It was Funboy who first noticed the broken windows. "Skully, are you seeing what I'm seeing?" He pointed to the openings along the ship. "Air Force Six has been compromised. The windows are busted."

The windows were supposed be capable of withstanding incredible pressures of low-space travel and resistant to bomb blasts. The glass was supposed to be tougher than steel.

"An RPG couldn't penetrate that glass," said Skully.

"Something obviously did," said Meade.

Juggler advanced toward the ship, and noted that the entry door was smashed inward, the metal twisted and warped on its hinges. "Jesus," he whispered.

"This ain't right," whispered Meade.

Funboy and Skully agreed, so everyone approached prudently with their senses on high alert.

Meade took the steps quietly, his footfalls too soft to be heard, with the rest of the team following. Skully took the rear while Meade cleared the way.

The interior was vast and once luxurious. Broken glass littered the floor, the upholstery on the chairs was torn and ripped, as if they had been slashed and raked at, and the walls bore the grooves of claw marks.

The team fanned out, creating a skirmish line.

And then they advanced looking through the sights of their weapons, the points pivoting from one side to the other, searching for targets.

But there were none.

Beneath their feet glass crunched.

"Notice something about the glass?" Funboy asked.

"Yeah." It was Meade. "It's was broken from the outside in."

The closer they neared the cockpit, the stronger the scent of blood and copper.

The door was closed. And badly dented.

"You getting that whiff?" Meade asked Skully.

"Smells like a slaughter," he answered. Whenever they went to the Wastelands to take care of business by butchering the savages, the aftermath always smelled the same, like blood and copper.

Meade pressed his ear against the door.

Silence.

Then he fell back. "Nothing," he whispered.

Skully nodded. "Armor-plated door."

"Something tried to get in," Funboy murmured ever so softly.

"Get us inside," Skully ordered.

"Copy that." Funboy slung his weapon over his shoulder, reached into his side pack, removed several small Semtex pads the size of silver dollars, placed them carefully along the diamond-studded steel by approximating where the inside hinges to the cockpit would be, and then cautioned the team to stand back.

He removed a small controller, lifted the safety cap, and depressed the button.

The hinged side of the door went up as a muffled whump as waves of the concussion's blast rippled throughout the cabin. Smoke filled the area, but quickly cleared, leaving a gaping hole in the wall.

Everyone raised their weapons and moved forward, the cloud acting as a thin veil to hide something within. But when they entered the cockpit they saw what Schott was talking about.

The pilot rested on the floor with his abdomen split wide and his entrails missing; the vacancy was left so hollow that the column of his backbone showed. Wreathed around the pilot's seat like garland were ropes of the man's bowels. Meat from his arms and legs were missing. As was his nose, eyes and the flesh of his cheeks, the pilot having been picked clean to the bone.

"My God," Meade stated disbelievingly. He'd seen bodies brutalized before, but nothing like this. "What the Hell are we up against, Skully?"

Even Skully didn't know, but he knew who did. He looked out the cockpit window and saw Schott on his knees with his hands on his head. "Not sure," he answered. "But we're about to find out."

They headed to the lower compartment beneath the docking bays. The entire area was glassed-in, giving everyone within the Force Elite an uneasy feeling as the universe showed all around them with no safety net below, just a glass floor they knew was there but couldn't be seen.

They walked along the catwalk until they reached the computer podium at the end. Schott began to boot the system.

"You said they were everywhere," Skully opened up. "How many approximately?"

"I have no way of knowing," said Schott. "But I do know this. There's a Hell of a lot more of them than there are of you."

The picture then grew from a centered mote on the screen to a full image. With a few tap of the buttons, Schott was able to bring up prerecorded images. He stood back from the monitor, pointing to the screen. "There you go. Have fun."

Team members congregated around the unit, watching, their heads shaking in disbelief, their minds unable to register the reality of what was playing out before their eyes.

"This is a joke, right?" asked Funboy.

"Nope," Schott stated without feeling. "I assure you, this is quite real."

Shapes and figures bounded about with incredible agility, leaping farther and higher than any human was capable of performing, and moving with fleeting speed. Shadowy shapes moved in and out of the red glow of burning light, casting enough illumination to reveal that they were at least human to a degree. Their limbs appeared as thin as broomsticks beneath decaying cloth that hung over them like drapery. On some, the burial clothes had rotted until the fabric appeared as gossamer thin as gauze.

Faces were ruined, the flesh had peeled away to reveal polished bone and exposed jawlines. Eyes were either missing or filmed over, the milky sheen providing a cold and icy effect to them, and fingers appeared dangerously long and keen, the skin having dried up and shrunk until the hands appeared like formidable weapons close to the sharp tines of a pitchfork.

"I'm not seeing this," uttered Meade. "This is not happening." He turned to Schott. "Is this a download from an old movie? One of those slasher-flicks from two centuries ago?"

"Check the time stamp on the lower right. You'll get your answer."

Meade did. The time registered seventy-five minutes ago.

And then the image froze. It was the moment Schott performed the hard shut down.

"I couldn't watch anymore," Schott said lowly.

Skully sighed. And he thought. Then: "Can you get images of what's happening on the upper levels from here?"

"Not from this computer. No."

"Is there a computer above us that can?"

He nodded. "Several. All you have to do is get to the fourth level. There's a mainframe station that can bring up every level on the ship."

"We can contact Earth from there?"

"No. That you'd have to do from the comm center."

"And where's that?"

"On the seventeenth level. One floor below the Observatory."

Skully stepped aside as if to give Schott a wide berth. "After you," he told him.

"After me what?" Schott appeared shocked.

"We need someone to navigate us through this ship. And guess what? You're it."

Schott began to shake his head. "I'm not going up there. Are you kidding me? Especially with those things running around. Not only no, but Hell no."

Skully raised the mouth of his weapon and jabbed it directly into Schott's gut, causing the engineer to grunt. "Tell you what. I'm going to give you a choice. You come with us and take the chance that we'll get you through this . . . or I'll kill you right here."

Schott looked around. "You're going to shoot a gun when we're surrounded by glass?"

Skully lowered his weapon. "All right, then." He removed a Ka-Bar combat knife from its sheath and put the knife's edge along Schott's throat. "How's this? Better?"

Schott swallowed. "Please," he said. "I just want to get out of here."

"So do we all, Mr. Schott-engineer extraordinaire for Mausoleum Twenty Sixty-Nine." He let the words hang for a moment. Then: "Choose."

"Do I really have a choice?"

"Absolutely. I just gave you two of them. Live or die. There's no in between."

"You'll keep me alive?"

"You're no good to me dead."

Schott closed his eyes, then nodded. I'll do it.

Skully sheathed his knife. "Very good, Mr. Schott. Wise choice. Now lead the way, and get my team to the right level."

"Aren't you going to give me a weapon?"

Skully offered a cocky grin. "We, Mr. Schott, we are your weapon . . . Now lead the way."

He did.

Chapter Thirty-Two.

Somehow it knew that it had to go up. It didn't know why other than it was being driven to do so. It wasn't about hunger or the need to feed. It was about seeking something unknown, to solve a mystery as to why its drive was far greater than its need to curb its painful hunger.

Its mind was a jumble of memories, unclear memories, memories of no true significance, just a scattering of loose fragments that made no sense. In its mind's eye it saw an infant, a girl so pretty. Then the infant became a young child, a quantum leap in memory, and she called out to her: 'mother' she said.

Mother.

It moaned. Then it reached a hand ceilingward as if reaching for something unattainable. Then in a moment of lucidity it spoke a single word, something of meaning that would come and go the moment it issued the word from its lips.

It said: "Daughter."

Then the moment was gone, a mental clip that quickly faded. Yet its olfactory senses told it that something of unknown origin was making its way to it.

So it waited.

In life the behemoth was a brutal savage, one who likened himself to be a man of violent means when he was an athlete who fought in the caged ring with his only weapons being his hands and feet. He was a king and a hero to the people of the Fields, besting his opponents with smashing blows and ruthless kicks that bordered on cruelty.

And men romanced fantasies and wanted to be him while women wanted to be with him, which meant that the world was his to take.

He had reigned for years, taking anabolic steroids to such a high amount that his features changed, such as his brow, which took on a simian slope to it that was derived more by chemical evolution rather than by ancestral inheritance. His muscles ballooned to supernatural sizes with his immensity becoming an intimidating factor in the ring. His eyes were dark and raven in color, making them appear without pupils or without any semblance of humanity-completely cold and fathomless.

But then the effects of chemical abuse eventually caught up with him as the whites of his eyes yellowed, and great pain subsisted in his side.

His liver was failing.

Doctors could do nothing for him, and within weeks of the diagnosis, he was dead.

So he was buried onboard Mausoleum 2069 per the demands of his estate, which nearly bled the funds completely dry and leaving loved ones with next to nothing.

No one attended his funeral.

When it came to inside the darkness of its tomb, it had no concept of who or what it was, only that it was instinctively driven to survive. Its massive arms reached out and felt the closed-in walls of its cradle, and with mighty thrusts of its feet, smashed the marble wallplate free.

Its bonds had been broken.

And then it hunted.

When it came upon the guard in the corridor, it received snippets of memory-of times when it was inside the ring relishing moments of victory and the kill. So it took away the guard's life with the cold compassion of a machine, the act telling it that killing was what it was meant to do.

But it did not feed on his body like the others. Its need to kill outweighed its need to eat, so it discarded the body by tossing it aside, allowing the underlings within the shadows to amass and devour the bounty of its kill.

And then it cried out in a primal scream that was so loud and long, that the surrounding walls trembled against the resonance of its call.