Chapter Seven

"I finally convinced Jurgens to show me the video feed from the colony. And what I saw was glorious! Breathtaking! Miners undergoing a transformation into something extraordinary. I must know more. Even as the believer in me wants to become one of them, the scientist needs to uncover their secrets. I need to study one of these … Necromorphs, as Kyne so clinically puts it. I need to witness this infection first hand. Perhaps that patient from the colony …"

- Challus Mercer, Science Officer; USG Ishimura

Isaac chose to visit Medical Storage first. When he thought about it, he considered that Zero-G Therapy might be the shorter distance to cover, but with that taken into account, he wondered why he shouldn't take out the longest path first to get it out of the way.

So, after grabbing a couple of extra plasma cutter charge packs from the storage locker in the security checkpoint, Isaac walked through the large door labelled Medical Wing. Instantly, his revulsion shot up several levels. An uncovered, rotting corpse lay at his feet almost immediately beyond the doors. Blood was pooled around the corpse, but it had congealed and dried long ago. There wasn't enough of a uniform present beyond the blood and gore to identify which section of the crew the man belonged to.

Steeling his resolve, Isaac continued past the mangled crewmember and down the sloping hall to its bottom. Another two corpses were there, mangled again and covered in dried pools of blood. One of them, from what little uniform Isaac could see, was a medical technician. Another was an engineer in a dull green-grey jumpsuit.

It made Isaac wonder.

Why were there so many bodies here? He'd seen but a few corpses in the flight deck and tram control areas. And those had been scattered, random, distant. So why was it that so far, he'd come across so many here in the medical area?

It made sense from one point of view, he guessed as he rounded a double corner in the hall and passed three more wrapped corpses against the walls. The medical wards were the most logical places to find so much death and decay. Patients from attacks by these strange creatures would have come straight here for treatment. Corpses would have been brought here for analysis and dissection. But most of these bodies so far were in the halls. There had been near a dozen on the tram platform, not counting the blindfolded woman and her friend, McCoy, and another couple in the hall leading the security station. Thinking back on it, Isaac even remembered the stench of death in the security station itself. There'd been no whole bodies in there that he'd seen, though—only shredded pieces of wholes.

And yet, it made more sense to Isaac that, once the threat had been identified, whatever crew had been left over at that stage would have holed up in a place that was more defensible and practical. The Bridge seemed like a good place, perhaps even Engineering. But Medical was connected to nearly every other section of the ship, even without the tram system. Attacks could have come at them from any angle. If the creatures were even able to coordinate, as Isaac hadn't seen as yet, attacks could even have come from every angle.

Then Isaac thought again of Nicole. She was a senior medical technician on this ship. Would she too have been holed up here? Would Isaac find her corpse strew around the deck, mangled, covered in blood-soaked linen? Or would she have had the sense to flee? Would she have seen the dangers of staying there and gone to the safest place she could find?

A loud clanging ahead tore him from his worries, and he looked up from the blood stained deck to see that the door ahead of him was malfunctioning. He swore. Though it wasn't as bad as the last one he'd come across, this new door still opened and shut at speeds too fast for any man to merely step through. The saving grace for Isaac was that there appeared to be a pattern.

Open shut. One, two, three. Open shut. One, two, three. He forced himself to commit the pattern to memory. He wasn't stupid enough to try and jump through. Not without help. But it would help him in using his stasis module.

He hit it dead on and raced through when it was open, keying in the second door's release and stepping through without a pause.

He was in a lab of sorts. Or was it medical office space? Ahead of him was a table that came up to his waist. Atop it were some empty vials, some scribbled notes on what looked like real paper, and a plastic model of the major organs of the human body. Each plastic body part was colour coded for easy recognition for someone like, say, Isaac. The brain was missing, he noted casually.

Behind it was a lit panel board, a couple of X-ray charts pinned to it at the top. Isaac knew without a doubt that the subject of those X-rays wasn't human. He didn't know much biology but there was no mistaking that the charts were just wrong. Most of the major organs were missing or had shifted to other parts of the body. Its girth was twice that of acceptable standards for most CEC crew, and its arms were long and curved, ending in bladed spikes similar to the standing creatures he'd seen numerous times before. He hadn't seen this creature before, and he shuddered to think that he might.

A storage unit against the wall was unlocked, and Isaac opened it, hoping to find something he could use inside. It was empty, so he turned away from it, scanning the room with a cautious frown.

Several desks on the level he was on had been thrown around haphazardly. Waste bins had been tipped, their contents spilling out over the floor. Broken glass and panelling littered the floor amongst the paper and card of hard copy reports and analyses. Isaac even spotted a data chip near the edge of the platform, just inside the safety rails. There was no blood on the floor, no gore, no corpses. Whatever had torn this room apart had either been human, or it had been chasing humans and caught up to them somewhere else.

Still, Isaac was careful as he approached the locked door across from the one he'd come in through. He checked to make sure that his plasma cutter was charged. Just as he was within arm's reach of the door, however, a series of loud clangs alerted him to danger.

He whirled around quickly, checking the area around him for any sign of what it was. But all he saw were vents being sealed up by emergency shutters. The door he had come through was lit in red, rather than blue; locked. He raced to it anyway and hammered down on the holo panel projector, trying to get the holo back. His efforts were in vain, and he swore and kicked the door hard.

He spun again at the sound of a horrid screech. Emergency shutters were still clanging shut over vents around the level he was on. He heard duller clangs as vents in the offices below also closed off. The lights flickered and went off, and the darkness was lit only by strobing yellow lights.

"Hazardous anomaly detected." The drone of the ship's onboard computer was almost drowned out by the wail of quarantine alerts sounding in time to the strobing of the emergency lights. "Quarantine activated."

"Oh, that's just fucking great!"

Isaac raised the cutter just as the nearest vent exploded outward and a blood-and-flesh covered alien thing flung itself through the opening. It landed with a wet thud on the deck, straightened, and turned slowly toward Isaac. Without thinking, he squeezed the trigger on the cutter and blasted the head off the thing, following through with two shots at the chest that took off the entire section around the thing's lest shoulder. He finished with another shot at the leg on the same side and watched it drop heavily to the deck.

A howl alerted him to a nearby threat. He turned a little to the left to see another one racing—literally racing—across the deck at him. Continuing to act on instinct, Isaac blasted away at it. He watched with no small amount of satisfaction as the first blast hit the thing's gut and caused it to double over, in pain or reflex he didn't know. The shot also reversed the creature's course, and it reacted as though it had been hit with a battering ram. It howled in fury as its arched back hit the deck, but Isaac didn't give it time to get back up. He aimed a couple of well-placed shots to cut off its arms and one of its legs, and then swung around to look for more.

Though he could see no more of the creatures on the upper landing, which wrapped around the edge of the vast room, he could hear the unmistakable howls and screeches of more of them nearby. There was no point in denying to himself that he knew they were on the main floor, waiting for him. Just as there was no point in denying that he had to go down there. The only doors up here were both locked—and one of them led back the way he'd come. On top of that, past hours had proven that lockdowns such as the one that had trapped him could only be lifted when the creatures in the area were either dead or gone. If he wanted to access any room beyond this point, he knew he was going to have to eliminate whatever threats waited for him on the lower level.

Sighing to himself, Isaac trudged along the walkway around the far side of the room and followed it to the riser on the other side to where he'd entered. He stepped onto the riser hesitantly, cautious of malfunctions. Then, rather than hit the control holo which was, somehow, still active, he looked over the rail down to the lower level. Most of the area was obscured from his view presently by the offices to the left and right, as well as work benches and support pillars in the central area.

But one of the creatures was in sight, though Isaac wasn't sure if it was even aware of his presence. It just stood there, its arm spikes raised passively, its chest heaving with each shallow, rasping breath. It looked across the space in Isaac's direction blankly, as if it didn't even see him at all. He didn't bother wondering about it before he unloaded a few well placed plasma shots to take it out. It went down after the first one; the following three were just for added measure.

Sure that it wasn't going to get back to its feet, and that no others would come running to its rescue, Isaac keyed the descent control on the holo and waited patiently as the riser lowered him to the bottom floor. When it stopped, he stepped off it. The door immediately to his right was locked, ringed in red like the ones upstairs and sealed off with emergency plating. The one straight ahead, across the main space dominated by desks and pillars, was unlocked; one of the windows smashed, its shards littering the floor outside the office.

He proceeded forward slowly, ever aware that as yet, the lockdown had not lifted. He knew that that meant there were more of those things around. He came around in front of the office that had been to his left. The door there was unlocked too, and he opened it and went inside.

The office wasn't in as much of a mess. The table was still upright and the lamp atop it still standing. It cast a dim light over the table in the darkness, showing the strewn papers and report chips. There were more papers and chips on the floor, and they crunched under Isaac's heavy boots as he walked around. The vent was closed off. The shelving unit behind the desk and chair was bare. Two of the four storage lockers against the wall the desk faced were unlocked. One was open already and empty.

Isaac opened the other one. There was a small med pack inside, and he grabbed it without hesitating. Aside from the pack, there was nothing else. He clipped the pack to a slot on his belt, and then closed the locker again.

When he was certain that there were no creatures hiding in the office, Isaac went back to the door and keyed the release.

He almost screamed in shock. One of those things was on the ground just outside the door, and it was very much alive. It wasn't one of the ones with the tail, however. Its arms were still long, bony blades that promised death, but everything below the torso was missing. There was tearing at that area that made it look like it had been shorn away previously. Isaac aimed a heavy kick to its head and backpedalled to get a better aim at it.

It screeched at him then, its dark eyes boring into him and its jaw hanging loose. Isaac fired once, twice, and the thing collapsed to the ground, losing the support of the bladed arms that had held it up. He approached it, lifted his foot, and then brought it down hard on the thing's head. The skull cracked and splintered under the pressure, and then the entire head just collapsed under the weight, imploding into a squishy mass of blood and flesh and brains.

Isaac fought the gag reflex that hit him and looked up to see another standing bladed creature approaching him from the hall. He took it out with the last shots of his plasma cutter and then ejected the charge pack to insert another.

All went silent then, and he stood perfectly still, waiting. The lights flickered on, and the emergency lights went dark at the same moment. "Quarantine lifted," the computer droned.

Isaac sighed in relief. He wasn't completely out of the woods yet; he knew that. But at least now, the immediate threat had been dealt with.

He navigated the mess in the centre of the floor and entered the other office. It was in similar condition to the first: upright desk and chair, papers and report chips strewn about haphazardly, desk lamp busted but still more or less upright. The nearby shelves had a couple of plasma charges on them and he grabbed them without a thought, slipping them into his belt for further use. There was another med pack, but he ignored it for now—he already had one. After finding nothing else of use in the room, he left it and went back towards the riser.

The door near it was now unlocked, the security grill that had blocked it off had lifted. Isaac took advantage of that and went inside. Another desk and chair in that room, with more charts of the overweight-looking alien thing and a few charts of others he had seen so far. Six lockers near the second door, three unlocked, opened, empty.

He went past them and through the other door into a short corridor. He rounded the bend in the corridor and found himself in a longer extension of it. There were windows at the other end, and through them he could see the pale green glow of growth tanks. He approached slowly at first, until he saw movement through the glass. Then he picked up his speed. There was someone in there!

A man in a medical-science uniform rushed over to the window when he spotted Isaac and banged on the glass. "Come on! Come on!" he shouted through the glass. It wasn't soundproof. Isaac could hear him clearly.

Something small skittered around on the floor behind him, and that only served to ratchet the man's panic some more. "Let me out!"

Isaac heard a spitting sound and something small and sharp punched through the man's left hand, pinning it to the glass. He screamed in pain, and Isaac, on instinct, took a step backwards.

And that's when he saw it rise up. It was small, no bigger than a child. But its skin was a sickly green-yellow, veined and distorted. Its eyes were black orbs in sunken pits. Small proboscis-like tentacles shot out around its head like a mane, and three longer, barb-tipped tentacles extended from a raw and fleshy opening on its back. Those tentacles waved around in the air, the barbs ever pointed in the medical man's direction as the creature's jaw opened wide and it howled into the air in triumph. Isaac swore.

The tentacles flicked forward as one, and their tips thudded into the small of the man's back. He cried out again in pain and jerked at the strike. But he was still alive, still whimpering, still trying to pry his hand free of the barb that had it pinned to the glass.

The creature behind him turned away and jumped up to cling to the wall. He climbed about a meter and circled around, craning its neck around to look at the man it had just struck. Its tentacles came around again to strike. All three flicked forward again as one, and the barbs from their tips were spat out. They all impacted the man's head with enough force that it exploded, showering the glass with blood, brains and bits of flesh.

"Fuck!" Isaac hissed. The creature dropped to the ground and skittered out of sight.

He rushed around the double bend in the hall to the door. It didn't take too much time to key the release, and he rushed through to kneel beside the man's body. Blood was pooling around him now, and his arm had come off at the shoulder; the hand was still pinned to the glass as the rest of the body slumped with enough force to tear free.

Now he had proof that there were survivors on board; and not just survivors like the guy he'd seen killed by a bladed monstrosity moments after picking up the plasma cutter, or the woman at the tram station that had died shortly after he'd come across her. This man … this man had been in good health, aside from the panic, and the fact that he'd been killed. Isaac wished he'd gotten to the door quicker. He might have saved the man's life. And even a medical-science officer for company was better than no company at all.

Movement behind him and a horrid wail made Isaac spin around. A great mass of flesh and tentacles was flying through the air at him. He threw up his hands on instinct to catch it, holding it at arm's length so that it wouldn't try to chew at his faceplate. The plasma cutter clattered to the floor when he released his grip on it. The large tentacles on the small thing's back flailed at him, lashing out and over his shoulder. He heard wrenching metal, and then something tore through the flesh at his right shoulder. He cried out in pain and shook the thing in his hands until the barb withdrew slid free from him.

Then, before it could impale him again, he threw the wretched thing straight down at the floor at his feet. He swung his leg back, and then flung it forward with as much speed and strength as he could muster. His booted foot made contact with a squishing sound, and the force of the impact sent the creature flying across the room until it crashed head-first into a wall. There was a crunch as vertebrae shattered under the force of the impact, and the tentacles went limp as it oozed down the wall to the floor, tracking blood along the way.

Isaac bent over and reached for his plasma cutter, but a surge of pain from the wound behind his shoulder caused him to withdraw that arm and reach out instead with the other. He hissed as the pain stabbed into his brain, teeth clenched to stop himself from screaming. It burned, as if it was on fire, as if it were acid.

When he had his plasma cutter in hand, he switched it to his right, and then reached around his waist with his left for the recently acquired med pack. He found it, placed the canister in the crook of his right arm to hold it, and then reached for the med pack delivery cap on his RIG. He pressed down on it and it popped open at once. Then he popped the lid on the med canister and plugged it into the open slot. He felt the gel oozing from the canister into the auto-delivery system, and then felt the gel being applied through his suit to the wound at his shoulder.

He sighed as the burning subsided, faded, and then dropped the empty canister and closed up the delivery cap.

When the pain was fully gone, he pulled up a diagnostic on the holo. There was a hole in the armour of his suit, just as he'd expected. He knew he was going to have to find a repair bench to fix it. It wouldn't take long to do, and it wasn't the utmost priority right now, but it would have to be seen to eventually.

He took the time to look around the room as feeling and mobility returned to his arm. Power was out to a lot of the artificial growth pods, and those that were still active appeared to have locked their inhabitants into a stasis cycle to prevent degeneration while at the same time halting the growth procedure. A couple of the pods had cracked open, their liquid contents sheeting the floor while there was no sign of the subjects they'd housed.

There was a riser in the corner, and he took it up to the upper landing. The pods there were all deactivated or malfunctioning, their inhabitants already showing early signs of necrosis and decay. The smell was palpable. The glass doors on the equipment cabinet were shattered and littered the floor. The shards crunched loudly under Isaac's feet as he proceeded across the landing to the unlocked door on the other side.

When he went through the second door, he found himself in another office. There was a locked door across the room from him, and the one window was only half-shuttered. Looking through the exposed glass, he saw that he was back in the main lab area, where the lockdown had occurred—top level. Glancing back to the other door, he realised that it was the one he couldn't get through when he'd been here last. He frowned at the prospect of doubling back and going the long way just to get back to the security station.

On the solitary desk in the office was a large red canister with steel braces and a large, obvious hazard label. The script above the hazard label read as Thermite. Smiling, he picked it up and examined it for leaks. There didn't appear to be any, so he released a clamp on the lower-back plating of his RIG and slotted the Thermite canister there for safe keeping. The clamp closed over the canister, securing it in place.

He switched on his audio comm. and tied it in to Hammond's RIG frequency. "Hammond, I've got the Thermite."

"Alright, that Thermite should be able to melt through the barricade back in the security station," Hammond's voice came over the speaker. "But you'll still need a shock pad to ignite it. I'm unlocking the door for you to make things easier.

"God; I hope I can hold this position. I can hear something big moving out there." The channel cut off with a burst of static, and Isaac looked over to see that the locked door was … no longer locked.

"Thank you, Hammond," Isaac whispered to himself.