by Hugo Huesca
Some combat androids were still standing. They looked like mummified soldiers.
“Where’s the Z-Alloy?” I asked over the comms to my team’s private channel. In truth, I wanted to get as far as possible from those standing corpses. I signed in for a science fiction adventure, not a horror movie.
“According to the report, the convoy was assaulted after the station went haywire,” Rylena said, “and there’s no ship’s debris floating by the station. I think it is inside Janus.”
“We are getting eaten by zombies,” divined Beard. “Then our game will get corrupted and we’ll start to have visions in real life—”
I rolled my eyes. The man was quoting one of his creepypasta.
“Or, pirates are using it as their base of operations,” said Walpurgis. She had skipped the whole “mystery exploring” part and already had her rifle out and pointed at every dark corner and possible ambush point. “Stay on guard. If I were a pirate hiding here, I’d wait until we got deep into the station, then I’d pick us off one by one.”
“Thanks, Walpurgis, that’s so helpful,” grunted Beard. I could see his light-beam nervously shake around every corner of the station.
“You’re a bit old to be scared of the dark, aren’t you, Beard?” I mocked him over the comms.
“If you think that, turn out your light, Cole.”
I shut up.
We lacked any map of the station, and exploring it could take us multiple days in-game. Instead, Rylena took out 401, the little scout drone, and ordered it to fly around and link a minimap to our visors as it advanced.
The little flying ball went out like a dart, happily delving into the darkness and the cramped walls like it was having the time of its life.
We followed it in a single line with Walpurgis at the back, on the look-out for ambushes. Beard was on point, checking for any automated trap. His Engineering skill was not ideal for trap-finding, but it would do in a pinch.
To move around, we used short bursts of oxygen from our suits and held on to the walls, ceilings, and floors for support. The station creaked everywhere we put our hands and feet on it. Like a giant waking up.
“Since the hangar is empty and we are looking for the remains of several spaceships, I’m ordering 401 to check only areas big enough to store them. You agree?”
“Tell it to avoid getting near the zombies and I’m good,” said Beard.
“No getting near zombies, right. Well then, we should be good now. Thanks for the help.”
“Sarcasm doesn’t become you, girl,” said Beard, his dignity intact.
The minimap guided us into a maze of cramped corridors and rusted tubes. Sometimes we’d meet a blown up life-support tube, still oozing its oxygen compound. We’d avoid it and the deep holes the caustic solution caused wherever it dripped. Give it enough time and the acid could carve a path into outer-space.
“There’s an open section up ahead,” said Rylena after what felt like hours.
I was getting tired of the enveloping darkness. It had that kind of silence —one just waiting for the screaming to begin.
“Could be where the alloy is kept?” I asked her.
“Only one way to find out.”
We floated our way into two open industrial doors. The sudden decompression of the entire station had managed to blow them open like they were made of cardboard, a long time ago.
“That’s why you don’t hire the cheapest engineer,” whispered the Beard.
There was something ominous about this entrance and without realizing it, it put us on high alert. I drew my Advanced Blaster and stood at the ready, careful to aim it only at angles where I wouldn’t accidentally hit my friends. Rylena did the same with her rifle.
“Alright, according to 401, the way ahead is clear.”
The chamber was so big it could fit a flotilla of freighter ships inside. It was almost as large as the station’s hangar, but instead of ships, it was filled by roof-tall machinery and conveyor belts.
“This is a drone factory,” said Rylena, studying the industrial machinery. Her beam sometimes hit an android’s head still attached to its base on the belts and they looked just like impaled human skulls. I suppressed a shiver and looked down. The floor was littered with magnetized drones and androids.
Somewhere behind us, the floor’s metal sheets creaked and complained.
“The Z-Alloy is definitely not here,” said Walpurgis, “we should go back.”
“I agree with the kid,” muttered Beard as he pointed his Gatling-laser gun at the dark corners. “I have a bad feeling about this.”
There was no low ceiling or odd corner we could use to propel ourselves back and we had slowly drifted into the middle of the facility chamber. Walpurgis was right. There was nothing here but the corpses of Janus’ robotic workforce.
“I’m all for going back—” I said as I turned back towards Beard. Two red dots of light floated behind his back. Instinctively, I turned my beam’s power up and revealed a steel skeleton standing on the magnetized floor, raising a claw-like hand towards my friend.
“Ow, careful with that!” exclaimed Beard, raising his hands to shield his eyes from the light.
“Look out, Gabrijel!” said Rylena, raising her rifle.
The Beard had no handle to move in zero gravity, so he went for his suit’s controls to turn on the oxygen bursts, but he was too slow. The claw of the thing scratched against the back of his spacesuit like a pneumatic hammer. His shields deployed and protected the armor, but the impact hit right when he turned on the oxygen stream.
He lost control of his propulsion and the impact sent him spinning into the darkness, screaming like a lost soul.
“Gabrijel!” exclaimed Rylena and went after him with her own oxygen stream.
“Careful with those, they are not unlimited,” said Walpurgis, as she and I unloaded our lasers against the skeleton. With each hit, a chunk of its body detached, leaving red-hot molten metal in its place. Without feeling any pain, the thing walked towards us, hands raised, its red eyes fixated on us. A laser beam struck him square in the chest, then, and turned him into scrap.
“He’s an android,” I exclaimed. “Half-built.”
I turned towards Walpurgis to figure out what the hell was going on and then she started shooting at the floor like a maniac.
I understood it one second after her. The floor was littered with half-finished androids and drones in different states of disrepair.
Every drone and android were an autonomous entity. But they were all connected to the same Station-wide network. The Space Station defense systems could be hacked just like Rylena had done before. But, it seemed, there were other systems in place beside the turrets…
The darkness of the chamber was now filled with tiny red dots and the cacophony of metal hitting metal. Some of the dots floated in the darkness just like us.
We were in a pool at night and someone had released the sharks.
I joined Walpurgis in shooting every single metallic corpse around us, even if it wasn’t moving. We’d seen this movie already —it was the zombie you thought was dead the one who would grab your ankle and bite your leg off.
Even then, they were too many. The red lights and the screeching of servos that had been paralyzed for who-knew-how-many-years were coming closer and closer.
“We have to retreat,” I told Walpurgis as she blew up three hollowed-out drones that floated lazily toward us. My blaster took out a legless android that was crawling its way around the floor. “If there are others in the station we’ll get surrounded here.”
“Rylena! Beard! How are you guys holding up?”
Incoherent yelling and fighting noises came from Beard’s comms.
“They got him!” Rylena shouted back. “The maintenance drones are coming from the hatches in the walls, I can’t shoot or he’ll be hit!”
“I told you there were zombies here!” Beard finally managed to yell back, grunting with effort. “They’re. Trying. To. Pul
l. My. Suit. Apart—”
“Hang on! Rylena, any ideas?” I called. I was now back to back with Walpurgis, as we slowly rotated over the chamber. My blaster overheated several times and the little cooling cartridges slowly built up all around me. I was running out of them, fast. Walpurgis got the bulk of the killing done, but even with her, the robots were more than we could shoot down. They were coming from the entrance, too, marching over magnetized feet and wheels or floating like a nightmare’s monsters.
“They are too many for us to fight,” called back Rylena, “Walpurgis, thin their numbers with plasma grenades, avoid hitting the corridors or we could get walled in. I’ll mark the zones in the minimap. Cole, get here and help me free Beard.”
“Yes, Cole, help her free Beard!” exclaimed Beard. “My shields are almost drained!”
I could now see little flares of blue fire all over a shadow at the other end of the chamber. The drones were trying to carve their way into the meaty bits of my friend.
“All right, I’m on it!” I exclaimed. I nudged my way away from Walpurgis, who was still shooting, and launched a massive amount of oxygen from my life-support backpack. I stretched my body like an Olympic diver and sliced through the air, shooting point-blank at everything that came in my way. I couldn’t miss at that distance, but the speed made it hard to aim.
“Careful, Cole, friendly fire!” exclaimed Rylena when one of my shots went wide.
Behind me, a green plasma explosion shook the station to the core. I saw a rain of charred drone remains fly by me one second later. Debris, tubes, and machinery detached themselves all around me.
I reached the wall and smashed against it when I failed to counter my acceleration enough. This time, I was expecting it and I recovered quickly. I magnetized my boots and adjusted my orientation. The wall, to me, had now become the floor and Beard was lying on it while a swarm of beetle-like circular drones held him there. Rylena was over him, trying to pull the drones off before they drained his shields, but she was overwhelmed.
“Hang on!” I ran towards them and caught two beetles on my hands. I crushed them without much effort and threw them away.
“Have they gone insane?” Beard exclaimed. The drones were magnetizing his entire suit to held him in place. We needed to thin their numbers before it was too late.
Then his shields went down.
As the drones started to pound on his armor, he lowered his visor and squirmed around. Both Rylena and I grabbed as many drones as we could, throwing them away. The beetle robots tried to climb over us, too, but not in enough numbers to dent our shields.
“They are trying to down us one by one,” said Rylena.
An explosion shook the place down and this time, I could see the floor crumble and tear with the deafening screech of metal breaking down.
“Too close to the foundations!” Rylena called over the comms, “next one is going to bring the place down over our heads!”
“They were overwhelming the entrance,” said Walpurgis, “we have to get out, now!”
“Leave me!” exclaimed Beard, “it’s too late for me anyways, leave me and save yourselves!”
He seemed to really believe he was sacrificing his life there. Or perhaps he was just itching to have a “brave sacrifice” scene ingame. One could never tell with him.
“Beard! Focus now, you still have your link to your ship up?” I told him.
“Yes! I can’t get it to fly here, too little space!”
“Don’t, but, we still have flares left, right?”
“Yes—” Three drones crawled over his visor and dented it with a jet of blue fire. We threw them away before they could destroy the vital electronics inside. And Beard’s face, too, of course.
Walpurgis was right, there were too many now to fight.
“Deploy them! Don’t ask, just do it, right now!” Then I turned to Rylena. “Can you hack into our own ship’s computer?”
“I already have the access codes, so no problem, but why?” now she was covered in dozens of beetles, too, and actively fighting against their own magnetizing. She was focused on keeping them off Beard, though. Then, she looked up, and I could hear her vicious smile as she understood my plan. “That’s genius, Cole! Quick, Beard, do as he says.”
“Walpurgis, meet with us!” I called over the comms as Beard linked to his freighter’s systems.
“The corridors—”
“Hell with the corridor, we need speed!”
Beard announced the flares were deployed. Chunks of his armor were already gone from his torso and legs. The automatic sealing mechanism of his high-leveled suit filled those holes with foam that became as hard as concrete after being sprayed. But it could only do so much…
“Alright, I’m in the computers! Hang on, everyone, go dark right now! Every energy emission, including life-support, everything off!” exclaimed Rylena, and one second later her transmission cut itself off. With her went the minimap and most of the information on my visor.
I followed her lead, turning on the emergency protocols in my own suit. The last thing I saw before my lamplight went dark was the silhouette of Walpurgis soaring towards us in an oxygen jet. I held on to Beard when my boots lost their grip on the wall and the lack of gravity threatened to send me adrift.
I heard her slamming against the wall one second afterward, but could not hear anyone’s voice. I grabbed at her with my free arm and caught her arm as she bounced away from the wall, kicking furiously at the empty air. She grabbed back at me and pulled herself to us.
For an instant, the only thing I heard was the constant scraping of the tiny legs of the maintenance drones on top of Beard’s suit and the clatter of the android’s steps. Their red eyes were the only light in the otherwise absolute darkness. They were too many to count, a mockery of the stars outside.
Then, the drones went quiet. I could swear I heard the confusion in their processors. One by one at first, I heard the little metallic legs scratch the metal wall as they all forgot about us and went to the chamber’s entrance. Eventually, the eyes did the same. They disappeared as their owners turned around and slowly walked out.
I checked Beard’s body to make sure he was still alive and felt a wave of relief when he grasped my forearm. The sealing foam was holding on.
We waited in total silence until Rylena’s signal. I knew she was silently tracking the undead-robot army movement towards the hangar.
Finally, she powered back on her suit and her flashlight was the signal I was waiting for. I powered back on as the rest of the team did the same thing.
“What was that?” Walpurgis asked immediately, “they were winning, there was no point retreating.”
“They aren’t alive,” said Rylena, “just the remains of an automated defense mechanism. Just like the missiles, but this time, inside the ship. Cole figured we could fool their sensors with a strong enough signal that pretended to be us.”
“Oh, you deployed the flares? Neat.”
Beard got up slowly. “Neat? I almost got eaten by zombies. God, I told you all there were zombies in here. We need to get out before they come back for us.”
“Yeah…” I helped him up as I wondered how to break the news to him. “All those robo-zombies? They are in the hangar now. With the ship.”
“Good news is, their sensors will be overwhelmed by the flares,” added Rylena.
We slowly floated our way towards the exit, slowly and distrusting every shadow, like wounded dogs licking their wounds.
“Those can last for hours,” said Beard with dismay. “We don’t have enough air to wait them out.”
“Yup. So, here’s the plan. We try to go around the station, grab the Z-Alloys before the timer runs out, then we get out,” said Rylena.
“You want to go explore in the dark with these things out there?” asked Beard.
“Gabrijel, just because those robots look just like skeletons,” said Walpurgis, “doesn’t mean they are skeletons. They are NPC mobs, just like everythi
ng else. They die just as easy as a tutorial enemy.”
I remembered how I was almost eaten by mutants in my own tutorial, but kept my mouth shut.
We drifted deeper and deeper into Janus, with 401 leading the way. The little drone had been easily ignored by the station’s defenses and was chirping just as happily as it was when we started exploring.
Us, on the other hand… a screen warned me I was causing damage to my own blaster from gripping it so hard with my strength-enhancing cyberarm.
The station wasn’t quiet now. It was filled with constant clanking and metal scratching of the undead robots everywhere in the station heading to the flares in the hangar. Their signal was thankfully strong enough to hide our own, but we still had to go dark several times when we stumbled face to face into the skull-like head of a combat android. All the while, we could hear the little drones on top of us rushing through the life-support pipes like they were a stream of water.
Eventually, we found out where the machines had been bringing the debris from the destroyed ships.
401, far away from us, turned on a video-feed of its discovery and showed us a stockpile by a warehouse near the heart of the station. It had been emptied out by the maintenance beetles a long time ago and filled with the corpses of several ships. I could distinguish a couple fighters from Posse of Iron, what little remained of a Zandier merchant ship, Terran Federation scouts, and even one white-and-silver scout from the Paladin Defense Force, the biggest player-led Alliance in the game.
As I was watching, I could see how the little drones marched to the PDF scout and began to quarter it with their flue-flame jets. They got tiny pieces of the ship and they carried it back towards the entrails of the station. Like ants butchering a lizard. Even the scout had enough material to feed their anthill for a long time.
“Oh god, they wanted to do the same to me…” whispered the Beard.
“Wouldn’t have been of much use,” said Walpurgis, “they are using the metal as raw materials to rebuild their losses.”
I imagined an android built partially with the remains of Beard’s avatar. Their heads already looked like human skulls, using an actual one was just a step removed. I forced the image out of my mind as goosebumps went down my body.
