He didn't presume to have to explain zero gravity combat to her, but Tails did feel compelled to warn the vixen about what they might be up against once they stepped out of the airlock.
"They're out there," he said softly, hoping she would understand.
"Of course they are," Fiona sighed.
The real problem was the fact that as quiet as the monsters were roaming the deck of the Ishimura, they were even quieter in the vacuum of space.
"And you're sure we have to fix this from out there?" she continued.
"Yes, the malfunction indicates the problem is with the canon itself. The reloading mechanism is likely jammed. It's common on these older models, especially if the power fluctuates."
Palming the access panel, the airlock lights engaged, strobing obnoxiously even as sound was sucked out of the room into the endless abyss. The expansive hull spanned out before them, stretching as far as the kit cared to look.
Inside the alloy RIG suit, his elevated heart rate become immediately apparent. What should have been a steady, was anything but. Every pump sent a loud erratic thump into his ears, each reminding him that he truly did have something to be scared of.
Keep it together.
Any other mission this would have been as routine as changing an air filter, but there was nothing routine about this. Scanning his path, Tails kept an eye out for any service hatches or vents that the creatures could claw their way out of. With a free paw he signaled as best he could to the vixen behind him to mind the openings.
Carefully placing one foot in front of the other, the thunk of his boots became as rhythmic as his pulse. With a deep sigh of what he wished was relief, Tails reached for the access panel on the rail gun. It was a massive cannon that fired 300mm scrap metal rods at approaching asteroids. It would completely obliterate anything smaller than a house. In the case of anything larger it would typically break up the boulders into rocks whose size would no longer threaten the integrity of the hall if they made it past the system.
Turning back to the fox peering over his shoulder, he grabbed her helmet and pulled it to his.
"Watch my back," he yelled as loud as he could.
In the absence of a working radio in the vacuum of space, engineers could always rely on direct contact communication. The sound would easily travel from his suit into hers if they were touching, but it would be feint.
"How long?" he heard back at a whispers level despite the obvious strain in her voice.
"Five minutes."
With a nod, Fiona tapped at her suit's wrist display, reminding him their oxygen levels would support no more than that.
The kit spared no time getting to work. Peering inside the gun's service hatch it was easy to see the loading mechanism had fouled itself on the soft iron round. It happened if the loading cycle was interrupted by a power outage. It would just need a nudge in the right direction at the right time. Tails reached for the manual over-ride and then with his free arm aimed his gravity tether at the breach. At the same moment, he pulled each as hard as he could. The hull vibrated as the two-ton cylinder lurched into place and the ADS panel's system lit up green.
"There," he said to no one in a sigh of relief, "all done."
But he wasn't all done, far from it. He had been trapped in too tight of corridors to see the bright blue flashes of plasma arching their way through the abyss. Everywhere he turned the creatures were descending on them, on Fiona.
Reaching for his own weapon, he drew a bead on the closest blade wielding monster and pulled the trigger. The fiend staggered, its grip lessening from the hall until it was unable to do more than flail in the dead space between the Ishimura and the nothing.
Tails realized he didn't need to kill them outright. These creatures, unlike the pair of foxes, did not have magnetic boots. Without their claws they would be lost to the void. Placing a hand on the vixen's shoulder, he gave a strong squeeze to signal that he had her back.
The torrent of plasma erupting from their weapons grew stronger, but so to did the wave of enemies. More than once the foxes found themselves pushing each other out of the way of attacks the other could not see. Daggered bone blades, large forearmed swords, it made no difference, everything was just as deadly out here as it was inside.
If he hadn't stopped to reload, Tails might have missed it. The creature was still over 200 yards out, but closing the distance at a blinding pace.
"No…" he muttered to himself before back pedaling until he felt his suit pressed up against another set of armor.
"We've got a problem!" he yelled at the top of his lungs."
A less than cordial, "no shit," was all he got in reply."
"Big one," he gasped as he began sending plasma bolts down range.
They did nothing to slow the roided out beast down.
"Fiona!" he screamed louder.
This time he could feel her armor shift as she turned to combine fire.
The creature was some how bigger than the last mutant they had encountered. Its hulking form was beyond imposing even at hundred feet away. Worse yet was the fact that unlike its smaller brothers, it seemed to be able to shrug off blaster fire as if it were nothing more than a water gun.
With an extra set of claws protruding from its back, the creature was more than capable of keeping a firm grip on ship's surface. They needed something that imparted more energy to knock this creature off course, but short of Isac's line cutter, there was nothing aboard the Ishimura that might do the trick.
Unless...
The kit released his weapon, letting it drift to his side. He knew what needed to be done, and he had only a few seconds left to do it. Furiously he tapped at as suits controls, burying his way into Ishimura's controls as quickly as he could. Tails could feel the vixen stealing glances at him, her gaze questioning his decision to stop shooting and play IT tech at the worst possible moment.
With a chuckle the two-tailed fox looked up as he raised a pointed finger at the creature. Snapping his thumb forward, the kit imitated the discharge of a pistol. In the blink of an eye the fiend was gone, reduced to nothing more than the blunt end of a physics equation.
He watched as Fiona lowered her plasma rifle slowly in disbelief. She gestured grandly in the direction of where the creature used to be as if to ask what happened.
All it took to erase their problem was a couple tons of lead accelerate to well past five times the speed of sound. It all happened so fast that there wasn't even time to process it. The formidable creature was there one moment, gone the next.
With a smile Tails pulled her helmet to his and replied, "I found a bigger gun," as he pointed at the ADS canon he had just repaired.
To say luck had been on his side as an understatement. When ADS canons went offline, they dropped parallel to the deck so that they could be repaired. And while the kit had repaired the weapon, he had never put it back into service. If he had it, it would have resumed targeting and destroying asteroids. Instead, he had been distracted by the battle that had been raging on right behind him. It was only at the last moment that he realized he might be able to manually fire the canon just as the freakishly large necromorph walked into its path.
Reaching up into black, Tails watched as the vixen prodded an eerily crimson blob. That along with the fine red mist that began to accumulate on his visor was likely all that was left of the creature that would have certainly been the end of them.
As she returned his weapon to him, Fiona began tapping her suit's wrist screen, reminding him of her depleting oxygen levels. With a nod, he motioned for her to follow him back to the air lock. Together they walked through a field of flailing corpses, trying and failing to lunge at them, break them, turn them. Part of him wanted to laugh as they strode through this proverbial valley of anything but the dead.
It wasn't until the sound came flooding back that he realized how hard he was breathing, how hard his companion was breathing. The vacuum of space had forced his body to sharpen its other senses while ignoring the noise his ears introduced. With the return oxygen, so too came the sound. Folding back his visor he dropped to his knees gasping for the air that he had always had.
"I'm glad I found you," came a whisper.
He wasn't sure if she had meant to say it out loud. Part of him thought better than to respond, "me too," but the words had already found their way past his lips.
I'm sorry it's taken me this long to update the story. I've had more requests to continue this story than perhaps any other I've ever written, so I will do my best to renew my efforts.
Cheers,
M.D.
