“Aye, Corporal. Just more of the same kind of shit we saw in the medical bay.”
There was a pause before Kalimura replied. “Copy.”
“Boss? How’s Elliott?” Carb asked.
“I managed to repressurize the medical bay and we have atmosphere. So far, so good.”
“Glad to hear it, Boss,” Carb said.
“Can you get the door open?”
“Don’t think so,” Dickerson said. “The atmosphere wall is down. We’re going to look around and then cut in if we can’t find a manual release.”
“Copy. Let me know when you get in.”
“Aye, Corporal,” Dickerson said. He cut the squad comms and switched back to private. “Carb? You see anything, I mean anything, that looks like a panel?”
“No,” she said. She crawled along the starboard side wall, her magnetic glove sliding across the steel. “If there is one, it should be about waist high.”
Following her example, he set his glove to near maximum and held it a quarter meter from the wall. The glove kept trying to pull him to the port corridor, but he was strong enough to keep it from affecting his balance. When he reached the door, he cut the magnetics again. “No joy.”
“None here either,” Carb said.
He turned. “You want the honors?”
Carb giggled. “You should know by now I like cutting shit.” She reached into her belt and pulled out the portable cutting beam. “How thick you think this is?”
“Probably a quarter meter,” Dickerson said. “Should be pretty standard for emergency doors, even back then.”
“I guess we’ll find out,” she said. A blue light licked out from the handheld cylinder. Carb moved to just above the door’s bottom and slowly lifted the cutting beam. A second later, a strong gust of trapped air rushed past her. “Well, it had pressure.”
Dickerson raised an eyebrow. “How the hell is that possible?”
“Don’t know,” she said and continued lifting the beam. By the time she stood to her full height, a clean gap had appeared in the metal. She moved across until she created a meter wide line and then knelt down again. When she reached the bottom of the door, she cut the beam’s power and stood back up. “Big enough?”
“For short people,” he said.
“Asshole,” Carb said.
He raised one of his boots, reversed the magnetic polarity, and kicked out against the three-sided panel. The metal panel fell through the door and into the darkness beyond. “We’re in,” he said, putting his foot back on the deck. “Now, let’s see what we see.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Pressure? Check. Temperature? Above freezing. Oxygen content? High enough for her to survive without a suit. The urge to pull off the helmet and remove the artificial second skin was maddening.
The longest duration she’d ever spent in a suit was ten hours and that was back in boot. It was part of the hell week that all SFMC personnel attended during indoctrination. Assuming you passed, most marines would never step outside of a ship while in space ever again. If you didn’t pass, you’d either be drummed out or given an assignment in the rear with the gear.
She’d often wondered just how many of the commanding officers in the SFMC hadn’t passed their training and became ass-sucking bureaucrats as a result. Not that it mattered. They gave the orders, marines either died or survived carrying them out. But if she ever saw Colonel Heyes again, she might get drummed out of the SFMC for slugging the pompous bastard.
Those were thoughts for later. She crouched next to the autodoc waiting for a sit-rep from her fireteam and for Elliott to wake up. The former should report in soon. The latter? Well, there was no telling when he’d come to. She hoped that by the time he did, they’d have a suit ready for him.
Kali’s HUD flashed yellow. When Dickerson and Carb had left the room, traveling out into the corridors to the emergency station, she’d pressurized the room, set the temperature to 2°C, and waited for the room to stabilize. When the pressure normalized to .5 atmospheres, she’d activated her external audio sensors. Now they were pinging her.
She stood from her position and followed the HUD arrows with her eyes. A vent near the ceiling rattled. She increased the sensitivity and listened. The suit removed the sound of her own breathing so she could focus. The rattle ceased and started again.
Heart thumping fast, she reached in her belt and pulled out a nano-probe. The short, thin, stick-like device came to life, her HUD lighting up with a view from the probe. She pushed the probe upward.
In z-g, a nano-probe could function for up to an hour of constant motion and data gathering. Outside z-g, you were screwed. For that, you needed a real drone, one that could roll across surfaces and jump over obstacles. She hated the larger drones. They were easily jammed, easily thwarted by demolishing any ingress/egress points a drone could use to search, and were a pain in the ass to carry.
The probe floated until it reached a meter from the vent. Kali piloted it through the grate and inside. She switched the probe to infrared to look for targets, but quickly switched back to normal view. The heat flowing through the vent was more than enough to cloud the probe’s ability to find other signatures. She’d almost have to decrease the heat flowing through the vent to find a target using the heat-sensing technology.
The white light flowing from the probe’s head lanced through the gloom, but only with a narrow beam. Something moved at the edge of the darkness. Kali frowned. Did they miss something? Mira had been in vacuum and absolute zero for 43 years. No carbon-based lifeform she’d ever heard of could withstand that.
But the pinecones can, she thought to herself. She piloted the probe until it was near the corner. The light caught the edge of the moving shadow again. She held her breath and waited.
The shape moved toward the probe. In the glare of the white light, she saw it for what it was. A pinecone. Only not just one. There were four of them she could see, all clogging the vent. The first one undulated its body and floated toward the probe. “Oh, fuck,” she said. She watched as a claw slid from its bottom. Kali piloted the probe backward. The pinecone followed. She wasn’t sure, but it looked as though its companions were too.
The probe left the vent and she stopped it a few centimeters from the grate. The light stabbing through the vent’s darkness illuminated the pinecones’ nubby surface. It was at the vent. Her audio sensors picked up a new sound. The rattle of the pinecones bouncing inside the vents gave way to the sound of crunching.
She raised her helmet, cut the probe feed, and stepped as far away from the vent as she could, her rifle aimed directly at the metal grate.
“Dickerson? Carb? We have a problem,” she said.
“Corporal. We have a suit and we’ll get back pronto. What’s your situation?”
She tried to slow her breathing, but her voice came out in a rasp. “I have hostiles in at least one vent.” A scratching, rattling sound came from her left. She checked her suit cam and noticed another vent entrance near the door. “Make that two vents.”
“Pinecones?”
“Yes,” she said. “What’s your ETA?”
“Two minutes. Unless we jet.”
“Jet,” she said, the word barely audible to her own ears.
“Aye, Corporal.”
She kept her rifle pointed at the vent above the autodoc, but continued peeking at the other vent through the cam. Kali connected to Elliot’s block to check his status. He was still unconscious. Good. At least he wouldn’t wake up in time to see a bunch of--
The screech of cutting metal filled the room. A second later, the vent exploded into metal splinters, the shards propelled outward like flechettes, only at a much reduced speed. The first pinecone floated out of the vent, its razor sharp claw lancing the air as if on instinct.
It rotated in the air which made no sense. Her audio sensors registered another screech of metal. She flipped her attention to the cam focused on the other vent. It too had detonated.
Another pinecone floated
through the first vent, followed by two more. Six of the creatures floated out of the second vent. Each of the strange animals undulated their bodies and all headed for one spot in the room--the autodoc.
Kali aimed at the original cluster of creatures and pulled the trigger. A flechette round ate the short distance in an eye blink and then exploded into a storm of electricity. One of the pinecones burst into blue flame. The sound overloaded her audio pickups and they shut down before blowing out her eardrums. A shockwave from the explosion flung the other three pinecones in different directions. One slammed into the wall while the other two flipped end over end to the floor.
She swung the rifle, aimed at the second cluster, and fired. The grouping seemed to spread apart and the flechette hit the wall, the Atmo-steel flashing blue with the current. The second cluster split into two groups of three, each flying at a different altitude. Her audio sensors filled with the sound of crackling and scratching. Kali looked back to the original cluster. The three remaining creatures had descended on the autodoc.
“No, fuckers!” she yelled and scrambled forward.
“Corporal, we’re at--”
“Get in here!” she screamed. “Now!”
“But--”
“Do it now!”
Kali kicked away from the deck and cut her magnetics. The pinecone creatures’ claws scratched and tore at the transparent aluminum bubble. She hit her jets and flew right above the autodoc. She used the butt of her rifle to knock one of the monstrous things away, driving it into the wall with an audible crunch.
“Corporal, the door won’t open. You need to kill the gen--”
“Blow it!” she yelled.
She halted her progress using the suit jets and knocked at another. It flipped fluidly in the air, brandishing its single, metallic-looking claw. She felt it scrape the rifle’s metal with a squeal. A single, short-lived boom hit her audio sensors just before all the oxygen rushed out of the room.
Without her magnetics, she flew sideways toward the door, arms and legs flailing for purchase. One of the creatures bounced off her visor as it swept by, pushed along by the surge of the decompression.
She activated her mag-gloves and set them to the highest level. Her hand grazed the side of the wall and stuck fast, the rest of her body still trying to fly out the door. The shock nearly pulled her arm from its socket. Screaming in pain, Kali fought to put her other glove against the wall. And then, the pressure was gone.
“We’re coming, Boss!” Carb yelled.
Kali pulled herself to the floor and activated her boots. She mag-walked to the autodoc just as she saw Carb and Dickerson through her rear cam. “If you see those fucking things, shoot them!”
“We’re clear, Corporal,” Dickerson said. “They flew out the medical bay entrance. One hit my arm on its way out.”
She nodded to herself and finally reached the autodoc. Deep scratches marred the bubble’s surface and a spiderweb of cracks had spread across the transparent aluminum. Yellow status lights glowed on the autodoc’s panel.
“Watch your six,” Kali said. “And one of you watch the vents.”
“Got it, Boss,” Carb said. “Is that where they came from?”
Kali didn’t respond. Warning lights began flashing as the autodoc vented both O2 and CO2. “Shit. Elliott’s losing pressure.”
“How long?” Dickerson asked.
“Maybe three minutes. After that, he’s dead,” Kali said in a monotone.
“Fuck that shit.” Through her rear camera, she watched him demag and jet back to the medical bay entrance.
“Dickerson, what are you doing?”
“Trying to save his damned life!” he yelled.
Kali turned to Carb, the spare suit floating next to her. “Fuck the vents. Get over here with that.”
“Aye, Boss,” Carb said and followed orders.
*****
Dickerson flew at 2m/s to the medical bay entrance. He managed to clip the doorway from the trauma center, but he barely noticed. The moment he reached the pressure door, he cut his forward momentum and jetted down to the floor with a hard shock to his knees.
To open the door from outside, he’d fired an explosive flechette. The round hit the wall just beside the door’s lower left corner. The resulting explosion took a chunk of the door with it. The explosive decompression widened the hole large enough for him to fit a fist through and get the door raised. Now that same hole in the hatch’s steel was going to prevent them from pressurizing the bay.
When he left the trauma area, he wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but knew he’d find it. He eyed the pile of corpses in the corner still tethered to the wall. “Fuck it,” he said and jetted to them. He pulled a blade from his belt and cut the line. The corpses floated from the wall with the inertia. He grabbed the shoulder of a woman, turned, and jetted back to the door.
“Corporal? I’m going to create a temporary seal. Get ready to pressurize.”
“Temporary seal?” Kali asked.
“Don’t ask. Just get ready.”
He lowered himself to the floor next to the partially shattered door and pushed the corpse against the hole. He didn’t know how long it would hold, or even if it would. With the atmosphere vented, the entire medical bay’s temperature had dropped back to near absolute zero. The corpses, if they’d thawed at all, would have instantly refrozen. He hoped the block of ice that had once been a human being would be enough. All they needed was two minutes, maybe three, to get Elliott out of the autodoc and into the suit.
Something moved in his peripheral vision. He turned his head and his breath stopped. While he’d been grabbing the corpse, or hell, even before that maybe, a large group of the pinecone things had made it back into the medical bay. They floated in a tight formation like a flotilla of SV-52 fighting craft preparing for an attack.
“Pressurizing,” Carb said over the comms.
“Wait!” Dickerson said. “Those fucking things are back!”
“We are out of time!” Kali yelled. “Do it!”
He said a prayer to the void and pushed against the corpse to try and form a seal. The corpse stuck fast as the room began to pressurize. Dickerson stepped back and tugged on the corpse’s shoulder. It didn’t move. He grinned. “I bought us some time,” he said. “Now--” He froze in mid-sentence.
The pinecones had changed direction and floated toward the trauma room. He brought up his rifle, switched to stun rounds, and fired. The flechette zoomed through the z-g. Several of the creatures seemed to sense it and tried to move, but they weren’t quick enough.
The round smashed into the middle of the cluster, hitting one of the monsters and exploding in arcs of electricity. The shockwave pushed the others into the wall, but they quickly reformed and continued to the trauma room. Cursing, Dickerson pushed off the floor and jetted after them.
*****
Kali held the suit at her side and aimed the flechette rifle with her other arm. As soon as the medical bay started to pressurize, Carb walked to the middle of the room and took up a covering position for the door. They both saw the flashes from Dickerson’s rifle and knew the things were coming at them.
“Dickerson,” Carb said, “I’m covering the door. Make sure you’re not between those things and me.”
“Copy,” Dickerson said, sounding out of breath. “I got one, but there are a lot more on their way.”
Kali tried to drown out the chatter, but it was preferable to the sound of her heart’s rapid beat thumping in her ears. She sent Elliott a block message, essentially an alarm to go off in his mind. If he didn’t wake up in a few seconds, she’d have to pull him out of the autodoc and stuff him into the suit. Her HUD lit with a green status--the medical bay had .7 atmospheres of pressure.
“Carb? We need--”
“They’re here, Boss.”
Kali let go of the suit and turned to face the door. The pinecones floated past the doorway and into the room. She activated her targeting package and her HUD lit with
ten targets. Ten? Where the hell were these things coming from?
Carb waited until they made it past the doorway and fired. The moment the round left the barrel, the creatures broke apart from their formation. The flechette hit the wall and exploded into electrified shards that bounced harmlessly toward the ceiling. “What the fuck?” she yelled.
She didn’t know how the things were propelling themselves, but Kali was certain they moved faster in an atmosphere than a vacuum. They also seemed to be more intelligent than she’d first thought. The cluster was reforming in a more spread-out formation, the creatures apparently realizing a tight grouping made them more vulnerable. Cursing, she fired a round at the closest pinecone.
The creature disappeared in bright arcs of electricity. Her audio sensors filled her ears with the sound of an explosion and crackling. One down, but the nine remaining were all heading toward a single target--the autodoc.
Carb fired another shot and vaporized one of the trailing creatures. The group spread out more, varying their attitude and altitude. “What the fuck are these things?” Carb yelled.
Kali said nothing. Dickerson’s growl filled her ears and another of the pinecones disappeared in a flare of blue lightning and fragmented metal. Mind on auto-pilot, Kali stepped sideways and fired again. She was two meters away from the autodoc, and she meant to get right next to it if she could. Despite the adrenaline rushing through her veins, she calmly aimed, lead the target, and fired. Another pinecone disappeared.
“Corporal! You’re in my sights!” Dickerson yelled.
“Tough shit,” she said and fired again. The shot went wide and struck the wall with a screech of metal and an impotent pop. “Have to get to Elliott before they do!”
Carb fired and another pinecone went down. Then the swarm, school, whatever the fuck you called it, completely split apart. The six remaining creatures flew in different directions, one of them streaking at Carb, and still another at Dickerson.
“Fuck you!” Carb yelled and fired. Her shot missed. The creature was no more than a meter from her when she turned her rifle and brandished it like a club. It darted at her with terrifying speed. Carb flexed her knees and swung. The rifle butt smacked into the creature with a crunch, the force sending it flying end over end through the z-g to hit the wall. Fragments of its exterior puffed out like a cloud of dust.
Derelict: Tomb (Derelict Saga Book 2) Page 18
