MotherShip (7 page)

“Yes. So, perhaps in this surface building, or probably in an underground complex...” Jaric began.

“Are humans!” Becky shouted.

Mother found herself hard pressed to suppress the children's actions. After a more thorough scan to ensure no T'kaan ships were in the immediate vicinity or that there were no signs of T'kaan life forms or their maggot young on the planet's surface near that point, Mother landed herself just outside the north entrance of the surface building from which the power readings emanated.

“Guardian, you will position yourself inside the building at this major juncture of the main corridors. From this position you can maintain contact with myself as well as with the children as they make their initial sweep of the uppermost underground level.” Mother paused, recreating over a million possible scenarios and their ultimate outcomes. “I must have more data before I can allow you to search further underground, out of my sensor contact.”

“Come on,” Kyle said. He grabbed Jaric and Becky each by an arm and pushed them toward Mother's open door.

“Guardian, please proceed,” Mother ordered. “I will provide direct communication to enhance your programming. But if you perceive a loss of communication, please backtrack until an active signal from me is obtained.”

Guardian nodded wordlessly as he passed through the door. The robot's huge gait enabled it to catch up to the three humans just as they entered the reinforced door of the building.

Jaric held the hand-held sensor before him, pointing it inside. He completed his sensor sweep of every part of the building inside within range.

“Anything?” Kyle asked tersely.

“No signs of life. Nor any recent traces,” Jaric sighed.

“Let's go inside.” Kyle began walking inside.

“Wait,” Becky said. “Let Guardian go first.”

“Why?” Kyle asked.

“Because.” Becky shrugged. “It could be dangerous.”

Kyle ignored her and walked inside, drawing the blaster from the holster at his hip as he disappeared into the darkness.

“Idiot,” Becky whispered.

Becky and Jaric heard Kyle's footsteps echo eerily from out of the black interior as he continued onward. Suddenly, they stopped. From the midst of darkness, a bright beam of light ignited.

“Come on. There's nothing here. I want to get down another level.” Kyle began walking deeper into the bowels of the building. As he walked, his beam of light pierced and probed up to the high ceiling and back down, then side to side as he entered a side corridor. Just before he entered, he turned to the others.

“Hurry up.”

Jaric started forward but stopped short as Becky grabbed his arm.

“What?” Jaric asked.

“Something's weird,” Becky whispered. “I don't like it.”

Jaric repeated his sensor sweep as Becky clung to his arm. The light beam on the sensor unit had automatically switched on as they tentatively stepped inside the dark interior. In the far, far distance, almost at the edge of their hearing, they could just make out the low thrumming of machinery.

“There's nobody in here, Kyle's right,” Jaric said.

Becky reached down to her waist and pulled out her blaster, still hanging on to Jaric's arm with her other hand. “Something's not right about this. Promise me you won't let Kyle get us into trouble.”

Jaric chuckled out loud. “If I can see it first with my sensor, then we won't get into trouble.”

“That doesn't make me feel better.” Becky urged Jaric forward with a nudge.

They joined Kyle. The three of them proceeded behind his dancing beam of light . The large room they first entered led them to a network of seemingly endless corridors.

Everywhere the light illuminated revealed a jumbled array of strewn furniture and other debris that littered their path. It seemed to be the remains of some terrible tragedy, but nowhere did they detect the slightest evidence of recent habitation.

The trio felt a gnawing doubt growing at the back of their minds.

Guardian followed without hesitation, communicating his visual sensors to Mother instantaneously. But just as Mother had deduced, as the children found the dusty stairwell and began descending, Guardian's communication link with her became disrupted.

“Stay at that point, Guardian. Children, do not proceed out of range from Guardian's sensors with you or I will lose contact with you completely.” Mother's voice emanated from Guardian's mouth. The battle robot's speech program was as primitive as the Fixer's and because his system programming had been devoted to battle algorithms and not to AI, he could only communicate the most basic commands via speech. At most times, Mother spoke through Guardian's systems with the children when they made planet-fall.

“Sure,” Kyle said with a confident smile. He turned and continued onward behind his dancing beam of light.

“There's something weird here,” Becky repeated as she looked furtively around into the forbidding darkness. The stairwell they stood next to was located at the far end of another large empty room after they had exited the main corridor.

“Well, my sensor reads nothing. So there can't be anything too weird,” Jaric whispered.

Jaric followed Kyle down into the well of darkness, the piercing light from his own hand-held light unit sending out a narrow beam that revealed their path for only a few meters ahead.

Becky took a deep breath, shook her head, and followed. She reached to her belt and pulled her own light unit out and flicked it on. Pointing the light with her left hand, she kept the blaster pointed down the beam of light with her right as she stepped down.

Guardian's red visuals watched as Becky disappeared into the darkness. This information was simultaneously routed to Mother. Now he tracked the children's sensor readings as they reached the first underground level. But as they began walking away from the staircase, their readings faded mysteriously—as if the children themselves were disappearing.

Mother's processors spiked with super-activity.

“Guardian, I have recalibrated my sensors to their greatest degree of detail.” A long pause of almost a millisecond ensued. “I have detected the faintest, almost distorted presence of T'ka...”

In that instant Mother's sensors were almost blinded as the hidden gun emplacement powered and fired, already pre-charged.

A human would never have reacted in time.

But in less than a quarter millisecond, Mother had raised her shields—enough to soften the blow.

Her primary power grid blew out with the sudden intensity of the direct hit. A moment later her backup replaced it, along with full shield strength. Mother routed power from every system for her weapons as her mighty engines roared to life.

Her manta-ray silhouette rose as three of her main guns swiveled and targeted the battery located in the thick brush.

Seven seconds after the attack began, Mother destroyed the gun and its T'kaan crew with her first blow.

“Guardian, this is a prearranged scenario the T'kaan have led us into.” Mother's calm electronic voice did not betray that her processors were now operating near maximum capacity—calculating every possibility of the T'kaan's next move.

Mother tried a message via Guardian's transmitter to warn the children, but they did not answer. Guardian's sensors noticed a movement from the darkness, from a sensor hole he now discovered from his previous scan of the huge unlit room. A strange clicking noise became audible. Huge, wallowing forms suddenly drew upwards from underneath flexible covering thrown off by tentacle arms.

Guardian aimed his assault blaster and fired at the first target.

“Fixer5,” Mother said to the tiny robot still inside her hull. “Gather more weapons and extra charges from the weapon's locker. You will need to take them to Guardian. He and the children will need them in order to escape.”

The diminutive worker robot rolled forward on its four legs with swift electronic obedience.

Alarms suddenly shouted, vying for Mother's attention as she focused on the growing numbers of T'kaan warriors that were appearing inside the complex from their sensor cloak.

They had been hidden by some kind of material that dampened, or evaded our sensors
, Mother thought.
I must not under-estimate these enemies ever again. I must pay attention to the minutest detail.

The screaming alarms, put onto background mode, suddenly leapt into her primary memories, into her Priority One processing queue.

“Guardian, three T'kaan frigates have finished a jump from hyperspace. Twelve fighters have been launched. I must engage them now,” Mother said simply. “I will return as soon as I can.”

Guardian had quickly dispatched four of the T'kaan with his assault blaster, but his personal shield that Mother had recently added to his systems was already down to half-power. His weapon would soon need a new charge as well. But now Mother would not be there to assist him. Alone, Guardian would have to use his battle-code and adapt quickly to this growing fire-fight.

“Get the children, Guardian. Fight your way down to them and then bring them back to the surface. I will return for you.”

Guardian rose, and immediately his body was pummeled by blaster fire from three directions. Calmly, he turned to each source and fired repeatedly until each T'kaan was dead.

He made his way to the stairwell. His internal diagnostics began to perform what repairs it could on the fly, primarily upon his shield. Popping out the empty power clip, Guardian replaced it with his only spare. As he reached the door to the stairwell, he carefully leaned outward so as to view down the dark chasm with his night-vision enabled eyes.

Blaster fire erupted and chewed the wall beside his head as he pulled back quickly. Stoically, he waited for Fixer5 and the extra weapons. As he did, his sensors perceived the sound of MotherShip's retreating engines. He realized with a quick sensor reading that Fixer5 had not yet left the ship.

Guardian was in a dilemma, he could not advance without more charges for his weapon. He could not complete Mother's last order to rescue the children. The robot stood his ground as his sensors watched the T'kaan warriors crawling toward him from the darkness.

They attacked and the robot returned fire.

Below, unaware of the fighting above them because of the T'kaan dampening field now encircling them, Kyle entered a large room and suddenly stumbled over some strewn debris and fell, stopping his fall by putting both his hands down as he reached the floor. But in doing this, he dropped his light.

He cursed his fall and felt around for the now extinguished light.
Idiot light
, Kyle thought.
It should've stayed on. Something must've knocked its on-off switch
.

Jaric poked his beam inside the room and did not see Kyle who was still flat on the ground in the darkness. He reached for his blaster as Becky stepped next to him.

In the next second there was movement everywhere.

Jaric's right hand which held the light was suddenly in the iron grasp of two rope-like tentacles. Darkness swept over them. Jaric fired the blaster in his left hand, just as something struck it violently out of his grasp. He was suddenly lying on the cold concrete floor with something huge pinning him down so hard that he couldn't breathe.

Somewhere in the darkness, Becky screamed.

A fantastic purple glow began to light the huge room around them amid the deep shadows. The children recognized the T'kaan lights with a sickening realization.

Kyle watched as a huge worm-like form suddenly lurched at him. He fired at the shadowy thing twice, and then something grabbed him from behind. Kyle struggled, pulling one of the tentacles off from around him.

But the world went black as a horrendous pain flashed through his mind. Time had no meaning as he wavered at the edge of consciousness. But he began to become aware of something. He didn't see it. But he could smell it.

The smell was horrific. It gagged him with its repulsive and overwhelming odor—like putrid, rotting meat. Like Death.

Kyle wretched uncontrollably until his nostrils were seared from the stomach bile he hurled. He vomited so hard he felt like somebody had just beaten him until his abdomen and sides ached from the terrible blows. There in the darkness, he tried to roll over, to see what was happening to him.

Something reached for him, pulled on his still shaking arms and turned him over with heartless ease.

Kyle looked up.

The huge fangs from the lower jaw curled toward each other like stubby tusks. Kyle's eyes tried to focus, and he saw the rest of the mouth. A mouth full of tiny, pointed fangs with a huge purple tongue.

He turned his head and wretched again, but there was nothing left, only stomach bile now dripped in long sinewy strings from his nose and mouth.

All around him the sound of clicking began. The T'kaan were snapping their jaws making the eerie sound with their largest fangs.

Kyle looked away, toward his right.

Jaric and Becky were each pressed against the massive body of a T'kaan. Across their bodies it looked as though a dozen tentacles held them fast. They looked back at him with fear in their eyes.

Their worst nightmare had come true.

His body repelled at the slightest touch of the wet, greasy body as the tentacles held him close and wrapped around him. The rope-like appendages quivered with jolts of strength as they held him fast. Kyle shut his eyes against that unnatural sensation, that nightmarish touch, as more of the wet, ever-quivering tubes slid and wrapped around him. His mind slipped into wild images as he fought to stay conscious. Again the nauseating stench wrenched his stomach, now multiplied by the disgusting sensation of the snake-like tentacles sliding around his body tighter and tighter. Easily they lifted him off the ground until his face was just before the strange globular mass on top of the T'kaan's head.

“Wha, what.” Kyle muttered as he began to black out again. His head was throbbing with pain. He realized he had been struck and taken deeper into this complex.
When? How long ago?

Kyle felt his body stiffen as the T'kaan spoke. Not the guttural, nonsensical gibberish of the T'kaan language, but it spoke in halting English that Kyle and the other two could understand.