The landing platform was on the other side of the main colony hub. The ship wheeled toward it and then was lost out of sight in the clouds. Getting there from here would be a mad, dangerous dash… could Merrilyn risk it, especially with Therese? It would take only one of those things to confront them along the two kilometers of corridors, and they would be lost—just when salvation was so close.
“Mama, are they soldiers? Are they coming to help us?”
“Yes, I hope so, Little Flower,” Merrilyn said, thinking furiously. She hadn’t been able to tell what sort of ship it was or who it belonged to in the glimpse she’d had from the observation window. Somebody must have managed to get a distress call out. It didn’t matter who it was, all that mattered was that they were here now.
“Mama, what if… what if they get to them first?”
“I’m thinking, Therese.” Her daughter was right. The entire crew could be wiped out before they could be any help at all. She had to warn them somehow.
Merrilyn switched on the monitors that showed the security camera feeds and cycled through rapidly until she got to the landing platform camera. Thank God it was still working. There was a tannoy system connected to the cameras, and Merrilyn could use it to both warn them and tell them where she and Therese were located. The storm was making the feed grainy with interference, but she could see the ship coming into view, buffeted by the strong winds and, after three attempts, coming to rest on the wide platform.
She couldn’t make out the designation numbers or name of the vessel, but it looked like a small commercial vehicle rather than a military ship. Merrilyn felt a pang and hoped they had guns. For a long while nothing happened, and then a hatch opened in the front of the ship and a set of steps was lowered.
Merrilyn counted five crew who disembarked and stood in the shelter of their ship, looking around at the deserted colony. They wore ordinary spacer fatigues. A merchant or trading ship. It didn’t matter. They were saved. Merrilyn took manual control of the camera and zoomed in a little, making out the Union Jack on the side of the ship. Three World Empire, then. No beef with the ICSC. But even if they had been United Americas marines, Merrilyn was sure they wouldn’t have abandoned a mother and child, even with the war.
It took a while for her to work out how to patch into the tannoy from the remote control, and she pressed the button just as the five crew began walking toward the access door leading to the colony hub. She needed to warn them to get back, or at least to take care. There must have been a burst of static from the speaker, because they all looked up. Merrilyn was about to introduce herself when it happened.
Behind the five figures, a black shape flitted across the landing platform. Merrilyn’s breath caught in her throat.
No. Don’t say it’s too late. Don’t say their saviors were dead before they even entered the colony.
But it wasn’t one of the creatures.
It was a human.
Merrilyn frowned and zoomed in, then her eyes widened in surprise. She recognized him. One of the miners. She didn’t know his name, only knew him by sight, but he’d survived, too. He must have been hiding out at the far end of the colony. How many other survivors were there? She had assumed only her and Therese. At least he would warn them about the—
Merrilyn’s hand flew to her mouth at what she saw on the screen. The man—François, she suddenly remembered—had come up behind the crew, and they turned. He waved his hands and pointed toward the colony buildings. One of the crew pulled out a handgun. At first Merrilyn thought, Thank God, they have weapons.
Until the woman turned it on François and shot him in the chest.
Very slowly, Merrilyn disconnected the link to the tannoy system.
“Mama?” Therese said, staring at the screen. “What happened? What does that mean?”
“It means, Little Flower,” Merrilyn said, “that we are going to have to hide again and be very, very quiet while Mama works out what to do.”
* * *
“What the fuck did you do that for?” Tom Moran bellowed over the raging storm, staring at the twitching body of the Frenchie colonist on the landing platform. Amina Mir looked at the gun in her hand and then at Moran.
“Sorry, guv. I thought he was going to go for us. He looked as mad as a bag of snakes. Banging on about monsters, and that.”
Moran shook his head. “You trigger-happy cow, Mir. Probably going to get us in a pile of shit, that. Well done.”
“I’m not exactly sure it will,” Boffin said. His real name was Jerry Bough, but everybody called him Boffin on account of him being the cleverest one of the crew when it came to science. “That distress call was sent out nearly a week ago. I just had Mother scan the colony mainframe. There’s been almost no activity since then.” He looked at Moran, then at the dead Frenchie. “I think just about everybody’s gone already. He must’ve been the last of them.”
Moran thought about it. “Sling him over the side. We never saw him, right?” The others murmured assent and began to roll the body to the edge of the landing platform. It was a long way down. Nobody would ever find him. When it was done, Moran said, “What do you mean, Boffin? All gone? Gone where?”
Boffin shrugged. “I don’t know. Weather’s a problem, too. Hard to get solid readings. I can get Mother patched into the colony network, but it’ll take a bit of time. She’s old, and we’re not used to hacking something so big.”
“Do it,” Moran said. “Rest of you, let’s get inside out of this bloody storm. See if we can work out what the hell happened here.”
* * *
If it had been up to Moran, he’d have ignored the distress call. They were a trade mission, not a rescue outfit, but base had suggested it would be good form to check it out anyway. They’d off-loaded a load of iron ore at a very nice little Chinese colony about a week out, and it was just his bad luck to be passing LV-187, the nearest colony to home, when they picked up the transmission.
Still, it would only hold them up for a day or so. The wife could wait that long to see him. Though, to be fair, she was only really interested in his pay-packet these days. Not that Moran was bothered. They’d had a nice little brothel on that Chinese colony, and he’d spent a little more than he should have of his bonus while they were there.
Once inside the French colony, though, he really, really wished somebody else had picked this up.
“You got your body-cam on, Mir?” he said as they picked their way through the corridor. It was fucking carnage. There were at least ten corpses, and none of them pretty. It was like a pack of rampaging wild animals had torn through the place. “Rest of you, weapons out.”
Priestley squatted down and turned over a prone corpse. The front of the woman’s torso had been ripped out, like something had exploded out of her from the inside. Frank Priestley was a tough old Yorkshireman and Moran had known him for donkey’s years. He’d never seen the old boy look as white as this. Looked like he was going to faint.
“What happened here, guv?” Priestley said, suddenly choking back a mouthful of bile. “It’s like a slaughterhouse.”
“I think we should get back on the Victory and get the fuck off here,” Bromley said, running a hand through her dreadlocks. “Whatever shit went down here, we don’t want to be next.” Moran was inclined to agree, but now they were hampered by regulations. Until there was a material threat to their lives, they were duty-bound to stay here and call it in. A sign on the wall, smeared with dried blood, said the comms tower was a quarter of a click ahead.
“Let’s call it in and get orders,” Moran said. “The colony comms is going to be a lot stronger than the ship system.” He thought about it for a moment. “They’re going to tell us to sweep the whole colony. Let’s save time. Priestley, Mir, you do a full circuit. This place isn’t that massive. Two kilometers end to end. Circle back and meet Bromley and me in the comms tower. Quicker we do this, quicker we can be on our way home.”
Amina and Priestley looked doubtful, but they moved off along the corridor. Then the Yorkshireman paused and turned back to them.
“What if we find survivors, guv?”
Moran scratched his beard. That would complicate things, he was sure, because he had an inkling about what sort of orders he was going to get back once he’d reached the comms tower. Moran was ex-military, and he could see the way the wind was blowing out here in the colonies. Survivors would mean a fully accountable rescue mission, and depending on how many of them there were, they might have to wait for an official response from the ICSC.
Then there was the Frenchie who Mir had shot. It was a long way down in a storm, for sure, but a full-scale investigation here—which there obviously would be—might turn up a something that was all a bit bloody awkward.
He walked over to them and flicked off Amina’s body-cam.
“There are no survivors,” he said quietly. “They’re all dead. Looks like they went crazy and killed each other. Understood.” Priestley nodded, and Moran switched Amina’s body-cam back on.
Then he said loudly, “Go now, and for God’s sake I hope you find somebody alive in this hell-hole.” When Amina turned to walk slowly up the corridor, he winked at Priestley and beckoned for Bromley to follow him in the opposite direction.
* * *
“Pinky Ponk!” Therese said.
“He’s here,” Merrilyn said, handing the toy to her daughter. “Now remember what I said, Little Flower. As soon as we are outside the canteen, we are playing the Quiet Game. You like the Quiet Game, don’t you?”
Therese nodded, pulled an imaginary zipper over her mouth, and nodded seriously.
“Good girl. Now just let Mama pack her bag, and we can go.”
She had been watching the newcomers on the security cameras, and had seen them split up. Two were heading this way, and would inevitably come into the canteen. Shooting François might have been a terrible mistake, but could she take the risk? They were going to have to leave the relative safety of the canteen and avoid, not just the things, but the people, too.
Monsters everywhere you look, Merrilyn sadly thought. Not for the first time she wished she’d never set eyes on LV-187, never brought Therese within a hundred light years of it.
With as many bottles of water, tins of food, and makeshift weapons that she could carry, Merrilyn hefted the rucksack onto her back and carefully opened the canteen door a tiny crack. She peered out, then turned and took Therese’s hand. Merrilyn put a finger to her lips and then mimed pulling a zipper over her closed mouth, nodding as Therese did the same. Then, taking a deep breath, she opened the door wide and led her daughter by the hand, out into the dim corridor.
* * *
“Well, what the fuck am I looking at here, then?” Moran said, tugging on his beard. They’d regrouped, and got Amina’s cam footage up on a monitor in the comms tower, where the storm was lashing the windows with rain as night started to fall over LV-187.
“I’ve never seen shit like that before in all my years,” Priestley said. “They were soft to the touch. Organic.”
“Kind of like big seed pods,” Amina said. “That had burst open.”
“Seed pods,” Moran said, staring at the paused image on the screen. “Frenchies growing some weird-arse shit here, then? I thought this was an oil operation.”
Priestley shook his head. “If that was the case, surely they’d have them in some kind of… nursery or something. These were sort of scattered around. Hidden in corridors. Access hatches. Storage cupboards. Weirdest thing I ever saw.”
“How many?” Moran said.
“Ten that we counted. Not saying there aren’t more—we didn’t get into every single service conduit or anything like that.”
“You know what this is,” Bromley said slowly. They all turned to look at her. “Black goo, innit?”
Moran sighed as Priestley said, “What’s that? Some shit you people put on your hair?”
“Racist twat.” Amina sighed, looking away.
“Fuck off,” Bromley said. “You know what I’m talking about.”
“We all know what you’re talking about, but we don’t know anything about that shit,” Moran said. “It’s rumor and conjecture.”
“Yeah, well, I know somebody who had family in one of the colonies out in the Kruger 60 system,” Bromley said, frowning. “You tell them it’s just conjecture, that whole worlds being wiped out by black bombers pouring shit into the atmosphere.”
“I heard it was the Union of Progressive Peoples,” Amina said.
“I heard the United Americas,” Bromley said.
“I heard it was Ronald McFucking Donald,” Priestley said. “Black goo. What a load of shite. You see any black goo here?”
“Priestley’s right,” Moran said, trying to take control. “Whatever’s going on with these border bombings isn’t anything to do with LV-187. This is some whole other shit.” He looked at Amina. “Any survivors?”
“No.”
“Really no survivors, or no survivors now?”
“No. Nothing. The canteen looked like someone had lived in it for a little while, but there was nobody in the vicinity.”
“Probably that poor sod who Deadeye Mir here blew away,” Priestley said, making a gun from his fingers and thumb and pretending to fire it at her with a pew-pew sound. Suddenly there was a buzzing sound from the comms console. Moran went over to check and turned to his team.
“Orders from our masters on New Albion.”
“Well?” Bromley said.
“Do we still have that Union Jack in the Victory? We’re going to need it, boys and girls, because we’re about to make history,” Moran said with a grin.
“I’ll buzz Boffin, tell him to get up here,” Priestley said, firing up his wrist comms. “And it’s the Union Flag, guv. It’s only the Union Jack when it’s flown from a ship.”
“History how?” Amina said.
“Shit’s going down,” Moran said. “Top-level shit, and we’re going to be part of it.”
Priestley killed the comms link and frowned at Moran. “Boffin’s on his way up. With the flag. He’s got Mother patched into the colony mainframe, but he thinks the readings are all fucked up.”
“How do you mean?” Moran said.
“He reckons the scan is showing lifeforms.”
“Well, duh. We’re here,” Bromley snorted.
Priestley flipped her two fingers. “Apart from us.”
“How many lifeforms readings apart from us?” Moran said.
“Seventeen,” Priestley said.