I'm on something of a writing spree at the moment, hopefully chapter 11 will not be too long in the making. Given my present speed i'll have it up in a day or two. As for this chapter, it gets a bit gory near the end, nothing too major but hey that's just me ;-)

Chapter ten

Two lives for the price of another

The marines reenter the hospital for the third time that day; they missed seeing Rikku and the predator heading to the wreckage of the Dropship by mere moments. They close the door behind them and Vasquez takes out a portable welder and starts to seal the door.

"Is doing that reversible? We will need it to get out of here at some point," asks Yuna thoughtfully.

"Yes it is, but for now we need to secure this building. We also need to sort out the salvaged equipment, think of a plan to get out of here, and get Baird to wake up," orders Beclem.

"Well I have an idea; if we can find some sort of radio in here we can contact Buddy and Brother on the Celsius to pick us up, the storm won't affect the Celsius and there is more than enough room on the Celsius for all of us."

"You still have that airship? Man I completely forgot about it. Well we have a radio here but we'll need to patch it into one of the terminals in this building to get it working though. But sounds like a plan to me. Now, we'd better get Baird to the med lab so Bishop can deal with him. Once we've got him there we head to that computer room, we can set up the radio in there. Man it'll be good to see that ship thing again."

Yuna sniffles slightly, "Rikku should have been joining us on that ship too you know?"

"I'm sorry Yuna, I want to get Rikku back as much as the next guy but if we went in there to retrieve her then we would probably all be captured and cocooned in there as well. Then we would all be dead. Then what would happen? These things would spread to the rest of Spira and our deaths would be pointless. You don't have to admit it but you know I'm right."

"That doesn't mean I want it this way," she mumbles

"Didn't say you had to like it, but that is the way it is. We all lost good friends today lets not make their loss worthless."

"…Okay."

Beclem turns back to Vasquez who has worked her way from the top of the door down to a few centimetres from the bottom. "Have you done yet Vasquez?"

"Bite me man," she says as she gets up and brushes herself off.

"Right, let's move."

The marines walk into one of the med-lab's analysis rooms; Elma and Biggs place Baird onto one of the beds and Bishop sets about his analysis and treatment of the unconscious man.

"Well, it seems pretty obvious that head trauma caused his loss of consciousness. He's gonna wake up mildly concussed, I'll do what I can, though really there's not a lot for me to do, we just need to let him wake up of is own accord. Hopefully he won't be out cold when your airship gets here. You guys do what you have to do, but whilst I'm here I think I will have a better look at one of those facehuggers, preferably the dead one, just to see if I can learn anything from it."

Everyone smirks and Elma slaps a hand on his shoulder "Huh! Enjoy Bish' because we aint gonna hang around here to watch, see you later."

"See you."

The Marines leave Bishop to his own devices and head for the computer room. Upon finding it they enter and mill about until Beclem snaps his fingers to get their attention.

"Alright listen up, there are two exits to this building other than the one Vasquez welded up just now, I want those doors sealed. Vasquez and Campbell I want you to seal the door in the north wing of this building. Biggs, Frosty, you take the door on the east wing of this place, those doors must be sealed. The rest of us will be in here. Oh and take a motion tracker, just in case, in fact each take a couple of grenades for your pulse rifles, you never know. He hands a couple of grenades to Campbell and Biggs. As they depart, Elma takes Yuna and Tidus to the stack of equipment that they managed to salvage from the wreckage.

"Well this is what we managed to salvage from the APC. We've got enough magazines for one person each, that's not so good. We've got two flamethrowers, one of which appears to be damaged; I don't know what's wrong with that. We've got a case of 10 M40 grenades for the pulse rifle's, that isn't so good either."

Tidus rolls his eyes, "Is there anything good to report?"

Well now that you mention it we did manage to reclaim four of our latest UA 571-C sentry guns. They are essentially an immobile smart gun. These things are great, especially in our situation. Trust me, we are gonna need these."

Beclem studies the schematics of the building on a large blue horizontal screen with Paine.

"Okay, from what we can see here, there are two underground routes that those animals can take that lead to this building. There's this maintenance tunnel here, which I think they could quite easily run through two at a time or something like that, and there is this main emergency tunnel here which is about as big as one of the main corridors in this building. They needed to have it that big so that if the reactor malfunctioned in some way and people got injured in and around the reactor, they could be quickly sent to this building. It's through these two routes that I believe allowed those things to sneak up on the colonists inside this building and take them down so quickly, no one saw them coming. Those two routes are within 20 metres of each other, which will mean we can set up sentry guns pretty quickly."

"What if the creatures are already down there waiting for us?"

"We give them as much of a kicking as we can. There is a real problem with the main access tunnel though because there is no door that can be sealed in there otherwise people needing emergency medical attention might not be able to get through, now the problem with this is that we can't weld it shut. We can however weld the door to the maintenance passage shut. Now we have been fortunate enough to be able to salvage four of our remote sentry guns, those things will fire at anything that is not recognized as being 'friend', what we're going to do is place two of the sentry guns in the maintenance passage and two in the main corridor, if those things try to get through they will be minced, until of course the guns run out of ammo, hopefully they wont. These tunnels are on the level below us so it shouldn't take long for us to get down there with these guns, set them up and weld up that maintenance hatch. But like you said, let's just hope that those things aren't already there. But first we had better wait for the others to get back."

He turns to see Yuna, Tidus and Elma standing behind him.

"Shouldn't we be calling the Celsius?" asks Yuna.

"Yeah give me a moment and I'll have that transmitter set up."

Back in the med lab, Baird begins to stir; he opens his eyes and winces at the bright lights above him. He brings his arms to his face and rubs his eyes. Slowly he sits up, arms on legs and looks around himself. He sees his two pistols on the table next to him, picks them up and gets up to leave. He notices Bishop examining the facehugger and walks over to him.

"Ah, you're awake, how are you feeling?"

"I've got one hell of a hangover, but I'll live."

"Good."

Baird takes a look at the partially dissected facehugger in front of Bishop.

"That's a nice pet you got there Bishop."

"Amazing isn't it? There aren't a lot of creatures on this planet that don't vaporize into pyreflies when they die, this is a unique specimen."

"Well you enjoy I'm going to walk around a bit."

"Don't push yourself too hard. I suggest you get to Beclem, he's taken charge of the situation for now, and he's with the others in the computer room."

"Alright," nods the lieutenant.

Baird steps outside of the med lab and watches as Frosty and Biggs jog in his direction with a motion tracker in the hands of Biggs, and Frosty holding his sniper rifle. They stop jogging as they reach him.

"Yo Hicks, good to see you in the land of the living," smiles Frosty.

"Yeah it's nice to be back, though I wish I didn't have to get back to it with a headache. Anyway what are you guys doing here, where is everyone else?"

"Beclem, Elma, Yuna, Paine and Tidus are in the computer room, and Vasquez and Campbell are heading to the North entrance to seal the door. Frosty and I are off to the East wing of the building to seal the door there."

"I see. Well I'll come along," he says as he holsters his two pistols.

The other two marines look at each other a little skeptically "Are you sure about that sir?" asks Frosty.

"Yeah I need to move around again, and having something to do should focus my mind a little."

"If you say so sir," submits Biggs.

"I do say so, let's shift it, marines."

"Yes sir," they both reply, and the three start to jog off to the east wing.

Bishop, his back to the entrance of the med lab, continues to prod and cut the facehugger. Silently, another large translucent object runs past the doorway, but does not stay to deal with Bishop.

The only other remaining predator in Macalania managed to get into the hospital complex long before the marines returned from the wreckage. He has been biding his time, waiting for a moment to strike and now that that opportunity has presented itself he is not going to let it walk by. He stops running as he reaches a corner down the hall, seeing that the marines are about 20 metres further down this new hall he proceeds to follow the group at a more stealthily pace as, from his experience a brash predator is a dead predator. That was what had happened to the first predator, he got too daring, went closer than he should have, and death by a hundred bullets was his reward. He had no intention of being brash; he was going to stick to the rules of the hunt.

The marines turn another corner and he proceeds even more carefully; he didn't want to go round that same corner and find himself staring down the barrel of one of the humans mighty weaponry just because they had stopped after that turning. He reached it and looked around cautiously. They hadn't stopped jogging and must have been nearer 30 metres away from him, one of them was welding the door shut while the other two look in his direction, Frosty for one, was looking through his sniper rifle scope. At such a far range and with that kind of weapon the predator realizes that Frosty is now a deadly opponent. The big guns needed to be brought out.

He stands at the edge of the corner, just out of view and unclips his razor disk from his side, put his fingers in the five finger holes and the oval shaped disk springs to life and extends its diameter so that it becomes a circle shape. Tiny lights on the disk light up and move from the center of the disk out to the edge and move back in, rhythmically. The Predator takes a breath and peeps around the corner. The marines hadn't moved from their positions.

Frosty now has the tracker and is pointing it in the direction of the corridor; it makes no sound apart from the pip pipping noise that it always makes, indicating that there is nothing there; the predator is out of range. Biggs finishes the welding and gets up. Suddenly they hear a strange whooshing noise and watch, to their horror as the disk shoots towards Frosty who can do nothing but scream.

Time seems to slow down as they watch the large disk go straight through the helpless marine just below his rib cage, cutting him completely in two. The disk abruptly stops in mid air and heads back in the direction that it came from, the precision of the weapon sends it straight back through the cut it has already made. Frosty's upper body seems to hang in mid air as his lower body collapses backwards spilling his entrails on the floor, the horrified looks on Baird and Biggs say it all as what was inside Frosty's chest follows his lower body downwards, dragging the rest of his body with them and lands with a sickening splat on the cold metal surface. The two standing men look at Frosty in shock. With the last of his life Frosty looks back at them and mouths 'I'm sorry guys', closes his eyes and slumps back.

Biggs glares down the hall "I'm gonna kill you, you son of a bitch! You're gonna die!" He fires his pulse rifle down the hall hitting nothing but steel.

When nothing more happens, Biggs, with Baird on his right, advances slowly towards the end of the hall, their weapons trained ahead of them where they believed the creature was hiding. They draw up level with a doorway, at least ten metres from the end of the hall and the predator springs out at them; unbeknownst to them, during the moments when Biggs and Baird were looking at Frosty, the predator had taken the opportunity to advance on them and had concealed himself in the door way, which had just enough room to hide him in. It leaps out at Biggs and rams him into Baird. The momentum of the powerful hunter picks both of them up off of their feet and they are smashed into the wall opposite, the two men give loud grunts of pain.

The predator takes a step back and punches Biggs in the stomach, which throws him a fair distance away from the skirmish; he drops his weapon as he hits the ground. Stunned, he clutches his stomach, wincing at the blow. The predator looks at Biggs; rightly believing him to be incapacitated and turns his attention to Baird who he holds by the throat. With the sound of metal sliding on metal he withdraws his wristblades and holds his arm back. Baird looks straight back at him, no longer afraid of death, for he knew that there is no point in being afraid of the inevitable. The Predator wastes no more time and stabs Baird in the chest, he makes no sound but instead glowers at the Predator, who looks back with no emotion. Slowly Baird's defiant stare fades and his body goes flaccid.

"NOOOOOO!" roars Biggs.

The predator drops Baird and begins to advance on him. Thinking quickly, Biggs makes a leap for his pulse rifle, grabs it, rolls backwards and pumps the grenade launcher on the rifle.

"Eat this you bastard son of a bitch!" he bellows at the surprised Yautja, who stops dead in his tracks.

He fires the grenade, which impacts on the predator's stomach. The subsequent explosion is impressive for such a small object and the predator is blasted backwards, or at least what is left of him, the rest of him showers the walls, the floor and Biggs with fluorescent green blood and chucks of slightly charred alien flesh.

Staggered, Biggs gets up slowly and shakes his head "That felt good."

He shambles towards the end of the corridor where lay what remains of the predator, its head, arms and a little bit of its upper body. The carcass is covered with its own blood and entrails and was now motionless. Biggs looks down at it with a grim look on his face.

"Yeah that's what happens when you kill my brothers you piece of shit!" he spits on the mask of the dead hunter then walks away from the bloodbath, despondently, pulse rifle in hand.

Poor ol' Biggs i seem to be putting him through a lot lately, ho hum.