Star Road Page 15

  Drop the snark, she told herself.

  “We’re making an unscheduled stop. We’re in the Nakai System.”

  “Can we get off the vehicle?” Rodriguez asked. “Stretch our legs?”

  Edgy. Tense. Something’s bugging him, too, Nahara thought. That actually eased his paranoia.

  “You folks sit tight. We’re going to have a look around. See what’s going on.”

  “Why?” Nahara asked, his voice shaking. “Is something wrong?”

  “Looks like nothing out there but ghosts,” the Chippie said.

  Nahara turned and looked at Sinjira as she stared out the window. Her face was pressed against the Plexi.

  “I have to get out,” Rodriguez said, unbuckling and standing up.

  Tense, Nahara thought, but trying to hide it. He’d make sure to keep an eye on this one. He’s up to something.

  Maybe he knows something. Shit, maybe he’s the one who’s been on to me the whole time.

  “Sorry. No one’s going anywhere until we check out the terminal.”

  “I have an important message waiting for me on the Pod System. If I don’t get it—”

  “I’m not risking civilian lives,” Captain Scott said sharply. “Not saying there’s any risk. Still—”

  “I’m not a civilian. I’m traveling under World Council orders.” Rodriguez eased into the aisle, stretching to his full height. “I have to get that message.”

  Yeah, Nahara thought. What’s up with him? World Council orders to do ... what?

  “This is an unscheduled stop,” Scott said. “How do you know your message pod will even be here?”

  “Because they took all contingencies into account and arranged to send pods that could be accessed at every way station along the route.”

  Nahara had to admire the man’s tenacity.

  Captain Scott struck him as someone who didn’t take any shit from anyone.

  Definitely keep an eye on him.

  “I have to go, too,” Nahara blurted out, surprising himself.

  Now Scott turned to him, rolling her eyes.

  Nahara stood up. “I know the standard layout of the way stations. I can get us in and out of here fast, if that’s what’s needed. Get any equipment you need for repairs.”

  Scott and the gunner exchanged glances. Obviously, they didn’t like how this was going.

  But what choice do they have?

  Finally: “All right. You two can come. But stay close.”

  ~ * ~

  18

  THE STATION

  “Where’s the main station office?” Jordan asked, taking point several steps ahead of the group.

  He had armed Nahara and Rodriguez, though he wasn’t convinced either of them could handle a weapon.

  He held his own pistol out, scanning the area, but his handheld thermal scanner showed no evidence of life in the immediate area.

  “The station control office?” Nahara said. His voice was tight—high-pitched. “Standard layout. It’s at the rear of the main building. We can access the main computers there, too.”

  “So where’s the pod bay?” Rodriguez’s voice was a bit shaky.

  “Close to station control.”

  Jordan had taken an immediate dislike to this planet.

  The gravity was Point 2 above Earth Standard, so he felt sluggish. Heavy. Slow reflexes.

  The blue star that was its sun cast thin shadows; the entire world looked washed out.

  Like it’s fading.

  Without having to be told, Annie moved to the right of the entrance doors of the main building while he swung to the left, signaling the others—Nahara and Rodriguez—to hang back.

  Simultaneously, he and Annie nodded and stepped forward to trigger the automatic doors.

  Jordan wasn’t surprised when they didn’t open.

  Annie cast a quick glance at him.

  “Power’s out.”

  To Nahara: “Doesn’t the terminal have auxiliary power?”

  “Only for the essentials—computers and communications.”

  “I would think getting in and out of the building might be considered essential,” Jordan said. He didn’t like belaboring the obvious. But this didn’t bode well.

  Thinking: What the hell happened here?

  Stepping over to the manual door, he pushed the metal bar to open it, but it, too, didn’t budge.

  Locked from the inside?

  No choice, then.

  He waved Annie away from the door. Then he gave the Plexi in the door a quick blast with his pulse pistol.

  It shattered, spreading a wide, white spiderweb across the surface. Jordan stepped up to it and kicked it in. Shards of Plexi rained like spilled diamonds onto the floor.

  ~ * ~

  As soon as they were inside, something to his left caught Jordan’s attention.

  Something on the floor.

  A body.

  Human.

  He pointed it out to Annie, who nodded.

  Performing a 360-degree sweep, they approached the body. Jordan wondered if Annie might be shocked by what she saw. But he’d seen enough death as a grunt fighting the Northwest Uprising.

  You grew ... kind of used to it.

  Kind of.

  Definitely a man—or what had been a man.

  His face was a tangled mess of ripped flesh. His throat had been torn away in one large chunk, exposing the glistening white knobs of his spine. His eyes so wide.

  And empty.

  Staring sightlessly up at the ceiling. Is that where what killed him had come from?

  “Jeezus—not good,” Annie said, shaking her head.

  “We know one thing.”

  “And that is?”

  “We’re not dealing with a human killer.”

  He looked down at the scanner.

  The only life signs were from the small SRV party.

  Good, he thought.

  Annie nodded.

  “Okay. Station control’s this way. Up a level,” Nahara said, signaling them over to the nonmoving escalator.

  Still scanning their perimeter, Jordan led the way up the steps with Nahara and Rodriguez close behind. Annie brought up the rear. Heads pivoting like searchlights.

  Then, just as they reached the top, Jordan heard a noise.

  A low growl.

  He looked at the scanner.

  We’ve got company.

  He dropped to one knee, pistol extended, gripped firmly in both hands.

  Then, down the corridor—so dark—something moved.

  And then—incredibly fast—it charged, and then launched itself at him.

  He pulled the trigger.

  ~ * ~

  Annie yelled when she heard the first shot. She started up the stairs, pushing past Nahara and Rodriguez to get to Jordan.

  “Jordan!”

  Only one shot.

  Jordan usually didn’t have to fire twice.

  But what if he missed, and... ?

  She heard an enraged howl—unearthly, a sound that made her stomach tighten.

  It filled the air, echoing in the empty corridor.

  Then the stench of singed flesh and hair filled her nostrils before she reached the top of the stairs. Nahara and Rodriguez froze on the dead escalator—and she saw what had happened.

  Jordan was getting to his feet, slowly. Then he walked over to his kill.

  He turned from side to side, looking in both directions at the upper floor.

  Checking for more visitors.

  “Why didn’t your scanner pick up that life form?”

  “It did. But not soon enough. Something’s wrong here. Some kind of interference.”

  She looked at the dead thing on the ground.

  “So what have we got here?”

  “This?” Jordan gave a quick glance down at the dead creature but didn’t lower his guard for an instant. “Not good.”

  T
he creature had to be at least four meters long, stretched out. A long snout... the wide anteater-like mouth lined with pointed fangs, fangs that could easily tear out a person’s throat. Or remove a head. Or an arm.

  One nasty beast, she thought.

  And it reeked. The fur, smoking from the pulse blast, gave off a horrible stench of musk, fecal matter, and singed skin and fur.

  Jordan’s pulse pistol had ripped away the creature’s right flank, exposing thick rib bones. The thick, matted pelt was marked with wide brown and black stripes. It was heavily muscled, especially the torso. Whatever it had for internal organs was spilled onto the polished floor, glistening, purple in the dim light that came through the high station windows.

  “I’m not familiar with this,” Annie said.

  “I am.” Jordan was still scanning the area with a cautious eye. “It’s a warrow.”

  “Never heard of ’em.”

  “You don’t want to. They don’t—uhh—do well in zoos. Thing is”—he turned to Annie and lowered his voice—”far as I know, they’re indigenous to only one planet... in the Janus System.”

  “We’re a long way from Janus.”

  Jordan nodded. “No kidding.”

  “So what the hell’s it doing here?” Nahara asked, suddenly coming back to life.

  Neither of them answered.

  Annie kept looking around the upper-level area, peering into the deepest shadows in the places farthest from the windows. The silence was unnerving.

  “Thing is,” Jordan finally said, “warrows always hunt in packs, like wolves, years ago on Earth. And they—” He caught himself.

  Annie turned to him. Eyebrows raised.

  “And?”

  “Just stay frosty,” Jordan said. “These things are clever stalkers, and like I said, they generally hunt in packs.”

  “How many in a pack?”

  The waver in Nahara’s voice made Annie tense even more.

  “How many do you think they need?” Jordan said.

  We need to get out of here, Annie thought.

  “Okay. Warrows. Maybe ... maybe more of them. All right. So let’s get to the damn pod bay,” Rodriguez said, “so I can get my message, and we can get the hell out of here.”

  Annie nodded. Not a bad plan. Check the ion deflectors fast.

  Then split.

  ~ * ~

  They moved as a group down the long corridor, their footsteps echoing loudly, Annie still in the rear. Gun at the ready.

  She said, so Jordan could hear, “I’d like to find out what happened here. The Authority will want—”

  But then she and the others drew up short when, ahead, they saw something that confirmed her worst fears.

  A dozen or more human corpses littered the floor and were draped over chairs and desks in awkward, unnatural poses.

  Throats and stomachs torn open. Organs spilled across the floor. Blood splattered in wide swatches on the floor and walls.

  Not fully dry ... Jesus, this slaughter didn’t happen all that long ago.

  “Well,” she said, “now we know why no one was here to greet us.”

  ~ * ~

  19

  THE BODIES

  Nahara took a breath, his paranoia now replaced with something more primal.

  The whole scene was surreal as he looked around station control. The auxiliary power had kicked on, so all the computer stations and monitors were up and running. No power anywhere else, though.

  But there were no people left alive.

  The room—a charnel house.

  Jordan walked around, ultimately counting more than thirty corpses, including the ones on the second floor. It was hard to get an exact count because they’d been ripped apart, and so many body parts were scattered all around.

  Some bodies were still draped across their desks and chairs where they had died. Others—and parts of others—were sprawled across the floor, sticky with drying, clotted blood. The filtered air still rich with the stench of excrement and death.

  “Looks like this just happened. Maybe within the last hour or two,” Rodriguez said.

  Nahara remembered. Rodriguez. Scientist. Exo-biologist.

  Knows things about alien creatures. That could be good.

  “You have the computer passwords?” Scott asked Nahara.

  He nodded.

  In a goddamned daze.

  He started rattling off the sequence of passwords that would bring the station’s screens to life, the visuals floating in the air, ready to reveal secrets.

  ~ * ~

  “Okay,” Annie said.

  With a few flicks of her hand, she moved one screen to the side and brought up others. The images from a series of monitors floated before her.

  “Right,” Jordan said, coming closer. “Let’s check the monitors and security cams. See what the hell happened here.”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Rodriguez’s voice was pitched so high.

  Is he freaking out?

  “They didn’t just break in here and start killing,” Jordan said.

  Annie looked back to her gunner. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean”—Jordan paused and, gun raised, looked all around—”someone set these animals loose in the station.”

  Annie looked at each of them in turn. Then she focused to Rodriguez.

  “We have to report this... get a pod out,” Annie said. “Doc, when you—”

  “I just want to get my message and get the hell out of here,” he said.

  “You can. And you’ll send word back to the WC Authority. Got it?”

  Rodriguez nodded.

  ~ * ~

  With the captain’s attention on Rodriguez, Nahara moved over to one of the computer bays and sat down. A screen popped up in front of him.

  Only then did he see what was resting on the terminal bay.

  A severed hand.

  Nahara gagged and, using a file folder from the desk, pushed it away. It left a thin smear of blood on the display. With a quick touch of a few keys, a display screen was projected in front of him.

  From where the others stood, they couldn’t see his screen as he waited for the computer to run through its initial boot.

  He entered his authority password and called up the security files. After they finished scrolling onto the screen, he entered a single command:

  Purge.

  If there was going to be an investigation into what happened here—and he had no doubt there would be—he’d make sure no compromising files remained.

  The computer screen ran down through the files before it flashed a message:

  REQUESTED FILES PURGED.

  But then ... someone was walking toward him.

  Scott.

  His fingers flew across the screen, hurrying now as he called up the backup files and then entered another purge command.

  The last of the files disappeared from the screen as the captain came up to the desk, leaning over his shoulder to look at the screen.

  “Anything?”

  Nahara grunted and shook his head.

  “Picked clean. Security vids are gone here, too. Transport and incoming logs deleted. Inter-office memos—kaput. Everything.”

  Scott gave him a hard look.

  An unasked question on her face?

  “My guess? Whoever released those creatures into the station had enough savvy to come up here, get computer access, and wipe the security files clean.”

  Scott nodded. Then: “Maybe. But where’d they get the passwords?”

  Nahara squirmed in his seat. He didn’t like this dance. He wanted to keep his lies to a minimum so he could keep track of them.