Extinction

contacted them.”

“They confirmed I wasn’t one of the engineers, yes-and then they burned down two perfectly good men because they were too close to the portal,” I said. I was angry with myself and the Macros. I stepped to an emergency locker and broke out a combat suit.

Major Robinson came around to talk to me quietly. “Sir, you don’t have to go out there.”

I looked at him. “No. But I’m sick of sitting here in the dark. Don’t you want to know what this ship looks like? Don’t you think it would help our assault if we could see the world we were landing on?”

Tight-lipped, he nodded and backed away.

“You’re in command while I’m out of contact, Major,” I said, slipping on a hood and tapping to activate the nanites. They sealed the hood into place and I touched another contact to pressurize the suit.

I left them there, at the command table. I walked out into the airlock and jumped to the ceiling. I was glad for every zero-G training exercise I’d participated in. I did a somersault and landed on my feet on the roof of the hold. Clanking along, I soon stood amongst the burn marks that represented two of my men. I eyed the Macro guards with disdain.

“I’m Kyle Riggs. Let me pass.”

After a few tense seconds, they broke formation and revealed a dark hole in the ceiling between them. I released the magnetic clamps on the sensor array and picked it up. The sensor array was about the size and dimensions of a trashcan. It was bulky, but weightless, as the Macro ship was now coasting.

I entered the portal and awkwardly levered the sensor array in behind me. Once through, I found myself standing in a dark, tube-like corridor that ran length-wise down the ship from bow to stern. I snapped on my suit lights and did a com-check with my command post. The signal was there, but it was sketchy. I looked up and down the tube, which was festooned with hanging cables. Some of the cables were semi-opaque hoses that ran with slow-moving, gelatinous liquids. Pinks, golds, blues and mauves slid this way and that toward unknown destinations. Other cables carried wires that showed bare metal. These were twisted-pair sets with only a tray-like guide of thin shielding between them. I suspected these were low-voltage data cables, but I couldn’t be sure. I worked to avoid contact with all the cables, in case they carried a jolt that would blow my magnetized boots off.

I flicked on every recorder my suit had, relaying the recordings to the command brick where it would be digitally stored for posterity. As I roamed the dim tubes I took passages that led upward toward the outer hull whenever possible. The plan was simple: I would plant the sensor array as close to the outer skin of the ship as I could. The unit should operate through anything solid up to a foot of thickness, depending on the composition of the hull. The best spot I could find would be a simple window, but I doubted I was going to see any of those. The Macros didn’t strike me as star-gazers.

After traversing two upward shafts, I lost contact with the command brick entirely. It was an odd, lonely feeling, moving around like a secret mammalian spy in the midst of the Macro stronghold. I felt like one of those squirrel-rats that used to sneak around in the nests of dinosaurs. In this environment, I was the alien.

I finally reached a tight tunnel with a lower ceiling than the rest. The hard, flat ceiling bent my back and made me drag the sensor array behind me, bumping over the uneven surfaces. This had to be it. I had to have reached the outer hull. I reached up and touched the smooth, solid surface overhead. Beyond this wall was the vacuum of space.

I searched for and found an alcove and tucked the sensor unit into it. I activated the unit and had it run a self-diagnostic. I should be getting readings soon, and these would be transmitted along a self-adapting wire made entirely of chained nanites to the hold below. The sensor array had its own internal reactor, so there wouldn’t be any power problems.

I watched as the sensor-nubs self-modulated and scanned their environment. The final verdict was a yellow bar-not great, but much better than nothing. We would no longer be flying blind if I could get this signal down to the command post.

I flipped a valve open. A trail of gleaming nanites, looking like a mercury spill of deadly proportions, slipped out of the opening and snaked toward the nearest exit on their own initiative. Like a trail of ants, I knew they would find their way back home to the command brick. The nanite stream thinned until it was almost unnoticeable, no thicker than a human vein.

I stood up, pressing my back against the low ceiling. I followed the shiny nanite strand with my eyes until it disappeared. This place was oppressive, and I felt an urge to get back to the command brick. I turned my helmet right and left, looking up and down the remote tunnel. I’d only seen a few of the Macros, and they had been much further down, closer to the level of the hold itself. I bared my teeth, debating my next move. My mouth suddenly felt dry.

In the end I figured, why the hell not? When else was I going to get the chance to roam on an alien ship while it was in full operation?

I didn’t follow the winding stream of nanites back to safety. Instead, I turned and crawled farther toward the stern, deeper into the Macro ship. The recorders were still on, and there was plenty of storage space on my suit’s data-meter. I figured I might as well take the opportunity to do a little spying.

I picked my way toward the stern, heading in the direction of the engines and whatever passed for the crew quarters on a Macro ship. It was the opposite direction from the one the nanites had taken. I was moving farther from the hold and the rest of the humans on this ship. In my head, I could see Sandra gritting her teeth and asking me if I was insane. Fortunately, she wasn’t around.

— 40-

Much of the ship was repetitive. I hadn’t been expecting a Van Gogh on every wall, but this was positively boring. Then I reached the central nexus of the ship.

As best I could figure, I was behind the hold, between the engines and the big empty space that contained my comrades in their stacked, steel, coffin-like bricks. This was where the Macros lived, so to speak. There were many strange rooms with no obvious propose. There were machines that churned and clunked independently, making air, weapons or replacement Macros-I wasn’t sure which.

But when I found the laboratory, I knew what it was. There were tech Macros in there, workers with a dozen mandibles that moved with motions so fast they could not be followed by the human eye-like a hundred flashing knives being juggled at once. I knew the type: they had built the nukes that had annihilated the domes back in Argentina and taken a lot of my men with them.

It was the thing on the table that made me forget all about the Macro techs. It was a living creature-a big one. It was long, and definitely worm-like. It had legs, however, about fifty of them. I wasn’t sure if it was a centipede, or a snake with a lot of legs. It spotted me with a jewel-like black eye. The creature opened its mouth and sort of yawned in my direction. I heard a high-pitched, singing sound. Was it trying to communicate?

The techs had it clamped down to a table with seven thick, metal hoops. Blood-like fluids ran down the sides of the creature from a hundred wounds. Suction tubes gargled and slurped up the fluids that ran from the wounds. The tech Macros’ knives flashed, sliced and diced. They were sampling the creature, working it over with their fine instruments. I suspected they were dissecting it-alive.

I should have just turned around and walked away. I knew that, but somehow, I couldn’t. I lifted a boot and placed it into the laboratory. The Macro techs reacted as if I’d touched one of their steel feet with a hot wire. They turned and the flashing mandibles froze in place.

I touched a button on my wrist. It was something we’d come up with for moments like this. A small nanite brainbox was located in my suit, like a CPU, monitoring pressures and the like. We’d allowed our larger nanite minds to teach them to speak a little of the primitive binary language of the Macros. They couldn’t give speeches, but they could translate a few words for us.

I held the button down now, which would cause the system to transmit my speech in binary. “Identify,” I said, pointing to the monster on the table.

The Macros stared at me for about three seconds. It was long enough for me to start sweating. Suddenly, under their cold inspection, my suit felt hot inside. Were they calling a combat squad with beamers? I had no way