by Ofelia Negra
Motionless by his feet was what had once been either a Marine assigned to the ship’s crew, or one of the Pandora’s regular assigned security officers. The health monitor on his combat PDT registered no signs of life, and their severed left hand clutched tightly to a pistol. Marcus ignored it, having seen how little effect regular ammunition had on these creatures. Instead, he knelt down by the dead soldier and inspected the piece of equipment that was clamped to the topside of the corpse’s PDT wrist plate.
“Hmm,” he thought to himself. “This could come in handy.”
Looking around again to make sure that he was safe… for now… he touched the controls on his right wrist and brought up his own PDT’s system specs. Then he laid the plasma torch down beside him, and reached out with both hands to the tech. Taking great care to pry loose the connecting latches and wires, Marcus tore the magnetic control module from the fighter’s wrist. He turned it over in his hands for a moment, examining every inch of it to make sure that it was still functioning. Then he planted it solidly on his left wrist plate, and used held his arm steady so that it wouldn’t fall off while he used his right hand to attach wires and clamps to keep it in place.
After everything was connected, he glanced over to the PDT display to see that the new device was already registering. It showed green. Marcus shut off the hologram and then glanced at the module’s energy capsule. The indicator on the capsule read as only four-fifths full, so he made a mental note to conserve the energy as best he could. He didn’t know if he would ever stumble across recharge canisters.
He picked up his plasma torch and stood up straight again. Then he stepped around the motionless former owner of the magnetic module and keyed in the door release.
The door slid open fast… too fast to be normal, and then slammed shut again. Only, when it slammed shut, it reopened, and then repeated the process again, and then again.
He frowned. There was no way he was going to be making it through that door by any normal means, the way he was going. And yet, there was that stasis module he’d picked up only seconds beforehand.
So much for conserving energy, he thought to himself.
He stopped less than a meter away from the malfunctioning door, watching it slam shut and fly open over and over. He pressed a control on the stasis module, and then extended his forearm only… any more than that and the door would slice it clean off.
Thankfully, Marcus had had a lot of experience at using a stasis unit before. They were necessary for most engineering jobs. They’d originally been designed for techs and mechanics, as a matter of fact. The point was to create a stasis field around a piece of equipment that was malfunctioning so that it wouldn’t endanger the engineer that had been assigned to repair it. Using it to drastically slow the spasms of the door mechanisms so that he could pass was child’s play by comparison.
So that’s what he did. He flexed his fingers and then pushed forward no more than a couple of centimeters. The small movement was all the device needed to register Marcus’s intent, and a small, blue-white ball extended from a small emitter ring on his palm slip. The ball seemed to melt into the slamming door, and crackling energy covered its surface for a moment before the door slowed. Marcus stepped through it with easy when it opened again, and turned to watch as it slowly closed behind him. After a few more opens and closes, the stasis field wore off, and the door continued its previous spasming.
Marcus hated that. He’d hoped, though irrational as it was, that hitting the door with the stasis field might have solved its malfunction. He himself didn’t have the time to slow it, pry open an access panel around the frame, and find the problem, let alone then fix it. The maintenance bay awaited him.
He shrugged, and then turned again and started up the sloping hall to its apex before stepping into the main corridor and swinging his gaze and the plasma torch around to scan the area for threats. For now, there appeared to be none, and that made him just a little more than only slightly uneasy. Surely, those horrendous creatures wouldn’t have given up on hunting him so easily?
There was a door at either end of the long corridor. The one to his right was lit in red, indicating that it was locked. Without Kira Davis’s help, it would remain so. Marcus didn’t have the expertise required to unlock it. The one to the left was lit in soft blue. That was his path, he concluded. He headed towards it slowly, taking each step with deliberate care. Just short of the unlocked door was a corridor to the right. It led to yet another locked door, so Marcus didn’t bother to check it out.
The LED reader above the door scrolled along, oblivious to Marcus’s presence. It read as Tram Repair Room, and a red-lit warning under it told Isaac what he already knew—that the tram system was malfunctioning. He paid the signage little mind as he keyed the door’s release and stepped inside, again scanning the area with keen eyes and a finger on the trigger of the cutter.
“Jesus,” he hissed to himself in frustration. “I’m being paranoid!” He lowered the cutter halfway and stepped up to the safety rail to look out into the bay. The autoloader arms were retracted and shut, and there was a tram on the tracks.
Confident that the area was clear of dangers at present, he walked a handful of steps to his right to the nearby control holo. He keyed in what he thought to be a reasonable command to extend the closest autoloader arm, and then watched as the command was accepted on the holo. The arm ground loudly in its socket, and then extended slowly toward the tram on the tracks, its jaws opening wide. Marcus watched it stop, and the jaws clamp down on a solid, nonslip surface, and then stay right where it was.
Typically, taking a tram off the tracks for maintenance and repair was a three-person job. Two people were to extend the arms simultaneously… which was only a recommendation, not an absolute… and the third person would stand by the master control and key in the retrieval.
So, wishing that he had two other people with him… which led to wishing that Davis and Hamilton weren’t separated from him by the blasted quarantine… Marcus proceeded up the short ramp and past the master control holo.
Just as he was starting down the opposite ramp, a horrid screech rent the air, and the cooling vent set into the wall directly in front of him exploded outward. Shards of shattered metal flew in all directions, and Marcus quickly dropped to the floor to avoid having his head taken off his shoulders by one. Breathing heavily with the fresh surge of adrenaline, he pushed himself back up to his feet, only to be knocked down again as something solid and fleshy slammed into him fully.
He looked up to see the blooded, veined texture of one of those creatures up close in all its horror. Its jaw was wide open, hanging loosely from busted joints and likely held there by the thin tendons Marcus saw. The black recesses of its eye sockets stared down at him, making him cold to the core. Bony spikes pierced the ramp on either side of him, just above his shoulders. Tiny arm-like growths from the thing’s midsection grasped for Marcus, but weren’t close enough to make contact.
The creature roared in his face, and pulled one of its deadly spikes from the ramp. Marcus knew what it was going to do. He wasn’t going to let it happen.
Roaring back to express his own anger over the deaths of his teammates, and his determination not to let that thing kill him, he pressed the muzzle of the plasma torch flat against the shoulder joint of the raised spike and squeezed the trigger. A triple-round of plasma blasted out and went clean through the shoulder, splattering Marcus’s visor with congealed blood and disgusting, necrotized flesh. He blasted again and the limb snapped free of the shoulder, clattering to the deck.
“Get off!” he screamed, kicking up with both feet to throw the thing off him as it howled in pain.
The other spike ripped free of the ramp with a tearing screech, and the thing stumbled back a couple of steps. Its keening quickly transformed into an enraged roar, but Marcus silenced it with a shot to the head, and then another two to cut off the thing’s legs. It fell to the floor, its roar dying off to a moan, and then to
silence. It didn’t move again.
But Marcus couldn’t stop there. Hammering footsteps on the metal behind him, the way he’d come from, alerted him to another threat. Still flat on his back, he arched his back and looked straight up, relative to his position, to see another creature charging across the ramps toward him. He brought the plasma torch around quickly, and blasted away with three shots, severing its legs in one, its head with the second, and one arm with the third.
Its dying moans mirrored that of its comrade, and it too never moved again as congealed blood leaked from its exposed wounds, almost like gel.
Marcus looked around, weapon in hands, scanning the perimeter for more creatures. When he was sure that there were no more in the area, he allowed his muscles to relax all at once, and his arms dropped limply to the floor.
He stayed like that for a couple of minutes as he regained his breath and willed some strength back into his arms and legs. Then, using the safety rail to his left as a support, he pulled himself back to his feet and looked around again with eyes and weapon, just to be sure. Then he leaned heavily against the rail, breathing heavily still.
“Get a grip,” he chanted quietly, squeezing his eyes shut. He tried as best he could to block the images of those things from his mind; tried to block the sight of their thick, congealed blood, their horrible fleshiness, and the terrifying spike-arms.
But the eyes haunted him. He found it hard to block out the sight of those deep pits of black. It was almost as if they called to him, pressing against his mind invitingly.
He pushed away from the rail and followed it around to the right, where the second autoloader control holo was. He reached out with his left hand and keyed in the right commands. Then he watched the second loader arm stretch out towards the tram, clamp down, unclamp, and then retract. The tram remained on the track with the first loader arm still attached.
“Shit!” Marcus said, slamming his fist on the rail in frustration. He keyed in the command again, and watched again as the arm extended and then retracted without maintaining its grip on the tram.
Annoyed at his failure, he hammered down on his PDT’s comm. “Hamilton, it’s Marcus,” he said. A holo-screen popped up in front of him and he saw the welcome faces of Hamilton and Davis. Both of them were still a little twitchy, he noticed, but that wasn’t entirely unjustified.
“What’s the problem, Marcus,” Hamilton said, glancing over his should at Davis.
“I’m at the tram repair station. One of the autoloader arms has a malfunction. I can’t get the tram off the tracks,” Marcus replied, frowning. Hamilton likely couldn’t see the frown through the helmet, but it was there all the same. “I can try to isolate the fault in the equipment, but that would take time, and considering I was just ambushed by a couple of those creatures, time is probably something I don’t have in abundance without backup.”
“The quarantine is keeping us locked out, Marcus,” Davis stated from behind Hamilton. “We can’t get to you. We can’t even get back up to the flight lounge to work our way around to you that way.”
“Are you OK?” Hamilton asked.
“I’m fine. That tip you gave about dismemberment really did the trick. What should I…?” And then it hit him; the solution he should really have considered on his own. Just how stupid was he?
He quickly attributed his lack of considering it to the fact that he was still reeling from the surprise attack by two of those fleshy creatures. He checked the indicator on the magnetic unit attached to his wrist plate, and then looked down at the loader arm on the lower level. Then he grinned, and turned back to the holo-screen.
“Never mind,” he said. “I think I just thought of a way.”
“Good man,” Hamilton replied. “Keep the channel open, regardless.”
Marcus nodded and then touched the control again on the magnetic unit. Then, he keyed in the command on the autoloader control holo, and as the arm started to extend he hit it with a resonance field to slow it down. Then, without waiting for the arm to complete its extension, he dashed up the nearby ramp to the master control holo.
Then he waited for the few extra seconds it took for the arm to complete its extension. Finally, it stopped, and clamped down on the tram’s exterior. Marcus reacted instantly, not knowing exactly how long it would hold before releasing again. He hit the controls to retract the tram.
There was a loud grinding sound, followed by a pop and a crackle of discharging electricity. The autoloader arms lifted the tram a meter off the tracks, and then retracted back into their sockets, pulling the tram toward Marcus. A panel in the floor between the arms opened at the middle, and a small platform popped out from the hole with clamping mechanisms open and waiting.
The loader arms stopped when the tram was fully over the new platform, and lowered the car onto it. Marcus waited for the clamps to secure themselves to the tram’s outer skin, and then hit another control. Immediately, the platform disappeared below, taking the tram down with it, and the doors clanged shut. He keyed in a few extra controls to start the auto repair.
“Marcus, you did it!” Kira said enthusiastically from the comm. holo-screen. “That tram was blocking the whole system. When you get the computer online, you’ll be able to call the tram from the control room.”
“I’m on my way to the maintenance bay now,” Marcus replied with a nod. He could hear the faint sound of buzzing and crackling below as the auto repair equipment got to work on the tram car.
“Good,” Davis replied, sighing with relief. “The faster the better, though… I can hear something crawling around out there.”
Marcus nodded and cut off the comm. He couldn’t afford to just wait here where he could be ambushed again. He wasn’t suicidal.
He turned around to face the wall behind him, grateful to see a magnetic recharge canister dispenser unit. He thumbed the request button successive times to end up with four spare canisters, which he attached to slots around his utility belt. Then he turned back to the door he had entered through and proceeded down the ramp toward it.
***
5
V
PFC Pandora Aerospace Engineering Dept.
Shuttle Repairs Invoice
Mission Day Two: Faulty fore gyro, vessel PFC-PAN-505. Replaced, now functional
Mission Day Three: Faulty 40 scope, vessel PFC-PAN-505. Still in repair.
Mission Day Four: Damaged landing repulsors, vessel PFC-PAN-505. Complete replacement, now functional. Damaged fore and left-fore viewports, vessel PFC-PAN-505. Replaced, now functional.
Mission Day Five: Damaged booster collar, vessel PFC-PAN-505. Repaired, now functional.
Engineer’s note: Stuart J.E.B. [2nd Engineer, Maintenance Bay]
-Repair Invoice; PFC Pandora
***
The trek backwards was faster, since Isaac was sure of his ability to wield the plasma torch effectively against the creatures now. He didn’t stop or slow so much to check corners anymore, preferring to check them as he went. He wasted more magnetic energy getting by the malfunctioning door again so that he could cross the tracks.
He was ambushed again on the tracks, however. And he found himself ready for it. He was halfway across to the door at the other end of the section when a horrid howl rent the air around him. Immediately he stopped walking, and scanned the perimeter with the plasma torch.
He soon found the perpetrator. Another thing was crawling along the wall, several meters above and in front of him. As he watched it, and as it watched him and drew closer, he noticed several distinct differences with this new creature.
For starters, it had no legs. In fact, there appeared to be only three limbs… two arms ending in a set of clawed fingers instead of bony spikes, and a long tail extending from the bottom of the hips, ending in a long sharp barb. It was darker than the standing creatures Marcus had seen thus far, and there were a couple of long, deep gashes criss-crossing its face.
He watched it carefully, keeping his eyes on it at al
l times as he continued ever-so-slowly toward the exit he wanted.
The thing howled at him again, and then with an almighty push, it shoved off from the wall and fell to the deck with a wet thud. Marcus backed away a few steps as quick as he could, and the thing sat there, watching him, ready to strike. Its “tail” swung wildly behind it, the deadly barb just itching to impale something.
Marcus aimed for the tail first, and two carefully placed shots took it off just below where it melded into the lower torso. The creature screeched at him, and, using its powerful arms, started to crawl across the tracks towards him. Without hesitating, Marcus took off both of the things arms, and then its head. Then he took a quick look around to make sure that there were no more of them, before he raced over to the door.
It opened to admit Marcus to the slanted corridor in which he’d seen a body fall from the ceiling earlier. With how much his suit weighed him down, he wasn’t too fond of climbing it, but he knew there wasn’t really an alternative. The door at the other end, thankfully, was still unlocked. At least, he thought, he wasn’t going to be wasting his time.