The Dark Side: Alex Hunter 9 Read online

  About The Dark Side

  Hundreds of thousands of miles away on the dark side of the moon, the Russian lunar base has self-destructed – all personnel are dead, except one. Olga Sobakin, the lone survivor, seeks refuge at the rival American base.

  Olga tells the Americans her base was attacked by a horrifying and nightmarish creature – the pattern was the same: people vanished, leaving nothing behind but shredded clothing and an unidentifiable waste product. The Americans are skeptical of her story at first, but then people begin to disappear …

  Back on Earth, just before the American lunar base goes completely dark, a single message is received: “Lifeform”. Intercepted whisperings from Russian intelligence indicate a deadly spreading attack and a rising global threat. Escalated to priority one, there’s only one team up for the task.

  Alex Hunter and his elite group of HAWCs are on a rescue mission to the desolate and darkest unknown. Who, or what, awaits them on the dark side?

  Contents

  About The Dark Side

  Epigraph

  CHAPTER 01

  CHAPTER 02

  CHAPTER 03

  CHAPTER 04

  CHAPTER 05

  CHAPTER 06

  CHAPTER 07

  CHAPTER 08

  CHAPTER 09

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  About Greig Beck

  Also by Greig Beck

  Copyright

  The phrase “dark side of the moon” does not refer to “dark” as in the absence of light, but rather “dark” as in unknown. Until humans were able to send a spacecraft around the moon, this area had never been seen. To this day, little is known about the hidden face of our closest astral body.

  It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

  ― Charles Darwin

  CHAPTER 01

  Vladimir Lenin Base, Russian lunar mining operation – dark side of the moon

  Olga slipped in the blood. Breach lights turned slowly overhead, bathing everything in a hellish red glow and from somewhere a klaxon horn blared its warning, further tearing at her nerves.

  Tears streaked her blood-spattered face as she scrambled to her feet and nearly fell again. The floor was awash with blood and a sticky black slime, with tattered remnants of clothing everywhere.

  They were all gone, all twenty-one of them. Only Viktor and herself had remained, and she didn’t think he’d made it either after they became separated, but then she heard him scream in fear and then agony.

  The thing had been smart, smarter than they ever could have known. It cut the communications, and knew it only needed to wait, wait until someone came. From Earth.

  Svoloch, she knew the supply ship would come from Earth, certainly, and come early because the communications had been interrupted and they wouldn’t know. And then they would walk straight into its trap.

  It seemed the creature didn’t just feed on them but on their memories as well. That’s how it grew smart.

  Olga stopped running as her confused and frightened mind worked overtime trying to make a plan. If she stayed here she was as good as dead. And if she were dead, there would be no one to warn them. She grimaced. The creature would get back home, to Earth, and then everything would be finished. Everything.

  She was resolute; the thing must not be allowed to get back home or even make it to the American base. Olga had been told by her superiors to stay away from the Americans, but she was a human being first, and therefore she needed to warn them.

  She began to run and her mind also accelerated as she settled on her priorities – she needed to warn people and she needed to destroy the base.

  “Faster,” she hissed between clenched teeth as she sprinted down a straight corridor, her lungs burning. She felt dizzy and knew she needed her medication. But there was no time to retrieve that now.

  Olga headed for the power generation room, and only slowed when she discovered the corridor leading to it was covered in sticky black webbing. The foul-smelling material coated the walls, floor, and ceiling, creating a tunnel that looked like it should house some sort of insect or spider.

  The substance also coated the overhead lights, masking them, so the corridor became darker the further in she went. She saw bready-looking lumps with things like toadstools growing at their center. They quivered as she passed by.

  Olga stepped carefully, trying to avoid the glistening pools of ooze she knew would be like viscous glue. At the corridor junction she saw the webbing continued along the opposite corridor toward the base crew’s sleeping quarters. Of course it did.

  My poor, poor friends, she thought.

  She licked bone-dry lips and carefully peered around the opposite corner – empty – all clear.

  “Go.”

  She ran again, heading toward the power-generation room. In seconds more she was there and slammed a hand over the door button. With a faint hiss, the door began to slide into the wall. She was inside before it had fully opened, and spun to punch the button to close the door.

  Olga headed for the reactor. She knelt by the six-foot door shield set into the floor. She entered the code to open it, and it lifted with agonizingly glacial speed. The room filled with a blue glow from the demineralized water acting as both insulation and a neutron moderator, absorbing many of the enriched particles from the nuclear rods it housed.

  She moved to the core rods, hesitating for only a few seconds as her mind whirled, trying to think of other options. None would come. So she opened the individual shielding panels to display the six, three-foot long rods of enriched plutonium. There was no self-destruct button like in the movies. Why would there be? In the vacuum of space or desolation of a moonscape, why would there be a need to commit suicide through the total destruction of your life-sustaining habitat?

  But there were ways to cause an accidental catastrophic detonation – when the rods were replaced every few years, they were removed while the water was drained. All she needed to do was drain the liquid and leave the rods inside their chambers. The radioactive heat would do the rest, very quickly building to significant de
tonation level.

  She opened the valves for the fluid release, and immediately the six-foot wide pool of glowing liquid began to drop. More alarms sounded, adding to the cacophony of madness surrounding her.

  Olga stood. It would take several minutes to fully drain, several more for the rods to reach critical levels of heat, and then they would cause a blast that should literally melt the base and sink it below the moon’s crust. Good.

  She backed up a few steps and then turned to run, rising to a sprint as she headed to the airlock. An insanely calm voice counted down overhead and warned of a potential meltdown unless the pool was reflooded. Olga ignored it as she careened into the airlock prep room. She skidded to a stop at the sight of the torn clothing, spatters of blood and viscera, and bloody handprints marking the walls. It was the scene of a hellish massacre. Tears filled her eyes once again. She knew these people, every one of them; they were her friends. Once.

  She swallowed her bile and crossed to the suit lockers; the first was empty, and the second one too. She knew no one had left the base, so she wondered whether the thing was so smart as to know to destroy or hide the lunar suits to stop anyone getting out. Then she remembered – of course it was; it had absorbed the minds of her friends and crewmates.

  In the last cabinet there was a single suit, too big for her, but she had no choice. She dragged it free and climbed into it, then crossed to a utilities cabinet and pulled things out and onto the floor until she found what she needed – duct tape. She wound the tape around her arms and legs to hold the oversized suit a little closer to her body and reduce the bulk and sagging.

  Once done, she lifted the helmet from the locker, dragged it onto her head, and locked it in place. Then finally fitted the tiny oxy-cylinder to her chest. She had no time to test the suit seal or the tank’s capacity level and only hoped it was enough to make it to the American base a mile to the east.

  Olga sucked in a deep, juddering breath and took one last look around as the seconds counted down.

  She saw movement through the viewing panel in the door and flattened herself against the wall; it was just a shadow, but enough to tell her something was out there. It was out there.

  The logical part of her brain told her to stay silent and still and wait, but her primitive brain screamed at her to get out, get out now.

  The primitive won and Olga rushed to the airlock, darted in, slammed her hand on the close button. She expelled the air inside the chamber in preparation for opening the outer door. Though the moon has a few gases in its thin atmosphere, for practical purposes it is considered a vacuum, and therefore it took time to equalize the air pressure.

  The seconds ticked over agonizingly slowly as the vents drew the air out. She hugged herself as her foot tapped nervously inside the oversized boot, her impatience making her want to scream.

  Olga moved to the viewing panel and peered back into the anterior room. To her horror, she saw the prep room door slide back and for a few seconds the thing filled the doorframe before it began to force itself inside.

  The green light blinked to red – airlock pressure equalization achieved. Olga grinned maniacally; it was too late, no matter how strong it was, the thing could never open the inner airlock door while the outer door was opening. The hydraulics simply wouldn’t allow it.

  “Fuck you!” she screamed at it from behind the three inch–thick safety glass.

  And then she gulped and backed up when, for the first time, she beheld the full hideousness of the creature – it was now far bigger than she expected. But she should have known better; all that body mass of the crew it had absorbed had to go somewhere.

  Only at the end did they realize what they were dealing with. It was different, obviously, to any other lifeform they had ever encountered on Earth, as its cell structure was malleable to the point of being able to change its shape and structure. If it wanted to, it could compress itself down to a fraction of its size. That was how it hid for so long.

  But now free of the need to hide it had reverted to its natural form – a living nightmare that filled the room.

  The creature madly lashed its black cords in the air leaving dark streaks on the walls, reaching out to pluck up fragments of clothing as though looking for morsels of flesh.

  Covering its lumpen body were stalks with swollen bulbs on the end that popped ripely and filled the room with powder or gas. Groups of milky orbs, eyes maybe, swivelled in concert with some of the arms as though in charge of each of their frenzied tasks. One group swivelled toward her, and sighted her through the glass panel.

  It dropped the rags it held and surged forward, just as the outer airlock door whooshed fully open.

  Olga spun back as the inner door clanged when the thing’s bulk struck the eight solid inches of steel and, ominously, alarm lights blinked their frantic warning. She sprinted to the outer door and dived through, tumbling when she hit the moon’s powdery surface and rolling for a moment more. In her ears she still heard the base’s calm voice counting down the seconds until core meltdown.

  She scrambled to her feet just as the outer door began to whine closed. She spun back.

  “Oh no.”

  It was coming after her.

  Of course it was, because it knew how to operate the airlock. And also probably knew exactly where she was going.

  Olga turned and moved as quickly as the oversized suit plus low gravity would allow.

  How far from the base did she need to be when it detonated? The explosion would be significant, but it was the radiation dispersal that would be the real worry. Though the suits had radiation shielding to guard against cosmic rays, the heavy reactor particles would stick to her, making her entire body toxic.

  She powered on, gritting her teeth. She chanced a look back and stopped dead. The outer door was now fully closed. It meant that the inner door could be operated, and then?

  She already knew the answer: and then it would be out.

  She made a small strangled noise in her throat and turned to run once again. How much more time? she wondered. Where was the –

  The flash of blinding light shot past her, but the explosion wasn’t heard because there were very few particles in the air of the near vacuum of the lunar surface to vibrate – sound didn’t travel well.

  But vibration waves did, and she felt them through the soles of her boots. She didn’t look back but hunched her shoulders in preparation for the shock wave she knew was coming.

  It hit like a hammer blow and kicked her forward. She went head over heels, and her face struck an exposed rocky outcrop. The faceplate of her helmet starred with cracks and she heard the devastating hiss of escaping gas.

  Her ankle hurt and at first she thought it might be broken from the fall. But then the pain moved up her leg and felt as if someone or something was gripping it in a vice.

  Olga turned, and her eyes went wide. An oily-looking black cord circled her leg and the thing loomed over her.

  She knew then she had lost her race.

  CHAPTER 02

  John F Kennedy Moon Base, Aitken Crater

  Mia Russo stepped from the portal and placed her large, weighted shoe silently down on the compacted dust of the lunar surface. Her boot was insulated with a two inch–thick rubber and Kevlar mesh sole and, like the suit, protected her from the lunar temperature extremes – daytime temps got up to 248 degrees and down to minus 230 at night. The hi-tech suits not only gave protection from the cold and heat but were reflective, and tough enough to withstand the constant radiation bombardment and micrometeor strikes – in effect, they were a modern-day suit of armor.

  The only problem was they paid for all this armor by having mobility that was little better than an oversized two-legged tortoise.

  Mia drew in a deep breath of dry, canned air and let it out slowly. The landscape beyond their base on the edge of the Aitken crater was both primordial and alien looking: jagged hills rose like monstrous teeth, crater edges lifted hundreds of feet, tiny craggy vall
eys like rips in a pie crust, all in hues of gray, purple, and some places, a deep, ocean blue. It should have been calming, but when you stood quietly and alone, you heard it – the wail – the soft, whistling shriek that was the moon’s constant background noise.

  Originally, many scientists had thought that the moon being a near vacuum would mean there would be an audible atmospheric emptiness. But they soon found that “space” makes sounds all the time. They said it was probably due to charged particles interacting with the moon’s weak magnetic field. And maybe that was true. But it sounded damn eerie and more like the disembodied wail of a lost soul crying out in anguish.

  Mia shook herself out of the creepy thought and closed the portal, watching as the hatch door slid shut and the access light went from green to red. She waited, facing the vehicle maintenance bays with a ramp leading under the ground and panel doors that fitted flush with the surface, while Benoit brought the crawler around. For the most part, their lunar base had been constructed to have a minimal profile – critical when they’d thought they were a covert operation. But now they were an obvious secret, and ever since the Russians had moved in to begin mining a few years back, they’d both pretended the other group didn’t exist even though they were a little over a mile apart.

  She’d seen the Russians out on the lunar surface many times and waved at their teams. And they’d waved back. What a world, I mean moon. She grinned, and pressed a small stud on the side of her helmet to lower the additional gold-coated visor over her eyes. The soft metal was an excellent reflector of infrared light while allowing penetration of visible light and was also malleable enough to be hammered down to a thickness of just 0.000002 inches – without it, the astronauts would eventually be blinded by the undiffused light they were bathed in during a lunar day.

  She sighed as the visor brought relief to her eyes – the phrase “dark side of the moon” did not refer to “dark” as in the absence of light, but rather “dark” as in unknown. Through a phenomenon called tidal locking, the same side of the moon always faced the Earth. The side that faced the universe had remained a mystery until the Soviets first photographed it in 1959.