by Ofelia Negra
The creature behind him turned away and jumped up to cling to the wall. He climbed about a meter and circled around, craning its neck around to look at the man it had just struck. Its tentacles came around again to strike. All three flicked forward again as one, and the barbs from their tips were spat out. They all impacted the man’s head with enough force that it exploded, showering the glass with blood, brains and bits of flesh.
“Fuck!” Marcus hissed. The creature dropped to the ground and skittered out of sight.
He rushed around the double bend in the hall to the door. It didn’t take too much time to key the release, and he rushed through to kneel beside the man’s body. Blood was pooling around him now, and his arm had come off at the shoulder; the hand was still pinned to the glass as the rest of the body slumped with enough force to tear free.
Now he had proof that there were survivors on board; and not just survivors like the guy he’d seen killed by a bladed monstrosity moments after picking up the plasma torch, or the woman at the tram station that had died shortly after he’d come across her. This man… this man had been in good health, aside from the panic, and the fact that he’d been killed. Marcus wished he’d gotten to the door quicker. He might have saved the man’s life. And even a medical-science officer for company was better than no company at all.
Movement behind him and a horrid wail made Marcus spin around. A great mass of flesh and tentacles was flying through the air at him. He threw up his hands on instinct to catch it, holding it at arm’s length so that it wouldn’t try to chew at his faceplate. The plasma torch clattered to the floor when he released his grip on it. The large tentacles on the small thing’s back flailed at him, lashing out and over his shoulder. He heard wrenching metal, and then something tore through the flesh at his right shoulder. He cried out in pain and shook the thing in his hands until the barb withdrew slid free from him.
Then, before it could impale him again, he threw the wretched thing straight down at the floor at his feet. He swung his leg back, and then flung it forward with as much speed and strength as he could muster. His booted foot made contact with a squishing sound, and the force of the impact sent the creature flying across the room until it crashed head-first into a wall. There was a crunch as vertebrae shattered under the force of the impact, and the tentacles went limp as it oozed down the wall to the floor, tracking blood along the way.
Marcus bent over and reached for his plasma torch, but a surge of pain from the wound behind his shoulder caused him to withdraw that arm and reach out instead with the other. He hissed as the pain stabbed into his brain, teeth clenched to stop himself from screaming. It burned, as if it was on fire, as if it were acid.
When he had his plasma torch in hand, he switched it to his right, and then reached around his waist with his left for the recently acquired med pack. He found it, placed the canister in the crook of his right arm to hold it, and then reached for the med pack delivery cap on his PDT. He pressed down on it and it popped open at once. Then he popped the lid on the med canister and plugged it into the open slot. He felt the gel oozing from the canister into the auto-delivery system, and then felt the gel being applied through his suit to the wound at his shoulder.
He sighed as the burning subsided, faded, and then dropped the empty canister and closed up the delivery cap.
When the pain was fully gone, he pulled up a diagnostic on the holo. There was a hole in the armor of his suit, just as he’d expected. He knew he was going to have to find a repair bench to fix it. It wouldn’t take long to do, and it wasn’t the utmost priority right now, but it would have to be seen to eventually.
He took the time to look around the room as feeling and mobility returned to his arm. Power was out to a lot of the artificial growth pods, and those that were still active appeared to have locked their inhabitants into a stasis cycle to prevent degeneration while at the same time halting the growth procedure. A couple of the pods had cracked open, their liquid contents sheeting the floor while there was no sign of the subjects they’d housed.
There was a riser in the corner, and he took it up to the upper landing. The pods there were all deactivated or malfunctioning, their inhabitants already showing early signs of necrosis and decay. The smell was palpable. The glass doors on the equipment cabinet were shattered and littered the floor. The shards crunched loudly under Marcus’s feet as he proceeded across the landing to the unlocked door on the other side.
When he went through the second door, he found himself in another office. There was a locked door across the room from him, and the one window was only half-shuttered. Looking through the exposed glass, he saw that he was back in the main lab area, where the lockdown had occurred… top level. Glancing back to the other door, he realized that it was the one he couldn’t get through when he’d been here last. He frowned at the prospect of doubling back and going the long way just to get back to the security station.
On the solitary desk in the office was a large red canister with steel braces and a large, obvious hazard label. The script above the hazard label read as thermite. Smiling, he picked it up and examined it for leaks. There didn’t appear to be any, so he released a clamp on the lower-back plating of his PDT and slotted the thermite canister there for safe keeping. The clamp closed over the canister, securing it in place.
He switched on his audio comm. and tied it in to Hamilton’s PDT frequency. “Hamilton, I’ve got the thermite.”
“Alright, that thermite should be able to melt through the barricade back in the security station,” Hamilton’s voice came over the speaker. “But you’ll still need a shock pad to ignite it. I’m unlocking the door for you to make things easier.
“God; I hope I can hold this position. I can hear something big moving out there.” The channel cut off with a burst of static, and Marcus looked over to see that the locked door was… no longer locked.
“Thank you, Hamilton,” Marcus whispered to himself.
***
8
VIII
Medical Log…
Dr. Warren, B. (Chief Psych Officer)
Report of Psychiatric Observation
Patient: Harris, P. (Employee #PM-19026-EH) Harris is asleep, after another strong sedative. He seems literally unable to sleep without chemical aid. Most people succumb to exhaustion after 50+ hours of waking, regardless of any desire to stay awake. Not Harris.
His explanation of events on the colony is also odd, and points to the same paranoia we’ve seen elsewhere planetside. His guilt is not in doubt… two planetside security officers were present when he took Dr. Costello hostage and murdered Nurse Evans… and he doesn’t deny his actions. But he insists that there was no crime, nor does he feel guilt.
This is classic sociopath behavior, but Harris exhibits no other symptoms. He is affable and friendly, able to empathize and offer original opinions. When questioned about the murder, however, he becomes withdrawn and intransigent, displaying schizophrenic behavior. He also undergoes intermittent hallucinatory periods, again similar to those experienced by other colonist. Harris claims he threatened the Doctor because he “had to stop the dreams and the faces”, and that he’ll kill again to “Make it whole again”. What that means, I haven’t determined yet. A most intriguing case.
***
Marcus found a power node in the office before he left it. It would help him with the repairs to his suit later, assuming he could find a repair bench and the appropriate tools. The node would keep his suit’s systems powered while he triggered the auto repair.
But when he was done in the office, he left swiftly, without looking back. He made his way back to the security station and through the other available door there, which led to zero-g therapy. As he made his way through the corridors, he only came across one thing that surprised him.
He wasn’t sure if it was a survivor, or one of those creatures, so he’d stood back to watch it for a few seconds as it rocked back and forth on its feet, smashing its face against the bulkh
ead in front of it over and over. After it had caved the side of its head in with a final, hard bash, it slumped to the ground, lifeless.
Marcus walked by slowly, keeping his eye on the corpse in case it decided to jump up and attack him. It didn’t.
He entered through the door at the end of the hall to find himself once more in a vast room. The room was two decks high. There was a door immediately to his left… locked, of course. There was a chip on the floor, but he ignored it. Tucked into the corner by the ramp was a repair bench and a ZG therapy capsule was blocking the ramp to the other side of the chamber. Atop it was a squarish platform with no safety rails.
Then he stopped by the repair bench. He flicked it on, and waited for the side benches to fold out, increasing the bench space by double. A couple of tool arms extended from the bench and latched themselves onto the front of his PDT, obviously sensing damage. He allowed it, and then pulled the power node from his belt and plugged it into a slot on the bench. He watched as it went to work; extra tool and repair arms extended from the top of the bench and reached over his shoulders to repair any major or minor damage to the suit.
The process lasted no more than a couple of minutes; but it was a couple of minutes in which Marcus’s panic level shot right up, due to the fact that he knew that he was vulnerable while attached to the bench the way he’d been. When it was over, the arms retracted back into the bench, it sealed up, switched itself off and went silent. Marcus spun around, raising his plasma torch, which had been seen to by the bench as well, and scanned the area. Nothing had snuck up on him, this time, but he made a promise to himself that he wouldn’t put himself in that position again unless he’d either completely cleared out the area, or had someone with him to watch his back.
Marcus’s anxiety began to wane, and he moved over to the ramp and used his magnetic module to shift the zero-g capsule as far to the left as he could, until the platform atop it slotted into the gap in the upper platform. He crossed the ramps swiftly to the other side of the room. Another riser was in the corner against the unlocked office. The office held no appeal for him, so he skipped it and went straight for the riser.
When he was on the top level, he proceeded to cross the platform he’d moved into place. Safe on the other side, he rounded a divider and moved the platform over a little further so that he could walk across it again, then proceeded down the corridor to the end. Light panels in the walls lit the corridor for him enough that he didn’t need to switch on his PDT’s beamers.
The door was locked. However, the control panel beside it had been pried loose; the covering had been dumped on the floor and the wires and conduits had been exposed. They glowed dimly with the energy coursing through them, but Marcus blasted them without a second’s hesitation. The door slid open to admit him.
The hall beyond split off at the end. Directly in front of Marcus was another door, unlocked, ready to be opened for him. But the hall continued to the right to another door. That door was ringed in red, locked securely. Marcus didn’t have time to try and bypass the lock himself, and with all the intermittent comm. interference they’d been experiencing so far, he didn’t want to waste time asking Hamilton to do it for him. So instead, he to the unlocked door and keyed the release.
The door was barely a few centimeters opened when he heard and felt it. Air rushed by him hard and fast, sucked through the gap in the door as it got wider and wider. He barely heard the sound of the computer announcing the vacuum beyond over the sound of the wind, and he dashed through the door and keyed the closing mechanism quickly to preserve the atmosphere in the diagnostics bay.
The corridor was darkened, but not unlit. Marcus took a moment to steady himself and to check the status of his suit’s pressure and the magnetism of his boots. Pressure was good, but he had no reserve oxygen… there was nowhere in the suit for it. If he could hold his breath for as long as it took him to get to the nearest pressurized area, he might stand a chance. His boots’ magnetic grips were stable, and working just fine.
Sucking the last gulp of oxygen from inside his suit, Marcus ran. He rounded the corner ahead of the door quickly, dashed through a series of interconnected offices when he found the main corridor was blocked by the collapsed ceiling. He dashed through another door at the other end of the corridor, pushing his way through the pressurized air that vented into the vacuum, and closed the door behind him quickly. He didn’t breathe again until he heard the sound of oxygen and pressure vents restoring the right atmosphere into the hall he was now in. Only then, did he take large, greedy gulps of air to satisfy his burning lungs.
The section Marcus was in was close enough to the edge of the ship, he figured, that it had been exposed to harsh vacuum when something… likely a chunk of stray rock from the planet crack… had ripped a hole right through the layers of hull. He knew that the ship’s hazard shields would have been up during a planet mining operation; it was standard procedure. The fact that something had gotten through those shields pointed to the likely scenario that the shields had been down, and that meant that power had been either completely out at the time, or diverted away.
On his knees on the deck, Marcus heaved great, hacking coughs as oxygen rushed back to fill his lungs. They hurt a little from the exposure to the vacuum, but there wasn’t exactly much he could do about that. He had plenty of it in here, as long as he didn’t reopen that door.
He went down the slanted hall to the large, round blast door at the end. It opened at his command without a fuss, admitting him to a massive spherical room. The whole structure was lined with gravity panels, and there was a generator to the left and right, capping the poles. A holo control panel was just to Marcus’s left, attached to a support brace from the platform he stood on. He activated the zero gravity field and waited as it spooled up. Panels began to flash in sequence, slowly, and the generators on each end of the chamber thrummed with energy.
Marcus instantly felt the difference. With the gravity off, the suit felt weightless on his body. He stood up a little straighter and stretched his arms and legs to work out the weight-granted kinks that had been gathering in his joints.
He took a couple of steps forward until he was standing on the downward curve between the door and the wall below it. The magnetism of his boots kept him to the deck plating, but he was now walking on a wall, and at first it was a little disorienting. He soon got over that. It was exactly the angle he wanted. He brought up his PDT control holo and switched off the magnetism of his boots. Then he pushed off from the deck firmly.
Drifting across the zero-gravity field was a great feeling, but the experience was sobered by the fact that there were two bodies floating in the field with him. There were some crates as well, and a large power cell, but they didn’t bother him so much. He drifted by them all, forcing himself not to look at the mutilated faces of the corpses, forcing down the gag reflex once more when he passed far too close to one.
When he reached the other side of the chamber, he stopped himself with his hands against the curved deck plates. Then, shifting as best he could in the weightlessness, he brought his feet around to the deck and reactivated the magnetic soles. He felt his feet clamp down on the deck, straightened up, and breathed a sigh. That part had been easy. It took little effort to take the few steps that put him upright once more and he examined the door to find that it was locked… one of the power cells had been yanked free.
He wondered about that. What reason could any crew in this section have to yank free a power cell for a door? It wasn’t as if the creatures used doors in the first place; they got into rooms and hallways through the vents, which were seemingly everywhere. But he didn’t worry about it too long.
He turned to his right and saw a power cell drifting very slowly away from him. He activated the magnetic unit, reached out, and pulled the power cell towards him. Then he grabbed it with both hands, deactivating the magnetic unit in the same swift stroke. He turned it over in his hands once to make sure that he wasn’t holding the
end that would plug into the socket, and then he lined it up and slammed it in with little grace. It was tough; they were built that way. He knew he wouldn’t damage it.
The connections fused together, linking the power from the cell to the door. Something beneath the wall plating hummed with life, and the red ring around the door changed to blue. Marcus keyed the release and stepped inside.
The room inside was small, almost claustrophobic. Shelves lined most of space against the walls. A couple of small, locked storage units lay tucked into the corner to his right. A pair of upright lockers was against the wall immediately to his left. One was locked, the other wasn’t. He opened it and found another small med pack. Guessing he might need it later, he plucked it from the shelf and clipped it to a spare slot at his belt before he slammed the locker shut with a reverberating clang.
A work table stood against the wall adjacent to the lockers. Benches on either side were piled high with scribbled reports, a data reader and data chips. There was no testing equipment, no instruments. The table had upon it a single thing. Its main body was round and flat, and there were three, thick appendages equidistant around its circumference. Each of those appendages had a series of controls and toggles and indicator lights. The flat top of the centerpiece had a few grooves and slots, but to what it fitted into, Marcus had no idea.
