Xenofestation 1-01
~Amber Alert~

Paragonas Vaunt

[SAMPLE]

 

Prologue - Red Warning

Fourteen minutes.

It had been fourteen minutes since the siren had tumbled her from her sleep couch, the whoop-shriek of the biocontainment alarm followed by the sub-bass thump of the compartment shutters slamming. They'd happened so close together that the two sounds seemed part of the same movement rather than one following as a consequence of the other.

The shutters would open again when the alarm ended.

If it ended.

She'd spent those fourteen minutes running through the checklist. Deadlocking the door to her cabin, checking the air had switched to local supply. Checking the contamination lights - all green, thankfully.

Then she'd used her handpad to report in to the security hub. She'd told them where she was, that she had sealed her cabin and it was green, no contamination. The calm voice of the operator - voice only, they gave her no image, which was unusual - reassured her she had done the right thing, and she was quite safe.

It was all under control.

She'd let out a held breath.

Then they'd said something else.

"Are you dressed?" the operator asked. "Don't get dressed, in case you need to use the refuge capsule."

Then they were gone, leaving her listening to dead air.

And the siren.

That was the first time she truly realised it might be serious. It wasn't all under control after all.

Of course, she'd already realised it wasn't a routine alarm, firstly because it had been triggered in the residential section of the station, where the participants relaxed and slept when they weren't actively taking part in the Programme, and secondly it had gone on for fourteen - no, fifteen - minutes now.

Containment alarms were an unwelcome reminder that here, in this fragile bubble of air suspended in the harsh vacuum of space twenty million miles from anywhere, the idea of complete safety was a brittle illusion. They were an unnecessary reminder, too, given that the frailty of human existence was never far from the mind of any participant in the Programme.

During her time on-station, she'd known the occasional containment alarm in the chambers, or the labs, or the pens. Sometimes one of the subjects would get loose, or one of the biosensors would give a false reading. They were notoriously hair-trigger, the biosensors. But there were so many shutters and valves and seals between the subjects and genuine escape that the alarms never ran on for more than four, maybe five minutes tops.

And never in the section where the women ate, and chatted, and slept, not in the calm sanctuary where they shed the trappings and stresses of what took place in the implantation chambers. Where they considered themselves safe.

As safe as they could be, at least.

She knew the alarm had been sounding for fifteen minutes because there was a tell-tale display over the locked door of her cabin, counting the minutes and the seconds. She also knew that if the counter reached thirty minutes without the alarm being cancelled the breach would be categorised as a total loss, irretrievable. And, if that happened, explosive bolts would automatically fire, hydraulic rams would release their pent-up energy, and the entire contaminated section would be ejected from the station. A hundred thousand tonnes of duralloy, jettisoned, along with anybody unfortunate enough still to be in it at the time, on a trajectory that would end around three days later as a fiery smear in the Sun's corona.

They'd either contain the breach within thirty minutes, or it would be excised. There were no other possible outcomes.

Fix the problem in thirty, or cut it out in thirty-one.

She crossed to the door on bare feet and inspected its frame, just as she had countless times already, as if she'd be able to tell simply by looking whether there was a microscopic fault anywhere in its seal. There was a viewing port in the door's centre, and she inspected the seal there too. The thick plexiglass window was secure, and its unyielding coolness beneath her fingers was reassuring.

It was an inch thick. Nothing could get through that.

Next to the window, there was a multiway control to regulate the passage of light through the pane, selectively allowing it one way or the other, frosting the glass for privacy or making it transparent. She cleared the glass so she could see out.

The corridor beyond was near-dark. It was night cycle for her corridor, but even so there should have been at least some light, a warm glow from the bulkhead lamps designed to give an impression of twilight, a throwback to the day-night rhythm of an Earth she'd never really known. Yet it was darker out there than she'd ever seen it, and she could see nothing past the reflection of her own face in the glass save for a weird pulsing glow.

A noise came to her from somewhere further down the corridor. A thump and a scrape, sensed as much through the deck beneath her feet as in her ears.

Was it the sound of help on its way, of people coming to her assistance?

She tried to think who else on her corridor would be in their rooms, in one of the cabins ranged on either side. Had one of them tried to signal, perhaps, just as a trapped crewmember might strike the deckhead with a heavy wrench to send a message? Was whoever it was in trouble?

She rushed back to her desk and grabbed her handpad.

Emergency connection only.

That was odd.

She glanced back at the window.

It occurred to her then, staring at the blackness beyond the pane, that the noise outside might not be friendly, and the light spill from her brightly-lit room could attract unwanted attention. She berated herself silently for not thinking of it before clearing the glass, then quickly turned off the main room light, blinking to allow her eyes to adjust.

She stepped back to the window.

With her room light off, she could see there were red emergency lamps glowing in the corridor, pulsing rhythmically brighter and darker in time with the alarm beacons. Their malevolent light gave her the unpleasant impression of the heartbeat of some huge beast.

She double-checked the door's deadlock, as she had already done, then gingerly pressed her face to the glass to peer along the corridor.

There was nothing to be seen to her left.

She turned and pressed her other cheek to the cold pane.

Nothing there either.

With her ear against the glass, though, she could hear something. Too steady to be the rushing of her blood in her ears, it sounded soft, a sliding sibilance, almost a throaty gurgling, some thick liquid flowing slowly.

She drew back.

There was something wrong with the window.

She leaned closer.

The bottom of the window was shimmering, making the view of the wall on the other side of the corridor swim and blur strangely. As she watched, the effect spread slowly upwards.

Was the plexiglass faulty?

Whatever it was, the effect was migrating upwards, and soon the whole pane was shimmering.

What was it?

She jumped back in alarm.

It was something on the outside of her door.

Something... some thickly viscous translucent material was slowly sliding its way up the outside of her cabin door, spreading across the window glass. The view through the bottom half was completely indistinct now, as if whatever covered it, although almost transparent, was so thickly layered on that it blurred the view.

Had something flooded in the corridor? Some chemical spill?

Cautiously she touched a finger to the window.

It was warm to the touch, where only a few moments ago it had been cold, and she fancied she could feel a faint vibration through the plexiglass, almost like a soft humming. And then, as she watched, a small white sphere rose into view.

It was about an inch in diameter, and it was embedded in the fluid now thickly coating the outside of her window. A second appeared, then a third. More, and yet more, a swarm of them rising up and pausing in front of the glass, almost as if hovering there even while tiny bubbles in the fluid rose past them.

The spheres slowly rotated, each bringing a small dark spot to face the window.

She recoiled, backpedalling until the backs of her legs banged into her desk, the pain unheeded.

Eyes.

They were eyes.

The pinhole pupil of each eyeball was fixed upon her. Slowly they roved up and down her body in a way that was most disturbing, and then, as she edged sideways across the room to break away from their gaze, they followed her every movement, tracking her unblinkingly. The way they all moved in silent unison made her stomach swim.

When finally she reached a spot that was shielded from their view, she paused to take stock.

She was still holding her handpad.

Emergency connection only.

This was undoubtedly an emergency.

She thumbed the call button for the security hub again.

As the call connected, she heard a babble of background voices, raised in agitation. Then the video feed resolved on an image of an empty chair.

"Hello?" she said, "Anyone there? This is Iv-"

"Yes, we know who you are," the operator butted in, and a young man came into view, sitting down in the chair and pressing a headset onto his scalp. His voice sound a lot less relaxed than it had before. "But you need to keep the comms clear. We are dealing with a situation right now, and the best thing you can do is relax and wait in your room until we give the all-clear."

"Situation?" she shot back, "The situation is there's something outside my door."

"Don't be silly," the operator replied, "You're just imagining it. You're hearing the sounds the station normally makes. Pumps. Thermal expansion. You're spinning every noise into a sinist-"

"No," she interrupted, "Look."

She edged along the wall until she was beside the door, and held up her handpad so the lens was pointing at the window. She could see an image of the glass on her pad's display, could see the cluster of eyes roving in unison. They appeared to be closely examining the frame of the window, slowly performing a circuit of its periphery with the same unwavering interest with which they had examined her.

"See that?" she said, "Do you see that?"

She brought her handpad back from the window, thumping the control to obscure the glass as she did so, then flipped her pad's view back to the security hub.

The man on the display was ashen-faced.

"Byers!" he shouted, "Byers! Get over here!"

Another face appeared on the video feed, a man leaning over the operator's shoulder.

"It's in the corridor outside Berth 14," the operator said to him, his voice rising as he spoke.

"Relax," the man replied, then gazed into the lens, "It's one of the new arrivals. It's just got a bit wayward, but you're quite safe th-"

"Shhh," she interrupted, "Did you hear that?"

"Hear what?"

"That sound. It's like... fuck, can you turn off the siren?"

"Wait a moment..."

The siren in her room stopped. Other alarms continued more distantly, though muffled enough that she could try to pick out the sound she had heard.

She strained to listen.

There.

"There, can you hear that?"

A soft humming noise, radiating through the polycarbonate plate of the door. Throbbing pulses, higher and then lower, in different places, as if the sound was... exploring the door.

Probing it.

It was almost as if the thing outside the door was talking, singing even. A cacophony of voices, all singing at a different pitch, a softly crooning susurration.

Crooning a lullaby.

Little pig, little pig, let me in...

And then all the voices narrowed to a single pitch, as clear and clean as a bell.

The door started to vibrate.

The hum filled the room.

She looked at her handpad again.

The two people on her screen were silent, transfixed by the sound.

The operator looked up at her, saw the silent question in her eyes.

"Trust me," he said, "It can't get in to your room."

The door creaked, resonating in its frame.

"Does it know that?" she replied.

The operator wasn't meeting her eye any more. Instead he was frowning at what he saw on the display in front of him.

He looked up.

Whatever he said next was drowned out by a loud cracking sound.

She squeaked in alarm.

"Listen to me," the man on her screen was saying, urgently, "Go to your refuge capsule. Go there n-"

She didn't hear the rest.

She was already going.

~O~

Her refuge capsule was built into the curving floor of her cabin, the curve a result of its location on the outer rim of one of the space station's great wheels, which spun slowly to create artificial gravity. Beneath her floor was the station's outer skin.

She'd not wanted to see the capsule every day, hadn't wanted to be reminded of what it represented - a last resort, the final redoubt in the event of an outbreak - so she'd had the clothes dispenser print her a large cloak, which she'd turned into a rug to cover it. She whisked the rug away now to reveal a heavy armoured door.

She punched the door control, willing it to open.

The catches released with a hiss, and the heavy door swung up under its own power, revealing the interior of the capsule.

Below her, the space was barely larger than a coffin, a comparison she was not at all comforted by, and lined throughout with crash padding. She sat down on the lip, her feet dangling over the drop.

Once, when the station had first been built, it had been fitted with the standard complement of life capsules, single-person emergency escape rafts. But when the station was converted to its current use, for the Programme, metal plates had been welded over the outer hull to disable them all. The Programme's organisers hadn't wanted the life capsules being - either accidentally or deliberately - a route for uncontrolled contamination to escape the station. They could never be used to escape now. Instead, they had been euphemistically renamed "refuge capsules" - a means for crew and participants to find a safe haven in an emergency, if not flee the station entirely.

It wasn't entirely clear to her whether the safe haven idea would work in practice. She'd never known it to be put to the test before.

~O~

Don't get dressed, the security officer had said. That was to allow the capsule's medprobes bare skin to work on. Her sleep suit - sleeveless nightshirt and shorts - should be fine, she decided, so she kept them on.

She glanced up at the timer over the door.

Eighteen minutes.

She wouldn't be able to see the timer from inside the capsule. She wouldn't be able to see the countdown to total loss.

She started a count in her head.

It was a one-way trip. Once she was in and the door was closed, she wouldn't be able to get out until they came to get her. Glued in place, in a cocoon of form-fitting crash padding.

Awaiting rescue.

If rescue came before the thirty minutes were up. Otherwise the refuge capsule would become the coffin it resembled. And then, three days later, a fiery cremation.

She hesitated on the rim, frozen by indecision.

Her mind was made up by the pinging sound of the door hinge pins clattering onto the floor.

Her cabin's contamination lights suddenly changed from green to red.

It had found its way into her room.

~O~

No more time to sit and stare.

She lowered herself down into the capsule. The crash padding was cold and springy under her feet. Carefully she lay on her back, arms by her sides and legs slightly apart to allow the spongy material to squeeze between her limbs.

There was a control unit by her right hand, with a single button. She wrapped trembling fingers around it, uttered a quick prayer to any gods who might be listening, and pressed the button.

The heavy capsule door started to swing slowly shut, dropping down upon her like the lid of a sarcophagus. For an instant, she had a dizzying, claustrophobic impulse to jump out before the door closed, but an instant more and it was too late and she had just enough time to take a breath and hold it before the lid struck home with a heavy, thudding finality that reverberated through her skull as of the sealing of a sepulchre.

There was a click of securing catches.

She was in darkness.

With a hiss of compressed gas, she felt the crash padding inflate and press into her body, around her head and her limbs, squeezing her into place, growing between her knees and along her arms, cushioning her inside her own personal armour-plated cocoon. Her ears popped at the pressure change.

Her face was cradled in a ring of soft padding, and as she shakily tried to regulate her breathing the capsule powered up, lighting a status display just below her eyeline. Above it there was a small plexiglass viewport, the view it gave of the interior of her cabin gloomy in the twilight of her room. She felt a diagnostic band wrap around her bare fore-arm, and another on her thigh, was almost comforted by the familiarity of the slightly scratchy sensation as it introduced a medprobe.

Her hearing was still affected by the pressure change, distorting the sounds coming to her, amplifying her breathing, drowning the beeping the capsule was making as it contacted the security hub to tell them she was in need of rescue. She yawned to try to clear the strange feeling she was underwater.

The effect of the station's spin, and a slight cant in the position of the capsule, still gave her a sense of up and down, her head somewhat up, her feet slightly down, even though her eyes told her she was lying on her back. But it wasn't simply a mismatch between what her eyes and ears were telling her that made her stomach float queasily.

~O~

The creature, whatever it was, that thing of gelatinous mass and myriad eyes, had got into her room, she knew that much. But did it know where she was now? Surely it wouldn't be able to smell her, sealed hermetically inside the capsule, if it could even smell at all. But could it sense where she had been? Had she left a trail of her fear to lead it to her door?

She wished she could have contrived a way to drag the rug back over the capsule after she closed the door. To have hidden the existence of the capsule from the creature the same way she had hidden it from herself.

Nineteen minutes.

The crash padding warmed, and her body's tension eased. The capsule's autodoc had sedated her slightly, she guessed, because she felt calmer than she told herself she should. She was bathed in a soft green light, the capsule's sensors all happy with the situation, even if she wasn't. And yet it might almost have been comforting, if it hadn't been for...

Had that humming sound always been there?

She strained her ears to listen, yawning again to make sure they were clear.

The humming. The humming the creature had made.

It was at the door of her capsule, and it was humming to get in.

Little pig, little pig, let me in...

And then viscous fluid flowed slowly over the outside of her viewport.

~O~

It had shown it was strong enough to break through her cabin door, but could it get to her in here? Could it get through the multiple layers of reinforced plasteel? Could it breach the capsule and if it did would it then breach her too?

There was no doubt it was trying.

Staring through the viewport at it, she supposed she should be glad at least that it wasn't a tomb wasp. Everybody feared the tomb wasp. Powerful, cunning, fatal. And if she should happen to get even a whiff of its pheromones, she'd be clawing at the door to get at it, to get it do to her what she'd be desperate for it to do.

But what was this creature knocking at her door? How dangerous was it? It might very well be safer than a tomb wasp.

Or it might not.

Cold eyes appeared at the viewport, drifting one by one into view until a dozen or more were watching her stonily, their implacable, unblinking scrutiny fixed upon her face.

She tried not to meet their gaze, but there was nowhere else to look to escape them, and closing her eyes was somehow worse. So she stared them down, defiant.

The humming was unmistakable now, the same sound the thing had made when it was breaking into her room, only now she could feel it through the crash padding just at the level of her belly button.

The chorus rose and fell, then narrowed, focussed in, and abruptly the whole capsule was resonating, deep, slow vibrations pulsing into her body. The pitch dropped, almost below the range of hearing, and the intensity increased, and now her whole body thrummed with it, her ear drums throbbing with a pulse so loud she couldn't hear her own cry of alarm, a vibration so intense she wondered if it would liquefy her very bones long before the door gave way.

She could feel it pulsing deep into her core, so deeply that the air in her every cavity vibrated. When she opened her mouth, her breath quavered with it, as if she were singing the same song in harmony with the creature. She could feel her empty stomach gurgle with the agitation.

Her lungs.

Her stomach.

And lower, beneath it all, deeper down in her body, there was another void that trembled with its quivering beat.

~O~

She was no novice in the Programme. She'd been a participant for more than two years now, letting alien creatures into her body however the needs of the Programme - and the subjects' particular biology - demanded. And the enhancements the Programme had wrought on her body, her heightened senses and physical responses to stimuli, she understood well the effect they had on her, on her willingness actively to participate in the events taking place. She knew that her body - once awoken - would be hungry, that primal hunger so hard to deny. If the thing outside the viewport got to her, she could end up battling her body's own wayward cravings as well as the creature's demands. It was a battle she might easily lose.

Suddenly the capsule's integrity alarm shrieked, cutting through the deep vibration in her body. The interior status lights turned abruptly from green to red. She felt the pressure dip of a broken seal. The humming stopped, and the vibration with it, leaving only the alarm, in her ears and in her mind.

It had broken in.

Just like that, it had breached the refuge capsule's armour plate.

Had they known it was capable of that?

Surely they hadn't, otherwise they wouldn't have dared bring it onto the station, because no barrier they could devise was proof against it.

She couldn't move.

She couldn't get away.

She held her breath, as if she could somehow, against all probability, still remain hidden from the creature, and waited for what she knew deep down was the inevitability of its touch.

The eyes on the other side of the glass all looked down in unison, at something out of sight below.

And then she felt it.

There was something in the capsule with her.

~O~

She felt it press wet and soft and warm against her belly.

She squeaked in alarm, trying to squirm away, even though there was nowhere to go.

She couldn't move.

She couldn't get away.

It was soft and clammy, glutinous, silky. Instantly it soaked through the material of her night-shirt, and dampness caressed her skin.

The wet thing explored her repulsively.

An appendage - a proboscis? a feeler? - powerful enough to punch through reinforced plasteel weave yet seemingly composed entirely of honey-thick slime, now tracked slowly, almost tenderly, downwards. It found the hem of her night-shirt and slid beneath, onto her bare skin. There it dallied, as if testing her, perhaps even tasting her. Then it pressed downwards, beneath her belly button, catching in the waistband of her sleep-shorts, downwards.

She moaned helplessly.

She couldn't move.

She couldn't get away.

The probing feeler tracked downwards, drawing her shorts slowly down with it, exposing her most intimate parts to its exploration.

She tried to press her legs together, but the crash padding between her knees restricted her movements. She couldn't close herself completely.

She felt treacly wetness pulse viscously into the space beneath her waistband, running down into her shorts. It slid down over her lower abdomen.

And there it flowed against her mound.

Slowly it oozed over the bare curve of her mons, and she groaned at the liquid warmth of it as it flowed stickily into the furrow of her most secret place, spreading into the gap the feeler had opened up inside the material of her shorts.

She moaned again.

Sticky warmth tickled at her.

Her body began to stir.

Don't get aroused!

As one, the eyes outside the window looked up and fixed her with their gaze, pitilessly backlit by the red glare of the emergency lights.

The viscous fluid swelled inside her shorts, widening its gain, then there was a soft gurgle, almost a sigh, and she felt something more solid press against her skin. A smooth, rubbery globe, rolling down the base of her belly, propelled by a sudden gout of liquid warmth, sliding down her body until it fetched up in the slimy space inside her shorts.

She gasped in near-revulsion.

She knew what it was.

An egg.

~O~

An alien egg, and she couldn't muster the full measure of loathing for it because now her body was wakening, stirring, threatening to fight her for control, to fight her for the right to choose to keep it out.

Or to let it in.

For an instant of outrage she had thought one of the eyes had got in, was down there, that the pinhole pupil of it was even now staring up at her from that angle, her most intimate parts exposed to its blank gaze. The realisation it was much larger than any of the eyes had been, was most likely in fact an egg being laid right inside her shorts, was by comparison almost - almost - a relief. A relief overlaid by a disgust she couldn't be sure was due more to the creature's touch or her body's traitorous response to that touch.

She knew exactly what the creature wanted from her. It was what they all wanted. It was why they were brought here, after all. It was why she was here, if it came to that.

But this was far from a normal implanting. To begin with, they'd already told her this creature was new to the station. She had no way of telling whether the xenobiologists knew yet that this creature's method of engagement was safe for her. After all, it had already surprised them by escaping from its pen. What other surprises did it have up its ovipositor?

And then there was the realisation that these were far from controlled experimental conditions. There was nobody to come to her aid if it went too far. Not unless they got here in the next eight minutes.

Finally, and most disturbingly, she had no seal in place. If it wanted to implant her, there was nothing to stop it. Not that she was even sure a seal would stop it, not if it could punch through the armour of her refuge capsule.

Nothing stood in its way, then. Except, perhaps, the strength of her own resolve. Would that be enough?

It would have to be.

The slime kept pumping slowly into her shorts. The sodden material sagged under the weight, stretched, and then the waistband started to draw downwards with the pressure, snagging for a few seconds at the flare of her hips before slipping onwards, her shorts dragging down until they caught at the middle of her parted thighs, prevented from sliding further by the crash padding between her knees.

Her bottom and mound were now nakedly exposed.

She knew this didn't really make a practical difference, given the slimy creature had already found its way inside her shorts, but the uncovering made her shiver nevertheless. At least there was some consolation from the fact that the egg, and she was sure it was an egg now, had dropped into the gusset of her shorts and was down near her knees rather than anywhere nearer her vulnerability.

But the slime kept flowing, and now it over-spilled the basin of her shorts, running thicker than honey down her calves to pool at her feet, squishing wetly between her toes. And still it kept coming.

Faster now. A torrent.

Was the creature trying to get its entire mass into her capsule?

She wriggled her toes uneasily in the slime.

It had submerged her naked feet, filled the space as far as her ankles, and was now rising warmly up her shins. She'd not seen the whole thing. How big was it? Would it fill the space completely?

Already the level was at her knees, and yet more slime was pumping warm down the cleft of her, slumping thickly down between her legs, filling the space below. Would it rise to fill her mouth, maybe even drown her before help could come to free her?

She couldn't look down, but she could feel the waistband of her shorts starting to slide slowly up her thighs again. The level of the slime had reached the tautly-stretched material, was flowing up past it, buoying it up towards her, bringing the egg with it. She could do nothing to stop it.

She couldn't move.

She couldn't get away.

She couldn't deny the egg's approach...

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