“The other six that aren’t like Murakame, let’s see,” Conway said. “Yes. The same basic patterns. Something very horrible is happening to them. Did anyone get any idea where her voice came from?”
“It sounded to me like it was down the same hall we need to go to reach the second power core,” Essentia said.
“Okay, Essentia, figure out what we’re about to deal with. Everyone else, make one hundred percent sure you’re ready for a battle,” Dollarhyde said. She paused. “Is it just a coincidence that this is happening in a power core room again?”
“Probably not,” Axel said. “We already believed that the spores for the killer plants were attracted to energy. We have no idea what the Sten-Plus use to power their ships, but at this point it seems like a likely hypothesis that their power source is something that life forms find attractive.”
“I don’t think it’s attractive,” Bayne mumbled. “I think this is all pretty ugly.”
“I think maybe I’ve got a hit here,” Essentia said, “but I don’t think the information is going to be very useful to us. Most of this is in a portion of the data files that either hasn’t been translated yet, or something in the alien syntax is giving the translation program a problem. There’s references to two creatures that can emit either a sticky or fibrous substance.” She gestured as the strange goo all around them. “It’s a mating pair, male and female, or whatever equivalent to male and female their species happen to have.”
“Anything else?” Dollarhyde asked. “Anything at all?”
“No. Everything else in the file is still incomprehensible.”
“Alright then, everyone, you heard her,” Dollarhyde said. “Two targets with some kind of defensive attack, and seven marines in distress. Axel, be ready to place your charges, as we might need to get out of there quickly.”
They went down the last corridor to the core room with Marsden still taking point. Just outside the door they stopped, and Marsden did his best to see inside the room without actually sticking his head through the entryway. He pulled back and whispered what he’d seen to the others.
“Looks almost identical to the previous power core room, including another exit on the other side. The lights are dim, but not as much as in the previous room. That seems to be from more of that goop on the ceiling. In fact the entire room is covered in it except for a few thin paths on the floor here and there. No sign of either of our targets or any of the hostages.”
“No sign at all?” Conway asked. “We all heard Arizona. She’s got to be in there.”
Dollarhyde gingerly stepped ahead of Marsden. Gesturing for everyone else to be ready to shoot if anything happened, she then called through the door. “Arizona? Anyone? Are you in there?”
They all braced for some kind of attack at Dollarhyde’s intrusion on the quiet, but for several seconds there was nothing. Finally someone, not Arizona, said, “Dollarhyde. Help.”
Dollarhyde nodded her okay to the marines, and they all filed in using a tight defensive pattern that kept them from spreading out and getting stuck in the slime and filaments. Still there was no movement in the room, and no sign of any of the marines.
What he did see, however, were a number of ghastly, bloated flesh sacks plastered on the walls all over the room. Marsden’s first thought was that they were some kind of larva or egg sacs, in which case he wanted to spare no time shooting each and every one before they could become something worse. But as his eyes adjusted to the dimmer light, Marsden realized he didn’t need to wait for them to be something out of his most horrifying nightmares. Each flesh sac wiggled and squirmed, obviously alive, but it was the number that horrified him.
Looking around the room, he saw exactly seven of them. They’d found the missing members of Delta team.
“…help…” This plea was Arizona again, and Marsden realized that she was the closest of the seven flesh sacs that hung on the wall about four meters from them. And it wasn’t that she was inside the flesh sac. She was the flesh sac. Her body was swollen to nearly three times its original girth. Arizona’s clothes and armor had either been stripped from her or else had ripped apart and fallen at her feet in the process that caused her body to hideously balloon. Her skin was tight and stretched against whatever was inside her, so much that in places Marsden thought the greasy, sweat-soaked skin had gone translucent and allowed him to see some kind of thick fluid sloshing inside her just below the surface. Her face was completely unrecognizable, and if not for her faint calls for rescue, Marsden wouldn’t have had any idea which of the marines she was. Another quick glance around told him that all the marines were in the exact same condition.
Marsden wanted to puke, and he was sure that he wasn’t alone. Llewellyn made a few sounds that clearly said she was fighting back a gagging reflex, but she managed to keep control of herself. There would be plenty of time later to vomit up their rations when they figured out what to do here, if there even was such a possibility.
“Oh God,” Conway whispered. “This is monstrous.” She took a first tentative step toward Arizona. Dollarhyde put a hand on her shoulder to stop her, which Conway immediately shoved away. “Don’t you dare try to stop me, Dollarhyde.”
“Conway, I don’t think there’s anything you can do for them anymore,” Dollarhyde said. She hefted her MH-56. “The best we can do for them is put them out of their misery as quickly as possible.”
“Uh-uh. No,” Conway said. “The very least you can let me do is examine her first. There’s got to be something I can do as long as they’re still alive. Maybe if I made incisions in key places, I can drain whatever fluid is causing this.”
Marsden was pretty sure that simply draining the fluid wouldn’t be enough to save them, considering how hideously distorted their body features had become. As he was staring at Arizona, he finally noticed something he hadn’t before. Hanging right over Arizona, in a shape that looked partly like a net and partly like a web, there was a concentrated patch of the razor-thin filaments. They looked almost like they had been put there on purpose to create an awning over her.
Marsden looked around to the other marines, noticing that Axel did the same thing. Both of them saw at the same time that there was a similar net over every one of the incapacitated marines. Not only that, but now that he was looking for them, Marsden saw thing strands actually hanging in the air and connecting each of the net awnings. The filaments were pulled tight, like tripwires.
Tripwires? Marsden turned his head to Axel and saw that she must have been thinking the exact same thing.
Conway moved to get closer to Arizona.
“Conway, no!” Marsden screamed. Before he could even finish getting the words out, Conway hissed and looked down at her foot. Her boot had been sliced open by something, and blood was freely pouring out. Marsden saw the razor filament she had walked into, which was connected to a point on the wall, which then went up, right to…
The net dropped from its place on the wall. It was so light, so thin, that it did fall with any speed. If he were the kind to think of things in such ways, he might have described it as having a gentle whimsy as it fell, like a loose spider web drifting in a slight spring breeze. He didn’t have time to look at the others, but he was pretty sure all of the other filament nets had also been triggered to fall.
What Marsden did have time for was to grab the two marines nearest him, Dollarhyde and Essentia, and violently shove them back, simultaneously pushing everyone behind them back in the direction of the door they’d come in. He looked back just in time to see the net gently waft into place on the swollen flesh of Arizona’s head.
The filament sliced through her stretched-tight skin, and with the pressure that had built up from inside her body, Arizona exploded.
Her body seemed to evaporate in much the same way an over-full water balloon would burst, the tears in her head expanding outward like across her skin with lightning-quick speed. Noxious green fluid spewed from her along with pieces of organs and bone. Marsden
felt some droplets of the liquid hit his back and sizzle as it tried to dissolve through his clothing. It didn’t get far, but as he looked back he saw that Conway hadn’t been so lucky. All seven of the marines burst throughout the room, but Conway was the only person close enough to the exploding bodies to get a full, direct hit. For a brief second she managed to scream when the substance hit her face, but the green acid instantly ate through her skin, her nose, her eyes, her tongue. Conway fell back to the floor with half her head and a significant portion of her chest gone.
“Back!” Dollarhyde screamed. “Everyone back through the door!” They were trained for this kind of hasty retreat, but several of the marines must have forgotten about the sticky spots and razor filaments. Trieloff made the mistake of backing up into a spot that glued her boots in place while two other marines ran afoul of dangling filament threads. One was caught right in the throat, causing the person next to him to get doused in a shower of his arterial blood, while the other suddenly developed a deep penetrating gash in his side. It caused him to lose his balance, making him fall into a thicker patch of the strands. The sliced through him like he’d been put into one of those old-fashioned hard-boiled egg slicers, turning him into tiny chunks of unrecognizable flesh.
Before any of them could make it as far as the door, something shot out from some unknown place overhead. A huge glob of the sticky version of the substance smacked into the top of the door from, dripping down and creating long strands of glue that barred their way. Marsden turned to the other door just in time to see a wad of the filament do the same thing, some of it slicing into the material of the ship while the rest dangled over the door.
“Look up there!” Axel called. She pointed in the direction of the top of the power core, where two creatures had apparently been hiding the entire time. Each of them looked like some kind of insect with heavily armored exoskeletons. The number and spacing of their legs made Marsden think of spiders, while their heads and bodies were more reminiscent of wasps, complete with gnashing mandibles in front and enormous stingers in their rears. One was brighter in color but significantly smaller, measuring about the same as Bayne’s shoulder width from mouth to stinger. The other was a drab gray and huge, easily the length of two marines lying down end to end.
“Everyone, you know what to do!” Dollarhyde screamed. “Fire!”
Almost everyone turned their rifles to the wasp-spiders perched in the center of the room. The only two who didn’t were Axel, who was ducking and weaving among the filaments in an effort to get closer to the core as she pulled out a couple of charges, and Trieloff, who was still struggling to get out from where she’d gotten stuck. She only struggled for a moment before bending low to untie her boots.
Marsden was afraid for a moment what might happen as seventeen separate marines tried to shoot something on top of a power core coursing with unknown energies and technology, but the two wasp-spiders jumped away from their spot quickly, each of them landing on and sticking to the walls on either side of the room. Neither of them seemed deterred by the glue or razor strands, and they walked among it all easily without sticking or getting cut open. Before most of the marines could adjust their aim, each of the creatures opened up their mandibles and spit something from their mouths. The gob from the larger one (the female, Marsden guessed, based on what little he knew of Earth insects) was big enough to hit three marines at once. The sticky substance covered their faces and knocked them off their feet, causing them to splat against the floor and stay there, unable to move or breathe for the glue.
The smaller one, likely the male, spit a wad of the strange silky strands that hit another marine square in her chest. She didn’t even get the chance to scream before the filament ripped apart her breasts, ribcage, and lungs.
“They’re too fast!” one of the marines yelled as the female again leaped to a different section of the wall. He was rewarded for his observation with a blast of the female’s glue against his chest, which knocked him back into a batch of filament. The filament ripped apart his back and rifle, but it didn’t appear to kill him outright. Instead he found himself glued to a wall. All the other marines tried to adjust their positions to get a better angle on the female as she jumped off the wall and directly in front of the marine she had just incapacitated.
Most of them aimed and fired at the female at the same time. She didn’t make any move to get out of their way this time, instead keeping all of her concentration on her trapped prey. The first several shots they took hit her in the abdomen, and while they punched a couple of holes in her body large enough to profusely bleed with black ichor, she didn’t pay much attention to them. The male, on the other hand, made some kind of wheezy hiss in warning at them before jumping between them and his mate.
While the male acted as a living shield, the female reared up on four of its hind legs to expose its stinger. The trapped marine screamed out a final challenge about what he wanted to do to the wasp-spider’s mother before the female stabbed him in the stomach. The marine grunted in pain, trying not to make any more noise as he faced his death, but he couldn’t help but scream as the wasp-spider injected him with something. His body instantly began to swell into an earlier version of what they had seen with Arizona and the others. The female seemed to lose a lot of its strength as she pumped him full of the poison and acid, and once he was swelled to bursting the female jumped away, although with decidedly less vigor than before. The male, significantly injured by their rain of bullets at this point, also leaped away, turning in midair just in time to spit another wad of filament.
The marines were too close to the exploding sac of flesh this time. Four of them were in the path of the acid splash, and while one was just far enough away she only got bathed on one side, it was still enough to dissolve most of her leg and drop her to the floor. Although she was obviously dying, she continued to aim and fire up until the moment she expired.
“I’ve got three charges placed!” Axel yelled. “Let’s get out of here!”
“In case you haven’t noticed, we’re still kind of trapped in this room!” Llewellyn said back.
“I’m on that too,” Axel said. “Just don’t let either of those things get me while I set this up.”
“Whatever you’re planning on doing, you better get it done five minutes ago!” Dollarhyde said. “If you take more than half a minute, I don’t think there’s going to be any of us left!”
To the marines’ advantage, both of the wasp-spiders had slowed significantly. Marsden guessed that the female would have to take some time before she built up enough acid in her stinger again to pull the same trick, while the male was running with an obvious limp in several of its legs. They all kept their fire on the creatures, trying to herd them into a corner, while Axel knelt down a safe distance from the strands over the opposite door. She pulled a long, thin strip out of her supplies, unrolled it, and then tossed one end in the direction of deadly curtain blocking their escape. The filaments sliced off a small portion of the end, but Axel didn’t seem to mind that. She pulled out a small device with a rather large button on it, which she wired up to the end of the strip that was closest to her.
“Fire in the hole!” she yelled as she made a fist and smashed it down on the button. She rolled out of the way as the whole strip ignited with a bright flash. At first Marsden didn’t understand what that had done. Then he saw the way flames began to lick at the place where the strip and the filaments met. It made sense, he suddenly realized. They couldn’t throw or shoot anything at the strands without the object being sliced into pieces, but the wispiness of the material made it susceptible to fire.
“Just hold those things off long enough for the fire to burn all the way, and then we can get out!” Axel said. She ran back to help Trieloff get out of her boots without further stepping in the glue while everyone else continued to unload their magazines into the wasp-spiders. The male finally went down, its legs curling up against it just like the death throes of a terrestrial spider, but w
hile slow, the female was still going strong. She didn’t look like she could do her leaping anymore, so instead she turned directly for them and charged.
“The door’s open now!” Dollarhyde said. She didn’t need to say anything else to get the rest of them headed for the exit. Axel led the way with Trieloff beside her, while Marsden and Bayne brought up the rear. They wasted no time getting out the door and to the end of the hallway, where there were still stick and dangerous spots, but it wasn’t as thick here as it had been in the other hallway.
The wasp-spider didn’t follow them.
Marsden took a deep breath, only realizing now how much his lungs burned from the exertion of the battle they’d just thought.
“I don’t think it’s going to follow us,” Bayne muttered.
“Don’t bet on it,” Marsden said. “Just get ready, everyone. The instant you see it in the doorway, you unload everything you can into it.
They all stopped. They waited. Several seconds passed.
With renewed energy, the female spider-wasp appeared in the doorway and sprinted down the hallway at them.
They let loose an insane rain of bullets down the hall, but for several seconds the wasp-spider just kept going. It was halfway down the corridor before it even began to slow down. Still they all kept their fingers on their triggers. It kept lurching forward, desperate to get one final attack in on them. It never got that last chance.
It collapsed just two meters from them. As black sludge leaked out of the impossible number of holes in its body, the female wasp-spider curled up for one last time and was still.
August 2, 2147 (Earth Calendar)
2040 Greenwich Mean Time
Location: Corridor of Sten-Plus Spacecraft Outside Power Core Room 2, Bullfinch-2
Marine Heartbeats Detected on Planet: 14
Forty-six. That was the number of Recon Marines that had landed on planet Bullfinch-2 to look into the crashed ship of an unknown species. It was the number that kept repeating over and over in Marsden’s head as he looked around at the only people out of those forty-six that had survived up to this point: Marsden himself, Dollarhyde, Axel, Trieloff, Bayne, Chunda, Llewellyn, Laughingmoon, Hemingford, and Essentia. Ten marines were all that were left. Marsden had been on missions that had gone south before, and he had seen plenty of comrades in arms die in the line of duty, but he had never experienced anything like this. And the mission still wasn’t over.
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