Hard Drop Read online

  HARD DROP

  Will van der Vaart

  Copyright © 2013 Will van der Vaart

  All rights reserved.

  PROLOGUE: THE SHADOW

  As mining ships went, the Conrad was a mid-sized cruiser. More scrap than metal, as the adage went, they were built to withstand long years of unrelenting abuse far from civilization and its drydocks. It was common to see them floating by, solitary, misshapen, and crumpled from impacts that would have swallowed smaller ships whole, one engine burning dimly into the horizon. As a raw recruit, Tyco Hale had seen the worst of them limping into port at Enceladus, towed on occasion by the massive solar sails that filled the sky for days on their approach. He had seen their ragged crews emerge from their hulls like moles into the sunlight, unwashed and unshaven, flush with credits from their profitable exiles and eager to spend them before scurrying back into the far reaches of the galaxy.

  The Conrad was different. Her disappearance three weeks ago was a matter of public record, and had raised few eyebrows – mining ships failed all the time, and were never heard from again. It was her reappearance that was troubling – and classified. As she hovered unsteadily outside the Admiralty Ship Huxley’s portside docks, Tyco had a good view of the vast scarring on her undercarriage and the long, ugly burn marks on her massive wings. She had put down recently, and not by plan. How she had made liftoff with that damage, or why she was here, now, no one seemed to know. There had been rumors from the start, whispered and uncertain. A smaller ship, the AS Portnow, had discovered her days before, drifting and unresponsive. Vital scans proved ineffective, thwarted by the overwhelming glow of a massive, uncontained reactor leak. The decision had been made to board the Conrad twenty-four hours ago, and the Portnow had sent a regulation boarding party across. Twenty minutes later, the Portnow, too, had gone silent, locked in unresponsive stasis with the much larger Conrad.

  Both ships had been quarantined since, cloaked in secrecy half a lightyear from civilization. There they had stayed, the Admiralty’s plans unclear until the Huxley – and her complement of Marines – had been summoned. Additional light cruisers had accompanied her, taking up observation stations at a distance from all three ships and advancing no farther. The sheer number of vessels present raised sinister questions about the Conrad, and the shipboard rumors went wild. Some said pirates had taken the ships, others that a fast-moving pestilence, contracted on some foreign moon, had run its horrific course. Still others whispered of mysterious, scrambled transmissions from the Portnow, and hinted that a foreign, sinister presence might have entered the vessel. The Admiralty, meanwhile, had said nothing; the marines were given no idea what they were facing, no briefing or intelligence to go off of. By the time they had been called to the airlock, minutes from crossing the narrow divide and boarding the silent ships, everyone had reached their own, grim conclusions. Not that Tyco cared for the rumors: it was the Admiralty’s silence that worried him.

  It had been a long 36 hours since arrival. The crewmen knew the troopers on sight, knew they would be the first to board the ghost ship, and treated them warily as a result, almost as if they, too, were ghosts. It gave everything a macabre air, as if every word, look, breath, or meal could be the last, and now that it was almost time, the wait felt crushing.

  Tyco stared out at the Portnow as the Huxley’s airlock bridge slid across to her, anchoring her lazy spin to a slow, contained roll.

  A comm link crackled up ahead. The entire row of troopers snapped to attention, staring up at the Captain, waiting on his signal.

  There was never a command. Just five fingers raised, then folded, one by one, counting down. Tyco crouched low in the row, ready to swing into action.

  The airlock hissed; the door flashed open, and the team moved in. Tyco swept in behind the veterans, covering their flanks. They moved quickly and quietly into the bridge, the ethereal light from the planet below gleaming dully through its opaque walls. Tyco felt the walkway shift underfoot, heard his breath echoing in his ears, and pushed on towards the Portnow. The team moved in tight formation, kneeling in the middle of the passage as the Captain overrode the Portnow’s airlock.

  It took a long second for Tyco’s visor to adjust to the darkness beyond the airlock door. The Portnow’s narrow hallway came suddenly into sharp relief, and his stomach tensed, the suspicion of combat now almost certain: the answering wall was covered in a long, ugly bloody smear. And not just blood: the Captain stepped forwards, ran his fingers along the wall, and held them up to the team. Small, cream-white fragments stood out against the red stain on his gloves. Bone shards, grisly and unmistakable. They crumbled into dust even as the Captain wiped them from his hands.

  Safeties came off in a flurry. The Captain waved them on, into the ship.

  The unit swung in after him, fanning out in small groups down the hallways. A thin film of frost crystals snaked eerily across the frozen walls. The damp interior had rusted the exposed metal into a dull red-brown punctuated only by blood spatters and long, screaming nail marks for yards at a time. There were no bodies – not in the gangways, not in the kitchen, not in the crew quarters. The ship had been ransacked, flooded with violence - every screen, every mirror, every breakable surface smashed, and gouged, and disfigured in veins of ugly, bloody scars. But nothing, it seemed, had been taken – it was just broken, smashed, and ruined. Whoever was here, whatever they had done, they weren’t pirates or thieves. The veterans were nervous and jumpy, snapping quickly from corner to corner. Quiet, focused, and efficient in their movements, they were taking no chances on the contents of this ship.

  The Portnow was empty. It didn’t take long to search her – she was just a short-run patrol ship, after all– and the team re-formed in silence at the bridge stretching across the void to the Conrad. The fluttering airlock opened at intervals on a long, dark tunnel. Gaping holes in its gleaming fabric twisted slowly with the ship’s motion, revealing by turns the blackness of space and the eerie luminescence of the world below .The whole bridge was near collapse, bloodied and unsteady, coiling ominously and groaning as the ships rocked unsteadily. From the vantage point of the broken airlock, it seemed to Tyco that he was staring down the pathway to hell, with no choice but to enter. He glanced nervously to the veterans by his sides, but they were quiet, staring straight ahead. One by one, they hurled themselves down the filthy bridge, turning midflight so they landed boots-first on the solid-metal hull below.

  The airlock flew open, revealing a yawning, awful darkness. The Captain entered first, quickly sweeping the hallway ahead of him. He nodded at the unit behind him and flashed a thumbs-up.

  “Helmets up.” He called, over the channel “Air’s good.” And disappeared into the dark. One by one, the troopers behind him flipped up their visors, taking a cautious, wary breath before diving in.

  “You see something, you tap in.” The Captain’s voice came evenly, crisply over the comm. “Immediately.”

  A flurry of quick taps answered him. The unit broke into teams and followed. Their flashlights bounced off into the darkness, swinging down long corridors, before disappearing from the sight as if they had never existed. As if the cavernous ship were swallowing them whole.

  Tyco stared at the rusting walls, at the floor. The Conrad could not have been drifting for more than two weeks, probably less than that, but by the looks of it, it had been years. He ran his fingers through the corrosion on the metal, felt the brittle rust break down under his light touch, leaving deep ruts where his fingers had been. He looked down at his feet, dragging them across the walkway, expecting clouds of iron dust to shift underfoot.

  But there was nothing there – no rust, no blood, not even dirt. The floor shone in the dim light, its metal tiles showing a cold, bluish grey, worn smoot
h as if it had been purposefully polished, and recently at that. Tyco knelt down to inspect it, puzzled at its appearance. He put a hand down, feeling the smooth metal under his fingertips, comparing it to the walls above. There was no resistance here, no friction beneath the tips of his gloves.

  But the floor was not completely devoid of rust. Piles of filings had accumulated at the path’s edge, bundling into reddish heaps where the walls met the floor. Almost as if they had been purposefully removed, or swept into the shadows to keep the path clean.

  One thing was clear: something – or someone – had worn the rust away, and they had done it since the Portnow’s arrival.

  A sudden tap on his shoulder startled him, bringing him back to his feet in a hurry. He looked up sheepishly to find the Captain staring down at him.

  “Rookie.” He said, and nodded at the track of polished metal. “Come with me.”

  Tyco nodded, falling in line behind two veterans the Captain had recruited already. They turned off of the main gangways, descending steadily into the belly of the ship. The path of smooth metal led them on, down a short flight of stairs, and for what felt like ages down a dark, empty hallway.

  Finally, it ended outside the heavy metal frame of the cargo bay doors. The controls had long since given out, and the unsteady lights that lit up the huge expanse beyond it did nothing to inspire confidence. Worse still, the ship’s artificial gravity was off, firing in intermittent, stomach-dropping bursts. The Captain planted his feet against the wall, waited until the gravity kicked off, and pushed through the gate in one quick, fluid motion, diving through the opening just as the system jolted back to life, slamming the metal back onto the ground.

  The veterans followed, one after the other, the time between lift and drop shrinking slightly each time. And then Tyco stood alone outside the doors, listening to the grav drive shudder on and off, trying to guess the rhythm of its spasms.

  Planting himself as the Captain had done, he waited for the familiar, shaking rattle that seemed to precede each drop-off, closed his eyes, and drove forwards, as fast as he could.

  The door gave way immediately, swinging open without resistance, and he was through, and clear, speeding above the metal decking through the dark. With the lights off, it was nearly impossible to see, and he squinted into the darkness, trying to make out the outlines of the bay.

  Hands shot out of the darkness towards him, reaching and grabbing at the edges of his uniform with a frantic urgency, closing roughly around his hands and neck.

  And not a second too soon.

  The drive spluttered, coughed – and then roared to life. Tyco felt his stomach lurch, and then, for a terrifying instant, he was falling, falling much farther than the scant centimeters he had thought he was hovering above the solid deck.

  In the sudden, bright light of the cargo bay, he realized his mistake. The door they had entered through had been a side door, its gangway ending abruptly in a short platform and a long ladder, its rungs stretching far down to the lower floor of the cargo bay. In his enthusiasm, he had leapt much higher than he’d meant to, and overshot the safety railing by a good half-meter.

  If not for the veteran’s precautions, he would still be falling, praying for another outage before he hit the ground.

  The two men pulled him roughly back across the rail, waiting until he had found his feet before letting him go abruptly. The younger of the two smirked down at him disdainfully, the cold amusement in his eye letting Tyco know he hadn’t heard the end of this just yet.

  Tyco stood, his cheeks burning, annoyed with himself for his mistake. He would be more careful from here on.

  The Captain had already begun the long, cautious descent down the ladder, with the older veteran following first. Tyco went last, moving hand over hand, holding on tightly with each hand until he had found the next rung with his feet. Gravity or no gravity, he was not taking chances.

  The ladder ended a meter above floor level, not far away from the macabre epicenter of what had clearly been the target area for bodies dumped over the ledge and falling with the aid of gravity. The remnants of blood spatter were visible in all directions, leaving a grisly compass rose of bone and flesh and tooth etched into the cargo bay floor.

  “Captain – “ The younger veteran called nervously.

  “I see it.” He responded, cutting him off as he drifted across the floor.

  The gravity drive fluttered on abruptly, sending the crates still left in the hold crashing dangerously to the ground before shutting down again. Something dropped against Tyco’s shoulder, and he caught it instinctively. It felt solid and oblong, and strangely familiar under his fingers. He turned to look at it, and found he was holding a human tooth. More were all around him, flung far and wide by the repeated impact of flesh against metal, hovering in the air like distended pieces of a grotesque smile. Tyco shuddered and forced himself to turn away.

  “What is this?” The older of the two veterans asked, staring from the fragments to the platform to the dark of the bay beyond. “What the hell happened here?’

  The Captain stared back at him quietly. “If I knew, we wouldn’t be here.”

  “Bridge is locked tight.” Came the update. “We’re going to try to breach it.” The Captain tapped twice in quiet acknowledgement.

  “Shouldn’t we bring them down - ?” The younger soldier asked, glancing up towards the gangway above anxiously.

  “No time.” The Captain answered, grimly. “They’ve seen us.” And in that moment, Tyco felt it – the presence in the bay with them. Eyes watching from the darkness. He glanced back at the Captain as he tapped his rifle. “Shoot to wound.”

  “What - ?” The younger man spat out into the silence.

  “Admiralty needs to know what we’re dealing with here. They want them alive.” Tyco's breath quickened; if the Admiralty didn’t know, who did? The rumors came dizzyingly back into focus, the sideways glances and fearful eyes, dismal in their unspoken suspicions. The carnage on board had done nothing to put them to rest, leaving only the pressing question, where were the bodies?

  The smooth path continued along the floor, leading into the dark. Something groaned up ahead, metal grinding heavily against metal before falling to the floor with a loud clatter. The Captain moved towards it quickly, beckoning for the team to follow. The veterans slowed, knowing they were near their goal, dreading what they were going to find.

  The rust trail ended abruptly, and the troopers found themselves stranded, in the middle of the cargo bay, anchored by their boots and staring at the barely-hovering, thousand-ton containers. The silence was heavy, punctuated only by the intermittent roar of the engines. Beads of sweat trickled down Tyco’s neck, and he was suddenly aware that he was drenched to the skin under his suit.

  The Conrad shifted, tilting back slowly as its engines cut out. Something thudded, hard, against a nearby container. Tyco broke on it immediately, rushing past a half-dozen sealed containers until, in a half-opened crate, he found the source of the noise. He stopped, staring in horror through the partially opened door as its contents swung slowly with the motion of the ship.

  The soldiers rushed past him, prying the container open in a frenzy. Fury trumped dismay as they flung the doors wide and stared at the carnage that greeted them.

  Stacked inside but floating freely, colliding in gruesome slow motion, the crews of the Conrad and Portnow were a horrible sight. Distended, torn flesh, cracked jaws, and gaping eye sockets, their eviscerated bodies now lay tangled, too many and too mangled to tell one from another. A gallery of tortured flesh floated slowly before them, confirming the worst of the troopers’ suspicions and fears.

  The younger soldier gagged, retched, and looked away, putting a hand out against the container to steady himself. He pulled it away, slick with blood, and vomited.

  “What is this?!” The older veteran demanded, turning to face the Captain. “What does something like this?”

  The Captain stared, slowly shaking his hea
d, saying nothing. Tyco looked away, willing himself to look anywhere but at the surreally floating mass of flesh, feeling sick to his stomach.

  Something flashed overhead. Tyco wheeled, quickly and angrily, his rifle at his shoulder in an instant. He squinted through his sight, trying to get a clear look at their enemy, but it had disappeared back into the shadows.

  "Cap -" He said, and then stopped abruptly, as a heavy, loud impact jarred the crate to his left, slamming it against the metal floor. He lifted his eyes and stared up into the brilliant light above him.

  Crouched on top of the crate was a distended, hideous grotesque – a horrifying creature, squatting low on four legs, hissing venomously across the metal deck.

  Even as Tyco swung his rifle, the hiss became a full-blown roar, and the creature leapt, swinging a curved, blood-caked blade down at him.

  Tyco shot instinctively, ignoring the Captain's command and the preferences of the Admiralty with it, emptying his magazine into the leaping horror.

  The bullets slammed home, rocking the creature backwards, slamming it against the crate. Dark blood flew into the thin air, and the creature’s limbs went limp in an instant.

  Tyco racked his rifle immediately, waiting for the second attack. It didn’t come.

  “Sorry, Cap –“ he said at last, eyes scanning the depths of the bay. “I tried –“

  But the Captain had already pushed forwards, pulling the corpse up from the floor and into the light. Its limbs flailed horribly as it came, rolling unnaturally across the floor and bending backwards upon themselves. Tyco watched as the Captain’s face fell, and his jaw set in bitter disappointment.

  “You did well, Rookie.” He said to Tyco, and then turned and thrust the corpse towards the veterans. “You wanted to know who did this.” He said. “Take a look.”

  They stepped forwards, guns ready as if the corpse might come back to life, and took hold of the floating, bloodied lump. They tore away at the layers of bloody rags that covered it, ripping through the bundled clothes and torn Admiralty uniforms of a dozen victims that must have been woefully inadequate protection against the freezing cold of the cargo bay, frenzied in their need to know their enemy.