by Ofelia Negra
Was Nikki even still alive, somewhere on board this ship? The thought entered his mind suddenly as he stared into the twin abysses of the creature’s eye sockets.
It screeched at him again, and then took another shuffle-step forward towards him.
Suddenly, the doors slammed shut with an almighty clang that rang throughout the lift, the PDT’s helmet, and Marcus’s head all at once. The force of the doors clamping shut split the creature straight down the middle. Marcus watched as the half that was trapped inside the lift with him fell to the floor with a loud splat. Blood poured from the bisection, congealing around the creature on the floor and creeping slowly towards Marcus’s boots.
He reached up and unsecured the clamps on his PDT’s helmet, and then pulled it free. Then, dropping it without a care, he fell to his knees and vomited.
***
3
III
Hamilton ran backwards down the hallway as fast as he safely could. He didn’t like retreating from a fight, but as he’d just seen from the way those things had just torn apart Johnson and James without even appearing as though they were affected by the bullets from their weapons… well, he just knew there was no other choice.
Kira Davis was behind him… in front of him… it didn’t matter. It was all relative. In either case, she led the way down the hall to the lift as Hamilton covered their escape, firing at anything that followed them.
He knew it wasn’t rational, but more than wanting to survive right now, he wanted to return to the flight lounge to see if his men were really dead. It wasn’t rational because the larger part of him knew that they were… their PDT monitors wouldn’t have flat-lined if they were still alive. Besides, he didn’t truly know how either of them could have survived after what those… things… had done to him.
His PDT’s audio unit crackled, reminding him that the channel between him and Marcus Stone was still wide open. “Fuck me!” the engineer’s voice swore loudly, panicked, over the comm.
Kira stopped in her tracks and spun, her hair flying wildly around her in the movement. She looked down at the control panel on Hamilton’s PDT’s wrist, and her brow, which had been furrowed in determination… determination to survive… unknotted.
“Marcus?” she said desperately. “Marcus!”
“His comm must be busted. He can’t hear us,” Hamilton said when there wasn’t a reply. He refused to believe that yet another member of his team was lost to him.
“Or those things got to him before he could get out of there!” Kira screamed in his face. “We have to get back to the ship! We have to get out of here!”
“Calm the fuck down, Miss Davis!” Hamilton shouted. He brought the rifle stock up to rest against his shoulder and looked down the targeting notches until one of the monsters was lined up. Then he squeezed the trigger, holding the rifle steady as it unloaded round after rapid round into the advancing monster.
One bullet went astray, and the thing’s head exploded atop its shoulders.
“Got one!” Hamilton cheered, lowering his rifle as the creature doubled over backwards with the hit. He and Kira watched it as it sprung back up straight and continued to advance, headless, towards them.
“Shit!” Kira swore.
“Get that lift up here now!”
“On it,” she replied, darting away behind him.
Hamilton followed, keeping his gun raised and letting fly with the occasional round to slow the advance of the unnatural beings.
“Here it is.” Hamilton stopped and looked over his shoulder to see Kira Davis fussing with the control panel for the lift. “I’ll have it open in a minute. Just keep those things off me!”
“Easier said than done,” Hamilton muttered as he ejected the spent ammo clip from the pulse rifle.
He reached around his waist to the spare clip on the back of his belt, plucked it free, and slammed it into the dispenser slot on his rifle. Then he flicked the autoloader switch and unloaded a couple more rounds into the nearest creature, taking off one of its long, bony arm-spikes at the elbow joint.
It screamed at him, more angry than hurt, and charged forward on ungainly legs. Hamilton unloaded another clip into one of those legs, severing it above the knee and watching, satisfied, as the thing’s weight dragged it down to the deck with a wet thud.
“Well, that seemed to work,” he said over his shoulder as another creature stepped over its fallen comrade and advanced slowly.
“I’ve got it!” Kira shouted.
Hamilton heard the lift doors unclamp and slide apart behind him. Without looking back, he started to walk backwards towards it, following Kira. Only when he was inside and the doors were closed again did he lower the rifle and check the ammo clip.
“Why aren’t those things dying?” Kira demanded of him in a tone that betrayed panic.
Hamilton ignored her and ejected the new ammo clip to visually check it… the reader on his rifle was damaged. It was still more than half full, and he smiled as he slotted it back into the rifle and loaded a set of bullets from the clip into chambers.
“Why do you expect me to know?” he snapped testily.
“I…”
The doors opened again after a brief descent, and Hamilton shoved Kira back behind him with a gentle shove before he poked his head around the door and looked around. The immediate area looked to be deserted… a few drops of blood on the deck here and there, and a looked door to the right of the lift, but that was all.
He stepped out first, rifle at the ready as he scanned from left to right, floor to ceiling. If there was one lesson these creatures had taught him, it was that he couldn’t just automatically expect them to attack from his level. As a security chief, and commanding officer of this mission, he should have known better anyway. But their ignorance to that simple fact had cost James and Johnson their lives. Hamilton vowed that it would not cost him his, or Kira’s.
But then that left one more uncertainty. Had Marcus escaped the creatures, trapped in the security checkpoint as he had been? Had he found a lift or any other sort of exit and used it to escape? Or had those creatures gotten to him too? Had he failed to learn the lessons taught by the deaths of their comrades in the flight lounge? Why hadn’t he answered his comm?
“This is the tram station,” Kira pointed out, departing the lift a couple of careful steps behind Hamilton.
“Can you call it up?” Hamilton asked. “I want to get to the Bridge and see if those things have gotten that far yet.”
“I shouldn’t have to,” Kira replied. “It’s motion activated. If there’s someone on the departure platform, then the tram will be sent here to pick them up.”
Hamilton nodded to let her know that he’d heard her, and then stepped through the door-less doorway into the departures waiting room. The seats were all empty, with no signs they’d been occupied recently at all. A few cases lay scattered about, and a couple of dropped ammo clips compatible with Hamilton’s pulse rifle. He picked them up and clipped them to his belt, just in case.
“There’s nobody here.”
“Way to state the obvious,” Kira replied, scowling at him.
Hamilton left the waiting room and walked around the windowed wall toward the actual platform itself. Kira followed him, looking around with her pistol in hand.
“How long would it take for the tram to arrive?” Hamilton asked her.
“It’s not coming.” Hamilton whirled around to face her and demanded an explanation at once. “Look,” she said simply, nodding across the tracks to a display holo above the opposite wall.
Hamilton sighed. The track was red-lined, and the diagram of the tram above it was blinking, indicating that it was non-functional. “Great,” he breathed angrily. “Just great. So how to do we get to the Bridge now?”
Before Kira had a chance to reply, a screech and a hum caught Hamilton’s attention, and he turned around to see that part of the wall was peeling away from the rest, revealing waist-high windows behind them. And through tho
se windows…
“Marcus! Marcus!” Kira called.
The moving figure on the other side of the windows, wearing a recognizable engineers PDT, stopped moving and turned to face them. Marcus Stone’s helmet was off, and he grinned broadly as he looked across at them.
“I can’t believe he made it,” Kira said to Hamilton, looking at him sidelong.
Hamilton keyed in his visual comm. on the PDT to Marcus’s PDT, and a holo-screen appeared before him, showing the weary, disturbed-looking face of the engineer. “Marcus,” he started, smiling. “Huh! We ran into more of them on the way over here. Are you OK?”
“Yeah, Cap,” Marcus said, almost cheerfully.
“More what?” Kira interrupted. “What the hell are those things? Is that the crew?”
“Keep your voice down,” Hamilton snapped. “Whatever they are, they’re not friendly. And half the doors on this ship are locked because of the quarantine.” He looked back down at the holo-screen, and Marcus, to see that the other man was looking around, assessing his own surroundings. “Now, Marcus, we have to get to the Bridge. But first, you’ve got to repair the tram system.”
“You’re crazy, Hamilton!” Kira exclaimed. “You’re going to get us all killed!”
Hamilton turned his head and glared at her. “If you listen to me, I will get you out of here alive!” She didn’t respond, but she did return his glare with one of her own. “Now, what’s wrong with the tram?”
Kira went to a nearby panel and linked her PDT’s system up to perform the necessary analysis. Hamilton watched, aware of how much patience was eaten away by her incessant challenges to his orders. She was going to have to be brought in line sooner or later, and Hamilton knew that someone with her skills was better as an ally than as an enemy. But she needed to understand that he was in command of the mission, not her. There was a chain of command that needed to be followed and civilian or not, Kira Davis was going to follow it one way or the other.
Hamilton heard the completion beep of her PDT’s analysis of the system, followed by a short sigh from Kira. “The data board’s fried. According to the system, there should be a spare in the maintenance bay.”
“All right, then,” Marcus said over the vid channel, “all I need to do is grab that spare. I know my way to the maintenance bay, it’s no problem.”
“But,” Kira started, louder, “there’s also a broken tram blocking this tunnel, which needs to be repaired.”
“Then we’ll do that,” Hamilton suggested.
“Damn it, Hamilton!” Kira swore. “Everything we need to do is on the other side of this quarantine! We can’t reach it from here!”
“We can’t,” Hamilton replied with an affirming nod. “But Marcus can.” He turned back to the holo-screen to see Marcus looking straight back at him. “Marcus, if I can get to the Bridge, I should be able to access the personnel files. You fix the tram, and I’ll help you find Nikki.”
“I’ll get right on it,” Marcus said with a nod and a smile. Hamilton was grateful that at least he wasn’t shaken up too much by those alien things.
“Are you armed?” Kira asked. “Those things aren’t just going to let you walk right past them.”
Marcus held up something for them both to see. “Plasma torch,” he told them. “I picked it up on my way down here. It seems to do the job so far. But it hasn’t got much charge.”
“Do what you can,” Hamilton said with a nod. “You might find charges for it in storage lockers or wherever. I suggest you pick up something stronger if you come across it though. A single-shot torch isn’t going to do you much good if they decide to swarm on your location.”
“Gotcha,” Marcus said. Then he was gone, and the holo-screen disappeared. Hamilton looked out across the tracks to see Marcus saluting casually back at him before he dashed across the room to another door and disappeared through it.
“And what do we do in the meantime?” Kira asked testily. Hamilton turned to look at her, frowning once more and surprised that his facial muscles hadn’t already locked into that expression permanently with how often he’d done it since their approach to the Pandora. “What makes you think those things are just going to wait out there and leave us be?”
“I’ll be surprised if they do, Miss Davis,” Hamilton replied bitingly. “But the tram is the fastest way around the ship, and I think it’s advisable that we don’t leave the platform unguarded.”
“So you just want to sit here and wait for us to be ambushed?”
“You are armed, Miss Davis!” Hamilton snapped. “We both are.”
“Bullets don’t stop those things!”
“They will slow them down, though. See what you can do about the doors while we’re stuck here.”
***
4
IV
Marcus knew his way to the maintenance bay without having to check the PDT’s scans of the deck. From tram control, he’d have to make his way toward the outer sections of the ship, through a maze of dark, almost lightless corridors and rooms. The plasma torch gave him small comfort, its weight in his hand something of a silent reminder that he wasn’t entirely useless.
He reveled in the knowledge that Hamilton and Davis had made it out of the flight lounge in one piece, and that it didn’t seem as though the fleshy creatures with the bony spike-arms had followed them. At least, so far, he knew he didn’t really have to worry about them.
He himself had managed to destroy one of the creatures after picking up the cutter. Though, if truth be told, he wasn’t entirely sure if he had killed the thing. Just because it had stopped moving, that didn’t necessarily mean that he’d killed it. Maybe it had decided to let him pass, and it was quietly stalking him through the bowels of the ship.
He opened another door, and his heart leapt into his throat, choking off a surprised yelp. Someone, or rather the corpse of someone, was hanging from the ceiling just beyond the door, legs swaying lightly.
Reacting on instinct born from the need to survive whatever had happened on board this ship, Marcus raised the torch until the line of three targeting lasers shined on the blooded torso of the hanging man or woman. There was movement overhead, scratching against the metal of the ceiling from the vents. The sound was moving away from Marcus, and he kept the plasma torch trained, just in case it decided to return.
When he was sure that it was unlikely, he stepped through the open doorway, and around the hanging body, and proceeded on. He turned only once in the corridor, when he heard a heavy splat, and saw that the corpse had dropped from the ceiling to the floor. The crew member’s face had been torn at viciously, and his arms looked like they’d been bitten off at the wrists. But aside from those wounds and some stab wounds around the upper chest area, the body was more or less intact. Marcus shuddered, and then resumed down the corridor.
Suddenly, his PDT’s comm. spat static out at him, and then Hamilton’s voice came through, clearly, frantically. “Marcus, be careful,” the mission Commander said. There was a pause, permeated only by the sound of single-shot pulse rifle fire from Hamilton’s end. “Shooting them in the body doesn’t seem to work. Go for the limbs. Dismember them. That should do the job.”
The comm. line shut off before Marcus could reply. He found himself musing on that little tidbit of help. He wondered truly now if that creature he’d “killed” earlier was truly dead at all. He hadn’t thought to dismember it at the time, assuming that unloading enough plasma into its chest and head might do the job instead.
He frowned and opened the door at the end of the hall, suddenly finding himself on a section of the tram tracks running throughout the great ship. To the left of him as he stepped out onto the powered-down tracks was a barricade that was as high as his chest. It was several meters away. When he turned to the right, he saw a similar barricade located several dozen meters away, blocking off another section of the track. Vent squares set into the floor at regular intervals spewed steam from cooling or cooled power conduits running beneath the tra
cks, which fogged Marcus’s PDT helmet only slightly.
He hit the defogger on his wrist controls, and once his vision was unimpaired again, he headed down the tracks to the right. He walked slowly, eyes and plasma torch scanning around him at all times. He expected an ambush at any second, and he couldn’t bring himself to lower his guard unless he was sure that he was safe.
But, all things so far considered, where on this ship was safe anymore?
He reached another door, set into the opposite wall near the far barricade, and stopped. His boot had thumped into something on the floor, and… despite the vulnerability it presented… Marcus lowered his weapon and looked down.
