Dark Dragons (60 page)

Carruthers turned to the HLJ driver.  “Sergeant Taylor,
you and your squad will remain here with the nuke.  If the rest of us, for
whatever reason, are compromised, declare penance to the Lord Our God and
engage the bomb’s trigger.”

“Yes, sir,” Taylor snapped without hesitation.

Darren looked down and pretended to tune his pulse rifle so
that Carruthers couldn’t see him roll his eyes in disgust.

“Darren, what are your plans post-extraction?” Carruthers
asked.

“Depends on what condition she’s in when we find her.”

“‘If’ you find her.”

“‘When’ we find her,” he replied with a grin, not wanting to
compromise the rapport already established.

Carruthers nodded.  “Alright troops, let’s go.”

Everyone save for the four-man engineer squad stepped
through the dim entryway onto the platform.  Brutus performed some
wireless cyberwarfare magic, and the lift was off, a soft hum pulsating under
the floor.  Everyone had their faces craned upward into the descending
darkness and the unknown shrouded by it.  Less than a minute later when
the lift began to slow, rifle muzzles rose.

“Frosty around the edges, boys,” Carruthers whispered over
the comm.

They came to a nearly dark machine room, perhaps twenty feet
wide.  Darren tagged a single Vorvon with one of his scouts standing at a
computer station on the far side of the room.  The alien did not have
armor but wore a thick red jumpsuit and bulky gloves which manipulated a
glowing sphere on the computer console with tiny streamers of electricity.

Darren faced Middleton, slid his vibro-knife out, and
mouthed the words,
He’s mine.
  He paid no attention to the
captain’s sudden look of apprehension as he vaulted off the lift and began his
stalk.  Knees bent, head low, eyes up and forward, Darren stealthily
closed the distance to his prey, weaving around humming machines and computer
consoles, ducking under low electrical conduits.

Darren offered the alien a silent promise that it would not
feel a thing when, at the end of his stalk, he sunk his humming blade into the
base of its skull.  He remembered to flick his wrist up and destroy the
tiny, neuronal lobe producing telepathy, negating its silent alarm, and then
twisted down, severing brain from spine.  The creature was already dead
before it slowly went limp and fell to the floor.

Darren gave his vibro-knife a snap in the air, slinging the
alien blood from its body before returning it to the scabbard slot under his
left arm.  He turned to see Vega Platoon pouring into the room and making
its way to the single portal and the corridor beyond.

Middleton stood over the dead Vorvon looking like a proud
papa.

“You still trust me?” Darren asked.

“Always.”

Carruthers walked up, looked down at the body, nodded once
with an impassive look and strolled off to join his men.

“That means he approves,” Middleton said.

*

Brutus took point, followed by Darren and Jorge.  As
soon as he entered the corridor leading out of the machine room, his enhanced
senses detected something . . . odd.  He couldn’t place it.  The air
felt heavy, constricting somehow.  Cold and humid.  The corridor
looked even more organic and ribbed than the others they had traversed, and the
walls looked slimy but dry to the touch.  It felt and looked like they
were walking inside a living thing.  Darren also noticed a slight pressure
on his temples.

He checked data from his suit’s foreign contaminant detector,
but the device detected nothing but clean breathable air and clean water vapor.

“Is anyone feeling a bit buggered, or is it just me?”
Middleton asked.

Everyone either nodded or voiced affirmatives.

“Tony, Nate,” Darren said.  “Get up here with me. 
We’re all taking point.”

“Roger that.”

Darren increased his pace, not waiting for his buddies,
stabbing the darkness ahead with his helmet lamp.  According to the
schematic map, they had maybe another ten minute walk until they reached the
bottom of the processing lab.  Or whatever it could be.  The map was
not very specific about surrounding structures and corridors either, even
though the rest of the ship was rather detailed in the imagery.  In fact,
the Vorvons did not appear to give much attention to this particular area of
their ship when they made their computer maps, either by intentional oversight
or, perhaps more ominously, outright forbiddance.

In the distance, a sound rose listlessly from the
darkness——a low throaty groan with weight, but it did not sound organic. 
It exhibited a machine-like echo as it wound down until there was silence once
again.

It brought goose pimples to Darren’s skin, making him
stop.  “What . . . was . . . that?”

The sound came again, this time with more volume.  A
reverberation pulsed through the air around them.  At the top of Darren’s
head, he could hear a hiss like an untuned AM radio.  Tony, Jorge and Nate
had anxious looks that betrayed similar perceptions.  The sound drew out a
little longer than before until it slowly spiraled away.

“Is that some kind of alarm?” Tony whispered.

A shadow suddenly leapt out of the wall toward him, and
Darren jerked his pulse rifle and fired.  Tony and Nate opened up, too,
blindly sweeping the area in front of them.  A second later, their rifles
went silent, the soft whine of their batteries recovering the only sound left.

“Did you see that!” Darren screamed.

“See what?” Nate shouted back.

“That shadow!”

“I didn’t see a shadow!”

“Then why did you fire?”

“Because you did, you jumpy asshole!”

Darren turned to face the darkness ahead.  “Recon
scouts!” he ordered.

The four of them let go four flying cameras, and the tiny
machines darted ahead.  With the green infrared screen, Darren watched the
RCS’s come to a fork in the sinuous corridor and split up.  Further away,
more corridors branched off from the last.

“Catacombs,” Tony said.

The recon images from the cameras began to sputter with
static as the signal strength diminished.  This confused Darren——
no
ECM jamming could interrupt their sub-space signals.  They were literally
jam-proof.  The weakening images on their visors, however, dispelled that.

“There’s a little girl!” Nate shouted.  He vaulted
forward with an almost mindless scramble, and everyone broke into a dead run
after him.

“Nate, hold up!” Darren said, his heart pumping.
 “Goddamn it, don’t go so far!”

“I saw a little girl!” Nate shouted over the comm which was
beginning to break up as well.  “She was naked, standing . . . the middle
of . . . corridor.”

“Nate!”

He had nearly run himself out of Darren’s helmet light
before Nate suddenly stopped, his arms flailing to hold up his balance.

“She’s not here!” he said.

Darren barely heard Nate’s muffled voice through his helmet
because their comms were dead.  Darren opened his visor, and everyone else
coming to a halt around him did the same when they realized that electronic
communication had been compromised.

“She was right here, I swear to god,” Nate continued, out of
breath, spinning around.  “She was naked and grubby looking, hair all mussed
up.  Her eyes. . . .”  He stared hard at the floor.  “Her eyes
were black as coal.  And she had a birth mark on her neck or
something.  I can still see every damn detail.”  Nate turned away,
his agitation lessening as he continued to calm himself.

“Was the birth mark on the left side of her neck?” someone
asked.  A SAWDOG moved forward from the back of the pack.  “Blond
hair?  High cheekbones?”

Nate nodded his head quickly, looking anticipatory, hoping
someone didn’t think him crazy.  “Yeah, you saw her, too?”

“No, but I think you just saw my daughter.”

No one stirred for a while.  Darren’s eyes roamed from
one bewildered face to another.  A few moments passed before Nate spoke.

“Is she dead?”

The man gripped his weapon tighter, teeth showing between his
lips.  “No!” he shouted.  “Why would you ask me something like that?”

“Because she looked . . . like a ghost . . . her eyes were
black and all messed up.”

The man suddenly looked despondent, and his suit began to
heave in and out as he took in big gulps of air.  “My daughter is alive
and with my wife and son at my parent’s.”  His eyes got wet.

“Can anyone hear that hissing sound?  In your
heads?”  Darren waited for a few people to nod affirmative.  “She
wasn’t real, Nate.  Something is messing with our heads, tossing images
around in each other’s minds.  That shadow I saw wasn’t real either. 
Your daughter
is
alive and well, mister, so just shake that shit off.”

That mystery sound bellowed once more, echoing throughout
the dank empty spaces of the catacombs.  This time there were other sounds
attached underneath its wavering base register——screams.  Hollow,
scattered screams.

“Jeee-sus Christ, we just walked into a haunted house,”
Middleton whispered.

*

The twisting, narrow corridors came to a large circular
room, thirty feet or so in diameter, and dimly lit by clusters of egg-like orbs
attached to the walls.  Here, the walls and ceiling looked more organic
than ever.  Darren could make out a round platform just a few inches high
in the center of the room.  Three recon scouts lying inoperable on the
ground at their feet were collected and placed in bandolier compartments.

Ghostly cries in the distance would occasionally pierce the
darkness around them and send fidgety rifles waving around at nothing. 
That strange bellow, mysterious and unnerving, shook the walls, and Darren had
the impression that they were much closer to the source.

As he took a sip of cool water from the drinking tube, he
noticed something move in a corridor on the opposite side of the room.  He
ignored it, looking away.  Everyone was seeing spooks, and it took the
combined effort of Darren and Carruthers to remind them to stay sharp.

Darren prayed he was wrong.  He prayed that Vanessa was
not down here in this place of rising horror.  Please be somewhere else,
he thought.  Not here.  He took another gulp of water, but it did not
cool the sourness in his stomach or the cramp in his lungs.

Without warning, the ceiling peeled away with a sickening
sucking sound.  Membranes opened and folded against the ooze, revealing a
ribbed vertical esophagus above them, lit at the top.  Crashing down from
above came the familiar machine-growl unsettling them for the last twenty
minutes . . . and the musty smell of birth and death.

“What is that?”

“Let’s find out,” Darren said, hands shaking. 
“Everyone on this platform.  Looks like another lift.”

He was correct.  As soon as everyone stepped onto the
raised section in the floor, it rotated slightly and began to hum before rising
quickly.

“Here we go!”

. . . I am the Invicid
. . . I am That Which Moves The Firmament.

“Firing positions!” Carruthers shouted.

Everyone went to their knees and faced outward

. . . I am the master
of your perfection . . . my caressing hand will wipe away the tears of your
disgrace.

The platform began to whoosh up faster.  Darren felt
the centrifugal force press down on him, and he fought to stay upright.

“Keep your bursts tight, laddies!” Middleton shouted.
“Steady now!”

. . . she is here,
Dar-ron . . . she shall be merged . . . ju’soon bih takeen sik ret Vorvon!

The platform halted at the top of what appeared to be a
stepped altar rising from the floor of a round chamber thousands of feet across
and hundreds of feet high.  It took Darren a few seconds to process the
abominable sight at the center of the huge expanse.

His mind rushed back to his early childhood to his
grandmother’s study and the framed poster which hung on the wall behind her
desk——
The Garden of Earthly Delights
, a medieval depiction of naked
human souls suffering unspeakable tortures at the hands of cackling demons and
grotesque monsters.  He remembered how that painting had had a disturbing
effect on him.  Some kids feared the doctor’s syringe.  Others
dreaded a cracked closet door at night.  Darren’s most profound childhood
terror was Hieronymus Bosch’s surreal vision of eternal damnation.  Now
that same horror suddenly swelled back inside him as an eighteen year-old
man.  The ghastly reality spread out before him, however, was no fucking
painting.

At the center of the chamber, clinging from the top of the
ceiling on huge strands of sinewy tendon, hung the Invicid, a gargantuan being
at least a thousand feet in diameter.  It had no true symmetry, as Darren
tried to will it in his mind into the resemblance of a jellyfish, but even a
jellyfish had physiological balance.  This thing looked like it had
exploded sometime in the past and had been reassembled with no regard to
preserve its original proportions.  It was a simple mass of pulsating
organs, monstrous tentacles drooping out at odd angles, clusters of brain bags
like grapes attached intermittently throughout the body and long crab-like legs
waving underneath.  A segmented appendage resembling a large intestine
hung down to the chamber floor and branched out in all directions, breaking
into smaller and smaller vessels meandering across the bottom.

Hundreds of mutated children skittered across the floor like
ants.  They were not screaming and shouting like Darren had heard
before.  Here they remained silent, reserved perhaps before their god
hanging from the ceiling.  Their insectile movements suggested nothing
important underway.  They appeared to be just scurrying about for no
reason.

Darren’s roving eyes then drew his attention to their
adjacent surroundings.  Arranged around the altar’s circular top were
several pink “mouths” at least four or five feet wide contained within metallic
ovoids which curved out and down toward the floor of the chamber.  He
could see muscles pulsating under the slimy flesh, and that’s when Darren
noticed another feature which struck the last shard of terror into his
heart.  On the floor, he spotted long thin fingernail marks gouged into
the surface leading toward each mouth.