by M. R. Forbes
A handful of Scrappers were inside. They poured out of the lift, guns in hand. Pig wasn’t with them, but that didn’t make them any less dangerous.
The crack of gunfire followed. Hayden didn’t look back. He sprinted for the hatch, hearing the bullets whizzing past him. One round caught his armor at the calf, hitting a plate there. Another grazed his shoulder, sending a feeling of moist warmth along his arm. Had it made it through the armor? Dozens of rounds punched into the trife, dropping them in a fading chorus of hissing.
The hatch slid open as he approached, just like in the Research module on the next deck up. He stopped on the other side, finding the door control. The trife in the hub were dead, the Scrappers turning their attention to him. They were all wearing the robes and masks, trying to keep themselves from getting the creature’s disease.
Hayden tapped on the control, quickly entering the master admin code into the panel. Bullets began to hit the area around him, a few of them striking his armor. He put his other arm in front of his head to protect it, rewarded when a round struck the small ballistic plate on the back of his hand.
He finished keying in the code, hoping his luck would hold out and it would have the effect he wanted. He nearly cried out in triumph again as the hatch slid closed in front of him.
He breathed heavily, slumping against the wall. A few rounds pinged off the metal of the hatch, followed by a few seconds of silence. Then the Scrappers started thumping against the door, trying to convince it to open with brute force. Then the thumping stopped.
Hayden was still for a few seconds, but only a few seconds. He hurried back to his feet, turning to face the inside of the module. He was sure the Scrappers hadn’t given up.
There were two more entrances to the module not counting the ventilation shafts.
He wasn’t even close to being safe.
45
Hayden moved through the entrance corridor of the module, reaching the second hatch only a dozen meters in. It opened as he neared, and where the Research module had placed a command center, he discovered a mess instead.
Metal tables and chairs sat abandoned in the room, a few thrown into the corner but most of them still in place, with enough seats for an entire platoon of soldiers. A small kitchen sat on the right in front of a bartop with indents for different foods. A large refrigeration unit sat behind it, dark and silent.
There were two hatches connecting to the mess. A dead soldier lay in the middle of one of them, preventing the hatch from closing. That didn’t stop it from sliding back and forth, and by the looks of it, the thing had been repeating the motion for a long time. Hayden found he was able to appreciate the irony of the hatch. So many other things on the ship had broken. The food refrigerator here. Eleven of the twelve hibernation pods on the deck above. Countless pieces of technology in Metro.
The door kept going after countless repetitions.
Hayden approached the soldier, leaning down and reaching for the rifle at his side. He noticed the blood when he did, a stain of it marking the edge of the body armor. It didn’t hurt all that much. He turned his arm over, checking the wound. A bullet had grazed him, just enough to draw blood. It was one of too many that had hit him; his life preserved only by the design of the armor he was wearing.
He returned his attention to the rifle, picking it up. The power was switched on. The display was dead. He grabbed the magazine and pulled it out. Empty. It wasn’t carrying a secondary magazine with the explosive spheres inside.
He moved past the soldier, into the area beyond. A long, narrow corridor with two levels of bunks on either side, a slim locker beside each. He opened a couple of them, finding nothing useful inside. Hangers for uniforms, some fading photographs. One locker had a torn and cracked image of a woman standing on a beach, the sun setting behind her. She was wearing a white dress, her hair bent and folded on top of her head, her feet invisible in the water. Another had a larger image of a naked woman, her breasts way out of proportion to the size of her body. Hayden didn’t understand why it was there.
He bypassed the room, heading into the adjacent one. It too was long and narrow, a series of spigots reaching out from the walls and a drain in the floor. A shower, followed by a latrine. The smell was horrible, and he turned around and went back the other way. What he was looking for was likely in the other direction.
He passed the mess and through the second hatch, into a long corridor with doors on either side. What looked like an Officer’s office. A small conference room, a larger meeting room. There was a hatch at the other end which led into a small connecting segment with a third hatch on the side. It slid open, revealing the target of his desire.
An open space greeted him. Lockers like the ones below Metro sat against one wall. On the opposite side three hundred meters away, a pair of lanes with targets at the end. Next to that was a rack.
It was loaded with weapons.
Hayden’s eyes widened at the sight of it. There were rifles, the same kind he had carried before. But there were other weapons, too. Different kinds of pistols, larger long guns, and a few other things with triggers but no obvious ammunition. It was all arranged neatly, ready to be lifted and fired at the targets on the far end. A rack of magazines and cartridges of different shapes and sizes sat beside it.
He couldn’t believe his luck. All of these years and the room had gone unnoticed. Undisturbed. The United States Marine Corp equipment was all present and intact. He didn’t quite understand how that could be. Didn’t the Scrappers know this was down here? Why hadn’t their forebears taken the weapons and used them against the xenotrife? Or did they know the cache was here, but they had never needed to make use of it? They seemed to be doing just fine without it, why not leave it in place and save it for an emergency?
He was going to make a move for the weapons, but that was when he noticed the floor in the center of the room vanished into shadow and light. He remembered what Jennifer had said about the lift between this deck and the next, installed to transport the equipment more efficiently to the vehicles in what should be the hangar below.
He moved to the edge and looked down.
A pile of debris rested on the floor of the hangar, two dozen or so suits of some kind of metal armor flung across the ground, along with heavier equipment and ordnance. Massive guns too large to carry, small projectiles spilled from broken containers. Bits and pieces of other broken equipment he couldn’t identify.
And a mass of xenotrife resting beside it.
He froze at the sight of them. The group was much bigger than the one he had discovered earlier, at least a hundred or more pressing tightly against one another. While it was heavily coated in the creature’s thick reproductive slime, it was also currently motionless.
The lift must have collapsed during one of the turbs. Age and wear had probably caused the mechanism to fail, the weight of the abandoned armor and weaponry on top putting added pressure on the systems. It appeared the trife had moved in after that, surrounding an area near the collapse. Why had they gathered here, of all places?
They thrived on radiation. Something down there had to be giving off some form of it.
Hayden backed away from the edge. He turned his eyes back to the lockers, and then to the guns in the corner. He needed those weapons. He just had to be quiet and careful.
He walked over to them, watching every step he took to make sure he didn’t trip over anything. His boots were clicking on the floor, and he hoped the trife’s state would prevent them from noticing the sound. He couldn’t go too slowly. The Scrappers were making their way back to him, and they were sure to be eager to stop him from taking their guns. He had to find the right balance of speed and silence, and at a minimum be ready to confront whichever enemy confronted him.
He made it over to the rack and looked over the weapons. He quickly grabbed a pair of pistols that matched the indents in his armor, loading them with fresh magazines, careful to tuck them under his arms and turn his back on the trife
nest as he did to minimize the noise. He also picked up a fresh rifle, adding a regular magazine to it before discovering there were no explosive rounds to be had. It probably didn’t make sense to let the soldiers fire such damaging ammunition at targets inside a spacecraft. It didn’t make much sense to let soldiers waste ammunition on target practice at all. The module was probably a standard design, one that could be dropped into more than just starships. He could imagine a number of them being linked together to form bases for larger armies.
He snapped the rifle onto his back, having to adjust it a few times to get it to stick. The plating there had been hit multiple times, saving his life but damaging the magnets or whatever held the weapon in the process. After that, he looked over the guns he didn’t recognize.
One had a long barrel and a small chamber at the back. It took Hayden a few seconds to locate the ammunition for it, picking up a cylindrical cartridge from the shelves beside the rack. The letters L-I-N were etched into it. He thought it was a curious weapon because it was light in his hand, and the cartridge barely had any weight at all. How could something like this do much damage? He wasn’t sure how it worked, but he held onto it anyway, the lack of weight making it easy to carry.
He picked up a second firearm. A pistol. This one was also fairly light and didn’t seem to carry any ammunition. It had a switch on the side, and when he flipped it a small display on the top showed a count of 0 with a hollow battery icon below it, indicating it was out of power. He searched the ammunition for a moment, finding a rounded rectangular piece that matched one in the gun’s grip. He figured out how to eject the first and loaded the fresh one, turning it on and seeing in now registered one hundred from a full charge.
One hundred what?
He was tempted to keep at it, but he had been ticking off seconds in his head, and he had a feeling his time was running short. He had to decide if he should return to the lift behind him or continue to the hatch he knew would be at the bow end of the ship. It was possible, even likely, that Pig had stationed Scrappers at both ends. He had reloaded, but that didn’t make him any more impervious to their bullets.
He started moving back the way he had come, remaining cautious where he stepped. He glanced down at the xenotrife nest below, ensuring the creatures were still distracted by the afterglow of their reproductive cycle, or whatever the hell it was.
He reached the hatch where he had entered, at the point where he had to make a final decision about his path forward.
He heard an echo behind him, back at the entrance to the module. The supposedly locked hatch sliding open. His thoughts dialed back to Jennifer’s severed hand.
She had clearance to the USMC module?
The decision had been made for him. He started moving around the edge of the collapsed floor, his pace a little quicker. He could hear the boots echoing in the corridors behind him, the Scrappers getting closer.
He heard motion in front of him as well. More footfalls. More of the murderous gang.
He was surrounded.
He cradled the strange, lighter rifle he had claimed. It didn’t fire projectiles; he knew that much. Whatever came out of the barrel, would it make a sound? If the xenotrife nest below him became active, they were all going to be in a shitload of trouble.
The first of the Scrappers emerged from the corridor ahead of him. A woman, judging by her size, though she was impossible to see beneath the mask and goggles. She wasn’t alone, flanked by a pair of larger men with more bringing up the rear. They were armed with revolvers and rifles that looked pitiful compared to the cache he had found.
The second group of Scrappers poured out behind him at nearly the same time, close to a dozen, leaving him to wonder how many of them there were. He still didn’t see Pig among them. Where was their leader in all of this?
He raised the muzzle of the rifle to his lips before motioning to the hole in the floor by flicking his head. The female Scrapper followed his motion, glancing down. Hayden couldn’t see her face, but he noticed how her body tensed at the sight of the nest.
The Scrappers behind him saw it, too. They moved toward him more quietly, doing their best not to make a sound. The first group followed suit, closing in on him in silence.
He was surrounded, the noose tightening inch by inch. He looked down at his weapon. Why had he picked it up if he wasn’t going to use it?
He squeezed the trigger.
He heard a soft whoosh, a motor somewhere in the gun spinning up and firing out a jet of compressed air. That air was mixed with whatever was in the cartridge, and an instant later a stream of freezing gas exploded from the muzzle, reaching out and hitting the lead Scrapper ahead of him, still four meters away.
It took about two seconds, and then she started screaming, turning and trying to escape from the gas, which moved around her and into the group of Scrappers behind. They turned away in fear as well, trying to avoid the nearly invisible cloud that suddenly seemed to be coating their robes.
Hayden spun around, redirecting the weapon toward the Scrappers behind him. They were caught off-guard by his attack and hesitant to fire their guns and wake the xenotrife. The blast of super-frigid air reached them, forcing them to turn away.
He looked down into the hangar below at the mass of trife. At first, he didn’t think the screaming was enough to disturb them. Then they started to slowly untangle.
He heard the click of a revolver’s hammer locking back in preparation. He didn’t know what he had thought was going to happen, but it wasn’t like he had a plan. He was completely dependent on instinct, luck, and a massive will to live.
As he threw himself over the edge of the collapsed floor toward the deck below, he hoped it would be enough.
46
Without the armor, the fall probably would have caused him to break at least one of his legs, and probably a few of his ribs.
With the armor, he still found himself engulfed in burning pain, his limbs slamming down on the uneven surface, his back cracking on the solid arm of one of the spilled metal suits at the bottom.
He rolled off the obstacle without hesitating, pulling himself away from the floor above as gunfire rained down on him. The Scrappers’ aim wasn’t great, and while a couple of the bullets scored hits on his body armor’s plating, most of them kicked up settled dirt and dust around him.
And served to wake the xenotrife.
He couldn’t believe the Scrappers were that stupid, but it seemed the screaming from the front lines and the subsequent motion from the trife had convinced them they were screwed anyway. Hayden had seen what Pig did to soldiers who didn’t follow orders, and he could imagine the same fate would await them if they went home empty-handed.
Too bad.
He got out from under the line of fire, pushing himself to his feet and continuing to back away. He glanced back to get a feel for the hangar. It was bigger than he had expected, stretching back beneath Deck Twenty-nine for at least six hundred meters. There were vehicles lined up back there, four huge wheeled behemoths with massive flat backs, which supposedly had some means of pulling pieces of Metro out of the ship and onto the flat earth of their new homeworld if they ever reached it. The size of the trucks was the reason his fall had been almost twenty meters instead of the usual three or four. The hangar was cavernous.
And dangerous.
The top layer of xenotrife were climbing down from their nest group, still moving fairly slowly. A fresh round of cracks from above and they stuttered and stumbled, knocked back by the fire from the recovering Scrappers, who had forgotten about him for the moment, at least.
The demons didn’t. He heard a hiss from his left, and one of them came out from behind a large, rectangular vehicle with four landing skids instead of wheels and what looked like huge rocket motors jutting out from the rear. It scampered toward him on all four, springing off its back feet and spreading its front claws as it neared.
Hayden lifted his weapon and pulled the trigger, sending a gout of gas out
toward the xenotrife. It howled in sudden agony, its flesh shriveling beneath the assault. Even after Hayden turned the weapon away, it continued to hiss and shrink and die, its physiology unable to stand up to the attack.
What the hell?
He looked down at the weapon. Why was this the only one of these guns he had seen when it seemed so incredibly effective against the trife? Was it experimental?
If so, the experiment was a success.
He turned around, watching as more of the trife spread away from the nest, breaking up and scaling the walls, able to cling to the top of the ceiling on their way to confront the Scrappers. More of them had caught sight of him as well, and they unfurled from the pile, casting off the sticky goop and rushing toward him en masse.
He scanned the hangar for an exit to the rest of the deck, finding one at the rear of the space past all of the massive loaders. He started running, painfully aware of the trife at his back as he charged toward what he hoped would be freedom.
Then that hatch slid open, revealing another contingent of Scrappers behind it. They charged into the space, aiming rifles that looked more modern than what the first group carried. Hayden changed direction immediately, rushing to get behind cover as the bullets started to fly.
A dozen trife were dead in seconds, knocked down by the sudden onslaught. Then they too adjusted to the new threat, breaking apart and surging behind cover in an effort to reach the enemy unharmed. A pair of them rushed toward Hayden, and he triggered his weapon, watching with satisfaction as they hissed and died.
The Scrappers on the floor above started to scream. Hayden looked back toward the nest in time to see one fall from the height, his lifeless corpse crashing to the floor. More bullets and hisses followed, and the constant muzzle flashes lit up the hangar like a celebration.
Hayden peered out from the corner of the loader, around the side of a huge tire. The Scrappers had taken defensive positions closer to the hatch, blocking off his chance at escape. Meanwhile, the trife were closing in on him, catching him in between two hostile armies.
