break the recorded data into small chunks, and I’ve been programming a worm to get the routine into the data core between pulses.”
“Hold on, a worm? Like a computer virus?”
Copper tilted his head. “Not exactly. They’re synonymous with malware now, sure, but the first worm was developed to find idle processors on a network and give them jobs to do. It was a legitimate software tool.”
Ellis frowned. He didn’t really like the idea of rogue autonomous programs being given free reign in Apollo’s data core, but this was the first piece of hopeful news he’d heard in a long time. “So can this work?”
“I think so. I’ve got a copy of the worm on this laptop, off-network, and I’ve assigned it Mischa’s compression routine as a payload. We’re about to try it on a non-essential file, something that we won’t miss if it hits a pulse and goes AWOL. We just need you to give the word.”
“It’s given. Let me know as soon as you have any results.”
Copper saluted briskly, and Ellis saw his pallor deepen suddenly as the sudden movement jarred his injured head. He reached out to steady the man as he swayed. “Maybe we’ll go easy on the protocol for a while, yeah?”
“That sounds like a good idea, sir.”
Ellis left the technician to his programs, and headed back towards the command throne. As he passed the tactical map he saw Meyers look up and beckon him over, and continued past the map to join her.
Meyers half-turned in her seat. “Colonel, I think we’ve got a problem.”
Her voice was low, little more than a whisper. Ellis leaned closer to her and responded in kind. “Another one?”
“Sorry. I know it’s the last thing you wanted to hear, but…” She lowered her voice still further. “I can’t be sure right now, not a hundred percent. But some of the sensor readings I’ve been able to get have shown something coming towards us. I’m picking up energy spikes like you’d not believe…”
“Wraith?”
She shook her head. “Sir, I think it’s a storm front.”
“How bad can that be?”
“Bad. The way the convection cells are starting to bunch up, the level of the spikes… We’re probably talking about a wavefront of twisters about as wide as Mars, traveling at several hundred kilometers an hour and causing lightning strikes a thousand times bigger than anything we get at home. If we get hit by that, it’ll shred us.”
“Dammit. Sharpe, are you hearing this?”
“Yes sir. And before you ask, no, we can’t get out of the way in time, not in the shape we’re in now. The pulse is getting worse — at this rate it’ll be impossible to make correction burns within eight hours, and with the main drives offline…”
“So unless we can fix the pulse before the storm hits, we’re done for.”
Sharpe nodded. “Our only alternative would be to go up and over it. We might just about be able to manage that, but we’d break cover. If any Wraith were looking in this direction…”
“Let’s keep that as Plan B for now.” He stepped back. Neither Meyers or Sharpe needed to be told to keep the information to themselves; they were quite aware of when such things should be spoken of in hushed tones and when they should be broadcast. Right now, there were only a few people that needed to know, and a lot more who would find the prospect of a ticking clock dangerously distracting.
Ellis found himself gazing out of the viewport. There was almost nothing to see, only the merest hint of glow from above, and the rest just gluey darkness. Even the stars were hidden from him, up above the ammonia. But out there, somewhere in the murk, was a raging storm front as big as a planet. When it arrived, it would bring light — sunlight as it scoured the cloud layers above and below, and an army of lightning strikes. There would be no missing it. When the storm was ready for them, it would announce itself.
All the better, then, not to be around when it did.
Copper’s compression worm was not an instant success. Ellis watched it fail nine times before it successfully retrieved a file. Even on the tenth time, it was able to snatch just a piece of data before the pulse killed it.
But it was a start. Information had been downloaded from the data core. It might only have been a fragment of a backup of a mission log, but it represented a breakthrough. If Ellis could have given Copper and his team a few hours downtime as a reward, he would gladly have done so.
He couldn’t. There simply was no time. He could feel the storm coming.
Instead, he set Copper’s people to work. Over the next hour, thousands of worms infiltrated the data core, splitting files wherever they could find them, compressing the split chunks, and hauling the encoded fragments into protected areas. A dozen laptops logged into these areas between pulses, uploading and recombining the data. There was no orderly plan for the worms, no priorities or targeted areas. At the rate Copper’s people were working, it was all they could do to keep replicating the worms and sending them, wave after wave, into the ship’s memory.
There were casualties. If a pulse arrived before a worm had completed its task, the worm and anything it was interacting with at the time was lost. But with a success rate of over ninety percent, and more technicians working to recreate the lost data as the missing files became apparent, Ellis realized that he was almost starting to hope.
The first data he asked to see was footage from Apollo’s internal security cameras. Major Kyle Deacon was still missing, and no trace could be found of the man. Although he loathed to admit it, Ellis knew there was a very good chance Deacon’s disappearance was not unconnected with the ship’s plight.
The footage was uploaded into a laptop. Once this was done, Ellis thanked Copper and his team for their efforts so far, told them to keep at it until they dropped, and then took the laptop away with him. This wasn’t something he wanted to view in public, at least not yet.
He didn’t want to see it alone, either.
Ellis was in his cabin, connecting the laptop to the ship’s power grid when Meyers keyed open the hatch. She raised an eyebrow. “Is that wise?”
“No alternative. These things are taking longer to charge all the time. The power feed won’t be constant, but if the battery’s charging between pulses it shouldn’t take the laptop down when the lights go out.”
“Beats swapping batteries, I guess.” A small assembly line of battery chargers had been set up in one of the maintenance bays, with runners to make sure the various laptops and PDAs being used all over the ship stayed fed. “What have you got?”
“Internal cams.” He moved his seat aside and dragged a second one over with his ankle. She dropped into it and peered at the screen. “That’s the mess hall.”
“I know. Hold on…” Ellis clicked out of the viewer application and brought up a list of available files. “Deacon left the bridge at, what, oh-three-fifty?”
“Yes sir.” Meyers looked at him quizzically. “Colonel, you don’t think —?”
“I’m not thinking anything, Major. But Deacon went missing just before all this happened, and no-one’s got a damn clue where he’s hiding. So yeah, forgive me if I’m interested as to where he went.”
“Sir, Deacon wouldn’t —” She stopped as he glared at her. “Sorry.”
“Don’t second-guess.” He tapped the screen. “If the answer’s anywhere, it’s here.”
She said nothing. Ellis went back to studying the files. “There, that’s the bridge cam file. Let’s start with that.”
He dragged the file onto the player. There was a faint whir from the laptop, and then the footage sprang to life; an instant of blurry color and then a jarring, static-riddled freeze-frame of black. “Goddamn it.”
“Sir, that’s the end of the file. All the recordings must have defaulted to the point they crashed out.”
“Right.” He squinted at the player’s controls for a moment, then found the rewind and started to scroll the footage back. The bridge appeared, four times. There were four cameras installed there, and their output had been pasted into a two by two montage.
Ellis watched people move in jerky reverse for a few seconds, then saw Deacon appear in the helm seat. “Okay, got him.”
He let the footage roll on. The internal cams were of quite high resolution, but there was no sound. Audio files were in a different section of the data core. In normal circumstances the pictures and sound would have been married and enhanced for playback, but all Ellis had right now was raw footage. He hoped it would be enough. “There he goes. Oh-three-fifty-two.”
“Marked. So now we need the entry corridor? What the hell does that come under?”
“These filenames are hard to- Hold on, I think this is it.” There were only two cameras in the corridor, but both showed Deacon leaving. Meyers marked the time again, and they moved to the next area.
Slowly, file by file, they tracked Deacon through the ship. The data core was in the forward part of the main hull, ahead of the bomb bay. The most direct route to it from the bridge was via the deck that ran over the bay, and that was where they saw him, with each camera they accessed. He didn’t deviate, didn’t slow down, didn’t make a detour into any other part of the ship. He simply left the bridge and headed directly for the core.
He never made it. Between one pair of cameras and the next, somewhere above the forward edge of the bomb bay, he simply vanished.
“Doesn’t make any damn sense,” Ellis muttered. “What’s off corridor nine?”
“Nothing he could get to without being picked up on another cam.” Meyers frowned. “Maybe there’s a storage cupboard down there or something… Sir, can you run those last two again?”
Ellis brought up the last two files. As he did so Meyers leaned across to take control of the laptop from him. He let her get on with it — she seemed more at home with the player application than he was.
She quickly brought the two pieces of footage up together. On the left side of the screen, Deacon stood frozen, paused between frames. On the right was the place he should have appeared once he had left the field of the first camera.
He didn’t. Just as before, when the player was activated, he walked out of the first camera’s view and never entered that of the second.
Meyers paused the player, scanned back a few frames until Deacon’s back reappeared. “What’s this?”
Ellis squinted at the screen. “What?”
“This shadow.” She took Deacon back a few frames, into shot again. “It’s not there now, but as he goes forward…” She sent him on, one frame at a time.
There, at the very edge of the screen, just as he stepped out of view, part of the wall darkened. Something had obscured the light. “A pulse?”
“No, the timing’s wrong. Sir, I think someone was down there with him.”
“No-one else is on the cameras.”
“I know. I’m not sure how, but whatever caused that shadow must have been right in front of him.” She stood up. “Sir, we’ve got to go down there and look.”
“Agreed. But I need you on the bridge.”
“Colonel —”
“Major, I know you and Deacon were friends. But I need you keeping an eye on that storm. Don’t worry, I’ll find him.”
She hesitated for a moment, then gave in. “All right. But please let me send a team of marines down to meet you there.”
“Wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Once he was in corridor nine, Ellis found it even harder to see where Deacon might have gone. It stretched ahead of him, wide and blank-walled. There didn’t seem to be anywhere to hide.
Still, appearances could be deceptive. The corridor was clean and uncluttered compared to some of the smaller accessways — in less central areas of the ship, corridors were little more than spaces between compartments, and were often narrow and tangled with systemry. There were places where two men simply could not get past each other for all the ducting on the walls, and if any crewmember met another coming the other way in such a place, they would have to agree as to which of them would back up to a wider point.
This corridor, running along the ship’s spine between the upper hull and the roof of the bomb bay, was kept free from such obvious obstructions. But in many places the wall panels could be removed to reveal storage areas, equipment lockers, access to systems. If Deacon had, as was looking increasingly likely, been attacked, he could quite easily have been concealed in such a place.
The marines Meyers had assigned to Ellis had already been briefed on that possibility. There were four of them, all armed, all carrying tactical lights clipped to their weapons. The emergency lighting made the corridor gloomy, a flat, grayish twilight that made details vanish. Ellis was as glad of the extra illumination as he was of the firepower.
“All right, this is where the camera last picked Deacon up,” he told them, pointing a few meters up the corridor. “We know he didn’t come back past this point, or at least not until the ship broke out. We’ll start here and move forward.”
The squad leader’s name was Spencer. He moved a couple of steps past Ellis, then turned back to him. “Colonel, we’ll run a fast sweep of the corridor first, make sure nothing’s obviously screwy. If it all looks clean, we’ll come back and start taking the walls down. Agreed?”
“Sounds good.”
Spencer gestured for the squad to follow him, then moved cautiously off down the corridor. Ellis took up position behind them, his own firearm drawn and held high. He would have liked to have gone ahead of the marines, but there were protocols to be observed. Putting himself in harm’s way to look good in front of a marine squad would have not only been foolish, but would have put others in jeopardy. The marines were here to search for Deacon, not to project him while he did the job himself.
He stayed close, though. There was no way he was simply going to hang back and watch them work.
Spencer had reached the next camera. “Colonel? He never made it to this one, am I right?”
“You are.”
“Not much of a blind spot.”
“Big enough. Needs redesigning, as soon as we get back. Anyway, my gut feeling is that whatever happened, happened here.”
The marine nodded. “Well, there’s only about six of these panels that will come off. If he’s here, it won’t take long to-“
“Sir!” One of the other marines was beckoning him to the far side of the corridor, closer to the first camera. “There’s something here.”
Ellis followed Spencer over. The marine who had called out was down on one knee, his taclight aimed at the floor. “I almost slipped up on this, Sir. Thought it might be blood, but it’s not…”
There was a fluid on the floor, but the marine was right; it wasn’t blood. Ellis could see a faint glisten along the edges of two floor panels, as though something had seeped up between them. He crouched, and drew his finger along the line of wetness.
It was slightly warm, and greasy. When he brought it to his nose it smelled faintly of meat. “What the hell?”
“More over here, sir!”
Spencer walked over to look at the new find. As he did, Ellis saw the marine closest to him put his hand on the panel to push himself upright, and freeze. “Hey, what?”
“What is it?”
The marine shook his head. “Sir, I’m not sure. I can feel… Here, you try.” He drew back.
Ellis touched the center of the panel. “Everybody hold still.”
“Sir?”
“Just stop walking!” He got lower, spread his hand out on the panel. There was a faint vibration there, rhythmic, a repetitive shudder from under the metal floor. Like an engine, pistons moving down there maybe. Or…
“Get this panel up,” he snapped. He stood up, stepped back, found himself wiping his hand reflexively on his jacket.
The panel was about a meter square. There were recessed screws holding it down, and fold-up handles in case engineers needed to reach the crawlspace below. One of the marines stepped forwards with a small powered screwdriver and bent over the panel.
In half a minute, the screws were free. Ellis watched the marine grab one of the handles and, as the lights dimmed in their regular pulse, hauled it up.
It resisted him, as if something sticky was holding it down. The man strained, cursed, and then the panel came free with a wet tearing sound, like the shell being ripped from a live crab. Off-balance, the marine stumbled sideways, taking the panel with him and exposing what lay beneath it to the light.
Beside him, dimly, Ellis heard one of the marines give vent to a choking curse.
The space under the floor panel was full of tissue, crimson and glistening wetly. For a moment Ellis thought that some creature had been butchered down there, had exploded from some ghastly internal pressure and spread it’s flesh and organs among the underfloor wiring. But there was simply too much of it. Almost the whole square meter was covered, a glossy, vein-shot mix of muscle and membrane, and what wasn’t flesh was metal — bright, new metal, impossibly polished, woven into and through the tissue like roots in soil. It was as though some unholy fusion of meat and steel, sinew and wire, ridged tracheal pipe and fluted silver cable had grown under the floor, a sickening, pulsing biomechanical tumor skulking and swelling beneath the shell of the corridor.
And it was alive. Ellis had felt the beat of it through the panel.
He stepped closer, transfixed by horrified fascination, and as he did so a dozen eyes opened in the morass and rolled around to look at him. He saw the pupils contract as they met the light.
The corridor groaned. Beneath his feet, the floor shifted.
He heard the metallic double-click of a P90 being primed, but whoever had done so never got the chance to fire it. In the next instant the floor erupted upwards, panels shrieking as they were torn free of their moorings. The corridor went dark, the fluorescent tubes shattering into dust and shards as the walls buckled. In an instant, the entire space was a chaotic nightmare of spinning taclights, sparks, the shouts of men and the thin, hissing bellows of whatever was squirming its way to freedom from under the floor.
Ellis was on his back. He’d been bowled clean off his feet by the churning corridor, the pistol flung from his grip. He scrabbled at the walls, trying to right himself, but they were slick and warm. There was a haze in the air, a drizzle of grease and blood. It was like being inside a lung.
The marines were still yelling. Ellis heard a scream, choked, cut short by a crunching, meaty impact. A P90 spun past him and he grabbed it, aimed it up the corridor as he rolled over and staggered to his feet.
He saw only chaos. Everything was moving, a ceaseless, whipping motion surrounding a vast and impossibly complex bulk that reared up from its hiding place, huge and strong and reeking of meat and oil. In the stark beam of the taclight, it shone as it rose.
It had already killed one of the marines: Ellis could see the man crumpled against the wall, eyes open and lifeless. Another marine scrambled in, trying to retrieve his comrade, but before Ellis could yell a warning an arm-thick mass of cable and tendon lashed out of the darkness with impossible speed.
The impact was sickening. The marine flew a dozen meters before he struck the deck.
The thing was almost at the ceiling now. Ellis still couldn’t get a grip on its shape — its outline was unstable, seething, writhing like a nest of crimson snakes. As it rose it juddered and shook like an ill-kept machine, as if multiple joints and cables and pistons were dragging it up, protesting, into position. Ellis couldn’t tell if any part of it was flesh or metal, plastic or gristle. It was organic and mechanical, bloody and glittering, and in the heart of it was something crucified, something that lolled forwards, skeletal, and turned its heavy, malformed head towards him to scream out its defiance and pain.
That something had the face of Kyle Deacon.