"Major! You all right?" the voice echoed down the metal creva.s.se. "Looks like you hit a gap in the AG."

"No s.h.i.t." Ridgeway cursed under his breath as he twisted his body in a hammock of rubber-clad cables. With every motion, water dripped in shifting streams. A loud pop cut the air just above his head and sparks showered down through the darkness like dying fireflies.

Caught your a.s.s by surprise, didn't it? Ridgeway's lip pulled back in a sneer of self-reproach. In s.p.a.ce, hitting an AG void would have extended his leap until he hit a wall or another source of gravity. But when the ship's AG failed here, the planet's gravity took over. Ridgeway had felt the sudden shift in mid-jump when the invisible force pulled his body abruptly off-course. The rest was just inertia; six hundred pounds of armored Marine didn't stop on a dime.

Sheer luck alone kept him from plowing into something lethal. As he tumbled down the gaping fissure, Ridgeway ping-ponged off the walls like a crash test dummy. Hitting an open source of high voltage could have ruined his day.

Then again, he reminded himself, hitting nothing at all could have been worse. Punching down through the ceiling of the Lobby would have really sucked. Ridgeway's brief thought took on a grimly prophetic air when he realized that he had no real idea what, if anything, was beneath him.

Another violent pop of electricity flashed somewhere to Ridgeway's left. White-orange sparks skipped like burning pac.h.i.n.ko b.a.l.l.s through the tangle of wires.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm moving," Ridgeway snarled as he pushed through a veil of cables. He peered out from the web and realized that he hung inverted, perhaps five meters above a curved metal ledge. The room beyond was too large to estimate from his current position.

With a powerful heave Ridgeway expanded the gap between the cables. A metal junction box, roughly the size of his helmet, tumbled free from the knotted ma.s.s. It dropped straight to the floor below with a loud bang, bounding once before it came to rest.

"Looks like the AG is all right down here," Ridgeway reported dryly, grunting as he twisted his upper body against the confining loops. Still another crack of voltage jumped just to the right of his head, the arc a vivid blue-white in color.

OK. That's enough of this s.h.i.t.

With his left hand, Ridgeway grabbed a fistful of thick, rubbery cable. Drawing right hand to his chest the Marine snapped out a climbing blade and swiped viciously. The strands parted in a blur and Ridgeway felt himself slide free. His firm grasp arrested his upper body's descent and allowed his feet to swing beneath him. In a fluid motion, Ridgeway opened his left hand and dropped into a cautious kneel on the balcony floor below.

With a harsh electric crunk, hundreds of lights came on as one. Ridgeway's right hand instinctively swept back where his fingers closed on a familiar grip. The carbine swung up in his grasp as he quickly backed against the nearest wall.

"You coming back up, Major?"

"Negative," Ridgeway's voice held an odd note of awe. "We've got something here."

But I'll be d.a.m.ned if I know what the h.e.l.l it is.

The walls of the room formed the curved inner surface of a huge sphere, easily a hundred meters in diameter. Ridgeway stood on the topmost of several balconies that wrapped fully around the room. The railed ledges, three in all, were evenly s.p.a.ced along the vertical height.

Much of the sweeping wall was composed of hexagonal plates, each with what appeared to be a small window set in its center. Judging from the wide hinges and heavy lock-handles, the plates were pressure-seal doors. A rectangular LCD panel was affixed above each door, some glowing brightly while others flickered or remained dark. A number of the doors hung open and many oozed a soft white vapor that crept down the sphere's inner surface with ethereal deliberation.

In the middle of the room, a pair of heavy rails ran up to the centerline, pole to pole on the sphere. Ridgeway could see streaks of lubricant gleaming black against the steely silver. The rails pa.s.sed through a heavy crane parked near the roof. The orange and black boom ended in an articulated forklift of some sort, but the appendage sported three heavy forklift blades instead of the traditional two. The opposing boom carried a sizable counterweight, presumably to balance the crane-arm at full extension. A coil of thick pneumatic line hung from the ceiling and looped lazily into the crane's motor housing.

Reversing direction, Ridgeway followed the lift rails all the way down to the floor. From his vantage point, the bottom of the sphere was a Sarga.s.so of tangled wires thick enough to daunt the most aspiring engineer. Vapor seeping down the walls coalesced amid the cables, adding to the oceanic illusion.

An island rose from this sea, a ma.s.s of electronics roughly ten meters in diameter. CRT screens grew like barnacles in haphazard cl.u.s.ters, plastered atop the dead parts of older equipment. Even here, cables snaked through every gap, black rubber eels in an artificial reef. Ridgeway guessed that parts of the haphazard construct were held together with little more than baling wire and duct tape.

"Merlin's just gonna love this," Ridgeway drawled, gazing at the abstract sculpture of electronics.

As if invoking an ancient spirit by speaking its name, a resounding metal clang marked Merlin's arrival.

"d.a.m.n," the engineer grumbled absent-mindedly as he rose to his feet, "that's one h.e.l.l of a way to--" He paused, voice dropping in tone as he scanned the sphere. "What the h.e.l.l is this?"

"d.a.m.n good question," Ridgeway replied casually, still looking down at the floor far below. "I'm counting on you to figure it out."

Ridgeway pointed down to the hummock of machinery rising from the fog. "The Island," he stated firmly, indicating the new callsign. As he uttered the words, a matching reference appeared on the TAC. "Darcy thinks someone is inbound to evac the Rimmer from someplace called the sphere. Unless there's two of these, I'd say this is a good candidate. If they have a way in, we have a way out."

He turned to Merlin. "The Island looks like a command center of some sort. We need eyes Merlin, as many as we can get. These b.a.s.t.a.r.ds may try to slip in and out on us. If they pull it off, we're screwed."

A much larger bang marked Monster's none-too-delicate arrival. St.i.tch and Taz followed suit and s.p.a.ced out along the balcony. Noting a distinct absence, Ridgeway turned to Monster. "Where's Darcy?"

"Perimeter sweep," he replied, drawing a short circle in the air with his left hand. "Got one of her voodoo feelings and went to check it out."

A curse formed, then faded, on Ridgeway's lips. He thought for a moment of calling her back, reconsidered, then dismissed the thought entirely. Unable to comprehend her expanded senses, he had little choice but to trust her judgment. Time to work with what he did understand.

He stabbed a finger at each of the balconies in descending order. "Three, Two and One. I want St.i.tch up here on Three holding high ground, Taz at the far side on Two. Merlin has the Island." Almost absently rapping Monster's chest with the back of an armored fist, Ridgeway's voice softened. "You stick with Merlin and watch his back. If something is out there, anything, I need to know yesterday."

"We're already on it," Monster barked with a sharp nod. He spun on his heels and fired a flurry of commands as the Marines scattered around the sphere's inner surface.

Ridgeway took heart in Monster's relentless enthusiasm as the broad-shouldered figure slid Navy-style down a long metal ladder to the floor. It would take the very best that every Marine had, and a d.a.m.n bit of luck besides, to pull their a.s.ses out of this. Ridgeway knew that he'd get their best. The luck worried him.

Coming full circle on his mental checklist, Ridgeway tapped a ComLink channel. "Darcy, how're we doing?" A long delay followed. "Darcy, come in."

Only a dull silence hung in reply. Ridgeway repeated the attempt across the team-wide and emergency channels to no avail. The sniper was missing from the TAC as well. Out of range, he reasoned, or behind some obstruction that blocked their transmissions.

While he was used to Darcy operating on her own, even a brief breakdown in comm gave rise to concern under these conditions. Ridgeway made a mental note of the time and set yet another stopwatch running in the back of his mind.

Drive system overload. Starvation. Darcy coming undone. Running into things that lived in frozen darkness. With a degree of morbid curiosity he wondered which timer would run out first.

Pushing the question from his mind, Ridgeway set out on a clockwise lap of Tier Three. He fired a quick wave to St.i.tch who matched his move on the far side of the same level. The medic nodded briefly in reply as the muzzle of the MP17 carved a slow, mechanical arc across the tiers below.

Due to it's position near the top of the sphere, Three was the smallest of the tiers. Ridgeway quickly walked the full circuit, examining the walls as he moved. Power-handlers and battery back-ups occupied most of the s.p.a.ce at this level. Green indicator lights pulsed all around the tier, silent testament to the restoration of power.

"Looks like the backups are maxed on Three," Ridgeway noted aloud, sharing his observations on a teamwide channel. He opened a limited visual feed that could be viewed by the others in what amounted to a small window floating in their line of vision. The technique allowed them to take part in his search while they carried out their own duties. Often, a second or third pair of eyes would catch a detail missed by the first. Ridgeway looked at another set of gauges, fully recharged as the first. "This place must have been one of the first things to come back online."

"You got that right Majah," Taz muttered in response. "The short-term reserves on these cryotubes are juiced up as well. a.s.suming they were dead to begin with, that shoulda taken some thirty-eight hours at le-- Oh, buggar!"

On reflex, Ridgeway pivoted towards the sudden shout as St.i.tch leaned over the rail, subgun angled down aggressively. Planted solidly in the clutter of the Island, Monster stood back-to-back with Merlin as the Gatling swung up to cover the balcony above.

Ridgeway bolted to a wall-hugging staircase and slid the rails on heels and palms. He hit Two on the move, his CAR at high-ready by the time he got to Taz. "What have you got?"

Taz kept his back to the balcony rail. The barrel of his own CAR pointed at a mangled cylinder door. Disgust oozed from the Aussie's voice as he said, "See for yourself."

Ridgeway followed the line of the weapon to a door that looked to have been pried open with the jaws of life. The number 2437 remained boldly legible on the damaged plate. Along the door's perimeter a thick pressure gasket hung limp and rotted. Ridgeway could see that the thick gla.s.s viewport was shattered. Crumbled fragments glittered on the deck like dusty gemstones in a smear of reddish black.

The coffin-sized compartment was unmistakable. CryoTube. The tech was older, but fundamentally Ridgeway stood before the same kind of freezer the Marines occupied on long voyages.

But if these are cryos, Ridgeway puzzled, there should be med gear, thermal showers, stuff to offset cryogenic sickness. He leaned to his left and glanced down at the Island, then up at the room-traversing crane with its three-bladed lift. Turning back to the mangled door, Ridgeway ran his fingers across one of the slots cut through every other side of the steel hexagon. A matching set of slots framed the tube itself, doubtlessly running the full length of the unit.

"Removable freezers." Ridgeway spilled the conclusion mechanically. "Insertion and extraction took place down on the Island. Pull a tube completely out of the wall and handle inserts and extractions down below." Given a large volume of pa.s.sengers, the idea had merit. Slower to be sure, but each sleeper could be handled with the utmost care.

Ridgeway gazed at the bloodstained wall. Whoever slept in tube 2437 had not been removed with care. The door had been literally ripped from its hinges. Dark bits reminiscent of leather or beef jerkey hung from the jagged metal edges.

Not leather, he realized, strips of flesh. Meat sc.r.a.ped off when some poor soul had been dragged out through the half-opened door.

An irregular piece of curved sh.e.l.l lay on the floor among the bits of broken gla.s.s. Badly stained, Ridgeway almost missed it. He knelt and carefully rocked the fragment to break it free from the crusted floor.

The smooth outer surface was covered with a random crosshatch of scratches. In contrast, the inner surface was deeply furrowed, the uneven ridges spread out in a leafy pattern. The frayed edges of the fragment looked to have been worked over with a bench grinder.

"Looks like a piece of ceramic, a bowl maybe." Ridgeway concluded, "Somebody took a dremel to it and sc.r.a.ped it all to h.e.l.l."

"It's not a bowl, it's a plate from somebody's skull." Even without the flattening effect of ComLink transmission, St.i.tch's a.s.sessment came through with the detached efficiency of someone describing a carburetor. "Probably parietal, left side, unless I miss my guess."

With a start, Ridgeway realized that he had left his video feed in transmit mode. He held the curved fragment steady between his thumb and index finger. "Take another look St.i.tch. Whatever it is, it sure isn't bone."

"I said it's a piece of somebody's skull Major, I never said it was original equipment." The medic's tone remained clinical. "It's an artificial plate, probably some kind of biopolycarbonate. See the branching indents along the inner surface?"

Ridgeway flipped the piece and looked at the pattern of twisting organic depressions. "Yeah, I see 'em."

"They're called meningeal grooves. They make room for the blood vessels that run along the outer surface of the brain. Cranial reconstruction has come a long way from the days of metal plates. For a while the big thing was hydroxyapat.i.te, a combination of calcium phosphates. It's a major component of human bone and got around some of the rejection problems. Ultimately though, we gave that up in favor of laser-cured polymer extrusions manufactured right off a 3D scan of the patient's head. That's what you're holding now."

Ridgeway looked closely at the damaged fragment as St.i.tch continued. "They don't machine those things at all. Each one is built up, a particle at a time, using the 3D model as a template. By the time it comes off the cradle, there's not much to do but sterilize it and drop it into place. That's why the grooves on the inside have such an organic look, they're modeled from an actual scan of the patient's brain."

The oily taste of revulsion began to form in Ridgeway's mouth. "So why is this thing chewed all to h.e.l.l?"

St.i.tch grimly confirmed his commander's insight. "I think you hit the nail on the head Major. If I was making a forensic a.n.a.lysis, I'd say that the damage looks consistent with teeth of some kind sc.r.a.ping the meat from the bone."

Taz took another step back, fingers flexing on the forestock of his CAR. "So you're saying that something dragged this poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d out of cryo and ate him like a frozen dinner?"

"It sure looks that way." The medic's voice remained stoic, but Ridgeway knew St.i.tch well enough to recognize the curtness that masked emotion. The evidence suggested a ghastly reality. The helplessness of anyone in cryogenic stasis had long been established as a core taboo, even in times of war. f.u.c.king with somebody on ice just wasn't done.

Ridgeway looked at the sc.r.a.p in his hand. Gnawing on their frozen brain was way out of bounds.

"b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l Majah, we've gotta frag these f.u.c.king b.a.s.t.a.r.ds."

Drawing a deep breath through clenched teeth, Ridgeway gripped the mangled piece of skull. He turned towards Taz and jabbed the younger Marine in the chest. "The only thing we have to do is get the h.e.l.l out of here. I don't understand how a ship warps into a planet or what they woke up to when they got here. All I know is it's my job to get five Marines home. My war is with the roof of this cave."

Taz flexed his shoulders once and turned away from the CryoTube and its grisly remains. "s.h.i.t Majah, I know. It's just that..."

Ridgeway's prodding hand opened and settled on the young man's shoulder. "I know, I know," he leaned in, his words little more than a forced whisper. "I'd like nothing more than to fry whoever did this." Ridgeway paused as Taz slowly nodded in concurrence. "But right now I've got the lives of five Marines to account for and that's the mission."

The young Marine visibly settled as his CAR rocked once more to a firm port arms. "Rojah that sir." But as armored fingers flexed repeatedly on the pistol grip, Ridgeway could see that Taz was far from comfortable letting the issue end there.

"All right," Ridgeway spoke firmly, his command voice returning, "head to the far side of this tier and stay one-eighty from me. St.i.tch, you stay ninety degrees off our axis on Three, no bunching up. When I roll, we all roll, got it?"

"On the way," Taz growled as he trotted quickly around the tier. St.i.tch flashed a thumbs-up and adjusted his own position.

As a cold resolve settled upon him, Ridgeway quietly set the fragment inside the open tube. He turned away from the mangled door and advanced around the ring in a clockwise direction. St.i.tch and Taz matched him step for step, guns at ready.

Ridgeway moved carefully, scanning the walls with care. Tier Two was darker, the shadows of upper tiers splayed across its walls.

As he walked, Ridgeway could see that literally thousands of CryoTubes made up the wall at the Tier Two level. Tier One looked much the same. Making a quick estimate of tube density per ten meter section of deck, Ridgeway calculated the total at roughly eight thousand cryogenic suspension chambers.

Eight thousand. A ripple of discomfort crept up Ridgeway's spine. How many of the sleeping pa.s.sengers ended up as undigested bits scattered across the floor?

The likely answer grew all the more obvious as he completed his circuit around the tier. While only one in ten showed signs of forced opening, sections of Tier Two looked like a charnel house. False teeth and gla.s.s eyes were just some of the inedible parts found scattered on bloodstained floor. Small broken crowns gave mute witness to the fact that even teeth had been consumed. A stainless steel hip joint lay beside the gnawed remains of a pacemaker. Ridgeway turned to the rail and breathed deep, trying to fight down the bile that bubbled at the back of his throat.

Gone, all gone. An old sense of tragedy clawed at his heart.

Ridgeway had slogged hip-deep in bogs of mud and broken bodies at Chungan Swamp. Soldiers who had signed up for the job, who went into a fight with their heads up and a gun in their hands His jaw clenched painfully as he looked back at the detritus that littered the floor. But this wasn't combat, and these weren't soldiers.

Something beyond the scale of the tragedy festered in Ridgeway's mind. His imagination grappled with the thought of being torn from the all-numbing coc.o.o.n of cryogenic sleep. Just the shock of sudden chamber decompression could prove fatal. He had seen all too well what could happen to a man when his CryoTube came apart. It wasn't pretty.

But with some eight thousand attempts, Ridgeway reasoned, a fair number must have survived extraction. They would have lurched violently into awareness as their minds struggled to reconnect senses with conscious thought.

The sense of hearing was always the first for Ridgeway. His longest stint in cryo had been eighteen months, a year and a half of suspended animation in which he did not age or think or dream. His first memory of retrieval was a distant hum and the clinking of metal. Voices drifted down to his brain, questions he could not understand. Then warmth, the dull realization that he was immersed in hyperbaric fluid that suffused his cells with both heat and oxygen. Light followed, flickering blobs of brilliance and shadow that resolved slowly into human forms, familiar faces that smiled and spoke in comforting tones.

His eyes flashed once more to one of the mangled doors. A woman's face stared silently from a small rectangular screen set into the face of the door. Brown hair, hazel eyes, a harmless face that probably went unnoticed in even a small group. Sherry Chalmers, age thirty-seven. PhD in biophysics.

What was the last thing you saw Sherry Chalmers? Ridgeway's gut felt like it would twist its way into his heart. Did you get lucky and just die in the black void of stasis, or did you fight your way back far enough to realize the crunching sound that filled your ears was something chewing on your bones?

"Dammit," Ridgeway spat as he punched the hanging door. Hinges cracked and the heavy metal hexagon fell to the floor with a loud clang. The snap and clatter of Marine weapons echoed from points all around the sphere. Dan Ridgeway could only stare at the empty tube.

Too late for you Chalmers, too late for anybody with the s.h.i.t luck to have ended up in one of these frozen food lockers.

"Two hours, two centuries, civvies waiting on me are in trouble." He regretted the muttered words as he spoke them, rejecting the illogical self-pity from which they arose. Whatever happened here took place long ago. He could help his Marines here and now, he could get them home.

Still, he growled with quiet savagery, let so much as one of these f.u.c.kers show its face... Ridgeway gripped the forestock of the CAR so hard that it creaked. He would show them how armed humans fought.

"Major," Merlin's voice popped over the ComLink. "I think you oughta see this."

"On the way." Ridgeway turned, thankful to be drawn away from the remaining bits of Sherry Chalmers. In a rush he vaulted the rail on Tier Two and clattered down the inwardly curved wall to the tier below. A single makeshift ramp extended from the edge of the sphere to the coastline of the Island. Oversized floor plates had been scavenged from somewhere and placed in drawbridge-fashion across the moat of cables. Judging from the angry hum that resonated up through the fog, the addition was mandatory.

With Gatling poised, Monster stepped aside and allowed Ridgeway to pa.s.s. As they brushed shoulder-to-shoulder on the footbridge, the larger Marine's deep baritone muttered in Ridgeway's ear. "The s.h.i.t just keeps getting weirder."

Great, Ridgeway thought as he acknowledged Monster's comment with only a curt nod.

Turning sideways, Ridgeway shimmied between two monoliths of angle-iron and electronics. Hubs, routers and miles of cable formed a thick web that filled the voids between dozens of video screens in each wide rack.

Merlin sat at what was clearly one of the original consoles, although two complete bridges of additional equipment had been layered on top. From the center of the console, Ridgeway could see fifty, maybe seventy-five monitors. Screens of every description hung crowded along the framework.

Merlin didn't look up from his work. His fingers tapped in a furious blur on the keyboard as he spoke. "Well, we're d.a.m.n sure at the center of things. Half the ship has been jury-rigged into here. It's like they didn't want to have to leave the room, but your guess is as good as mine as to why. I did figure out one thing though; n.o.body is running around making repairs on this tub."

The statement struck Ridgeway as non-sequitor. "I don't follow; you said that you didn't--"

"Not somebody," Merlin cut in, emphasizing the last syllable, "some thing. Well, more like a few trillion things. Look."

An armored finger pointed to a monitor on the first overhead bridge. It showed a room filled with large air-handlers. Sparks flickered intermittently from an unseen short above one of the turbine-style blowers. The overhead lights stuttered occasionally, but maintained enough light to see the room clearly. Nothing appeared to move.

"Empty right?"