"Vera, Vera!" I found myself shouting into my headset when I could not push past Brensen into the bloody hallway beyond the bulkhead door.
Vera's smooth "Affirmative," snapped me back into some semblance of calm.
"That damn thing grabbed Fox," I stated, stepping back into the repair hangar's catwalk and getting my thoughts back together, "I need you to track him. Tell me where it's taking him." At least I had the forethought to hand out personal tracking bands to everyone before we had left the command section.
Vera did not respond verbally, but instead I could hear her swing around in her chair and her fingers start flying over the bridge's command console. Though she rarely, if ever, expressed emotions, I could tell by her actions that she was, indeed, worried. She had been listening in to our exchange, and had undoubtedly heard Fox's last scream.
"I have his signal," her voice spat back to me after a moment. "He's in motion deeper into the engine core." There was a pause, then she added, "He appears to be between decks two and three."
"It's still in the ventilation system," I remarked to Brensen, who was likewise listening on his own comlink as he still watched the mix of blood and gathering condensation drip from the ventillation shaft.
"Are we going to go get him?" Greavers asked somewhat nervously.
"Yes, we are, him - and it," I said through gritted teeth.
"Man, I don't know if that's a wise idea," Greavers cautioned. "It's already got one of us, and I'm all out of ammo."
"Two of us," I stated, reminding him of Holiday. Greavers grimaced at the reminder. I took a moment to back away from Brensen, pulling the clip out of my pistol. Five bullets left, plus one still in the chamber. I doled out three bullets to Greavers, warning him, "Don't waste them."
By the time I had slapped the clip back into the pistol and turned to Brensen, the large man had already swung further into the hexagonal corridor and was glancing between the steam-shrouded hall and the ventilation shaft. Where the huge hangar had been entirely dark other than our flashlights, the light in this hallway would flicker to life for a second, and then plunge back into utter darkness for another two. Between the sudden bursts of light and the fog that filled the area, it was going to make maneuvering the area hell.
I carefully moved up past the dripping ventilation shaft towards Brensen, followed by Greavers, who hesitated at the doorway, peering upward into the black shaft above us.
"Captain," Vera's crackling voice warned me. "Fox has stopped moving. He's on deck three now, near cooling station number six. It is about twenty-five meters aft of your position."
I could see Greavers pale. We'd have trouble covering that distance so quickly while standing up these twisting, maze-like corridors full of hissing and humming machinery. This thing had covered that distance quickly in the ventilation shaft.
"Any luck with ship's sensors on tracking that thing that grabbed him," I asked.
"No, unfortunately. Also, now that you are in the engine section there is too much activity for the motion sensors to be of any use at all." Vera noted.
Greavers, who was likewise hearing Vera's increasingly static-interrupted voice, could only shake his head.
"Captain, the ship's communication network is severed in that section, along with system controls," Vera alerted me. "Once you close that bulkhead door, most likely we will loose communication."
I looked back to the bulkhead door that Greavers was crouched under at the moment. "Captain," Vera stated to us. "Perhaps I should come to you. I share Fox's technical knowledge of the ship and could advise you-"
"No," I stated, motioning for Greavers to shut the bulkhead door. "You stay where you are and monitor what you can. I need you to keep trying to reroute the ship systems to anything that might give us back control back over the ship's power and engine system." Vera sighed compliance, but I was already tuning her out, covering Greavers as he laid his pistol on the ground, out the large splatter of blood, so he could winch the coffin-like bulkhead door shut behind us.
I hated to cut off Vera like that, but she was an android - she'd do what she was told. It was true she had Fox's technical knowledge - the man had programmed that into her himself. He'd also modified her in other ways as well, and at times I could swear she felt for him, perhaps because of it. But in a fight, she'd be worthless - Fox had made sure her Asimov protocols were not only intact, but enhanced.
It had actually been Brensen who had requested those particular enhancements. Though he would never talk about it, I knew Brensen had been in more than a scrap or two during his marine tour. He'd seen or experienced something that had made him want to get as far away from his military career as he could. Also, he could best be described as cool towards our company as well. He certainly had a healthy disrespect for it, so much so I wondered why he'd take a position on our crew, working under contract. His only response was he'd work for us, but he wasn't working for our employer.
When Greavers finished sealing the door shut, he retrieved his gun and grimaced at me. "You know we're going to have go back through it," he said, carefully standing up.
"I don't want it circling back behind us and slipping back out into the hangar," I reasoned. As Greavers pulled up past the ventilation shaft, I turned to Brensen and motioned for him to move forward. I made one last attempt to contact Vera with my headset, but received nothing but static. With the communications network down in this area, I couldn't even hear Greavers or Brensen's nervous breathing through the headset.
We were on the second deck of the Orgenella now, following a hexagonal hallway marked with yellow and black stripes at waist height. Heavy machinery protruded from the lower half of the bare metal hallway, and a myriad of pipes and conduit hung above our heads. Fluorescent lights were suspended at regular intervals above us, recessed above the metal braces that held up the ceiling and pipework. The stark white light slowly thrummed to brilliant life every few seconds then instantly fell to darkness, all along its length as we made our way towards the cooling station. I almost wish the lights were completely out, as the sudden shift to darkness made even the flashlights worthless to see by until the next slowly rising flicker of overhead light.
We were about ten meters down the corridor when it shifted forty-five degrees to the right. Beyond Brensen, I could see two columns of hissing steam pouring downward towards the floor, like some medieval dragon were belching the vapors from its very nostrils.
"That must be the source of the steam," Greavers commented from behind me, vainly trying to run his flashlight up and down the column to pinpoint the source.
"If it is," Brensen stated from in front of me, "that's not good. That's liquid coolant for the reactor."
"Feels damn hot," I commented, still a good two or three meters away. "Can we get past?"
"Gonna be like stepping through a really hot shower," Brensen mumbled, "Vapor's harmless enough, it's just the heat that's bad for you." He stated, taking off his shirt.
"What are you doing?" I asked, shining my flashlight at his face as if it would make him stop.
"There's a control valve on the other side of that geyser," Brensen explained. "I can get through and shut it off. Kill two birds with one stone."
"What birds?" I barked. I knew what he was about to do, and it was the same foolishness that had robbed us of Fox. At the same time, I knew it had to be done if we intended to move off. There was no way I or Greavers would get through without getting scalded.
"If you shut that off," Greavers asked, momentarily distracting me, "Ain't that going increase how fast the engines will overheat?"
Before I could look back to Brensen, the huge man lurched forward, dashing through the geyser with little more than a grunt.
"Goddamn it," I cursed, taking a few steps forward to follow him, before being stopped by the intense heat I felt from the downward columns of steam.
A few moments later, I could hear the protest of the metal valves on the other side as Brensen worked at dissipating the monstrous clouds of steam. I watched intently, holding out my gun in case I should see another glance of the alien creature stalking up on Brensen. But the columns of steam and flickering light kept me from being able to see even Brensen.
After what seemed an eternity, the steam finally dissipated, turning into a warm fog at our feet. As soon as it was feasible, I made my way over to him. "Don't do that again," I half-heartedly warned him. I could see his glistening skin was red and I saw the grimace he tried to hide on his face. "You're burned."
"I'll live," he tried to assuage me, stuffing his half-soaked shirt into his belt. I did notice that he no longer let the strap of the pulse rifle dangle on his shoulder, but that it now dangled beneath the gun as he took the forward position again and led us down the hall.
"Cap," Greavers called from behind me. "Look at the floor."
Brensen stopped and I whirled around, shining my flashlight feebly at the floor. It took a moment to see what Greavers was talking about through the metal grates that covered the piping beneath the main floor. The flickering lights above reflected off standing water that seeped between the pipes.
"Crap," I mouthed. "From the water reclamation system?" I asked Brensen.
"Smell like it's got coolant in it - liquid hydrogen. Must be mixing with the oxygen in the air," he said, after a sniff. "We've got a big leak," he said, "And it's not just from the pipes back there."
"Isn't liquid hydrogen supposed to be cold?" Greavers asked aloud. I looked at Brensen, knowing the answer should be yes. I knew just enough about the ship to also know that the water storage system was tied into the cooling system as a back-up in case of a failure of the hydrogen system. The hot steam we were seeing back here meant that system had kicked in.
"We better get moving," I stated, and Brensen nodded, getting back up and moving on.
A few more meters down the hall, the corridor swung back towards the aft of the ship. Then, after a few more meters, it opened into a large, octagonal chamber. Two other hallways lead out of the room, one to our left and the other to the right. Across the room, protruding from the ceiling were the lower portion of three 5,000 gallon tanks that made up cooling station six. Pipes and conduit ran to and from the system, like a hundred umbilical cords feeding an enormous set of metal triplets.
The floor of the room was depressed by short flight of six steps down, to provide ample headroom beneath the tanks above. However, the room was flooded with water up to just above the first step. In the center of the room, another octagonal structure protruded from the surface, the glistening metal handholds of a ladder leading down protruding upward from padded wall as if they were some sort of periscope. We could hear water cascading down over the inside wall of the stairwell.
Brensen's light followed the trickle of water that cascaded into the pool of a room up strange, glistening stalagmite that lead to the storage tanks. Hissing nostrils of white ice belched from long scratches along the storage tank, eventually melting at the tips and turning into the cascade that ran down into the water below us. The air was oddly hot, and exceptionally humid.
"What... the... fuck... is that," Greavers breathed from behind me, indicating the column that Brensen was illuminating. In the flickering light, I could have sworn it looked like a long, stretched ligament of muscle, half-covered in a dull gray sheathe of bone of chitin. Large, round holes in the stalagmite revealed the corded flesh-like material beneath it and seemed to collect the melting water to direct it into the pool below.
As we watched it in the flickering half-light, I realized the stalagmite was breathing.