Ganked In Space

by N M Tatum

  To be fair, Robert did sound like a real douche. Still, Shelly’s office felt like a Tupperware container full of fresh despair. It was in the air, and Cody was sick of breathing it.

  “Are we about ready?” he asked. “I’m getting antsy.”

  Joel dropped his screwdriver on the desk where he’d been working and stood up victoriously. “Done. And these things are going to cook some serious bug ass.”

  Cody jumped to his feet, matching Joel’s excitement. “Good, I need to get out of this room. It’s starting to freak me out.”

  Joel ran them through a quick tutorial. The flamethrowers worked largely the same as the chemguns except they had tanks full of fuel instead of chemicals. When the fuel hit an ignition source as it exited the barrel, it produced a streaming flame.

  “So, a little note about the guns,” he said as he neared the end of his spiel, a warning in his tone.

  Cody and Reggie froze, anxious worry on their faces.

  “As brilliant as I am, these guns were rigged together in an hour, with spare parts,” Joel explained.

  “Which means…?” Cody asked.

  “Which means, if they get knocked around, they could blow up in your face,” Joel said, sidling casually around the other two and heading for the exit.

  “Noted,” Cody said, eyeing his gun. He carefully put the flamethrower over his shoulder.

  “All right, boys,” Reggie said, when they’d exited the office. “We’re down to about thirteen hours to rid this station of nasties. We totally got this!”

  Chapter Six

  Sector 12 Transgalactic Station

  The elevator dinged. Sublevel four: engineering department, and a swarm of flesh-eating nightmare beasts. The door slid open, and the Notches held their new weapons at the ready. They breathed a collective sigh of relief when they were met with nothing.

  Exiting the elevator in a tight formation, Reggie on point, the others watching the flanks, they felt ready to take on the bugs. They were rested, newly armed, and had a better sense of their enemy and a fresh mindset. They were unprepared before, unsure of what they were walking into. But they knew now. They knew the horror that was waiting in the dark, ready to snap their bones like twigs and chew off their flesh.

  “You guys remember the qualifier game we won to make it into the VRE championships?” Reggie asked in a hush. “The Return to Order team deathmatch?”

  “Yeah,” Cody said with a chuckle. “One of our highlights.”

  “Best of five series,” Joel said. “We were down two to nothing. Needed to win three in a row.”

  “Against a team favored to rank highly in the championships,” Reggie added as they progressed further down the hall. “Everyone counted us out. But that’s when we changed up our tactics. We moved as a unit. Never left each other’s side. They spread out, played zones, came at us one by one, and we wiped them out.”

  Reggie held up his fist, signaling them to stop at the intersection in the corridor. Before peering around the corner, he said, “That’s what we do now. We stick together. We move as a unit.”

  The others nodded in agreement.

  Reggie peeked around the corner and signaled the all-clear. They moved as one, never allowing more than a few feet of daylight between them. Reggie was always on point, and Joel and Cody always watched the flanks. Even when a group of ShimVens rushed them as they approached the main engineering section, they didn’t break formation.

  “Twelve o’clock!” Reggie yelled.

  Joel and Cody pivoted and angled their flamethrowers forward, a safe distance from each other. All three of them lay on the triggers at the same time, sending a wall of fire hurtling at the bugs.

  The creatures shrieked as the inferno swallowed them. When the Notches let up, the bugs were nothing but twisted, crispy corpses.

  Joel held his flamethrower up and smiled at it. “Hell yeah.”

  The others seemed equally pleased. They pressed forward, toward the heart of the engineering section. Cody hypothesized that’s where the bulk of the swarm would be; that’s where the largest concentration of wires and circuits and all the stuff the bugs loved to munch on were located.

  Another small group of ShimVens rushed them a minute later, four bugs in total. Two charged from the front, and Reggie smoked them without a problem; one tried to flank them, but Joel caught it in time. It was the one that dropped from the ceiling that almost did them in.

  Cody noticed the shadow fall over him a split-second too late. He raised his flamethrower and let loose a burst of fire, but the bug was too low. The fire missed, and the bug smashed into him. Cody hit the floor with such force that the air was knocked out of his lungs. His head swam as he tried to get up and fight off the bug at the same time. It slashed at him with its needle-like legs. Cody used his gun to block it.

  Without thinking, Reggie took aim. Joel tried to tell him to stop, but his voice was swallowed by the whoosh of fire.

  Reggie’s flamethrower ignited, washing the bug in a stream of flame, nearly hitting Cody. The bug shrieked, flailed and fell dead. Still on fire, the ShimVen toppled over onto Cody. Joel rushed forward and thrust Cody’s flamethrower out of his hand and away from the burning bug. Reggie kicked the ShimVen off Cody and dropped on top of his friend to extinguish him.

  Reggie rolled off Cody once the flames died.

  “Shit, man,” Cody snapped. “You almost killed me.”

  “Sorry,” Reggie said, his voice low. “I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Damn right, you weren’t,” Joel said. “If you’d hit his flamethrower, the fuel tank could’ve blown, and we’d all be toast.”

  Cody stood up and took stock of the singed parts of his suit. The damage was superficial—nothing that compromised his ability to press on, other than the hit to his confidence.

  Reggie paced a few yards up and down the corridor. He was shaken. His fingers twitched, and his heart pounded from the adrenaline.

  I almost burned my friend alive.

  Going forward, he’d have to be more careful, or he was going to blow them all up.

  “Okay,” Reggie said after a lengthy silence. “I think we should split up.”

  Joel’s face twisted with confusion. “Didn’t you give us a speech about teamwork a little while ago? And now you want to split up?”

  A little while ago, I hadn’t almost torched my friend, Reggie thought. Aloud, he said, “I didn’t know the power of the flamethrowers then. These things are incredible, but we can’t use them in tight quarters.”

  Then something sparked in his mind. An idea that was both great and stupid.

  “The initial plan would have worked if the chem wasn’t a bust. We should try it again. Set up kill zones, lure them in and then torch them to hell. We can organize three separate but simultaneous traps. That will split the swarm, and let us each burn our share…then we’ll be done with the whole thing. Piece of cake.”

  Cody’s face turned pale, like he was ready to puke. “You want all of us to be live human bait now? Alone?”

  Doubt poked at Reggie’s brain. He pushed it away. “I know it sounds dangerous, but this will definitely work. It would have worked if the chems were legit. These bugs aren’t that bad—there’s just a ton of them. But now that we have a real means of killing them, it’ll be a piece of cake.”

  “I wish you’d stop saying that,” Joel said.

  “We got this.”

  Reggie was trying to sound as optimistic as he could. He needed to believe it. He needed to know that this was going to work out, that they would kill these ShimVens, get a reputation, rake in more lucrative jobs and get rich. Then they would never have to split up and find office jobs and only talk to each other over direct message and, eventually, even stop doing that because of mortgages and families and deadlines.

  We’re going to kill the bugs. Everything is going to be fine.

  Joel and Cody both nodded half-heartedly. They split up the gear, making sure each of them had the supplies to mak
e an effective bug trap. After studying the schematics, Joel assigned them specific kill zones.

  “It’s important that we all know where the others are going to be,” Joel said, running his hand through his wavy brown hair. “We’re separating temporarily, but we’ll still need to have each other’s backs.”

  The other two agreed with adamant nods.

  Once ready, they all returned to the elevator, choosing those over the stairs. It was a quiet ride down to sublevel five. When the doors slid open, Cody’s heart jumped into his throat.

  “My stop,” he said, trying to psych himself up. He moved his head from side to side, the way fighters do before jumping in the ring. All it did was put a kink in the left side of his neck. He stepped out, rubbing his now spasming neck, and turned to face his friends. “Listen, guys, this has been a real trip. I just want you to know, in case I get eaten—”

  Joel pressed the ‘close door’ button. It slid shut, cutting Cody off, but they could still hear his muffled voice shouting from the other side.

  “I blame you!” Cody finished.

  The elevator lurched as it descended another floor. “Sublevel six,” Joel said. “I’ve always loved sublevel six.” He needlessly checked his flamethrower again, trying to distract himself from the fact that his hands were shaking, and a cold sweat had begun to run down his face.

  The door opened to another level of cold metal and the stink of solvent and shit in the air.

  Joel stepped out. He didn’t turn to face Reggie, but said over his shoulder, “Don’t get dead.”

  “You either,” Reggie retorted as the door closed.

  Alone, Reggie ran his fingers along the pincer tucked in his belt. He loved the trophy system. That’s what this job was. A trophy grab. An achievement. Something he could display that would bring them glory. And glory begets more glory. This job was a stepping stone. It was important.

  The elevator stopped. A lonely ding sounded his arrival on sublevel seven.

  “Don’t get dead,” he told himself.

  He stepped out and readied his flamethrower.

  Chapter Seven

  Sector 12 Transgalactic Station

  Sublevel five felt like a tomb. It was cold, echoed, and smelled like dead ass. Cody kept thinking a zombie was about to jump out from behind every corner. If they did, he hoped this level was plagued with the old zombies, the dumb ones that shambled around, moaning, walking into walls and falling in holes. If it was fast zombies, he’d be fucked. He wasn’t outrunning anything with this crick in his neck or all the gear strapped to his back.

  “Positivity,” he whispered to himself. Reggie was always going on about the power of positive thinking.

  Right. Like he could just think his way out of a situation with thousands of hideous space roaches, and keep them from gnawing his legs off. If he had that sort of power, Cody would be thinking himself onto a beach right then. He could see himself with a tropical drink in hand and his head in the lap of a curvaceous woman as she ran her fingers through his hair and told him he was a genius.

  Actually, with the creepy darkness lurking before him, he’d settle for a pizza and some battle armor.

  His kill zone wasn’t far from the elevator. There was a control hub for this level’s automated movers a few yards ahead. Sublevel five was a sorting level. Cargo was brought down here, sorted according to its shipping destination and then moved to the appropriate loading dock. The sorting and moving were all automated, so this floor was loaded with bots designed to lift and carry. The ShimVens loved sucking on cables and fuse boxes and power stations.

  Cody moved swiftly down the hall and ducked into the room on the left—the control hub. It was in the shape of an octagon, and the control panel lined the back of the room. Dormant bots stood in a line along the right side. Some of them were bipedal; a few newer models ran on treads. All of them had two arms with large, grabbing claws on the end.

  From the state of the room, it looked like the swarm had yet to visit, which is what the guys had assumed. The bulk of the swarm they encountered had been working their way down from the main floor—this was evident from the fact that some of the sublevels had its infrastructure largely intact.

  Cody hoped it would remain that way.

  He plugged into the main control panel and quickly took over the system. The firewalls in this place were laughable. One would think such a cornerstone of galactic commerce would safeguard itself a little better from cyber attack.

  He dumped the rations in the center of the floor and activated the cooling fans meant to keep the servers from overheating. The wind blew over the rations and through Cody’s hair. The fans would blow the scent of the rations and his sweaty flesh into the hall, and once the bugs got a whiff of that and felt the energy pumping through the machines, they’d be down to feast.

  Cody kneeled by the main control panel, his wristcom jacked in. He raised his flamethrower and waited.

  Joel moved through sublevel six like a ninja. Disappearing into the shadows. Rolling around corners. Stepping as lightly as an autumn leaf falling from a tree. He even yelled, “Hiyah!” and side-kicked a garbage can that had the audacity to jump out at him.

  He laughed to himself and continued stepping lightly, feeling weightless. Because why should sneaking through the bowels of an abandoned space station and hunting a swarm of devil bugs not be fun?

  Joel knew it was an act. In truth, he was seconds away from pissing himself. But he needed to keep up the charade, or the fear would take over and paralyze him. Then the bugs would nibble him to death as he lay in the fetal position and cried.

  Sublevel six was the machine shop. After his ninja act lost its luster, he focused on that fact. Typically, the machine shop of a space station of this size would have been a playground for Joel. So many broken things for him to put back together. He would have been like an elf in a demented Santa’s workshop. This was the place all the bots went for repairs. All the tools and tech and transports, too. Everything. Machine guts were spewed across workbenches. Bot corpses were stacked in heaps. Mountains of spare parts loomed like dormant volcanoes ready to erupt at any moment.

  It was heaven.

  The main workshop was a few hundred yards into the sublevel. He reached it after having shrieked with alarm only twice. Both times at shadows, but those shadows were total assholes that were out to get him. He sent them both to hell in a blast of fire. Flamethrower works, at least. He was glad to know that before he set himself like cheese in a rat trap.

  It was a shame Joel wasn’t stepping into that workshop under different circumstances. He could have entertained himself for hours. There were so many half-built contraptions, bots in need of repair and spare parts lying about in desperate need of being turned into something awesome. It could have been his happy place. But it’s hard to find joy when facing painful death and/or bad Intergalactic Yelp reviews.

  It would read: ‘Contractor not only failed to eradicate the ShimVens infestation, but I had to hire another contractor to clean up the mess his eviscerated body left behind,’ and Joel and the guys would never work again. Also, he’d be dead, which was arguably worse.

  Joel dropped the rations in a heap on the floor and set up his portable fan behind it to push the scent. There was nothing to do but wait for the bugs to come after the bait. He perused the workshop to kill the time. As he sorted through the junk, his mind flooded with glorious ideas, automatically fitting the parts together like puzzle pieces, joining them to create a wondrous machine that murdered bugs.

  When his brain started flashing blueprints, he couldn’t stop himself anymore.

  He set about putting the parts together as the skittering started to echo in the vents.

  When Reggie had been back in the elevator, the panic took over. He couldn’t get out of his head. Alone in the elevator on the way down to sublevel seven, all he could think about was Cody and Joel, and how they were probably pissed at him for taking this job.

  He had been too e
ager. Reggie had jumped at the chance for a real, paying job, and had agreed to unreasonable terms. He half-hoped he’d die on this station so he wouldn’t have to tell the guys how much they were getting paid. Thinking about it now, it absolutely was not enough.

  But no matter what, he was pressing forward. He couldn’t tell if it was out of pure stubbornness, or if he really did care about creating a reputation. Regardless of the pay, if they were successful on this job, it would set them up. It was a hell of a resume builder.

  Not if they were dead, though. And he would definitely get dead if he didn’t put his head on straight.

  He again ran his fingers along the pincers tucked into his belt. He’d earned plenty of trophies during his gaming career, but this was different. He’d ripped the pincer off his enemy with his bare hands while dripping with bug blood. These proved he had what it took to get the job done.

  Sublevel seven was a literal dump—the garbage level. That was obvious the moment Reggie stepped off the elevator, and into ankle-deep trash. Joel had explained to him a little bit about how these areas worked on space stations. Chutes led to the floor from every level above it, dropping garbage in massive heaps throughout the day. At specified times, the incinerator would activate. The floor was one large conveyor. When running, it pulled all the garbage toward the center of the level, which dropped away into one huge incinerator shaft. The fumes were then vented out into space.

  The smell hit Reggie in the face like a steel-toed boot. The station had been abandoned for a few days now, meaning this trash should have been burned days ago but had been sitting and stewing instead. Reggie tried not to think of what he was walking in as he trudged through the level. However, as his pants became soaked with garbage soup, he couldn’t think of anything else. His guts gurgled, and he tasted bile in the back of his throat.