Lifeboat: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 2) by Savage Felix R. & Patterson Bill

Author:Savage, Felix R. & Patterson, Bill [Savage, Felix R.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: hard science fiction first contact technothriller
Publisher: Knights Hill Publishing
Published: 2017-01-02T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 25

Kate gathered in the loose end of the tether that should have been attached to Giles’s belt. It had been cleanly severed. She wrapped it around her right glove and untied the other end from the stanchion. The tether reel at the end was made of solid steel. It would weigh several pounds on Earth. Not a bad weapon. It was the only one she had, anyway.

She kicked off from the wall and floated into the darkness.

“Giles,” she called over the radio. “Giles.”

She drifted along the corridor they had explored before. Her headlamp shone on blackened, bubbled paint. Further on, swirls of acid color glowed undamaged on the walls. So this was the MOAD’s interior décor. Pretty gross.

She reached an intersection. The corridor crossing this one was as broad as a subway tunnel. Weirdly, tables and sofas stood in groups in the middle of the corridor, like some kind of extraterrestrial café. Kate’s heart hammered. She peeked left and right.

The walls of the corridor were lined with lockers eight feet high. Kate suddenly remembered an incident from her own high school days. Some kids had shut a girl into her own locker. She was too ashamed to shout and kick the door, apparently, so no one found her until after school, when the janitor heard her crying. Kate had been friends with the kids who did the shutting-in. They had laughed for weeks about it. She felt bad about that to this day.

Each locker had a plaque above it, etched with the chicken-scratch writing Giles had found so intriguing.

Kate chuckled bleakly. She rapped her tether reel on the nearest locker. “It’s safe to come out now, Giles. Time to go home…”

The locker lit up with a soft green light.

Kate pushed off from it in fright, and because she was in freefall she kept going until she bumped into one of the sofas in the middle of the corridor.

The light grew brighter. The door of the locker was translucent. The light was coming from inside, and it silhouetted a humanoid shape.

A woman, Kate thought.

Floating suspended.

Thick locks haloed her head like a mermaid’s hair.

But this mermaid had legs. Runway-model legs. Skinny arms, and a face …

A face like a huge Halloween mask, with outsize eyes, closed.

It’s an alien. A motherfucking alien.

Kate gripped her tether reel. She felt absolutely terrified lest those eyes should open, and fix on her.

She glanced up and down the tunnel. The green glow from the locker with the alien woman in it illuminated more and more lockers stretching away in both directions. Hundreds of them. Thousands.

She pushed off from the sofa, and caught movement at the edge of her faceplate.

An alien clambered over the sofa, reaching for her.

Just like the one in the locker, but dead black all over. The thick locks on its head wriggled like an octopus’s tentacles.

Kate let out a shocked little grunt, and hurled the tether reel into those repulsive tentacles.

An unbearable high tone stabbed into her ears.

Kate wanted to rip her helmet off to escape the noise.

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