Deathstalker Rebellion

them.'

'Still think this was cabin fever, Captain?' said Stelmach.

'I'm not ruling anything out yet,' said Silence calmly. 'This is looking more and more like an alien attack, I agree, but we still have no hard evidence that anything other than humans were ever here. Remember, the Hadenmen are loose again. And there's always Shub and its Furies. Investigator, could the tissues taken from this body have been intended for study, rather than food?'

'Quite possibly, Captain. It would explain the thoroughness.'

'This can wait,' Silence decided. 'I want this whole Base checked out, floor by floor. There'll be time for questions and hypotheses after we're sure this place is secure.'

He gestured sharply to the marines. With Frost in the lead the party moved on deeper into the Base, weapons at the ready. Things grew worse the further in they got. There was destruction everywhere, and more partial bodies. Doors had been torn out of door frames, holes punched through walls, instruments wrecked, the pieces scattered to no apparent purpose or pattern. Every room had been torn apart and wrecked, but nothing obvious had been taken. The number of bodies mounted steadily. The amount consumed or taken varied, but the heads were always left intact apart from the brains, leaving so many silently screaming faces. Silence felt a slow core of cold anger building within him. This wasn't an attack, it was a slaughter; and he swore silently to every new dead face that he would take a bloody revenge for them all.

Frost just seemed increasingly interested, but she was an Investigator, after all. Cross said very little, except to comment on the increasing destruction and identify the occasional face in a choked voice. Stelmach had nothing to say, but kept very close to the others. The six marines maintained their defensive perimeter, checking every open doorway and turn of the corridor with trained weapons. Tension built inexorably as the away team moved on through the darkness, their only light what they had brought with them. Shadows loomed and danced; the only sound was the dull thuds of steel boots on the floor and their own increasingly harsh breathing. No one felt like talking much. There was still no trace of any actual alien, but broken swords lay discarded here and there, shattered on something harder than steel, and there was more damage to walls and floor and ceiling from discharged energy weapons. Here and there great holes had been punched through the thick steel walls, as though by some incredible force. Silence couldn't have done it, even with all the strength of his powered armor. The last creature he'd seen capable of such a feat had been the genetically engineered aliens he'd discovered sleeping in the vaults on Grendel. The thought disturbed him, so he kept it to himself, for later. And everywhere they went, the water came down in an endless rain, as though trying to wash away what had happened.

On the second floor Frost stopped suddenly and knelt down, shining her lights onto something on the floor. The others crowded around her, adding their lights to hers. The Investigator studied the pool of dark liquid thoughtfully and then stirred it slowly with a steel finger. It was a thick, sticky liquid that tried to cling to her finger when she pulled it away. She had to shake her hand hard to get it free.

'What is it, Investigator?' said Silence finally.

'Too early to say, Captain. I've seen smaller splashes of it here and there, but with nothing to suggest what it is or where it came from. But it looks organic.'

'Alien blood?' said Cross.

'Maybe,' said Frost uncommittedly. 'I'll take some samples, and the Dauntless labs can run tests on it.'

'Follow full quarantine procedures,' said Silence. 'Just in case.'

'Of course, Captain.'

Of course. She knows what she's doing. Let her get on with her job. Silence took a deep breath and let it out slowly as he straightened up. He looked about him and scowled inside the safety of his helm. It wouldn't do any good for the others to see how frustrated he was getting. They'd ended up in one of the main control centers on the second floor, and it was even more of a mess than anywhere else, if that was possible. Most of the instrumentation had been ripped out of its settings and partially dismantled. As though the dismantlers had never seen anything like it before. Perhaps they hadn't. Not for the first time, Silence remembered the alien ship he and Frost had found crash-landed on Unseeli, with its strange and unnatural biomechanical systems. A ship that had been grown as much as made. The single alien from that ship had killed every human being in Unseeli's Base Seven and transformed the Base itself in horrid alien ways. Hopefully, that wasn't what they had here. The signs were different.

'Stelmach, try and find a computer terminal you can access. I need the Commander's log.'

'I'm doing my best, Captain. There are some working systems still on-line, but reaching them's the problem. Whatever came through here really trashed the place.'

I want results, not excuses! Silence nearly snapped, but kept it to himself. 'Do your best, Stelmach. We won't leave here till you've exhausted every possibility.' He looked around as Cross came over to join him. 'Anything new?'

'Not exactly, Captain. There's something wrong here. Apart from the obvious. There aren't enough bodies.'

'Explain.'

'Given the size of the contingent running this Base, we should have encountered far more bodies than we have. Unless they're all piled up somewhere we haven't found yet, I'd have to say as many as seventy to eighty per cent of the Base personnel are missing. Which suggests to me that the invaders may have taken the surviving personnel with them when they left.'

'As hostages.'

'Or specimens.'

'But there is a chance they could still be alive?'

'Unknown, Captain. They could have been taken to the alien craft for… study.'

And that was an interesting choice of word, Silence thought unhappily. It could mean anything from observation to vivisection. Either way, it was a complication Silence could have done without. He came to Gehenna to investigate what had happened at its Base, not go chasing blindly off after missing personnel. But he couldn't just ignore them. Not if there was a chance, however small, that some of them might still be alive. He scowled, torn over what to do for the best. His duty was clear; discovering what had happened in the Base had to have top priority Whatever had trashed the Base so thoroughly could be a threat to the Empire itself. Just at the time when the last thing it needed was another threat. But he couldn't abandon people to death or worse. He couldn't. He made himself stop frowning. His head was beginning to ache again. Facts. He needed hard facts to help him make his decision.

'Stelmach…'

'All right, all right! I think I've got something…'

Silence and Frost moved over to join Stelmach and Cross beside a comm panel that didn't look quite as wrecked as the others. It still looked pretty bad, and from the way Stelmach and Cross were fiddling about with its innards, there was clearly still a lot wrong with it.

'Bear with us for a moment, Captain,' said Stelmach without looking up from what he was doing. 'I've cobbled together parts from a dozen panels, and if we're very lucky, it might just condescend to work for us.'

'I helped,' said Cross.

'All right, I was going to tell them. This man's wasted in Communications, Captain. He knows more about the inside of comm tech than I do, and I thought I knew everything. Ever thought about a career in security work, Cross?'

'Save the recruiting speeches for later,' said Frost. 'What have you got?'

'If we're extremely lucky, access to the security systems. There are surveillance cameras throughout the Base, and their files are kept separate from the rest, hidden away for obvious reasons. Apparently, the aliens didn't dig deep enough to find them.'

'Yeah,' said Silence. 'Right. That sounds like Security.'

'You'd better hope I'm right, Captain,' Stelmach said stiffly. 'Whatever happened here, it's over. The attackers are long gone. These security files could be the only records of what actually happened here.'

'We'll applaud later,' said Frost. 'Get on with it.'

Stelmach sniffed loudly, just to let them know his feelings were hurt, and then he and Cross made the last few connections. The information in the security files downloaded directly through their comm implants so that