Stasis (The Ascendants Book 2) Page 3

  They came to a rest with their sights set on the boarding vessel, and fired. Again, the green and red blasts of their shot—thousands of degrees of heat and charged particles rushing through the vacuum at imperceptible speeds—erupted and illuminated the bridge, and again, the shots sailed wide into the blackness and traveled for thousands of miles before fizzling out in a harmless, silent series of sparks.

  Caspar Faulk sat dumbfounded at his desk, staring at the green blip on his radar that would inevitably collide with the Vulcan and bring with it a plague of locusts, a marauding swarm of insects, a cloud of death.

  Captain Cromwell burst forth from his quarters, shouting over the bridge floor that a shooting battle was imminent. Stations had to be manned, guns prepared. The defense force commanders rounded up their soldiers and marched them off to the docking bays and in the flurry of activity, Caspar Faulk found himself standing with a rifle in his hands and the open palm of an officer pressed against his back, beckoning him to move forward, like his life depended on it.

  In the rush of bodies pressing for the door, he had no where to go but in the same direction as everyone else, toward the shooting. Toward the mayhem. Before he was marched off with the rest of the bridge command, he shot a look over his shoulders at Cromwell, who paced back and forth on his solitary perch, muttering to himself and turning on his heel at every fifth step. Kenneth Alexander attempted to get the Captain back into his quarters, but the man refused, and the doors closed on the Captain as Caspar Faulk entered the hall and descended into the ship’s main corridors to prepare for battle, with the heft and cold of his rifle feeling uncomfortable in his hands, and the sweat of a thousand men and women hanging acrid in the air, assaulting his nostrils and making him want to swoon.

  “Enemy boarding vessel has locked onto the surface of the Vulcan,” came the ship’s computer, and a ripple of worried conversation rocked the crowd that remained constantly in flux, endlessly shifting about and moving to the various entrance points that accessed the higher levels of the ship in an attempt to blockade the bridge from the renegade grasshoppers. None of these people had seen combat. None of these people knew how to work a gun. None of these people would survive if they found themselves in a hallway squirming with Ides that scrambled across the ceilings and walls and floor.

  Would he?

  Of course not, he told himself. That is why he worked on the bridge. He tightened his grip on the butt of his rifle as an officer told him to stop moving and stand guard at the door he faced.

  As he stood in the line of soldiers that kept their guns trained on the sliding door that blocked off the entry points for the lower portions of the ship, the lights flickered once and came back on with a spark and the sizzle of poor wiring, before going out again, and plunging the hallway and the soldiers standing in it into complete darkness, in which one could not discern where the ceiling was, nor the floor, and where the shouting of terrified soldiers mingled into one echoing din that rose above any other sound, even that of the boarding vessel slamming against the surface of the ship and beginning to drill through it.

  He felt only a great sense of appreciation for the twist of fate that had him standing where he stood, on the port side of the Vulcan, the opposite side from the point at which the boarding party would enter. The farthest place on the ship from where the slaughter would begin.

  The lights came on again, though they continued to flicker and remained unreliable, doing more to unsettle the soldiers than if they had simply remained inactive. In the weakened light of the sputtering bulbs, he saw Captain Cromwell and Kenneth Alexander walking with their guns drawn and trying to rouse the soldiers into a fighting mood. Beneath the Captain’s bellicose veneer, Faulk saw the agitated shadow of the Captain as the bridge doors slid shut, the Captain who paced back and forth and muttered and could not keep his cool.

  A typical MarsForm Captain, he thought, retired from the army after a long career of doing nothing and shaken up when things didn’t go as smoothly as they should.

  Chapter 7

  Cromwell walked the line of troops awaiting the onset of the battle, looking each one in the eye and trying to assess their mettle as the moment of their deaths drew closer. “Not all of you are going to lay your head on a pillow tonight, men. Not all of you are going home to your sweethearts. I know this. But I also know,” he said, choked up, like he had an apple stuck in his throat, “that some of you will. Because the grasshoppers don’t have what we have. They don’t have love for their planet and their families. They don’t have camaraderie, and they sure as hell don’t have the guns we got!”

  The Captain barked a hoarse laugh, like the sound a knife sharpener grinding away at a blade. Caspar Faulk tried to reconcile the image of this man, pacing back and forth down the rank of troops still alive, the contingent survivors of the Ides’ slaughter who had somehow managed to regroup in the engine room, where the Ides pooled up on the other side of the door and eagerly sought entrance.

  Some of their number bleed profusely from heads, hands, arms. At least one had already lost a limb, and the smell of the cauterizer searing her flesh back together still hung heavy in the air as the Captain promised that the ship would never be lost, that the day of the Ides rampaging through the galaxy were over, and that the Vulcan would fly again. The woman with the missing arm, who moaned quietly and incoherently in the corner, asked when they would be eating dinner, and what would be served, though no one responded and the break in Captain Cromwell’s rhythm produced a noticeable effect on the profoundity of his speech. He swallowed again, as the sounds of the Ides cackling on the other side of the engine room doors reached their ears through ten inches of reinforced steel.

  Over the echo of the engine charging and firing, pushing the vessel through the Plutonian Gravity Field to the homing beacon that they had locked onto and would soon arrive at, the sound seemed ghostly, like the calls of fallen soldiers on the field of battle reverberating through a tourist’s imagination a century later.

  It all seemed as if it had already happened, and for a moment as Captain Cromwell finished up his speech, Faulk thought that maybe they were all in stuck in a loop, and that the events they were about to witness and partake in were going to happen a million more times, and had happened a million times already. He didn’t know what to do. His rifle still had not been discharged, though he had ample occasion to fire it.

  Every time he line up his sights and tried to catch a grasshopper down range, he panicked, and found himself unable to pull the trigger. He made it to the engine room by a sheer stroke of luck, as did the other survivors, but their wounds and the grim determination of their wills to live separated them from him, until he felt so sufficiently alone standing in the mire of soldiers that he told himself that, without a doubt, when the Ascendancy arrived to fight over the escape pod, which Cromwell would not give up, he would leave with them.

  The thrum of the engines roared away in the background, obliging Captain Cromwell to scream at the top of his lungs as he berated a man who quaked with fear. He tried to conceal his fear for as long as he could, his lips trembling and his eyes watering, but as the mad laughter of the Ides continued to roll over the defense force of the Vulcan and the intermingled survivors who made it this far, the man’s calm broke and he heaved out a massive sob that rent the air around them just as severely as the laughing aliens or the engines that slammed away, unmindful of the human drama playing itself out before their hulking frames.

  Captain Cromwell paused in his speech and in his slow ambulation, rounding on his heels and storming in the direction of the man who allowed a cry of fear to escape his lips. “Are you scared, soldier? Are you scared?” His lips contorted into a grimace that made his entire face seem like a caricature of a righteously indignant sheriff from an archaic cowboy movie, and with his face but an inch and a half away from the pointed, trembling nose of the man whom he screamed at, the captain seemed to all in the room like a desperate general, not wanting to face the poi
nt of his own blade when the battle is decided. He shook himself, though with fear or adrenaline, no one could quite guess. Spit flew from his mouth and speckled the blinking face of the man.

  People began to feel sorry, and Caspar saw more than one close their eyes to avoid having to share in the man’s humiliation. He had begun to question when the berating would cease, when they could get back to meditation on their impending deaths, and whether or not he would ever get another chance to check his SatCom—where was Jakob? And the Councilman? These questions burned above all else—and if Kasey would be located by any of the parties searching for her. It hadn’t even occurred to him that the Ides had arrived in search of their nemesis, the mythologized Kasey Lee, floating in the vacuum in cryo-freeze and waiting to be woken up. Maybe this was no accident.

  And then he heard the report of a pistol and the gasp—immediate and muffled—and then the sound of an unsupported bag of meat crumpling to the ground. He turned, still not processing what had happened, and saw the body of the man who had cried splayed on the floor and the woman who stood behind him trying desperately to avoid removing her hand from the butt of her gun to wipe the man’s blood from her forehead. He saw the Captain still standing over the man’s corpse and continuing to scream, making out the violence of his gesticulation before realizing what he said: “We have no room for cowards on this boat, private! You better move your feet if you want to eat! Move it! Now!” and his foot lashed out and struck the nonresponsive back of the private whom he had just killed. Everyone around him broke rank, and the woman who tried to resist the pressing urge to wipe the dead man’s blood away now ran with the rest of the crew.

  This is my chance, he thought. The SatCom. He knew that the ship was laced with an intricate network of pathways and means of transportation, and in his training with the Ascendancy (and with the Terran Council, and of, MarsForm), he had been made to commit the architectural layout of the vessel to memory. It all made perfect sense, when he thought about the eventuality of a civilian being attacked and needing to defend oneself: the main core of the ship, its engines and rudder and control room, and everything else that made it a space craft was interconnected and the residential quarters, the food service areas, they were all almost an entirely separate unit, with an entire separate set of pathways and access points. In reality. The bridge and the engine room comprised something of a castle.

  This is it.

  He slipped away, or at least attempted to, trying not to let people see him bolt for the secret passageways that would be in the engine foreman’s office—a quarter mile? Maybe a half?—any longer than that and he didn’t know if he would make it, if the doors would hold out, but as he tried to slip away from the survivors without being noticed, Kenneth Alexander stepped to the back of Captain Cromwell and leveled his own pistol at the head of the commanding officer. He pulled the trigger, and Cromwell fell with a gurgling sound that cut off his tirade atop the boy he had murdered.

  “This is a fucking mutiny, people, and no one is going anywhere!” Alexander screamed, firing more pistol shots into the air and hearing them ping off the metallic ceiling, invisible through the darkness that pooled above.

  The crowd stopped, with Caspar Faulk hiding in the shadow behind the man’s sphere of influence, beyond his field of vision. He dropped to his knees, thankful he had turned around for one moment to see Kenneth Alexander stepping up behind his Captain with the pistol out, thankful he had been granted the head start, the time to duck away, before the man killed their leader and took his place.

  He closed his eyes and tried to breath as calmly as he could, but the blood, the pattern it made pooling at the feet of those who were forced to stand back in their rank and file lines, sickening shapes and footprints left everywhere as people tracked it about, stuck his brain and had him on the verge of hyperventilation.

  “We need to open the door,” Alexander said, and in that moment, Caspar Faulk knew that the man was no better acclimated to battle than Cromwell had been. “And we need to end it.”

  And I need to get the fuck out of here, he said to himself, snapping out of his bout of hyperventilation as the drive and instinctual knowledge of his survival kicked in. He snuck away, jumping from shadow to shadow until he had the open space to run, as fast and quietly as he could, down the long and maze-like catwalks that stretched over the gigantic chasm that contained the edifice of the generator, the behemoth engine. Its sounds covered his footfalls well, and before long, he ran with no concern for the sound he made, pumping at the air and sending his knees rocketing up and down like the pistons he ran through. But the engines could not obscure the sound of the Ides storming in when the door finally gave—or the survivors opened it, mad with fear?—and the cloud of death rushed in to fill the empty space on the other side.

  He heard shouts and gunfire, but most all, he heard the supernaturally loud cackle of the grasshopper fighting party jumping and crawling on the ceilings and shooting their outdated and archaic weaponry with extreme precision through the heads of those they targeted. He didn’t know how long it would last, but he had no plans on finding out. Redoubling his efforts, he pushed himself to run faster. To break through the cramps that were seizing his sides and the tightness in his thighs that threatened to tear the fibers of his muscle.

  He didn’t care. He thought only of Jakob, and he flew so fast that he thought he might leave the ground entirely. Eventually, he made it to the foreman’s office, and he gained entry to the hidden network of caverns and passages, the secret second ship hidden with the first, that only the initiated knew of. He gained entry into a haven.

  Which way to the bridge? he wondered when he entered the hallway concealed behind a filing cabinet. Left, right or straight up. He grasped the ladder before him and climbed. Straight up it is.

  Chapter 8

  Someone must be alive.

  He knew it. Someone must be alive.

  When he entered the control room, adjacent to the bridge, he found deserted desks and work stations, upturned piles of charts and no signs of life. They must have fled, for no bodies littered the floor and he found no traces of blood on the walls and carpets.

  Where did they go? The navigators. The people who were never to abandon their post regardless of the danger of their position.

  Immediately, he ran to the bank of security monitors that lined the convex wall of the Chief Navigator’s viewing deck, where he could see all manner of the astronomical bodies in three dimensional visual representation. A gigantic planetarium, really. That is what this room is. He had been inside it once before, when he trained, and the scope of the room when it filled up with holographic planets and constellations and stars really stoked his imagination and prepared him for a world of mysticism and adventure that did not actually exist anywhere outside this room for a MarsForm employee.

  Now, with the power out and the room abandoned, he felt as if the entire vaulted space of the room were nothing but a mausoleum for a monarch whom nobody remembered or could think of a fitting epitaph for. It seemed empty and open and vacuous, devoid of imagination rather than inspiring it. He looked around at the dull white walls and the floor of the room that, now, without swirling masses of astral gasses and comets and planets zipping through their orbits and circling the heads of workers below, the room reminded him of no more than the floor of a real estate office, where a thousand—two thousand—people rambled on their various SatComs about why it might be a great idea to get in on the Monoliths before all the space filled up.

  It seemed mundane, though it was truly not.

  The power continued to flicker, and every time it went down, back up generators kicked on. He ran conduits to the bank of monitors, he rearranged the circuitry on the generator switchboards, he did everything he could, but nothing could make the screens turn on. God damn it. Turn the fuck on, he snarled, his nose crinkling up like the snout of a wolf as he fidgeted with the wiring of one monitor, running to the coils of another in the vain hope that with e
nough power linked together from separate monitors, one of them would turn on and show him what was happening on board, where the humans were.

  Where the grasshoppers were.

  And he could reach out to Jakob, too, though using the ship’s lines would blow his cover and he would be revealed as a traitor.

  He feared the worst, and figured it wouldn’t matter.

  But first things first. He had to get this control room running, and he needed to know where the humans were.

  He managed to power up the monitors, and the screens that jumped to life showed him the horror of the Ides fury. Everywhere, on every screen, the tattered remains of human corpses lined the halls, and where the Ides now lingered in lazy, victorious delirium, they feasted on the remains of the fallen or languidly walked around the halls, fighting with each other over the leg or forearm of a crewmember.

  One panel displayed the voracious appetite of the predators clearer than any other: within its frame, Caspar Faulk witnessed the surrounding of a sole survivor—the sign of human life he had been waiting for—by the Ides. She fired off one shot from her shaky, hand-held pistol and the grasshoppers fell on her, engulfing her in a swarm of stunted wings and long, barbed hook hands. He realized, as the woman fell beneath the rising tide of the aliens overtaking her, that the woman was the same one who incessantly yammered on about the holiday season and whether or not she would have time off work. The scream picked up by the security monitor chilled his blood even through the warbled distortion of its failing power source, and he imagined that to be there first hand, to witness that horror in person rather than vicariously through the screen of a security monitor, would drive him to insanity, and he would spend his final minutes raving like a lunatic as the Ides turned from her corpse and rounded on him.