Sherlock/Alien films crossover (Part 1/2)
Title: They Mostly Come Out at Night
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC) / Alien Franchise
Rating: R for some violence
Summer: For the kinkmeme prompt here - Mummy Holmes was admiral of the British space fleet, and her sons were gestated in a synthetic womb called an AGU. When something monstrous burst out of a lieutenant's chest and got loose on board a ship carrying the Holmes family, the unborn second son and was left on board. A quarter of a century later, the Orbiter 200B is a floating wreck on the edge of the colonised territory. Mycroft Holmes sends a Royal Navy special ops vehicle, the Baker, to the abandoned ship to learn what can be salvaged...
Also available on Ao3.
The thunder of Sally’s gun brought down a shower of icicles. It reverberated through the metal deck under Anderson’s feet and for a handful of seconds lit up the corridor. Anderson saw a shadow, nothing more, and then he heard his own voice yelling, “Move! Move!” as he scooped his shoulder under Dimmock’s and ran as fast as the stiff plastic suit and the rifle slung over his back would allow. Sally was at the rear trying to sprint in the same menthol-green protection suit, bumping against them as she alternated between stumbling forward and watching their backs.
“Stamford!” Sally screamed. “Come in, damn you!”
Only the echoes answered. Then came Lestrade in their headsets, trying to raise the doctor over the comms. The beams of their headlamps swung across the frost-burnished walls. Stamford didn't answer.
“Boss,” Anderson panted. “Shut up, please, we need some quiet.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Lestrade barked down the line. “Where is Stamford? Why could I hear gunfire?”
“We can’t just leave him!” Sally broke in.
“Yes we can,” Anderson told her. Dimmock was groaning, whining about his leg, and it felt like he was getting heavier. “We’re not staying here. Not until we figure out what that was.”
The upcoming junction was familiar. Anderson hauled Dimmock around the corner and saw a sign directing them to the O-G dock, wiped clear of frost by Stamford’s thick-gloved hand on their way in. They were almost there.
They were almost safe.
---
Less than an hour earlier, Captain Greg Lestrade had shut himself up in the server room with a scratched headset that looked old enough to be pre-colonial. The cladding had peeled off and the frame was scratchy against his scalp, but they’d been the only set he could find in the storage closet outside. The Baker was full of such odd bits and ends after three generations of service. The ship was something of an antique in today’s navy, which was exactly why Lestrade liked it. Its engines had never failed, its hull had been tested by every chemical and physical trial in the fourteen solar systems, and its top-of-the-range computer network was retrofitted, which meant viruses and power failures and glitches and corruptions could all be circumvented by just turning on the manual systems. You felt safe in a ship like the Baker.
The images he was watching were old, too. Twenty-four years and nineteen days old, give or take a few hours. They had been downloaded from the network of the silent Orbiter-200B almost as soon as the Baker had docked with it above the airless moon that had been its last base of operations. The video was the captain’s final entry as the ship was abandoned. In the background, there were shouts and the endless, ugly hoot of a siren.
“Impossible to reach the last of the emergency pods, not enough trained pilots to fly the shuttles,” the white-haired captain spoke into the lens, as if to an old friend. “The rescuers took the families and the officers first. I stayed behind to evacuate the last of the cadets and our technical crew, but then they closed the doors behind them-“ there was a noise beyond the screen, the slow roll and shiver of a distant explosion. A man in a private’s uniform surged up and whispered something in the captain’s ear. With a couple of words from his leader he departed. When he turned back to the lens, the captain had a faint, desperate smile on his face. “We’ve blown up the bridge where the worst of the contagion was present. We’ve no… we’ve idea what it is. The lights always go first. No one has come face to face with it and lived. Maybe… surely it can’t survive depressurisation. Oxygen levels in the bridge sector are less than five percent of regulation and dropping… surely nothing will survive,” he looked over his shoulder and then back at the camera, rubbing a wrinkle from his brow with the pad of his thumb. Plenty more replaced it with each twitch of his muscles. “My people put our numbers at one hundred cadets and at least two hundred crew still on board. We can hold out until the navy returns with a stronger rescue fleet. This is Captain Gerald Porter, signing off.”
The entry ended. Lestrade sucked in a long breath through his nose, leaning back against a whirring driver shelf in the cramped room. He folded his arms as he stared at the filepath for the captain’s last log entry, the date blinking across the far side of the screen. Mycroft had said that there had been crew left behind in the panic, but less than a score. That was the official story. Was it possible he didn’t know? Or had he kept that little titbit to himself, even as he poured so many other classified secrets into Lestrade’s ears?
“You better not have lied to me, you toff,” Lestrade growled. “Not after everything I agreed to.”
There was a static hiss and Donovan’s voice yelped in his ear, “Boss, we’ve got fucking mutiny again.”
“You are such a daddy’s girl,” Anderson whined into his own radio.
“Excuse me, don’t talk to Lestrade, I’m in charge here,” Dimmock snapped.
Lestrade winced and pulled up his headset to adjust the volume on the tiny earpiece he was wearing beneath it. In some distant part of the Baker, Sally and Anderson where bickering about ammo. Again. Sally had insisted on hollow-point rounds while Anderson had wanted plastic-tipped. Both types had a high lethality, but Sally and Anderson disagreed on which was more likely to pierce a ship’s outer hull if they went astray. If Lestrade had been down in the airlock with them, he would have knocked their heads together and told them they shouldn’t need to fire their damn weapons anyway. This was a salvage mission, not damn recce. There shouldn’t be anything they needed to shoot at.
That’s what Mycroft had promised, anyway.
He clicked his jaw to switch on the transmission from his earpiece, “Donovan. Anderson. Shut it. I want the lines clear unless you’ve got something to report. And for Chrissake, Dimmock is your commander on this foray.”
There was a chorus of “Yes, sir,” from all four of the team, slightly slow and surly in Sally’s case. Lestrade clicked his transmission off and went back to the screen. He wanted to be down there with them, stepping into the unknown, walking where no humans had walked for almost three decades. But he was a yarder here to do a job, not go thrill seeking.
‘Yarders’ was the nickname for the navy’s exploratory scouts, men and women trained to adapt to the weirdest and most dangerous missions - answering distress signals from colonies where order had broken down, carving trails on planets that were only partially terraformed, putting down anarchy on mutinied ships and raiding others that were suspected of piracy. Normally the Baker might be packed with up to forty navy officers and cadets under Lestrade’s command, but they were a skeleton crew on this particular mission. Stanley Hopkins was serving as communications officer for now, first pilot Dubugue was in the cockpit at all times, while Lieutenant Dimmock was Lestrade’s second in command and the ship's co-pilot. Sally and Anderson were their dedicated combat specialists and had served the longest under Lestrade. Finally they’d been saddled with Mike Stanford as their medic after the Baker’s usual doctor Sarah had found out she was pregnant two days before launch. On top of the crew, they had picked up a dozen passengers at the nearest refilling station - mostly discharged soldiers heading back to earth from the war on A-F85, a colony planet in the outer reaches that was fighting for independence. The passengers had their own facilities at the other end of the ship and had mostly kept to themselves so far.
They had one other employee of her majesty’s navy on board, one that Mycroft had specially arranged for reasons that Lestrade himself was only partially clear on. The spare ward beside the med bay had been converted into a makeshift lab for the use of a pathologist who called herself Molly Hooper. Molly was mousey and over-apologetic about her presence, which grated endlessly on Lestrade’s patience. Not just because it was annoying, but because Molly wasn’t a proper person, as she’d explained when meeting the crew. She was one of the newest-model, picture-perfect androids that were supposed to be indistinguishable from an organic Homo sapiens. “Legally you don’t have to, you know, treat me like I’m a human,” Molly mumbled to Lestrade’s team, wringing her hands, “But, er, it’d be sort of nice if you did. Is that okay?” Her submissiveness made Lestrade incredibly uncomfortable whenever he remembered that she was programmed like that.
Their job was to collect samples from the dead ship. Lestrade wanted to be at the head of the pack, but yarder regulations decried that one senior officer had to remain on the Baker at all times, and this was Dimmock’s first real mission since he’d made lieutenant. He’d been so keen, Lestrade didn’t have the heart to tell him to stay on board. Once the abandoned Orbiter vessel was secure, Lestrade would go with one of his most trusted yarders, probably Donovan. He’d carry out the task that had not been committed to paper or binary code, that Mycroft had given directly to him, to carry in his head.
There were smattering of unnamed entries in the ship’s log after the last with Captain Porter’s ID. As he scrolled down to the next one, Lestrade throught back to that day in Mycroft’s office, two weeks before they’d left Earth.
---
Mycroft had himself a spot on the corner of the fifty-seventh floor. The walls were glass, looking out over a smoky London criss-crossed with waterways since the rise of the oceans. Lestrade was ushered in by a black-skinned, silver-haired android with a feminine smile and a kickboxer’s body beneath its robes. Secretary and bouncer all in one. Before he even stepped through the door, the android made him sign three secrecy contracts that threatened him with job termination, imprisonment, or maybe worse.
Mycroft was just putting down the phone. The electronic assistant could apparently coordinate his schedule seamlessly, escorting in one appointment as the other ended without even understanding the conversation it was listening in on. Lestrade waited at the door until Mycroft twitched his hand at the chair across from his desk.
“Greg, it’s a pleasure to see you,” he said with a smile, getting up to shake his guest’s hand. Lestrade had never introduced himself to Mycroft by his first name, but Mycroft uttered it as if they were the closest of friends. Perhaps they were. Perhaps when a man saved your life, you owed him close friendship. Among other things.
The ‘sir’ was only half-formed in Lestrade’s throat when Mycroft waved it away. “Please, let’s dispense with the formability. This is a personal conversation.”
“Since when do you have personal conversations?” Lestrade asked.
Mycroft didn’t deign this with an answer, settling back into his tall chair. At his right hand a row of pens was lined up like soldiers. He didn’t look a day older than he had five years ago, when Lestrade had first met him on Colony LT-5 with an acid storm battering at the walls of the kitset barracks and his life crashing around his ears. But back then Mycroft had already looked twice his age, so perhaps the years were just catching up with his body. Lestrade wasn’t sure where Mycroft’s brain stood by that measure.
The administrator held out an opaque plastic folder. “You may have some questions about the mission that you and your skeleton team were briefed with yesterday. This will answer most of them.”
“What's in here?” Lestrade asked. He didn’t wonder how Mycroft knew about the Baker’s next assignment. Mycroft always cultivated an air of omnipotence.
“The truth,” Mycroft said, entwining his fingers on the polished surface of his desk. Real wood, by the look of it. Solid, not the baked mush approximating tree cells that they made from the yeast factories. Lestrade was pretty sure the last time he’d seen wood, it had been part of his grandfather’s inheritance, taken away by the senior Lestrade’s third wife.
Mycroft pointed at the folder open in Lestrade’s hands. “I’m sure you knew, long before you got the brief, about the Orbiter vessel affectionately nicknamed London Pride? It’s such a pity the name fell out of fashion after the incident, I rather like it.”
“Yeah, I know the story,” Lestrade was frowning down at the papers inside the folder. Each one was stamped with the watermark ‘CLASSIFIED - DO NOT COPY’. There were words that he couldn’t decipher. Species names, he thought. “I think I took my first girlfriend to the feature film. Some kind of super-rabies, wasn’t it? They had to abandon ship, lot of people died? I remember in the movie get rescued by the black ops for some reason.”
“Indeed, it is quite a good story,” Mycroft smiled. “You probably won’t have heard that I was a survivor of the Pride.”
Lestrade’s head twitched up. “You? God, you must have been a kid.”
“I was twelve,” Mycroft nodded, his tone as breezy as if discussing a comedic family holiday. “The youngest on board, bar one special case. There were about two dozen partners and families of top naval officers. And there was a very good reason why the black ops got involved,” he tapped his nails on the priceless wood veneer, “The rabies story is a lie. There was such a breakdown of communications that no one who got off the 200B had seen the true culprit. None of the survivors had any idea what killed the team of SAS agents that the 200B picked up a couple of days earlier,” Mycroft shrugged.
“Then what?” Lestrade asked, looking between the folder in his hand and Mycroft’s face.
Mycroft winced. “Have you been watching the news reports on Colony Procyon-15? Have you heard of
Tatminartok?”
“Yeah,” Lestrade frowned. “Wiped out by a deadly strain of dogpox,” he glanced at the folder again. “I’m seeing a pattern here.”
“You catch on quick,” Mycroft said, his voice lowered. He leaned forward. “The fact is, no one knows what killed P-15 and Tatminartok. Distress calls were made to their nearest neighbours. A yarder team was sent to P-15, and by radio claimed that someone in the colony was alive and dangerous. That was the last anyone heard of them. A second team, more highly trained and heavily armed, was equipped with pulse monitors and constant video streams. They transmitted for about an hour after touching down before their hearts stopped one by one. Their videos captured brief, blurry images, and the sound of their screams, but little useful data. The colony was bombed from orbit, but the atmosphere rapidly destroyed the remains before it could be studied,” Mycroft shrugged, “Tatminartok was a fully terraformed planet with a population forty times larger than P-15. This time we monitored it from orbit for weeks after getting the distress call. Nobody responded to our transmissions. No one made contact with the beacons we dropped. We sent down probes, but they stopped broadcasting soon after. Once again, little usable footage. Whatever it was, it knew to approach its victim from the opposite side to their eyes,” Mycroft’s smile was tinged with something akin to admiration. He cleared his throat. “Tatminartok had a considerable number of inter-stellar ships. Once again, the colony was bombed from orbit, rather than allow the killers to escape.”
Lestrade raised his eyebrows, “You think this was done by some kind of militant extremists?”
“Not at all. None of the known independence organisations have the ability to massacre a colony the size of Tatminarktok without some visible damage to infrastructure,” Mycroft steepled his fingers. “Besides, they would have claimed credit by now.”
“Then who did it?”
Mycroft inclined his head. Lestrade glanced down at the word ‘200B’, repeated over and over on the classified sheets.
“Whatever it was, we now believe it was also the doom of Orbiter 200B,” Mycroft said quietly. “Your salvage mission is not about deactivating the Pride’s nuclear reactor, or retrieving lost computer drives or any other nonsense your superiors have told you. We need biological samples. Facts. Data. You’ll be accompanied by an expert pathologist. You will learn what really killed London Pride,” his voice was chilly now, “and how we can fight it.”
Lestrade leaned forward, jabbing his forefinger at the folder, “You want me and my team of six to walk up to something that killed a load of SAS blokes and then two entire colonies?”
“Not at all, Captain,” Mycroft raised his hand. “We know this… adversary… can be destroyed by the liberal application of explosions. It is physical. There are indications that it eats its victims. It has been twenty-four years. Do you really think it could still be alive?”
“Well an Orbiter’s got oxygen farms and greenhouses, doesn’t it?” Lestrade demanded. “Theoretically, if there were human survivors they could feed themselves for decades, if their fusion cells didn’t malfunction.”
“Tatminarktok’s algae pastures were untouched, we could see that much from our low-orbit photos,” Mycroft countered. “Our best analysts predict that it needs high-energy substances. Meat.”
“Yeah, and you just said your best analysts have a couple of video fragments and some bloody satellite pictures to work on, that’s why you’re sending us in here in the first place,” Lestrade tossed the folder down on the shiny wood, knocking aside Mycroft’s neat line of pens. “And worse, that’s why you’re sending such a small team in, isn’t it? Because if we do survive, there’s fewer people to tell the rest of the colonies what you’ve covered up.”
Mycroft caught the last pen just before it rolled off the desk. He placed it down far away from the edge and then shifted forward, reached out and put his hand over Lestrade’s.
“I did not give this order,” Mycroft said. “I did not decide to keep this mission small. But I did recommend your team.”
Lestrade took a moment before he slid his hand out from beneath Mycroft’s. The other man closed his fist over the empty air.
“Why the hell would you do that?” he asked.
“For two reasons,” Mycroft said. “Firstly, on the slight chance - and I truly believe it is slight - that there is still danger on the ship, I believe no one else is better suited to survive it. And secondly, because there is no one else I could trust with the task I need to ask of you.”
Lestrade raised an eyebrow. “This is the part of the conversation that’s personal, I presume.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Well, spit it out.”
Mycroft pinched the bridge of his nose, smoothed down his hair and finally looked up to meet Lestrade’s gaze again. “There was one person on that ship younger than myself. Like me, he should have been born from a machine, an artificial womb gestating my mother and father’s DNA. But we abandoned the ship before he was ready. I need to know what happened to him.”
“You’re talking about an AGU,” Lestrade blinked. “But they’re not even legal anymore. There was too much risk that-“
“I know, but I present myself as evidence that the process usually worked as desired,” Mycroft leaned back in his chair. “Please, Captain. Find this unit for me. Even if you cannot retrieve it physically, I will reward every member of your team, and I will be forever in your debt. Those are not words I ever utter lightly.”
“Sir,” Lestrade shook his head. “Mycroft. Think about what might’ve happened to the rest of the crew. Do you really want to know the fate of some poor embryo stuck in that mess?”
Mycroft's smile was twisted with pain. “My friend, I have a strong stomach. And more to the point, a strong imagination. I need to put this to rest before it eats me from the inside out.”
---
On the Baker, Lestrade made sure the entirety of the ship’s log was saved to the local disk and then went to the next entry on the list. It was dated eight month’s after Captain Porter’s, eight months after the navy had left the ship to die slowly. Lestrade adjusted his headset and started the video.
The face in front of the lens was breathing in long, slow gasps and his lids were hooded as if with dire sleep deprivation. There were smears of machine grease on his neck and he wore a padded jacket that was too big for him and had a popped seam on one shoulder. Behind him, externally wired lights hung from a curved ceiling that retreated into shadows where two figures were playing cards on an overturned ammo crate.
“My name is Wit Mason,” he croaked, licking his lips. “I am… I was the chief engineer of Dock One. I’ve worked aboard London Pride for seven years. We managed to wire up a terminal down here, um, yesterday. Haven’t managed to restore long-range communications yet. Most of the equipment was lost with the bridge,” he looked over his shoulder into the shadows and back to the camera. “There are sixteen of us left now. Out of what must have been, must’ve been hundreds. We think that Jones and a couple of cadets were still alive in the weapons bay, but they haven’t made contact for about a week. So it’s just us now. They’ve been picking us off one by one. Even at the beginning, they never attacked more than two people at once. I think,” Mason coughed and massaged his throat, “maybe they knew somehow that we weren’t going anywhere. That they could take their time.”
For a moment, Mason just stared blankly at the lens. Lestrade could see in the man’s eyes that he did not expect anyone to ever hear his words, that he thought he was speaking to an empty future, a barren ship in cold space.
“We’re all crew now. The cadets kept trying to fight them, but we set up this water tank for a long siege,” he glanced around him, rubbing both hands through his matted here, “This tank's all empty now, but we’ve got the filters running again so we should be able to make the other one last for years as long as we can keep dumping our waste into the few cisterns still working. Don’t know why we’d want to stay here for years,” he added softly, without malice. “Number seventeen cries all the time. The cadets didn’t want to keep him, an extra mouth to feed and all that. Maybe it’s for the best that they got the last of the cadets about, I don’t know, a month ago? The cadets weren’t that good at keeping their cool once the last officer died,” in the background there was a screech of metal and Mason raised his head. He started speaking to someone out of the screen, his voice muffled away from the mic. “Did you reach the greenhouse? Did you get… what the hell is that? What did you bring him in here for? Dammit, throw him out! He could be impregnated, don’t -“
As he stood up, he switched the camera off and the entry ended.
Lestrade took a breath and played the next entry. This one was dated twenty-three months after Wit Mason’s. This time it was a woman speaking into the camera, and there were no lights behind her. She was thin and unwashed, her hair hacked into a manageably short bob and tangled beyond the hope of any comb.
“Didn’t know this thing still worked,” she rasped. She might have been trying to smile. “Wish I didn’t have to be the one to talk to you. Hate having my picture taken. Something should be left, though. There’s only three of us. Douglas and me, I’m Baynes, and Baby. There’s not much food now. We thought, maybe, we could eat the bodies of the ones who died, but they’ve all gone and died on trips to the greenhouses instead of in our little safe house. Inconsiderate of them.”
The entry ended abruptly. Lestrade opened the next one, which was dated only a fortnight later. The same woman looked out at him, the shadows deep under her eyes. She scratched at a sore on her cheek. “It’s been six days since Douglas stopped speaking. Sits and stares at pictures of his wife. I don’t even know her name. I stopped bringing him food, but he don’t complain, so fuck ‘im,” she reached out to wipe a remnant of dust from the corner of the lens. “No point hanging round here. Gonna try to make it to the greenhouses. They were full to bursting, when Lanner last made it there and back. God, that must be six months ago. He said everything’s overgrown, even the machines are going haywire, over-producing soil, there’s things growing in every nook and cranny. More food than I could eat in a year. I just have to reach it. I’ll take Baby. There’s gotta be next to no chance I’ll make it but, y’know, better we die quick than starve to death. Maybe better. I’ll say goodbye now. Goodbye.”
The entry ended. Lestrade scrolled through and saw several unnamed files that looked like more entries dated over ten years later, but they contained no video. Computer glitches, no doubt.
“Christ, Mycroft,” he muttered, taking off the headset. “What have you got us into?”
That was when Sally started screaming Stamford’s name over the comms.
---
Doctor John Watson sat on his bunk in the cramped quarters at the bottom of the Baker and hoped for a disaster.
He didn't want people to die or anything, course not. He was a doctor, and he'd never wish injury on anyone, he knew from personal experience how that wrecked a life. But he just needed something to end the boredom. Anything. A space crash. An engine fire. A pirate attack. A spate of severe colds on the ship. Anything.
His fist trembled as he closed it over his thigh. He could feel the knot in his shoulder. It seemed to grow and send out tendrils of discomfort whenever he was inactive, like he had been for the past three weeks, sitting on similar bunks in similar military transports and waiting for Earth to appear as a little blue dot in the vastness of the universe. And when he got to Earth? A pension, and more sitting alone in bedrooms, and the knot would feel bigger and bigger with each passing day.
He wanted to be back in the dust and the mess, beside men and women who wanted to be there just as much as he did.
He just needed something. Something to break the boredom.
---
Lestrade squeezed through the backup pressure door before it could fully open, bursting through into the foyer outside the airlock. The first thing he saw was Sally standing by the main door into the dock, her rifle still cocked and held at the ready. The ship's second in command was lying on the floor with only the top half of his green suit removed, face white and cheeks puffing up as he breathed in gulps and pinched gasps. Anderson knelt over him, holding the internal phone between his ear and shoulder while he tried to get Dimmock’s boot off, “Well what kind of bloody pathologist are you?” he barked into the receiver, apparently to Molly.
“What the hell happened?” Lestrade barked. “Donovan! Can you stop pointing your damn weapon at the thinnest wall of this ship, please?”
“Something took Stamford! Something took him!” Anderson's voice was panicked. Lestrade had never witnessed Anderson panic. Anderson was calm and sarcastic even with bombs falling around his ears. Lestrade had seen it. “He was there one second and then he was gone and he - I never heard anyone scream like that-“
“Boss, I gotta keep watch. I think it followed us,” Donovan snapped at Lestrade. That really brought him up short. Sally was hot-headed, sure, but she followed orders when she was given them. Lestrade had never seen her disobey a superior officer in all the years he’d known her.
“Alright,” Lestrade nodded, crouching down beside Dimmock. He put his hand on his lieutenant’s shoulder. “How bad are you?”
“Just my ankle, sir,” Dimmock closed his eyes and gritted his teeth as Anderson gave a particularly rough tug on the stubborn boot. “The floor gave way as I followed Mike. It was… melted somehow, under the frost. Mike was on the far side. He disappeared while Sally and Anderson were pulling me back up. They couldn’t cross the gap to go after him, I promise,” he tried to sit up, desperate to apologise for the team.
Lestrade waved the other man down. “They did the right thing. Anderson, hang up the phone. Molly’s not programmed as a proper doctor, alright? And we can cut this boot off, we just need to get Dimmock to the med bay. Come on, one under each arm, and Sally,” Lestrade looked over at Donovan as he and Anderson lifted Dimmock up, "you stay by the door and keep lookout.”
Donovan twisted around. She hadn’t taken off her helmet, as if she really thought she might have to empty her magazine into the wall around the airlock and brave a depressurisation, but her expression through the acrylic faceplate was livid.
“You knew, didn’t you?” she snapped. “You knew something was in there.”
“I was told there was a tiny possibility.”
Sally’s mouth was a tiny, sharp line. Dimmock gave a particularly painful groan, and her gaze flicked to him and then back to Lestrade’s face. “I think Stamford-”
“Dimmock’s injury is our first priority,” Lestrade answered.
“Yes, I know protocol,” Sally shook her head. “I was saying, Stamford was talking to one of the passengers when we first boarded. Short guy, I didn’t get his name. I think they were old buddies from med school.”
“Thank you,” Lestrade clicked his jaw to activate his earpiece without letting go of Dimmock, “Hopkins, I need you to go and talk to the passengers. Don’t start a fuss, but ask if one of them is a doctor. Friend of Stamford’s. If he’s there, get him up to the med bay as fast as you can.”
“We’re not done talking about this, sir,” Sally yelled after him as they hauled Dimmock out of the room.
---
The doctor was a small, sandy-haired fellow who set a fast pace into the med bay despite leaning on a cane. There were a lot of questions in his gaze as he took in Dimmock lying on the pull-out bed with Anderson hacking at his boot with scissors. Lestrade was pacing back and forth talking to his earpiece, trying to convince Dubugue not to disengage from the 200B in case Stamford was still alive. He shut his mouth as soon as the civilian limped inside, but the man went straight to Dimmock and took over from Anderson. “Give me those, you can’t cut through plastikev like that,” he grumbled. “You have to work at the joints.”
“How bad is it?” Dimmock moaned. “Am I gonna lose the foot?”
“Let me have a look. How’d this happen?” the man glanced at Lestrade, whose captain’s stripes were display clearly on his shoulders. “I thought this stop was a straightforward salvage mission?”
“A deck collapsed,” Anderson started to peel off his own suit at last. “He fell a couple of levels. We had to haul him out with ropes.”
“Where’s Mike? I thought he was your medic.”
Lestrade cut in before Anderson could reply. “He was stuck on the far side of the collapse. He’s trying to find another way back to the dock.”
Thankfully, the stranger was too busy with his patient to dig deeper into this story. “Looks like a decent break,” he said as he eased Dimmock’s boot and sock off and very carefully slid a pillow under the swollen, blackening foot. The ankle was twisted at an angle that was agonising just to look at. “What’s your name?”
“Norman Dimmock,” the lieutenant panted.
The doctor squeezed his hand. “Okay, Norman. I’m Doctor John Watson. Can you tell me to stop when this hurts?”
“Stop!” Dimmock gasped, almost was soon as John tried to pull his ankle back into place.
“Okay. And here, at your knee?”
“That’s f-fine. Only hurts a little.”
“Good. Norman, you’ve got a very good chance that you’ll keep this foot, okay? I’ll need to do an X-ray, but I’d say you’ve got a shattered calcaneous and maybe a couple of metatarsals fractured. That’s your heel and the long bones in the middle of your foot. I can splint it and give you some morphine, but you’re probably going to be looking at surgery to put a plate in when we get back to earth. It’s very routine, you won’t be out of service too long.”
“Gotcha,” Dimmock tipped his head back. “Thank you. Um. I’ll take that morphine now, if that’s okay boss.”
“Yeah, I want you resting for the rest of the trip,” Lestrade patted his shoulder. He caught the doctor’s eye over Dimmock’s heaving chest as the stranger cut away more cloth to get full access to the injured leg. Yeah, Lestrade knew that look. It was the same one Sally had given him as he’d left her guarding the airlock. This guy was going to have questions.
The doctor at least waited until Dimmock was bandaged and doped up before he tugged Lestrade aside.
“Captain?” he waited for Lestrade to nod his acknowledgement to the title. John glanced back at Anderson and Dimmock. “This isn’t standard salvage, is it?”
“The particulars of this mission are classified,” Lestrade folded his arms.
“Sir, I saw that Orbiter through the cabin windows. That’s a B-model. It’s got to be at least ten years since it fired up its engines, and Mr Dimmock’s suit is set to maximum thermal retention. If Stamford’s hurt, you need to get him back on board before he freezes to death-“
“I appreciate your concern, Doctor, but my team’s welfare is not your responsibility,” Lestrade said grittily.
“It is if I’m the only doctor on board,” John pointed out. “Have you got Stamford in radio contact?”
“No, not at this moment.”
“Christ, you need to get him out of there,” John was already starting to turn as if he planned to walk straight through the nearest dock onto the 200B. Lestrade grabbed his arm.
“Doctor Watson,” Lestrade said quietly. “We are working on it.”
“Look, I was a medic for a special ops team before I was-” he swallowed, “-sent home. I may not be able to do a lot of abseiling, but I can still belay like a pro and operate bolt cutters and mecha suits in zero G. Your team is two men down, so maybe I can help if Mike is trapped.”
Lestrade glanced at the ceiling. Somewhere above, Sally was still standing by the airlock with her rifle at the ready. She’d plunge back into the belly of that ship to find Stamford if those were her orders, while Anderson would pull himself together and follow her anywhere. But Lestrade couldn’t send the two of them in alone. If he accompanied them himself it would leave the Baker without a senior officer. Dubugue technically came next in rank, but Lestrade knew he wasn’t a leader, and Hopkins was arrogant enough that he would probably take unofficial command. Lestrade couldn’t leave the lives of Dimmock and his passengers in their hands, and it wasn’t like anyone would listen to Molly. And here was a special-ops medic standing in front of him asking to help.
Lestrade was a yarder. ‘Adaptable’ was right at the top of the job description. And he wouldn’t leave a man behind.
He blew out a long breath between his teeth. “Anderson,” he called. “Raise Sally on your earpiece and tell her to meet us in Molly’s temporary lab,” he jerked his head at John. “It’s just next door.”
He decided right then that he was never doing Mycroft another favour as long as he lived.
---
“Captain. Hello!” Molly Hooper looked up from her computer screens and cleared piles of data drives from the only spare chair. Lestrade did not sit down. She stood hugging the piles of plastic drives to her chest. “Can I help you with something?”
“I need three copies of the secrecy contract I was made to sign when I agreed to this mission,” Lestrade scowled. “I know you know what I’m talking about. I’m going to give Donovan, Anderson and Dr Watson here the truth about the 200B.”
“Um, Gosh, well,” Molly managed to balance the drives on top of a humming centrifuge and wiped her hands on her lab coat, “I’m not actually authorised to, er, authorise that…”
“But you’re supposed to defer to me in emergency situations, right?”
“Yes,” Molly squirmed.
“So get me the contracts. That’s an order.”
There were three printed piles of paper in her hands by the time Anderson and Donovan arrived. Sally had stripped off her suit, but her weapon was still slung over her shoulder. Her lips were pale from pouting so hard.
“What I am about to tell you reflects very badly on the tops levels of Her Majesty’s fleet and probably certain branches of our government,” Lestrade said, handing out the papers. “But frankly, my only concern is finishing this mission without any deaths. My orders were to get biological samples of whatever caused the crisis on the Orbiter 200B, and to get these samples no matter the cost. If we leave now, we’re not just leaving Stamford. Some other yarder team will be sent in to finish the job, probably with even less information than I’ve been given.”
“Wait, hold on, what are you talking about ‘leaving’ for?” John interrupted. “How can you consider leaving Stamford?”
“Um,” Molly raised her hand tentatively. “Sorry, I’ve sort of listening in on the comms. I’ve got to tell you, there’s very little chance that Dr Stamford is still alive.”
“What?” John raised his head.
“Thank you Molly, but we still have to assume he is until proven otherwise,” Lestrade growled. He turned back to his two yarders and the doctor. “I was told that whatever is on that ship, it’s been dead for years. Evidently that information was wrong. It’s taken Stamford. Possibly to eat him.”
“I knew it,” Sally snarled. “I saw it. It wasn’t human.”
“What was it, then?” John’s brow was twisting in disbelief. “Some sort of military experiment?”
“We don’t know what it is,” Lestrade cut in. “But my guess is, well,” he shrugged. “It’s first contact.”
Anderson gave a cynical grunt, but for once didn’t argue. Maybe he’d caught a glimpse of what Sally had seen. The corner of John’s mouth was twitching in a half-smile as he looked around at the yarders. “This is mad,” he said. “You can’t really think-“
“I saw it,” Sally repeated. “It grabbed Stamford like he weighed nothing. In his protective suit and all.”
“Why didn’t we see it before we boarded?” Anderson asked. “I thought we had the 200B’s network online.”
Molly piped up. “We did. Most of the Orbiter’s systems are down, including the surveillance cameras, but I got some of the cruder monitors working. Temperature and carbon-hydrogen sensors gave no indication that anyone was alive anywhere on board.”
“Like I told you before you crossed over, the air is breathable but the temperature is freezing everywhere except for the greenhouses,” Lestrade explained. “The life systems looked like they had failed some time in the last ten years.”
Molly stepped forward, “No, that’s not what I told you when I looked at the history data,” she mumbled.
Lestrade’s head shot around. “What do you mean?”
“I said most of the systems had been switched off about ten years ago,” she winced at his glare. “The ship didn’t record any error reports. It looks more like most of the ship has been deliberately shut down.”
“Why would anyone do that?” Anderson sneered.
Molly shrugged, her gaze flickering around the circle of watching faces. “Obviously it’s not enough to kill those creatures, so maybe just to save power. The fuel cells could last a hundred years if they were only maintaining the greenhouses and the air filters.”
“Christ,” Sally ran her hands through her hair. “So this thing could be smart.”
“I’ll, uh, I’ll do another scan,” Molly edged back towards her computers.
“Right,” John said, shoving the secrecy contract back into Lestrade’s hands. “I’m not signing this. If the rest of you are willing, I’m going in there to find Stamford. Got it?”
“What?” Lestrade looked down at the papers. “No, you’ve got to fill this out, this is top level government secrets-“
“Should have made me sign it before you told me them,” John raised his hands. He turned to Anderson and Sally. “Are you two coming? Yes? Then show me where I can find a suit and a rifle.”
Part Two Here
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC) / Alien Franchise
Rating: R for some violence
Summer: For the kinkmeme prompt here - Mummy Holmes was admiral of the British space fleet, and her sons were gestated in a synthetic womb called an AGU. When something monstrous burst out of a lieutenant's chest and got loose on board a ship carrying the Holmes family, the unborn second son and was left on board. A quarter of a century later, the Orbiter 200B is a floating wreck on the edge of the colonised territory. Mycroft Holmes sends a Royal Navy special ops vehicle, the Baker, to the abandoned ship to learn what can be salvaged...
Also available on Ao3.
The thunder of Sally’s gun brought down a shower of icicles. It reverberated through the metal deck under Anderson’s feet and for a handful of seconds lit up the corridor. Anderson saw a shadow, nothing more, and then he heard his own voice yelling, “Move! Move!” as he scooped his shoulder under Dimmock’s and ran as fast as the stiff plastic suit and the rifle slung over his back would allow. Sally was at the rear trying to sprint in the same menthol-green protection suit, bumping against them as she alternated between stumbling forward and watching their backs.
“Stamford!” Sally screamed. “Come in, damn you!”
Only the echoes answered. Then came Lestrade in their headsets, trying to raise the doctor over the comms. The beams of their headlamps swung across the frost-burnished walls. Stamford didn't answer.
“Boss,” Anderson panted. “Shut up, please, we need some quiet.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Lestrade barked down the line. “Where is Stamford? Why could I hear gunfire?”
“We can’t just leave him!” Sally broke in.
“Yes we can,” Anderson told her. Dimmock was groaning, whining about his leg, and it felt like he was getting heavier. “We’re not staying here. Not until we figure out what that was.”
The upcoming junction was familiar. Anderson hauled Dimmock around the corner and saw a sign directing them to the O-G dock, wiped clear of frost by Stamford’s thick-gloved hand on their way in. They were almost there.
They were almost safe.
---
Less than an hour earlier, Captain Greg Lestrade had shut himself up in the server room with a scratched headset that looked old enough to be pre-colonial. The cladding had peeled off and the frame was scratchy against his scalp, but they’d been the only set he could find in the storage closet outside. The Baker was full of such odd bits and ends after three generations of service. The ship was something of an antique in today’s navy, which was exactly why Lestrade liked it. Its engines had never failed, its hull had been tested by every chemical and physical trial in the fourteen solar systems, and its top-of-the-range computer network was retrofitted, which meant viruses and power failures and glitches and corruptions could all be circumvented by just turning on the manual systems. You felt safe in a ship like the Baker.
The images he was watching were old, too. Twenty-four years and nineteen days old, give or take a few hours. They had been downloaded from the network of the silent Orbiter-200B almost as soon as the Baker had docked with it above the airless moon that had been its last base of operations. The video was the captain’s final entry as the ship was abandoned. In the background, there were shouts and the endless, ugly hoot of a siren.
“Impossible to reach the last of the emergency pods, not enough trained pilots to fly the shuttles,” the white-haired captain spoke into the lens, as if to an old friend. “The rescuers took the families and the officers first. I stayed behind to evacuate the last of the cadets and our technical crew, but then they closed the doors behind them-“ there was a noise beyond the screen, the slow roll and shiver of a distant explosion. A man in a private’s uniform surged up and whispered something in the captain’s ear. With a couple of words from his leader he departed. When he turned back to the lens, the captain had a faint, desperate smile on his face. “We’ve blown up the bridge where the worst of the contagion was present. We’ve no… we’ve idea what it is. The lights always go first. No one has come face to face with it and lived. Maybe… surely it can’t survive depressurisation. Oxygen levels in the bridge sector are less than five percent of regulation and dropping… surely nothing will survive,” he looked over his shoulder and then back at the camera, rubbing a wrinkle from his brow with the pad of his thumb. Plenty more replaced it with each twitch of his muscles. “My people put our numbers at one hundred cadets and at least two hundred crew still on board. We can hold out until the navy returns with a stronger rescue fleet. This is Captain Gerald Porter, signing off.”
The entry ended. Lestrade sucked in a long breath through his nose, leaning back against a whirring driver shelf in the cramped room. He folded his arms as he stared at the filepath for the captain’s last log entry, the date blinking across the far side of the screen. Mycroft had said that there had been crew left behind in the panic, but less than a score. That was the official story. Was it possible he didn’t know? Or had he kept that little titbit to himself, even as he poured so many other classified secrets into Lestrade’s ears?
“You better not have lied to me, you toff,” Lestrade growled. “Not after everything I agreed to.”
There was a static hiss and Donovan’s voice yelped in his ear, “Boss, we’ve got fucking mutiny again.”
“You are such a daddy’s girl,” Anderson whined into his own radio.
“Excuse me, don’t talk to Lestrade, I’m in charge here,” Dimmock snapped.
Lestrade winced and pulled up his headset to adjust the volume on the tiny earpiece he was wearing beneath it. In some distant part of the Baker, Sally and Anderson where bickering about ammo. Again. Sally had insisted on hollow-point rounds while Anderson had wanted plastic-tipped. Both types had a high lethality, but Sally and Anderson disagreed on which was more likely to pierce a ship’s outer hull if they went astray. If Lestrade had been down in the airlock with them, he would have knocked their heads together and told them they shouldn’t need to fire their damn weapons anyway. This was a salvage mission, not damn recce. There shouldn’t be anything they needed to shoot at.
That’s what Mycroft had promised, anyway.
He clicked his jaw to switch on the transmission from his earpiece, “Donovan. Anderson. Shut it. I want the lines clear unless you’ve got something to report. And for Chrissake, Dimmock is your commander on this foray.”
There was a chorus of “Yes, sir,” from all four of the team, slightly slow and surly in Sally’s case. Lestrade clicked his transmission off and went back to the screen. He wanted to be down there with them, stepping into the unknown, walking where no humans had walked for almost three decades. But he was a yarder here to do a job, not go thrill seeking.
‘Yarders’ was the nickname for the navy’s exploratory scouts, men and women trained to adapt to the weirdest and most dangerous missions - answering distress signals from colonies where order had broken down, carving trails on planets that were only partially terraformed, putting down anarchy on mutinied ships and raiding others that were suspected of piracy. Normally the Baker might be packed with up to forty navy officers and cadets under Lestrade’s command, but they were a skeleton crew on this particular mission. Stanley Hopkins was serving as communications officer for now, first pilot Dubugue was in the cockpit at all times, while Lieutenant Dimmock was Lestrade’s second in command and the ship's co-pilot. Sally and Anderson were their dedicated combat specialists and had served the longest under Lestrade. Finally they’d been saddled with Mike Stanford as their medic after the Baker’s usual doctor Sarah had found out she was pregnant two days before launch. On top of the crew, they had picked up a dozen passengers at the nearest refilling station - mostly discharged soldiers heading back to earth from the war on A-F85, a colony planet in the outer reaches that was fighting for independence. The passengers had their own facilities at the other end of the ship and had mostly kept to themselves so far.
They had one other employee of her majesty’s navy on board, one that Mycroft had specially arranged for reasons that Lestrade himself was only partially clear on. The spare ward beside the med bay had been converted into a makeshift lab for the use of a pathologist who called herself Molly Hooper. Molly was mousey and over-apologetic about her presence, which grated endlessly on Lestrade’s patience. Not just because it was annoying, but because Molly wasn’t a proper person, as she’d explained when meeting the crew. She was one of the newest-model, picture-perfect androids that were supposed to be indistinguishable from an organic Homo sapiens. “Legally you don’t have to, you know, treat me like I’m a human,” Molly mumbled to Lestrade’s team, wringing her hands, “But, er, it’d be sort of nice if you did. Is that okay?” Her submissiveness made Lestrade incredibly uncomfortable whenever he remembered that she was programmed like that.
Their job was to collect samples from the dead ship. Lestrade wanted to be at the head of the pack, but yarder regulations decried that one senior officer had to remain on the Baker at all times, and this was Dimmock’s first real mission since he’d made lieutenant. He’d been so keen, Lestrade didn’t have the heart to tell him to stay on board. Once the abandoned Orbiter vessel was secure, Lestrade would go with one of his most trusted yarders, probably Donovan. He’d carry out the task that had not been committed to paper or binary code, that Mycroft had given directly to him, to carry in his head.
There were smattering of unnamed entries in the ship’s log after the last with Captain Porter’s ID. As he scrolled down to the next one, Lestrade throught back to that day in Mycroft’s office, two weeks before they’d left Earth.
---
Mycroft had himself a spot on the corner of the fifty-seventh floor. The walls were glass, looking out over a smoky London criss-crossed with waterways since the rise of the oceans. Lestrade was ushered in by a black-skinned, silver-haired android with a feminine smile and a kickboxer’s body beneath its robes. Secretary and bouncer all in one. Before he even stepped through the door, the android made him sign three secrecy contracts that threatened him with job termination, imprisonment, or maybe worse.
Mycroft was just putting down the phone. The electronic assistant could apparently coordinate his schedule seamlessly, escorting in one appointment as the other ended without even understanding the conversation it was listening in on. Lestrade waited at the door until Mycroft twitched his hand at the chair across from his desk.
“Greg, it’s a pleasure to see you,” he said with a smile, getting up to shake his guest’s hand. Lestrade had never introduced himself to Mycroft by his first name, but Mycroft uttered it as if they were the closest of friends. Perhaps they were. Perhaps when a man saved your life, you owed him close friendship. Among other things.
The ‘sir’ was only half-formed in Lestrade’s throat when Mycroft waved it away. “Please, let’s dispense with the formability. This is a personal conversation.”
“Since when do you have personal conversations?” Lestrade asked.
Mycroft didn’t deign this with an answer, settling back into his tall chair. At his right hand a row of pens was lined up like soldiers. He didn’t look a day older than he had five years ago, when Lestrade had first met him on Colony LT-5 with an acid storm battering at the walls of the kitset barracks and his life crashing around his ears. But back then Mycroft had already looked twice his age, so perhaps the years were just catching up with his body. Lestrade wasn’t sure where Mycroft’s brain stood by that measure.
The administrator held out an opaque plastic folder. “You may have some questions about the mission that you and your skeleton team were briefed with yesterday. This will answer most of them.”
“What's in here?” Lestrade asked. He didn’t wonder how Mycroft knew about the Baker’s next assignment. Mycroft always cultivated an air of omnipotence.
“The truth,” Mycroft said, entwining his fingers on the polished surface of his desk. Real wood, by the look of it. Solid, not the baked mush approximating tree cells that they made from the yeast factories. Lestrade was pretty sure the last time he’d seen wood, it had been part of his grandfather’s inheritance, taken away by the senior Lestrade’s third wife.
Mycroft pointed at the folder open in Lestrade’s hands. “I’m sure you knew, long before you got the brief, about the Orbiter vessel affectionately nicknamed London Pride? It’s such a pity the name fell out of fashion after the incident, I rather like it.”
“Yeah, I know the story,” Lestrade was frowning down at the papers inside the folder. Each one was stamped with the watermark ‘CLASSIFIED - DO NOT COPY’. There were words that he couldn’t decipher. Species names, he thought. “I think I took my first girlfriend to the feature film. Some kind of super-rabies, wasn’t it? They had to abandon ship, lot of people died? I remember in the movie get rescued by the black ops for some reason.”
“Indeed, it is quite a good story,” Mycroft smiled. “You probably won’t have heard that I was a survivor of the Pride.”
Lestrade’s head twitched up. “You? God, you must have been a kid.”
“I was twelve,” Mycroft nodded, his tone as breezy as if discussing a comedic family holiday. “The youngest on board, bar one special case. There were about two dozen partners and families of top naval officers. And there was a very good reason why the black ops got involved,” he tapped his nails on the priceless wood veneer, “The rabies story is a lie. There was such a breakdown of communications that no one who got off the 200B had seen the true culprit. None of the survivors had any idea what killed the team of SAS agents that the 200B picked up a couple of days earlier,” Mycroft shrugged.
“Then what?” Lestrade asked, looking between the folder in his hand and Mycroft’s face.
Mycroft winced. “Have you been watching the news reports on Colony Procyon-15? Have you heard of
Tatminartok?”
“Yeah,” Lestrade frowned. “Wiped out by a deadly strain of dogpox,” he glanced at the folder again. “I’m seeing a pattern here.”
“You catch on quick,” Mycroft said, his voice lowered. He leaned forward. “The fact is, no one knows what killed P-15 and Tatminartok. Distress calls were made to their nearest neighbours. A yarder team was sent to P-15, and by radio claimed that someone in the colony was alive and dangerous. That was the last anyone heard of them. A second team, more highly trained and heavily armed, was equipped with pulse monitors and constant video streams. They transmitted for about an hour after touching down before their hearts stopped one by one. Their videos captured brief, blurry images, and the sound of their screams, but little useful data. The colony was bombed from orbit, but the atmosphere rapidly destroyed the remains before it could be studied,” Mycroft shrugged, “Tatminartok was a fully terraformed planet with a population forty times larger than P-15. This time we monitored it from orbit for weeks after getting the distress call. Nobody responded to our transmissions. No one made contact with the beacons we dropped. We sent down probes, but they stopped broadcasting soon after. Once again, little usable footage. Whatever it was, it knew to approach its victim from the opposite side to their eyes,” Mycroft’s smile was tinged with something akin to admiration. He cleared his throat. “Tatminartok had a considerable number of inter-stellar ships. Once again, the colony was bombed from orbit, rather than allow the killers to escape.”
Lestrade raised his eyebrows, “You think this was done by some kind of militant extremists?”
“Not at all. None of the known independence organisations have the ability to massacre a colony the size of Tatminarktok without some visible damage to infrastructure,” Mycroft steepled his fingers. “Besides, they would have claimed credit by now.”
“Then who did it?”
Mycroft inclined his head. Lestrade glanced down at the word ‘200B’, repeated over and over on the classified sheets.
“Whatever it was, we now believe it was also the doom of Orbiter 200B,” Mycroft said quietly. “Your salvage mission is not about deactivating the Pride’s nuclear reactor, or retrieving lost computer drives or any other nonsense your superiors have told you. We need biological samples. Facts. Data. You’ll be accompanied by an expert pathologist. You will learn what really killed London Pride,” his voice was chilly now, “and how we can fight it.”
Lestrade leaned forward, jabbing his forefinger at the folder, “You want me and my team of six to walk up to something that killed a load of SAS blokes and then two entire colonies?”
“Not at all, Captain,” Mycroft raised his hand. “We know this… adversary… can be destroyed by the liberal application of explosions. It is physical. There are indications that it eats its victims. It has been twenty-four years. Do you really think it could still be alive?”
“Well an Orbiter’s got oxygen farms and greenhouses, doesn’t it?” Lestrade demanded. “Theoretically, if there were human survivors they could feed themselves for decades, if their fusion cells didn’t malfunction.”
“Tatminarktok’s algae pastures were untouched, we could see that much from our low-orbit photos,” Mycroft countered. “Our best analysts predict that it needs high-energy substances. Meat.”
“Yeah, and you just said your best analysts have a couple of video fragments and some bloody satellite pictures to work on, that’s why you’re sending us in here in the first place,” Lestrade tossed the folder down on the shiny wood, knocking aside Mycroft’s neat line of pens. “And worse, that’s why you’re sending such a small team in, isn’t it? Because if we do survive, there’s fewer people to tell the rest of the colonies what you’ve covered up.”
Mycroft caught the last pen just before it rolled off the desk. He placed it down far away from the edge and then shifted forward, reached out and put his hand over Lestrade’s.
“I did not give this order,” Mycroft said. “I did not decide to keep this mission small. But I did recommend your team.”
Lestrade took a moment before he slid his hand out from beneath Mycroft’s. The other man closed his fist over the empty air.
“Why the hell would you do that?” he asked.
“For two reasons,” Mycroft said. “Firstly, on the slight chance - and I truly believe it is slight - that there is still danger on the ship, I believe no one else is better suited to survive it. And secondly, because there is no one else I could trust with the task I need to ask of you.”
Lestrade raised an eyebrow. “This is the part of the conversation that’s personal, I presume.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Well, spit it out.”
Mycroft pinched the bridge of his nose, smoothed down his hair and finally looked up to meet Lestrade’s gaze again. “There was one person on that ship younger than myself. Like me, he should have been born from a machine, an artificial womb gestating my mother and father’s DNA. But we abandoned the ship before he was ready. I need to know what happened to him.”
“You’re talking about an AGU,” Lestrade blinked. “But they’re not even legal anymore. There was too much risk that-“
“I know, but I present myself as evidence that the process usually worked as desired,” Mycroft leaned back in his chair. “Please, Captain. Find this unit for me. Even if you cannot retrieve it physically, I will reward every member of your team, and I will be forever in your debt. Those are not words I ever utter lightly.”
“Sir,” Lestrade shook his head. “Mycroft. Think about what might’ve happened to the rest of the crew. Do you really want to know the fate of some poor embryo stuck in that mess?”
Mycroft's smile was twisted with pain. “My friend, I have a strong stomach. And more to the point, a strong imagination. I need to put this to rest before it eats me from the inside out.”
---
On the Baker, Lestrade made sure the entirety of the ship’s log was saved to the local disk and then went to the next entry on the list. It was dated eight month’s after Captain Porter’s, eight months after the navy had left the ship to die slowly. Lestrade adjusted his headset and started the video.
The face in front of the lens was breathing in long, slow gasps and his lids were hooded as if with dire sleep deprivation. There were smears of machine grease on his neck and he wore a padded jacket that was too big for him and had a popped seam on one shoulder. Behind him, externally wired lights hung from a curved ceiling that retreated into shadows where two figures were playing cards on an overturned ammo crate.
“My name is Wit Mason,” he croaked, licking his lips. “I am… I was the chief engineer of Dock One. I’ve worked aboard London Pride for seven years. We managed to wire up a terminal down here, um, yesterday. Haven’t managed to restore long-range communications yet. Most of the equipment was lost with the bridge,” he looked over his shoulder into the shadows and back to the camera. “There are sixteen of us left now. Out of what must have been, must’ve been hundreds. We think that Jones and a couple of cadets were still alive in the weapons bay, but they haven’t made contact for about a week. So it’s just us now. They’ve been picking us off one by one. Even at the beginning, they never attacked more than two people at once. I think,” Mason coughed and massaged his throat, “maybe they knew somehow that we weren’t going anywhere. That they could take their time.”
For a moment, Mason just stared blankly at the lens. Lestrade could see in the man’s eyes that he did not expect anyone to ever hear his words, that he thought he was speaking to an empty future, a barren ship in cold space.
“We’re all crew now. The cadets kept trying to fight them, but we set up this water tank for a long siege,” he glanced around him, rubbing both hands through his matted here, “This tank's all empty now, but we’ve got the filters running again so we should be able to make the other one last for years as long as we can keep dumping our waste into the few cisterns still working. Don’t know why we’d want to stay here for years,” he added softly, without malice. “Number seventeen cries all the time. The cadets didn’t want to keep him, an extra mouth to feed and all that. Maybe it’s for the best that they got the last of the cadets about, I don’t know, a month ago? The cadets weren’t that good at keeping their cool once the last officer died,” in the background there was a screech of metal and Mason raised his head. He started speaking to someone out of the screen, his voice muffled away from the mic. “Did you reach the greenhouse? Did you get… what the hell is that? What did you bring him in here for? Dammit, throw him out! He could be impregnated, don’t -“
As he stood up, he switched the camera off and the entry ended.
Lestrade took a breath and played the next entry. This one was dated twenty-three months after Wit Mason’s. This time it was a woman speaking into the camera, and there were no lights behind her. She was thin and unwashed, her hair hacked into a manageably short bob and tangled beyond the hope of any comb.
“Didn’t know this thing still worked,” she rasped. She might have been trying to smile. “Wish I didn’t have to be the one to talk to you. Hate having my picture taken. Something should be left, though. There’s only three of us. Douglas and me, I’m Baynes, and Baby. There’s not much food now. We thought, maybe, we could eat the bodies of the ones who died, but they’ve all gone and died on trips to the greenhouses instead of in our little safe house. Inconsiderate of them.”
The entry ended abruptly. Lestrade opened the next one, which was dated only a fortnight later. The same woman looked out at him, the shadows deep under her eyes. She scratched at a sore on her cheek. “It’s been six days since Douglas stopped speaking. Sits and stares at pictures of his wife. I don’t even know her name. I stopped bringing him food, but he don’t complain, so fuck ‘im,” she reached out to wipe a remnant of dust from the corner of the lens. “No point hanging round here. Gonna try to make it to the greenhouses. They were full to bursting, when Lanner last made it there and back. God, that must be six months ago. He said everything’s overgrown, even the machines are going haywire, over-producing soil, there’s things growing in every nook and cranny. More food than I could eat in a year. I just have to reach it. I’ll take Baby. There’s gotta be next to no chance I’ll make it but, y’know, better we die quick than starve to death. Maybe better. I’ll say goodbye now. Goodbye.”
The entry ended. Lestrade scrolled through and saw several unnamed files that looked like more entries dated over ten years later, but they contained no video. Computer glitches, no doubt.
“Christ, Mycroft,” he muttered, taking off the headset. “What have you got us into?”
That was when Sally started screaming Stamford’s name over the comms.
---
Doctor John Watson sat on his bunk in the cramped quarters at the bottom of the Baker and hoped for a disaster.
He didn't want people to die or anything, course not. He was a doctor, and he'd never wish injury on anyone, he knew from personal experience how that wrecked a life. But he just needed something to end the boredom. Anything. A space crash. An engine fire. A pirate attack. A spate of severe colds on the ship. Anything.
His fist trembled as he closed it over his thigh. He could feel the knot in his shoulder. It seemed to grow and send out tendrils of discomfort whenever he was inactive, like he had been for the past three weeks, sitting on similar bunks in similar military transports and waiting for Earth to appear as a little blue dot in the vastness of the universe. And when he got to Earth? A pension, and more sitting alone in bedrooms, and the knot would feel bigger and bigger with each passing day.
He wanted to be back in the dust and the mess, beside men and women who wanted to be there just as much as he did.
He just needed something. Something to break the boredom.
---
Lestrade squeezed through the backup pressure door before it could fully open, bursting through into the foyer outside the airlock. The first thing he saw was Sally standing by the main door into the dock, her rifle still cocked and held at the ready. The ship's second in command was lying on the floor with only the top half of his green suit removed, face white and cheeks puffing up as he breathed in gulps and pinched gasps. Anderson knelt over him, holding the internal phone between his ear and shoulder while he tried to get Dimmock’s boot off, “Well what kind of bloody pathologist are you?” he barked into the receiver, apparently to Molly.
“What the hell happened?” Lestrade barked. “Donovan! Can you stop pointing your damn weapon at the thinnest wall of this ship, please?”
“Something took Stamford! Something took him!” Anderson's voice was panicked. Lestrade had never witnessed Anderson panic. Anderson was calm and sarcastic even with bombs falling around his ears. Lestrade had seen it. “He was there one second and then he was gone and he - I never heard anyone scream like that-“
“Boss, I gotta keep watch. I think it followed us,” Donovan snapped at Lestrade. That really brought him up short. Sally was hot-headed, sure, but she followed orders when she was given them. Lestrade had never seen her disobey a superior officer in all the years he’d known her.
“Alright,” Lestrade nodded, crouching down beside Dimmock. He put his hand on his lieutenant’s shoulder. “How bad are you?”
“Just my ankle, sir,” Dimmock closed his eyes and gritted his teeth as Anderson gave a particularly rough tug on the stubborn boot. “The floor gave way as I followed Mike. It was… melted somehow, under the frost. Mike was on the far side. He disappeared while Sally and Anderson were pulling me back up. They couldn’t cross the gap to go after him, I promise,” he tried to sit up, desperate to apologise for the team.
Lestrade waved the other man down. “They did the right thing. Anderson, hang up the phone. Molly’s not programmed as a proper doctor, alright? And we can cut this boot off, we just need to get Dimmock to the med bay. Come on, one under each arm, and Sally,” Lestrade looked over at Donovan as he and Anderson lifted Dimmock up, "you stay by the door and keep lookout.”
Donovan twisted around. She hadn’t taken off her helmet, as if she really thought she might have to empty her magazine into the wall around the airlock and brave a depressurisation, but her expression through the acrylic faceplate was livid.
“You knew, didn’t you?” she snapped. “You knew something was in there.”
“I was told there was a tiny possibility.”
Sally’s mouth was a tiny, sharp line. Dimmock gave a particularly painful groan, and her gaze flicked to him and then back to Lestrade’s face. “I think Stamford-”
“Dimmock’s injury is our first priority,” Lestrade answered.
“Yes, I know protocol,” Sally shook her head. “I was saying, Stamford was talking to one of the passengers when we first boarded. Short guy, I didn’t get his name. I think they were old buddies from med school.”
“Thank you,” Lestrade clicked his jaw to activate his earpiece without letting go of Dimmock, “Hopkins, I need you to go and talk to the passengers. Don’t start a fuss, but ask if one of them is a doctor. Friend of Stamford’s. If he’s there, get him up to the med bay as fast as you can.”
“We’re not done talking about this, sir,” Sally yelled after him as they hauled Dimmock out of the room.
---
The doctor was a small, sandy-haired fellow who set a fast pace into the med bay despite leaning on a cane. There were a lot of questions in his gaze as he took in Dimmock lying on the pull-out bed with Anderson hacking at his boot with scissors. Lestrade was pacing back and forth talking to his earpiece, trying to convince Dubugue not to disengage from the 200B in case Stamford was still alive. He shut his mouth as soon as the civilian limped inside, but the man went straight to Dimmock and took over from Anderson. “Give me those, you can’t cut through plastikev like that,” he grumbled. “You have to work at the joints.”
“How bad is it?” Dimmock moaned. “Am I gonna lose the foot?”
“Let me have a look. How’d this happen?” the man glanced at Lestrade, whose captain’s stripes were display clearly on his shoulders. “I thought this stop was a straightforward salvage mission?”
“A deck collapsed,” Anderson started to peel off his own suit at last. “He fell a couple of levels. We had to haul him out with ropes.”
“Where’s Mike? I thought he was your medic.”
Lestrade cut in before Anderson could reply. “He was stuck on the far side of the collapse. He’s trying to find another way back to the dock.”
Thankfully, the stranger was too busy with his patient to dig deeper into this story. “Looks like a decent break,” he said as he eased Dimmock’s boot and sock off and very carefully slid a pillow under the swollen, blackening foot. The ankle was twisted at an angle that was agonising just to look at. “What’s your name?”
“Norman Dimmock,” the lieutenant panted.
The doctor squeezed his hand. “Okay, Norman. I’m Doctor John Watson. Can you tell me to stop when this hurts?”
“Stop!” Dimmock gasped, almost was soon as John tried to pull his ankle back into place.
“Okay. And here, at your knee?”
“That’s f-fine. Only hurts a little.”
“Good. Norman, you’ve got a very good chance that you’ll keep this foot, okay? I’ll need to do an X-ray, but I’d say you’ve got a shattered calcaneous and maybe a couple of metatarsals fractured. That’s your heel and the long bones in the middle of your foot. I can splint it and give you some morphine, but you’re probably going to be looking at surgery to put a plate in when we get back to earth. It’s very routine, you won’t be out of service too long.”
“Gotcha,” Dimmock tipped his head back. “Thank you. Um. I’ll take that morphine now, if that’s okay boss.”
“Yeah, I want you resting for the rest of the trip,” Lestrade patted his shoulder. He caught the doctor’s eye over Dimmock’s heaving chest as the stranger cut away more cloth to get full access to the injured leg. Yeah, Lestrade knew that look. It was the same one Sally had given him as he’d left her guarding the airlock. This guy was going to have questions.
The doctor at least waited until Dimmock was bandaged and doped up before he tugged Lestrade aside.
“Captain?” he waited for Lestrade to nod his acknowledgement to the title. John glanced back at Anderson and Dimmock. “This isn’t standard salvage, is it?”
“The particulars of this mission are classified,” Lestrade folded his arms.
“Sir, I saw that Orbiter through the cabin windows. That’s a B-model. It’s got to be at least ten years since it fired up its engines, and Mr Dimmock’s suit is set to maximum thermal retention. If Stamford’s hurt, you need to get him back on board before he freezes to death-“
“I appreciate your concern, Doctor, but my team’s welfare is not your responsibility,” Lestrade said grittily.
“It is if I’m the only doctor on board,” John pointed out. “Have you got Stamford in radio contact?”
“No, not at this moment.”
“Christ, you need to get him out of there,” John was already starting to turn as if he planned to walk straight through the nearest dock onto the 200B. Lestrade grabbed his arm.
“Doctor Watson,” Lestrade said quietly. “We are working on it.”
“Look, I was a medic for a special ops team before I was-” he swallowed, “-sent home. I may not be able to do a lot of abseiling, but I can still belay like a pro and operate bolt cutters and mecha suits in zero G. Your team is two men down, so maybe I can help if Mike is trapped.”
Lestrade glanced at the ceiling. Somewhere above, Sally was still standing by the airlock with her rifle at the ready. She’d plunge back into the belly of that ship to find Stamford if those were her orders, while Anderson would pull himself together and follow her anywhere. But Lestrade couldn’t send the two of them in alone. If he accompanied them himself it would leave the Baker without a senior officer. Dubugue technically came next in rank, but Lestrade knew he wasn’t a leader, and Hopkins was arrogant enough that he would probably take unofficial command. Lestrade couldn’t leave the lives of Dimmock and his passengers in their hands, and it wasn’t like anyone would listen to Molly. And here was a special-ops medic standing in front of him asking to help.
Lestrade was a yarder. ‘Adaptable’ was right at the top of the job description. And he wouldn’t leave a man behind.
He blew out a long breath between his teeth. “Anderson,” he called. “Raise Sally on your earpiece and tell her to meet us in Molly’s temporary lab,” he jerked his head at John. “It’s just next door.”
He decided right then that he was never doing Mycroft another favour as long as he lived.
---
“Captain. Hello!” Molly Hooper looked up from her computer screens and cleared piles of data drives from the only spare chair. Lestrade did not sit down. She stood hugging the piles of plastic drives to her chest. “Can I help you with something?”
“I need three copies of the secrecy contract I was made to sign when I agreed to this mission,” Lestrade scowled. “I know you know what I’m talking about. I’m going to give Donovan, Anderson and Dr Watson here the truth about the 200B.”
“Um, Gosh, well,” Molly managed to balance the drives on top of a humming centrifuge and wiped her hands on her lab coat, “I’m not actually authorised to, er, authorise that…”
“But you’re supposed to defer to me in emergency situations, right?”
“Yes,” Molly squirmed.
“So get me the contracts. That’s an order.”
There were three printed piles of paper in her hands by the time Anderson and Donovan arrived. Sally had stripped off her suit, but her weapon was still slung over her shoulder. Her lips were pale from pouting so hard.
“What I am about to tell you reflects very badly on the tops levels of Her Majesty’s fleet and probably certain branches of our government,” Lestrade said, handing out the papers. “But frankly, my only concern is finishing this mission without any deaths. My orders were to get biological samples of whatever caused the crisis on the Orbiter 200B, and to get these samples no matter the cost. If we leave now, we’re not just leaving Stamford. Some other yarder team will be sent in to finish the job, probably with even less information than I’ve been given.”
“Wait, hold on, what are you talking about ‘leaving’ for?” John interrupted. “How can you consider leaving Stamford?”
“Um,” Molly raised her hand tentatively. “Sorry, I’ve sort of listening in on the comms. I’ve got to tell you, there’s very little chance that Dr Stamford is still alive.”
“What?” John raised his head.
“Thank you Molly, but we still have to assume he is until proven otherwise,” Lestrade growled. He turned back to his two yarders and the doctor. “I was told that whatever is on that ship, it’s been dead for years. Evidently that information was wrong. It’s taken Stamford. Possibly to eat him.”
“I knew it,” Sally snarled. “I saw it. It wasn’t human.”
“What was it, then?” John’s brow was twisting in disbelief. “Some sort of military experiment?”
“We don’t know what it is,” Lestrade cut in. “But my guess is, well,” he shrugged. “It’s first contact.”
Anderson gave a cynical grunt, but for once didn’t argue. Maybe he’d caught a glimpse of what Sally had seen. The corner of John’s mouth was twitching in a half-smile as he looked around at the yarders. “This is mad,” he said. “You can’t really think-“
“I saw it,” Sally repeated. “It grabbed Stamford like he weighed nothing. In his protective suit and all.”
“Why didn’t we see it before we boarded?” Anderson asked. “I thought we had the 200B’s network online.”
Molly piped up. “We did. Most of the Orbiter’s systems are down, including the surveillance cameras, but I got some of the cruder monitors working. Temperature and carbon-hydrogen sensors gave no indication that anyone was alive anywhere on board.”
“Like I told you before you crossed over, the air is breathable but the temperature is freezing everywhere except for the greenhouses,” Lestrade explained. “The life systems looked like they had failed some time in the last ten years.”
Molly stepped forward, “No, that’s not what I told you when I looked at the history data,” she mumbled.
Lestrade’s head shot around. “What do you mean?”
“I said most of the systems had been switched off about ten years ago,” she winced at his glare. “The ship didn’t record any error reports. It looks more like most of the ship has been deliberately shut down.”
“Why would anyone do that?” Anderson sneered.
Molly shrugged, her gaze flickering around the circle of watching faces. “Obviously it’s not enough to kill those creatures, so maybe just to save power. The fuel cells could last a hundred years if they were only maintaining the greenhouses and the air filters.”
“Christ,” Sally ran her hands through her hair. “So this thing could be smart.”
“I’ll, uh, I’ll do another scan,” Molly edged back towards her computers.
“Right,” John said, shoving the secrecy contract back into Lestrade’s hands. “I’m not signing this. If the rest of you are willing, I’m going in there to find Stamford. Got it?”
“What?” Lestrade looked down at the papers. “No, you’ve got to fill this out, this is top level government secrets-“
“Should have made me sign it before you told me them,” John raised his hands. He turned to Anderson and Sally. “Are you two coming? Yes? Then show me where I can find a suit and a rifle.”
Part Two Here