by Jamie Sawyer
“Stay down, P,” I said. “I’m going to try something.”
“Understood,” the Pariah replied.
INITIATE CLUSTER SHELLS, I directed my suit.
CONFIRMED, the suit said back to me.
There was a gentle tug from the launcher-rig on my shoulders, and a curtain of grenades showered the area. Explosives detonated, covering most of the chamber in razor-sharp debris. While the Krell didn’t exactly fall back, I managed to clear a zone safe around us.
ARMOUR INTEGRITY: 69%. NULL-SHIELD COMPROMISED.
I squashed a fry underfoot, made it to the main tunnel. The navigator’s life-sign was visible behind us.
“We’re leaving the command chamber,” I said. “Pariah’s on point. Coming up on Novak’s location now.”
“I’ll try not to shoot the fish,” Novak said.
The Russian was an angry war-demon, surrounded by Krell bodies. He had a primary-form pinned to the wall with one of his mono-knives: speared through the thorax by the blade.
“Having fun, I see,” I said to him.
Novak pulled his powered knife free of the alien’s body. Tossed the still-squirming xeno aside.
“Is work,” he said, shrugging.
Novak’s suit was compromised in ten places, the armour plating ruptured by several angry-looking spines. Those, I knew, would get him soon enough. Each was loaded with bio-toxin, filled with incapacitating poison. Novak’s medi-suite would keep him alive—flush his blood for as long as it could—but already he was slowing down. And for every Krell he killed, two took its place. Primary-forms erupted from every possible hiding place. Our survival could now be measured in seconds.
“Not coming back,” he said, his words peppered with gasps. There was no time for talk, no time for planning. “Move. I hold position.”
I slapped a hand to his shoulder as I passed him. “You did good, Novak. You did good.”
He grunted. “Tell to someone who cares.”
We left Novak—Russian lifer, general asshole, but more than anything else member of Jenkins’ Jackals—to his bloody work. Yet more primary-forms—and even the bigger, angrier outlines of tertiaries and quads—were materialising behind us. Novak’s fate was absolutely and utterly sealed, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.
The water level was now rising faster and faster.
“Coming up on your location, Feng!” I said.
I activated the grenade harness again. More cluster grenades pumped the area, explosions muted by the liquid but no less lethal.
A Krell tertiary-form—almost as big as the HURT—lurched from an open shaft in the deckhead. Used every feature and ridge of the ship’s interior for purchase—working in perfect concert with the environment, making rapid progress towards me.
I brought my guns round, fired. The alien evaporated, body parts scattering the tunnel. But the action had slowed me down, and I felt a weight on my back. I glimpsed a primary-form, shape jagged and angry, slashing at my life-support pack. Dragging me back the way we’d come.
ARMOUR INTEGRITY: 60%. SUGGEST DEFENSIVE ACTION.
“P!” I bellowed.
Pariah was on it. These two strains of the same species shared no kinship.
In abject rage, Pariah threw the primary-form against the wall—with enough force that the other alien’s body-armour split, squirting ichor. Dead.
At just that moment, Feng swam into view.
“Go!” Feng yelled.
He twisted about, and Pariah worked with him to hold another tertiary-form against the wall. Feng punched the xeno hostile with one fist, again and again, while Pariah put a barb through its face.
ARMOUR INTEGRITY: 50%. AMMUNITION LEVELS CRITICAL.
My panic was blinding. I was completely submerged, visibility was shot, and the current in the ship’s life-blood was pulling me back towards the navigator’s chamber. My medi-suite had started to administer a steady dose of combat-drugs, just to keep me functional. I kicked out with my feet, tried to move forward.
“I’m not going to make this,” I said, panting for breath. “There are too many of them.”
“Take the upper shaft,” Feng said. “I’m right behind you—”
A volley of bio-flechettes showered the area, a clutch of Krell gun-grafts on our six.
“Incoming!” I yelled.
Multiple impacts bounced off the HURT’s armour plating. ARMOUR INTEGRITY: 40%.
“Up,” Feng said, throwing his head upwards, firing his plasma rifle into the horde of Krell coming down the corridor. “Use that shaft!”
A vertical shaft gaped above me. Dark, tight, empty.
Pariah was already there. Limbs stretched across the tunnel mouth, like some massive spider. Climbing to the next deck.
“Come,” it barked.
Feng tossed aside his rifle to give me a leg-up. His null-shield flashed with impacts, taking more heat as the Krell followed up their initial assault.
“I’ve got this,” he said. Blood splattered the inside of his face-plate, foamed his lips. When had he been hit? His vitals were displayed on my HUD, and I knew then that he was as good as dead. “You’ve put on weight.”
“Not funny,” I said.
Feng grunted as he took the weight of my armoured foot. Hauled me up into the shaft. I gripped the insides of the tunnel with my fingertips. The sides were slick with algae, but as I drew my body up I used my knees and then my feet to climb.
And not a second too soon.
A brief bloom of light at the bottom of the shaft told me that Feng had gone out in a blaze of glory: as good an end as any sim could ever ask for. The backwash flared up the shaft, made the structure around me shake, but I was almost wedged into position and managed to hold tight.
Feng’s bios flatlined on my HUD. Extraction confirmed.
ARMOUR INTEGRITY: 32%.
Pariah’s shadow was above me—clambering talon over claw despite the explosion. Whatever had happened on this ship had seriously pissed the xeno off…
We cleared the shaft and emerged into another tunnel—still dark, but at least this one was dry. A sickening realisation dawned on me: I didn’t know where I was. The geography of this place was almost impossible to follow.
“We hear its signal,” Pariah said. Corrected: “Her signal.”
“Lopez’s freq-beacon?” I asked, slamming a fist into the face of a Krell primary-form that dared to follow us up the shaft. The body fell away, back the way that we had come.
“Yes,” it said. “This way.”
As I hauled myself up into the tunnel, I found that my left leg dragged behind me. I’m hit, I registered. When had I suffered that damage? I’d barely noticed the haze of error messages and medical alerts that flooded my HUD, but now I fixed on one. LEFT LEG ATTENUATOR DAMAGED. AUTO-REPAIR SYSTEMS OFFLINE. When I tried to lift the leg, the joint locked up. OPERATIONAL STATUS CRITICAL, my suit told me. I stumbled, grabbed the wall to steady myself. Jesus. It wasn’t just the HURT that was in pain. I was injured, and badly.
You cannot let yourself die in here, I thought. Even if it is only simulated.
“Suit,” I ordered. “Open medi-suite. Give me everything you’ve got. Keep me alive.”
The HURT didn’t argue, because we both wanted the same thing: to get off this ship. There was a sudden thickness at the back of my throat, a very familiar reaction caused by dumping excessive combat-drugs into my bloodstream. Time seemed to stretch for a heartbeat…
… then everything snapped into hyper-clarity.
But I was living on borrowed time, and I knew that this body would soon crash and burn. The suit medi-suite was compensating, ruining this disposable skin to achieve the mission objective. With the hyper-alertness came a sense of elation. The limb unlocked, attenuator hissing in protest, and I staggered on with new purpose.
Pariah had been watching me throughout, head cocked.
“I’m good,” I said. “For now.”
Lopez’s post was ahead, and I made out
her outline.
“I see you, ma’am!” Lopez said. Her expression was incredulous behind her face-plate. “What happened to your armour?”
“No time to explain.” Talking felt superfluous. Every word just took too long to say. “Novak and Feng are gone. Can you get Riggs on the comm?”
“I haven’t been able to for a while—”
Lopez’s null-shield fizzled as a secondary-form raked the tunnel with boomer-fire. There was an enormous thunderclap—the boom from which the weapon got its name—and a wave of heat washed the tunnel. I braced to take the force of the backdraft.
ARMOUR INTEGRITY: 19%.
Pariah ducked, escaping the explosion. Lopez wasn’t so lucky. She let out a sick cry, crumpled against the wall, then literally disintegrated under the onslaught. Although it seemed that no one was getting out of this in one piece, some weren’t going to get out of it in any pieces at all.
Pariah’s bio-suit warped in the intense heat. The voice-box failed to find any adequate translation as it let out a guttural roar. I fired simultaneous volleys from my guns, hoping to catch the shooter—
Behind me, Krell primaries poured from the shaft.
“P! They’re on me!”
Move.
Guns firing.
Krell firing back.
More primaries.
Bodies everywhere.
Screaming.
ARMOUR INTEGRITY: 11%.
CRITICAL ERROR! CRITICAL ERROR! USER EVACUATION RECOMMENDED!
No breath to even scream.
A thatch of black limbs above me.
Krell everywhere.
ARMOUR INTEGRITY: 3%. SUIT COMPROMISED.
I was on my back, the HURT’s HUD a mess of fractures. All I could see was an enormous Krell warrior over me, strands of black spittle dripping from its open maw, spattering the HURT’s face-plate. The alien raised a claw. Brought it down over my head.
“I’m finished—”
Brilliant white light filled my vision. The sound of the Krell assault became distant and remote.
I expected to feel the pull of extraction, the crash as the neural-link between my real body and the simulant was severed. That was how this usually played out.
But not this time. Instead, my sim-senses began to reboot. I was down, but I wasn’t out.
A sour, briny smell filled my helmet. Breached: the suit was breached. The Krell’s scent was foreign and familiar and disgusting. Combined with the odour of burning Krell flesh: an unmistakable tang.
Crack-crack-crack.
That sound was just as familiar: a plasma rifle firing on full-auto, the noise so sharp that it was dampened by the suit’s auto-senses. The body of my Krell attacker had been split in two, had collapsed across me, pinned me to the floor.
A voice came over the comms link: “Get up, Keira! Get up and get out of here!”
Riggs. Yelling at me. Incessantly.
I stirred from the floor and grappled the Krell’s smoking corpse. The body was flecked with silver threads across the hide, eyes pools of mercury, and it felt impossibly heavy. That, I realised, was because my armour’s man-amp was blown. My left arm was locked in place, and neither of my legs would function. Every grey plate of the suit was stitched with scars, pocked with stinger-spines, peppered with barbs…
“I … I told you to stay with the shuttle!” I said, my voice warbling in my throat, the words difficult to form properly through the miasma of drugs.
Riggs thrust out a hand in my direction. I went to grasp it, but I couldn’t move. I collapsed back into the pile of dead and dying Krell.
“I couldn’t let you go down like that,” Riggs said.
“You abandoned your post…”
“Don’t give me that shit,” Riggs said. Already, bio-signs were building all round us: the Krell closing in for another assault. “You okay?”
“I’m still moving.”
“Then do just that. Get out of here.”
“No,” I said. “I can’t fly the shuttle!”
“It’s automated,” Riggs insisted. “I’ve set the flight controls as best I can.”
“You take the black box.”
Riggs hesitated for an instant. Mouth open, about to say something.
And that was all it took. A Krell primary lurched from above him, speared him with a talon through the shoulder. Riggs howled. He twisted about, hurled the alien over his shoulder and into the wall. It was a particularly ragged-looking specimen, face a mess of lesions and sores.
Pariah pummelled the infected alien with both barb-guns. It was a mercy killing, in a way.
“It was a good plan,” Riggs said. “But not so much any more.” He slumped against the wall, clutching at the hole in his shoulder. “Fuck, that hurts. Now what are we going to do?”
I went to move again. The HURT’s servo systems whined in dissent, sent me back to the floor. The suit wasn’t going anywhere. Someone had to get the intel off this ship, but with Riggs and me down … That left only Pariah. No. It had to be me.
Acid rose in my gut, burnt all the way up my trachea.
“I’m bailing out.”
“What…?” Riggs asked. His eyes were already unfocused, the blood loss and trauma doing their thing to his sim-skin.
“My armour’s too badly damaged,” I said.
Without any further delay—because, if I let myself think about it for any more than a split second, I knew that I was going to persuade myself that this was a ridiculous idea—I thought-commanded the HURT to EJECT USER.
GOODBYE, the armour said.
Then the torso cavity opened like a clamshell and spat me out. I smoothly pulled my arms free and flexed them. The rest wasn’t quite so easy: my left leg felt numb, almost as unresponsive as the limbs of the HURT suit. I can’t believe I’m doing this. The corridor was cold, but the air clammy and wet: a weird combination. I had no respirator, and the ship’s smell alone was almost enough to stop me in my tracks.
“You’re insane,” Riggs said.
“I’m completing our objective. I have Pariah for security.”
Still, it was hard to argue with him. I yanked at the feedback-cables that tied my stimulant to the HURT, severing any connection with the armour. Pretty much everything hurt. I was bleeding from a dozen injuries.
“If a mission’s worth doing, it’s worth dying for,” I said.
“I hear that,” Riggs muttered.
Without asking his permission, I leant in, unholstered the Widowmaker pistol at his belt, and checked the load. Full magazine of armour-piercing rounds. Riggs didn’t resist, just watched on with awe in his eyes. Soon enough, he wouldn’t need it anyway. Then I reached for the HURT suit’s storage pouch—where the black box had been stored—and pulled it free. Handled without the HURT’s man-amp, the box felt a good deal heavier.
“We go,” Pariah insisted.
“One more thing.”
There was a small manual control panel just inside the HURT’s user compartment. The screen flashed erratically, the text difficult for me to read. But I jabbed at the controls, working fast, and selected the appropriate command. What little power was left in the suit was diverted to the set function.
“What are you doing?” Riggs said.
“You’re going to have to take one for the team,” I said. “I’m putting the suit’s frequency-beacon in overdrive. Absolute amplification.”
“Nice,” Riggs said. We bumped fists. “I think that you’d better do as Pariah says.”
I didn’t need any more encouragement.
I turned and ran as fast as I could, down the tunnel. The deck was slippery and wet. I was wearing only a neoprene undersuit, the fabric slashed and torn, and the atmosphere prickled against my flesh. The crawling sensation I’d felt pretty much since we got aboard this ship had returned tenfold.
Then on to the home stretch: the hangar bay. Pariah was beside me, bounding now to cover the distance.
Riggs had left the shuttle’s access-ramp deployed. I
n other circumstances, I’d have rebuked him for that. Right now, it was a godsend.
“In!” I shouted at P, as I leapt inside. Drank in lungfuls of atmosphere: it was mildly more palatable than that aboard the Krell bio-ship. I slipped, skidded, lightweight boots no good against the metal decking.
As soon as the xeno was inside, I slapped a palm on the emergency control. The ramp began to hum shut behind us.
“We’re in!” I roared. “We’re in the shuttle!”
Took me a moment to realise that I had no communications tech any more, that my rig had gone down with the HURT suit. I stumbled into the cockpit, saw that Riggs had left the transport hot, the control panel still illuminated. Slammed fists against the communicator control, desperate to hear another human voice. The Warhawk’s console crackled with static.
“We read you!” said Zero, from the speaker unit. “What’s happening? Your suit has gone off the grid.”
“Riggs saved me,” I said. “I think he’s dead.”
“Extraction confirmed,” Zero said. “They’re all dead.”
“Do you have the black box?” Sergkov asked.
“That’s an affirmative. P is with me.”
“Then you need to get out of there.”
“Double affirmative.”
The shuttle rocked back and forth, and through the cockpit view-port I saw flashes of shadow in the hangar outside. Something big and angry thrashed behind the now-closed access-ramp. Had they already finished with the HURT suit, already torn apart the freq-beacon? I had no sense of time any more, only knew that the Krell weren’t going to let me escape without another battle.
“Fuck you,” I whispered, keying the shuttle’s thrust control.
The boat was made for fast activation, and instantly the engine roared to life, spaceframe shuddering. Although I wouldn’t have wanted to fly the shuttle with a proper human cargo, Riggs had been right: most of the controls had been pre-set. That would have to do.
More Krell bodies outside. The sound of metal shearing, the shuttle’s hull being assaulted. Beyond the cockpit’s view-port, the hangar’s portal was a wide starfield.
IGNITION CONTROL READY, the shuttle’s control panel indicated.
“Here goes.”