Питер Филлипс - In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

But Wergard stayed silent while the seconds slipped away. When some two minutes had passed, Danestar realized the giant fire shape was settling back beneath the surface of the street. Within seconds then it disappeared.

A leaden hopelessness settled on her at last. When they saw the thing again, it would be coming in for the final attack. And if it rose against the force fields from below the building, they would not see it then. She must remember to pull the trigger the instant the barrier indicators flashed their warning. Then it would be over.

She looked around at Wergard, saw he had placed the instrument on the table before him and was scowling down at it, lost in the black abstraction that somehow had enabled his fingers to do what normally must have been impossible to them. Only a few more minutes, Danestar thought, and he might have completed it. She parted her lips to warn him of what was about to happen, then shook her head silently. Why disturb him now? There was nothing more Wergard could do, either.

As she looked back at the viewscreen, the Pit creature began to rise through the street level a hundred yards away. It lifted smoothly, monstrously, a flowing mountain of purple brilliance, poured toward them.

Seconds left . . . Her finger went taut on the trigger.

A bemused, slow voice seemed to say heavily, “My eyes keep blurring now. Want to check this, Danestar? I think I have the setting, but—”

“ No time! ” She screamed it out, as the gun dropped to the table. She twisted awkwardly around on the chair, right hand reaching. “Let me have it!”

Then Wergard, shocked free of whatever trance had closed on him, was there, slapping the device into her hand, steadying her as she twisted back toward the detector and fitted it in. He swung away from her. Danestar locked the attachment down, glanced over her shoulder, saw him standing again at the other table, eyes fixed on her, hand lifted above the plunger of the power pack beside the carbine.

“Now!” she whispered.

Wergard couldn’t possibly have beard it. But his palm came down in a hard slap on the plunger as the indicators of the entire eastern section of the barrier flared red.

Danestar was a girl who preferred subtle methods in her work when possible. She had designed the detector’s interference attachment primarily to permit careful, unnoticeable manipulations of messages passing over supposedly untappable communication lines; and it worked very well for that purpose.

On this occasion, however, with the peak thrust of the power pack surging into it, there was nothing subtle about its action. A storm of static howled through the Depot along the Pit creature’s internal communication band. In reaction to it, the composite body quite literally shattered. The viewscreen filled with boiling geysers of purple light. Under the dull black dome of the main barrier, the rising mass expanded into a writhing, glowing cloud. Ripped by continuing torrents of static, it faded further, dissipated into billions of flashing lines of light, mindlessly seeking escape. In their billions, they poured upon the defense globe of the ancient fortress.

For three or four minutes, the great barrier drank them in greedily.

Then the U-League Depot stood quiet again.

The military team had pulled off their mission and now their problem was to get off the planet again while staying alive. They were only worried about human enemies who might be on their trail. That was a big mistake . . .

Neal Asher is one of the brightest of British science fiction writers (though many of his stories are more dark than bright), and has been very prolific since his first story was published in 1989, publishing fifteen novels and three short story collections (one of which was later reprinted in an expanded version), and numerous novellas and short stories. Most of his works (including “The Rhine’s World Incident”) are set in a future history called the Polity Universe. His stories have no shortage of action and violence and have been described as space opera with a cyberpunk sensibility (I would have described them as hard-boiled space opera, but then I’m not a critic). His stories, “Suckers” and “Mason’s Rats III,” were finalists for the British Science Fiction Award. Among the earlier novels in his Polity series are Gridlinked , The Line of Polity , The Skinner , Brass Man , and Polity Agent . For more information about the series, and his non-Polity works, see his website, http://freespace.virgin.net/n.asher/. Many of his short stories and novelettes fit nicely into the horror in space category, so picking one for this anthology was not easy. I finally decided that this one made me more uneasy than the others.

The remote control rested dead in Reynold’s hand, but any moment now Kirin might make the connection, and the little lozenge of black metal would become a source of godlike power. Reynold closed his hand over it, sudden doubts assailing him, and as always felt a tight stab of fear. That power depended on Kirin’s success, which wasn’t guaranteed, and on the hope that the device the remote connected to had not been discovered and neutralized.

He turned towards her. “Any luck?”

She sat on the damp ground with her laptop open on a mouldering log before her, with optics running from it to the framework supporting the sat dish, spherical laser com unit and microwave transmitter rods. She was also auged into the laptop; an optic lead running from the bean-shaped augmentation behind her ear to plug into it. Beside the laptop rested a big flat memstore packed with state-of-the-art worms and viruses.

“It is not a matter of luck,” she stated succinctly.

Reynold returned his attention to the city down on the plain. Athelford was the centre of commerce and Polity power here on Rhine’s World, most of both concentrated at its heart where skyscrapers reared about the domes and containment spheres of the runcible port. However, the unit first sent here had not been able to position the device right next to the port itself and its damned controlling AI—Reynold felt an involuntary shudder at the thought of the kind of icy artificial intelligences they were up against. The unit had been forced to act fast when the plutonium processing plant, no doubt meticulously tracked down by some forensic AI, got hit by Earth Central Security. They’d also not been able to detonate. Something had taken them out before they could even send the signal.

“The yokels are calling in,” said Plate. He was boosted and otherwise physically enhanced, and wore com gear about his head plugged into the weird scaley Dracocorp aug affixed behind his ear. “Our contact wants our coordinates.”

“Tell him to head to the rendezvous as planned.” Reynold glanced back at where their gravcar lay underneath its chameleoncloth tarpaulin. “First chance we get we’ll need to ask our contact why he’s not sticking to that plan.”

Plate grinned.

“Are we still secure?” Reynold asked.

“Still secure,” Plate replied, his grin disappearing. “But encoded Polity com activity is ramping up as is city and sat-scan output.”

“They know we’re here,” said Kirin, still concentrating on her laptop.

“Get me the device, Kirin,” said Reynold. “Get it to me now.”

One of her eyes had gone metallic and her fingers were blurring over her keyboard. “If it was easy to find the signal and lock in the transmission key, we wouldn’t have to be this damned close and, anyway, ECS would have found it by now.”

“But we know the main frequencies and have the key,” Reynold observed.