Have Tech, Will Travel (SCE Books 1-4) - Keith R. A. DeCandido_. [et al.] [21]
They were packed into what had to be a core area big enough to hold the Enterprise . They were all floating, limbs tangled up in limbs, faces moving slowly past the viewport.
Faces frozen in terror and pain.
It was like a giant, slowly moving, zero-g dance of bodies.
Lense was studying her tricorder, a bead of sweat dripping off her forehead.
“Can you tell me what killed them?” Gomez asked.
“No,” Lense said, “I can’t, exactly. There seem to be varied reasons. None of this makes any sense.”
“You’re telling us?” Vale said.
“What?” Gomez said, flipping her tricorder into action.
Geordi forced himself, after the doctor’s strange comments, to study the mass in the vacuum on the other side of that port.
She was right. He couldn’t tell right off what had killed the people closest to the port. Some seemed to show signs of the decompression that came with being tossed alive into space.
Other bodies looked like they had been cut apart in some way. Some bodies were missing arms; others, legs; a few, heads.
Still others had puncture wounds of different types. Actually, the more he noticed, the more he saw that they all had puncture wounds.
Then something caught his attention to the right of the port, just inside the core. A movement out there that didn’t seem to fit in with the slow waltz of the dead. He studied the area, trying to make himself see only the patterns in the dead limbs and faces.
Then he saw it again. A movement along one of the body’s arms.
“There’s something moving in there!”
He pointed to the right, and both Gomez and Dr. Lense aimed their tricorders in that direction. Something small and dark was chewing on an arm, swallowing hunks of flesh as it burrowed inside.
Geordi felt his stomach twist as the entity disappeared into the body, leaving a pretty good hole in the dead flesh.
The creature looked like a combination between a crab and a wasp, and clearly was able to function in the nonatmosphere environment of space.
He looked at the body closest to him. There were small holes of different sizes all over it as well.
Suddenly Dr. Lense stepped back from the window, as if it had shocked her. “This is a breeding nest,” she said.
“The bodies are food?” Geordi asked.
“Exactly,” Lense said. “Placed there for the hatchlings.”
“And the eggs have hatched, it seems.”
“Less than an hour ago,” Lense said, “from what I can tell.”
“Which is why we scanned no signs of life in this ship,” Vale said.
“Well, there’s life now,” Gomez said.
The bodies were starting to move more and more as the creatures devoured them, drilling in and out, making the cloth ripple on some. Every time Geordi got a glance at one of the creatures, he wanted to smash it, like a spider crawling on the floor.
How did they get in here, if they were spaceborn creatures?
Geordi scanned past the bodies at the walls of the core. There were large tubes, big enough to easily fly the da Vinci through, that seemed to lead up through the ship, more than likely to hatches on the surface. And around the walls there were docking ports. This core had served more than one function. It was the loading and unloading area, more than likely for supplies. Through one of those ports—that must have been how the creatures got in.
The bodies were floating up into those tubes as well as in the core.
“Can you tell where the main nest is?” Gomez asked.
Dr. Lense shook her head. “I think you’re looking at it. The eggs were planted in these bodies. Some of these people were still alive when the eggs were planted.”
“Now I know I’m going to be sick,” Vale said.
“Where are the adults?” Gomez asked.
“Dead,” Geordi said. “I’ll bet those are the twelve killed in the fight with the Enterprise .”
“You mean these creatures are intelligent?” Vale asked. “And twelve of them did