Blood and Fire (15 page)

Berryman and Shibano had gone as far aft as they could. “Broadway” was sealed off beyond the mess room. There were twinkling wavicles everywhere. For some reason, they preferred the edges of objects more than flat surfaces, so the entire starship seemed outlined in firefly sparkles—red, gold, green, yellow and white. It looked like the inside of an amusement park.

“Look,” pointed Berryman, gesturing with one gloved hand. Here and there throughout the corridor and the mess room, there were weblike structures hanging from overhead frames and upper corners of the bulkheads. They were faint and gauzy and they held brighter patches of wavicles. They were flickering more intensely. “They're trying to do something here,” he said.

“Mating?” suggested Shibano.

“Don't you ever think about anything else?” Berryman said, annoyed.

“What else is there to think about?”

“What ever happened to old-fashioned curiosity?”

“I'm curious. I'm curious about mating habits.”

“Never mind,” said Berryman. “
Star Wolf
? Are you getting all this?”

Goldberg's voice came back. “We copy. Should we annotate the part about Shibano's mating habits too?”

“Only if you think there's someone who doesn't know yet. Come on, guys—I appreciate the attempts at normalcy. But let's stay focused on the job here, okay?”

“Copy that,” Goldberg said, intentionally dry.

“Has Williger seen these pictures yet?” Berryman asked.

“She's looking now.”

“And?”

“She isn't talking. And she isn't happy.”

“Thanks.”
For nothing
, he wanted to add.

Shibano was examining the sealed hatch that led aftward to the engine room. He motioned to Berryman. “Do you want to scan this?”

Berryman approached, unclipping his scanner from his utility belt. “HARLIE, I'm about to scan aft of the mess room. What do the
Star Wolf
scanners show?”

The display popped up inside his helmet. Indistinct life forms—wavicles?—piled up all around the engine room and the corridor leading from the mess room. Also toward the aft-most Cargo Bay. Berryman activated his own scanner and studied its readouts, but the results were even less precise than HARLIE's more processed images.

“Let's not open it,” he said. “That's for Korie to decide.” He nodded toward “Broadway.” “Let's head back.”

Broadway was the main corridor of the starship; it was directly above the keel which ran the entire length of the vessel. The keel provided maintenance and service access to the starship's machinery; “Broadway” provided access to the operational centers, including Officers' Country, the Bridge and the Communications Bay. They stuck their heads in. “How's it going?” Berryman asked Easton.

Inside his starsuit, Easton's shrug was almost invisible. “Ask Hodel, he's doing all the hard work. I'm only here to take pictures for the log.”

Hodel grunted. Either in agreement or because of the difficulty of his access to the innards of the orange box, they couldn't tell. The box had been unlocked and opened, revealing a complex web of cables, cards and connections. It was a miniature intelligence engine that processed and recorded a complete record of the starship's operational log. The ability of the unit was sufficient to run a ship if need be, and several vessels had actually cannibalized their orange boxes to return home after the mauling at Marathon.

Hodel was tracing one of the cables with a logic probe. “I'm looking for an upstream connection,” he said. “This box has been modified with some weird encryption modules—whoever did it was really paranoid. Whatever they were doing here, they didn't want anybody finding out. I hope Korie's having better luck with the I.E. This is like ... peeling an ice cube.”

Berryman thought about offering to help, but there was really no room for another body in the Communications Bay. Berryman glanced to Easton and the two of them exchanged meaningful looks through their helmets. “We'll go forward,” said Berryman, more for Hodel's benefit. “Get out of your way.”

Hodel barely noticed; his attention was tight-focused on the task in front of him. “Son of a blistered bitch ...” All he wanted to do was connect a transmitter to the orange box—but the unit had been modified either before the
Norway
's mission, or sometime enroute. And even with HARLIE's assistance, it was still a difficult job. HARLIE was searching LENNIE's own memories for additional information, but his remarks
were becoming increasingly hostile and uncooperative. Hodel hoped they could complete the connection before HARLIE became downright abusive.

“Look at this,” suggested HARLIE, abruptly. A schematic appeared on the display inside Hodel's helmet.

The helmsman studied it thoughtfully for a moment, then nodded. “It looks good, stand by.” He started talking to himself while he worked. “Blue fiber to blue insert. Green to green. Just like home. Now—I need this and this goes here, and I need that and that goes there, and set this jumper—! Run the autoconnect, and—it's good! I've got a channel. HARLIE?”

“It's live, and it's decodable. You can connect your transmitter to the port in module blue-four. You'll have to reroute two of the replicator channels first. They're using bandwidth in the commfix module that I need to take over. Plug them into the green-two port; that has empty bandwidth. The channels are redundant, but the box will generate error messages if its redundancy is compromised.”

“Roger that.” Hodel reached into the box and began moving cables. Without looking up from what he was doing, he said to Easton, “So? How long have you and Berryman been together?”

“Is it that obvious?”

“Is a bear Catholic?” Hodel grunted as he pulled a replicator cable loose from its socket and moved it to a new port. “It's no secret.”

“We've been together since before the Academy. Four years now. We were bonded before we left home.”

Hodel barely heard; he was preoccupied with the tangle of connections before him. He finished rerouting the last of the replicator cables before he said anything else. “Ah, that does it—all right, come here little transmitter. Time to justify your existence. Here we go—put your little cable right in there and—there, got it!” He looked to his readouts. “Good, it's live. HARLIE, do you copy?”

“Took you long enough,” HARLIE snapped. “
Nikker-lunker
.”

“I'm only human,” Hodel said, ignoring the toxicity in HARLIE's tone. “What's your excuse?”

“Sorry about that,” HARLIE said dryly. “Download is initiated. Thank you.”

“I'll be glad when you wipe that LENNIE off your butt.”

“Me too,” said HARLIE. “Thank you for being so understanding.
Khlunt-phake
!”

Hodel pushed himself back out of the wall access and finally off his
aching knees. His joints cracked as he straightened. He reclined against the opposite bulkhead and braced his legs to either side of the open access panel and its hanging tangles of optical cables. “Sheesh,” he said. “Why don't they put these things up where people can reach them easier? Never mind. I already know the answer. Lack of space. And besides, they never expect that anyone will have to get in there.” Without taking a breath, or even seeming to change the subject, he glanced over at Easton. “You must have been bonded young?”

“We were. We actually ...” Easton looked embarrassed. “We actually hadn't been planning it. We were just friends, but our local recruiting officer suggested it. Partner benefits, that kind of thing. Long-term stability. He showed us the graphs. We'd have a better chance of maintaining if we were unified. You know the jargon.”

“So, do you like it?”

Easton nodded, with uncharacteristic shyness. “Yeah,” he admitted. “Paul is good for me. Who knows what kind of a jerk I might have turned into if it weren't for his steadying influence? Why do you ask? Are you considering it? Is there someone—?”

“Me?” Now it was Hodel's turn to look embarrassed. “I'm still recovering from the shock of learning that sex can be done with a partner.”

“Give me a break, Mikhail. You're a good-looking guy. Smart. Funny. Surely there's someone for you—ask HARLIE to do a match.”

“I did. You don't want to know who he came up with.”

“Who?”

“You don't want to know.”

“Aww, come on—I showed you mine, you show me yours—who?”

“My ex,” Hodel said sadly.

“Oh.” And then, “Oh, dear.” And then Easton looked at Hodel again, this time a little more sharply. Was that another one of Mikhail's little jokes? He still hadn't answered the question, had he?

“Hey!” Hodel sat up suddenly, peering forward into the access panel again, frowning in puzzlement. “What the hell—?”

Something was moving inside the panel. Something small. It came wiggling down the glowing curve of a light-pipe. It looked like a fluttering worm—not quite there. It seemed haloed with a crimson luminescence, almost a fluorescent glare.

Hodel blinked.

“I see it too,” said Easton. “We'd better show it to Mr. Korie.”

“Yeah.”

Hodel fumbled for a moment at his belt. He produced a small transparent
sample bag. Holding it open next to the light-pipe, he flicked the worm into it with the tip of a logic probe. The worm
trilled
angrily—a highpitched sound that was
felt
more than heard. It was a piercing sensation in the ears. Hodel sealed the bag and laid it aside. Then he reached behind him for a cable tracer—a circular clamp. “All right. Let me just put a tracer on this pipe and see where it leads to, and then we'll take this thing to—” He was reaching up inside the panel when his expression suddenly changed. Puzzled. Then—“O w w w! What the
phluck—
?!”

He yanked his hand back out of the access. There were several shiny red worms crawling across the back of his hand. Reflexively he tried to brush them off—they began
trilling
with a combined resonance that nearly paralyzed him with the pain. The sound was so loud that even Easton could feel it through his starsuit. And then it got
worse
. Louder. Hodel was screaming, writhing in the cramped space of the Communications Bay, trying to shake the worms off his hand. Easton leapt back, already calling to the
Star Wolf
and the rest of the mission team. “Mr. Korie—!” But before anyone could respond—

It didn't make sense—suddenly, there were more of them—a wetlooking mass of slippery red worms, shimmering with luminescence. They came sliding down out of the access panel—first a few, then more and more, a torrent, an avalanche—the sound of them was incredible! They flowed down and down and across the deck and across Hodel, who twisted and jerked and gasped, kicking his way backward out of the Communications Bay.

Easton leapt back, horrified—he unclipped his stinger beam from his belt, set it for spray and fired—the red worms exploded into clouds of wavicles—but not like the wavicles elsewhere on the vessel. These were bright crimson and enraged, they moved like piercing neon beams, zeroing straight back into Hodel's spasming body. Their angry buzzing was a wall of pain!

The worms were
flowing up
onto Hodel's body now, a squalling mass of luminous flickers. They flowed up the legs of his starsuit and over his waist, up into his open tunic—all writhing and glistening with an appalling wet sheen. Whatever they were, they moved in concert. Haloed in a blood-colored aura, they flickered with an unreal
not-quite-there
quality. They flowed into Hodel's underclothing, all over his chest and arms and up to his neck and toward his face, into his open mouth and his nostrils—into his eyes and ears! Hodel was no longer conscious—
he couldn't be conscious!
—but his body stretched and jerked and flung itself across the deck in spasmodic, galvanic movements.

Easton didn't know what to do. He fired again, triggering more explosions of crimson needles—furious wavicles! They pincushioned into Hodel in a dreadful implosion of light. Their sound pushed Easton backward like a slap to his body.

And now—finally—a great wet gooey mass of worms, churning and angry, came sliding, oozing, blubbering down out of the access panel. There was no end to them! A river of death! The multitudes flowed across the floor like living lava, sweeping up and over Hodel's still-writhing form, leaving only a ghastly lump in the glistening mass. A lump that screamed and rolled in pain. The worms, the dreadful
bloodworms
, spread out across the deck, rolling and roiling like angry fire leaping across space—

And in the middle of it, the lump sat up, clawing, shouting—“Hmlp mf!! Dmpf smmfinf!”—grabbing and reaching, until the tiny red creatures pulled it down again, rending it into gobbets of ghastly wet movement—

Easton kept backing, backing away, horrified. He managed to gasp, “God forgive me!” and raised his weapon up, dialing it to its strongest setting. And then he fired, blasting at the horror again and again, as if he were washing it away with a hose. Wherever the stinger beams touched, the bloodworms exploded, again and again—the fire filled the air—the lights were everywhere—he kept on firing—until Hodel's desperate screams were finally drowned out by the twinkling, crackling, roar of the bloodworms. And still the worms continued to pour wet and slithery out of the access panel—like a vast red carpet of flame, they rolled toward Easton—up the corridor toward the Bridge—he turned and ran—

Korie and Bach came scrambling through the hatch from the Command Deck, skidding to a horrified halt—