by Pierce Brown
I brace myself for the decompression.
It never comes. No alarm wail. I turn to look.
Steam swirls into the triangular hole. On the far end of the tunnel a viscous membrane seals the tunnel’s exit. When I see it growing on the inner aperture, I backpedal and call for Fig.
She comes around the corner irritated until she stops dead in her tracks, eyes on the hole. The membrane has grown fast, now covering the hole like the head of a drum. Dark red veins slither through the fleshy substance.
Something happens to Fig. A pulse goes through her that makes my hairs stand on end. The white lines on her skin throb and her flesh ripples, and then subdivides to thicken until it looks like the scales of a lizard.
Her slender pistol appears in her hand.
I hear wet thumps behind me and turn to see dark shapes emerge from the membrane. They fall on the floor dripping with viscera like stillborn babies.
But they aren’t babies. And they aren’t dead.
If anything, they look like they are sleeping.
SOON THE ROOM IS filled with armored men and heavy weapons as Fig summons our escort of Sol Guards. Human faces become metal screaming suns as their helmets slither closed. I only just remember I’m naked. I shove on the clothes and shoes Paxton set out and let the guards push me over to Volga. She stands dripping. The guards didn’t undo the cuffs or take her out of her jumpsuit for her shower.
Figment approaches the sleeping intruders as the Sol Guards fan around them.
“Backup inbound,” a Sol Guard growls to Fig.
“Are they dead?” Paxton asks.
“Zilch on thermal except respiratory exhaust. They’re barely breathing.”
“Obsidian?”
“That one’s too small. It’s like a baboon. And look at the size of their heads.”
Six long men and one powerfully built, but shorter even than me, lie on the floor completely naked, with long, pale leather packs strapped onto their backs.
No, not men.
There’s something wrong with them. The dark, earth-red skin that covers them looks more like hide. White scars make intricate lines over it. Amphibian-like folds cover their eyes, ears, and nostrils. Their heads are unnaturally large and shaved except for long black tails of coarse hair. Grease from the membrane shimmers on their skin.
The small one shows the first signs of movement.
He looks up at us through the steam with a flat human face, though his passive black eyes are as big as eggs. There’s a soft crack and he begins to chew. Blood pours out his thin-lipped mouth. Bits of glass tinkle on the floor. He shudders in ecstasy.
“Shoot it if it moves,” the lead grunt barks.
Paxton toggles his sights. The light in the room spasms off, then back on. A low whine goes through the ship.
“What was that?” Fig asks the soldiers.
“Electronic surge.”
Fig tilts her head at the small creature. “Fuck this.” She shoots it in the chest. The creature is kicked back three meters by the blast. It lies with a hole in its guts, as if the skin parted itself for some invisible wedge. There is no burning scent.
Never seen anything like that gun.
It made the light in the room bend. The soldiers glance sideways at the weapon, but Fig’s already dialing the big bitch.
“Madam Julii, a situation is developing on L22Z2. We have a breach party. Do you have that White’s shuttle on your scopes? Nothing else? Definitely not Vox. Maybe Core deeplabs. Sending visual. No suits. Perforated the hull without tripping thermal sensors. That’s right. Vacuum with no suits. Breach is somehow pressure sealed—a membrane. I recommend you perform a hull integrity test. Might not be isolated.” A beat. “Copy.” Fig shuts off her com. “You two.” She points at me and Volga. “I’m not getting paid enough for this. On me. You boys got the ball. She’s sending a squad of Peerless.”
A low, horrible sound comes from the corpse of the smaller intruder.
Fig turns. It isn’t dead after all. It is laughing. A deep laugh, like the one you’d hear from a monster in the deeptunnels of Lagalos. Like the laugh of a nightmare.
But the nightmare just deepens.
The creature pulls itself up, entrails hanging from its open gut. It licks its lips, its eyes like that of a waiting crocodile.
The Julii Sol Guards aren’t slagging with this.
“Medici can inspect the pieces,” the officer drones. “Put them down.”
Then the lights go out.
“Null G’s!” Paxton shouts.
I feel it myself. A slow lightness as gravity disappears and I drift upward. But there is no upward in the shower block. I feel like I’m floating in an endless gulf, in a darkness so deep even my cave-born eyes can’t see my hands in front of my face.
A deep, manly voice bellows, “Nag ag ak, berserker!”
Light erupts from Sol Guard weapons, showing the horror in stuttered frames.
The small intruder scuttles along the floor like a demon crab as the soldiers float upward.
Fig zips away from them as if by magic.
The six larger intruders lunge from the ground toward the floating soldiers.
Bloody mouths.
Black eyes.
Huge metal weapons with runes painted upon them are pulled from their bags. Guns puke fire. I pinwheel aimlessly in the drift as carnage swirls around me.
The Sol Guard captain fires, the force sending him into a backward spin across my path. A crooked spear tipped in something shimmering whizzes past my ears through his low back, out his belly, and into his forearm, hurling him out of sight. I hear a metal thunk as he’s stapled to the wall, screaming.
Spent cartridges float past.
An arm.
Globules of blood.
Shards of tile.
Then a big intruder.
He cruises past me, naked and bleeding, carrying horrible, jagged weapons. Both covered in gore. His feverish eyes meet mine. There is a manic joy there. He is at peace in the zero gravity, coasting toward his next target. To strike me is to ruin the pattern of his hunt. But his eyes say: soon.
Darkness. No guns fire. There’s a wet hacking sound.
Then a screech.
A blaring gun illuminates the room as it fires a stream of energy at the wall. The metal glows molten. The man’s arm is pinned by a spear to the floor or the ceiling or the wall, I can’t tell. It’s Paxton, I realize just as the smallest intruder embraces him like a child hugging its father.
“It’s eating me…” Paxton screams. “It’s eating…”
His voice gurgles away as the intruder gnaws into his throat and it goes black again.
I gotta get out of here.
My heart hammers in my chest so hard I can barely breathe. My mine-born eyes and my weeks in unreliable gravity save me this time from rebounding poorly off the wall. I push off with intent toward the hallway behind me, away from the slaughter block. I drift on my course, everything black, hearing only gnawing sounds, gurgles, whimpering, and shearing metal.
I slam into the wall and scramble to hold on.
I can’t find anything in the darkness. Then I grab at a shape, encircle my hands around it, and feel a foot. Then another leg encircles me, bringing me close.
“It’s me,” Volga says. Her voice is husky and even. “Quiet. I need you to get me out of these cuffs. Tap my leg if you understand.”
A man screams nearby.
I tap Volga’s leg.
“Climb up me.” I climb and with shaking hands listen to Volga’s instructions. “There is a knife in my thigh.”
“Which pocket?”
“In my thigh.”
I search blindly for it and find a cold hilt. I hesitate to pull it out until Volga wrenches her leg away herself. Warm blood spil
ls over my fingers as I slide the thick blade out. Volga doesn’t make a sound. I feel the weapon’s edge. It cuts my finger. Gods, it’s sharp. Following her instructions, I manage to remove the finger cuffs one by one.
By the time I cut through the cable around her waist, someone is laughing in the darkness. Blue light emanating from her tattoos reveals Fig cornered on the wall opposite the breach by five of the laughing intruders. Slaughtered Sol Guards float around them. The smallest intruder uses the bodies to navigate the null G. Looks like Fig has killed one of them. His body floats above her, missing its head.
If anything, the intruders look intrigued by her, and eager to test Fig themselves. They line up one by one. The little one gets to go first. His knotted arms pick up two axes. He sticks out a tongue implanted with a circle divider and hisses through the hole in the center.
Fig just sneers.
“Night vision. Berserker psychoactives and pressure-sealed skin. Someone had a fun time making you ugly fucks.” Fig smiles. “How’s it work in vacuum if you got a wound?”
Something blinks on the wall behind the monsters.
“Bihd am’drah zürk Fá!” the smallest says, lifting both axes above his head and closing his eyes. The others echo the call and lift their weapons.
Volga shoves me hard out of the shower block and into the hall.
Something inhales. Then a flash.
A force slams me into the opposite wall of the hall hard enough for me to bloody my tongue and dent my skull. I drift senseless, wailing in my ears.
Everything aches.
When I open my eyes, the hall is filled with broken tiles. Volga blinks, dazed from a wound on her forehead. Spheres of fire writhe in the null gravity behind us in the shower block. One of the intruders floats in the middle of the fire, wheeling its arms in vain to escape.
Then there’s a secondary explosion from Fig’s bomb and the sound of warping metal.
The wall of the shower block caves outward. A window opens to space.
Time stands still.
Colossal metal towers with glowing windows whip past. Inside the windows, tiny forms stare out at us, so close we can almost see the color of their eyes as the Pandora races along the shoulder of Phobos. The city moon glows in the darkness, and then she is gone.
Time resumes.
The shower block becomes a drain out into space.
The intruders are whipped out of sight.
We’re pushed down the hall by the decompressing ship.
I ricochet against the wall. My head slams into something rigid. My ribs bend around metal, pushing the air from my lungs. The whole world is spinning.
I grab for anything. Nails shearing off until I find a jagged lip of metal to grip my fingers around at the inner edge of the breach. My legs dangle down a funnel of bent metal leading to empty space. Cold grips my bones. The water on my tongue boils off.
I feel more than see something white drifting to my left. I snatch at it and look back as my shoulder joint pops. Pain stabs through the rotator cuff. I’ve got a handful of Volga’s hair in my hand. Is it my hand? It’s expanding. Volga stares up at me, her eyes beginning to swell in her head. My grip is all that’s keeping her and us from spinning into the void. She uses me as a ladder to climb back into the ship. Hand over hand.
Bitch is going to leave me. I consider letting go, but I’m distracted by a glowing shape in the ruins of the shower block.
Figment.
Somehow she survived the blast to crawl on the wall like a salamander. Her fingers secure her to the metal. I shout at her, but nothing comes out. She glances over her shoulder at us, and then continues along the ceiling into the hallway to make her own escape. Eager to catch her, Volga crawls more quickly. I lose my grip, and we lurch toward space before she somehow stops herself and grabs me by my hair this time.
My vision warps. Blood boils in my eyeballs. Intense pressure pushes at everything. But I can see the outside of the ship. The hull stretches for kilometers.
There’s more of them.
Shadows float against the Pandora’s jade-green hull, attached by cables, sawing their way in. They look like insects from the distance. They have no ships, no metal space suits. There’s hundreds. Maybe more. One by one they disappear into the Pandora.
I’m going to die.
I don’t want to die.
I can’t leave Liam without anyone.
Has it been ten seconds or thirty? Pressure pushes my urine out. Bile rushes up my esophagus and gushes out my mouth. Something moves outside the hull, large panels of metal moving like puzzle pieces to cover the breach. Volga sees them and jerks on my arm, pulling me forward. The flow of pressure from the ship has stopped, it seems. And I fly back in through the hole just before the scale armor seals the breach. Volga flies in just behind me.
Thunkathunkathunka.
The breach seals.
Emergency lights bathe us red. There’s still no pressure, still no oxygen. Darkness is melting the world away. Volga gestures at one of the Sol Guards. The captain still impaled on the wall—the only one not to get sucked out. She pushes her way to him, and then goes limp before she reaches him. She collides violently with the hull, unconscious.
I wait for her to wake up.
She’s not going to.
If we die, it’s on me.
If Liam is an orphan, it’s on me.
I kick off the wall for the corpse and feel the world dimming.
VOLGA PANTS LIKE A bear in the null G. Oxygen finally fills the room. There in the emergency lighting of the destroyed locker room, she looks almost as monstrous as the intruders did. Her pale calves are thicker than my thighs and corded with muscle and thin white hair. They flex as she pushes herself up to the level of the impaled captain. His limbs float around him like a child making a dust angel.
Volga is not as gentle as in her letters as she scavenges weapons from the dead.
I flex my hands around the breath mask I hold. I don’t remember how I kept us alive until the oxygen came back in. Volga says she woke up with me pressing the oxygen mask to her face. I must have taken it from one of the corpses. It must be the lack of oxygen or the vacuum slagging with my memory. Maybe that’s a side effect.
Whatever happened, I did it. Me.
I feel numb from the killing I just saw. Body trembling from adrenaline, from the boiling blood. I dry-heave, sending me into a spinning motion that I only stop by catching a locker.
My head is all a-jumble. My hands are not much better off. Several fingernails are missing at the root. The fingers of both hands are torn to the bone between the first and the second joints. My skin feels sunburnt.
“That was scary,” Volga says.
Words come out slowly. “Do you know what those—”
“They looked like…” Was she about to say Obsidian? She blinks. “Whatever they are, they must have hit the AGG first.”
It takes me a moment. “AGG?”
“Sorry. Artificial gravity generator. Fig just left us,” she says, breaking the fingers of the dead captain to loosen his grip on his rifle. How is she not fazed by this? “Did you see?”
“I saw.”
“She’s such a bastard.”
“Personally, I’m a mite more worried about the monsters.”
She looks at me over her shoulder. “If Ephraim taught me one thing, it is not to stick your nose in other people’s business. They are here for Julii. Not us.”
Finally managing to free the rifle, she does a series of technical motions followed by the clicking of the weapon and a whaaaamp sound as green lights flicker on its screen. She grins and pets it. She grimaces as she catches me watching her. “Guns like me. But I do not like the Julii. She has been cruel.” She looks at the walls. The blood boiled off in the vacuum has left brownish stains. “Time to go.”
“No shit.”
“So?” She wipes the blood from her eyes. “Where to?”
“You’re the gangster, you tell me.”
“Gangster, gangster, gangster. I am a—”
“Freelancer. Yeah, whatever. I’m neither, so…”
She tilts her head at me and her entire body begins to rotate. Stupid null G. “Yes. You would be a worthless judge of this situation. Sorry.” She hesitates. “I will lead.” She starts pushing her way toward the hall.
“Where are you going? Do you even have a plan?”
She catches herself on a bent locker. “This is not our war. We must find the hangar.”
“You can fly?”
“Sometimes.”
She pushes off down the hall without me. I glance back at the dead captain. His pistol is still in his holster. I take it and follow Volga, not at all reassured.
The ship is quiet as we float through the pulsing corridors. Sirens wail as a calm voice instructs all Sol Guards to meet at their rally points, and all support to report to their safe rooms. An enemy is aboard. Code Black, whatever that means.
More sounds of gunfire and close-quarters combat echo down hallways the farther we go. Bodies of men in robotic armor strew the floor. Few if any are burned. Most were victims of spears and axes. The monsters didn’t seem to bring a single gun aboard, but with the way they moved in the zero G, I don’t think they need any.
I can’t shake the feeling more will appear from the shadows.
Or from around the corner.
My heart won’t stop throbbing.
“Where are we going?” I ask Volga as we float in the center of an intersection. I feel as though someone is watching us. The bodies of murdered Yellow civilians float far behind us. She squints at the air, incredibly calm.
“Can you see blood?” she whispers. “I lost Fig’s trail. My eyes are not good in low light. Sorry.”
Have we been following her trail the whole time? I thought we were just going at random. Volga might look stupid, but she’s done this before. Well, maybe not fight monsters from space, but the other stuff. Seeing how comfortable she looks with the rifle in her hands, I remember what she did to Kavax. How many people has she killed?
