Vaughn Heppner - The Lost Starship

Captain Maddox floated outside the scout, staring in grim anticipation. The plan had sounded saner sitting in the wardroom. Out here, doubts began to assail him.

The entire venture had been a desperate gamble from the beginning. The operation showed the Star Watch’s—humanity’s—weakness against the genetic marvels, the so-called New Men.

He kept wondering what group had fled the Oikumene to travel into the Beyond to create better men and women. If Star Watch knew the answer, it might help unravel the mystery. It might reveal a weakness in the supermen. What had Per Lomax told him? The New Men came as gods in judgment of old-style humanity.

Growing progressively sleepier, Maddox blinked in an effort to remain awake. If the enemy were gods, he had to become a godslayer. This lunatic plan of acting as corpses had to work.

Ever so slowly, Maddox turned his head. The others drifted nearby in their vacc-suits. Dana had explained it. She would override the robo-doctor, injecting them with a hibernating drug, simulating death. Each of them wore a medikit around their waist. When something attempted to peel off his spacesuit, the medikit would inject the wearer with stimulants.

Maddox’s final hibernating injection would come soon. He had taken stage one aboard the Geronimo . Afterward, he had carted the comatose people into the outer bay. Opening the hatch, Maddox let decompression eject the crew in a tumbling mass. With a thruster-pack, he glided into the void after them. He’d gathered the sleeping crew, bringing them to a central area.

Now, Maddox watched Geronimo drifting away. The red giant blazed its fierce starlight, casting the system in a red nimbus.

Under the computer’s guidance, the scout came alive. Its thruster port glowed orange and then red. A moment later, blue exhaust poured out for several seconds. That shoved the Patrol scout toward the ancient vessel.

Maddox watched sleepily, imagining that Geronimo went to investigate the prize. Ah, what was this? His eyes blinked rapidly. Another light flared into existence, one farther away. The dot of light grew, and so did a pinpoint object.

In time, a chill swept through Maddox. He saw it then: the ancient sentinel. It was coming, growing in size.

A hoarse chuckle reverberated inside his helmet. The annihilator came to investigate the foreign objects. What would the alien starship do to the scout and then to them as corpses ?

A purple beam slashed through the void. The tip touched Geronimo . In a flash of destruction, the scout exploded as metal rained in all directions. Water, coolants, bedding material, electronics and computer pieces all flashed into the void as tiny hot objects. Like that, their workhorse, their home these past months, was gone.

Did the scout travel far enough away from us? Are we safe from the blast radius?

Maddox tried to turn his head to see what had happened to the others. The muscles in his neck refused his mental commands. The medikit must have already given him the stage two injection. His eyelids were becoming too heavy to keep open.

Time blurred for Maddox even as he fought to remain awake to see what would happen.

Oh! What was this?

Maddox saw a vast shape gliding through the interstellar night. Blue lights dotted the vessel, showing the twin disc areas.

It’s here. The sentinel has come to investigate. Does the starship wonder about our so-called corpses?

The giant warship slowed. A section in one of the large discs slid open. Light poured from it. Then something thin slid out. An alien shuttle—if that’s what it was—began to nose toward them.

Maddox strove to stay awake to see this marvel, but he was losing the fight. What would the alien craft do to them? He almost overrode the medikit to give him the stim now. An instinct warned him that would be a deadly idea.

I’ll trust the geniuses, Professor Ludendorff and Doctor Rich. I hope they guessed right. I’m too young to die. I want to live. I want to defeat the New Men …

Maddox’s eyelids flickered. He felt groggy despite the apprehension weighing on his chest.

Why am I feeling so—?

With a start, he realized he’d heard a scream of pure agony. That’s what had focused his lazy thoughts. It sounded like Doctor Rich.

Maddox strove to open his eyes, to wake up. Another scream put goosebumps on his arms. By a sleepy force of will, he lifted his eyelids as if they were lead shutters. The sight horrified him.

Doctor Rich lay on a lumpy upright pad with tubes stuck in her body. Blood surged through the tubes. He guessed the life essences pumped out of her body.

Maddox made a croaking noise of outrage. The blood pumped into a container that was rapidly filling.

Even as he watched, thin flexible cables attached themselves to Doctor Rich. They jolted her with electricity or something similar. She screamed once more. Blue webs of energy snaked across her body, making her arch upward. A hat of some kind sat on her head. Cables led from it to a pulsating bank on the nearest wall. No, on the wall was a mass of what looked like alien flesh with quivering nodes and more cables or tentacles slowly waving in the air.

With an inarticulate bellow, Maddox strove to move his arms. He could not. A cool portion of his mind forced him to look down. Crisscrossing bands of alien material strapped him in place.

A fierce and feminine roar of determination caused Maddox to look to his left. Meta strained against the bands holding her down. Her muscles were rigid with strain with veins popping up from her skin. Then, one after another, the bands around her body snapped off.

“Free me!” Maddox shouted. “Get me out of here!”

Like a wild beast, Meta leaped to him. By her floating movement, it was clear she was weightless. Meta crashed against his pad, her knees striking his chest, knocking the wind out of him. As he gasped to breathe in the smoky atmosphere, she intertwined her fingers around a thick band across his pectorals. With a heave of strength, she ripped it loose. She did it again and again, tearing off the other bands, freeing him.

As Maddox sucked down air, the most bloodcurdling scream of all erupted from Dana Rich.

In a fluid motion, acting with lethal rage, Maddox drew his gun. He fired bullet after bullet into the pulsating half-alive proto-flesh on the wall, the one in charge of all those tubes. Meta did the same thing. Each shot blasted its noise against his ears. Each slug exploded chunks of flesh from the alien mass. Vile jets of steam hissed from the flesh. The thin cables that had electrified Dana flew off her cot and began to thrash back and forth.

“Keep shooting!” Maddox shouted. He leaped at Doctor Rich, sailing toward her. A tentacle-like cable slashed toward his face. He caught it, and the thing struggled with him.

Audibly panting, Meta reloaded her gun and continued to fire into the main mass. The smell of gunpowder had grown thick in the chamber.

The tentacle in Maddox’s grip flailed with less power than before.

“Empty every bullet you have into it!” Maddox shouted.

“No,” Dana moaned. “Don’t do that. You’ll kill us if you do.”

Maddox’s focus snapped onto the doctor. Her eyes were wide and staring. Drool spilled from her mouth.

“I’m so tired,” Dana said. “It’s taken too much of my blood.”

“Why did it do that?” Maddox asked.

“To feed,” Dana said. “It’s hungry, very hungry.”

A feeling of loathing came over Maddox. With a manic grasp, he tore the cap off the doctor’s head. He ripped tiny leads from it attached to her scalp, and blood drifted in the air. Then he pulled the larger leads off her flesh, freeing her from the proto-flesh. In the zero gravity, he manhandled her away from the torturing pad.