Hunter and Hunted
Chapter Twenty-one
Rick stepped into a mess as fiber optic cables, lights, panels, and more were hanging from the ceiling; there was smoke everywhere. Then things got even worse. The entire station shook like something big had hit it. "Alexis?" He knew she would know.
"Bee's shields are down. That was the two destroyers doing that. There are three cargo ships that have activated and are on the way. You have maybe 16 to 18 minutes before they hit the station, that will be about 3,000 Zombies," Alexis warned.
"SHIT! We don't have that much ammunition. Try and reach her, have her tell you where she is." Rick started walking and checked to make sure the others were right behind him. "Keep your eyes open back there. Once the Zombies get here they might find away behind us." He kept walking while using his targeting system to see if he saw anyone. However, what he saw so far were dead bodies. Waiting to be infected.
His warning had Jim spinning to look and scan behind him before turning back around. He didn't want to get lost in there.
"Three levels down, Dad and more to your left." Alexis came back. "She said something about loading something."
"Of course she is," Rick muttered. He should have known that she would be worried about some thing instead of her own life.
Rick stopped at a transit pod. "We need to find a ladder down, look around." He didn't trust that the power would last the trip let alone the trip back up.
"Over here," Kate called out and watched Rick start down the stairs. She followed him, her mother and father close behind them.
Progress was slowed when they had to move debris off to one side. They decided to try a different route when that space was actually on fire. "One minute, Dad. The first cargo ship's about to hit."
"SHIT! Where is she now?" Rick was worried that she would move and they would never find her in this mess.
"She says she hasn't moved. That she can't move, whatever that means." Alexis replied a moment later.
"Can't move?" Johanna had heard everything and was really beginning to worry about this trip.
"Just keep your eyes open. Zombies may be slow but if there are that many of them, this place will fill up fast." Rick lifted another piece of debris to one side.
They kept moving. "We're here, where is she?" Rick really wished his suit could talk to more than just his ship. In fact he didn't know how Alexis was talking to her now. It looked like the main power was down.
"She says in a storage locker. Look around. The third and last active Zombie-filled cargo ship is about to hit," Alexis added.
"Doors, start opening doors." He had no idea where the storage lockers were located on her station. So Rick picked one and just as quickly closed it. He was closing the second door when he saw a beam streak just past Kate's head.
"HEY! DON'T SHOOT ME!" Kate shrieked; she was here to rescue her, not get killed by her.
"She's says sorry and that she needs a hand to carry something," Alexis announced, having heard Kate screaming.
Rick took off his helmet and instantly smelled smoke and burning whatever. "BEE, What the hell!?" She almost killed his mate.
"Richard Castle! Who's that?" She pointed at Kate who she'd taken a shot at.
"This is Kate, my mate. We need to get moving. Cargo ships filled with Zombies are crashing into your station. And why are you fighting alone?" Where was everyone?
"Help me carry this. Move that gorgeous ass of yours and give me a hand." Bee didn't put down the weapon she was holding that was actually bigger than she was, though.
"This is Bee?" If Kate was willing to admit it, she'd been thinking that Bee was actually going to be just that, a bee, with wings and all.
"Jim, Johanna, get in here and pick this thing up." Rick didn't think he had the time to argue with her about carrying anything. It was just better to help her and get moving.
"Kate, Bee, take point. Get us back to our ship." Rick put his helmet back on.
Bee got out in front, mostly because she could only talk to Alexis and she wasn't here, though she wanted to watch her case carefully. What was in it was invaluable to her.
"Zombies!" Rick's voice warned followed by him shooting the creatures in the head. Problem was when one fell another took its place. "Keep moving, maybe a little faster." They moved slowly but there were so many of them.
Kate was a little behind Bee when suddenly Bee started firing her huge weapon. Kate still didn't understand how she could even use that thing. However, her firing it meant she was shooting at Zombies. Kate saw several behind the ones Bee was shooting at. It got her to bring up her targeting system and doing what she had been told, Kate fired one round per Zombie. "Rick, they've gotten behind us already!"
Bee started moving again, so did Kate. Her parents were right behind her, carrying what was about the size of a casket and almost looked like one save for the fact it appeared to be made of metal.
"Keep moving!" All Rick saw was Zombies. The part he hated most was the fact that his ammunition was being used up. He'd been through this before clearing out that Xindi Carrier. But he'd taken extra ammunition with him for that one. Now he had nothing extra on him.
Bee and Kate were a little out in front of Jim and Johanna, enough so that when she turned to look she didn't always see them. That was partly because of the stairs and partly because of all the mess.
It was because of that that she missed something. "JIM!" Johanna pointed past him only to have him point past her. They had Zombies coming down the hallway toward both of them.
They knew what they needed to do but they had never done this before so they weren't very fast at responding. Still it wasn't hard to fire a single round when the light came on indicating that they each had a lock on the head of a Zombie.
They were both still firing when Rick showed up. "Get moving, I'll handle this." They were slower than he was since they were carrying something between them. "Move it!" They hadn't yet started moving and were still firing. Finally Rick got their attention and they picked up what they were carrying and started moving. This left Rick to start firing behind him, as well as to his left and to his right. "Just how many damn cargo ships have hit us?" There were just too many of them to have come from only three cargo ships.
"Five so far, Dad, with two more about to hit. The last two are on the far side," Alexis answered him even if he didn't want one.
"How are you doing?" Was their ship in trouble?
"I'm fine, just get here without getting yourself killed." Thankfully, wearing his suit insured he wasn't going to get infected.
"I'm running low on ammunition so we need to be fast. Too many damn Zombies." Rick kept firing based on what his targeting told him. He was also watching his ammunition count. Still he had to keep moving or he was going to get trapped.
Kate stopped just a little behind Bee who was firing her monstrous gun. Well monstrous for her anyway, maybe even for herself. Since she was taller than Bee she looked over her, used her targeting system, and started firing.
They had managed to clear the corridor of not just Zombies, that had somehow managed to get behind them already, but also of debris that hadn't been there when they'd come through initially. Though since Bee was out in front and all of the corridors kind of looked the same to Kate, there was no way to tell for sure unless she asked and she was far too busy to do that.
Bee began moving again just as Rick caught up to Jim and Johanna. "What's the delay, keep moving." The corridor behind him was empty for the moment but that wasn't going to last long.
Johanna dropped her end of the case which forced Jim to stop; he asked what was wrong. "Just tripped over some debris." She picked her end back up again and Jim started walking again.
"We made it!" Kate saw Bee at what looked like an airlock; she watched her open it and go inside. Now that she was safe, her mind started buzzing with questions. Like how did the station still have air if cargo ships where crashing into it? Also how did dead Zombies not die exposed to open space? Then she looked back, saw her parents carrying that case, and waited for them.
"Go! Go!" Kate waved her parents into the airlock and waited for Rick. Her mother had just entered when Rick showed up, turned around behind him, and started firing.
This time it was Rick's turn. "Go! Go!" He wanted to be last and make sure everyone was onboard.
No sooner Rick had entered the ship than he retracted that walkway. "ALEXIS! Get us out of here!" It was time to leave. He turned to find everyone including Bee in the corridor that had access to the airlock.
"Moving." Alexis fired up the engines and started to move away from the station. "God, what a mess." Alexis could see what was left of it. Thanks to the cargo ships, one side had all but collapsed. That was when she noticed that there wasn't only a couple destroyers – there was a goddamn battleship! "SHIT!" At first Alexis wanted to add more power to the engines to get farther away from that beast. But no distance was far enough except one. She began warming up the jump drive.
"Stay here for now," Rick told all of them and ran to the transit pod that would take him to the bridge.
"Standby for jump," Alexis cautioned everyone after selecting a destination. Since it seemed they were going there a lot, she chose Earth once again.
None of them, however, listened to Rick and they all followed him. Though they had to wait for the next pod to arrive to reach the bridge. That pod had only just arrived.
"OH SHIT!" Alexis had spotted it. That battleship was building up power and she could swear she could see the weapon they were powering begin to glow. She had already committed some of their power to the jump, so she routed the rest to the shields and hoped they could take it. That was when she started the jump and it was also the moment the weapon hit them. The result was instantaneous. Everyone was thrown roughly up against a wall. They began to float then all of them hit the floor, seemingly face-first.
Rick pried the doors of his pod open since he had just reached the Bridge and what he saw was not encouraging. There were fires in every direction. He made to step out onto the Bridge to reach a fire extinguisher when suddenly he found himself floating again. He used the foot that wasn't in the air to push with and when he hit the ceiling he used the ceiling to push off of to reach the fire extinguisher.
The Bridge was starting to fill with smoke when he saw Alexis pop into view. Seeing her eased his panicked mind immensely. "We've got fires everywhere, Dad. Here, Engineering, and all three shield emitters. We have power for now, but barely." Her readings told her there was damn little and she was using most of it so she stopped projecting an image of herself.
"I'll handle the Bridge. Get Bee down to Engineering and the other three to take a shield emitter each." Rick reached the first fire and was in such a hurry that he didn't think and pressed the button. This caused two things: one, the propellant worked perfectly, but it didn't put the fire out. And two, what it did do was act as the business end of a rocket and send him crashing into the ceiling.
"DAMN IT!" He needed to start thinking or things were only going to get worse. He pushed off of the ceiling and landed where he could use his feet to brace himself and then used the fire extinguisher again.
Bee was much better at this. She found herself in Engineering with no trouble and had the big fire extinguisher in hand. Bracing herself, she began to put out the first of two fires.
The Becketts, though, had no such training. However, they did know what to do in a zero-G environment. Plus they still had their suits on. For each of them their first attempt at putting out the fire resulted in them all starting to spin out of control. "WHAT THE HELL!" Jim yelled just as Johanna spat out, "WELL, SHIT!" And Kate screamed, "DAMN IT!" With a little work they all braced for the next attempt and soon had the fires out as did Bee and Rick.
"Alexis!?" He didn't see her anywhere.
She answered by voice only. "Still here, Dad, just conserving power."
"What happened?" Rick pushed off to reach a console and hoped it still had power so he could see how bad things were.
"That battleship hit us just as we jumped. I added all the power I could to the shield. It should have blown a hole in us. A big one." Alexis knew what weapon had been used. They should be dead now. All of them.
"Can you replay it for me?" Maybe if he saw it he would understand what had happened.
"Not yet. Power's building, but slowly. A lot like last time." Actually it had been a really close call that it wasn't exactly like last time. For which Alexis was very thankful. She never wanted to be that dark again.
+x+ [-O-] +x+
Everyone was now on the bridge, the artificial gravity was back on again so they were standing and had even taken their helmets off. "Ready yet?" Rick asked. Meaning he was asking Alexis.
Alexis flickered into view. "Hi, Bee." It had been a while and Alexis kind of liked her even though most of the time she was a little insulting. It was just who she was.
"This is us. This is the station and this is the battleship." Alexis put all three up on her 3D display table. "I had killed power to the engines so we were drifting because of the residual movement. Just as we jumped, the battleship fired." She revealed what she had garnered from all of her recordings and scans.
Rick watched as the beam struck one of the pyramid's points. "It clipped us, One of the shield emitters, looks like."
"If it had hit us dead-on we would have a huge hole in us which would have killed us all," Alexis said somberly.
"Who installed your shield emitters?" Bee queried. "Whoever did it did a nice job." Bee had seen the power slice down in Engineering and since she knew the power that beam held, she knew they were lucky to be alive.
Kate answered her. "Gina. …Well her friends did, anyway."
"My kind of friends. Are they all as ugly as you are, Richard Castle?" Bee loved to tease him by saying the opposite of what she thought.
Kate snickered then said, "Worse! Much worse!"
"They were all spiders. About this big?" Johanna spread her arms wide and even then they weren't wide enough.
Alexis tried to get them back on point. "It leaves us with a problem. Main power's up, but the power to the shield emitters is down. The jump drive's down and our engines are also down." Alexis thought that was bad enough.
Rick closed his eyes for a few seconds and swore under his breath. "Which means we're floating in the middle of nowhere. Can't jump, can't move, and don't have shields. Our suits have barely any ammunition which means if anyone at all finds us, we're dead. Damn it all to hell! Any more bad news?" Might as well get all of it so he could go off and shoot himself with his last round.
"Just this. …I have no idea where we are. Nothing matches up to anything I have in my memory. Where ever we are, neither we nor anyone we've gotten maps from has ever been here. I can't see or scan anything that resembles any place we know." They weren't just dead in space, they were lost in space.
"I'm sorry, Bee. Everyone." It might not be his fault, but he was in charge and it had been his idea to go see Bee to barter for ammunition.
"It's not your fault, baby." Kate moved in close to hug him.
"We're not completely weaponless." Bee had a secret. A big one. Normally she would barter for what was inside it. It was just that if she wanted to live to be even older than she already was then she knew she shouldn't. After all they'd saved her life.
That had all eyes on her. "What's in that thing that you just had to have?" Rick really wanted to know if it was worth them risking their lives, more than they already had been.
"Everything." Bee meant literally everything. "Every single thing I own."
She saw all the questioning eyes looking at her. "I traded my biggest deal for that container. It's a dimensional holder." Bee was all set to explain when Alexis broke in.
"OH MY GOD!" Alexis looked at her in shock. "You're serious." Now everyone was looking at her with questions, including Bee.
Alexis saw them all staring at her, waiting somewhat impatiently for an answer. "A dimensional holder is just what it sounds like. There's another dimension inside that box. So long as you can get whatever it is in through the opening, what's on the other side in that dimension could be big enough to hold a planet the size of Earth for example. But on this side it only weighs what the box is made of, however big that is. I've read about them but never knew that one was real, until now." She was beyond impressed.
Rick and even Kate were keeping up. Rick looked at Bee again. "Everything? How?" How had she done that? When did she find the time to do that?
Bee hated to do this. It just wasn't in her nature. She was an arms dealer and traded for everything and that included information. "We spotted the Zombie fleet jumping in. It was too big, plus they had that damnable battleship. My shields were never going to hold up under that thing. So I ordered all my workers to abandon the station.
"I stayed behind to load the case with everything I could. I had planned on taking one of the shuttles, but someone else took it. I was dead until you showed up. I never dreamed Richard Castle and his damn fine ass would save me." Bee shook her huge head.
Kate was still trying to get used to seeing her. Bee was maybe all of three feet tall. She had a really big head for such a small body. The fact that she was bald didn't lessen her otherness. It was those eyes of hers that really got her, though. She thought of them as Marty Feldman eyes. They were huge and Bee always had those goggles on to cover them. Kate had no idea just what she was.
"Everything?" Rick tried again and saw her nod. "Ammunition, weapons?" That had been what they were talking about at the time and saw her continue to nod. "We'll work out what exactly is in it later. First I need to find out why the jump drive and engines are dead. Think you can handle the shield emitters? Find out what's wrong?" Rick looked at Bee.
Bee looked like she'd just been insulted and was all set to hurl insults at him when Rick held up his hands in contrition. "Sorry, just look for us, please. It's your life, too." If she wanted to keep on living they needed to fix this ship. Maybe she had just what they needed in that box of hers.
The question was, what did she want for any of it if she did?