Alien Infestation

by Peter Fugazzotto

  He paused for a second and glanced over his shoulder. Fifi was looking at him, a big smile plastered across her face. He scowled. Damn her and her high hopes for him.

  She was beaming like he was graduating from the academy about to shake the hand of the general and receive a diploma rather than climb up a rusty ladder into the nest of alien bugs.

  His hand nearly slipped off the next rung. This must have been where Engstrom fell. The ladder from here on up was pretty disgusting, coated in slime and stink. It smelled like someone vomited all over the ladder. It was mostly that foul ochre fluid that the bugs seeped. Nasty things.

  He picked his way carefully up the ladder, squeegeeing off slime with his gloves and sending globs of the junk to splatter on the floor below. That cleared the fools out beneath him rather quickly. The height was somewhat dizzying but Snake refocused on the rungs and the hole above and quickly quelled any trembling in his limbs.

  Air coursed through the hole. With it came an even stronger smell of the ichor. Maybe Hatt was right after all. Maybe, rather than aliens, these were demons sent here to make Snake and all the other sinners pay for the crimes they had committed against humanity.

  But his crimes were not so bad as to deserve this. Thieves did not suffer eternal damnation. Or at least he hoped not. Plus he was not really stealing. He was salvaging. A big difference, even if he still ended up collecting a ransom for whatever he found.

  Snake stopped right below the hole. It was gloomy up through the opening. He could see that the hall was filled with shadows, the reflected lights from the pods, steam bursting from vents and broken pipes. No sound of screaming. No whirring or clacking and no slurping of brains. At least he had that.

  He looked over his shoulder.

  Fifi stood at the bottom of the ladder, gun held close to her chest. She was a good kid but if it hit the fan up here, she would be no help. Even as good a sharp shooter as she was, she was too far away, and the light was too dim, for her to be accurate with her gun. He was alone now. He would be the one who would test the waters, the guinea pig.

  He reached down and loosened the straps that held the machete to his thigh. He would be able to draw the blade faster than the gun. And he was not so sure about how well the gun would work. He had seen those bullets explode against the chitinous armor of the bugs. He should have taken Fifi's flamethrower but too late for that now.

  One last glance, a quick smile, and then he was up and through the hole.

  He had just sprung through and landed in a crouch when the bug swiped at his head. Snake dove to the side and as he rolled back to his feet, he drew the machete.

  The bug charged. Snake swung the machete and the blow tore into an extended claw. The bug whirred in pain but redoubled its pace, coming in so fast that it knocked Snake's next blow off course, and suddenly he was tangled up with the limbs of the bug.

  It stank. Its cold plates pressed against his face, nearly smothering him. He stomped at its legs with his heel and heard the sharp crack of its exoskeleton. With a sudden twisting, he wrenched himself out of its embrace and threw a hard uppercut at the thing's face. Sharp pain burned across his knuckles and down to his elbow. Pins and needles exploded up to his neck. He could not feel his arm anymore. It was as if he punched a brick wall. That was a mistake.

  He kicked again and squirmed and darted out to the side, ducking, and narrowly avoiding getting his head pulped by a sudden swatting by the bug. The bug missed wildly and had swung so hard that it lost its balance for a second, falling forward.

  That was the one moment that Snake needed. He lifted his machete overhead, leapt into the air, and as he came down, he chopped. Chitin cracked. Hot, stinking ichor exploded. And the bug's head rolled, slowly, its mandible clacking, rolled right into the ladder hole and disappeared.

  But, of course, the headless body kept moving. It spun around, claws lashing out, turning, desperate to kill Snake even as it died itself.

  "Die, you son of a..." Snake waited until the headless bug turned the other direction and then he sprung forward, front kicking the side of the bug and sending it skittering to a wall of exposed pipes. He walked in close, and hacked at its limbs. More ichor flew from the severed, thrashing limbs. The sticky liquid covered his face and hands, but he kept hacking and slashing, and then drove his blade down to the hilt deep into the back of the creature. It quivered, tried to flip over, and then slowly stopped moving.

  Snake stood, one leg on the carapace of the beast, and yanked his ichor-drenched machete from the carcass.

  "You are one hard to kill cockroach."

  Something scraped on the ground behind him. He whirled around, blade in front of him, eyes wide, teeth bared, ready to kill again.

  Fifi's head emerged from the tunnel and then the tip of her gun. She rotated in a slow circle and then climbed out. She stayed in a crouch and dashed to Snake's side. She winced at the remains of the bug.

  "Chopping off its head wasn't enough?"

  "Apparently it wasn't. No walk in the park here."

  Fifi blew a slow steady whistle, and Crunch's head popped out of the ladder tunnel. His face cracked into a wide smile. He twisted and turned, squeezing his way out of the hole.

  Fifi scanned the dark halls receding away. "Gotta be more of them out there. They left a guard at the tunnel. They're not just mindless bugs. We're got our work cut out for us."

  He sheathed his machete and carefully wiped the ochre fluid from his cheeks and sleeves. "These things are nasty. Next time, we just light them up. Too much work to chop them to bits. The headless thing, though, that bothers me. A lot."

  "Snake, thanks," said Fifi. "Thanks for leading the way."

  He shrugged.

  "For stepping up. For putting yourself in harm's way before all others. Thank you."

  "Someone had to do something. And Engstrom wasn't available, so I guess it was my turn."

  A few minutes later, the team was assembled on the first floor.

  "A straight run," said Engstrom. "Down this hall, through the containment room, one more hall, and then we're at the door. Roy's waiting for us. He'll open the door and we'll be free. We'll be done with this. We'll be out of the prison."

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  EVEN AS THE door slammed to a close behind Engstrom, her heart pounded wildly. They were through. She and the others had made it out of the Acheron's prison blocks and into the safety of the outer edges.

  After Crunch finished spinning the door handle closed, Engstrom went and double-checked the manual latch. She shook it with her hand. It was not as secure as she would have liked but it would hold. No one inside the cells would be able to wrench the doors open. Not that bugs could open doors, or at least she hoped that they could not.

  Already the survivors began to separate, Li, Scully, and Harrison bunching to one side while the prisoners gathered on the opposite of the doorway.

  She peered through the double glass windows of the containment rooms. Through the far glass, she saw shadows, flickering lights. She had half-expected to see the bugs pounding their pincers against the window, their slavering mandibles pressed against the glass. But she saw none of that, just vague shadows.

  Snake came along side her, and spoke in a low voice. "I'm not going back in there," he said.

  She smiled. "Why do you think I would send you back into that nest of demons? That place is sealed off forever as far as I'm concerned."

  "Not this prison," he said. "Any prison. I'm not going to die in a stasis pod. Frozen. Trapped like a bug." He chuckled. "I'm not going to be shackled again. Telemachus-4 is not in my destiny. I'd rather die first. You need to understand that." He nodded his head toward the others, his crew and Thor, the last of the surviving prisoners. "None of us are willing to give up our freedom. You get that?"

  "We'll cross that bridge when we get there, Snake."

  "We've already crossed that bridge. Long time ago."

  She wanted to say something more to him but she did not know
what she could. If it were up to her, she would give him that freedom. But she knew that it was not up to her. It was up to Kronos, up to the Federation, and knowing that bothered her because as much faith as she put into them, as loyal as she was, as much as she was willing to follow the orders to help maintain the fabric of society, she had a creeping suspicion about how Kronos would react to her walking back onto the Poros with a handful of prisoners in tow. Her word would mean nothing, and that bothered her.

  Two minutes later, the survivors reached the Acheron's control room. It was empty.

  "Where's Roy?" asked Harrison. The ensign was disheveled. His uniform hung on him at an odd angle, his eye twitched, and he could not stop clenching and unclenching his fists.

  Engstrom went to the control panels and dialed in the comms system to the Poros. A torrent of static blared through the intercom. She slammed it off.

  "Something wrong here. Can't get through."

  "Let's just go," said Harrison. "Let's get back to the Poros. Let's get out of here. I want to go home."

  "Son, panicking is not going to help anything."

  "Neither is just standing around here. Let's go. Please."

  They were turning towards the door to the corridor leading back towards the connector tube when Fifi blurted out. "There. On the video feed." She pointed back towards the control panels.

  Engstrom stared at the screen. Bugs. A half dozen of them moving down a hallway. "Let's get moving," she said.

  "No," said Fifi, her hand clamping over Engstrom's wrist. "Look."

  Engstrom looked back at the screen. Yes, there were alien bugs in a hallway. So what? She knew what they looked like. Then she saw where Fifi's finger traced: along the words on the bottom of the screen. The video feed was coming from the Acheron outside of the prison blocks. The bugs were no longer contained in the prison. They had gotten out.

  "To the connector tube," she yelled. "Fast!"

  She was the last of them, running out of the control room, and back towards the connector tube that would lead them into the safety of the Poros. She wanted time to process all this but she knew she had no time to think. No time to do anything but to run. Because to run meant to survive.

  They were halfway there when Roy stepped out of a closet. The watchman's eyes were wide. He clutched a length of metal pipe in both hands, ready to swing it.

  "Thank god, Engstrom!" He dropped the pipe and ran to her, grabbing her arms. "They're in here. Please. Help me get out."

  "We'll get through the tube and get reinforcements," said Engstrom.

  His arms dropped by his sides and he stepped back from him, staggering steps. "You don't know, do you?"

  "What?"

  "They're here. The bugs are here."

  "Yes, I know that."

  "In the tube. They are in the connecting tube between the Acheron and the Poros. And Sergeant Smith and Marine Team 1, they did not make it through."

  "No way through," muttered Engstrom.

  She slipped past the others, who had frozen in their steps, and eased up to the compression chamber door. Through the double windows, she saw the connector tube: blood-splattered, teeming with bugs.

  "Can we get through one of the other connector tubes?" she asked Roy.

  He shook his head. "We disengaged those long ago."

  "Then how do we get through?" asked Harrison. His jaw trembled. "How do we get back to the Poros?"

  "The tube is the only way back," said Snake.

  "If we open those doors and start shooting, it's only going to draw the other bugs in the Acheron towards us," Engstrom said. "We'll be attacked from both sides."

  "What other choice do we have?" asked Snake. "I'm not going to wait here for them to hunt us down one by one. I'm not going out that way."

  "We can flush them out," said Roy. "We can go along the outside of the ships and the tube, get inside the Poros, and from there we can access the control panel and flush them out of the tube."

  "We can't do it from this side."

  "Not designed that way. The Federation has the tube set up so you can only flush it from their side."

  "And if that fails."

  "There's a manual override on the outside of the tube."

  "So who's going to do this?" asked Engstrom turning towards her soldiers. "Which one of you can do this?"

  "I'll do it," said Roy. "I'll go outside. I'll flush the bugs."

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  ROY HELD ONTO the metal rail and tried to slow his breathing. The rail was thinner than he thought. He had expected something more substantial on the outside of the Acheron.

  His breath fogged the visor of the helmet of his exterior suit. Something was wrong with the suit. The glass should not have been fogging up and it is should not have been as freezing as it was. He wondered if he had put it on too quickly before he decompressed and left the interior of the Acheron.

  But he had no choice. He did not have the leisure of time. The bugs, the monsters, whatever the hell they were had broken out of the prison block. They had somehow gotten to the secure part of the ship. Not through the door. That thing was locked tight.

  He remembered not half an hour ago, when he had been inside the control room flipping through the video feeds trying to get a fix on Engstrom and the escaped prisoners when he had seen a movement in the video. It took him a moment to realize that he was looking at one of the aliens. He had thought it a man in the shadows at first. Then it took him another half a moment to realize that the alien was no longer contained inside the walls of the prison block. The bug was on the outside, and it was moving in the direction of his control room, and it was not alone.

  Roy was not a fighter. He had never been in the Space Marines. He had never served in any of the Earth's security forces. He was technician, a glorified handyman, who had accepted the position when the pharma company threatened to pursue criminal action after he had mistakenly destroyed one of the chemical labs on New Singapore. He had messed up. He had drunk and smoked too much the night before and fell asleep. Slept right through the blaring alarms. The whole facility, with its equipment worth tens of millions of credits, went up in flames. They came after Roy so he disappeared. He hacked into his employee record, made a few changes, and successfully landed the position on the Acheron.

  The most boring job he had ever had by far. But it was safe. He was safe. Away from the men who wanted to strip away every last credit he had and likely snap his legs at the same time. He had heard stories about the company's enforcers taking souvenirs with them.

  At least, Roy had thought he was safe until he saw the aliens creeping in the hallway towards him.

  He had hidden in the compression chamber. He had curled against the wall, tears streaming down his eyes. All he could think of what was his life could have been, what he could have been if he had taken the right steps, if he had not messed up. He was weeping, lost in those thoughts, when he had heard the voices outside of the compression room.

  It was Engstrom and the other survivors, and he had rushed out to them, and for a few moments, he was filled with hope. He wanted to squeeze Engstrom in his arms. He wanted to shout his joy to the stars.

  He was safe. He was no longer alone.

  And then when he told them that the bugs swarmed in the connector tube, he realized that their one path to join the Space Marines on the Poros was gone. They were doomed.

  Roy volunteered to flush them out without a thought. He had been so torn down by the thought of dying alone in the ship, eaten by the bugs, that he simply said that he would walk outside the ship and flush the aliens. There had been no hesitation.

  But now that he was pulling his way along the hull of the Acheron, hand over hand grasping the thin rail, he wondered if he had rushed fool-heartedly right towards his own death.

  An indicator light flashed red inside of his space suit. "What the heck?"

  He needed to access the controls on the sleeve of the suit but he did not want to release either hand from gr
ipping the thin rail. He snuck a glance over his shoulder, not far, but just enough to get a glimpse of the deep black space, the distant stars.

  If he lost his grip, no one would come for him. He would float out there in the vast emptiness, alone, helpless, until the moment his air supply ran out.

  He took two deep breaths, willed his hand to open, and then keyed in the request for a status check on the suit. Small green text scrolled across the lower edge of the helmet glass.

  Roy cursed.

  The suit was showing a maintenance error. Indicator lights were flashing on the internal helmet display. He scrolled through the diagnostics. Sealing error. Non-fatal. He laughed. Thank god for that.

  He scrolled further. Oxygen levels low. He clicked into that error. Something wrong with the oxygen supply. Maybe another twenty minutes. He should have checked the suit before he climbed into it. He had half a dozen to choose from and he chose that one.

  He cursed his bad luck.

  He counted breaths until he could relax. Then he continued to pull himself along the rail.

  He looked ahead at the connector tube, the Poros, and the rest of the mass of tangled ships that made up the convoy including the giant colony ship where five thousand slept while the bugs murdered and invaded. He peered down the length of the small handrail. He could do this. Hand by hand. He could work his way over to the connector and to the Poros.

  He was not sure how he would get inside but he would figure it out. When he was over there, he could likely manually port into their communications system and send out a distress signal. Once he sent out a distress signal they would send down Marine Teams and they would slaughter all the bugs in the connector tube. The path would be clear for the others.

  He paused. He was breathing harder than he would have liked.

  He just needed to cross the tube, and then position himself at one of the external doors. He hoped the closest one was not too far down the hull of the vessel.

  Roy traversed the exterior rail on the Acheron more slowly than he wanted. He knew he needed to hurry. He knew that his oxygen levels were running out. But his body was not responding. His hands almost had a mind of their own clutching hard at the rail, reluctant to let go, reluctant for him to be held by a single hand. Both hands were so much safer.