A spaceship.
THE SHIP
In a word, it was magnificent.
Even under a layer of 50-year-old frost, it was magnificent.
Its lines were streamlined and smooth; its outer shell was silver, armoured and hard. It had two downswept wings, one high tailfin and three mammoth rear thrusters.
Totally alien.
Totally cool.
It was largely intact, except for its great crushed nose—the result of a tremendous crash many years ago.
Filling the vast floor area all around the ship was a huge multi-holed alien structure, like a nest of some sort, or a three-dimensional spiderweb, dotted with thousands of foul slimy holes. This huge web fanned out from the ship and climbed the walls of the hangar. It too was covered in frost.
All was still.
‘There!’ Armstrong pointed at a small office, also raised off the floor, bolted to the wall at the very end of the catwalk far below them. ‘That must be the lab! Move!’
Down the staircase they raced.
As they ran, more of the man-sized dragons emerged from nests mounted on the walls of the hangar. They swooped in on the double-helix-like staircase—as the Marines descending the stairs returned automatic fire at them.
The dragons squealed, some fell, flapping and spasming.
One grabbed a Marine and hurled him off the stairs, sending him falling a hundred feet into the web-like formation on the floor of the hangar. The man landed in the web, which cushioned his fall, and he survived…
…for about two seconds.
Thwack! He was grabbed by a fiendishly strong claw that reached out from the nearest hole and yanked him out of sight, screaming. Then—
Crunch!
A foul blast of human blood came spraying out of the hole and the screaming stopped.
‘ Fucking hell…’ the Marine behind Armstrong breathed.
Armstrong paid him no heed. He hit the catwalk on the fly, just as one of the winged dargons landed on it right in front of him and bared its teeth.
Two booming shots from his Desert Eagle pistol removed the dragon’s head and it stumbled and staggered—headless—before falling off the catwalk, out of his way.
Behind him, another Marine fell.
They were three down, now.
Armstrong came to the lab, found the door locked from the inside.
Four booming gunshots fixed that. The door came free and he kicked it open and entered.
THE DEATH LAB
It was quiet as a tomb in the lab.
No squeals, no gunfire, no blood-sprays.
Armstrong and his men fanned out. ‘Gentlemen! Files, notes, everything you can find. We can’t stay for long! Move it! Koepp—cover that door behind us!’
As his men went to work, Armstrong scanned the lab—benches, desks, filing cabinets, serum bottles; all of it covered in frost; long abandoned.
An ice-encrusted human corpse lay in a corner—coiled in the foetal position, frozen in death; but whole, uneaten.
‘Doc!’ Armstrong called to his medic. ‘Check him out!’
Doc slid to the dead man’s side, examined him.
‘He froze to death, sir. Musta locked himself in here to hide from the aliens.’
Someone called: ‘Jesus, these records date back to 1938, when the ship was found buried half a mile underneath Tunguska…the Soviets believed its crash was the impact in 1908. It had just penetrated deep underground…’
Another man said, ‘They brought it inside this facility—and examined it for years, venturing ever deeper into it. Then, in mid-1956, they found the creatures in its innermost chamber. But they were frozen in some kind of suspended-animation unit. Hibernation units. They were sleeping. And the stupid Soviets woke them them up. Within three years, it was all over.’
Armstrong was still standing near the frozen laboratory worker. Clasped in the dead man’s hands was a large notepad.
Armstrong grabbed it, flipped it open.
The early pages were written in neat, clinical Russian:
‘ The extra-terrestrials adore the taste of human meat. Live human meat. They won’t touch the dead prisoners. Saw the anti-social writer, Polemov, thrown into the ship
today. He wasn’t as brave as he was in his anti-Soviet writings! He screamed like a girl as they dragged him across the catwalk and tossed him in. ’
And another entry:
‘ These creatures do not appear to be the builders of the spaceship. It is well beyond their development. The remains of least nine other alien species have been found
on the ship—all dead. Only this species survived. Was this some kind of zoological transport ship in which the animals escaped?’
Then this entry:
‘ The creatures seem to go through three life-phases: the slug-like infant phase, the dragon-like flying adult, and then the largest phase of all, the enormous super-adults that live in the holes of the large web/mound formation.
The infant phase lasts approximately five weeks. The adult phase, ten weeks. The super-adult phase, another ten weeks. Total life-span, twenty-five weeks.
‘The life-cycle is reminiscent of the common butterfly, only with one additional stage: a small slug becomes a large winged adult which then cocoons again and becomes much much larger...
‘According to Comrade Dr Karlov, at the fifth week of super-adult life, the creatures give asexual birth to new infants. On present observations, the good doctor estimates that every one super-adult gives birth to two infants…’
But then, late in the notebook, the ordered writing became a frantic, messy, desperate scrawclass="underline"
‘ We’ve lost control of the complex! Karlov was wrong! It wasn’t a one-to-two ratio at all! Only the first generation had that ratio. The second generation of super-adults gave birth to four infants. The next gave birth to eight. Then the next: sixteen! They have now multiplied beyond our control and are taking over the complex! ’
The final entry read:
‘ The order has been given. Complex 13 is surrounded by the Spetsnatz who, along with the outside temperatures, are keeping the creatures at bay. The Complex is now to be buried under a deliberate landslide, triggered by explosives. Trapped in this laboratory, I cannot get out, unless I choose to run the gauntlet of a thousand man-eating creatures. I will die in here. For the hundreds of men I have marched to their deaths, may God have mercy on my soul.’
Armstrong stuffed the notebook into his backpack. ‘I have the breeding information!’ he called.
‘And I have the killing information,’ one of his men said. ‘The Soviets did experiments on them with different temperatures. Heat is no good—they can survive superheated temperatures of up to 1,000 degrees Celsius. No wonder our grenades didn’t work! But they’re not impervious to cold! According to this data, the things can’t survive temperatures below -35° Celsius!’
‘That’s why they’re trapped in here…’ Doc said.
‘And that’s exactly the information we need,’ Armstrong called. ‘Now let’s get the hell out of here.’
JOURNEY OUT OF HELL
Out of the lab they bolted.
Dozens of squealing man-sized dragons now filled the air of the hangar.
Armstrong and his men fired up in every direction as they ran, bringing down creatures all around them.
They came to the spindly metal spiral staircase leading to the ceiling…
…just as a series of great low growls arose from the floor of the hangar.
Every man froze.