Alien Evolution Read online

  “Shall we go make some friends?”

  It looked like a human station outside. Apart from the lichen.

  The crew of the Mercury Blade stepped down to the landing gantry to find themselves in a fairly typical loading bay, with spaces for at least another four ships of a similar size, but the Mercury was the only one in attendance. The gantries fed back to a balcony at the rear of the rounded, metal room, where a large blast door stood firmly closed. There were no lights other than the dim glow of their suits, and the only sound that filtered through their assorted helmets, earpieces, and targeting visors was the distant hissing and clanging of a space station on its last legs.

  “Irie? Can you get this place up and running?” Eliard called as Val took the lead ahead of them, padding down the landing gantry to the balcony.

  “Got it, Captain.” Eliard watched as she shadowed the gunner, pulling out some sort of mobile computer board and decoupling wires as she moved to a panel with silent lights. “I’ll be able to patch in through here…” she said, working to unscrew the panel from its hinges to reveal a mess of rubber tubing and wires.

  “What do you think this stuff is?” Cassandra had started to follow the other pair and paused by one of the railings to the balcony, leaning over the blue-green lichen that clustered there. Eliard joined her. It was frilled, almost furred, with smaller singular ‘stamens’ standing up from its body.

  “I would have said space-rust, but…” Eliard frowned as he looked at it.

  “It’s everywhere,” Cassandra pointed out. “Look…” She pointed at where the edges of the ‘frilled’ lichen broke out of blue-black ‘plates’ or scales of a material that could have been metal, could have been organic, but flaked off easily under a gloved finger, to fall to the grillwork floors like bark shavings. These plates stretched along vast swathes of the surface, obscuring whatever signs, lights, or stencils had once been etched onto the walls.

  “I don’t like it. Could be anything,” Eliard muttered, stepping back to join the others in front of the door.

  “Almost got it…” Irie said.

  “I’ll open it,” Val leveled the Judge at it.

  “No, wait, you big thug!” Irie snapped at him, pressing the last few controls on her forearm keypad before there was a dull chime and a hiss of steam from somewhere near the floor, and the port doors started to open.

  “Ready—” Eliard hissed as Val aimed and took a defensive crouch.

  Whamp-whamp-whamp! There was a series of loud bangs as, one by one, a set of overhead lights in the hallway beyond burst into life, revealing a large octagonal hallway with a grillwork floor—

  Before the lights instantly started flickering and flushing an emergency orange. And in that orange light, something raised its head…

  “Sckrowl!”

  Something moved from the floor where it had lain. Small, or hunched over, Eliard saw a moment of pale bluish-white skin—oddly shiny, like it was or diseased—and a flash of white.

  “Crap!” Irie jumped in shock, but the thing was fast. Val was pulling up his meson cannon to try and target it, but it had already leapt to the wall, and then to the opposing wall nearer to them, and then to the edge of the door…

  “What is that thing?!” Eliard had a moment to shout as it clutched the side of the bulkhead door, leaning into their landing bay and screeching at them. For one, awful nightmarish split-second, the captain saw it in crystal-clear clarity, and he knew that the thing was unlike anything that he had ever seen in his life.

  It was hairless, and vaguely rat-like in the way its snout extended from a neckless head. It had small black orbs for eyes underneath ridges of bone, and it clutched at the wall with segmented arms with blackened claws. It was much larger than Eliard had initially thought. It was probably almost as big as Irie, at around five foot, but its oddly pale and bulbous back was hunched so far over itself that it looked much smaller.

  And then, as the crew of the Mercury Blade stood and stared, stunned for the briefest moment, the hairless, humanoid rat-thing did something truly terrifying. It lifted itself up from the sides of the door, holding on with back legs or tail or whatever else it had, flinging its head up as though praising their arrival.

  But it wasn’t happy to see them. The middle of the creature, from jawline to chest, opened to reveal a sudden explosion of tentacles, each one cruelly barbed as they snapped out in the air toward them.

  “Sweet mother of—” Cassandra ducked, and Irie was rolling out of the way, but the Duergar were a strong lot. They had been raised up by the ancient Valyien specifically for their aggressiveness, their strength and stamina, and their ability to withstand great amounts of damage.

  “Get some!” he roared, lifting his meson rifle and pulling the trigger.

  The thing’s chittering disappeared in the deafening boom of the Judge, as a ball of white and purple energy shot out of the gunner’s prime weapon and exploded against the edge of the door. Purple plasma-flame washed away down the walls, and the bulkhead door itself was smoking and buckled where the shot had hit…but of the strange creature, there was no sign at all.

  No sign apart from what Cassandra was pointing at, disgustedly, as she rolled across the doorway with her own rifle to cover Val from the opposite direction. There was a greasy, wet-looking stain on the floor, and in the middle of that was a glob of viscera, ending in the remains of three curled-over claws.

  “Please tell me that’s all that remains of that thing,” Cassandra said, kneeling closer as Val swung the meson cannon back and forth over the corridor. Nothing else moved in the flickering light.

  “I doubt it,” Eliard muttered, blaster in his hand as he joined them. “There would be a lot more mess, right, Val?”

  “S’right.” The Duergar didn’t even appear fazed at having shot something that was unknown to Imperial science.

  “It looks almost mammalian…” Cassandra prodded the gobbet of claws with her rifle. It twitched spasmodically, making her cringe. “Have you ever seen photos of those old Earth creatures? Armadillos? Or echidnas?” she asked as she looked at it. Eliard nodded, as he seemed to dimly remember some holographic educational video from many decades ago.

  “This reminds me of them, almost. Look, it was clearly a mammal, but it had a kind of network of scales too.” Her voice was somewhere between horror and wonder.

  “Blue scales, too…” Eliard noted, as they had the definite sheen of blue-black to them, growing smaller and smaller as they erupted into the hardened black claws. That reminded him of something. Where had he seen blue-black scales like that just recently? Not scales, flakes, he thought, his eyes swinging back to the railing where the furred lichen could still be seen, and its host or symbiotic scale-algae.

  Irie had picked herself up and followed his gaze. “No way. Plant and animal hybrid? That would be insane.”

  “Actually,” Cassandra whispered, “not as insane as you might think. Lichens and fungus and algae are only partially classified as a plant. Some scientists are still arguing that they’re more like bacteria, which I guess you could say is a kind of animal.”

  “But you’re talking full-on genetic morphing!” Irie shook her head. “The fact that that thing—whatever it was—has blue scales doesn’t mean that it’s somehow growing out of that damned rust!” Eliard realized that his mechanic and engineer seemed deeply shaken by this suggestion. Was it because this was a mutant, messy biology that had nothing to do with the careful and exact functions of physics and engineering?

  “You’re right.” The captain shook his head. “Anyway. Maybe the rust was growing on it or something. Or it’s a type of camouflage for the creature…”

  “Enough talk!” Val grunted above them.

  “He’s right.” The captain picked himself up. “We’re not here for a class project, but to find the most dangerous weapon that the Imperial Coalition has ever seen.”

  “But what is that thing? What was it!?” Cassandra was still asking, even as the capta
in ordered his crew to get moving down the flickering, blue-scaled corridor.

  “Readings?” Eliard called, and it was Cassandra who read off her wrist computer.

  “We’ve got residual power. No life form readings, which is odd, considering…” She didn’t finish her statement after a dark look from Irie, but it was clear to everyone what she meant. Walking down the length of the corridor, they had seen more evidence of the strange rat-tentacle creatures, from scratches in the corners of the bulkheads to bits of metal grillwork that had been ripped apart, exposing ceramic and rubber pipes beneath.

  Wherever they came from, there were more of those things. Eliard scowled. And they had been big. “Irie? I’m going to need schematics for this place. What can you do?”

  “Find me a console and I can try to patch into the station’s computer. There’s no telling if the hard drive is corrupted or not, though,” Irie said. “Until then, I can help you out with these…” The captain watched as she riffled in her utility belt pouches until she had produced a collection of small disks, which she proceeded to click together and connect wires, before the thing hummed into the air, flashing a dull blue-white light every few moments. “Portable sonar drone,” she said proudly, using her own wrist computer to direct the thing’s tiny rotors to speed down the corridor ahead of them. “I’ll patch the signal to your suits, so wait for one…two…three!”

  Incoming Connection: Eye-in-the-Sky1.

  Eliard saw a faint blue light wash across his visor, displaying a faint trace-line schematic of the corridor that the drone had sped down, and the humped shape of the crew behind it. The sonar-drone continued, revealing that this corridor curved around in a large arc, flashing past two bulkhead doors on either end, before stopping at a further closed wall of metal.

  “Okay, keep the Eye up for now.” Eliard indicated the doors to the right and left at the end of the corridor first of all. “Will this thing pick up those rats?” Eliard asked. “Cassandra’s sensors didn’t…”

  “Just so long as the thing has got a body, then all the Eye does is ping off of it.” Irie said, clearly rattled at the strangeness of those creatures that defied her scientific worldview.

  “And if it’s got a body, I can shoot it.” Val grinned as he sighted down his heavy rifle.

  What more could you ask for? the captain thought.

  4

  Full Action Deployment

  The corridor was a tube of metal, with two bulkhead doors standing on the right and left sides of the passageway, before a much larger octagonal door where the corridor ended. Irie’s Eye-in-the-Sky drone hung in the air, pulsing its dim light sporadically, unable to go forward.

  “Irie?” Eliard whispered, taking up a position by the door on the right side of the corridor. Like the larger one, this was also octagonal. The blue-scale lichen had almost completely covered it, obscuring whatever words or panels had displayed what it was originally used for. The captain watched as his mechanic started attacking the panels on the side of the door with her toolset, while Val stood beside him with the Judge levelled, and Cassandra kept watch at their backs.

  “Eyes peeled, everyone,” Eliard breathed.

  “Shoot first, ask questions later.” The behemoth-sized Duergar grinned, setting his blunt head to the sights of the massive gun.

  “Okay, security override. Mechanical switches…” Irie’s litany of updates were incomprehensible to the rest of them, but they knew what her pleased sigh meant as she hit the last few buttons on her wired-in wrist computer and stepped back.

  Tsss! With a hiss, the octagonal doors petalled open, revealing—

  “Garbage,” Val grunted, taking his eyes from the Judge’s sights for a moment.

  It was true, though, the captain had to agree. What he could see looked to be some sort of guard’s mess hall or locker room. Metal cabinets sat along two walls, looking mostly empty or with bits of equipment hanging loose and disheveled over the floor and tables. Metal stools had been thrown aside, and, rather disturbingly, there was still someone’s metal-tin ration packs, opened and half-eaten, on one of the tables beside a plastic spork.

  “Ugh.” Eliard shuddered. “I know that smell anywhere. Reprocessed, textured ham mash. They used it in ration packs at Trevalyn Academy when they wanted to ‘give us a feel for what it’s like in the real world’.”

  “When you weren’t dining on all that caviar and Venusian asparagus?” Irie scowled. Everyone knew that Trevalyn Academy for house nobles trained captains and officers, not grunts.

  “Ha-ha. We worked. Just not very often.” Eliard slid to the edge of the open door, checking across his line of fire as Val checked the other direction. Nothing and no one was here.

  “They left in a hurry,” Eliard said quietly, looking around the abandoned equipment. “Look, we’ve got regular civilian clothes up here, a few utility belts and tool sets.” Irie pricked her ears up at that, decoupling her wrist from the door to riffle for anything useful. There wasn’t a lot.

  “What’s missing?” Cassandra called over her shoulder from where she still stood watching the corridor outside.

  “Huh?” Eliard asked. “Well, the guards, obviously.”

  An exaggerated sigh. “No, I mean what’s missing from the scene. Analysis is what House Archival does, remember?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Eliard nodded for the Duergar to take over on guard duty so Cassandra could move into the room. He watched her as she seemed to compose herself, standing perfectly still at the doorway, before taking a step in and opening her eyes.

  “Civilian clothes.” She nodded at the spilled cabinet-booths. “But there’s plenty of space for secure suits in there and boots and what have you, right?”

  Eliard and Irie nodded.

  “So the guards here were on duty. They were also human-normal from the dimensions, and they were either wearing their uniforms or had just put them on…” She paused, counting the cabinets. “And it was an emergency that they didn’t see coming. No advance warning, and it was devastating.”

  “How do you know all of that?” Irie asked incredulously.

  “There’s about forty different cabinets here, and not one of them has any professional suits or gear in there. That means that every one of those forty people were on duty, or were more likely called on duty at short notice…” She nodded to the unfinished reconstituted ham mess tin. “How many guards does it take to patrol this place? To man the satellite receivers? This station isn’t that big, I’d reckon fifteen would probably do it. Let’s be generous and say twenty. That means that twenty human guards were currently on their routine guard duty, and then suddenly the other twenty were called up. Double the amount. Everyone on board.”

  “Full Action Deployment.” Eliard nodded, remembering a glimmer of his training at the academy. “They don’t send that call out very often, only when the crapola really hits the fan.”

  “So…” Cassandra nodded to herself, for all the world like an Imperial Investigator researching a crime scene. “Every Armcore guard is deployed, no time to take personal effects. Where did they go? That’s the real question…but one we can guess, perhaps.”

  “We can?” Irie staggered.

  “Where are the ships?” Cassandra asked. “There weren’t any in the loading bay, remember? I think that the guards were scrambled to deal with a sudden threat. But it couldn’t be an enemy jumping in—”

  “Because of the null space,” Irie said.

  “Exactly,” Cassandra agreed. “But that still leaves the guards who should have been inside here. The only possible options are: the station was taken over and cleaned out after the invaders left, or…”

  “Abandoned,” Eliard confirmed. “That would explain the sudden disappearance of people. If there was a catastrophic leak of oxygen or something?”

  “But someone restored the life support systems afterward,” Irie pointed out, putting the final set of batteries and charge packs that she had stolen into her utility belt. “Why do I feel that y
ou’re going to ask me to try and pull the station records next?”

  “We need to know what we’re dealing with,” Eliard confirmed as they took one last look around the abandoned guard room. He then led the way to the unopened door on the other side of the corridor. Irie got to work just as she had before, and Eliard and Cassandra took up their defensive postures once more.

  Tssss! The door opened to reveal a low-light, complicated room of glass and metal.

  “Ssss….” And even though the door had ceased moving, the hissing continued.

  “Watch out!” Eliard reacted first, raising his blaster to shoot a dead-eye shot at the mutant rat-thing as it launched itself through the air, the tentacles under its head splaying wide to reveal, in a split-second, that they surrounded a maw of sharp, serrated teeth.

  Thwap! The captain’s shot passed through the thing’s body, changing its attack in mid-flight to tumble through the air and across the floor. Irie turned to fire a shot from her rifle, but the thing had already scampered into the guard’s room, leaving a trail of purple-blackish blood behind it.

  It had been huge. Bigger than the last one that had attacked them. Almost full human-sized but moving as fast as the rodent it partly resembled.

  “Split!” Eliard shouted, turning to go after the thing, while Casandra turned back to the new room that they had opened, as another of the giant things leapt at her. The agent let out an involuntary shout of alarm, barely managing to get her arm up just in time as the thing latched on, sending her to the floor with its weight and filling her vision with its tentacles.