"Hey wait a minute, we're leaving him behind?" Barry worriedly asked. "Whats he gonna do ?".
"This ship needs to breach the surface before we can escape. He's going to the controls to get it out of here. And then probably initiate the self-destruct so that it doesn't follow us" Ross surmised.
Ryuki made his way towards the bridge. White gleaming walls boxed him into a narrow passageway barely large enough to allow his mech to pass through. He considered stepping out and walking the rest of the way but a cold chill sprang up over his skin and his hairs stood on end. The thought of being outside, unarmed and unprotected, sent fear racing back into his head. He thought he had succumbed it but really all he did was push it aside by replacing it with the need to escape. His team had now departed, leaving him with only his own concerns. And those led eventually to the idea of death.
In the darkness of his pilot bay , with the dim lights flashing and the shadows swaying, death approached him like an emptiness that spread from the bright harsh light that poured through his view screen. He focused on it , even as he piloted , to watch it grow and cover his controls and displays. It could have been a trick played by his mind. His vision may have been adjusting to a different level of light due to the changing size of his irises.
A good reason didn't stop him from slowly approaching that event horizon of the mind. He felt drips of sweat develop down the sides of his torsos. His forehead cooled as drops slowly flowed down to his cheeks. One drop slipped into his eye , causing his vision to go blurry as he rubbed his eyes. The blur had warped the immaculate hallway into a strange psychedelic landscape of merging light and shadows with walls that seemed to heave and breath and spill into the darkness.
His eyes adjusted , the displays returned to their pale states and the hallway no longer looked like an endless starched landscape. In front of him was the hatch that led into the bridge. It was too small to take the mech through. He waited there for a bit, wondering what to do. He could blow it open to make space but that could destroy the flight controls.
He breathed heavily. The lever to open the hatch was a few centimeters away from his right hand. His hand was shaking as his mind couldn't process the decision. It jerked as if stuck but came closer to the lever until finally the tips of his fingers hit the rubberized handle. Instantly, he pulled the lever down and popped the hatch open.
He climbed down and approached the hatch. It wasn't particularly large but seemed heavily armored. The control panel too was armored with a few clear partitions for buttons and the display. The green unlock button pulsed . It seemed the door had already been unlocked or was left that way.
He tapped the button and heard a series of bolts and locks whir into motion. The loud clang of the door indicated that it had fully undone the safety bolts and stops and waited for him to pull it open.
He hesitated for a moment , wondering if death was on the otherside. Death was something to fear but oddly elicited curiosity. He was tentative about it but his heart pounded with excitement. The adrenaline began to flow through his veins and a new strength took over.
He pulled it open , expecting to see disgusting fistulas and polyps but he saw something that was much more disturbing. Standing at the bridge controls was one of many figures. The back of its head was ridged like the lobes of a brain but it pulsated with green veins . Something seemed to be stretched over its face, some kind of mask Ryuki thought.
The creature turned around as the others continued to manipulate the controls. The face was human. It was human once at least. It was stretched over like rubber. All the parts of the face were there but none of the bone or cartilage to support it. The nose was flat and the cheeks were bloated. There was no jaw but the lips and mouth were still there. The eyes though, they were completely gone and replaced with chromatic disks.
Then he heard the voices.
They couldn't talk but he could hear them some how. It was a low hum at first , like people whispering to each other in a quiet room. But instead of soft words they sounded like cicada chirps that stretched and morphed their frequency ranges until it became maddening. They were trying to talk to him.
Eventually the sounds coalesced into something that seemed understandable. They were words , he could tell that much ,but still disjointed. It seemed they were attempting to figure out how to talk to him by probing his mind for word associations. It was a horrifying experience to hear words so stretched and distorted. If he were believer he would have thought that this was some demon speaking to him in tongues.
The face was unmoving but inexplicably he could hear cogent, concise phrases coming from its mouth. It was buzzing through his head, all the words being dumped on to him. Soon they harmonized into a weird atonal melody , surely enough to drive anyone crazy. But somehow he managed to survive the psychic assault.
"You have been disturbing us" he hard clearly. The chromatic eyes looked at him , the muscles on the face began to twitch as if to show some kind of emotion. "Our launch has been delayed" he heard the voice speak again.
Thats right, Ryuki remembered why he was there. Force the ship to launch ,make it crash upward through the ice shelf and allow his team to escape in the auxiliary ship. "We know what your comrades are doing" he heard the voice echo through his skull.
"We do not wish to engage in combat on this deck. It was assumed that you would have been captured by our troops in the cargo holds. When you breached into the primary hull we had realized that our containment plan had failed".
"What's this about ?" Ryuki mustered. His head was still dizzy , making it difficult to say anything more. "We cannot allow you to escape. Our operatives would be in grave danger otherwise". Operatives. That makes sense. The people who evacuated the base, they were the operatives. This ship was their base.
"What do you plan to do" Ryuki asked as the pounding in his head became more manageable. His vision ,though ,worsened. It was them, it had to be. They were disorienting him to keep him docile. Behind him, the mech waited. He could slip back in and blast plasma fire into the bridge.
"You will not pilot your machine" his mind told him. His body felt otherwise. All the maneuvers drilled into his head, all the instincts that began to pulse through his blood, they were telling him to run for it. "Even if you do get back in, what do you intend to do? Your comrades are already surrounded and you have no way of escaping through the ice shelf. Surrender now", it said.
The other beings continued their work as if nothing was happening. They were drones , this one must be the drone commander. He inched his way backwards but a forceful pressure against his back resisted him. He turned his head to see no obstacles in his path. He could feel something trying to control him. All his might now focused on overcoming the grasp of the parasite. His aching body felt as if it was being pulled down and towards the bulbous figures in front of him.
His ears began to ring and vertigo began to take away his senses. His stomach churned as if he were on a boat in the middle of a typhoon. Sweat poured out from under his hair and raced down his sides . His legs began to chafe , his body contorting against his will.
His body only had enough strength left to activate the hardsuits retrieval protocol. He could no longer guarantee control over himself but the suit was impervious to psychic attacks. He released his body so to concentrate completely on maintaining his grasp over his thoughts.
The suit turned itself around and speedily entered the mech. Instantly the voice disappeared. The hardened shell had blocked it like a faraday cage blocks radio and wireless. He activated the missile silo and armed another warhead. They definitely know now that he is ready to fire.
The spike of radiation sends quivering waves of skin over the distorted human face of the parasite-alien. It cannot speak to him , ostensibly to threaten his team or himself should he fire the missile point blank. It wasn't necessary anyway, his displays were flashing red warnings and a constant drone of klaxons and voice alerts made sure that he knew what he was committing to would be insanely dangerous.
He turned on the loudspeaker. "Launch the ship now or I will turn this ship into a radioactive heap" he said. He turned the speaker off and observed. The drone commander stood for a brief moment. Perhaps contemplating how long it would take for the guards to rush back. The commander had made such a naive mistake. But that mistake revealed the inner workings of these creatures. It was completely possible the reason why it didn't realize the tactical mistake of not guarding the bridge because the mind it leached off didn't realize it either.
Now if he could just survive the ordeal he could actually tell someone about it. The missile rail slowly arched over his shoulder , pointing straight at the commander. The sirens reached an apex of annoying ringing. Everything was telling him how stupid this was. One of them would have to stand down before this went nuclear.
The cargo airlock into the auxiliary ship was big enough to handle very large cargo and freight containers. Their three mechs and the think tank fit inside it comfortably. Dizzy scanned using her onboard short range seismic sensors. She could see large blobs show up on her scanner, slowly approaching the airlock from all directions.
"Hey Dizzy , I figured it out!" Wasp said with disturbing enthusiasm. For the longest time he hadn't said a single word. Dizzy assumed he was too shell shocked to speak up. "You frakkin idiot, what did you do!" she yelled back. "Hey man, they don't call this a think tank for nothing", he responded.
"What?" she yelled. "Its a tank and tanks have cannons yeah? Not just those peashooters you've been using. I mean, didn't you wonder why the hell this thing is so big even though it only fits three people?", Wasp replied.
"Whats your point, man!?" she yelled back as she watched the scanner fill up with white blobs about to envelope them in a kill box. "I got the cannon working, well more like a railgun. I got access to it, it just needs to turn out now. It was retracted into the thorax ,probably to keep it safe. Now we can activate it!" he yelled.
Ferromagnetic fluid began to fill bladders and hydraulics, the sound of which like sloshing soda in someones throat. The top panels of the thorax popped open and then spun around on the multidimensional joints. Coming down ,they formed armored shields on the sides and gave space to the rail gun to sit snugly on top.
The magnetic rails extended out and the hyper-capacitors began to buzz with energy. The air crackled from the static electric discharge from the gun assembly with tiny sparks intercepting dust like lightning bolts.
Barry and Karin worked as quickly as possible on the access hatch. The ship wasn't built for a strike force to be easily transported. The doors were designed to keep pirates on the outside but it also kept the soldiers in. Bashing the control panel failed to give any useful results and now the plasma torches were burning.
They could hear the low rumble of the oncoming horde. They had to rely on Ross and Dizzy to hold back the flood. Karin thought it was hopeless. Barry strung together curses and swears into an unending run on sentence.