They reached out desperate hands and began hauling on the hatch door, trying to close it. At first, it didn’t want to move. Then it began slowly closing with a groaning sound of heavy metal hinges. More bolts spat out, striking the circular door. Bits of molten metal like silver candlewax splashed them.

  Malena shrieked briefly when one bead of metal landed on the skin over her collarbone. She could feel it burning its way down into her flesh.

  “Were you hit?” Tanner asked.

  “Just pull!”

  They kept pulling and at last the door was swinging easily, less than a foot from closing. Then the bolts stopped coming and she heard a new sound, one that was even more frightening than being shot at by accelerators.

  Footsteps. It couldn’t be anything else. The tread was impossibly heavy, sounding more like an elephant’s charge than a running man. The steps took too long between beats, as if the owner of those feet took vast leaps with each stride. The steps thumped down rhythmically in the passageway outside with deep, resounding notes.

  Roaring and red-faced, Tanner and she heaved the door shut and spun the latch. Almost immediately, it began spinning the opposite direction. Tanner’s hands were knocked away from the latch. He grabbed it again. When it was going down, he couldn’t hold it. But when it began an upward arc, he hung from it with all his weight. The latch continued to spin open, but more slowly. Tanner was lifted from the floor and still he hung on, straining and making animal sounds of effort.

  Malena realized he was being overpowered like a child. Whatever was on the other side of that hatch, it was huge and possessed strength beyond that of any man.

  “There’s a pin,” she said. She reached behind the spinning latch, past Tanner’s straining body, and slid a locking pin into the mechanism. Like a wheel with a spike in the axel, the latch clanged and froze in place.

  Both she and Tanner slumped against the hatch, their sides heaving with exertion. There was a sheen of sweat on both of them. Malena could feel the burn in her shoulder again, where the bead of metal had burrowed its way into her, cauterizing the flesh an inch or more deep.

  They listened at the hatch tensely, but heard nothing for a time. Then finally, they thought they heard the thud of slow steps heading away from them.

  “We should be safe for now,” Tanner whispered.

  “Yeah, for now.”

  “Where did you get hit?”

  She pulled her collar aside and he eyed the spot.

  “Looks like an incendiary wound. Your arm still works, right?”

  She nodded and demonstrated, rotating her shoulder wincing with pain.

  “No bleeding. Just a burn hole. You’ll be fine for now. They’ll dig that out when we get home to XCU. We have excellent surgeons. They can even hide the scar if you want.”

  Malena nodded and gulped in air. She didn’t want to think about that now. She didn’t entirely believe they would make it out of this ship, but she planned to die trying.

  “How long until they figure out they can burn their way through these walls?” she asked.

  “What?”

  She explained Carl’s rage and how he’d burned a hole in the ceiling to get Sophie’s killer.

  “Hmm. I hadn’t thought about that. They could come through if they want to. But I don’t think they’ll try it.”

  “Why not?”

  Tanner gestured toward the capsules. “These are their people. We’ve got hostages. If they burn their way in, they might hit the capsules.”

  Malena had a sudden, terrifying thought. She looked around the room with darting eyes.

  “What is it now?” Tanner asked.

  “You’re right about them burning their way in, but I’ve got a new possibility to worry about. What if there’s another entrance to this chamber, and they’re going there to open it right now?”

  Tanner’s eyes widened. They got moving without any more conversation. They both searched the chamber looking behind each sarcophagus and bulky instrument. There were large metal things here, one for each capsule. These squatty devices looked like fireplugs the size of garbage cans. They had huge hoses, made of flexible metal tubing, which ran from the floor to the device and then to a capsule. To Malena, they were clearly some kind of control system for the capsules. Liquids and gasses could be heard inside, gurgling and pumping. They were cold and gave off frosty vapors.

  It was about then Malena realized she was quite cold, and growing colder by the minute. The sweaty chase had left her warmed up, but now she was cooling rapidly. The perspiration on her forehead and arms had turned cold and begun to chill her. She shivered.

  “I know,” said Tanner, rejoining her in the midst of the chamber. “This place is basically an icebox. We can’t stay here forever, we’ll freeze. But I didn’t see another way in.”

  “Neither did I,” she said, moving to one of capsules that was still occupied. She brushed away the frost on the little window covering the face. She tried to peer inside, but she could only see a huge, shadowy head. She couldn’t make out much in the way of features, except to say they were exceedingly ugly. If she had to make a comparison, she thought the face resembled that of a cathedral gargoyle.

  Then her eyes strayed to the slot to one side of the capsule’s window. She recognized the slot and the object inside. It was a golden metallic color and contained a single rectangular sheet of what looked like colored glass or quartz.

  “I’ve seen these before,” she said, digging in her pack. She showed Tanner the artifact, and explained she’d taken it when the Dutch team had been smashing them on the floor.

  Tanner frowned at the object. “What is it?”

  “Haak said he thought it was some kind of computer wafer.”

  He looked alarmed, and handed it back to her. He walked to the nearest capsule that stood open and examined it. Malena followed him.

  “See here?” he said, pointing at the slot next to the missing creature’s head. “The internal light is dead. There’s no soft glow—no power.”

  She examined the wafer in its slot. Tanner was right. This one was dead. She shrugged.

  “Maybe it’s been disconnected. Maybe when the capsule opens, they turn themselves off.”

  “Maybe,” Tanner admitted. “Or maybe when Haak’s people threw these around, they caused a system fault and released more visitors.”

  Malena slowly nodded. It made a lot of sense. But they had smashed hundreds of these things. How many visitors were awake now? There was no way to tell.

  Tanner walked to each of the capsules in turn. Soon he called her over.

  “See this one? The visitor is still in there, but capsule appears to be switched off. What do you think?”

  She examined the system. “I think the creature is dead. I think a lot of them are dead. If I had to guess, I’d say Haak’s people unwittingly disconnected their life support systems.”

  “Hell of a way to introduce yourself to your new neighbors, isn’t it?”

  Malena didn’t know what to say. But in her mind, her estimation of the odds they’d leave this ship alive had just lowered significantly.

  -27-

  Malena and Tanner walked from capsule to capsule, eyeing the frozen inhabitants. There weren’t any indicator lights on the icy coffins. If humans had built these things, there would have been rows of readouts, data, flashing numbers and maybe heartbeat monitors. With these alien systems, there was only a soft glow on the active ones, along with a gentle gurgling sound.

  Tanner tapped on the glass of the one he was examining. There was no response.

  “We’ve got a hard decision to make,” he said.

  “Whether to stay or try to break out?”

  He shook his head. “No. The question is what we’re going to do with these capsules. If we stay here for long, they could open on us. We could have a pissed-off thousand pound visitor come out swinging.”

  “What can we do about that?”

  “I think these glass-slide things—the wafers—I think if we pulled them out of these life support systems they would be disabled.”

  She looked at him in horror.

  “I’m just saying. This is about survival now. We know they aren’t going to talk, I don’t even know if they can talk. But they’re going to kill us if they can.”

  “Tanner, we invaded their ship. We’ve done a lot of damage, but we couldn’t possibly kill them when they’re helpless like this. That would be totally wrong.”

  He shrugged and nodded. “Yes. You’re right about that. It was just a thought. Just something I figured I should throw out there. The question is: how badly do you want to stay alive?”

  “Not badly enough to kill helpless beings who might become a danger to us. If they come at us shooting and swinging, that’s one thing. But murdering them in their sleep—that’s too much. Have you thought about the bigger implications here? I mean, what have we done already? Have we started some kind of war? Do they consider us all to be savages now?”

  Tanner scratched his head and threw up his hands. “I don’t know. I really don’t know. I’ve been to a number of sites, but rarely ones with living visitors. Usually, we find a few pilots who’ve just died in a crash. Maybe three to five individuals. We haven’t come up with a protocol to handle bigger finds. My orders in a situation like this are vague.”

  “What are those orders?”

  “You know—the usual deal. They go something like this: Team is to avoid contact with living visitors when encountered. Team is to engage only if other courses of action have been exhausted and hostile intent has been verified…etc.”

  She thought it over and understood how such orders did leave a lot up to the discretion of the team leader. In this situation, engagement seemed unavoidable. But was killing a helpless alien warranted? True, the creatures had proven they were dangerous and hostile. Killing them now might save the lives of the last two members of the team. But the orders didn’t guide them on how to deal with issues of honorable conduct and interspecies consequences to their actions.

  “We’re just here to steal their X and sneak away, aren’t we?” she asked.

  “Pretty much. We’re agents, not military. Remember that.”

  “You mean we’re thieves, not warriors.”

  “That’s an unpleasant comparison. I think of us more akin to archeologists, or paleontologists. Think about the explorers who took artifacts from Egyptian tombs to put them into museums. Were they scientists or grave robbers?”

  “I suppose it depends on your point of view. But in this case, the owners of these artifacts are still alive. That moves us into the category of burglars at best.”

  Tanner grimaced. “I guess you’re right. We got into a business of retrieving X from downed craft—salvaging missions, let’s call them. We’ve gotten pretty good at it, and it’s been paying off with huge technological gains. But the governments are getting greedy now. They aren’t thinking about future consequences—they just want the X and they want it before another team picks it up. They see this find as a race, a chance to grab a big score and run home with it.”

  Malena paced and thought hard. She shivered slightly; the cold was getting to her. She wanted to keep moving, if only to warm up.

  “I’m thinking about the visitors,” she said, “how they’ve behaved up until this point. They’ve been inside the ship, and they must know it better than we do. They probably have some kind of sensor system. They might be watching us at this very moment via a camera—or their equivalent device. Let’s think about how they’ve acted so far. We know they’re intelligent, right? They couldn’t have put together a ship like this without advanced tech and an organized society. We can assume they’re at least as advanced as we are, but different of course.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Okay, let’s look at what they’ve done so far. When we first ran into their machines, they gathered us like specimens and performed some kind of procedure on human brain tissue. We were horrified, but like you said at the time, I imagine the rats I’ve performed surgery upon in college weren’t too happy either.”

  “It didn’t make us love them and their dissection-machines, that’s for sure.”

  “But let’s stay on the topic of motivations. I would say they were studying us. Any human biologist would have done the same when encountering a plentiful new species.”

  “You’re saying that to a lab animal, you’re some kind of ghoul.”

  Malena smiled faintly. “I suppose I am. But they would think of me as a predator, nothing worse. It takes an intelligent creature like a human to make things more complicated. Going back to the behavior of the visitors, the next time we encountered them was after we entered the ship. The machines behaved differently after that. They attacked to defend the ship, to kill outright, not to collect.”

  Tanner shrugged. “Okay, if you say so. I’m not sure where all of this is going. But we need to get out of here fast.”

  “Give me a minute to think out loud,” Malena said, continuing to pace. Her burned shoulder was bothering her, and she rubbed at it gently with her fingers. “After we managed to break into the ship, we found the sphere of X and disconnected it. That loss of power brought the barrier down. What if that barrier was their standard defensive system? From their point of view, we went from a native species to a serious threat at that moment. We entered their ship and disabled their defenses.”

  Tanner perked up. “I see where you’re going. They’ve been reacting to us. They stepped up to the challenge and awakened at least one individual crew member. You would think having crashed into the planet would have been emergency enough for that.”

  “We don’t know enough. Maybe from their point of view, procedures were being carefully followed—or screwed up. We just can’t know.”

  “All right, so what do you think happened next?” he asked, frowning as he attempted to recall the exact order of events over the last few days. “We scared them by taking down their dome. Then one of their people tried to stop us. You blew off his hand and we escaped.”

  “Hours later, we came back with reinforcements. Haak’s team forced their way in, but the aliens were scared and didn’t fight right away. They moved the X to keep it safe. At that time, they were probably trying to repair their systems.”

  “Then what does Haak do?” Tanner asked loudly. She could tell he was getting into it. “He goes into their computer room and starts tearing things up.”

  She nodded. “That was too much. They attacked and killed Sophie. More crewmembers were awakened to deal with the growing threat in the ship. As far as I can tell, they’ve ambushed Haak’s team and possibly wiped them out.”

  “Okay, where does all that leave us right now?”

  “They didn’t force their way inside this chamber because they don’t want to damage their helpless crewmen in these capsules. They’re watching us now, and they know we could kill their people—we’ve done it before.”

  Tanner stared at her worriedly. “I can’t see how this comes out with a peaceful ending. If we’re the last people on the ship, they’ll wait until we come out, or starve, or freeze.”

  “And if we disconnect more of these capsules, they’ll have a good reason to break in and finish us off to save the rest.”

  He looked around at the capsules with greater respect. “I think you’re right, Malena. These capsules are the only things that are keeping us alive right now. They’re life support for us as well as for them. They’re our hostages, and no bank robber can expect to live long once he starts killing the hostages.”

  “That’s how I see it.”

  “The question is, how do we capitalize on our position?”

  “Let’s do it the way a bank robber would. Let’s put a gun to their heads and demand a ticket out. We’ll each stand at a capsule and put our hands on a wafer to show we mean business. Then we open the door. With luck, they’ll let us out.”

  Tanner looked doubtful. “We don’t know how big a value they put on individual lives. They might rush in and kill us, figuring the loss of only two more crewmen was worth it.”

  “Maybe. But if we just sit here, we’re going to die anyway. We’ve got no food and very little water. We’ll be frozen solid within a day or two. Each hour we wait, we’ll grow weaker.”

  In the end, they did as Malena had suggested. Tanner pulled the locking pin and spun open the door. Both of them rushed over to a capsule and grabbed hold of a wafer. She felt a trickle of live current, which left her fingertips tingling.

  It was very quiet in the chamber after the hatch had groaned open. It stood there, wafting frost out into the warmer passageway. They stayed quiet, blowing steam as they breathed hard, their hearts pounding.

  Nothing happened for a full minute. They heard the metal hinges on the big hatch tick as the metal expanded and contracted and temperatures equalized.

  “They’re gone,” Tanner said finally. “We should run for it.”

  “That might be part of their plan.”

  “Well if it is, it’s working. What else can we do? Stand here for hours holding onto these wafers?”

  “Let’s give it more time.”

  Tanner let go of the wafer and advanced on the balls of his feet to the open hatchway.

  “Tanner, come back!” she hissed at him.

  He waved for her to stay in position. “Keep your hand on the trigger. I’m going to have a look around.”

  He stepped out into the passageway, moving very quietly. He crept into the darkness and vanished.

  “Tanner?” she whispered after a minute or so had passed.

  Then she heard something—something odd. It wasn’t a howl, exactly, it was similar to that but deeper in pitch. It was more of a ghostly moan from an inhuman throat. A deep, bass noise, it made her skin itch with fear when she heard it. There are sounds a large predator could make that cause instinctive fear in humans, and she knew she was hearing one.

  She had been standing partly behind a capsule and holding onto the wafer that powered it. She took a step forward, out from hiding. She eyed the hatchway. She had two choices. She could run out and search for Tanner, that was option A.