Chapter 4: Connecting Dots

Reid scrambled through the ventilation duct, her knees scraping on the cold metal floor as she rounded another corner, the engineer and her science team in tow. There were fewer branching paths here, fewer places where the little swarm of lizards could evade them. Finally she came to a T-junction, and stopped, looking to her left and right. Damn it, no sign of them. She waited for the engineer to catch up and then demanded to know where these two vents led. He sat down to catch his breath and withdrew his tablet computer from one of the many pockets on his yellow vest.

“Right would take you towards the firing range, and beyond that the direction of the commercial quarter. Left would take you towards the barracks, and in the direction of the residential quarter.”

“Are the Krell barracks in that direction?” Reid asked breathlessly, rubbing her scuffed knees.

“Yes, the human, Krell and mixed Borealan barracks are all in that direction.”

“Then we go left, there’s something we missed at the Krell barracks, I can feel it.”

Dubois chimed in, shuffling up behind the engineer and leaning against the wall of the vent, wiping his forehead with the sleeve of his jacket. It was getting warmer the deeper they got into the ventilation system, which she took as another clue that they were on the right track.

“We already checked the barracks Reid, and we found nothing, or did you forget?”

She shot him an angry look, she was becoming exhausted by this chase and she was in no mood for his cynicism.

“Give it a rest Mister Dubois, I won’t rule out the Krell until we’re absolutely sure, and I won’t be sure until we find out where these things are coming from.”

“Lead us into Russia then, Napoleon,” he said sarcastically with a dismissive wave of his hand. Reid shook her head and prepared to start moving again, she would show the cocky Frenchman when she discovered the source of the infestation, and with every passing moment her confidence that it was somehow linked to the Krell grew stronger. She set off down the leftward passage, and heard the groans of her companions as they trailed after her.

This was a long vent with fewer turns, it must branch off the main system in order to supply the various barracks. Her theory was confirmed when they came to a three-way split, and she stopped to consider. The engineer began to tap at his tablet computer again, but she waved for him to stop.

“No need, I can feel the humidity coming down the vent, it’s this way.”

She picked the center tunnel, and shuffled down into the darkness, her handheld torch dimmed by a distinct mist in the stale air. The filtration system was shut down for the duration of their search of course, and the air was not being circulated as it usually would, the damp clung to her as if she were crawling through a hollow tree trunk in some godforsaken swamp.

On and on they went, until finally they reached some kind of hub, a dozen vents splitting off in every direction.

“We’re above the Krell barracks now,” the engineer said, “each of these vents goes to a different room.”

“Hang on,” Sousa muttered as he pushed past the engineer to kneel beside Reid. “What’s that?”

She followed his pointing and saw it too, some kind of lumpy shape resting against the wall of the vent, obscured in the semi-darkness. She shone the beam of her torch through the thick haze, and there were gasps from the team. Eggshells, and dried fluids all over the walls and floor, either from the lizards breaking out of their eggs or the act of laying them. There was a whole damned nest here, dozens, maybe a hundred broken shells and more intact eggs the size of cantaloupes clustered in piles. They seemed to be stuck to the metal with some kind of sticky, gooey mucous. Reid crept forward and prodded the gelatinous matter with her finger, it clung to her skin and had the consistency of tar or molasses.

She jumped as a lizard sped past her, escaping down one of the many vents that surrounded them.

“That’s why we couldn’t find anything in the barracks,” Reid whispered, “they were keeping them in the vents! Did they lie to us, or did they just not understand the questions we were asking?”

“Either way we have to clean these eggs out,” the engineer said, “this is a major biohazard. We’re going to have to purge miles of the vent system to ensure all the foreign matter is cleared out.”

Reid turned and placed her hand on the man’s shoulder, her expression alarmed.

“Hang on, ‘purge’? We still don’t know what these things are, just that they have some link to the Krell. They could be pets gone feral, parasites maybe, but what if they’re baby Krell and you just blow them all out into space? How are their parents going to feel about that?”

“All of the Krell on the station are male, Reid,” Sousa sighed. “We’ve been over this already, nobody has ever even seen a female Krell.”

“Exactly, nobody has ever seen one. For all you know they reproduce asexually, or via damned mitosis, how can we be sure?”

“If that were the case, the specimens we have examined up to now would not have had distinctly male reproductive organs. Reid, you roped me into this because I’m the best biologist on the station, and I’m telling you that the Krell species has two genders. Everything we know about them points to that fact, if you won’t take my word for it, then why am I here?”

She sat and took a moment to compose herself, he was right of course, he was the resident expert on the subject and that was why she had requested that he join her team. Maybe she was becoming emotional, but the thought of just flushing all of those defenseless creatures into space as if they were just garbage bothered her. They weren’t aggressive or diseased, they were just trapped in a foreign environment through no fault of their own. How would they solve the problem any other way though? If the lizards were allowed to continue breeding they would multiply and become a real danger to the station, they couldn’t very well send hundreds of engineers into the vents to round them all up by hand. Sousa seemed to notice the resignation in her expression and leaned over to pat her on the back.

“It’s a shitty situation, I know, but at this point we have to choose between the welfare of these pest animals and the security of the Pinwheel. We just don’t have the resources or the time to find a more humane solution.”

“You’re right, you’re right, I’m sorry. Of course the vents must be purged, I will inform Chief Moralez that we’ve found the location of their primary nest, if there are others they won’t be very large yet.”

“Speaking of large,” Sousa muttered, crawling past her to examine the nest more closely. “One thing still bothers me...” He took one of the eggs in his hands and struggled to pull it free from the sticky webbing that glued it to the floor, turning it over and examining it more closely. It looked like an oversized golf ball, perfectly spherical, the pale shell pocked with small indentations and imperfections. “These eggs are too big, the largest known egg to body size ratio is the Kiwi bird of New Zealand, Earth. The female can lay an egg that weighs up to a quarter of her own body weight, which means that even when we make a conservative estimate, the creature that laid this egg must have been four or five times the weight of the lizards we’ve seen so far.”

“So you think there is a mother lizard roaming around in the vents somewhere?” Dubois asked, the promise of something larger to hunt peaking his interest.

“That’s likely to be the case, if my theory is correct then it may be many times their size.” He hesitated for a moment before slinging the egg under his arm, obviously intending to take it back to the lab as a trophy. “I’m making the call, a Krell somehow smuggled a pet onboard the station, a close genetic relative of their species that was already pregnant. I can’t speculate as to the exact method of reproduction with so little evidence to go on, but if you pressed me I would have to guess that the female of the species can store sperm for later use, much like a bamboo shark. A female could potentially use stored sperm years after the initial mating, the owner may not have been aware of the fact when they brought the animal onto the station. I would love to capture the creature for study, maybe then we could figure out how it was able to get past the scrubbers, but alas we just don’t have the time.”

“Do you think the ventilation system purge will kill it?” Reid asked, directing her question towards the engineer.

“No doubt,” he replied, “a purge opens the vents up to space and flushes them clean. Anything not bolted to the floor will get sucked out, and anything alive will die in a matter of seconds when the pressure and temperature plummet. Of course the connected buildings will have to be temporarily evacuated until the purge is complete, which is the reason we didn’t do that to begin with.”

It wasn’t a very satisfying conclusion, but it was one that Reid had to accept. Now she just had to hope that Webber might have been able to get some blood from the stone that was the tight-lipped Krell in the barracks. If she could confirm that one of them had brought a pet onboard, they could put this affair behind them and get back to their real work.

“Can we exit the ventilation system from here,” she asked the engineer, “are there any grates that we can remove so that we don’t have to crawl all the way back?”

He checked his tablet, and then nodded.

“Yes Ma’am, we can drop down through one of the ventilation grates in the largest room, then we can exit the building normally into the torus proper.”

There were sighs of relief from Dubois and Sousa, and the group started to move. Reid took one last glance over her shoulder at the cluster of eggs before crawling away to join them.

Webber awoke with a start, were those human voices she could hear? Oh crap, how long had she been asleep? The Krell still had his arm draped over her, his broad chest rising and falling heavily as he slept beside her, she was still coated in sticky fluids from their earlier romp. Fuck, fuck, she had to get out of sight. She tried to slip out from beneath his arm but found it too heavy to lift off her, the damned limb was packed with so much muscle that it must weigh as much as she did. She frantically wriggled, trying to move downwards past his portly belly, and finally succeeded in squeezing free of his bearhug.

She tried to stand, but stumbled, covering her mouth to suppress a giggle as she realized that her knees were still weak. Fucked so hard she couldn’t walk, what would her undergrad roommate have said if she could see Lena now? Not so much a plain bookworm now, eh, Karen?

She hastily collected her clothing from the heap beside the recessed bed. She couldn’t dress yet, not with all of this gelatinous mess still sticking to her inner thighs, but she worried someone might see her clothing. She crept across the room and slid into the furthest bed, trying to bury herself in loose pillows and cushions so that she couldn’t be seen from the door should someone check the room.

The sound of muffled voices and footsteps grew louder until Lena could make out Doctor Reid among them. Had they come to check on her? Her blood went cold as the automatic door slid open.

“Why was this door closed?” Reid mused, taking a step into the room and looking around. Lena peeked at her from a parting between two cushions, holding her breath as her boss surveyed the space. “Doctor Webber should still be here, why isn’t she interviewing the Krell?”

“She may have set off back to the lab already,” Sousa this time, “maybe we’ll meet her back there.”

Reid lingered for another moment before leaving, closing the door behind her, perhaps assuming that the sleeping Krell wanted privacy. Lena breathed a sigh of relief, then waited for another minute before climbing out of her makeshift pillow fort. Perhaps she could don just her lab coat and take a quick dip in one of the pools to wash off, then take an extremely thorough shower when she got back to the lab. She could make the excuse of needing to wash off the sweat after spending so much time in the humid Krell barracks and slip away before anyone could wise up.

Despite her fear of being discovered, she felt great, excited. Maybe she had needed that encounter more than she cared to admit, she felt like a new woman, all of her stress and insecurity burned away as if she had taken the much deserved vacation that her schedule had never allowed her.

Perhaps she should do this again some time, she had a better excuse than anyone to make frequent visits to the barracks, and she bit her lip as the thought of having the Krell on call crossed her mind. Later, right now she needed to get cleaned up and make her way back to the lab before Reid got impatient and sent someone to fetch her.

She slung her white lab coat over her shoulders and fastened the buttons down the front as best she could, the Krell that were in the common room might not even know she was dressed strangely. As she crept towards the door to avoid waking the dormant Krell, she felt a pair of massive arms hug her from behind and lift her bare feet off the floor.

The Krell nestled his snout in her hair and breathed in her scent, very much awake as Lena began to blush. She struggled and so he placed her back on the ground, but not before dragging his warm tongue across the back of her neck. She felt her loins begin to moisten again, her heart quickening as the giant creature loomed over her.

“N-Not now, damn it,” she muttered. What were the Krell phrases she was struggling to remember? The words were on the tip of her tongue.

“No, stay,” she said in their native language, a hissing, rumbling dialect that sounded at once like a boiling kettle and a failing car engine. He cocked his head at her, she didn’t want to hurt his feelings, she intended very much to come back for round two when the opportunity presented itself. “I ... return ... future,” she struggled, without being able to reproduce their subsonic growls she was unable to use much of their vernacular. She asked his name too, she wanted to be sure that she could find the right alien again, they all looked so similar to her untrained eye. His reply sounded like the word ‘sheath’ spoken through a bad lisp, and tinged with an almost musical reverb.

“Sleethe, I think that’s right,” she mused, reverting back to English. “Hell, I probably couldn’t pronounce it properly if you wrote it down for me. I’m Lena, Lay ... nah.” She spelled it out for him but he made no attempt to repeat it, he probably didn’t need to know her name and would sense her by smell, he certainly seemed to enjoy her scent.