A city without citizens, Monster thought uneasily, wondering yet again what had happened to her crew.

According to Ridgeway, the question of when had emerged to rival the question of what. Merlin's theory about the stalact.i.tes opened a lot of questions. There was an unmistakable antiquity about the ship, a sense of permanence as it lay here in it's frozen grave. Monster didn't have to work hard to imagine the ship sitting here when the planet was young.

Monster brusquely dismissed the line of thought. The last thing he needed was to get prosaic about the bizarre situation. Life broke down into scientific fact and tactical reality; nothing else. Still, the uneasiness lingered.

Monster found himself less disturbed by what he could see than what he couldn't. Nameless gut reaction had become an intuition upon which Monster had long come to rely. That intuition told him something was wrong about this place, even more wrong than the obvious. Although he'd never admit it, the ship gave him the creeps.

Shifting his weight, he stared down the long canted hall. In the broken light, the interior was a frozen study in overlapping greys and blacks. Nothing moved except the lingering curls of smoke in the air.

He glanced back at Merlin and unexpectedly felt a quiet flash of pride. The young Marine was busting his a.s.s under s.h.i.t conditions; no complaints, no excuses. That was the Marine way, and that made it Monster's way.

"Any less would be human," Monster recited the fragment of his own mantra, "and humans could be beaten." The core belief that Marines were more than human was hammered into them from day one, an innate conviction that allowed them to persevere when lesser men gave up. Set aside all technology, Monster believed with conviction, and the man who wins is the one who simply refuses to die.

Monster had been born to the role. His size and strength quickly established him as a superman in the eyes of new recruits, but there was far more to the role than physical presence. It demanded discipline and a can-do att.i.tude, consistency in a world where things changed in the thud of a bullet. Monster loved it like nothing else.

Merlin popped up from his work and his head swiveled through a four-point check of the room.

Monster grinned. Perimeter sweep on regular intervals, just like clockwork. Getting so buried in one task that you lose track of what's around you, tunnel vision, put a lot of good men in the ground. Taking a page from his own book, Monster scanned the corridor once more.

Nothing but darkness loomed down the aft hallway, irregularly-s.p.a.ced lights dimming along the gradual fade to black. Swinging his attention forward, Monster swept the length of the cluttered wall just in time to see the Lobby doors smashed from their frames in a thunder of crushed metal.

"s.h.i.t!" Lurching back into the doorframe, Monster's right arm snapped down and engaged the barrel cl.u.s.ter of the Gatling. Safeties disengaged with an electronic click as he finished the draw stroke and brought the machinegun to target.

A ma.s.s of tangled wreckage now obscured the Lobby doorway. Pieces of angle-iron and grate steel lay strewn across the floor. Amid the wall of debris, Monster recognized a large yellow number 7 hanging askance beyond the door.

With a metallic sc.r.a.pe, Merlin slid like a base runner through the door, pa.s.sing beneath the Gatling as he skidded into the hallway. The engineer's CAR was shouldered, a familiar ascending whine crisp in the cold air.

"Aft," Monster barked, directing Merlin to watch their flank. The collapse was likely caused by one of his own Marines, but a diversion wasn't out of the question. With his TAC scrambled, Monster had no way to know. As if in confirmation of his worst fear, something shook within the ma.s.s of metal.

"Major!" Monster barked across the comm.

"I copy, go." The wreckage shook violently as Ridgeway's voice replied. A piece of metal tube rang like an over-struck tuning fork.

"Need a Team Sitrep Major," Monster's muzzle snapped to a piece of vertical diamondplate steel that trembled with increasing fervor. "I need it now."

"St.i.tch is here with the Rimmer, Darcy's on recon up top and Taz is on patrol--"

"s.h.i.t." Monster yanked the Gatling a few degrees off-target. "Where?"

"Aft, then down your way, why?"

Bolts along the edge of the gridded metal panel snapped and skittered across the floor like chrome dice. The plate dropped out of sight with a guillotine blur, revealing a crushed limb. Pieces of metal, slick with blood, gleamed in the dark recess.

"Dammit Taz!" Monster's outburst spilled out across the open comm as he bolted forward. He slammed into the ma.s.s of metal and drove with both legs. "Told you..." he snarled as he heaved up against the wreckage, "to watch the bridges."

Metal groaned and the framework shifted upward. Monster dropped his shoulder beneath the rising lever and threw the full strength of man and armor into the lift. Sheet metal tore with a warbling pig-squeal.

"Crikey Gunny, what the h.e.l.l are you on about?" The Aussie's voice on the Com was clear and calm, tinged only by a note of irritation.

Monster froze, the sudden silence broken only by a dull metal creak. His gaze fell to the crushed, bleeding limb just inches from his knee as he spoke in a husky whisper. "Where are you?"

"Thirty-nine starboard aft, right where I'm b.l.o.o.d.y well supposed to be. What the h.e.l.l did I do now?"

The dark shape lay still, oozing a reddish fluid that Monster had first taken for blood. Closer now, he could see a metallic sheen to the liquid as it dripped in thick clots down an erratic staircase of broken metal. Buried in leathery skeins lay a mangled chain of cables and pistons. Monster felt the tension drain from his body.

s.h.i.t. Just f.u.c.king machinery, he thought with a sigh. Not one of my Marines. He shifted his stance and began to lower the weight supported on his shoulders.

The broken thing s.n.a.t.c.hed violently and drew back by half its length, twisting like a metal snake. In the dim light Monster caught the flash of curved steel blades that flexed finger-like in the shadows before the limb thrashed once more and disappeared, yanked back through the far side of the heap.

Monster lunged back and the pile fell to the floor with a smash. Through the crush of collapsing steel, Monster could hear an erratic pattern of footfalls rapidly vanishing into the distance.

CHAPTER 20.

Jenner gingerly clamped a flexible water bottle between his palms. The three remaining digits on his left hand were too tender to be of any use. He raised the bottle to his mouth, careful to avoid brushing the fissure in his lower lip, another piece of meat lost to blackened death.

Squeezing the bottle between his flipper-like hands, Jenner closed his eyes and let the cool droplets trickle down his throat. He focused on every swallow, hoping to stave off the dark nightmare images that played through his mind.

A metallic clang from across the room caused Jenner to flinch and the translucent bottle slipped from his grasp. It fell to the floor, bounced twice and rolled away.

s.h.i.t, Jenner cursed inwardly, realizing that the ongoing noise was just the doctor rummaging through a box of equipment. He felt a short wave of relief. The doctor didn't scare him-- not like the other one, the one with the h.e.l.lish eyes.

Jenner shuddered, a tremor in his guts that spread quickly to his hands. He wrapped his arms tightly about himself and tried to will away the shakes. Despite his best efforts, Jenner's mind reached unbidden to the amber-eyed Marine.

Killer's eyes, Jenner told himself.

All the Marines struck him as hard characters. h.e.l.l, even the girl is scary, Jenner admitted, but Taz was frightening in a way that Jenner had never known.

He wants me dead, and not just the way that a soldier wants to take the fight to the enemy. Jenner mulled dismally, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d is looking forward to killing me like a little kid looks forward to opening a new toy.

Despite his abysmal state of mind, Jenner was surprised to find that dying itself had lost most of its menace. His recent memory was a twisted blur of cold and suffering. Nightmares hung just behind his closed eyelids, fitful dreams of drowning in living quicksand.

He wondered if his mind had suffered more damage than his body. Even in the worst of times, his grasp on reality, no matter how s.h.i.tty that reality was, had always seemed solid. That had been before the voices began, dark mutterings in a language he didn't know but somehow understood.

The voices brought images of things that turned his stomach, scenes that played out like distant memories. Jenner couldn't begin to grasp what it all meant. Mystery voices, hallucinations, to Jenner they were all signs of a collapsing mind.

As a matter of self defense, Jenner tried to rivet his attention on the world around him, to focus on what was real. Briggs was dead, that much was real. The Truck was gone as well, blown all to h.e.l.l. The exercise was not helping -- everything he knew was gone.

h.e.l.l, he whimpered inwardly, half of me is gone as well.

Jenner vomited the first time he saw himself in a small metal mirror. Lacking a nose, both ears and half a lip, his head looked like an animated skull. Wide chunks of his scalp were missing, flesh tones visible between irregular patches of brown hair.

I look like a chopped car, he reflected miserably, wheels missing, doors gone, hood ripped off. How many of the cars that he swiped as a kid ended up stripped to the frame? His fate struck him like some kind of cheap, karmic joke. Dying would simply bring this whole s.h.i.tty story to a close. f.u.c.ked up life, f.u.c.ked up career-- now I'm just plain f.u.c.ked altogether.

"Hey."

Jenner lurched at the sudden sound, arms flapping up to curl around his head. Wide eyes peered between crossed forearms at the fabric strip on the figure's chest that read REMUZZI, but the Marines called him St.i.tch.

"Take it easy." The Marine's voice held no trace of warmth, but he seemed genuine in his desire to keep Jenner alive; that alone set him apart from Taz.

"Shorry," Jenner slurred, lowering his arms. "Uh, hows.h.i.t goin?" The attempt at smalltalk was feeble and his missing teeth and lip conspired to give him a pathetic, wet lisp.

The only reply was a bright penlight beam in Jenner's left eye. Sudden brilliance caused him to blink rapidly as the beam jumped to his right eye. Jenner tried to hold still, having no desire to draw the medic's ire.

If the effort was noticed at all, St.i.tch gave no outward sign. The medic proceeded mechanically through a series of examinations, listening to Jenner's heart and lungs, peering into the gaping skull-holes that had at one point been garnished with ears and a nose. Jenner yelped when St.i.tch pinched several of the pink finger-nubs that transitioned slowly from compressed-yellow back to a normally irritated pink.

"Pretty shcrewed," Jenner slurred, looking at the remains of his right hand.

"Yeah," St.i.tch nodded, his attention fixed on his task. "Hope you didn't spend a lot on piano lessons."

To his surprise, Jenner broke a brief, wry grin, his first in a long time. The no-bulls.h.i.t att.i.tude was oddly rea.s.suring. "I heard you guysshtalking about the..." he paused and tipped his head towards the table, "about the machine. 'Shupposed to be shome kinda miracle."

"I don't know about miracles," St.i.tch replied as he sc.r.a.ped a small bit of Jenner's skin into a shallow gla.s.s dish filled with something that looked like jell-o. "But it's the d.a.m.nest thing I've ever seen."

"Sho what went wrong?" Jenner asked, wriggling the stubs on his right hand.

"That's what I'm trying to figure out." St.i.tch prepped a syringe, a process Jenner knew all too well. "The nanites, that's the little--"

"Bugsh?"

"Yeah, only they're not bugs, they're machines. Robots really, about the size of a human cell. No batteries, probably to minimize size. My best guess is that they convert body heat or run off myoelectric current."

Jenner self-consciously wondered if he looked as clueless as he felt. The medic might as well have been speaking Martian. Jenner's brow wrinkled as he tried to follow along.

St.i.tch must have noted the strain etched on Jenner's face because the discussion down-shifted abruptly. "Think of the table as a camera. It takes a photo of you, well, more like an X-ray. That tells it what shape you're in. Then it looks at your DNA; that tells it what you should look like if you were healthy."

The concept wasn't all that tough, Jenner thought as he watched the needle slide into his arm. He listened quietly as the clear syringe filled with a ruddy red fluid, noting what looked like tiny silver flecks in his own blood.

"The nanites can move stuff from one place to the next and weld it back together. If you get a whole bunch of 'em working together you can patch up a lot of damage." The medic placed a small adhesive gauze disk over the puncture wound and pressed firmly. "What the little suckers can't do is make living tissue from nothing. You lost whole pieces of meat--"

"Like fingersh." Jenner interjected, once more flexing a maimed hand in the air.

"Yeah," St.i.tch said with a short nod that might have held a trace of sympathy. "The nanites could only pull so much from the rest of your body before the salvage op started to compromise other systems. You got back maybe ten, twelve percent of what you lost, but that's all the surplus material your scrawny a.s.s had to spare."

"Shoulda eaten a shteak for my last meal," Jenner muttered sourly, "maybe a gutful of meat woulda got me another finger or two."

St.i.tch paused in the midst of transferring the blood sample to a small stainless steel device. "Huh," he muttered as his eyes tracked back toward the table. "There's a thought."

A furrow creased Jenner's disfigured face, as close to a scowl as he could manage. "s.h.i.tloada good that doesh me now," he spat, left hand raised to his face. He fought back a rising sense of dispair as finger stubs gently brushed across cratered nostrils.

St.i.tch didn't appear to notice. The gla.s.s vial in his hand tapped slowly on the stainless steel tray. "Might work," he said aloud. "Hit of midazolam would put you under." He looked down at the vial in his hand, absently tumbling the cylinder. "Yeah..."

As though he snapped out of a trance, St.i.tch blinked and looked up at Jenner. "Course we're kinda short on steak dinners and I don't think anybody delivers down here." The medic gave another short shrug, "b.u.mmer luck."

"Only luck I got." The comment escaped Jenner's lips without a hint of exaggeration. The question that followed slipped out before he had a chance to reconsider. "You guysh gonna kill me?"

The medic's eyes snapped around, dark eyes that softened as he stood quietly wiping the syringe with a piece of cloth. "Look, we may be harda.s.ses, but we don't kill people for no reason."

"Yeah, s...o...b..dy oughta tell that ashole Taz."

The medic's eyes hardened. "If I were you," he growled, voice low, "I'd keep my mouth shut around Taz."

"Why? What the h.e.l.l did I ever do to him?"

"We've all lost friends to Rimmers, some take it more personally than others. When you put on the uniform, you put on the history."

"That'sh bulls.h.i.t, I never hurt any--"

St.i.tch cut him off, a stiff index finger snapping up to the gap formerly occupied by Jenner's nose. "Look, stupid, read my lips: no-body-cares." The medic emphasized the syllable as though talking to a small child. "If you've got any brains left, you'll keep your yap shut and ride this out. As far as I'm concerned you're an injured POW. That means you get my best treatment until you do something to jeopardize our safety."

Like what, slap you to death? Jenner felt weak and pitiful as he looked down at his ruined hands. Choosing only to nod his head, he remained silent.

"Good. So here's how it plays. If we don't find a way out of here we're all gonna die, you included. If you know anything about this boat or how it got down here, it could go a long way towards getting all of our a.s.ses back to the surface."

"Boat?" Jenner's head swung up and c.o.c.ked over to one side. He blinked hard, trying not to appear lost as he groped for something intelligent to say. "Ish that why everything ish leaning?"

St.i.tch looked him squarely in the eyes as if trying to divine truth in a swirl of tea-leaves. Then the lanky Marine looked down at the instrument in his hands and sighed quietly. "Yeah, something like that."

Jenner gave a sudden start as the Sickbay door opened with a hiss. Four armored figures lumbered into the room, their feet clinging to the angled floor with reptilian surety. A sense of urgency crawled up Jenner's spine as his gaze settled on the word TAZ emblazoned on an armored breastplate.

Survival instinct gnawed at the back of Jenner's thinking. His ability to avoid contact was limited, and at some point he be stuck alone with the surly Aussie. Getting away from the Marines became increasingly critical in Jenner's mind.

He looked across the Sickbay to the table. As the medic's words played back through his mind, a glimmer of distant hope began to form.

CHAPTER 21.

Razor-sharp crosshairs tracked slowly along the heavy chain, each link a flattened oval of grey steel nearly a foot long. Ice coated its length, the hazy crystalline surface clearly visible through the telescopic sight.

Small digits in the top center of Darcy's vision read 467m, the precise distance to the chain. A laser rangefinder served as just one piece of the complex weaponsight package. As range to target changed, the visible image area shifted to maintain a point of impact in the center of the reticle. Gone were the days of dialing in range and windage on scope turrets, or calculating holdover using black three-quarter mil dots s.p.a.ced evenly along the crosshairs. Technology had given the mainstream sniper a tremendous edge in point-and-shoot engagement.

Anything but mainstream, Darcy relied on skill and knowledge over the infinite layers of gadgetry that forced its way onto the battlefield. "Gimmicks fail," she muttered with a faint smile, "trust your training." The axiom had been hammered into her brain throughout sniper school and remained a centerpoint of Darcy's existence.

Sliding her view down the ma.s.sive hydraulic claw, Darcy absorbed and categorized details great and small. Although a solid-state drive stored digital reference images, retrieving a specific file could take time. Things in her mind were instantly available.