Schaefer smiled after her. “Why not?” he asked no one in particular.
Together, they walked into the ship.
Schaefer had expected some sort of airlock or antechamber between the opening and the ship’s actual interior, but there didn’t seem to be any; instead, they simply walked in, as if the opening were the mouth of a cave.
Once they were inside, though, the environment abruptly changed. The air stank, a heavy, oily smell, and was thick with warm fog, reducing visibility and making it hard to breathe. The light was a dull orange-red glow that came from the red walls, walls that were completely covered in elaborate, incomprehensible patterns. Whether those patterns were machinery, or decoration, or something structural, neither Schaefer nor Ligacheva could guess.
Whatever the patterns were, they were ugly. Schaefer didn’t care to study them closely. He felt sick and dizzy enough already.
He wondered whether there were forcefields or some other device that kept the foul air in, or whether it just didn’t want to mix with Earth’s atmosphere.
”It’s FM,” he said in English, remembering something an engineer had once told him. “Fucking magic.” He looked around at the ghastly light, the oozing, roiling fog of an atmosphere, the insanely patterned walls. He peered ahead to where the curving corridor opened out into a large chamber; patterned red pillars joined floor to ceiling, while other curving passages or rounded bays opened off every side. The place was a maze, all of it awash in baleful red light and stinking mist.
”No wonder they’re such jerks,” he said. “If I spent fifteen minutes tooling around in a madhouse like this, I’d want to kill something myself.” He hefted his AK-47. “In fact, I do.”
”Wait,” Ligacheva said. “Look over there.”
”What?” Schaefer asked.
Ligacheva pointed at one of the rounded bays. Schaefer followed her as she led the way into it.
He saw, then, what had caught her eye. One section of wall here was not entirely red. It was hard to be sure, in the hideous red light, whether the pieces they were looking at were green or gray or black, but they weren’t red.
The original red wall was torn open here; to Schaefer it looked as if something had exploded, but he supposed it might simply have been ripped apart by the aliens in their efforts at repair.
And parts of the pattern had been replaced, not with more of the red substance, but with ordinary pipes and valves and circuit boards. Schaefer could see Cyrillic lettering on several of them.
”Those filthy bastards,” Ligacheva said. “The attack on the refinery, the workers slaughtered, my squad, my friends, all of them killed for this?”
”Got to give them credit,” Schaefer said calmly. “They’re resourceful. Something blew out here in the crash, or maybe caused the crash, and they needed to make an unscheduled pit stop. Your little pumping station served as their version of Trak Auto.”
”But they killed all those men for a few pieces of machinery!” Ligacheva shouted. “It’s not even anything secret, anything special just plumbing! They could have asked! They could have bartered! They could have just taken it without killing-we couldn’t have stopped them, and why would we care about junk?” She slammed the butt of her rifle against the pipes. “It’s just junk!”
Schaefer grabbed her around the waist and pulled her back. “Stop it!” he ordered. “Damn it, that’s enough!”
She struggled in his grip. “But…”
”Just shut up! There may be more of them aboard! If you want us to have a chance to do any good here, shut up before any of those things hear us!”
Ligacheva quieted, and Schaefer released her.
”Now, I admit,” he said, “that our friends here have not been on their best behavior during their visit to your country. I agree completely that before we leave their ship, we should make sure to leave them a little something to remember us by.”
”What sort of something?” Ligacheva demanded.
Schaefer hefted the pack. “Oh, a few of these toys in the right places ought to do wonders.”
Ligacheva stared at the pack for a moment, then turned to the makeshift repair job.
”Yes,” she said. “But…”
Before she could say any more, a blow from nowhere knocked both of them down. The choking mist seemed to be thicker down at floor level, and Schaefer was coughing even before the alien appeared out of nowhere and picked him up, one-handed, by the throat.
It was as big and ugly as any of the others Schaefer had ever seen. It wore no mask, presumably it had no need for one here aboard its own ship. Its yellow fingers and black claws closed on Schaefer’s neck, not tight enough to inflict serious damage, but tightly enough that it lifted him easily and inescapably.
Ligacheva came up out of the fog with her AK-47 in hand, but before she could squeeze -the trigger, in the second she took to be sure she wouldn’t hit Schaefer, the monster slapped her back with its free hand. She slammed against the wall and slumped, dazed, back down into the mist.
Schaefer struggled in the thing’s grip, but resisted the temptation to pry at its fingers. He knew these things were too strong for such a maneuver to do any good; strong as he was by human standards, he wouldn’t be able to free himself. He needed to find another way to fight back. Bare-handed, he couldn’t do anything; his AK-47 was out of reach; he needed some other weapon.
He reached back behind himself, stretching.
The creature growled at him, a grating, unearthly noise. The fingerlike outer fangs around its mouth flexed horribly, and the vertical slit of its mouth opened wide, revealing its inner teeth.
”Damn you to hell,” Schaefer said as his hands closed on a shard of the shattered red wall of the spaceship’s interior. He gripped it, felt the razorsharp edge where it had broken, and yanked at it.
It came away in his hand, and without a second’s hesitation he plunged it into the alien predator’s side.
The creature screamed in pain and flung him aside as if he were so much junk mail, tearing the makeshift dagger from his grasp.
Schaefer rolled when he landed and came up gasping but intact. He started for the broken section of wall, hoping to find another sharp fragment he could use.
”Just tell me,” he said as he watched the bellowing alien, looking for a chance to dodge past it toward the wreckage, “why Earth? Why is it always Earth? What’s wrong with the big game on Mars, or Jupiter, or the goddamn Dog Star, or whatever the hell is out there? It’s a big fucking galaxy, isn’t it? Why can’t you just…”
Then he saw the shadow in the fog behind his foe, and even before the new arrival turned off its invisibility shield, Schaefer knew he was facing a second enemy in addition to the wounded one.
Then the creature appeared, and Schaefer saw that it was carrying a corpse draped over its right shoulder-an alien corpse, the corpse of the sentry he and Ligacheva had killed out in the canyon.
”Oh, shit.”
He backed up against the broken section of wall, knowing that he was letting himself be cornered, but not knowing what else he could do. The wounded predator was staggering slightly, holding its side, but still upright; the new arrival was ignoring its injured companion and staring directly at Schaefer, but not yet moving to attack. It lifted its dead companion off its shoulder and lowered the body gently to the floor, all the while keeping its masked eyes directed straight at Schaefer.
Then the uninjured alien reached up and disconnected something from its mask; gas hissed for a few seconds. It lifted the metal mask away and revealed its ghastly face; those hideous mouth parts, looking like some unholy hybrid of fang, finger, and tentacle, were flexing in anticipation. It took a step closer to Schaefer as he groped unsuccessfully for another sharp piece of wreckage.