She read the room. I could tell as her eyes came back to me. Like she was suddenly figuring out she was dangerously close to some edge with us. I watched the realization dawn in her pretty face.
A face I could have lived lifetimes with and still not gotten tired of.
“The official story about this whole thing is a bigger lie than the one I’ve already uncovered for you. This wreck, the Crash, is not alien. Not totally. There’s definitely some alien technology at play here. This ship went faster and farther than any ship ever will. Trust me on that one. What you’re looking at is a ship, manufactured by us, but about ten thousand years in the future from now. As near as I can estimate. That’s where we were sending the Enterprise. That was what Operation Zephyr was looking to accomplish. So… this must be it. This ship… is what they found.”
No one said anything. Then we heard the horns and the drums. Tribal. Erupting and ululating outside along the hull. Uroooooo UrUrUrooooo.
It froze your blood to hear them shrieking alarm. You knew it wasn’t good. Knew they were coming for you.
Choker swore. He was near the edge of the docking port we’d come through, staring out into its vastness like some kind of psychopath endlessly fascinated with all the oblivion it implied. And yes, the record notes he’s a sociopath and there’s a difference.
“Orion, we got big problems.”
I raced over, my battle rattle feeling heavier than usual. Heavier than it should. Already tired that some new thing was about to ruin my already no-room-to-be-ruined schedule. I was wondering how much more one man could take.
Choker was looking down-hull, toward the black gaping chasm the starship, or lifeboat, had plowed itself into long ago. Down into the crust of the dark subterranean world. The hull down there was alive and moving. Alive with movement sweeping up along its ancient and fantastic cylinder. Like a sea of dark locusts swarming up the hull. Suddenly torches, hundreds if not thousands of them, sprang to life as the locusts surged up along the hull toward us.
Except they weren’t locusts.
I irised in with my combat lens and tagged incoming monkey soldiers. Apes too. But smaller and faster than the ones that had gone up and down the cliffs during our first encounter. They had weapons. Some even had firearms.
But it didn’t matter whether they did or didn’t. We didn’t have enough ammunition for the numbers coming at us even if they were unarmed. This was at least brigade-sized. Making the word outnumbered a laughable representation of our current situation.
The captain got us busy doing the survival game.
“Time to move, Sergeant. Let’s go. Now.”
Chapter Forty-Four
Hustling and moving deeper into the ship revealed two things to us as we scrambled to put distance between us and the apes. Maybe we could find some kind of chokepoint to fight them off for as long as we could. Regardless of the lack of ammunition we had left. But as we moved, yeah, once you saw it… saw it was a human-designed ship in its basic DNA of design, you couldn’t unsee it. Even though there were fantastic differences, there were similarities that must be the music of all ships of the stars made by humans. All the things you’d expect in a starship of this size. Things you’d only seen in spectacuthrillers, of course, about ships no non-Monarch citizen of the galaxy would ever have the privilege of riding on. But human at first light and the more you looked. Scanning the darkness for exactly the way conduits and piping would be laid out. Where the interface panels were. How the hatches operated. The feel of the floor in this section. Different because of usage type than it would be in another section.
The second thing revealed was that the wreck had become a madhouse. Everything had been rage-ruined. Walls scrawled and gouged with nonsense writing like we’d seen in the docking bay. Except more often some kind of ape/monkey hieroglyph system had taken over in long and more orderly strings. Here and there splash pages of pidgin Numerican slogans proclaimed ape supremacy and never-ending death to “hooma” which seemed to indicate humanity.
Man. Mankind. Hooma.
Only good hooma is dead hooma!
“Sergeant Orion,” ordered the Old Man as we moved fast into what looked to be a quarters section of the vast ship. Lifeboat, she called it. “Take the lead element. I’ll take Team Two. Get her to take us toward the Node. We’re still on mission. Things just got more interesting. That’s all.”
“Copy that, sir.” I slithered along the column in the darkness of the madhouse tight corridor and linked up with the Monarch.
“How far to target?”
“We can be there in twenty minutes if the way is clear, according to my map.”
I nodded, hearing my own ragged breathing. “Show Punch the way. I’ll keep up the rear of Team One and stay in visual of the captain. Let’s move.”
“On it, Sarge,” said Punch, and we were off.
Eighty meters later, the apes hit our rear at a T-intersection. I could hear the successive booms of the Old Man’s combat shotgun working to keep them back as we moved forward as fast as possible. Then Hauser picked up the fire support to our rear, both men talking their guns to keep the dark shapes down-corridor from overrunning us as we moved fast along our new course track. The staccato ring of gunfire reverberated across the dark passages as we hustled forward.
The comm was chaos.
“Two from the left.” Jacks.
“Engaging.” Hauser.
“Got one!” shouted the Kid. “More coming in!”
“Fall back by twos. Hauser, you’re with me.” The captain.
“Watch out!” Jacks.
Suddenly my combat lens got an airdrop and I could see the route into the ship. It was an
