Time blurred for Maddox even as he fought to remain awake to see what would happen.
Oh! What was this?
Maddox saw a vast shape gliding through the interstellar night. Blue lights dotted the vessel, showing the twin disc areas.
It’s here. The sentinel has come to investigate. Does the starship wonder about our so-called corpses?
The giant warship slowed. A section in one of the large discs slid open. Light poured from it. Then something thin slid out. An alien shuttle—if that’s what it was—began to nose toward them.
Maddox strove to stay awake to see this marvel, but he was losing the fight. What would the alien craft do to them? He almost overrode the medikit to give him the stim now. An instinct warned him that would be a deadly idea.
I’ll trust the geniuses, Professor Ludendorff and Doctor Rich. I hope they guessed right. I’m too young to die. I want to live. I want to defeat the New Men…
Maddox’s eyelids flickered. He felt groggy despite the apprehension weighing on his chest.
Why am I feeling so—?
With a start, he realized he’d heard a scream of pure agony. That’s what had focused his lazy thoughts. It sounded like Doctor Rich.
Maddox strove to open his eyes, to wake up. Another scream put goosebumps on his arms. By a sleepy force of will, he lifted his eyelids as if they were lead shutters. The sight horrified him.
Doctor Rich lay on a lumpy upright pad with tubes stuck in her body. Blood surged through the tubes. He guessed the life essences pumped out of her body.
Maddox made a croaking noise of outrage. The blood pumped into a container that was rapidly filling.
Even as he watched, thin flexible cables attached themselves to Doctor Rich. They jolted her with electricity or something similar. She screamed once more. Blue webs of energy snaked across her body, making her arch upward. A hat of some kind sat on her head. Cables led from it to a pulsating bank on the nearest wall. No, on the wall was a mass of what looked like alien flesh with quivering nodes and more cables or tentacles slowly waving in the air.
With an inarticulate bellow, Maddox strove to move his arms. He could not. A cool portion of his mind forced him to look down. Crisscrossing bands of alien material strapped him in place.
A fierce and feminine roar of determination caused Maddox to look to his left. Meta strained against the bands holding her down. Her muscles were rigid with strain with veins popping up from her skin. Then, one after another, the bands around her body snapped off.
“Free me!” Maddox shouted. “Get me out of here!”
Like a wild beast, Meta leaped to him. By her floating movement, it was clear she was weightless. Meta crashed against his pad, her knees striking his chest, knocking the wind out of him. As he gasped to breathe in the smoky atmosphere, she intertwined her fingers around a thick band across his pectorals. With a heave of strength, she ripped it loose. She did it again and again, tearing off the other bands, freeing him.
As Maddox sucked down air, the most bloodcurdling scream of all erupted from Dana Rich.
In a fluid motion, acting with lethal rage, Maddox drew his gun. He fired bullet after bullet into the pulsating half-alive proto-flesh on the wall, the one in charge of all those tubes. Meta did the same thing. Each shot blasted its noise against his ears. Each slug exploded chunks of flesh from the alien mass. Vile jets of steam hissed from the flesh. The thin cables that had electrified Dana flew off her cot and began to thrash back and forth.
“Keep shooting!” Maddox shouted. He leaped at Doctor Rich, sailing toward her. A tentacle-like cable slashed toward his face. He caught it, and the thing struggled with him.
Audibly panting, Meta reloaded her gun and continued to fire into the main mass. The smell of gunpowder had grown thick in the chamber.
The tentacle in Maddox’s grip flailed with less power than before.
“Empty every bullet you have into it!” Maddox shouted.
“No,” Dana moaned. “Don’t do that. You’ll kill us if you do.”
Maddox’s focus snapped onto the doctor. Her eyes were wide and staring. Drool spilled from her mouth.
“I’m so tired,” Dana said. “It’s taken too much of my blood.”
“Why did it do that?” Maddox asked.
“To feed,” Dana said. “It’s hungry, very hungry.”
A feeling of loathing came over Maddox. With a manic grasp, he tore the cap off the doctor’s head. He ripped tiny leads from it attached to her scalp, and blood drifted in the air. Then he pulled the larger leads off her flesh, freeing her from the proto-flesh. In the zero gravity, he manhandled her away from the torturing pad.
Blood oozed from her many wounds, floating away from her in tiny globules.
“Quick,” Maddox said in a loud voice. “Help me save her.”
Perhaps sensing his intent, Meta holstered her smoking gun. Together with Maddox, they applied bandages to the many wounds. Once the bleeding stopped, Maddox ordered Meta to free the others. They watched with openmouthed horror and drooling sleepiness.
The Rouen Colony woman applied her strength yet again, freeing each of the crew from their restraints.
“The doctor’s too pale,” Valerie said. “We have to use our medikits.”
Maddox nodded for her to proceed. Valerie used a higher function on her kit. She gave the doctor a direct blood transfusion. It turned out Sergeant Riker had the same blood type. So, he also gave Dana a transfusion.
The room stank of alien stenches, gunpowder and blood. More vapors and a dark oozing substance extruded from the fleshy mass on the wall that seemed to operate the torture chamber.
Maddox looked around. He couldn’t spy any hatches out of here.
“What do we do now?” Keith asked as he panted.
“Good question,” Maddox said.
Dana’s eyelids flickered until she finally focused on him. “I know what to do,” she whispered.
“We’re listening,” Maddox said.
“The… the creature communicated with me,” Dana said. “It’s so terribly lonely.”
“You can tell us all about that later,” Maddox said. “For now, I want to know if we’re on the shuttle or in the starship.”
Dana frowned at the question.
Maddox explained to her what he’d seen before passing out.
“Oh, yes, the shuttle,” Dana said. “I see what you mean. We’re on it or in it. The creature is too afraid to move into the sentinel. It’s been waiting for reinforcements.”
“What do you mean?” Keith asked with his eyes wide and wild. “You’re telling us this… creature has waited for reinforcements for six thousand years?”
Dana nodded weakly.
Maddox felt cold inside as ruthlessness and despair battled within him. “Is the alien ship filled with these life forms?” he asked, indicting the quivering flesh.
Dana stared at him. “Do you mean the ship or shuttle?”
“The starship,” Maddox said, “our goal.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Dana said. “This one invaded the sentinel or was part of a combat group. It was or is a medical creature.”
“How do you know any of this?” Maddox asked.
Gingerly, Dana touched the bandages on her scalp. “It communicated directly with my brain. You should have left those in place.”
“It was draining your blood!” Maddox shouted.
Dana shuddered.
“Is that thing—” Maddox jerked his thumb at the mass of alien-flesh beginning to ooze off the wall—“flying the shuttle?”