BETA-9
Jack watched as the aliens concentrated their attack on the shield division area of the ship she called home. Aliens knew that shields repelled each other, and that a ship that big couldn’t generate a single shield big enough to envelope the entire ship. A combination of two shields, one fore and another aft would protect the entire ship but where the shields met, they would flatten and slightly repel each other, like balloons squeezed closely together. To keep the shields from tearing the ship apart, the engineers worked out a nexus – a super-strong structure that connected both ends of the ship together and provided enough support to withstand an adequate amount of shield compression. Unfortunately, the aliens had learned that by concentrating fire in between the two ‘bubbles’ you could actually squeeze through a thin projectile or energy beam, opening the way for a larger missile.
Jack’s ship was now dying as the shields collapsed and the nexus was torn apart from the projectiles. She was surprised by a large blinding light, and her eyes needed time to readjust themselves, but by the time she could see again her own ship was being severely buffeted by the planet’s atmosphere and her view had become distorted. She wondered if the aft section had indeed survived, but hoped not. With no way of moving, it was only a matter of time until that part of the ship drifted toward this planet and burned on reentry.
“Jack, it’s time to eject. The Rapier will become unstable very soon.” It had no vectors, no controlling surfaces, no shielding and no way to remain stable in flight in an atmosphere. Even if it somehow miraculously survived atmospheric reentry, she would be killed long before it crashed, by the buffeting and spinning as the ship spun out of control.
“Now Jack! If you don’t eject, I will have to take over.”
“Fine! Speed?”
“27,000 kilometers per hour.” She cursed Nancy, Scratch, her old boyfriends and most of all, the aliens. She thought about Bones as she jerked hard on the one of only two levers in the cockpit.
There was nothing quite as ecstatic as free-falling from 160 kilometers up. Her seat had naturally spun backward to her direction of travel, and after stabilizing itself and firing the retro-rockets, it had automatically released the harness that held her suit tightly in place. Now that her Drop suit, better known as the MAXON T4 was disconnected, the suit comp told her that her speed was quickly dropping and was now at 22,660 kilometers per hour. The roar of the thin atmosphere rushing past her quickly increased to the point of being deafening, but she barely heard it as she looked down at the panorama of a distant surface. Jack stretched out in the standard pose, quite relaxed as she watched the ground far below. Her suit was at full power because its crystalline/metallic fused surface converted heat into energy and stored it until its ultra efficient capacitors were full. After that, any extra energy received was released automatically in timed pulses through the charge dump nodes on the surface of her suit. The more energy it received, the more intense the pulses were, until it was released as lightning.
By the time she reached the troposphere, the intense electrical discharges would have blinded a nearby observer or shorted out any electrical circuits on passing craft. This particular unit had seen a lot of action, the last eight years of it from Jack herself. Jack could see the aura of the power discharging into the atmosphere as it soaked up the heat and re-directed it outward, and she felt her hair stand on end inside her suit from the ionized charge that seeped in. She had only done this once before on a training jump, and enjoyed every second of it while most of her student team retched in their own suits. The twenty minute dive was not nearly long enough for her.
“5000 meters Jack,” her suit comp reminded her.
Jack broke out of her reverie and looked around to find a suitable spot to land. She still didn’t know what she was going to do, and this barely habitable planet didn’t seem particularly welcome, but she might as well go where she had a better chance of surviving. She had no idea how long she was going to be here. ‘Perhaps the rest of my short life’, Jack thought. The bleakness and lack of significant vegetation depressed her.
“4000 meters, deploying air brakes.”
“Not yet comp, I want to drift over a bit.” Jack spotted an area that seemed unusual. It didn’t fit the natural surroundings, and she wanted to take a look. The aliens had come from this planet surface, and they obviously must have had either a huge base or a number of them.
“Comp, mark location.” The computer tracked the direction of her eyesight, pinpointed the target area, and ‘marked’ the area for future reference.
“3000 meters, deploying air brakes.”
‘Damn, still too far. Guess I’ll have to walk,’ Jack thought. She concentrated now on her landing, adjusting her air brakes to fine tune her descent. At 1000 meters up Jack started noticing something unusual on the target landing area displayed on her helmet, three round dots on an otherwise bleak and featureless area. She thought they were rocks until she noticed the three coming together.
“Alien activity, 3 units, 800 meters below!” her suit blared, a moment after she noticed it.
“Ants! Damn bugs are everywhere, even in my landing area!” She cursed and was about to shift her air brakes when an idea formed in her head.
The oldest alien scout was also the last one to pick up the chemical message, his antennae being brittle and lacking sensitivity. The two younger scouts had just been hatched, and their keen sensors immediately picked up the tiny particulates of contrail condensation and residual hydrogen ions, and getting together to rub antennae, came to the conclusion that a (possible) human ship had landed nearby. This was critical information for the protection of the hive. All three had agreed on the course of action and were just about to turn away when one of the younger scouts suddenly stopped and noticed a shadow forming below him. It turned its head just in time to have the one side of its thousands of prismatic eyes register two large feet, just as Jack smashed into the three alien bugs.
“YEEHAWWW!!! Did you get that comp?” Jack asked.
“Yes.”
‘The boys back home are going to love that one’, Jack thought, as she laughed to herself over the incident. “Stupid bugs! Just wish there were more.” At close to 200 kilometers per hour not even a bug exoskeleton could protect it from a 400 kg suit and the 57 kilogram person in it.
‘Hmm, wonder what they’ll call me now. Bug Stomper,…Bug Squisher,…The Squisher,…Jack Squisher…wow that was terrible. The Hammer…Jack Hammer!’ Jack laughed at the thought, thinking back to good times and memories when someone else called her by that call sign, one she refused to use. She certainly wouldn’t use it now, knowing Scratch would turn it into something sexual once he found out. ‘Then again, he turned everything into something sexual’, Jack thought, but quickly scowled as she remembered that Scratch was probably dead.
Jack’s suit had automatically inflated an internal air bladders to compress her body and protect her from the landing. While she waited for it to retract she scanned her surroundings to verify that the ones she crushed were dead, and to make sure there weren’t more.
“Comp, atmospheric statistics.”
“Nitrogen, 62%; carbon dioxide, 20%; oxygen, 11%; water, 4.5%; arsenic, .5 %; ammonia .3%, moisture, .2% and the rest are inert trace gases. Barometric pressure is 650 millibars and temperature is at 17 degrees.”
“And gravity?”
“Gravity, .8 Earth.”
“Great, a veritable paradise. Might as well go see what those bugs are up to.”
Because Jack’s suit augmented her every move, she didn’t notice the gravity difference. WF221’s gravity was kept earth normal, as was every other ship in the fleet. Legend had it that Earth had not been destroyed during the Great Escape, but that both it and some extraordinary people on it survived the cataclysm. Jack didn’t think she’d see a livable Earth again, but keeping gravity at normal was both logical and psychological, giving them hope.
“Comp, give me power levels and alert me to any unusual movements or electrical activity,” Jack said.
“81% and yes, Jack, I will notify you,” her suit replied. “By the way, that was very impressive.”
“That was what?” she asked, surprised again.
“Your decisive reaction to the situation and your calm demeanor was very impressive. My sensors showed that your heart rate spiked when you formulated your plan, probably out of excitement, but during the execution it never rose above seventy-eight beats per minute.”
That was the first time Jack had ever heard of any suit doing something like this. “Is commendation in your programming?” she asked but got no response, again unusual.
‘I’ll have to get this checked out,’ she told herself before it hit her how stupid the thought was.
She looked around the ground and noticed claw marks in the soft arid sand, took a bearing on their direction and starting jumping. At nearly a hundred meters per jump, it not only saved time but allowed her to see further into the distance. As she landed, she confirmed her direction with the same claw marks. She had to backtrack several times to find them again, and at one point spent several hours searching for sign over rocky terrain.
Unless the aliens had a specific destination and purpose, they would randomly walk from one point to another. This was surprisingly effective when it came to scouting but made their actions predictable.
Jack took one more jump, and in mid jump she noticed an unusual opening in the near distance.
“Alien activity, multiple units, 2.2 kilometers bearing 221 degrees!” Her suit said, once again late on the call. “Uneven ground density, 65% probability of a subterranean cavity! Brace for landing!”
As Jack came down, she noticed nothing unusual about the terrain but she loosened up and set herself up for a soft landing anyway. Suits were hardly ever wrong, and they were almost as complex as their pilot’s ship.
The ground came up, and Jack felt it break up through the suit biofeedback. Before she knew it, she had sunk waist deep into soft volcanic rock, with her lower legs dangling free below the surface. She had stopped at her arms, which left her with little available movement.
Jack hung there, feeling somewhat like a cork in a bottle.
“What’s underneath me?” she asked.
“A subterranean cavern of undetermined length, but greater than 200 meters south west in length and 123 meters northeast in length. The irregular cave bottom is approximately 10 meters down from where you are now. The temperature is 27 degrees Celsius, humidity is 65% and there is considerable more oxygen, at 16%. There is also life, unclassified, and mostly smaller than your head. This is all I can tell from this position.”
Jack had to laugh at the reference to her head. “Is my head big?” she asked, and then added “How does this life compare to the size of my ass?” and giggled away until she remembered where she was.
“Your head is slightly smaller…”
“Cut it out, I was kidding,” Jack quickly added. She took stock of her situation and after several attempts at moving, decided she was really stuck. “Isn’t that great,” she muttered. “What’s my energy level?”
“78%.”
“Any ideas?”
“No,” the suit computer replied.
“Any alien activity in the surrounding area?”
“Only the aliens below us and those 2.2 kilometers away,” her suit comp replied.
“How are the life forms below us reacting?”
“They appear to be tending to their duties as before.”
“Power down then, minimal life support but temperature at 18 degrees, and keep an eye out.”
It was getting dark now and too much that happened for her to have any energy left to struggle. She drank water and took care of her bodily needs, things that the suit cared for automatically even when powered down. Jack looked around at the purple tone of the landscape, noticing the lava-like formations all around her. The wind blew strongly against her but she didn’t feel it. She could easily see the dust devils kicking up all around her and figured the double sun made the weather system on this planet go haywire. Still, the setting suns did look pretty, and she stayed there watching them until they finally disappeared over the horizon.
Jack’s eyes finally fell on the ground she was now stuck in. Shards of volcanic rock lay all around her from the impact of her landing, though she figured the majority would have been driven below. After looking closely, she figured it must have been a lava tunnel that she had fallen through. The cave roof was less than a meter below, seeing as she could move her legs. She reached out and grabbed a piece of the rock laying near her and she easily crushed it in her suited up hands. As she thought about all this, she drifted off to sleep.
Scratch had just gotten up from eating and was passing Jack with a tray full food and snacks for later. He had filled his pockets full of snacks too, and they were dropping out as he walked. Jack saw him coming and watched in awe at the amount of food he was going to eat between now and dinner. There was something about him that attracted her, and yet at times she felt angry at herself for it. This came out as aggression, and now it was time to be aggressive. She stuck her leg out.
Scratch was in the process of sticking his tongue out at her when he caught her leg, and in a slow motion way, started to tip over. His tray went flying as his arms started cart-wheeling, but just before he hit the ground his body stopped. Jack watched amazed as his arms flipped wildly in circles faster and faster as he somehow kept himself afloat, hands just lightly slapping the ground. She looked around to see if others had noticed him when her brain told her this slapping sound wasn’t quite right – that it actually sounded like a tapping sound, like a pen tapping on a wooden table...
She woke up with a start, a pair of claws tapping on her helmet.
“Power on, quiet mode,” she whispered, knowing that the ants easily picked up vibrations.
She took stock of the bug now in front of her. Its claw had disappeared as it turned and its body now blocked her view. Tensing up, her arm shot out hitting the alien so hard its body ripped in two with the impact. Bug juice splattered on her face-shield and when she wiped it off she noticed the dozen or so others surrounding it. She stood stock still as she watched each alien swing its head toward her, their antennae waving in the air. They didn’t know what to make of this object sticking out of the ground.
“Not gonna wait around to find out,” she said to herself. Just as they started to move toward her, she swung her arms as high as she could and hammered the ground. The vibration rippled across the hardened magma, but all she did was pulverize the rock beneath her arms. The aliens were now alarmed and their antennae frantically waved to and fro as they communicated with each other. She swung again and again, each time kicking up a cloud of dust, and was starting to feel the ground give way. The aliens were only a meter away when she hammered her last blow as hard as she could. The ground let go and she broke through, together with the other dozen bugs. Two broke legs on the fall and limped in circles, but the other ten immediately attacked.
Jack knew her suit would be damaged if she hung around to fight against these odds. It was their cold and calculated determination that made them especially dangerous and they pursued their enemies doggedly, but it was the lack of emotion that scared her the most. She couldn’t help but compare them to a psychopathic killer, although she knew that the comparison wasn’t quite right either. Perhaps it was the fact that you couldn’t reason with either and your ultimate and only recourse was to get rid of them.
She ran toward the path of least resistance, and on the way picked up two aliens by their heads. They struggled to get a grip on anything they could and their mandibles were working as they tried to reach the arms of her suit, but Jack held a firm grip on both heads as she struggled to keep ahead of the group now behind her. She would normally be much faster than the ants, but the two on her arms slowed her down. These ants were in their element and her bulky suit got in the way. She worried it might be only a matter of time before this cave narrowed, and if that happened she would be trapped.
As she ran she brushed up against one side of the wall, and the cave’s course surface wore through the ant’s exoskeleton. Dropping it, she did the same to the other. Now unencumbered, she quickly gained a good lead on them.
“Distance to aliens?” Jack asked.
“30 meters to the closest one.”
“Are they grouped together?”
“No, two are in front with one immediately behind the other, and the rest vary up to 10 meters behind the first.”
“Perfect,” Jack said. She looked around for a depression in the wall just small enough to fit into but out of view of those trailing. The path was getting rougher now, with rocks strewn here and there and the material of the walls changing from the earlier smoothed out surface of the cooled magma to a rougher, crystalline rock.
She rounded a corner and found exactly what she was looking for, a recess in the rock hidden out of view of those following, just big enough for her suit to fit inside. She waited patiently until the first two passed and then jumped out behind them. By this time they were running almost side by side.
Making a small jump, she and landed on top of them and mashed their heads together. She left the pile twitching as she took a quick glance behind her. The remaining six were now clumped together because of the confined space, but their claws allowed them to spread up the sides of the cave. They were only a few meters behind. The cave walls were transitioning once again from the course surface into one like smooth glass, and she hoped it would slow then ants further.
Another bend in the tunnel was coming up and it was tight enough that Jack wasn’t sure if she would fit or not. The black, smooth glass wall seemed thick, and she had to concentrate to keep from slipping.
“Scan ahead!”
“No aliens for the next forty meters. As to the tunnel, my signals are getting bounced and I cannot interpret them. Visual is the only available source of information.”
Visual, showed no way out, and there was definitely no way back. It was either run or fight, and the odds were still against her.
“You might not fit through the gap.”
She ignored her suit comp and dove thru it. Something clanged and she heard the sound of glass breaking, but she made it through the opening and slid more than scrambled around a small bend. After pushing herself along, the tunnel opened up again and she got up. Jack ran a few more meters, quickly scanning the ground for a large round rock, but the walls and floors here were just as smooth as the tight passage she had just come through.
“The aliens are gaining. Twenty meters and closing.”
Out of desperation, she knocked loose a protrusion from the ceiling, picked it up just as the bugs were rounding the tight corner. Throwing it as hard as she could, the 30 kilo piece of fused iron and diamond blasted thru the air and slammed into the aliens all funneled together at the narrow opening. Legs broke apart and exoskeletons smashed into pieces as the rock pulverized the group.
‘Well, that was surprisingly effective. I should make a game out of this,’ she said to herself. ‘A hard round ball, and ant-like figures standing at the end of a long corridor. Points for every bug you knock down, and extra points if you knock them all down at…Concentrate, dammit,” Jack reminded herself. “Comp, did you get this all recorded?”
“Yes.”
‘At least anyone who finds my remains could look back at how smart I was before I died,’ Jack thought and then corrected herself. “Enough about this, I’m not dying. It’s thinking like this that will get me killed.”
After double checking that all the bugs had died and that none could return and report back on events, she continued down the tunnel in the general direction of the alien hive she had seen earlier.
As she thought about it, Jack couldn’t believe that an alien hive had started here. It had been clearly established that the aliens kept some sort of telepathic connection open to a Queen mother on their home planet. How they did it was still a mystery, but captured alien ants apparently lost that ability even though they were kept well fed and taken care of. Once that link was lost, any captured ant would be in some sort of a dormant state, reacting to external stimuli in a purely mechanical way, like sleeping goldfish in a glass jar. They wouldn’t even eat unless food was placed in their mandibles, and almost all of them eventually died of starvation. The few they kept alive lived to what was old age for them – two years, remained in that comatose state.
It was easy to deduce that with the destruction of the home planet, the bugs would have roamed around without a purpose until they starved to death, but recent events made it obvious that their understanding of how the aliens functioned must be wrong. Was there a new queen here? Obviously. Was there more than one, one for each planet perhaps? Intel had said no a year ago, but now they were mysteriously quiet. “Well, I’m not going to get any answers standing around here.”
Unknown to Jack, her actions were being observed by the tunnel denizens, a crab-like species with a transparent shell and a number of larger and smaller sets of pincers located around the perimeter of their bodies. As Jack walked, a number of these creatures made themselves visible, defiantly walking in front of Jack’s direction of travel.
Jack had gotten tired of adjusting her eyesight to the proper light level. The little light there was fluctuated in intensity in the different parts of the tunnel. The walls seemed to radiate it, but how it was produced was a mystery. She hadn’t seen the creatures and was about to step on one when she stopped, her foot inches above the crab-like alien. Its pincers were up and ready, as were all the rest that had now joined it.
“Jack, there are a number of small creatures blocking our direction of travel.”
“I can see that. Why were you late noticing them?” Jack asked as she adjusted her sight.
“They did not register on my sensors at first, and they have no heat signature. Because of the low light…”
“Ok, ok I get it. They obviously don’t want us to pass. I wonder why?”
All the creatures were immobile, facing her with their pincers in the air. Up the sides of the cave were round objects about the size of grapes clustered in the hundreds of small cavities carved out from the smooth glass walls. Jack guessed them to be eggs, but she knew she could easily be wrong. Tending these clusters were a similar type of crab, simpler and without the larger pincers of their cousins on the ground. They carefully rotated each egg one by one. Paying close attention, Jack noticed one of the eggs oozing something from a small hole, and one of those smaller creatures collecting the stuff as it went from egg to egg.
“So they’re protecting their nest. Can’t go around it, and there’s no other underground way to get to the hive that I know of. Hmm…”
Jack looked down at the creatures again. They had lowered their pincers but still stood there facing her. She noticed that they had organized themselves into a good defensive position, taking advantage of their size and the layout of the cave. Jack was sure they couldn’t hurt her, but it didn’t matter. They were obviously sentient creatures and she didn’t want to harm them in any way. After thinking for a bit, she raised her left arm and pointed in the direction she wanted to travel. They all looked at her hand, facing her quietly. She waited to see what they would do, and when she was just about to give up, they all lifted up their left pincer and pointed the direction she had come. She laughed at their audacity and wondered if they were simply imitating her move. At about this time Jack started to hear noises, a sort of whispering sound similar to the sound of a light wind rustling through tree branches.
“Where is that noise coming from?”
“What noise are you referring to?”
“That rustling noise…Is there a breeze in this tunnel?”
“No,” the suit computer replied. “There is no breeze, and no noise save very minor sounds made by the creatures.”
Jack repeated her earlier hand signal. When she got no further reaction she sat down. The creatures hadn’t moved except for the lowering of their pincers. As Jack sat and waited, the creatures stood completely still and she started feeling an unusual pressure building up in her mind.
“This is definitely freaky,” she said as she looked at the group. Jack had no idea what it was and she was given no time to find out as they broke their inactivity by scurried up her like a wave. Fighting a strong impulse to wipe them off, she waited to see what they would do. The last thing she wanted was an action misinterpreted as aggression.
The creatures probed and squeezed and even surprised her with some sort of internal light they turned on when peering through her visor. The whispering was now a drone, one that sounded like bees taking care of a beehive. Then all of a sudden, a deep low sound like a bell tolling rung so loudly Jack thought her suit was hit by a falling rock.
“What was THAT?” Jack asked surprised.
“What, Jack?”
“Oh, come on. There was an obvious noise like a large bell being rung!”
“There is no noise you can hear Jaclyn, and yes, I am working under normal parameters. Otherwise, there are sub-audible noises emanating from the creatures themselves. I assure you, you are not able to hear any of these sounds, unless you want me to amplify and modify them to suit your hearing range.”
“No, that’s fine,” Jack said, frustrated.
“Are you working under normal parameters?”
She laughed. “Wait, let me do an internal check…Yup, everything is A-OK!” This is the first time any suit had asked her anything like this before. It was definitely screwed up.
In the meantime, the noises ceased, as did all movements from the creatures. Even the ones on the walls tending the nests stopped and watched her as she sat there. She felt odd being watched by them and didn’t know what to do.
She was startled by the same sound she had heard before, a low tolling bell sound that rung and reverberated through her head. This time she checked her suit sensors for vibrations instead of noise, but there weren’t any. As she sat there thinking about it the creatures seemed to watch her reaction.
Slowly her mind calmed down and a comforting darkness descended until her vision went black. Jack didn’t know what to make of this, but somehow she felt calm, as if she was getting ready to watch a teaching unit holoplay back at the ship. She knew she should be alarmed, and she heard a distant voice that sounded like the voice from her suit saying something, but it was lost in the image that started to form in her head.
In a fugue state, the darkness gave way to an image of a creature relentlessly approaching her. Still in her suit, she tried running at first, but creature closed the gap until it finally caught up to her and started to tear her suit apart. No matter what she tried, she couldn’t get it off, and although she felt she could have destroyed it easily, she knew that would be the wrong move. As much as she realized her drop suit was her greatest friend, a soothing wave of peace and calmness enveloped her. She stopped struggling and simply waited until the creature broke through. She could feel its claws against her skin but the feeling of peace persisted, fighting her natural fear. The claws, though cool to the touch, didn’t hurt. It took a few tentative steps as it stood there on her belly, and then it slowly climbed up until she could feel it on the side of her face. At one point it stumbled as it tried to find a grip without cutting her skin, and she was surprised to see her own hand come up to help it as it made its way up to her head. Once there it stood still for a moment and then somehow slowly sank in until she could feel it inside her skull.
Somehow, she didn’t feel terrified. She knew it wasn’t actually happening but every aspect of it certainly felt real, right down to the sweat pouring down her body. She wanted a drink bad, but her body was paralyzed. The vision went black again as Jack slowly fell into a deep sleep.
Jack came to with a start as she realized that another vision had just started, and this one showed her an alien ant coming toward her through the same tunnel she was in. Her first reaction was to destroy it as she had all the others, but then she remembered that this was simply a vision and she figured the crabs wanted to show her something.
The ant came closer, but on its way through the tunnel it came across the nest and started analyzing everything in it with its sensors. Once it was done it stood completely unmoving, as if in some sort of trance. Seconds turned into minutes, and Jack was startled when it suddenly let out a piercing scream. It was unlike anything she ever heard and certainly unlike anything an ant ever did. They had no way of making noise other then the clipping sound of their claws or the tapping of their antennae.
It stopped screaming as abruptly as it had started and then stood there completely still again, waiting. Within moments out of the darkness of the tunnel hundreds upon hundreds of ants emerged, and they ravaged the nest. Jack couldn’t imagine how so many ants could fit inside that space but she could see them pushing and shoving each other violently in their frenzy. Many of the ants trampled each other and some of them were so crushed their exoskeleton burst from the pressure of those behind, but those that were able to started feeding greedily, smashing nests, taking eggs, and cracking open the crabs.
She watched disgustingly as one ant greedily slurped down the contents of one of the creatures while a few others slowly pulled the legs off the other ones they found tending the nests. By the time they were done, the nest was completely destroyed and crab carcasses littered the ground the ants had trampled. Jack couldn’t help but look around in pity, revulsion still showing on her face from the grotesque things she had just witnessed. She felt that although some of what she saw was not quite real, the event portrayed in her vision had actually happened. She didn’t know what to make of it all or when the events occurred or why she was seeing it, but her revulsion and hatred for the ants was clearly understood by the creatures reading her mind. The visions ended, and Jack drifted off once again into darkness.
That night Jack’s dreams danced from one subject to another. One minute, she was married to Scratch, the next they had found Earth, then she saw Scratch back on this planet naked, alive and co-operating with the ants while she walked freely among them. An unknown third person in a drop suit like hers, face unrecognizable, then came crashing into the Hive, causing utter confusion and destruction. After this Jack’s dreams drifted to these creatures and the colonies they had set up, their metamorphosis into another type of being she couldn’t quite discern, the destruction of their nurseries by the ants, and the counterattack they launched in return.
Her mind then drifted to space, to a human colony of misfits and mutants living in some station somewhere, plotting death and destruction. The next image she sees is of the Hive chamber once again, with Scratch in the middle sitting on a throne made of solid diamond. The bugs are ignoring them both while he sits naked, looking at her in adulation. Only then does she realize she’s naked too and she gets embarrassed, but their attention is diverted by the activities in the background as the person in the drop suit causes havoc among the ants.
The final dream was of Bones, or at least of his body. He was in a large room and with him were hundreds of other humans, all of them naked, and they were all standing rigidly and completely still. When she looked closer she noticed that his eyes were closed and that alien tubes went into the back of his head. Just before her dream faded, his eyes suddenly shot open and a terrifying scream came out. Jack shuddered when she realized that not only was Bones’ mouth still closed, but that it was the same type of scream she heard earlier with the ant in her dream. When darkness came once again, she felt relieved that this nightmare would be over.
Jack woke up with a start, her suit querying her physical and mental status in an alarmed voice. A headache was pounding away and she felt the kind of tired you get from chronic insomnia.
“I’m fine. Tired, but fine,” she informed her suit comp.
She thought back to the dreams and was surprised that she could remember all of them to the very last detail. They all had a reality to them that surprised her, but the last terrifying one was especially vivid, so vivid that it was more a vision than a dream. She was sure that they were real and felt frustrated, feeling that she needed to do something about what she had seen but not really knowing what to do.
Exiting the suit temporarily, Jack worked the stiffness out of her body. Getting back in, she took a drink of water from the dispenser and noticed that most of the crabs had disappeared, leaving a path for her through the nest that was still being tended by the simpler of the crab-like creatures. Her suit had scanned all the information in and had temporarily labeled these as ‘Worker Crabs’, while the larger crabs were simply labeled ‘Crabs’. That suited Jack just fine.
Jack gingerly walked forward, being careful not to disturb or damage anything. Once she was through, she picked up her pace and thought about what she had seen in her dreams. What were these creatures, and did they metamorphose into something else like the dream showed? If so, what? Jack didn’t know, but she felt that she would soon find out.
“How far are we from the Hive entrance we saw from the surface?”
“Approximately one kilometer if this cave continues in its present direction.”
Jack slowed down and started to pay more attention to details. This part of the cave seemed as if it was the same as when magma flowed through it eons ago. It showed no sign of alien activity. The walls were glass-like, with large bubbles formed here and there along the floor, walls and ceiling. It seemed fused into one piece with no magma residue left behind. ‘Strange,’ Jack thought. She continued to walk for another half hour until the suit comp stated: “Jack, We have gone beyond where the Hive is supposed to be. The cave has swerved slightly to the left, and it appears that this cave does not intersect with the Hive.”
“Which is the part of the cave that is closest to the Hive complex?”
“Backtrack 12 meters. My sensors picked up an anomaly on the cave wall that I originally dismissed. Please return to that spot and tap the wall.”
Jack found the spot and tapped with her robotic knuckle. “It sounds…hollow…”
“The wall is relatively thin, approximately one-half meter thick at its very center, but it does thicken towards the floor and roof of this cavern and whatever is on the other side.”
“How hard is this stuff?” Jack asked.
The suit comp took control of its arm and tapped the wall harder. After a second it said, “Very hard but very brittle.”
Jack turned on her different light filters until she got the view she wanted – stress flows across the glass. “Do you think I can break this?”
“Yes. I would suggest kicking.”
“Kicking it is!” Jack wound up and gave the wall a solid kick at the weakest point. The glass wall reverberated and the tunnel rung with the impact, but nothing happened. She continued to kick time after time but with no effect other then the wall vibrating with the kick. She finally stopped kicking and her brow knit in concentration as she continued to study the stress features of the glass wall.
“Is there a pattern to the ringing?”
“Analyzing…Yes. Displaying on visor…”
Jack looked and saw a consistent set of peaks and valleys that mirrored her kicks, but she also saw an underlying frequency that didn’t match.
“Please tempo the frequency, point five seconds before they happen.”
Jack got ready and gave the wall a solid kick, and the sound came back again. Each time the computer prompted her, she gave another kick, and with each kick the volume of the ringing intensified. Finally, after eight kicks and just when Jack was ready to stop again, the wall exploded in a shower of glass and debris and a jagged hole big enough for her to walk through opened up.
Her jaw dropped as she looked into a large chamber approximately one hundred meters across, with tunnels branching off all around the perimeter of the chamber. In the center Jack saw a naked Scratch sitting on a natural glass formation that looked very much like a throne. Near him hanging off the ceiling of the chamber were thousands of long tendrils of ooze dripping down into a honeycomb framework that contained alien larvae.
It was obvious the chamber was a Hive nest, and worker ants lined the perimeter with eggs while they waited. Jack had just caught one fully grown ant vacating a chamber, its exoskeleton completely white from having just recently hardened. Worker ants cleaned up the ooze on its skin and once it left, they deposited a newly hatched larva back into the same honeycomb chamber.
Although Scratch was near the center, no worker bothered him as he sat there. But with the vibration of the exploding wall spreading through the rock, worker ants turned towards the origin of the vibrations as they actively waved their sensors in the air. Jack watched as dozens headed toward her with more coming out of the tunnels. There was no way Jack could win against all of these, and her mind went blank as she confronted certain death.