CHAPTER
1
There
was a thump as the ship nudged up against the hull.
Creighton stood up and went over to the
hatch. The rest of the men formed up behind him.
“Ready,” called back the pilot and
the green light came on. With a push of a button the hatch came open
and Creighton moved into the airlock.
Another button and the outer hatch came
open exposing the entrance to the station.
Another hatch stood in the way.
Creighton dialed in and that hatch came
open.
The men moved quickly into the station.
“Phew,” said one of the troopers
grabbing his nose, “What’s that?”
“The smell of death,” said
Creighton.
The trooper nodded though he didn’t
really know what Creighton was talking about. Raw recruits, the new
breed, trained for contingencies that never happened, not
particularly experienced with the world all that much or with much of
the known either, cut off as most Earthers were from nature,
sanitized and hermetically sealed up in modern cities. They wouldn’t
know what that meant.
But Creighton knew. And his gut
tightened.
“Palmer,” he said to one of the men
beside him. “Take two men with you. Check out the systems. What
isn’t up you get running again. We don’t know what’s happened
or what we’ll find. But we need this station to be fully functional
again.
“And turn off the beacon. We’re here
so it’s done its job.”
“Okay, Sarge,” said Palmer and he
pointed at two others. “With me.”
The three of them went off down the
hallway, the deck ringing with the sound of their boots.
“The rest of you spread out and
search,” continued Creighton.
“Let’s go find out what happened.
“Be alert, be on the defensive,” he
added. “We don’t know why they set the beacon. Could be anything,
so be careful.
“Teams of three.”
He pointed to two near him.
“With me.”
The others broke off and began to spread
out through the station. The sounds of their going disturbed the
stillness.
Creighton took his men and began his own
search. They started at the quarters near the entrance hall and went
room by room from there.
They found no one; they found nothing.
It was as if the station had been abandoned. But they knew this was
not right.
Creighton understood that when they came
in. The question was simply finding them and dealing with the dead
his nose told him were there.
They moved down the corridor to another
area. They found nothing there either.
There was no one around.
It was all quiet.
“Sarge,” said a voice in Creighton’s
headset.
“What is it, Shell?”
“We’re down here by the assembly
hall. The doors won’t open. We’re trying to force them. If they
don’t come, we’ll try and wedge one of them open enough to send
in some eyes.
“But might be something here.”
“I’m coming,” said Creighton.
“Y Corridor. At the end. I’ll send
someone out to you.”
“Don’t need it,” said Creighton
looking at the commpad on his arm. “I got a fix.”
“Keep looking,” said Creighton to
the two that had been with him. “Signal if you find
something—anything.”
They nodded and Creighton went out.
He found Y Corridor. At the end of it,
Shell stood in front of a set of large double doors with two of the
men. There was a small gap where one of them had been pried open a
little.
The smell was stronger there.
“Probe’s in,” said Shell. “Take
a look.”
Creighton touched his commpad and
brought up the feed from the probe. The screen blinked and, when it
came up, he was looking down from above.
What he was looking down on was a large
number of people pressed in against the doors.
Actually, piled against the doors would
have been more accurate. Except for the fact that they were upright,
or mostly so, they looked like a pile that had been pushed against
the doors.
There was no movement among them that
Creighton could see. The people down there were still, motionless, as
fixed and as stationary as statues.
Creighton touched the screen and the
picture moved. A full three-sixty look showed a large hall that was
empty—empty except near the doors.
Creighton panned back to the people.
There must have been a couple of hundred
of them there. The contingent for jump stations was close to five
hundred and this one was no exception. If there was no one anywhere
else, and he was getting no reports of his men finding people
anywhere else, that meant quite a number of people were in that hall
pressed up against these doors.
Why?
Creighton had no idea.
“We’ll need the ‘key to the
city,’” said Shell. “These doors aren’t coming open without
some force.
“Locked?”
“No, with the systems off, these doors
are made to open up. The lock, if there is any, won’t function when
systems are offline. That’s for safety so people can get out.
“It’s just the force of all of them
against it holding them closed.”
Why they built this place that way was
beyond him. Maybe it was overconfidence but it seemed to be common
sense to have the door swing out instead of in. So they didn’t use
common sense.
But that was the way of things nowadays.
So many decisions being made for reasons other than common sense.
“Any other way in?”
“We didn’t look but there ought to
be. It’s a pretty big hall.”
Creighton pulled up the designs of the
station on his commpad and examined them.
There it was—no, actually, two of
them. One to the left and one right.
“Let’s go,” said Creighton and he
went off to his left. Shell and the men followed him.
A few yards down, they found another
corridor. It ran off to the right.
“Down here,” said Creighton and they
turned into it.
A hundred yards down this one and
another corridor intersected. Creighton turned right again.
Halfway down, they found a door.
The sign read, Control Room.
Creighton tried it. It was open.
They walked in.
It was a control room for the hall. That
hall was an assembly area for the station.
The room was dark inside though the
emergencies were on in there, too. In the front of the room they
could see view-screens and switches for the lights and there were
systems controls and environmental for the hall.
Above that a long window stretched
across the whole length of the room. It stared out on the hall.
The hall itself was dark but the
emergency lights allowed them to see dimly what was there. They could
see the huddle of people near the entrance though they could see
nothing in detail.
There was a door to their right. It
opened out onto a landing in the back of the hall. Below that were
stairs. They took them down and onto the floor of the hall.
The smell of death again. It was thick.
“Whew!” said one of the men.
They covered their noses.
Creighton shuddered. He looked at the
other men to see if they had noticed. He was ashamed of it but he
couldn’t help it. He didn’t like this kind of duty.
Dead bodies.
He shuddered again and hoped the others
didn’t see that one either.
“Bio-masks,” he said and pulled his
down from his helmet.
The other men did the same.
They walked down the aisle toward the
side where the main door was. Though they could not see it, they
could hear the probe buzzing overhead.
They came up to where the people were
massed. So many people, hundreds of people, pushed up and piled in.
The people stood there stiff but
Creighton could see now that they were distorted into a number of
shapes that made them look inhuman. From what they could see in the
light of their torches, their faces were contorted also, stretched
out in grotesque grimaces of great anguish and horror.
There was something dark gathered below
them. Puddles of black. They shined in their torch lights.
“Blood,” said Creighton.
The people stood there unmoved and
immovable, frozen in the attitude of their death, contorted in all
manner of positions and shapes. They were grotesque statues,
grotesque and inhuman statues, crammed in against the doorway. They
were a tangled and piled up mass of what had been humanity that
looked now for all intents and purposes like some free-form memorial
to an awful holocaust.
These had been humans, once living,
breathing humanity, but they were now lifeless and the horror and
anguish of their moment of death was carved into their faces.
The people of the station.
“What happened to them, Sarge?”
asked Shell.
“I have no idea,” said Creighton.
It was the worst thing he had ever seen.
What could have caused it was beyond him.
“Doctor,” he said into his headset,
“we need you here.”
***
“What does this look like to you?”
asked Creighton.
He was speaking to a woman near him. Her
name was Smart and she was not in uniform. She was government. The
medical corps of the Security Forces was government not career
security.
“I don’t understand it,” she said.
“It looks as if the mass of them tried to get around, over or under
each other to get out.
“Look how badly some of them are
contorted. Impossibly out of shape. What would cause that, I don’t
know.
“And the faces.”
Creighton looked but he knew what was
there. He had already seen it. Too much.
“Look at the horror on the faces,”
she said.
Horror was there and shock and surprise
mixed in, too. But that was all set over against great pain and
anguish. It was there in the faces.
“They look like they’ve been
tortured,” said Creighton.
The doctor nodded.
“And look down there, below, on the
floor.”
She pointed to the blood pooled
underneath them. It was a congealed mass.
There were stains on the tunics, large
stains. That blood on the deck looked like it had soaked through and
pooled on the floor below.
“You think it’s trauma?” asked
Creighton.
“Maybe. It looks like they bled
through the fabric—probably from wounds underneath. But I won’t
know until I can examine them.”
“So they were tortured and then
allowed to make for the exit,” said Creighton. “Doesn’t make
any sense.”
“I’ll have to examine them. They’ll
have to be untangled and taken where I can examine them.
“Over there.”
She pointed to an open area off to their
right, a place where there were no seats. It was a widening of the
aisle to allow people access to the doors.
“I’ll need a table.”
A table was found and set up in that
spot. A couple of the bodies were untangled from the mass, carried
over and placed on the table. They lay there on top as they had when
they stood, stiff, contorted, statue-like.
The doctor began examining them.
Shock and anguish—deep and severe
pain, wondered Creighton. What could cause that?
Some disease?
He went over to the doctor.
“You think it might be sickness of
some type, a disease?” he asked.
“Could be, but that can’t be known
definitively without tests. But it’s possible. My problem is what
would cause them to exsanguinate like they did. That’s a puzzle.”
“Wounds?”
“There’s none on this one,” she
said pointing down to the first body. “Maybe some of the others
have it but this one doesn’t.”
She moved to the second one and began
checking it.
“Some tropical infections from Earth
cause internal bleeding, massive internal bleeding, but that would be
interior, internal. They only bleed internally when they get infected
by those. There’s no exsanguination.
“I guess you can never know, though.
The galaxy is a big place, even what comparatively little of it has
been explored by us in the last fifty years. We don’t find it all
goodness and light out there when it comes to diseases. There are
others, some strange ones we’ve found. So it could be a new one
brought in from some other world.”
She pulled the tunic back over the one
she was examining.
“No trauma on this one either.”
She went over to the mass of bodies and
began examining them where they stood.
Creighton realized something then. He
hadn’t noticed it before, but all he could see was men. There
wasn’t a woman among them that he could see.
There had been women on the station and
there were children, too. The station was an official posting but
family was allowed like at any base.
But there were no children in the tangle
either.
Where were the women and children?
“Anybody see any women?” Creighton
asked the men near him. He had ordered more of them to the assembly
hall and they were helping the doctor.
Not one of them had.
“Any children?”
No.
“Shell,” said Creighton, “you take
two men and search the rest of the hall. There’re some doors across
the way. Take a look and see what you can find.”
“Alright,” said Shell and pointed to
two others. “You’re with me.”
They went off across the hall.
Creighton went back over to the doctor.
“No trauma on any of these either,”
she said turning to him. “Looks like they bled out from their
pores.
“That’s a new one for me.”
“Sarge!”
It was Shell.
Creighton turned and saw him waving from
a doorway across the hall.
“Over here!”
Creighton ran over to where he stood.
When he got there, he saw that Shell’s
face was white. The others were bent over. One of them was vomiting.
“In there.”
Shell motioned to the open door.
Creighton walked in.
It was dark inside so he had to use his
torch.
There was nothing he could see in the
light of the torch except for more seats. Up front was some kind of
platform—a stage, possibly. Maybe this was some kind of theater.
He flashed his torch around the room. He
saw nothing. On another pass, he happened to flick the torch up. When
he did, he caught sight of something up there in the beam as it
passed.
Creighton came back to it and
immediately knew what it was.
It was feet dangling down into the
light.
Creighton pointed the torch further up.
When he did, he groaned.
There they were. The women. And the
children.
“Oh Lord have mercy!” he said.
The women and the children. They were
there but they were not there the same way the men were. These women
and these children were not crowding around any entrance-way to get
out but were there, up there, overhead, gathered near the ceiling.
They hung in rows, all the women, all
the children; precise geometric rows. They hung there perfectly still
suspended from the ceiling like a multitude of marionettes put away
in storage after what would have been some ghastly production from
the summer run.
But these didn’t hang by their hands
or by their feet by any string which could give them motion or life.
These women and these children hung there above by a cord tied around
their necks.
They were dead. From the position of
their heads that was very clear.
All of them dead.
The children dead!
Creighton felt like falling to his
knees. He didn’t but his heart sank into the pit of his stomach.
It was hideous. Each of them up there
stared out blankly from heads canted at an unnatural angle. But they
had been human, each of them, once. They had had potential—especially
the children—that had been throttled out of them. Their hopes and
their dreams, a life of great promise spread out before them, a
future of potential joys and happiness, of small satisfactions that
come from accomplishment and anticipation.
But no more. All of that had been
crushed and strangled out of them.
Those children; those innocent children!
There was something they did have in
common with the men out in the hall, though. Creighton could see it
below them. A large dark patch on the floor underneath.
Blood. It was blood. Just like the men
out there.
Creighton took it all in. He saw it all
and it stunned him and made him sick.
Maybe the men, for some reason—maybe
them. Possibly the women, though he wouldn’t know why them.
But the children? Why the children? Why
would they do this to the children?
And it was clear someone had to have
done it. This wasn’t any disease. From the looks of it it had to
have been a number of them. How it was done was another matter and
unknown, but that they had been killed was now very clear.
Why the children?
Creighton thought of his own back at the
base and a shudder went through him again. He wanted to see them, to
make sure they were alright.
They were far away from there, safe and
secure at the base so he needn’t have worried. But still, he wanted
to be with them to hug them.
Suddenly, he felt guilty about that. His
children were alive and these were dead.
The lights came up at that moment.
“I got ‘em up and running,” said
Palmer in Creighton’s headset.
“Good work.”
The light made it much worse.
Creighton avoided looking up. But his
attention was suddenly drawn to the wall.
The back wall.
On it was a message. Written in large,
dripping letters, it read:
Tell Him Volloq is coming.
I am legion.
A message written in blood.
“What does it mean?” asked Shell who
had come in. He looked better; he had recovered enough to come in but
his eyes avoided looking up.
“I don’t know,” said Creighton.
But the name Volloq was familiar to him. He had an impression he had
heard it before.
And “legion,” that meant “many.”
There were many of them?
He spoke into his headset.
“Any of you found anyone alive? Looks
like we have some perpetrators.
“You find anyone or anything around
that might be them?”
“No.”
“Nothing.”
“No one.”
“Can’t find anyone or anything.”
“Sarge,” said another voice over his
comm. “This is Bunt. We’re near Corridor D. There’s an escape
pod missing.”
Escape pod? It figured they would escape
if they could.
But they still had to be careful.
Nothing could be assumed.
“Everyone keep their eyes open. These
people were killed. Whoever did this is dangerous and might, I
repeat, might still be on board. So use extreme caution.”
Creighton walked out of the room into
the hall. He called to the doctor.
“We’ll need you over here,” he
said.
Volloq.
Why was that name familiar? It rang a
bell for some reason. Creighton thought about it for a moment and
then pulled up his commpad.
Volloq. Volloq.
So familiar.
“Who would do such a thing?” asked a
trooper near him.
It was Tyml, the one who had vomited. He
was shaking his head.
“Why would they do such a thing? How
could they have done this?”
“I don’t know,” said Creighton.
“But whoever they were, it looks like ‘Volloq’ has something to
do with it.”
And then it hit him. Suddenly, it hit
him.
Volloq! Volloq!
It’s him!
He remembered who it was now; he
remembered. And his face went white.
“It’s not a ‘they,’” he said.
“It’s a ‘him.’
“Volloq is a him!”
“One man did all this?” asked Tyml
surprised. “How is that possible?”
“Not a man,” said Creighton, “a
beast, a monster—a terror.”
“Get command on the line. They have to
know.
“Volloq is back!”
To purchase the book go to: I Am Legion .
