Читать книгу Imminent Domain - SEAN KOPING - Страница 7

April 20^th 2021

0635 hours

Gossamer Muse Super Cruise-liner

Deck Seven, Casino

The Gossamer Muse was a Mega class luxury cruise-liner clearly designed for the ‘filthy rich’ with the most opulent tastes. An extravagantly ambitious undertaking the G.M. was the third largest cruise ship ever built. With a total of 16 decks, the vessel had over 1400 passenger cabins and carried over 3000 passengers and a crew of a thousand. All of whom, for all intents and purposes, had mysteriously disappeared. Throughout the decks of the ship, we had managed to cover so far, there were a few signs of disturbance and struggle. However any suspicions of piracy were soon dismissed when in our search for survivors we discovered that the passenger cabins and the ship’s vault were virtually untouched. The only peculiarity we encountered were connected groupings of inch in diameter perforations randomly spread along the floors, wall and sometimes the ceilings of cabins throughout the ship. Disturbingly, the ship’s two mandatory small arms lockers were empty.

Two hours had passed and the technicians on the top deck, pool-side, had managed to restore partial power to some parts of the ship. We had just about completed about sixty percent of our sweep of the ship when my team arrived at the ship’s casino. The team consisted of two Chinese S.F. members Tan and Jin-Lao and a tech named Portly or something. We weren’t there long, when ‘Colt’ reported in over the com. Ahead of our scheduled fifteen minute check-in.

“Colonel, I’m on deck three: engineering,” he said hesitantly, “I think I got something here you should see.”

There was a moment of garbled static then the colonel’s gravel-laced voice,

“Show me.”

A few seconds later the P.D.A. of every Alpha unit member came alive.

The ship had taken on water in the lower decks but the damage appeared to be minimal. Deck 3 was almost totally underwater. Colt and two C.S.F. commandos were standing on an elevated walkway above the two-deck tall engineering section towards the rear of the ship. Their discovery that the ship was sinking paled in significance to their other discovery. The pods.

Floating in the waters that were flooding the slowly sinking vessel was a lattice-work of large spherical pods. The entire engineering section was filled with the interconnected, partially submerged pods that seem to emit a soft sickly yellow glow in the darkness. The pods themselves were a pale yellow color covered with blue-black veins that pulsed with life. Covered with a viscous translucent slime the pods pulsed rhythmically writhing in the dark waters of the flooded compartment.

I held my arm out so that that the others could see the video. The overweight technician opened large metal brief-case he had been lugging around in one hand. In it was the mother of all lap-top computers and attached some wires to the Multi-spectrum computer/scanner he carried in the other. Suddenly the 25’ inch monitor in the gun-metal grey brief-case gave us the best seats in the house. ‘Portly’ had tapped into Alpha-unit’s encrypted frequency in less than thirty seconds. An impressive feat that was supposed to be theoretically impossible.

“We get cool toys, too,” Portly chuckled nervously.

The Colonel’s voice came over the com again.

“Professor, are you getting this?”

“…my god there must be hundreds of them,” Professor Schuller whispered his voice trembled with awe, “Y-yes I am seeing the video now.’

Professor Schuller, too valuable to be physically present on the Gossamer Muse monitored the ‘op’ from the newly built PWR Operations Command Centre in New York City via an up-link relayed through the Thuraya satellite system.The Thuraya satellite system from a geo-synchronous orbit 22,300 miles above the equator, in addition to other various functions, tracked movement of and provided internet-connectivity to cruise-liners like the Gossamer Muse.

“What are we looking at here, Professor?”

“I can’t say for certain… without further examination… but my guess is that we are looking at a system of inter-connected …definitely organic… incubation chambers.”

“Eggs.” Portly translated un-necessarily.

“Incubation chambers?” Colt asked uneasily over the Com, “For what?”

“Do you think you can get us in closer?” the professor asked obviously lost in thought.

“What’re you kidding me?” Colt shot back.

We never heard the professor’s answer.

There we stood in the partially lit Casino gathered around Portly’s monster lap-top as it lay on the velvet carpeted black-jack table. Jin-lao saw it first. In the darkness at the far end of the casino something moved toward the exit. Away from us.

“Halt!” Jin-lao shouted and brought up his flash-light mounted M4A1 Chinese triple pulse assault rifle.

The beam of light cut through the black and illuminated the doorway where something or someone moved out of the way.

Jin-Lao bolted toward the doorway with Tan and me close behind.

“Colonel, we have un-known contact! Deck Seven! In pursuit!” I shouted as I ran.

“Negative! Rabbit Hold position. Repeat- Hold your position. We’re coming to you!”

“Sir they’re right there!” I protested to my superior.

“Hold your position, Rabbit! That’s an order, soldier!”

I stopped reluctantly at the doorway and swore under my breath. All I could do was watch as the two Chinese commandos disappeared down the darkened hallway. I un-safed my weapon. A minute later Portly jogged up beside me out of breath,

“What the hell was that?!”

“Unknown, Portly.” I answered clinically still covering the hall-way with my OICWv.2. “It was probably one of the terrorists.”

“What do we do now?”

“We hold our position.” I growled in disappointment.