"Okay," she said.
"Okay?" He paced back and forth in front of the control console. "So all's fine then, right? No little snide remarks about what I should be doing? About what a real hero would do in this situation then?"
"Nope."
He squinted at her. His lips trembled. "You don't think I know the game you're playing. Play all you want but I'm not going to. They illegally detained us. The damned Federation. They've been living hell for the past five years. You know that. Then that Kronos, sentenced us to the mining camps, same thing as sentencing us to death."
"Yeah, he did."
"And..."
"What?" Fifi asked.
"What are you going to say?"
She shook her head, still standing there in the doorway with her arms crossed.
"All good," said Crunch. "The Phaethon is back under our control."
"Ha!" Snake jumped into the chair and swiveled it around to the controls. He swiped at data screens, tapped buttons, and toggled switches. "I'm going to save us. I'm going to get us out of here." He turned back to Fifi. "We can't fight them. You see that, don't you? Too many of them. Not enough ammo. It's a dying cause. Why throw away our lives for nothing? I'm not going to die for nothing."
A sixty-second countdown timer came up on one of the screens.
Snake flashed a thumbs up. "Buckle in. We are hitting full engines in less than a minute and then we are out of here. No looking back."
"No looking back, huh?" Fife still stood there, arms crossed. She wasn't going to move.
Snake wheeled around. "What? Say what you need to say. Spit it out, will you? We're leaving in less than a minute so if you got something to say, get it off your chest."
"Nothing to say, Snake. Nothing."
He pounded a fist on the arm of the chair. Forty seconds until he could crank up the engine blasters and send them hurtling away from the Poros.
"Fine," he said through gritted teeth. "I know what you want to say. You want to tell me that I can be more than who I am, that underneath the gruff exterior a hero lies. You want me to stop the countdown, arm myself to the teeth, and charge out that door. And not just for those sleepers but also for Engstrom. You want me to believe in hope. You want to believe in something so strongly that I would be willing to die for it. Is that it? Is that what you want me to say? You tell me, Fifi. Tell me."
She shrugged and turned away.
Fifteen seconds.
He turned back to the chair. His hands trembled. He swiped across the screen but his fingers were coated with sweat and the motion did not take. He tried again until he could pull up the diagnostics screen. The engines were nearly fully primed. Their charge would be so strong that when the engines fired up the hull of the Poros would be blackened from the burners. If he were lucky, maybe the whole of the ship would catch on fire and torch the bugs back to the hole they climbed out of.
Ten seconds.
But the colony ship would go up in flames too. Five thousand people, men, women, and children. Would they wake in that last moment engulfed in flames? Or would they wake suddenly inside their pods, their air supply cut off, drowning in the thick liquid while the fire danced in the halls?
Five seconds.
And what about Engstrom? His throat tightened. Even if she managed to escape the bugs, even if she made it all the way to the control room to manually release the colony ship, how numbered were her days? How soon before the bugs found her? There were only so many places to hide. She could hide for hours, maybe even days, without being found, but at some point she would need to leave from whatever safety she had found and she would be exposed to the bugs. One person alone, even a fierce soldier, stood no chance against the swarm of cockroaches. She might take a few out but they would overwhelm her.
For a moment, he imagined the bugs swarming on her, their claws piercing her flesh, her screams, the sickening crunch as their mandibles cracked bones.
The countdown hit zero. The screen flashed red. Snake cursed and slammed his fist down.
On the abort button.
The Phaethon shivered under the pent up energy of the engines.
He unbuckled his belt and stood on unwavering legs. He marched out of the cockpit, threw open the munitions closet, and began gearing up.
Time to find Engstrom. Time to save the colonists.
Chapter Thirty-Six
IT WAS TOO quiet.
Snake stopped and stared down the hall of the Poros. The walls still smoked from where Fifi had blown up the swarm of bugs. He scowled at the stench of bugs. They smelled like burnt hair. Charred exoskeletons piled on the floor. The walls were blackened with sections crumbling away.
He could not believe he was back in the destroyer, not after he had just escaped.
He looked back over his shoulder. Fifi and Crunch peeked out from around threshold to the compression chamber and the Phaethon.
A few minutes before when Fifi finally had spoken, she had said that she was coming with him. Crunch said he would go where Fifi went, but Snake turned them both back. This was his problem to work through, he had said, his problem to solve.
Snake looked at Fifi perched behind a sniper rifle, one eye hidden by the spotting scope. She had begged.
Standing alone in the hallway, Snake felt suddenly very vulnerable. Maybe he should have let her come along.
But he needed to do this alone. He needed to do it in a way that would not risk anyone else's life. He needed to prove something to himself – and to Engstrom.
He was not sure what had changed in him.
A few days ago, he had cared about nothing but himself and making his fortune off salvaged ships. He had been content with his life on the fringe of the Federation. In fact, he had actively sought out that life. After all, the Federation had betrayed him. They were the ones who had originally treated him like a criminal and he had simply lived up to their expectations.
Even after discovering the research vessel Galileo, his worst suspicions about the Federation had been confirmed. They had illegally boarded his vessel, stolen his salvage, arrested him, and sentenced him to a slow death. Right now, he should be on the Phaethon blasting the engines and getting as far away from the Poros and the Federation as fast as possible.
But something had changed.
It was not the bugs. They were simply another pack of killers, no different than the Space Marines in his eyes.
No, it was Engstrom. That stupid idealistic soldier. Always hard-nosed and obeying her orders. But she had disobeyed them for Snake. She had risked her rank and future, and really her life, to get him out of the Acheron. She had seen something more important than following orders. She had seen something that had allowed her to become more than she already was.
And, this now, what Snake did, it was the same thing. This was the moment of transformation in his life. He could go on living the life he had always lived or he could change. He could put others before his own needs. He could risk everything for another.
Plus Engstrom still owed him that kiss, and he was damned sure that he was not going to let that opportunity slip by him. She promised him a kiss, and he was going to claim it. But first, he had to find her and bring her back to the Phaethon, and maybe prove to her along the way that he was not as bad as he had made himself out to be.
He would help her get to the control room and set the colony ship free, and then they would get back to the Phaethon, and once there, he would sweep her in his arms and claim that kiss.
He laughed out loud. "I'll taste your lips."
"What the hell you talking about?" Crunch's voice hissed through Snake's helmet.
"Oh, hell, is this thing on?"
"Of course, it is, you fool. We've got the map of the Poros pulled up. When you get to the next intersection, take a right, and I'll guide you the rest of the way to the control room. But when you turn that corner, you'll be alone, buddy. Our guns won't be there to support you. You sure you don't want us to come along?"
"No
, no. This is on me."
Fifi's voice cracked on the line. "He doesn't want an audience when he tastes Engstrom's lips."
"Oh, come on, now. This is serious business here. Stop joking around. I need to focus."
"On those lips."
"On the cockroaches." He slipped past the charred bodies of the bugs. Their carapaces crackled beneath his boots. Too loud especially against the silence in the halls.
He reached the intersection, paused for a moment, and then glanced down the left and right halls. All clear.
"It's too quiet out here," he whispered. "Where the heck did the bugs go? They knew where we went and then Engstrom came out. They should have been waiting for me the moment I stepped out of that door. I don't like this at all."
He turned the corner and proceeded down the hall. Most of the lights above had either been shot out or broken by the bugs. In between the few pools of lights, vast darkness stretched.
"We've lost visual," said Crunch. "You're on your own now." Static surged around his words.
"Might be losing more than visual," Snake muttered.
He waited for a snide reply from Fifi but he was greeted only by a sudden wave of static. This was not good.
He thought for a moment of turning back and asking Fifi and Crunch to join him. Maybe it would have been the smart thing to do. But he had something that he needed to prove. Not just to himself but also to Engstrom. He needed to prove that he was willing to face his own death for something greater.
He wondered if he was being a fool.
No matter. It was too late now.
He strode quickly down the hall, keeping at a pace just under a jog so that his gear would not jangle, speeding up the pace when he moved through the pools of darkness. Each time he entered the darkness he expected bugs to burst forth but instead they did not.
While it would have been better to have Crunch's voice in his ear guiding him through the halls, the way to the control room was not complex and Snake had burned the simple turns into his memory.
Eventually he reached another intersection and paused at the corner. He slowly peered around the corner, gun poking ahead of him. It was a long stretch of corridor, dimly lit, with a flood of light at the far end. All along the hall open doorways littered the way.
He would not have enough time to check each of the rooms. Not if he hoped to reach Engstrom quickly. He wondered if she were already at the control room. Had she even needed him to come along any way? What if she did what she needed to do and returned to the Phaethon while he still wandered these halls? He hoped he was not such a fool.
As he was rounding the corner and beginning his approach down the hall, he noticed a wide, black smear running along the floor. He sniffed the air. It was not fuel or even bug. With his eyes ahead, he stopped and crouched down, wiping his gloved hand on the smear on the floor. Too gloomy to tell exactly what it was. He lifted his glove to his nose and smelled. The coppery tang of blood.
His stomach tightened. The long swath of blood stretched from one end of the hall to the other. Close to fifty yards. More blood than could have come from a single person.
He fought back the sudden urge to throw up. He crept forward, resisting the temptation to glance into the open doors on his left and right. It would do no good to clear each of the rooms. But as he passed the open doors, cold air pressed against his cheeks as if each room descended into a dark subterranean cavern in which nightmares lurked. Impossible he knew but it sent a shiver up his spine.
He was halfway down the hallway when he heard the clacking. He froze for a second. It was coming from behind him.
He turned. The hallway was empty. But the sound was close. It must have been coming from one of the rooms. He did not want to keep his back to the bug, but he needed to keep moving. He needed to get to Engstrom, and if he got caught here unleashing the fury of his gun he would only draw more bugs to him.
He only hoped that if the bug emerged from the room and came after him that he would hear it and have enough time to open fire.
He set off at a jog in the direction of the control room.
The clacking sound grew. Only this time it was not just from the door behind him. It came from each open doorway that he passed. Then he heard it from the doors ahead of him.
Sweat beaded on his brow. He battled to calm his breath. He slipped his finger over the trigger.
He was close to the end of the hall, almost clear of the bloody smear along the floor, when the entire corridor erupted in a sudden chittering, and as one, a dozen bugs emerged from the rooms, ahead and behind him.
Snake cursed. They had trapped him.
He sprayed bullets immediately. The bug closest to him burst apart in the gunfire, the carapace cracking open, ochre blood splattering on the wall behind it. It was easy to kill but in that ease lay a deception because the hallway was filled on either side with bugs and Snake saw that the swarm was too great and even if killed bug after bug, they would be on him. They would be at him too close from opposite directions and he would not be able to defend himself. They would overrun him and tear him limb from limb.
He flipped on the missile mode on his gun and pulled the trigger. The missile hit the first wave of bugs and at the same time the force of the explosion hurled Snake from his feet and he slid along the floor firing bullets at the bugs in the other directions. A chittering scream pierced the air. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up.
Despite his gunfire, despite the bugs that his bullets mowed down, they were still coming from the hall ahead and emerging from the dark smoke behind. He had nowhere to run. They would close in on him from either side in a second.
So he rolled into one of the rooms along the hall.
It was a small room. The personal quarters of one of the officers. Small and with no way out of it.
He cursed. He was trapped. But at least he had his back to a wall.
This was it. The end. Nowhere left to run. Only so many bullets in his gun. He was not sure he would even be able to reload. Already the bugs swarmed the door, and endless wall of bugs, chittering, clacking, pincers grasping and tearing, as they fought their way to get to him.
He fired relentlessly, the gun pulsing in his arms, the shock of it shaking him through his bones. Bullets tore holes in carapaces, exploded bug heads into dark green pulp, and ripped off limbs.
And before him the pile of corpses grew, but the press of bugs was relentless. He kept his finger on the trigger. The gun danced in his hands. The hammering of the bullets bursting from his gun was deafening. Still he fired.
Then the bullets ran out and the air was filled with the empty clicking of the gun. As fast as he could, he switched out the magazine and continued firing only losing a second or two, but that break was enough for the bugs to surge forward and where before he had held them just outside the door now, several had pressed into the room forcing Snake to retreat further, the backs of his legs bumping up against the small desk in the wall.
He knew that the next time he switched out the magazine, he would lose his ground. They would be on him. At that point, it would be how fast he could draw his machetes and how fast he could swing.
And how soon his arms would tire.
Death came for him.
He heard the whistling, faint at first, and then rising to an unleashed scream. Before he could figure out what it was the hallway lit up, all darkness sucked away, and the air pulled at him as if it wanted to drag him into the hall. For a moment, even all the chittering stopped, and his ears filled with an unnatural silence.
The bugs in the threshold paused in their frenzy, heads tilted.
Then the hallway exploded in flames.
Snake was lifted off his feet, above the small desk, and slammed into the wall so hard that photos and vases tumbled off the shelf behind him. A moment later he was on the floor surrounded by black smoke. The air seared his lungs. He coughed and spewed and blindly groped for the gun that had flown from his hands. He felt along the floor
and he grasped the hot metal of the barrel and pulled the gun back towards himself. His eyes watered. He coughed again, his nose running, his throat burning.
He strained to listen for the horrific sound of the chittering and clacking, the impending death song of the bugs, but his ears rung from the explosion and he could hear nothing beneath the dull buzzing.
He swatted at the air in front of him, clearing out a small space before the smoke rolled back in. But slowly it thinned, and he could see the ghostly twisted shapes of the bugs – or what remained of them – strewn on the floor.
"Fifi?" he called into the haze of the hallway. "I told you to stay put. You could have gotten yourself killed – or more likely me."
A lone figure materialized in the doorway, a human figure. Snake lowered his gun and sighed heavily.
"Couldn't stand to be so far from me, could you?" a female voice said. The smoke cleared enough so that Snake could see the half-smile on the face of Engstrom. "Fifi was right about this gun. It packs a punch. Maybe next time you might want to avoid an ambush. I'm not always going to be there to rescue you."
Snake picked himself up and stepped into the hallway. Flames lit the ceiling. Bugs lay dead everywhere. Most of them had been blown to bits. Fragments of carapace and globs of ochre ichor clung to the walls and ceilings. The place stank of dead bug.
"I was coming to save you," he said. "Couldn't let you go by yourself."
Engstrom waved him forward with her gun. "You saving me? Stick close so you don't have to save me again, okay."
He limped after her. His right thigh ached where he had slammed against the desk. Not broken, just horribly bruised. He imagined the black and blue lump that would form on his leg.
"Thanks," he said. "Got in a bit over my head."
She stopped and turned. "Thank you for coming. I knew a hero hid behind that patch."
Emotion welled in his throat, an unexpected surge of joy, and he fought to get the words out of his mouth. "Let's go. Let's free the colony ship."
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