by S. A. Lusher
“Huh, neat,” Jennifer said she finished patting down the corpse.
“What?” Mark asked, from his crouched position. He was pawing through a pile of clothing at the bottom of one of the lockers. Who the hell stored a uniform in a gun locker?
“Incendiary grenade,” Jennifer replied.
“I thought there weren't supposed to be grenades onboard. Too dangerous.”
“That's true. Obviously, and thankfully, someone broke that rule. We'll just have to be careful where we use it. Find anything?”
“Not really.”
They continued their search. They checked out the whole room and managed to find some scattered shotgun shells, enough to bring him back up to full. He also finally located a shoulder strap. Clipping it on, he slung his shotgun and brought his pistol into play, figuring he should conserve some ammo. They managed to track down a few more magazines for the pistol and one for Jennifer's rifle, then gave up the hunt and resumed their journey.
They remained silent the whole way there, only having to put down a handful more zombies, which didn't seem like too much at this point. Mark wondered about this Necro Virus. Where did it come from? Hideo had said it was Cyr. Mark didn't know too much about the Cyr. Only that they were very ancient and powerful and now long gone. All of his thoughts derailed as Jennifer made him stop. He stared forward.
There was a hole in one wall, covered in shadows.
“I've seen this before,” she said.
“Seen what? A hole in the wall?” Mark replied.
“Yeah. Not long after we woke up. There's something in there. Something dangerous, but I don't know what.”
“How do you know?”
“Can't you sense it?”
He frowned, staring at the hole. Maybe she was right, it did kind of seem like the place something would hide. It made him think of those spiders that hid in little nests just under the ground. They popped out of their trap doors and snagged unwary bugs.
“Here...” Jennifer walked forward and picked up a severed hand lying on the floor not far from the hole. She tossed it forward. Something long and slender and dark shot out of the hole and snagged the hand mid-flight and pulled it hastily back into the shadowy hole in the wall, causing them both to jump back in surprise.
“Holy shit,” Mark whispered.
“Knew it,” Jennifer said. “Fucking knew it. Is there another way around?” she asked.
Mark shook his head. “No, this corridor is the only way to that room, unless we want to go crawling around in the vents again.”
Jennifer shook her head and reached into her pocket. “No, we'll deal with this thing here and now. Step back a ways.”
Mark did as she said. Jennifer pulled the pin on the incendiary grenade she'd discovered and tossed it into the hole. This time the arm didn't come out to grab it. Could it tell the difference between meat and everything else that fast? Either way, it didn't matter, because then Jennifer was running and there was a tremendous flash of light and a loud bang, followed promptly by a shriek of pain. They waited a bit for the flames to die down, then headed forward.
“Hold on,” Jennifer said. “I want to see it.”
Mark reluctantly paused by the hole in the wall. It was a sort dug out gash, taller than it was wide, like a cat's eye, the edges jagged. Jennifer flicked on the flashlight mounted on her rifle and pointed it in. Mark stared cautiously inside. It was difficult to tell what it had originally looked like, but he had an idea of long, spindly limbs and a thin body.
“Jeez, these fucking things,” Jennifer whispered.
The smell was starting to get to him, like burning meat that had long ago gone bad. He screwed up his face, then turned away from it and hurried down towards the power relay. He managed to get in there and start working after making sure he was alone. Jennifer joined him a moment later. She seemed content to let him work in silence. Mark hurried up with the repairs to the relay. He wanted to be done with this deck but, more importantly, he wanted to just be done with the EVA he had to do. He wasn't looking forward to that at all.
If he was any less brave than he currently was, then he'd probably be finding any excuse not to go out there. But, honestly, part of him wanted to be out there because it was extremely unlikely that they'd have to deal with any zombies on the hull. The zombies would be flash frozen if they went out there. Okay, well, maybe not flash frozen, but they'd be pretty immobile pretty quickly, regardless of how tough they might be.
Mark closed the panel he was working on and flipped a switch. All at once, most of the lights in the room came to life, a comfortable green color.
“Okay, that's it. Now all we have to do is actually release the damned array, which should be pretty simple,” Mark said.
“Great. Let's get to the nearest airlock and suit up,” Jennifer replied.
* * * * *
EVA had always been a bit of an adventure all its own, Jennifer reflected as she waited for the airlock to finish evacuating all the atmosphere within it. There had been an airlock bay not far from where they had made the final repair. She'd suggested going back up to the utilities level so that they could access an airlock closer to where the array was, but Mark had said he'd rather just walk along the surface than walk through more of the ship. And she supposed that made enough sense. There was a good chance there'd be nothing out there with them. And while that made sense, Mark still seemed like he was on the verge of panicking.
She'd used a security override to peek into his suit's data suite, part of which had vitals monitoring, and his heart rate was way up.
“Mark,” she said as the airlock finished and the door in front of them opened, releasing a tiny puff of what remained of the atmosphere in there with them and revealing the infinite glorious starscape before them.
“Yeah?” he replied.
“I want to tell you a story.”
“...okay.”
They left the airlock, locked their magnetic boots to the surface of the hull, pointed themselves towards the auxiliary array and set off.
“When I was twenty two, still in SI on Rise, I went on vacation to this little sort of resort town in a valley. There were maybe a hundred people there. Just cabins and a few shops and a single little dingy starport. Not much security. The day after I got there, I was eating lunch in probably the only real restaurant that place had. There was an explosion at the starport. Being SI, I went to investigate. I was maybe halfway there when I heard gunfire and screaming. I had a pretty good idea of what was happening. It was a slaver attack. I had my pistol on me. It was loaded, but no spare magazines. I knew I had a choice. I could hide out in the forest, and they probably wouldn't find me, or I could try to save those people. I knew there was a good chance that explosion had been them taking out what little security this place had.
“Any response teams were going to get there far too late.”
“So what did you do?”
“I pulled out my pistol and I started making my way towards the starport. Everyone I encountered on the way there, I sent off into the woods, to hide. I found three of the slavers at a cabin, rounding up a pair of families that had been staying there. I took them out, grabbed their guns and sent the families off into the forest. Then I moved on to the next cabin, and the next cabin. It wasn't easy, and I ended up getting shot three times, but I killed about half the slavers and kept the other half busy for long enough that they didn't get a chance to escape by the time reinforcements arrived. The rest of the slavers were either killed or arrested.
“My point is, when I was deciding whether or not to run, it was probably, at that point, the hardest decision of my life. Wanting to run and hide is, honestly, a natural reaction. No one wants to put up with this shit, especially not when they're twenty two and still figuring everything out. But I knew that I was probably the only person who could get the job done. The only person there who could save those people. So I did it. I suffered, to be sure, but not one person was taken hostage that day. There were
, unfortunately, ten deaths, seven in the initial explosion and another three from people who were resisting the slavers.
“Anyway, I wanted to tell you that I know what you're going through. You didn't ask for this. None of us did. But you are making the right choice in dealing with it head on. And I wanted to thank you for not making me do this by myself. I've gone through a lot of shit since then, had to toughen up a great deal, but I still get the urge to run and hide. That's the real secret of learning to be brave. Your fear will lessen and you will get more confident, yes, but the urge to run will always be there. Being brave is always saying no to that, so, thanks for saying no to your fear.”
“You're welcome,” he replied after a moment.
His heart rate was down and he sounded better.
“We're here. Watch my back,” he said.
“Got it.”
Jennifer looked in all directions along the hull, since, if there was anyone out there, they could come from any direction. But she watched Mark manually twist open a hatch on the side of the ship, hearing him grunt as he worked it, then he pulled a switch and a large, metal tower slowly and silently rose from its niche in the ship. Mark spent a moment checking out a console next to the array, then straightened up.
“Okay, it's done. It's functional. We can broadcast,” he said.
“Thank god,” Jennifer muttered. She activated Ishi's channel. “Ishi, come in. We did it. The array is active...Ishi? Hello?”
Silence. Nothing but silence.
“You have got to be shitting me,” she moaned.
“We can cut out a lot of travel time if we use an airlock on the bridge level,” Mark said, already walking that way.
“Good idea,” Jennifer replied.
She set off.
CHAPTER 09
–Truth–
Mark was actually kind of starting to enjoy the extra vehicular activity walk as they approached the airlock that would take them to the bridge level. He hadn't done much EVA in his life, but he supposed, he also hadn't done any EVA while there were zombies on the inside of the ship and this was the only real way he could get away from them. He was enjoying the stars, the peace, the isolation of it all. He and Jennifer were like insects, crawling across some vast, unimaginable thing. Mark had only actually seen the ship in its whole once, and that was when he'd been on approach to it. And even then he hadn't been able to comfortably contemplate its size.
“We're here, get ready,” Jennifer said.
Mark knew what that meant. Get ready to fight for his life. They honed in on the airlock and Jennifer activated it. The door swung open and they waited a moment, to see if anything would come out, just in case a zombie had gotten locked inside. But there was nothing and they climbed into the airlock. Jennifer worked the controls, the door clanged almost silently shut behind them and atmosphere began to fill the small bay.
Jennifer was still trying to get in touch with Hideo, but so far, there was nothing. Mark was beginning to fear the worst.
It was hard not to, aboard the Cimmerian.
Another clang sounded, this one much louder, and the interior door opened. There was nothing waiting for them in the locker bay beyond. Jennifer began taking off her suit. Mark hesitated. He took off his helmet. “Maybe we should keep them on,” he suggested.
“I thought about that, but no, we need speed over all else in this situation. These things are built to stand up to space, not necessarily to claws and teeth. Whatever potential small increase in defense we'd gain, we'd more than lose in speed. This isn't exactly combat armor,” she replied.
“Fair point,” he said, and started taking off his own suit.
A moment later, they were both back to their standard jumpsuits, weapons in hand. Without wasting a second, the pair left the airlock bay and came back into the small network of corridors that made up the bridge deck. Mark was leading the way, so when he turned a corner and spied a pack of Spitters up ahead, taking up residence in the primary corridor that led to the bridge, he was the one who had to deal with the problem first.
He let out a small sound of surprise, snapped his pistol up and let off a couple of shots that put one of them down immediately. Another one turned and fired off one of its spikes. Mark tried to move but he hardly even had a chance. An explosion of burning pain ruptured from his right shoulder and he let out a cry of agony, stumbling backwards and falling flat on his ass. He heard Jennifer say his name, then everything was lost in a staccato haze of gunsmoke and muzzle flare. In that moment, the whole of his world was his pain.
Mark tried to reach up, to grab the spine that was sticking about an inch out of shoulder, but his finger brushed it and a fresh explosion of pain washed through him, making him almost sick with agony. He was gearing up to make another attempt, then Jennifer was crouching in front of him, eying the spine. She shook her head and got out her medkit.
“Well,” he said, through gritted teeth, “we'll find out whether or not that vaccination was crap.”
Jennifer offered a small laughed. “Yep, hold still,” she said.
“What are you gonna-FUCK!” Mark screamed as she pulled out the thin bony spine. He sucked in wind to scream at her, that she should have given him some goddamned warning, but then she was pouring something into his wound that brought a fresh wave of agony and he found himself shouting again.
Jennifer clapped a hand over his mouth. “Please,” she said. “Try to contain yourself.”
This struck Mark as a hilarious thing to say and it seemed to douse the flames of his anger, bringing them back down to smoldering embers.
“Do you have to be so quick with everything?” he groaned as she smoothed a bandage into place over the wound.
“Yes,” Jennifer replied. “Quick is good. I like you Mark, you're brave, but I've seen your kind before when it comes to medical procedures. You want warning, then you get warning and you're all 'no, wait, I'm not ready yet, just another minute', and you're never ready. It's always 'just one more minute'. We don't have time for that. I needed to clean and wrap your wound, regardless of how you felt about it, it had to be done. Sooner the better.”
Mark groaned. She had a point. She at least injected him with a bit of morphine. That dulled the pain a great deal.
“Come on,” she said, replacing her kit and helping him to his feet.
As soon as he was up, she led the way down the central corridor, towards the bridge. The door was open. A really, really bad sign. Mark raised his pistol once more. He and Jennifer came onto the bridge. “Hideo?” he asked, softly.
They spied the medic immediately.
He was lying among the deckplates in a pool of his own blood, the back of his head a wrecked ruin from what seemed to be a point-blank gunshot.
Jennifer immediately went to check the bridge, closing the door behind them. Mark took a look around, but he had the feeling that they were alone. He walked forward, towards Hideo. How could he be dead? It was obvious that someone had killed him...Frost? But hadn't Frost said he'd seen someone else on the research deck? Mark numbly dropped to his knees and began patting the medic down, seeing if he had something, anything on him that would help them. He found it in the man's inner pocket. An infopad.
“We're clear...what is that?” Jennifer asked.
“Infopad...” Mark murmured. He was navigating it. It seemed to be mostly unused. There were just two files on it, both of them unlabeled, one a text file, one a video file. Mark stood and activated the video file.
The screen cleared to black, then faded in to show Hideo, staring nervously at the camera. “Mark. Jennifer. Comms are down again so on the off chance that I don't make it to our next meeting, I thought I needed to tell you this here and now. I've pieced together a list of people who were involved in gassing us and turning us all over to be experimented on. I still don't know who has done the experimenting and the list isn't complete, but that's not the important part. The important part is that Frost is on the list. He betrayed us. If you see him, tak
e him out. He is not to be trusted. I'm putting all the evidence I've gathered in this infopad. I hope to see you soon.”
The video came to an end. Mark felt cold all over. Frost had been that close to him in the cargo deck and the engineering deck. Why hadn't he killed him then? Mark was very glad that he hadn't, but why? Maybe because he knew he might need Mark? He must have been the one who shut down the lights in engineering...
“Fucking hell,” Jennifer muttered. “Mark, get on BioScan right now. Find him.”
Mark nodded and settled into one of the other workstations. “What about you? What are you going to do?” he asked.
“Figure out where we are and get some kind of communication out,” Jennifer replied, moving over to another console.
They both worked in silence for several minutes.
“Found him,” Mark said. “He's in research.”
“You're sure it's him?” Jennifer asked.
“Yeah. Well, mostly. I mean, there's just three human life signs left. You and me are here, on the bridge, the only other one is down in research, moving fast.”
“Where's he going?” Jennifer murmured.
“No idea.”
With a sigh, she turned back to her work, then she straightened up. “Okay, I know where we are. Relatively. We're near the Far Reach, pretty far from where we were. We're way out here, but there's some kind of structure on a nearby moon. We seem to be in orbit around it. If I were to place bets on it, I'd bet that whoever kidnapped us all brought us out here and used the lunar structure as a base of operations for their fucked up experiments.”
“So...what do we do?” Mark asked.
“Well, we call for help and then we take out that son of a bitch Frost,” Jennifer replied.
“You just said the magic words.”
They both looked around. Frost's voice was coming through the bridge speaker system. “Don't bother coming after me,” he said. “I'm leaving this tub.”
