Synthesis - James Swallow [19]
“Nice shot, boss,” noted the security officer.
“Chews up the charge like you wouldn’t believe, though,” she replied. “One or two more, and I’ll drain it.”
As if to answer her, small hatches flipped open all over the walls, extruding holding cages like the ones she had seen in the other chamber. Each one had a fresh drone in it, and they were coming on-line, activating in a wave of unblinking blue eyes.
Fell was at her back, in a crouch. “I read intensive data transfer from the, uh, core unit,” she said. “Not sure what it’s talking to, though. I don’t think it’s directing the drones…”
“Something is,” said Dennisar, blasting another three machines with a trio of quick shots.
“Can you shut it off?” said Vale. She chanced a look at the alien module. The glow of millisecond-fast operations flickered inside the casing like captured fireflies. “Tell it we’re friendly, beg it for mercy, anything!”
“We should make a break for it,” Dennisar noted. “We let these things bottle us up, they won’t need to kill us. We’ll blow our exposure limit and fry in our suits.”
The commander’s lips curled. “Chief, I appreciate your candor, but could you try to offer a more upbeat opinion in future?”
“I just call them like I see them,” replied the Orion.
“I can’t shut it down.” Frustration was thick in Fell’s voice. “I can’t see properly… if I could just see…”
Vale fired off another wide-beam discharge and glared at the cylinder. Whatever was in there, if it was some kind of intelligence or just a collection of programmed responses driven into defensive mode by the earlier attack, it was going to kill them one way or another unless she could stop it. Her lips thinned, and she pressed her weapon into the ensign’s hand. “Hold this. If anything fuzzy comes too close, blast it.”
“Commander, what are you going to do?”
Vale pushed in and found footholds where she could brace herself. “My mother once told me,” she began, taking purchase on the core module with her gloved hands, “that in some cases, the brute-force approach is the only one that will work.” Vale bent at the knees and yanked hard, pulling with all her might against the damaged frame still holding the kinked module in its support structure. Energy exploded around her, issuing from the still-connected cables and the framework. She felt heat wash over her suit and ignored it, tensing again.
The second time it worked. Already damaged by whatever had put the wreck in such a sorry state to begin with, the support frame fractured and split. There was an abrupt sensation of falling, and Vale was suddenly tumbling away from the center of the chamber, the drumlike nexus core going with her.
Uncontrolled power coruscated around her in a nimbus, and she bellowed in agony. She felt the suit’s built-in medical module nip at her arm as a hypospray shot painkillers into her bloodstream. The deck of the alien chamber rose to meet her, and she bumped into it, banging her head against the inside of her faceplate. Vale’s ears were ringing, and she tasted blood in her mouth.
She blinked owlishly. Her vision was blurry. Ah. This is what Peya meant. An indistinct object drifted close to her, and she batted it away with a jerk of reflex as she belatedly recognized the silhouette of a fluted shape and spindly legs; but it was dead, its eye lens dark.
A tinny voice sounded in her ear. It sounded like Keru. “Commander? Commander Vale, do you read? All of a sudden, the interference shut off. The hatches are retracting. We’re moving back upship. Do you copy this transmission, over?”
Vale tried to speak, but her throat was desert-dry, and all she could manage was a croak. The tingling aftereffect of the energy discharge was making every muscle in her body twitch.
“Copy that, sir,” she heard Dennisar say. “We’re heading to the shuttle. The commander took a shock, but her vitals are steady. She shut