Deathstalker Rebellion

secrets the alien ship had left, it was keeping them jealously to itself. Silence activated his comm implant.

'Dauntless, this is the Captain. Do you hear me?'

'Loud and clear, Captain,' said Cross immediately. 'Sensors are locked on your position, and we have full telemetry on your hard suits. Wherever you go once you're inside the alien craft, we'll be able to follow your movements and advise you.'

'I feel safer already,' said Frost. 'Keep your guns trained, Cross. Whatever happens, this ship is not to be allowed to escape. You will prevent such an escape with all means necessary, whatever the cost. Is that clear?'

'Captain?' said Cross uncertainly.

'Do as the Investigator says,' Silence said flatly. 'She's the expert here. If it comes down to the bottom line, we're all expendable. The Investigator and I perhaps a little more so than others. We're going in now. Let's all stick together, people. And whatever we find inside this ship, don't get distracted. I want information, not dead heroes. Investigator, if you'd care to lead the way, we can get this show on the road.'

'Of course, Captain.'

Frost stepped off the edge of the pit and began to fall slowly down into the great hole the Dauntless had made, helped on her way by short bursts from her backpack. Silence followed her, and one by one the marines came after him, in a long line of slowly falling bodies. The shoulder lights on their hard suits pushed back the darkness as they fell, but there wasn't much to see. The inside walls of the pit were composed of the same thick white cables, pressed and twisted together. The controlled fall seemed to go on for ages, and then the floor of the pit loomed suddenly up beneath them. Frost touched down first, got her balance in a moment, and looked quickly about her, built-in weapons at the ready. Silence joined her a moment later. The massive cables beneath his feet didn't give at all, bulging around him like waves in a frozen sea. The marines drifted down around him, dropping out of the gloom into the light like great silver snowflakes. They landed easily, with casual skill, and moved out to form a defensive circle around Silence and the Investigator, who was thoughtfully studying the floor of the pit.

'Interesting,' she said finally. 'We hit this ship with everything we had. When its shields went down, the outer skin of the hull, or whatever the hell this stuff is, took the full brunt of disrupter cannon firing at virtually point-blank range. Solid steel would have melted and run like water, where it didn't immediately evaporate. But I can't find any trace of heat or structural damage.'

'Self-regenerating?' said Silence, and the Investigator shrugged.

'Maybe. If it is, it's far beyond anything we've got. And why just repair the walls? Why not seal over the hole?'

'Because they knew we'd be coming, and they wanted to control where we landed,' said Silence. 'The word trap suggests itself to me. Suggestions?'

'Blast a way through to the interior,' said Frost. 'I brought enough shaped charges to blow a path through a small moon. Once we're inside, we'll see if anyone comes to complain about the noise.'

'If you're going to start messing about with explosives, I am getting myself and my men out of here,' Silence said firmly. 'I never met an Investigator yet who understood the concept of subtlety when it came to explosives.'

And then he broke off and looked sharply at the wall beside them. Two of the thick white cables were twisting slowly apart to form a tunnel leading deeper into the ship. Frost leaned in cautiously, her suit lights illuminating the tunnel as far as they could. It seemed entirely empty. Silence tried his suit's sensors, but they weren't picking up anything. As far as they were concerned, the tunnel might not even have been there.

'Silence to Dauntless. You picking up anything on your end?'

'We're patched into your suits' comm signals, Captain,' Cross murmured in his ear. 'We can see everything you can. But long-range sensors have nothing to add. I can say we're not picking up any life signs yet. We've heard from Golgotha starport; they're still too busy putting themselves back together to be able to offer us any help. The good news is that the six starcruisers who went chasing off after the Hadenman ship apparently lost contact with it. They're on their way back. Should be here in just under an hour.'

'Well, that's something, I suppose.' Silence turned to Frost. 'Your call, Investigator. Do we go in?'

'Into a possible trap, possibly crammed with murderous aliens? Of course, Captain. Nothing to be gained standing around here.'

'I had a feeling you were going to say that. All right, lead the way. Marines, stay close behind us. Be ready to fire at a moment's notice, but exercise caution. There's always the chance we might find the missing personnel from Gehenna Base in here somewhere. I'd like to get them out of here alive if at all possible. Lead on, Investigator.'

Frost stepped carefully into the tunnel and moved in step by step. Silence and the marines moved after her. The cables making up the tunnel's inner walls were smoother, thinner, but just as unyielding to the touch. Their white color had thin blue traces in it, like veins. Silence increased the magnification of what he was seeing, and the wall seemed to leap toward him. The cables were pulsing slightly in a regular rhythm. He stepped the view back to normal and touched the wall with the tips of his steel fingers. The built-in sensors detected no warmth of life, only a faint stickiness. The walls were rounded, like the floor and the ceiling, as though he and his team were walking through the bowels of some enormous beast. And maybe they were at that. Silence glanced back over his shoulder, to see how the marines were coping, and only then realized that the tunnel had closed itself off behind them. The cables had fitted together again, thick and impenetrable. Silence quickly alerted the others and then spun around to see for themselves. Frost was all for going back and blasting it with her disrupters, but Silence stopped her.

'Let's follow the tunnel first. See where it leads. We can always come back and blast it later. Dauntless, have you followed what's happened here?' There was nothing but quiet in his ears. 'Hello, Dauntless? Do you hear me?' He listened hard, but all he could hear was his own harsh breathing. 'Investigator, see if you can raise them.'

Frost tried, and then the marines, to no avail. Frost growled something under her breath and then turned to Silence. 'It's not the suits. All the diagnostics check out. Something's blocking the signal. We're on our own, Captain.'

'Not for the first time. Press on, Investigator. I don't think the occupants of this ship let us in just to hold us here. I think… they're expecting us.'

Frost sniffed loudly and led the way on. And as they penetrated farther into the ship, the cables continued to open before them, creating more tunnel, and closing off behind them, to prevent turning back, so that Silence and his people moved constantly in a traveling pocket within the webbing.

The cables varied even more in size now, and there were other changes, too. The corpse-white cables swirled around and over each other, tangled together beyond sense or meaning, some little more than a finger's width. The floor was no different, and more than ever Silence felt like he was walking on a spider's web, sending out rhythmic signals of where he was and where he was going. The impression grew stronger as all the strands grew increasingly sticky to the touch. It got harder to pull their boots free from the floor, and soon only the power of the hard suits' servomechanisms kept them going. Strange lights pulsed within the rounded tunnel walls, come and gone so quickly it was difficult to decide what color they might have been. Sometimes Silence thought they weren't any color he'd ever seen before. But still there was no sign of any construction or device, or any sign at all of whatever crewed the alien ship.

The tunnel puckered in suddenly from all sides, so that the away team had to crawl through on their hands and knees, one after the other. And on the other side they rose to their feet as they found themselves in a great, egg-shaped chamber, with a high ceiling and smooth polished walls. Dark shapes and oddities budded out from the floor and walls, carefully formed but enigmatic in meaning. Frost snapped out a warning not to touch them, which Silence for one found completely superfluous. He wouldn't have touched any of them on a bet. For no reason he could put a finger on, his mind kept throwing up an image of himself stuck helplessly to one of the dark shapes, while the chamber filled slowly with digestive juices. He was sweating inside the hard suit, despite the cool air it was circulating.

They moved on through the vast chamber, stepping slowly and carefully, touching nothing, and finally left the chamber through another of the puckered holes. Beyond lay more tunnels, opening before them and closing after them, and more chambers studded with various shapes, none of them immediately comprehensible to the human mind. Until finally the away team encountered another, smaller chamber, and discovered what had happened to the