Питер Филлипс - In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

Reynold headed over to the room in which the interrogation was being conducted and banged open the door. “I thought I told you to keep him quiet?”

Their traitor had been strapped in a chair, a gag in his mouth. He was writhing in agony, skin stripped off his arm from elbow to wrist and one eye burnt out. The trooper in there with him had been rigging up something from the room’s powerpoint, but now held his weapon and had been heading for the door.

“That wasn’t him, sir,” he said.

Reynold whirled, drawing his pulse-gun, then tapping his com button. “Report in.” One reply from Spiro on the roof, one from the other trooper as he stumbled sleepily into the living room, nothing from Kirin, but then she was asleep, and nothing from Plate. “Plate?” Still nothing.

“Where did Plate go?” Reynold asked the seated guard.

The man pointed to a nearby hall containing bunk rooms. Signalling the two troopers to follow, Reynold headed over, opening the first door. The interior light came on immediately to show Plate, sprawled on a bed, his back arched and hands twisted in claws above him, fingers bloody. Reynold surveilled the room, but there was little to see. It possessed no window so the only access was the door, held just the one bed, some wall cupboards and a sanitary cubicle. Then he spotted the vent cover lying on the floor with a couple of screws beside it, and looked up. Something metallic and segmented slid out of sight into the air-conditioning vent.

“What the fuck was that?” asked one of the troops behind him.

“Any dangerous life forms on this world?” Reynold asked carefully, trying to keep his voice level.

“Dunno,” came the illuminating reply. “We came in with you.”

Reynold walked over to Plate and studied him. Blood covered his head and the pillow was deep red, soaked with it. Leaning closer Reynold saw holes in Plate’s face and skull, each a few millimetres wide. Some were even cut through his aug.

“Get Jepson—bring him here.”

Jepson seemed just as bewildered as Reynold. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

“Are you a local or what?” asked Spiro, who had now joined them.

“Been in the city most of my life,” said Jepson, then shifted back as Spiro stepped towards him. “Brockle . . . he might know. Brockle’s a farm boy.”

“Let’s get fat boy,” said Spiro, snagging the shoulder of one of his men and departing.

Brockle came stumbling into the room wiping tiredly at his eyes. He almost looked thinner to Reynold, maybe worn down by fear. His gaze wandered about the room for a moment in bewilderment, finally focusing on the corpse on the bed.

“Why you kill ’em?” he asked.

“We did not kill him,” said Reynold, “but something did.” He pointed to the open air-conditioning duct.

Brockle stared at that in bewilderment too, then returned his gaze to Reynold almost hopefully.

“What is there here on Rhine’s World that could do this?”

“Rats?” Brockle suggested.

Spiro hit him hard, in the guts, and Brockle staggered back making an odd whining sound. Spiro, obviously surprised he hadn’t gone down stepped in to hit him again but Reynold caught his shoulder. “Just lock them back up.” But even as Spiro turned to obey, doubled shrieks of agony reverberated, followed by the sound of something heavy crashing against a wall.

Spiro led the way out and soon they were back in the living room. He kicked open the door to the room in which Jepson’s comrades were incarcerated and entered, gun in hand, then on automatic he opened fire at something. By the time Reynold entered Spiro was backing up, staring at the smoking line of his shots traversing up the wall to the open air duct.

“What did you see?” Reynold asked, gazing at the two corpses on the floor. Both men were frozen in agonized rictus, their heads bloody pepper-pots. One of them had been opened up below the sternum and his guts bulged out across the floor.

“Some sort of snake,” Spiro managed.

Calm, got to stay calm. “Kirin,” said Reynold. “I’ll need you to do a search for me.” No reply. “Kirin?”

Whatever it was it had got her in her sleep, but the sofa being a dark terracotta colour had not shown the blood. Reynold spun her laptop round and flipped it open, turned it on. The screen just showed blank fuzz. After a moment he noticed the holes cut through the keyboard, and that seemed to make no sense at all. He turned to the others and eyed Jepson and Brockle.

“Put them back in there.” He gestured to that bloody room.

“You can’t do that,” said Jepson.

“I can do what I fucking please.” Reynold drew his weapon and pointed it, but Brockle moved in front of Jepson waving those long-fingered hands.

“We done nuthin! We done nuthin!”

Spiro and his men grabbed the two and shoved them back into the room, slamming the door shut behind them.

“What the fuck is this?” said Spiro, finally turning to face Reynold.

The laptop, with its holes . . .

Reynold stepped over to the room in which Spiro and his men had been torturing their other prisoner, and kicked the door open. The chair lay down on its side, the torture victim’s head resting in a pool of blood. A sticking trail had been wormed across the floor, and up the wall to an open air vent. It seemed he only had a moment to process the sight before someone else shrieked in agony. The sound just seemed to go on and on, then something crashed against the inside of the door Jepson and Brockle had just been forced through, and the shrieking stopped. Brockle or Jepson, it didn’t matter now.

“We get out of here,” said Reynold. “They fucking found us.”

“What the fuck do you mean?” asked Spiro.

Reynold pointed at the laptop then at Kirin, at the holes in her head. “Something is here . . .”

The lights went out and a door exploded into splinters.

Pulse-fire cut the pitch darkness and a silvery object whickered through the air. Reynold backed up and felt something slide over his foot. He fired down at the floor and briefly caught a glimpse of a long flat segmented thing, metallic, with a nightmare head decked with pincers, manipulators and tubular probes. He fired again. Someone was screaming, pulse-fire revealed Spiro staggering to one side. It wasn’t him making that noise because one of the worm-things was pushing its way into him through his mouth. A window shattered and there came further screaming from outside.

Silence.

Then a voice, calm and modulated.

“Absolutely correct of course,” it said.

“Who are you?” Reynold asked, backing up through the darkness. A hard hook caught his heel and he went over, then a cold tongue slammed between his palm and his pulse-gun and just flipped the weapon away into the darkness.

“I am your case worker,” the voice replied.

“You tried to stop us,” he said.

“Yes, I tried to obtain your location. Had you given it the satellite strike would have taken you out a moment later. This was also why I planted that locator in the leg of one of Jepson’s men—just to focus attention away from me for a while.”

“You’re the one that killed our last unit here—the one that planted the device.”

“Unfortunately not—they were taken out by satellite strike, hence the reason we did not obtain the location of the tactical nuclear device. Had it been me, everything would have been known.”

Reynold thought about the holes through his comrades’ heads, through their augs and the holes even through Kirin’s laptop. Something had been eating the information out of them even as it killed them. Mind-reaming was the reason Separatists never wanted to be caught alive, but as far as Reynold knew that would happen in a white-tiled cell deep in the bowels of some ECS facility, not like this.