The Lost Starship

-32-

Captain Maddox floated outside the scout, staring in grim anticipation. The plan had sounded saner sitting in the wardroom. Out here, doubts began to assail him.

The entire venture had been a desperate gamble from the beginning. The operation showed the Star Watch’s—humanity’s—weakness against the genetic marvels, the so-called New Men.

He kept wondering what group had fled the Oikumene to travel into the Beyond to create better men and women. If Star Watch knew the answer, it might help unravel the mystery. It might reveal a weakness in the supermen. What had Per Lomax told him? The New Men came as gods in judgment of old-style humanity.

Growing progressively sleepier, Maddox blinked in an effort to remain awake. If the enemy were gods, he had to become a godslayer. This lunatic plan of acting as corpses had to work.

Ever so slowly, Maddox turned his head. The others drifted nearby in their vacc-suits. Dana had explained it. She would override the robo-doctor, injecting them with a hibernating drug, simulating death. Each of them wore a medikit around their waist. When something attempted to peel off his spacesuit, the medikit would inject the wearer with stimulants.

Maddox’s final hibernating injection would come soon. He had taken stage one aboard the Geronimo. Afterward, he had carted the comatose people into the outer bay. Opening the hatch, Maddox let decompression eject the crew in a tumbling mass. With a thruster-pack, he glided into the void after them. He’d gathered the sleeping crew, bringing them to a central area.

Now, Maddox watched Geronimo drifting away. The red giant blazed its fierce starlight, casting the system in a red nimbus.

Under the computer’s guidance, the scout came alive. Its thruster port glowed orange and then red. A moment later, blue exhaust poured out for several seconds. That shoved the Patrol scout toward the ancient vessel.

Maddox watched sleepily, imagining that Geronimo went to investigate the prize. Ah, what was this? His eyes blinked rapidly. Another light flared into existence, one farther away. The dot of light grew, and so did a pinpoint object.

In time, a chill swept through Maddox. He saw it then: the ancient sentinel. It was coming, growing in size.

A hoarse chuckle reverberated inside his helmet. The annihilator came to investigate the foreign objects. What would the alien starship do to the scout and then to them as corpses?

A purple beam slashed through the void. The tip touched Geronimo. In a flash of destruction, the scout exploded as metal rained in all directions. Water, coolants, bedding material, electronics and computer pieces all flashed into the void as tiny hot objects. Like that, their workhorse, their home these past months, was gone.

Did the scout travel far enough away from us? Are we safe from the blast radius?

Maddox tried to turn his head to see what had happened to the others. The muscles in his neck refused his mental commands. The medikit must have already given him the stage two injection. His eyelids were becoming too heavy to keep open.

Time blurred for Maddox even as he fought to remain awake to see what would happen.

Oh! What was this?

Maddox saw a vast shape gliding through the interstellar night. Blue lights dotted the vessel, showing the twin disc areas.

It’s here. The sentinel has come to investigate. Does the starship wonder about our so-called corpses?

The giant warship slowed. A section in one of the large discs slid open. Light poured from it. Then something thin slid out. An alien shuttle—if that’s what it was—began to nose toward them.

Maddox strove to stay awake to see this marvel, but he was losing the fight. What would the alien craft do to them? He almost overrode the medikit to give him the stim now. An instinct warned him that would be a deadly idea.

I’ll trust the geniuses, Professor Ludendorff and Doctor Rich. I hope they guessed right. I’m too young to die. I want to live. I want to defeat the New Men…

Maddox’s eyelids flickered. He felt groggy despite the apprehension weighing on his chest.

Why am I feeling so—?

With a start, he realized he’d heard a scream of pure agony. That’s what had focused his lazy thoughts. It sounded like Doctor Rich.

Maddox strove to open his eyes, to wake up. Another scream put goosebumps on his arms. By a sleepy force of will, he lifted his eyelids as if they were lead shutters. The sight horrified him.

Doctor Rich lay on a lumpy upright pad with tubes stuck in her body. Blood surged through the tubes. He guessed the life essences pumped out of her body.

Maddox made a croaking noise of outrage. The blood pumped into a container that was rapidly filling.

Even as he watched, thin flexible cables attached themselves to Doctor Rich. They jolted her with electricity or something similar. She screamed once more. Blue webs of energy snaked across her body, making her arch upward. A hat of some kind sat on her head. Cables led from it to a pulsating bank on the nearest wall. No, on the wall was a mass of what looked like alien flesh with quivering nodes and more cables or tentacles slowly waving in the air.

With an inarticulate bellow, Maddox strove to move his arms. He could not. A cool portion of his mind forced him to look down. Crisscrossing bands of alien material strapped him in place.

A fierce and feminine roar of determination caused Maddox to look to his left. Meta strained against the bands holding her down. Her muscles were rigid with strain with veins popping up from her skin. Then, one after another, the bands around her body snapped off.

“Free me!” Maddox shouted. “Get me out of here!”

Like a wild beast, Meta leaped to him. By her floating movement, it was clear she was weightless. Meta crashed against his pad, her knees striking his chest, knocking the wind out of him. As he gasped to breathe in the smoky atmosphere, she intertwined her fingers around a thick band across his pectorals. With a heave of strength, she ripped it loose. She did it again and again, tearing off the other bands, freeing him.

As Maddox sucked down air, the most bloodcurdling scream of all erupted from Dana Rich.

In a fluid motion, acting with lethal rage, Maddox drew his gun. He fired bullet after bullet into the pulsating half-alive proto-flesh on the wall, the one in charge of all those tubes. Meta did the same thing. Each shot blasted its noise against his ears. Each slug exploded chunks of flesh from the alien mass. Vile jets of steam hissed from the flesh. The thin cables that had electrified Dana flew off her cot and began to thrash back and forth.

“Keep shooting!” Maddox shouted. He leaped at Doctor Rich, sailing toward her. A tentacle-like cable slashed toward his face. He caught it, and the thing struggled with him.

Audibly panting, Meta reloaded her gun and continued to fire into the main mass. The smell of gunpowder had grown thick in the chamber.

The tentacle in Maddox’s grip flailed with less power than before.

“Empty every bullet you have into it!” Maddox shouted.

“No,” Dana moaned. “Don’t do that. You’ll kill us if you do.”

Maddox’s focus snapped onto the doctor. Her eyes were wide and staring. Drool spilled from her mouth.

“I’m so tired,” Dana said. “It’s taken too much of my blood.”

“Why did it do that?” Maddox asked.

“To feed,” Dana said. “It’s hungry, very hungry.”

A feeling of loathing came over Maddox. With a manic grasp, he tore the cap off the doctor’s head. He ripped tiny leads from it attached to her scalp, and blood drifted in the air. Then he pulled the larger leads off her flesh, freeing her from the proto-flesh. In the zero gravity, he manhandled her away from the torturing pad.

Blood oozed from her many wounds, floating away from her in tiny globules.

“Quick,” Maddox said in a loud voice. “Help me save her.”

Perhaps sensing his intent, Meta holstered her smoking gun. Together with Maddox, they applied bandages to the many wounds. Once the bleeding stopped, Maddox ordered Meta to free the others. They watched with openmouthed horror and drooling sleepiness.

The Rouen Colony woman applied her strength yet again, freeing each of the crew from their restraints.

“The doctor’s too pale,” Valerie said. “We have to use our medikits.”

Maddox nodded for her to proceed. Valerie used a higher function on her kit. She gave the doctor a direct blood transfusion. It turned out Sergeant Riker had the same blood type. So, he also gave Dana a transfusion.

The room stank of alien stenches, gunpowder and blood. More vapors and a dark oozing substance extruded from the fleshy mass on the wall that seemed to operate the torture chamber.

Maddox looked around. He couldn’t spy any hatches out of here.

“What do we do now?” Keith asked as he panted.

“Good question,” Maddox said.

Dana’s eyelids flickered until she finally focused on him. “I know what to do,” she whispered.

“We’re listening,” Maddox said.

“The… the creature communicated with me,” Dana said. “It’s so terribly lonely.”

“You can tell us all about that later,” Maddox said. “For now, I want to know if we’re on the shuttle or in the starship.”

Dana frowned at the question.

Maddox explained to her what he’d seen before passing out.

“Oh, yes, the shuttle,” Dana said. “I see what you mean. We’re on it or in it. The creature is too afraid to move into the sentinel. It’s been waiting for reinforcements.”

“What do you mean?” Keith asked with his eyes wide and wild. “You’re telling us this… creature has waited for reinforcements for six thousand years?”

Dana nodded weakly.

Maddox felt cold inside as ruthlessness and despair battled within him. “Is the alien ship filled with these life forms?” he asked, indicting the quivering flesh.

Dana stared at him. “Do you mean the ship or shuttle?”

“The starship,” Maddox said, “our goal.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Dana said. “This one invaded the sentinel or was part of a combat group. It was or is a medical creature.”

“How do you know any of this?” Maddox asked.

Gingerly, Dana touched the bandages on her scalp. “It communicated directly with my brain. You should have left those in place.”

“It was draining your blood!” Maddox shouted.

Dana shuddered.

“Is that thing—” Maddox jerked his thumb at the mass of alien-flesh beginning to ooze off the wall—“flying the shuttle?”

“I don’t think so,” Dana said. “I have the feeling the sentinel is flying it. The creature merely intercepts those the starship tries to rescue.”

Maddox fought for calm. “How do we get out of this room?”

Dana frowned as she looked around. Finally, she pointed at the barely quivering flesh. “We have to peel that thing off,” she said. “The hatch is behind it.”

“We’d better put our vacc-suits back on,” Sergeant Riker said. The suits lay scattered on the deck. “We don’t know what’s in the rest of the shuttle, if it has more air we can breathe.”

Maddox glanced at his aide. The sergeant looked shaken, and the man gripped his arm where the medikit had drawn blood.

“Good idea,” Maddox told him. “Let’s suit up, people. We’re alive, and it appears we might have the freedom of the shuttle. Now is the time to make the most of it.”

Peeling away the shuddering warm flesh might have been too difficult without their suits on. The hatch was smaller than those on the scout, but it was large enough for them to squeeze through.

What looked like crusted slime coated the deck plates. It crackled as their boots crunched over it.

“We can call them the slime aliens,” Keith said over his short-speaker.

“Are there more of them aboard the shuttle?” Meta asked Dana.

The doctor shook her helmet. She wheezed over the headphones. Meta and Valerie helped her along the short corridor.

“No,” Dana whispered. “Use the other hatch.”

Maddox released his grip on the one and forced the other. It opened into a narrow control room with a triangular window in front. He and the others piled into the chamber. What might have been tentacle slot buttons on a panel glowed with various colors.

Maddox glanced back at Dana.

Meta helped the doctor forward. Dana examined the lights on the panel. “I don’t know, maybe.”

“Maybe what?” asked Keith.

No one answered him. Everyone was too busy staring through the triangular window, watching the growing starship.

“It looks as if we headed for that bay,” Valerie said, pointing at the bigger vessel.

Silently, Maddox agreed with her. First the medical flesh creature and now the narrow control slots on the panel—he was glad humanity hadn’t encountered alien life before this. The New Men were different enough. What would communication be like with a sentient squid alien?

“Are there more of the wall creatures on the starship?” Keith asked.

“I don’t think you understand,” Dana told him. “The creature had a single function as a medical machine.”

“It wasn’t truly alive then?” Maddox said.

“Oh, it was,” Dana said, “which is interesting.”

“No,” Valerie said. “It’s disgusting.”

“You only say that because it’s different,” Dana told her.

“Exactly,” Valerie agreed, “too different. The thing was eating you alive.”

“It didn’t want to,” Dana said. “It hungered, yet it tried to communicate with me. It taught me whatever I asked it.”

“How could you ask if it was an alien?” Maddox said.

“That certainly compounded the problem,” Dana said. “Direct thoughts helped.” She grew quiet. “The loneliness of the creature staggered me. I felt sorry for it. Over the centuries, the creature has fed off the others like it to sustain itself.”

“Disgusting,” Valerie repeated.

Dana turned on her. “You’re a Star Watch officer. You’re trained to explore the universe and understand things that are different.”

“Sorry,” Valerie said, who didn’t sound apologetic at all. “Blood-sucking alien vampires don’t count.”

“You must look past your primitive emotional responses,” Dana said. “It was alive. It thought, and it had survived the ages until now.”

“You have a point, Doctor,” Maddox said. “I’m hoping your brief time linked with it has given you enough information for us to take over the sentinel.”

“I’m afraid I have bad news for you,” Dana said. “I’m just remembering now what the medical creature told me. The starship has defenders. That’s why the creature has stayed in the shuttle, searching for fighters of its kind to overpower the defenders and take over the vessel. Then it can return to its homeworld.”

“Where is that?” Maddox asked.

“It doesn’t know,” Dana said. “It was a simple medical creature. I think over the centuries—due to need—it started thinking. That’s what slowed its reactions against you. In the old days, it would have subdued you after the first shot. While you were busy firing, I communicated with it, pleading for your lives. It listened long enough for you to kill it, and for that I will always feel badly.”

Like the others, Dana had watched the approaching starship even as she spoke. Now she turned around to face Maddox. “You may have killed the only true alien mankind will ever find. That should give you pause for reflection.”

Maddox grunted. He didn’t care one bit about medical creatures from six thousand years ago. He wanted this starship, and he needed it now.

“Let’s get ready,” Maddox said.

“We’re going to attack the alien defenders head-on?” Sergeant Riker asked him.

“I don’t see what else we can do,” Maddox said. “We didn’t come all this way to wait in the shuttle. After we dock, we’re going to storm the sentinel.”