by S. A. Lusher
“Open fire!” he called.
They formed a semi-circle and began laying down fire on the Shadows that were emerging from open vent grates in the floor and ceiling, from behind crates, from among the gathering darkness. The gunfire was loud, but an incessant, awful whispering was even louder. Greg pounded out shell after shell, hitting a new Shadow each time, but there were so many of them. Even as he emptied his shotgun, he didn’t have time to reload and was forced to pull out his pistol. He kept his shots as careful and accurate as he could.
He managed to kill enough of them that when he needed to reload, there was time to do so. He slapped a fresh magazine into the gun and kept firing, emptying it and then the next one as well. As he reloaded with the last magazine he had on him, the whispering finally died away. They waited for several seconds.
“Okay...how do we figure out how to restore power?” Greg asked.
“We need a terminal,” Eve replied. “We find a power cell to hook into it and then we run a diagnostic, get an idea of where we need to go and what we need to do. Look around for Spec Ops suits of power armor, cells from their armor should work fine,” she explained.
The team quickly went to work, watching the shifting darkness as close as they could. It didn’t take long to find a suit of power armor that was intact enough to recover power cells from. Once they got them to Eve, she tracked down a general access terminal across the bay and hooked them up. The screen flickered to life and she spent several minutes running through the diagnostics procedure. Greg kept watch with the others while she did this. He could occasionally hear whispering or something shifting, but no gunshots.
No one was alive or fighting down here.
This deck belonged to the Shadows.
“Got it,” Eve said. “There’s a major power junction node that was damaged. If we can get to it, I can fix it, and that should give us power.”
“You don’t sound too certain about that,” Eric replied.
“A lot of damage was done in the fighting,” Eve said.
“Great. Fine, let’s go,” Greg said.
The group moved slowly out of the bay and into a long maintenance room. Greg played his light over workbenches and lockers, tables and shelves. He didn’t see any Shadows, or anything else lurking in the darkness. Cautiously, he moved through it, trying to find a good compromise between a brisk pace and a cautious one. A single misstep could result in death in this miserable place. As he reached the far door, he froze up, hearing whispering somewhere nearby. He couldn’t tell where it was coming from, let alone if it was in the room with him or not. Finally, he opened the door, grateful at least that the bare basics of emergency power still allowed doors to work. Nothing beyond the door, just another rigid length of metal corridor.
There were skeletons laid out across it, bleached bone in suits of armor.
“Fuck,” he whispered as he set off.
He was at least grateful that he wasn’t doing this alone. Although the fact that he wasn’t meant that his friends were at risk and he hated putting them at risk more than he did himself. If they died, he had to live with it. And he didn’t really live with it all that well. He thought that probably everyone else on the team was stronger than he was, more emotionally stable, more capable of handling loss. It’d probably be easier for them if he died than the other way around. But, all things considered, Greg still liked being alive enough to fight for it.
They hurried down the corridor, took a turn, moved down another passageway and came to the door they needed. He opened it up and cleared the room with a quick sweep of his shotgun. The beam of light revealed walls covered with all sorts of tech and gear and workstations. No Shadows, though. “Clear,” he said, stepping inside.
They spread out across the room, checking the corners and the shadows, any small niches that could be hiding places, vent grates, while Eve moved over to the node. Greg glanced over as Drake approached him.
“Hey, you doing okay?” he asked.
“Um...yeah, why?” he replied.
“You look like shit,” he answered. Greg snorted and Drake laughed. “You know what I mean. You’ve been going longer and harder than anyone else here. Jennifer, Eve and Genevieve were on ice for half the mission and Eric and I were down for the count. You’ve been going, going, going since the beginning. I just wanted to make sure you’re holding it together.”
“Yeah...I am,” Greg replied after a moment. “For now. I’ll be honest, this needs to be over soon. I’m pretty depleted right now. I’m running on empty.”
“Almost there,” Drake said. “We’ll get it done.”
“We’ll get it done,” Greg agreed, feeling some of his lethargy lift. Perception was a weird fucking thing. You could spend hours, days slogging through a horrible situation but when you were near the end, when you should be absolutely dead on your feet, just knowing that it was almost over could give you a huge boost of energy.
And fuck did he need one.
“There,” Eve said suddenly. Her statement was followed by a loud click and a hum of power. The lights overhead shined to life, although they weren’t nearly as bright as Greg had hoped they would be. But whatever, light was light.
“Thank fuck, can we go to the engines now?” he asked.
“Yes. We’ll need to move to the other side of the deck to get there. But it should be easier now at least,” Eve replied.
Greg grunted in reply and headed back out into the corridor. He stopped, frowning. “Uh-oh,” he said.
“What?” Eric asked.
“Take a look.”
They joined him in the corridor. Back the way they’d come, the lights were out. The light from their current location only reached so far.
“Some light’s better than none. Come on, we can’t linger,” Genevieve said, heading off.
With a sigh, Greg followed after her.
Why couldn’t anything ever be easy?
Just even one fucking thing?
They hurried down the length of the hall and then paused at the edge of the darkness, shining their lights into it. No Shadows were waiting. They quickly moved through it and then passed through a door beyond it, coming into the first major leg of their journey: the ship’s oxygen plant. The room was long, broad and mostly dark. From what little Greg could see, there were immense silver tanks to either side them. Huge pillars ringed with piping and supporting all manner of equipment and life-sustaining gear provided a kind of central wall, running down the middle of the room. In between the pillars and tanks were open areas.
They were littered with bones.
Nothing but bones and more bones.
“Fucking hell,” Drake whispered. “It’s almost like a feeding ground.”
“I wonder how many there are,” Greg murmured as he began walking through the bones, playing his light across the darker areas. “Dozens at least.”
“Maybe even a hundred,” Jennifer said quietly.
“Shh!” Eve hissed.
They all fell silent and froze. Greg heard it again: the whispering. He looked around, trying to keep the rising panic down. Out of all the horrors he had endured on Tempest, in Polaris and here, he feared the Shadows the most. The only thing he was more afraid of were the Deathless. Thinking of them helped calm him a little. He’d faced down worse before, and he could do this. He’d done it a hundred times already.
Just aim and shoot.
Kill and move on.
It was what he had to do. It was all he could do.
Greg finally spotted a pair of neon blue eyes staring at him, glowering in the overhead gloom. He yelled out a warning, raised the shotgun and fired. The Shadow burst and melted away into the air, but the whispering intensified.
“Go!” he called.
They began running, kicking their way through the bones and scattered remains of the personnel who had been here when it happened. Shadows crept out of dark spots, out of vents, from behind and beneath machinery and huge pieces of dead equipment. Greg aimed
and fired, aimed and fired, the shotgun jerking in his armored grasp. He’d made it halfway across the bay when he ran out. Working fast, he fed more shells into the weapon. He’d only gotten three shoved in when he was forced to yank the barrel up and squeeze the trigger once again, narrowly avoiding death by blowing a leaping Shadow dead ahead of him into free-floating dust.
He fired off the last two shots and quickly fed more shells into the shotgun, listening to the others blast away behind behind, keeping the horrors at bay. He managed to hit the far door and open it up, seeing glorious light beyond, without any other Shadows getting too close. He leaped through and cleared the space beyond, finding himself in another maintenance bay. He turned and provided cover for the others as they rushed through the door. Once the last person, Eve, was through, Greg hit the close button.
The whispering became muted and distant.
“I fucking hate those things,” Eric said.
“Seconded,” Greg muttered as he forced himself to keep walking.
They made their way through the empty maintenance bay, then through another, larger one, finding no more Shadows waiting for them among the darkness. After another five minutes of navigating a partially-lit network of corridors, they finally arrived at the main engine room. It was, thankfully, fairly well-lit.
Greg and the others stood guard again while Eve checked out the main workstation. Several minutes passed by in muted gloom.
After another five minutes, Eve cursed suddenly.
“What?” Greg asked.
“I’m fucking locked out! I can’t do anything here. I can’t get into the fucking engines. There’s no way we’re doing this from here,” she replied, looking at him.
“Where then?”
She sighed. “The bridge. We need to get to the bridge if we want to blow this ship to hell.”
“Of course we do...fine, let’s go,” he growled, setting off yet again.
* * * * *
It felt like it took ages, eras and eons, but the squad finally managed to work their way back up through the various decks, cutting out as much time as they could by taking whatever elevators and stairwells they could find. Once they got up to the first deck, they found what was left of Special Operations making a last stand against the Mutants. The team waited until both of them had whittled each other down, then killed the survivors. Greg didn’t feel particularly good about it, but he was in too much pain to care.
At last, they stood before the door to the bridge.
“Get ready, we’ve got no idea what’s behind this door,” he said, keycard in hand. The squad formed up by the door and he slid the card, then keyed the button. As the door opened up, a gunshot rang out and Greg hard several startled shouts.
A body dropped.
“Don’t fucking move or I’ll blow us all to hell!” a new voice shouted.
Greg looked down at the body of whoever had been shot, fear seizing him. Then he saw the face behind the plate and he felt a cold kind of relief.
Volker.
He was the one who had taken the bullet, right between the eyes. Well...if nothing else, it solved the problem of how in the hell to deal with him if and when they left this ship. Speaking of which...Greg looked up.
The bridge was a bloody, wrecked mess, just like everywhere else on the ship. Two people were standing in the middle of it. Well, one person was standing, another was leaning heavily on a console, clutching at a nasty wound in her stomach. The man holding a smoking pistol in one hand and what appeared to be a detonator in the other must have been Blackmore. He was tall, pale, barrel-chested and sported an ugly graying mustache. His suit was torn, burned and bloody, but his eyes were still sharp and focused and lethal.
“Blackmore,” Greg heard himself say.
“Yes...Blackmore. Alexander Mathias Blackmore,” the man growled.
Behind him was a woman in an equally battered military-issue uniform. She was a slight woman with severely cut black hair and olive skin. Her face was a mask of pain and she was clutching her stomach, which was bloody.
There was a Mutant corpse not far away from her.
“You disgust me. All of you. Do you have any idea how hard I’ve worked? The sacrifices I’ve had to make!? Do you!?” Blackmore roared. “I’ve fought and bled and killed and sacrificed for the Galactic Alliance, for the human race, and what do I get in return? Shit on. Shoved aside for some band of mercenary scum run by a senile old man who has no fucking clue what he’s doing. I’m going to enjoy killing you. All of you,” he said. “I’m going to enjoy wiping out this disgusting, pathetic race of cowering, whimpering morons.”
He began to raise his pistol.
Greg still had his gun in hand, but what could he do? Could he risk shooting the bastard and blowing them all to hell?
Well, yeah, he sure could.
Even if they all died, it meant that the threat would die with them.
But as he was preparing to do this, the woman behind him, Jericho, suddenly moved. She moved fast, but Greg could tell the effort cost her. She had a knife in hand and before any of them could do anything, she plunged it into Blackmore’s neck. He let out a brief scream and then went limp. Greg’s whole body tensed, waiting for the explosions, the sudden death, the bombs. But nothing happened as the detonator and pistol fell from his grasp and clattered to the deckplates. Greg let out a long sigh of relief.
Jericho groaned and collapsed to the floor.
“Clear the room,” Greg said, moving forward to her. He kept his distance, having no idea what her motivations were, and crouched in front of her. “Why’d you do that?” he asked.
“Because he was insane,” she groaned.
“He’s always been insane,” Greg replied.
She shook her head. “No, he wasn’t before. When we started working together. He was smart, decisive. He was a real visionary. Don’t give me that look, I’m not an idiot. Smooth-talking politicians are a credit a dozen. Blackmore was the real deal. He told me his plan a year ago after we’d started working together on some under the table assignments. I had a lot of contacts in the military, a lot of pull. He had money, resources. He started setting up this operation. His plans...they made sense. If he had followed through, if he hadn’t gone this insane fucking route with his Saturate...I wouldn’t have killed him. You’d be the one dying right now.”
“Fantastic to know,” Greg muttered. “How’d you get Spec Ops to run security?”
She sighed, winced, looked away. “Blackmail, bribery, threats, lies. The ends justified the means, in my book. I knew where a lot of the skeletons were buried, so I helped him secure security for this op. I’m not proud.”
“Yeah, you got a lot of good men and women killed,” Drake said, standing next to Greg. “The bridge is clear,” he said.
“Good.” He considered it for a moment. “That detonator, was it legit?”
“Yeah. I rigged the bombs myself. Last-ditch self-destruct mechanism.” She gestured to the Captain’s workstation she was leaning against now, in the center of the room. “All the data you want is in there. Take it, then get out of here, blow this place to hell.”
“You’re coming with us,” Greg said as Eric settled into the workstation.
She shook her head, winced, coughed. She spat out a thick wad of blood. “No, I’m not.”
“This isn’t open for debate,” Greg replied, getting his medical kit out.
She waved him away. “I know. I’m staying here. Got hit deep by that fucking Mutant there. It got my liver. I don’t have long. After everything that happened here...I don’t want to make it off this ship. Just...leave me.”
Greg opened his mouth to argue with her but, abruptly, her head bowed forward, chin resting against her chest, which no longer rose and fell. The light faded from her eyes. Grunting, Greg reached out and checked her pulse.
“She’s dead,” he muttered, standing up and replacing his kit. “Well...fuck.”
“I’ve got the data,” Eric said. “Can we pleas
e leave now?”
“Yeah,” Greg replied. He saw Genevieve retrieve the detonator. She studied it a minute, pushed a button on it, then secured it.
“I’ll take care of this, make sure it doesn’t go off accidentally,” she said.
“Perfect. Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Greg replied, setting off.
* * * * *
It was almost as if everything onboard the Perseus knew that if they allowed the squad to escape, they would die.
So they were doing everything they could to prevent that.
All manner of Mutant, Fiend and Shadow crawled out of the metalwork, snapping at each other as they tried to kill the escaping squad. Greg gathered whatever ammo he could on the bridge, then put it to use as they shot their way back down to the second deck and into the hangar they’d originally come in through. He emptied the shotgun and abandoned it, then put the rifle he’d found to use, hosing the opposition down, burning through magazines. There were no words as the squad shot their way through bloody, metal hallways, across abandoned, body-strewn rooms carpeted with spent shell casings and discarded weapons.
By the time they got to the hangar, Greg had been reduced to his pistol again, but he no longer cared, because there it was.
The shuttle.
Their escape.
Almost there. Just barely twenty meters between them and salvation. And they would have made it without a problem if a Serpent hadn’t come out from behind it and started making right for them. “Aw fuck,” Greg groaned, grabbing for his rail driver. Someone had since closed the bay doors and re-pressurized the hangar.
“You’ll blow out the hull!” Jennifer warned.
“No choice! Gotta kill that thing!” Greg replied. “Everyone seal up! Get ready!”
He aimed, waited a second to see if he could think of any other way to deal with this threat, then squeezed the trigger. This thing needed to die right now. The rail hit it dead on and as he watched the rock snake fly apart in a plume of dark gore, he was really glad that he’d made the decision to save that last rail.