Deathstalker 02 - Deathstalker Rebellion

any of them on a bet. For no reason he could put a finger on, his mind kept throwing up an image of himself stuck helplessly to one of the dark shapes, while the chamber filled slowly with digestive juices. He was sweating inside the hard suit, despite the cool air it was circulating.
    They moved on through the vast chamber, stepping slowly and carefully, touching nothing, and finally left the chamber through another of the puckered holes.
    Beyond lay more tunnels, opening before them and closing after them, and more chambers studded with various shapes, none of them immediately comprehensible to the human mind. Until finally the away team encountered another, smaller chamber, and discovered what had happened to the missing Gehenna Base personnel.
    The chamber was some hundred feet in diameter, the walls pockmarked in rows both vertical and horizontal, and a thin layer of vapor covered the floor, beading wetly on the hard suits' armor. There was light of a kind, a harsh unforgiving blue-white glare that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. Long flat slabs of some unfamiliar metal were scattered across the floor, held just above the vapor, and on those slabs, held firmly by some unseen force, were the remains of the Base personnel. Some were only parts: organs and limbs and faces.
    A dozen complete torsos had been messily vivisected, and from the few with heads attached and the expression on their faces, Silence had no doubt at all that these men and women had been alive and aware when the vivisection began.
    Anywhere else he might have felt sick, for all his experience, but right then he was too full of rage and fury to feel anything else.
    "They'll die for this," said Frost in a calm, cold voice. "Every living thing on this ship shall pay in blood and suffering."
    The marines stirred restlessly, looking this way and that for something to aim
    their weapons at. Silence knew how they felt, but kept an icy firm control on his anger. "You can kill the aliens only after the specialists have squeezed every drop of information out of them, Investigator. Until then, I want captives, not corpses. Marines, remember your orders. Minimum force only, unless in life-threatening situations. Use your own judgment, but you'd better be prepared to back it up later. There will be a time for vengeance, but we must have the information this ship holds. We might have to face more of its kind in the future."
    "Don't lecture me," said Frost. "I know my duty."
    "Sorry, Investigator. Just speaking for the record. There's nothing more we can do here. Mark this chamber's location on your suits' maps, and we'll move on. We can send people in to retrieve the bodies later. Right now we have to find the control section. I want this ship immobilized and helpless before it can finish its repairs. I also want a good look at the crew, and more and more it seems the only place we can be sure of finding them is at the control center. They wouldn't dare abandon that."
    He led the way across the chamber, moving carefully between the crimson spread-eagled bodies on the slabs, trying hard not to look at them. It was easier to control his anger that way. It seemed to take forever to reach the opening on the far wall, but as he drew near it puckered shut in a mass of solid, tightly packed cables. Silence prodded it here and there with his steel fingers, but it didn't give anywhere. He hadn't thought it would. He hit it once with his fist, and then turned back to the others. They stared at him silently with their featureless steel helmets. Slowly, and without any fuss, the light was going out. The slabs with their grisly specimens began to disappear into
    rising vapor. It didn't take much imagination on Silence's part to picture the alien crew massing on the other side of the closed portal.
    "Marines, I feel we are quite definitely now in a life-threatening situation.
    Feel free to shoot anything that moves that isn't us. I'd like a few specimens left alive, just a few, so if anything runs, let it. Investigator, make an opening here."
    Frost aimed her armored right hand at the closed opening, and the disrupter built into the glove blasted a hole right through the tightly packed webbing. A sickly green light spilled into the chamber through a ten-foot-wide hole, and everyone braced themselves for an attack that never came. Silence and Frost edged forward and peered through the new opening. Hanging ends of ruptured cables hung twitching and