Every one of his sensors had been activated early, their generators brought online while they were still tethered to the launch racks. Those that had been successfully modified had been levered open, force-fed a new set of instructions, then connected by lengths of scavenged fiber-optic cable to a central controller. The controller was powered by batteries, as was the remote to operate it, and of course the sensors had their own internal naquadah generators. Hopefully, the entirely network was independent of the power drains, and the obscene creature that was causing them.
None of the sensors would ever be fit for their original purpose again. Over the past couple of hours, every one of them had been systematically wrecked. Still, thought Ellis, if the plan worked, the sensors would be giving themselves for a noble cause.
Hell, if he made it out of the jovian alive, he’d even buy McKay a drink.
Spencer was starting to order some of the techs down. It was a slower process than Ellis would have liked; he was intensely aware of time ticking away. As one man started to clamber down from the rack there was a hefty clanging sound in his wake, and Ellis actually winced. “Careful up there, damn it!”
The tech looked down at him, over one shoulder. “Sir, that wasn’t me…”
“Then what the hell was it?”
“Not sure…” He moved another meter along the rack, heading for the lowest point so he could jump down.
Above him, the noise came again. A solid metallic impact.
“Aw crap,” muttered Ellis.
A section of the bay roof crashed out of its moorings, spinning down to the deck; Ellis saw Spencer duck aside to avoid being bisected. A moment later something darted from the hole left by the panel, an oozing congeries of eyes and mouths on the end of a sinuous limb. The limb swung about, its movements convulsive, lashing like an injured snake while the eyes blinked and the mouths opened and closed, tongues tasting the air. They looked sickeningly human.
The creature had been breeding tissue for hours, ever since it had devoured Deacon. It had used him as a template, an incubator, a biofactory as it had spread and grown into the ship, and now it had copied his senses to find out what was happening directly below it.
It was using Deacon’s eyes to look everywhere at once. And it didn’t like what it saw.
The tech Ellis had shouted at gave a hoarse scream as the thing lunged at him, and batted it away. As he scrambled along the rack a thin tendril dropped down alongside the sensory cluster, hung for a second, and then cracked like a whip. It was so fast that Ellis didn’t even see where the last couple of meters of it had gone, but when it recoiled it had the man in its grasp.
Instantly, the bay was a chorus of screams. The techs that were already on the deck scrambled for the exits; those that weren’t jumped for their lives. Ellis heard bones break as some of them hit, and then he was in the midst of them, dragging the injured onto their feet.
Above his head, the tendril snapped again, and the tech’s body crashed with shattering force into a sensor.
Ellis drew his pistol and snapped off a series of shots into the bundle of eyes. He saw three of them burst wetly before the thing snaked back into the ceiling, squealing and hissing. He kept firing, shots caroming off racks and the roof panels, before the slide locked back and he threw the weapon down. “Spencer! We’re done here!”
Spencer was still over at the controller, aiming at the tendril with his P90 and squeezing off tightly controlled bursts at its root. As Ellis shouted he snatched up the remote and tossed it over to him. “Catch.”
Ellis grabbed it out of the air, purely on reflex. “Get over here!”
“Can’t…” Spencer emptied his weapon, dropped the mag and slammed in a new one. “If it gets this we’re all done for.”
Another sensor came apart in a rain of sparks and broken metal. Ellis took one more look at Spencer, cursed, and went for the hatch. Behind him, the tendril snapped, and Spencer’s P90 fired and kept firing, emptying itself into the ceiling.
Ellis keyed the hatch closed without looking back. When it was shut he sprinted past the shocked and injured techs, heading for the stairs. “Get out of here!” he yelled back. “Now!”
He hit the stairs at a run, triggering his headset as he began to climb them three at a time. “Meyers?”
“One minute fifty, sir. And we’ve got a problem.”
“Another one?”
“I think that last burn was too hot. Three Wraith cruisers just entered the ammonia layer.”
“Nothing we can do about that now. Get ready.” He was at the top of the stairs. He grabbed a rail, using his own forward momentum to haul himself into the corridor. Around the corner from him, the creature was screaming like a burning zoo.
Ellis rounded the corner and stopped. He waited until the thing looked around at him again, that metallic copy of Kyle Deacon’s agonized face lolling towards him with a look of deranged malevolence in its glittering eyes.
It saw him. The mouth opened, and it hissed.
“Got something for you,” said Ellis quietly. He raised the remote, just long enough for the creature to notice it, and then thumbed the trigger.
Somehow, while he was putting the plan together, he had managed to convince himself that the communications lasers would be silent. He had probably been imagining them in normal operation, sending pulses of coherent light across thousands of kilometers, allowing the sensors to talk to each other, stay in formation without giving themselves away. In space, of course, the lasers would be soundless and invisible.
Inside Apollo, all firing at maximum power through the roof of the bomb bay and into corridor nine, they were unimaginably loud.
The noise that almost deafened him permanently was, he would learn later, that of air exploding in the path of the laser beams. He didn’t hear the floor of the corridor flash apart, or the creature erupt in a whirling cloud of fluid and spinning fragments; it was all part of the same gigantic noise, and after that his eardrums were frozen in shock.
The final part of the plan was for him to call Meyers, tell her to trigger the bay doors, but that was beyond him. Luckily, the noise and the impact of the lasers had been enough for her to hear all the way up in the bridge. She opened the bomb bay without waiting to be told.
There was no vacuum outside Apollo. The atmosphere around the ship was only a little thinner than that inside, although its composition was very different.
No, what sealed the creature’s fate was not differential pressure, but simple gravity.
With the bay doors closed, the ship’s artificial gravity was kept at a constant Earth normal. Even when they were open, the corridor above maintained its own G field. Or it would have done, had it not just been blown open by several high-energy communications lasers.
The jovian was a very big planet. Its surface gravity was at least four times that of Earth.
Burned, pulverized, and bleeding, the creature suddenly found itself being dragged downwards by its own mass. Ellis saw it peel off the wall, the tendrils and roots that anchored it ripped away as it was hauled towards the floor. Had he not been temporarily deafened, he thought, he would have heard it screaming as it was torn free, but he heard nothing. He didn’t hear the groan of the corridor floor beginning to give way, either.
He felt it, though, through the soles of his boots. A frightening bass rumble of stressed metal tearing, shearing through its fixings, and then a sudden springing impact as an entire section of it surrendered to gravity and dropped away, rushing down into the darkness. A moment later the creature went too, a last few tentacles hanging on for an agonizing second before they split apart under the stress.
Even through his deafness, Ellis heard it crashing through the launch racks.