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= NEBULA EXPRESS =

a DarkSF novel

by John Argo

Page 21.

Chapter Ten

"Watch out!" Lantz cried suddenly as mudmen burst into the elevator lobby. Lantz whirled about, holding her rifle ready in pale, muscular arms. Her rangy body bucked several times as she fired, and damp curls of orange hair jigged about her narrow, intent face. More mudmen spilled into the area waving their claws, and the humans dispatched them in a welter of crackling blue light and flying chips of faux marble.

"In here!" Brenna said, punching open the elevator doors. The four remaining humans sidled into the grayish light inside the elevator as shiny brass doors rumbled shut. For a second, mudmen tried to pry the doors apart. Ridge got a lingering glimpse of scaly skin and peeling, horny claws. The claws were at least two inches long, and ribbed with black lateral stripes within, while the outside was coated with a thick layer of horn. "Don't shoot!" Tomson cried. Lantz and Brenna used their rifle butts to slam the clawed hands into bloody pulp, which the owners then pulled away. A puddle of greenish blood dripped onto the floor, and bits of gore dribbled down the crack between the doors. Ridge looked away as he felt his gorge rising.

The elevator rose. Lights flashed by above, indicating changes of floors. Ridge counted twelve floors. The lights were round and bore small black numbers. The last circle was red rather than yellow, and had the letters CP in it. "That's where we want to go," Ridge said. "That's where we'll find Captain Venable and get an explanation of all this."

For a minute or two the elevator slowly rose. The four humans stood tensely with their eyes upcast. Ridge felt the tension in himself, and noticed how his companions' cheekbones were hollowed, their eyes framed in dark orbits, their faces dribbling sweat as they stood with their rifles ready. Then the elevator began to falter. "No!" Lantz cried, punching the buttons. "Go go go!" Tomson muttered under his breath. "Come on!" Brenna said. Ridge felt like smashing his rifle against the buttons. The elevator slowed down, shuddered, and stopped. "Oh no!" they all said. "Damn!" Tomson kicked the splashboard along the wall with his boot. Ridge said: "Let's think it through, guys. Let's be calm. What is happening? The elevator died on us. Looks like we made it about half-way up there. We may need to climb the remaining six floors on foot. We can do it."

The elevator did not start up again. The lights were lit and the lighted buttons promised power, but somehow this was not translating through to the guts of the machine. "Open the door," Ridge told Lantz. All four stood with their rifles pointing, as Lantz gingerly reached over and pressed the button. She sprang back in a ready pose. The doors made a shuddering noise and then rumbled gently open. Ridge expected a mudmen charge, but all was quiet. They stepped out into a wide space, and for a moment Ridge thought it was just another clean, well-lit laboratory or office space. A moment later he began to realize how wrong he was. The first clues were what looked like ancient shreds of cloth lying along the carpeted floors.

"Weapons," Tomson said softly in a warning tone of voice. They moved slowly forward while holding their weapons ready. The air was still but when the climate control fans hidden in air ducts cut in, Brenna let out a little yell, and Ridge nearly jumped a yard backwards. "Damn!" Tomson said. Lantz's eyeballs were rolling left and right and up, while her hands flexed around her rifle. Lantz's cheeks looked sucked-in, and her mouth had a quizzical tilt to it, as if she were about to cry. Ridge felt the same way.

The lobby area was about forty feet long and twenty feet wide, with large open portals leading into darkness on either side. Opposite the elevator doors were high glass walls whose dark hues varied from dark brown through various off-shades of gray to a dirty charcoal. They looked old, Ridge thought with added foreboding. Maybe he was ready now to face the truth, whatever that was. Nothing was as he'd thought it to be just that morning, and he swallowed hard at the thought that he'd have a lot of other unhappy surprises before the tally was done. "Careful," he said. Keeping the others in line kept him from going crazy. Keeping his friends alive meant more than the luxury of slumping inward and preoccupying himself with the gloom he felt slowly spreading through his soul. "Easy does it."

Lantz was the first to reach the high, arched portal on the right. The area around the portal was steeped in shadows from large, stacked boxes, but beyond the boxes Ridge saw light. As Lantz stepped through into the grayer, brighter light, she made a face and cried out. Her face did not lose its mask of dismay as the others crowded around her. Ridge almost did not want to look, but he knew he must.

They stood at one end of a long room like a dormitory. It had a low ceiling of large, square tiles. The walls were covered with monitoring equipment. In some areas were rows of two dozen black chemical suits with staring round eye holes in charcoal hoods; purpose unknowable, but obviously for some type of rescue. Doors on all sides led into more rooms like this one. Instead of beds, the incubators lined up by the hundreds reminded Ridge of the sleeping boxes he'd seen in WorkPod01 while hanging by his fingernails. He did not want to call these containers coffins, though they had some resemblance to containers for dead persons. Their rounded glass lids had a smoky look, but many of the lids had been torn off or hung at odd angles. Many other lids had been smashed, and the shards lay on the skeletal remains they contained. The incubators made an even procession of twenty to a row, and Ridge counted about 40 rows. As they walked in, Ridge saw other rooms like it, and guessed there must be several thousand incubators.

"All dead," Tomson said as he walked from one incubator to the next. Brenna, Lantz, and Ridge did the same in other aisles running among the receptacles.

"These remains are mummified with age," Ridge said. "This happened a long time ago." It was a bone house, a charnel place, Ridge thought. What had happened here? What was going on?

"Look," Brenna said pointing along the floors. Many of the bodies had been lifted roughly from their resting places and left of the thinly carpeted floor. Few of those bodies were intact.

"They've been gnawed," Tomson said in a disgusted voice. Lantz stifled a choking sound, and Ridge felt overwhelmed by the cruelty and insanity of this overwhelming sight. "Mudmen," he said. "It had to be mudmen."

"They had quite a feast here," Brenna said. "What a terrible place."

Ridge walked numbly with his rifle hanging. "For some reason, the ship's crew left their offices and other work stations. They came here, expecting to sleep through their emergency, whatever that was. They never woke up again, because they never expected to be attacked while they were asleep."

"Why asleep?" Lantz said. "On the Luna-Neptune run?"

"Expecting help," Tomson said. "It would save oxygen to go into suspended animation like this. Maybe the hull was punctured."

Ridge frowned. "Thousands of people. How can that be? Unless it was a colony ship, there wouldn't be this many people on board. And I've never heard of a ship where each person had a deep sleep incubator."

Brenna said: "You think the plan was to go to sleep? That would imply a much longer journey." She stared at Ridge, Tomson, back at Ridge. "There is no place in the solar system that would require a fast-moving ship to have deep sleep capabilities. Besides, those are experimental, and I can't think of a single ship that had them." She bit her lip, realizing she had said something that might not make sense.

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