“Alpha, I want you to try to match up all these cages with the list of races you found in the other lab,” he said.
“Yes, Captain,” Alpha said. Even her droid features belied a hint of shock. For a fleeting moment, Tag wished he could have shielded her from what some sentient forms were capable of when they disregarded the value of other races and other lives.
He was reminded of his time in the Forest of Light when the Forinth watched him from the woods or of his missions onto other stations where the Dreg crept after them from the shadows. Searching the room, he shone his helmet-mounted lights onto a suspicious patch of darkness. Green eyes reflected the light back at him. He swept the beams over a cat-like creature with six legs. It vanished, hissing, into the shadows before Tag could pull out his pulse pistol.
“Was that one of those things that attacked us earlier?” Sofia asked, concern in her voice.
“No,” Lonestar said, “those bastards were three times bigger. That cat-thing just looked like one of the scared strays that wanders onto my family’s ranch.”
“Still,” Tag said, “be cautious. We don’t know what that thing is. If it’s survived when everything else is pretty well dead, then the creature might be more dangerous than it looks.”
“Got a point, Cap,” Gorenado said. “It’s got to be damn smart, damn deadly, or damn lucky.”
The marines formed a circle around Tag and the others, searching for potential threats.
“I still want to take samples from all the prisoners here,” Tag said. “I don’t know if it will be helpful or not, but maybe it’ll tell us why the Collectors were so interested in them.”
The others nodded, and Alpha, Coren, and Sofia pulled their bio-collection vials from the packs secured to their shoulders. Tag followed suit, bending over the nearest alien. He used a pair of forceps to secure several pieces of its flaking skin and secured them in a vial before moving onto a rat-sized alien covered in what looked like snail shells.
As they continued collecting samples, Tag tried not to think about the horror surrounding him. He focused instead on the task at hand. Collect a sample. Deposit it. Secure the vial. Repeat. Over and over. Lonestar shadowed Tag., keeping watch over him like a bodyguard. “You ever have a dog, Captain?” she asked.
“Sorry, what?”
“Ever had a pet?”
Tag shook his head as he bent over another creature who looked more fungus than animal. “Nah, I didn’t. Why?”
“Maybe you wouldn’t understand,” she said, “but when I was maybe six or seven, the whole colony experienced a huge power outage—a complete blackout. And when things got dark on the ranch, they got real dark. There were always rumors floating around about the aliens who used to live on our planet before we arrived. That maybe they still haunted the place, their spirits wondering who these strangers were taking their ancestral ground.”
Tag shivered. “Does this story have a point?” he asked, more sharply than he intended.
“I never really believed in that hocus-pocus mumbo-jumbo,” she said. “But anyway, night of that outage, my parents were at some dance hosted by my uncle. I was all alone in this rickety wooden house that creaked when the wind tickled it. So there I am, my house whispering to me, sitting in the darkness, and my dog, Casey, sleeping in bed with me.”
Tag deposited another sample into a vial.
“All of a sudden, Casey jumped down from my bed,” Lonestar continued. “The door to my room—never was real secure to begin with—creaked open. Maybe it was just the wind, maybe it was something else. But all I saw was pitch-black nothingness outside that door. And Casey. Oh, boy. Casey just stared out that door. His fur stood on end, his haunches tight. He started growling, but I couldn’t see what was spooking him. He just kept snarling at the shadows.
“Then he yelped and started whimpering. Jumped right back into bed with me, and I pulled the covers over my head, snuggled up with that dog, shivering and crying the both of us. Not a proud moment.”
Tag paused from taking another sample and looked up at Lonestar. Her eyes were transfixed by some spot in the darkness he couldn’t see.
“Guess the point of that whole story is: that’s how I feel right now.”
Again, a shiver passed through Tag. “That makes two of us.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
While they explored the specimen chamber, Tag kept searching for the green eyes of that cat-like creature he had seen before, wondering if it was biding its time before it would descend on him in a flurry of claws.
But the cat never appeared again. Unfortunately, that didn’t mean they were safe.
He heard distant shrieks but didn’t react, uncertain if they were in his imagination or real. Nearby, Lonestar froze; it wasn’t just in his mind. He followed the angle her rifle barrel toward another corridor. The shrieks seemed to be emanating from there, their ghastly calls booming against the bulkhead, amplified by the specimen chamber.
“It’s those damn creatures again,” Lonestar said. She knelt, peering down her rifle as the shrieks grew louder.
“Everyone form up on me!” Tag said. “Bull, Alpha, I want you to get us out of here. Now!”
The scrape of claws on metal pierced the cries of the screaming aliens. Alpha held her wrist terminal out, and a holo of the Hope projected from it. The image zoomed in on their location.
“The route we took here is blocked off by our barricade,” Alpha said.
“And those monsters, whatever they are,” Sumo added.
“But we should be able to take the path toward the bridge.”
“Excellent,” Tag said. “Priority number one is making sure everyone is safe. If we can lose these things and make it to the bridge, all the better. Understood?”
“Yes, Captain,” came the chorus of replies.
The faint, flickering emergency lights at the far end of the specimen chamber briefly illuminated the first of the creatures. Long talons raked from skinny, sinewy arms. The beast ran on four legs, not unlike a centaur, except instead of a horse-like body, its lower half looked more similar to a reptile. A tail tipped with spikes trailed behind it. The creature’s face sported obsidian tusks that protruded from a massive underbite, and beady black eyes met Tag’s from the end of long, lobster-esque stalks. Three more of the creatures burst from the end of the corridor, scrambling over the remains of the specimen enclosures toward Tag and his crew.
“Looks like some goddamn overgrown scorpions,” Lonestar murmured.
“Go!” Tag yelled.
The aliens shrieked, their tails flicking behind their heads. At first, Tag wasn’t sure if their tails were keeping them in balance or somehow used for locomotion. The needle-sharp spines pinging and embedding into the gunk around him answered his question.
“Look out for their projectiles!” Alpha said. One of the spines pierced her suit as she warned the others, embedding itself in her arm.
“Alpha!” Tag yelled, reaching out to help her, his stomach churning at the sight of the finger-sized spine buried in her synthetic flesh.
“Do not be alarmed,” Alpha said. “It has hit nothing vital. My biosensors detect a discrete neurotoxin within the spines, however.”
Tag knew the only living cells within her chassis were located within her head as part of her synth-bio brain, and the neurotoxin would be unable to make its way there. Still he felt the anxiety of a parent seeing a child hurt. “Be careful, Alpha!”
The group sprinted from the chamber toward another corridor with Bull leading them. Lonestar and Gorenado took potshots at the creatures. Each of the scorpioids was no taller than Tag’s waist, but what they lacked in size, they made up for in ferocity. Pulsefire and kinetic slugs slammed into their bodies, and blue liquid oozed out, tinted violet by the crimson emergency lights. A few lucky shots found fatal targets, piercing heads or gouging holes through chests, but most of the beasts continued onward even when their eyestalks were scythed by gunfire. Dozens of them spilled into the specimen cha
mber, and more were still emerging from the hall.
“Faster!” Lonestar said. “These things are angrier than a bull after a branding!”
They rounded a corner, losing sight of their pursuers. The cries and shrieks assured Tag the beasts were not far behind. He found himself wondering, between gasps of breath, if these things were creatures the Collectors had brought aboard and left forgotten, resigned to live in the relic of a station forever. Maybe they had escaped from the specimen room. Three hells, maybe they had killed the Collectors.
Bull charged ahead, leading the group onward. Lonestar and Gorenado fired another wall of slugs at the creatures before they turned a corner.
“You do know where you’re going, don’t you, Bull?” Sofia asked, her voice raspy.
“Bull is still taking us along the correct route,” Alpha said.
Tag gasped for air as he ran at a near-sprint. He tasted something metallic, and his lungs began to burn even as his suit reacted to his increased pulse and air intake, pumping extra oxygen into its atmosphere. The adrenaline surging through his veins provided some relief as his muscles strained, pulling and stretching, taking him further from the alien scorpioids still shrieking with wild yells.
A beast rounded a corner, dangerously close, and leapt. Lonestar’s shots missed, and Tag fired wildly with his pulse pistol, but it was Gorenado who saved her by butting the creature with his rifle. When the scorpioid was knocked off balance, Lonestar fired into it with abandon, and rounds burst through the creature’s rib cage.
Two more scorpioids followed, accelerating toward them, their voices raised in high-pitched shrieks that threatened to burst Tag’s eardrums. The first cocked its tail back, ready to strike. He braced himself for the monster’s attack, preparing to fire, but a sudden hissing sounded from behind Tag instead. He didn’t have time to turn before a shape blasted past him and jumped at the first scorpioid.
It was the cat-thing they had seen earlier in the specimen chamber. The little devil scratched at the scorpioid’s eye stalks, and Tag squeezed his pistol’s trigger. Orange rounds lanced from the weapon, impaling the scorpioid over and over. Its mission evidently complete, the cat-thing dashed off to disappear in the shadows once more.
“Thanks, buddy,” Tag called after it.
A twinge of regret tickled through him as he watched the other creature mowed down by Sumo’s fire. It probably wasn’t the scorpioids’ fault that they were stuck on this hellscape of a space station. Maybe they were once peaceful—friendly, even—but their time spent imprisoned here had warped their minds, bent them toward sociopathy. Maybe they were just desperate for food. A thousand reasons whirled through Tag’s head as to why these things were after him and his crew.
None of those reasons really mattered right now.
All that mattered was his crew’s survival.
“We’re almost there!” Bull boomed. “Just a little farther. Marines, hold it together back there!”
The marines answered with a hail of gunfire that brought down the next wave of pursuers. Several of the scorpioids went down, but their comrades paid them no heed as they trampled their bleeding corpses, saliva dripping in long ropes from their tusks. Their tails continued to whip, flinging spikes against the bulkhead in response to the marines’ fire.
“Captain! Look out!” Sumo yelled.
Tag swiveled as he ran, trying to figure out what Sumo was warning him about. Understanding came too slow. He saw the scorpioid’s tail flick forward, the spike shooting out from it faster than he could blink. With barely any time to move, he tried to duck.
He wasn’t going to make it—he’d reacted too slowly.
Then something blocked his view. Blocked the spike. It took him an adrenaline-fueled moment to realize Sumo had thrown herself in front of him.
His vision tunneled as she fell backward, her body crashing into his. Even in his own EVA suit, her power armor was too heavy, knocking them both to the deck. Alpha turned with Sofia, standing over them and firing into the scorpioids.
“Sumo!” Tag said, turning her over, his eyes tracing over her chest where he expected to see the spike sticking out.
Instead, she jumped out of his grip. “I’m fine! I’m fine!” She kneeled and fired at their attackers before Tag could say anything else. “Mag shields work against pulsefire and projectiles.”
“But not against claws,” Bull said.
They continued running and lobbing the occasional volley back into the scorpioids until Bull and Lonestar halted. Sumo and Gorenado paused and fired into the corridor, using it as a chokepoint against the monsters.
“What’s going on?” Tag asked, trying to see around Bull’s hulking form. His stomach plummeted when he saw what had stopped the marines.
An enormous cylindrical room stretched twenty decks tall. A central pillar with the diameter of an air car ran through the middle of the chamber. Crooked, brown vines snaked up around the pillar, rising from the abyss toward the ceiling.
“The bridge is up there,” Alpha said nonchalantly, pointing at the top of the pillar.
Catwalks connected to the central pillar, and ladders to other corridors were arranged around the circumference of the vast room. Several of the catwalks appeared to have rusted out and fallen away, lost to the void below. The catwalk connecting their corridor to the central column was one of those missing, and they were currently on deck eleven.
The unfettered shrieks of the scorpioids resounded louder and louder against the bulkhead as the monsters spilled through the corridor. Their feet scrabbled in the brown gunk covering the deck as they charged.
For every scorpioid they brought down, two more seemed to emerge, clotting the corridor with their corpses yet continuously pushing forward, centimeter by centimeter. Tag glanced back at the pillar, then back at the growing mound of scorpioids. There was nowhere for them to run.
“We’ve got to jump!” Tag said.
He could sense Sofia’s unease as she stood next to them. The marines were equipped with power armor suits that would help them make their jump with ease. Coren was the most agile of the group; his lanky limbs made him a powerful long jumper. Alpha had the advantage of a mechanical body that Tag had seen carry her distances longer than the leap to the nearest ladder spiraling around the pillar. Only Sofia and Tag were limited by their relatively fragile, clumsy human bodies inside lightweight EVA suits.
The scorpioids were just meters from their position. There was no more time to delay, to find an alternative escape. It was either do or die.
“Bull! Lonestar! Get your asses to the ladder on the other side and cover us!”
Bull looked about to hesitate but then sprinted, jumping the chasm to the ladder. He reached out with one hand and grabbed a rung, quickly climbing to the nearest landing. Lonestar joined him. They laid down a wall of mini-Gauss fire to ward off the scorpioids. Alpha and Coren soared over the abyss next, making the jump look effortless.
Sofia looked at Tag. A glimmer of fear showed in her eyes. “I don’t think I can make it.”
“Then don’t think,” Gorenado said. “Jump with me!”
He held her hand, and together they jumped. Sofia never would’ve made it if it weren’t for Gorenado’s help. When his body slammed against the ladder, he gripped her wrist with his free hand, holding Sofia as she dangled, then pulled her toward safety. Her chest heaved as she cemented her grip around the rung.
Tag mentally prepared himself for the jump. In his mind’s eye, he saw his hands connecting with the ladder. As if thinking it would make it so.
“I got this,” he said under his breath. He was taller than Sofia. He could make it.
“Cap, let me help,” Sumo said.
The calls of the scorpioids grew louder, and they charged more brazenly than before, scrambling over the ranks of their dead.
“Now or never,” Tag said. Sumo grasped his hand. Together they sprinted toward the edge. With his muscles straining from the effort, he pushed himself off, flyin
g over the darkness below. Sumo hit the ladder first, sending a tremor up the tubular rungs. Her grip tightened around Tag’s fingers, helping him to swing toward the ladder. He crashed into it, carried by his own momentum.
She smiled at him through her visor. “Told you—”
She didn’t have a chance to finish. The impact resonated upward, shaking Sofia’s already precarious grip on the slime-covered rungs. She fell past Gorenado’s reaching hands. Tag reached out for Sofia as she fell toward him. Her arm slid through his grip until his fingers interlocked with hers.
For a fraction of a second, Tag thought he had saved her. His relief was swamped by a rush of adrenaline as Sofia pulled him downward, toward the darkness, toward the unknown ten decks below them. Sumo reached for him, but it was already too late. Tag saw a look of sorrow and regret on her face as she yelled his name, red emergency lights flickering over her as the blackness swallowed Tag and Sofia.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Tag held Sofia’s hand as they dropped, as if doing so would somehow save them both. Suddenly, they hit something soft. After a moment of resistance, it gave way, slowing their descent. His helmet-mounted lights flickered over dark vines that stretched like a gargantuan spiderweb. He groped blindly for the vines as he and Sofia broke through the first layer, but he couldn’t gain purchase. The vines seemed to retract from his grip. Still he fell against them, each consecutive layer receding and breaking slower than the last. Their fall slowed until they were hanging in a tangle of vines less than a foot from the floor. They wriggled free and planted their boots on solid ground, both of them panting and laughing.
Shattered Dawn (The Eternal Frontier Book 3) Page 8
