Starck's Lament (The Shadow Wars Book 11)

by S. A. Lusher

  They needed to hide, now.

  Eric looked around frantically and his eyes fell on an open floor panel with a toolbox and work-light next to it. The maintenance crawl-ways! Not the best place but it should suit their needs at least for the moment. He grabbed Autumn's hand and pointed. She nodded quickly and they hurried as quietly as they could across the corridor. Autumn dropped down into the crawlspace first and as soon as she was clear, Eric crouched and lowered himself into the opening. As he did, he heard a warning sound coming from somewhere.

  It had noticed them, somehow.

  Eric disappeared from sight, he hoped, into the crawl-way. He had no idea what kind of sensory input these creatures had. Maybe they could detect thoughts or body heat or pheromones...they could survive in a zero-atmosphere environment and were practically bulletproof, so why not? Ahead of him, Autumn was on her hands and knees, crawling away. He moved to join her, hurrying to catch up. Overhead, they heard the thunderous thuds of the creature as it entered the corridor they had just escaped from.

  The pounding from overhead drove dust from the cracks in the deckplates and rattled everything around them.

  As it came directly over their position, they both froze. Eric had just about caught up to Autumn. He considered the situation for a moment. They could probably get to the control tower from the crawl-ways and it was about another twenty meters ahead of them. Not much of a trip at all, if they were walking, but crawling, down here in the dim lights with a living nightmare overhead...Eric gently tapped Autumn's foot.

  She glanced back at him, the tightly controlled fear obvious on her face. He pointed forwards, indicating that she should start moving. She nodded, faced forward and began to very slowly and carefully move forward. Eric followed after her. He studied the crawl-way as they began making slow progress, more to keep his mind from completely freaking out than anything else. The creature had gone still for the moment and he could somehow feel its presence radiating through the deckplates. It was a horrific feeling, as though darkness itself was somehow seeping into his body and his mind. Eric tried to shake it off.

  The crawl-way was a fairly tight place with flat, scuffed lights about every five feet on either side of them. Thick, black cabling ran along the walls, held in place by what amounted to essentially giant staples and, in some places, industrial-strength tape, providing power and light to the facility at large. To make matters more annoying, it wasn't really a floor they were crawling on but a tightly-packed nest of piping.

  He wondered how often stuff got lost down here, falling into the cracks.

  Suddenly, overhead, he heard the footfalls start up again. Definitely not a good sign. They were getting closer, not further away. Very not good. Eric and Autumn began to hurry up, risking moving faster, making noise.

  Surely it knew they were there-

  There was a tremendous bang and a rending of steel and, just ahead of Autumn, one long-clawed hand appeared, punching down through the deckplates. She screamed and stopped. Eric ran into her, then began to back up, pulling her with him. The hand reached around for a moment, then disappeared, light spilling in from above through the new hole.

  “What-” Autumn began, then another hole appeared, practically over her head and the clawed hand punched down once more. One of the claws reached forward and hooked Autumn's suit. She let out a scream of fear.

  Eric's mind tried to come up with something to do but all he could think was to curse himself for choosing to go down into this fucking crawlspace where they were sitting ducks. He realized Autumn was doing something. She had reached over and grabbed one of the thick, black cables. Grunting with effort, she simultaneously managed to rip herself free of the creature and yank the cable out of the wall. Blue-white sparks began to spit.

  With a yell of fury, she drove the sparking end of the cable into the creature's reaching, alien hand. Suddenly, the smell of burning meat filled the crawlspace and a loud, furious shriek sounded and the hand attempted to retract, but the cable seemed to be stuck fast to it. All around them, the lights surged and flickered madly.

  Suddenly, they were plunged into the darkness and all at once the creature stopped moving. All was still and silent.

  “Is it dead?” Eric whispered.

  “I don't know,” Autumn replied. “How about we get the fuck out of this thing?”

  “Okay. Back up, we passed another hatch.”

  Autumn nodded and the pair of them quickly backed away from the creature's smoking, charred hand. It wasn't moving. Eric prayed it stayed that way. He got to the hatch without incident, opened it and peered out into the corridor above. Emergency lighting flared to life. There was nothing waiting for them but the creature. He really hoped it was dead because he had finally gone on to abandon his heavy machine gun back in the hangar bay, buying into his own logic of running being the best course of action. All he had on him for defense at this point was his pistol and some ammo he'd managed to pick up and a single grenade he'd recovered from Seth's body.

  Autumn still had her SMG and some spare magazines, but it didn't seem to amount to much. Eric helped her up out of the hole and they cautiously approached the creature, which was still wholly immobilized. They stood a good few meters away from it before Eric finally gathered up his courage and hurried past it.

  He cringed as he ran past, expecting it to grab him, but it remained completely still. Once he was safely past it, Autumn joined him, hurrying around the corpse. Eric let out a sigh of relief as she made it. So, the thing really was dead, or at least out cold. They weren't too far from the command tower now. He and Autumn resumed their journey. As they began walking again and the terror began to subside to something more rational and reasonable, Eric felt the weight of their previous conversation settle over him.

  “I suppose I should tie up the loose end from our last conversation,” he said, a little heavily.

  “What loose end? I thought it ended well,” Autumn replied.

  “It did. I was more talking about my loss.”

  “You don't have to talk about that if you don't want to. I don't want it to seem like I'm over here silently resenting you for not telling me or something.”

  “No, it's fine. And I know you, Autumn. You aren't the silent resentment type. You're the 'hey, I've got a fucking problem with you and we're going to talk about, right here, right now' type,” Eric replied, feeling a smile briefly creep onto his face.

  Autumn snorted. “Yeah, I guess I am.”

  “Part of your charm...” He sighed. “His name was Darren. We met the final year of college and started dating. It got serious pretty quickly and we moved in together after graduating. We got jobs, fell into a great routine...we had five great years together. Then he died. There was a malfunction in the power grid of the grocery store he was in. There was a power surge nearby. It fried him. He died instantly.”

  “Fuck...I'm so sorry, Eric. I...don't even know what else to say,” Autumn replied softly.

  “It's fine. No one knows what to say. That's normal. But...well, that's the story. It was horrible beyond belief and I'll probably never get over it. After it happened I just...I didn't get close to anyone for a long time, in any kind of relationship. I kind of just became an isolationist. After a few years I met someone and she just...made me want to date again. We had a good run, almost a year, but we broke up because...well, like you said, it was complicated. I think it boiled down to the fact that the spark just wasn't there anymore for either of us and we decided we'd probably be happier apart than together,” Eric explained.

  “I've been there...too many times for comfort,” Autumn murmured.

  “Here we are,” Eric said as they came to stand before a large pair of double doors that had been forcibly ripped open.

  They stepped slowly in through the open door. Eric felt apprehension take a firm hold on him as he came into the control tower. The base of it looked like they'd used it to store whatever random junk they could. There were crates, barrels, lockers and al
l manner of dusty stuff shoved along the edges of the room, mostly sitting in the shadows cast by a staircase that wrapped around the tower's interior, leading up to the control center that sat at the top. Eric spied an elevator in the back wall, but decided to stick to the stairs.

  Even before the incident, he imagined that it didn't work too well. He led the way and felt at least partially hopeful that they'd be alone up there. The stairs didn't look like they were very weight-bearing. Any of the creatures that attempted to climb up after them would very likely cause the stairs to break beneath them. Of course, it was possible that they could just climb the walls, or the elevator shaft, or the exterior and break in through any windows...Eric derailed that train of thought. There was enough to worry about as it was.

  As he trudged up the stairwell, Eric thought about what he'd told Autumn. He realized that it was, more than anything else in his life, his experience with Darren that had so soured him on human contact. Even as he had this thought, he found it greatly ironic. He didn't really like being around people and yet his greatest motivator was the helping of other people. It would be funny, he thought, if he wasn't so fucking miserable all the time. They reached the top of the stairs. Eric hit the access button for the only door there.

  It slowly slid open, some of its internal mechanisms squealing as it did. The sound echoed down the stairwell, making the two of them cringe in fear and jerk in surprise. Trying to get his pulse back down to normal, Eric stepped through the door and took a quick look around. It reminded him of a spaceport control tower. The walls were largely made of thick, industrial-strength glass, fogged with years or possibly decades worth of scratches and scuffs. Beneath the windows was a ring of workstations and consoles.

  “Wow,” Autumn murmured. “This place looks pretty untouched.”

  Eric agreed. It seemed like none of the monsters had gotten up here. That made him immediately suspicious and he moved over to the largest, most important looking workstation. Everything was scratched, grimy and pretty ancient looking, probably from the previous generation of technology, some of it even older than that, but it all looked basically functional. He took a seat and booted up the workstation.

  “Okay, let's see how fucked we are,” he said.

  He sensed Autumn hovering behind him and concentrated on his work. It took him a little while to first get the damned thing fired up and then to navigate the menus. Whoever was in control of this had some odd ideas about organization and menu structure. But, eventually, he found what he was looking for: communications. He tried to activate the primary communications array, waited while the SEARCHING... symbol flashed slowly.

  “Moment of truth,” he said.

  They both waited for several more seconds before it stopped flashing. Text appeared on the screen. Eric frowned as he read it.

  PRIMARY COMMUNICATIONS ARRAY: NON-FUNCTIONAL

  WOULD YOU LIKE TO ACTIVATE AUXILIARY COMMUNICATIONS ARRAY?

  Y/N

  He hit Y and waited as the SEARCHING... symbol reappeared, slowly fading in and out. After a few more seconds, the same message appeared, except that this time there was no option to try a tertiary or any other array.

  “Fuck!” Autumn snapped.

  “Don't worry, we still have options...maybe,” Eric replied.

  He spent the next few moments running a diagnostic on both of the comms arrays, to see if he could possibly repair the damage in a reasonable amount of time. Seconds ticked by slowly, bleeding into minutes. Autumn began pacing. Eric wished there was something else he could be doing but there honestly was nothing at the moment. He had the idea to fire up BioScan but remembered that the creatures had been interfering with it. The gear on his ship had been more sophisticated than this set-up and even it hadn't been able to cut through.

  The computer chimed.

  The damage report on the primary array was finished. He opened up the file and immediately his heart sank. The page was filled with line after line of red text. Each line represented a different component that had been damaged.

  “I take it that's bad?” Autumn asked.

  “Yeah...it's bad. God, this part right here would take a week to rebuild...and this one is pretty rare...shit, it's fucked beyond repair. Now we get to see if the backup is in the same condition,” Eric replied.

  Even as he said it, the computer chimed once more.

  A second page of text filled the screen. It was just as bad as the first one, from the top of the screen to the bottom, nothing but lines of red text.

  Autumn sighed explosively.

  “Don't worry, we've still got one option left,” Eric said.

  “What's that?”

  “Emergency beacon. Legally, all outposts and ships have to have one...” Eric replied quietly. He opened up Theseus Station's inventory manifest and ran a search for the emergency beacon, relatively sure that they would have one. They had to. A single hit in the database came back. Eric opened up the file and started reading...

  His heart sank.

  “Oh fuck...” he groaned.

  “What? What's wrong?” Autumn asked.

  “Their emergency beacon was damaged beyond repair in an accident a few weeks ago. They had put in for a new one, but it hasn't arrived yet.”

  “You are shitting me!” Autumn groaned, throwing up her hands in frustration, turning and marching across the room. Eric sat back in the chair, feeling utterly defeated. What could they possibly do now? He supposed the best course of action might be to begin at least attempting repairs on one of the comms arrays, he might be able to salvage parts from the Liberation...

  “Eric!” Autumn called, sounding hopeful.

  “What?” he asked, standing bolt upright out of his chair and hurrying to join her. She was standing by the windows, staring down at something.

  “Look!”

  He joined her and looked down. His heart swelled with cautious hope. There was a ship. Another ship, at least as big as the Liberation had been, maybe a bit bigger. It looked like a beat-up cargo hauler and clearly it had taken some damage, there were holes in the hull. But it was mostly intact. It sat on one of the landing pads, on the opposite side of where they had originally landed. How the hell had they missed that?

  “They might have working comms or at least a beacon. Or hell, maybe it might be flight-worthy or have a ship in storage we could use,” Autumn said, speaking rapidly, excited.

  “All the reason I need. Come on,” Eric replied, heading for the door.

  “There's an armory not far from here,” Autumn said, joining him. “We should hit it up, see if we can find anything that might pack a punch.”

  Eric nodded in agreement, feeling his hope slowly returning as he and Autumn quickly began to make their way back down the winding staircase.

  CHAPTER 09

  –Discovery–

  The trip to the armory wasn't a complete waste.

  Eric had been secretly hoping for something that would pack more of a punch, something that would help them take out the creatures with ease. Well, not ease, exactly, that felt like it was asking for too much. But to facilitate their death more smoothly, at the very least. The armory was a medium sized room, not just a place to store guns and ammo but also to work on the guns and also body armor. In between the crates, smudged glass cases and lockers, there were workbenches with scattered tools and spare parts.

  Eric knew that to some people it might seem very odd, possibly illegal, for an isolated cargo pit-stop to have a well-stocked armory, but anyone living on the fringe knew that not only was it legal, it was recommended and, often, necessary. Life along the Far Reach alternated sharply between mind-numbingly boring and ridiculously lethal. It was all too easy for a group of raiders or slavers to swoop down and overrun your ship or your station and often Search & Rescue or any Galactic Alliance military personnel were too far away to get to you in time. Space was huge and mankind was spread too thin.

  Although it was obvious that the armory had been well-stocked, it had
been almost thoroughly cleaned out. Eric wished there was some kind of electricity-based weapon he could find. They seemed fairly susceptible to it, but the best he could come up with on the fly was an overcharged stun pistol and he couldn't even find one of those. He supposed if he had enough time he might be able to rig up something, given his technical knowledge, but they didn't really have the time. So, he and Autumn performed a thorough search of the armory.

  They didn't manage to come up with as much as he'd liked.

  “Lame haul,” Autumn said as they finished up.

  Eric grunted in reply. He'd secured another compact SMG, almost the same model as the one he'd had before, since he'd managed to score a kill with it and it wouldn't slow him down. He grabbed a powerful pistol and managed to snag some armor-piercing rounds, loading his pockets down with whatever he could find. Autumn also grabbed any armor-piercing rounds she could locate and she managed to find a grenade as well.

  That was it.

  “Better than nothing,” he said as they left the armory.

  They stepped back out into the corridor beyond, checked to make sure the coast was clear and began making their way down it. They had to get back to the pair of hangars where they'd been tricked into believing there was a way out. That was still fucking with Eric. He was having difficulty wrapping his head fully around the concept that these grinning lunatic creatures were anything beyond alien animals. They were just so...insane looking. He supposed, more than that, it was the fact that they were so unrelentingly brutal.

  Despite all the cruelties he had seen in his life, the inhumanity, he found it difficult to reconcile an intelligence behind this merciless, almost mechanical savagery. It was so much easier to attribute this level of brutality to an empty animal mind, responding only to triggered instincts, instead of some kind of actual intelligence.

  Because that begged the disquieting question: what was the purpose of such violence? What were they doing?

  There were pieces of a puzzle here, a terrifying puzzle, and Eric wasn't sure he wanted to contemplate it. Besides the giant mystery of where these things had come from and what they were, there were subtler, more disturbing questions, like: Where were the bodies? It was obvious that they were collecting the corpses...