Mangled Meat Read Free

needed enough PSIs in the dock to take my EUD mitt off. Then I grabbed an SV probe off the hardware lock.
    “What the fuck are you fuckin’ doin’?” Yung asked.
    I didn’t bother answering. The sub-violet lume element would show me the same spot where the hull was touched. “There it is,” I muttered. It was a downward streak. Someone had pressed his or her fingertip against the hull at this precise point. Then they’d dragged their fingertip down in a straight line...
    With my mitt off, then, I did the same thing. I pressed my fingertip on the same spot, then dragged it down.
    A small ingression on the high quadrant of the hull formed. And for you earth-loving no-hackers who don’t know what that means... It means a doorway opened.
    ***
     
    “He did it!” Yung barked. “The candyass civvie fuck did it! First Platoon! Lock and load. ” Yung shoved me back out of the way as his troops charged their Colt M-57 Squad Assault Systems. “Cole, Alvirez, take firing positions at the bulkhead! Filips and Bensin, cover the entrance at one-five meters! Come on, Roburts! It’s me and you.”
    “Sarge, Sarge,” I interrupted. “The G.I. Joe stuff isn’t going to be necessary.” I showed him my fileflat which was now out-indexing the atomic chromatography specs from the p/a/a scan. “Check this out.”
    Yung frowned at the readouts, his trigger finger twitching. “The fuck am I supposed to know what that shit is? I ain’t no wirehead—I’m a fuckin’ Army Ranger!”
    Tell me about it. “This is a radio assay and carbon-date of the fingerprint. It’s over 2,000 years old, Sarge. Any life form inside that victor is long dead.”
    “Balls,” the platoon sergeant replied. “Cover me, Roburts!” Then he raised his weapon and entered the craft. I guess these guys had their games to play, so what the hell. They had to go through the motions, I guess to maintain their identities. And I guess I did the same thing, in my own way, too.
    But when Yung entered the victor with his wrist-light and rifle—it seemed like a whole lot of time went by with all of us just standing there staring at the doorway. Yung didn’t respond. We couldn’t even see his shadow moving in there.
    “Hey, Sarge?” I called out.
    Nothing.
    “Sergeant Yung! Relay your status!” one of the other grunts cracked.
    Nothing.
    Then—
    “Holy everlovin’ motherfuckin’ shit...”
    It was Yung’s voice that carried back to our CVCs. I turned to the SGT E-5 next to me. “You’re next in command, pal. You better send someone in there.”
    “I-I-I—,” he stammered.
    What the hell, I thought. I grabbed the SGT’s wrist-light and stepped into the victor. The cabin walls were black but somehow tinged with silver. I saw no evidence of an operator’s seat, instruments, or controls. Just the weird silver-black, which sucked up the 1000-candle-power sodium light I was carrying.
    “Down here,” Yung’s voice drifted to me.
    It was like walking through black fog. I seemed to take many more steps than the depth of the craft would allow, but eventually Yung’s form came into focus. He’d dropped his weapon on the victor’s floor and was just sitting there on a starboard protrudement.
    “Guess I just wasn’t ready for it,” he said. He sat there with the rim of his helmet in his palm. He looked out of it. He looked whacked.
    “What’s that, Sarge?”
    “Seen a lot of fucked up shit in my time. Seen guys die, my own men, seen whole transport plats blow up ‘cos some mech jockey forgot to close a vent-line. I saw the P-4 quake split the whole planetoid in half and swallow fifteen thousand colonists five minutes after my thruster took off. It’s fucked up shit, man.”
    “Straighten up, Sarge,” I said. For whatever reason, he was going down memory lane, and the scenery wasn’t too great. “Get yourself squared away. Sure, we’re standing inside an alien spacecraft—the first one ever discovered—and you’re right, it’s fucked