ALIEN THE COLD FORGE Read online

  WARNING: MANUAL SEPARATION OVERRIDE

  Upon opening it, she finds three banks of backlit buttons. This is one of the six codes every employee of the Cold Forge possesses: docking override, SCIF access, scuttle protocol, Juno reinit, Titus reinit, and kennels severance.

  Since it’s been a while for her, she checks the instructions on the underside of the panel. Type the code. Pop the lever housing. Pull the lever to confirm. Replace the housing. Get clear in one minute.

  In the old firing squad executions on Earth, ten men would line up, and one of them would fire a blank. No one knew who fired the impotent shot. This was supposed to keep the murders from their consciences. In Blue’s eyes, all ten of the trigger-pullers are killers.

  There are no fake bullets in this execution.

  There is no crime, either.

  “I’m at the first lock panel.”

  “Copy,” Lucy responds. Nothing else. No words of encouragement. Blue taps each symbol with a gloved finger, keeping her gestures sure and deliberate. She can’t miss, or she’ll use up one of her three tries. On the fourth miss, she’ll be locked out. She completes the sequence, and the panel flashes in acknowledgement.

  Grasping the massive grip of the lever housing, she pulls. It takes a surprising amount of Marcus’s strength to get it free. A steel cylinder the size of a champagne bottle rises from the heart of the panel, and Blue slides open the latch on the front. The priming lever rests inside, its yellow-and-black striped grip like a venomous snake.

  “Priming the bolts now.”

  “Copy.” Lucy’s going to cry—Blue can hear the sobs in her voice.

  She grasps the lever, but her strength fails her. Every tearful breath Lucy takes weighs down upon her hand, staying it. Anne, beautiful and vibrant, is going to die.

  Blue summons her voice and closes her eyes.

  “Put Commander Cardozo on. I can’t do this if you’re going to cry in my fucking ear.”

  “Bitch,” Lucy whispers.

  A rustling, then Daniel’s voice comes over the line.

  “You okay?”

  “No.” She keeps one hand on the priming lever and the other on her mag hold. “Have you ever lost men under your command?”

  “No,” Daniel says. “Most Marines never see front-line combat. Thing is, when you’ve got everything from knives to nukes, most people don’t want to fight you.”

  “You always look so tough.”

  “My mom was a Gurkha. She killed a lot of Pakistanis before she moved stateside and married my dad. I guess I’m just trying to be like her. Acting like I’ve got a job to do. Why do you always look so tough?”

  “My dad managed a hedge fund before he died.”

  “So a real killer, then,” Daniel replies, chuckling. “Blue, I’m going to help you out here.”

  “How?”

  “Pull the fucking lever now,” he replies, his voice like a slab of granite. “That’s an order.”

  Without another thought, her hand does as it’s told. The lever snaps down under her weight, and when she releases it, it springs back to its initial position. The backlit buttons on the panel pulse blood red. She shuts the housing door and plunges the cylinder back into the panel like an old-timey dynamite detonator.

  “Started the detonation sequence.”

  “Roger that,” Daniel says. “Confirmed on our screens. Two more to go, now get moving.”

  * * *

  Blue has already landed at the next access point when she feels the peppery staccato of a hundred explosive bolts firing in sequence. It rumbles across the decks and up through her magnetic handhold—a silent saw tearing the station apart. She knows the protocol. Inside the kennels, doors will seal and alarms will sound. The sadness of her physical body creeps over the brain-direct interface, and she begins to hear Marcus cry.

  This feels so wrong, but she knows what must be done. Two more lines of bolts, and the kennels can be pushed away with RB-232’s retro thrusters.

  The heat is beginning to register as greater pain, but she ignores it. Blue looks down at the panel, and her hands don’t want to cooperate. It was hard enough to open up the first one, and now she has to do it again. She turns back toward Kaufmann, careful not to look directly at it, its rays hard on her face. She’s going to burn up her research to save these assholes.

  “I’m at the second panel.” Her voice is barely a whisper.

  “Let’s get this done, Blue.” Daniel clears his throat. “You need to be back here.”

  “Okay, yeah. Copy.” She fits her ratchet to the first bolt, and another voice comes over her comm.

  “Blue!” Anne says, alarms blaring in the background. “Is that you out there?”

  She can’t bring herself to pull the trigger on the ratchet.

  “Anne?”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ it’s you,” she says. “I know—look, I know you’re just trying to protect the rest of the SCIF, but we’re still alive in here!”

  “How many of you?” Like it matters. Is there a number that will change her mind?

  There’s a long pause.

  “At least a few of us. We got separated, but listen—” Panic edges into Anne’s voice. “Listen… to me, okay? We can get out. Do you copy that? I know we can get out without them catching us.”

  The image of Anne’s blushing face, sweaty and sated, edges into Blue’s mind without permission. The trigger on the ratchet feels like it’s made of stone.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know yet, but we’ll come up with a plan.” Her voice is a rush. “Just don’t—”

  The comm beeps to indicate a severed connection.

  “Anne?” Blue’s voice shakes uncontrollably. Her fear has overcome Marcus’s body, and she feels her own ailing form, as clear as day. “Anne!”

  She shouts the name over and over again, but it just ricochets in her helmet, unable to penetrate the vastness of space. She screams in impotent rage, but Anne’s voice doesn’t return. Surely the connection wouldn’t have terminated if she was killed. Blue would’ve heard the woman’s grisly end.

  “I had Lucy cut the comms from the kennels,” Daniel says, his voice ice cold. “You still have a job to do, and that wasn’t helping.”

  Blue shakes her head. “Maybe we should hear them out.”

  “If you don’t blow those bolts, everyone on this station is dead. Do I make myself clear? This is a numbers game. Now do your—”

  The comm emits a weird squeal, like a hundred high-pitched chimes being struck in random order. Daniel’s voice transforms to a low moan, then a breathy whistle, unnatural in its swift alterations, then nothing. Blue recognizes what’s happened. It’s the loss of comms due to unreliable connections. In the early days of RB-232, the flares of Kaufmann would play havoc on the radios, knocking out swathes of data during wireless transfer. It was almost impossible to speak from one side of the station to the other.

  But with modulation and a bit of fancy mathematical footwork, they’d fixed it. Blue couldn’t remember the last time someone on the station lost comms.

  “Commander?” she says. “Commander, come in.”

  No response. She keys her suit radio, switching it to an unsecured frequency.

  “RB-232 all channels, this is Blue Marsalis, come in.” She waits ten seconds and tries again. No one responds, maybe because they didn’t hear her—maybe because they can’t.

  Something is wrong.

  She spins her EVA suit to head back to the airlock. They still have some time before they must cut the kennels free. Maybe, while Blue is inside, they can cook up a plan to get Anne out of there.

  What felt like a long journey to the second panel compresses under Blue’s racing mind, and she’s back at the airlock in no time. She keys in her code, and the doors refuse to open. Blue tries the code again, but she notices the pad isn’t even active.

  “What the fuck?” she mumbles. “RB-232 all personnel, what’s going on? Open the SCIF airlock door.”

&nbs
p; Kaufmann seems to grow even hotter upon her back. Her EVA has already lasted too long. She risks frying herself if she stays out much longer. She can’t lose Marcus. Not now. She bangs the airlock, its solid mass quiet against her fist.

  “Open the goddamned door!”

  The SCIF airlock has access control to stop it from being manually cycled. The other airlocks don’t. If Blue’s SCIF access code doesn’t get her into this one, it stands to reason she could maneuver to another one.

  She checks her propellant. She had enough for three stops and a return trip, with room to spare for maneuvering in the middle. She’s made two of the stops, but the trips to and from were the longest legs. If she’s lucky, she’ll have enough to make it to the airlock on the shady side of the SCIF. If not, she’ll have to walk the Turtle along the surface, where the solar reflections will roast her legs.

  Blue backs away from the hull and fires a short set of bursts to get herself moving. The suit will easily reach forty miles an hour, but she’ll need propellant to slow down. She makes a few minor course corrections, then settles in for the drift.

  Getting to the opposite side of the Cold Forge’s cylinder proves more difficult than she anticipated. Instead of throttling up to speed and waiting for her journey to complete, she has to make six to eight short leaps, each correction draining more of her valuable propellant. Finally, the shadowed side of the station looms in her view, black beside the golden light of the star. A lamp illuminates the entrance of the distant airlock, and Blue nearly sobs with relief. A warning sounds in her ear as she course corrects. She gets a tiny bit of forward momentum, but the nozzles sputter helplessly as the tanks run dry.

  “No. Not now.”

  She clicks the sticks again and reboots the Turtle.

  “Come on, you piece of shit.”

  The tanks give her a tiny burst, but not enough. She can’t even be certain if she’ll hit the station if she waits it out.

  “Fuck!”

  She can’t call for rescue. There’s no backup for her—no one answering anywhere. She can’t imagine the reason, and that frightens her so much more. All she has is a dead radio, a dying suit, and the stupid, heavy Turtle shell on her back. Too much of it is taken up by reflective shielding, not enough by fuel, which gives it the worst ratio of any EVA suit she’s ever touched.

  Maybe I can use that.

  The Turtle is heavy—far heavier than her body, and it’s moving in the right general direction. Even though there’s no resistance to stop it, Blue could shove off of it in the direction of the station. It would be pushed away, but inertia dictates that she’ll go further because of her lighter mass.

  Or, it might spin, and she’d miss entirely, sending Marcus’s body into a slowly decaying orbit around a star.

  Blue unclips from her five-point harness, careful that her motion doesn’t cause much reorientation. She needs the back padding to be a flat surface, perpendicular to the station hull. Then, she can leap outward and try to catch the station. Hanging onto the safety harness, she plants her feet against the flat cushions of the Turtle, then twists to look up at the Cold Forge. The hulk looms before her, cutting night out of the day with its silhouette.

  Fixing her eyes on the airlock door, she leaps—

  —and strikes the control stick with her foot.

  The last bit of propellant charge erupts from the nozzles, and the pack hooks onto her ankle before coming free. She launches, but spins out of control. The station tumbles in her view, and her breath comes in gasps. She has no way of knowing if she’s off-course or not. Her tool belt tugs at her waist, and she draws it in closer, which only accelerates her spin, like an ice skater leaping into a triple axel.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she mutters, trying to remember how to stop a bad maneuver in zero g. Unbuckling the tool belt she holds it in one hand, splaying her arms and legs as far as they’ll go. The stars around her slow down as the tools sling far out from the axis of her spin. The station stops whipping through her view, and she can actually gauge her approach. She’s going to hit low, but she’ll make it.

  Her back connects with metal and her arms go wide. She tries to kick it with one of her mag boots, praying the sole will attach. Her body hit the station all wrong, and she bounces off toward the great darkness beyond. In desperation, she swings the heavy tool belt toward the hull, which spins her along a different axis. To her surprise, the belt hooks into something, and she jerks to a halt, her legs dangling above the stars.

  Taking a deep breath, she looks down, the dizzying vertigo of space stretching on forever. Gingerly, she reaches up to get a better grip, but her arm is just a little too short. If the tool belt loses its purchase, she’ll never make up the six inches that lie between her and the hull. Gently, she pulls herself closer and wraps her fingers around the lowest safety handhold. With halting motions, she clambers up the shadowy hull toward the airlock.

  When she presses the manual cycle and the door opens wide for her, she wants nothing more dearly than to pop a bottle of champagne. She imagines the cold bubbles on her lips, and pressing a sweating flute to her sun-chapped face. But if she did that, she’d have to drain Marcus’s digestive system. He’s a cheaper model, with a lactic-resistant interior and no real digestion to speak of.

  Then it hits her. What a fool she’s been.

  She never should’ve used the chimps.

  Blue had the perfect praepotens sample catcher all along.

  As the airlock pressurizes, outside sounds bleed into her suit: alarm bells, muddled warnings, and something that sounds like a sputtering engine, though it’s too regular. Her ears take the last sound apart, piece by piece until she finally remembers where she’s heard it before.

  It’s pulse rifle fire, and it’s coming from the central strut.

  INTERLUDE

  DICK

  He awakens to splitting pain in his head.

  He’s… kneeling? That’s not quite right. There’s something supporting his back, or pressed against it. His shoulders burn. His thighs ache.

  Dick tries to open his eyes, only to find that one of them won’t open, and the pain is so great that he aborts the attempt. Every time he tries to move his right eye, it’s like someone sticks a hot needle into his brain and twists it around. There’s a steady drip down his face of something warm, blood, and something cold—he can’t quite place his finger on it.

  He’s missing time. He tries to capture the last moment he remembers, but it’s like grasping at smoke. He recalls finding Kambili.

  Kambili told them about Blue’s server. Then he sat down with… no… they found the server and he was with Dorian Sudler. Dick was feeding the creatures. There was someone skulking around near the cells. Dick can’t pull their face from the ether.

  He must have a concussion. He could’ve fallen, or maybe someone hit him.

  Dick tries to move his fingers—maybe he can see what the bloody hell is wrong with his face—but his arms are bound up tight by what feels like coils of steel. His hands throb, almost numb, and he wonders if they’re broken. Panic sets in, and he kicks his legs out, trying to stand up. Something shoves him from behind, and a hard steel edge digs into his gut.

  He forces open his left eye to find himself pressed over the top of a crate like an arrested man, hands restrained behind his back. He struggles again, and this time his restraints twist, wrenching his shoulders out of joint. Dick screams as loudly as he ever has, though his voice is broken and throat ravaged.

  A low hiss drips into his ear, breath hot and rancid, and he freezes, instantly aware of the source.

  Blistering pain burns the clouds from Dick’s mind, and he forces his left eye open again. He should be dead. He’s going to die. For some reason, the creature hasn’t killed him yet. As far as he knows, it’s only fucked up both his arms, concussed him, mangled his face. He’ll never be able to run from it. He tilts his head to get a better look around, and the blinding pain in his right eye is followed by a stringy tug.

>   When he was a little boy, he remembers reaching into a mailbox, and finding a redback spider on his hand. A lesser boy would’ve slapped at it and been rewarded with a potentially fatal bite. He’d placed his hand back on the blistering-hot metal mailbox and waited patiently for the spider to leave. When it was off of him, he’d crushed it with a shoe.

  He needs to find that patience now.

  Blurry words swim into focus on the crate below him.

  —NGEROUS SPEC—

  He knows the rest of it from heart. “Dangerous specimen. Do not open without prior authorization.” It’s an egg crate. The big fucker wants to impregnate him. Why does it know what an egg crate looks like? He thinks of all the times they hefted one of these past the cells on a power loader. The beasties are always paying attention.

  Dick almost laughs when his good eye swivels to the crate’s failsafe to find it still blinking active red. It can’t be opened outside of the impregnation lab—not without triggering the countermeasures inside.

  The snatcher wedges the spade of its chitinous tail into the space between the lid and the lock. Dick’s good eye bulges. If it prizes the lock, he’s going to get a face full of lye and thermite. The creature crows in frustration as the lock fails to move, and Dick expects a killing blow to fall.

  Instead, two sharp tail strikes come down on the hinges, like the blows of an axe, weakening the container. Then again and again the strikes fall, their echoes banging out into the kennels, until the hinges lay twisted and warped from the hits. The long spine wedges back into place and pries the lid, and Dick feels the metal start to fail.

  As it cracks, he shoves back hard against the creature, its bony ribs digging into his back. Dick’s whole body seizes with pain, but this is his only chance for escape. If he can just knock the beast loose, he might crawl away in the confusion.

  There’s a flash as the thermite lights inside the crate, filling the air with acrid, flickering orange smoke. One whiff of the flames and acid, and he can no longer smell anything but agony. Blistering heat washes over Dick’s exposed face, chapping his skin, and still he pushes back. The blast of lye is coming soon, powerful enough to dissolve his flesh.