XI
The corridors of the lower levels of The Eden were eerily deserted, as if the people who worked there knew something was amiss and had fled to the higher levels, out of the way of the quartet of armed men and women and the dark beings that followed them.
The passages themselves were dark and poorly lit, the lower four levels of the ship unofficially referred to by other crew members as The Underground. Pipes ran the length of the corridors at head height, some humming with the power that coursed through the wires protected within, others almost glowing from the superheated gases and liquids they ferried back and forth. The lower levels where home to a lot of complicated machinery involved in the smooth running of the hydroponics ship and the many domes that ran the length of the craft, most of which needed to be maintained almost every hour of the thirty-six hour days the craft operated by.
"Like a ghost ship," murmured JT, carefully peering into the rooms leading away from the main corridor of the deck. Chambers as dark as the corridor greeted him, posts simply abandoned mid-shift: chairs lay on the ground, tables upended, bunks left unmade, and entertainment consoles and decks of cards were left unattended.
'Happens all the time, you know?" JT carried on. "Ships just deserted, left abandoned as soon as something goes wrong. There's hundreds of ships that have been left crewless out there, that's one of the reasons salvage is such a big business at the moment. Me and Naki considered it once, the two of us going in to business. He couldn't get the collateral behind us to get it rolling, though: do you know how much a ship costs? Millions for something that would work as a cargo hauler, which is what we would've needed for…"
"Crew here may not have had time to leave their stations," Stevens cut him off. "You seen those things pull my injured men out of the barracks. They wanted them alive: food, I guess, maybe they like their meat warm."
"They eat us?" JT asked, almost moaning.
"Seen their teeth, right? I don't picture them as the type of creatures that sit and munch on carrot sticks, do you?"
"They eat," murmured Evelyn, passing her handgun from one hand to another. "They eat the flesh. They eat the meat. They eat their way out of us."
"Are you okay?" JT asked, stepping back from the Marines and falling in line with the doctor. "You want to stop for a while?"
"We don't stop," Stevens said aloud. "We keep moving to the shuttle bay, make sure it's clean for the dropship coming. More men, more weapons."
"A show of force," Dawes agreed. "Not that those things will understand."
Far behind them, the echoes of a deep explosion rolled up the corridor, followed quickly by the dying screams of a handful of the nightmare animals. Stevens picked up his pace, urging the group forward into a brisk pace, then a light jog.
"They'll follow us, but slower: They'll think we've ambushed every pressure door, every junction."
"Assuming they think," Dawes pointed out.
"No, they think: they flanked us in the barracks, surrounded us in a classic pincer, they're intelligent, like a pack of lions or something like that, they know how to hunt their prey. Speaking of which, we're there prey, and we need to make tracks. Where's the lift?"
"Left at the next junction," JT said, jerking his head to the left as if to indicate the direction. "Fourth door on the right."
The rest of the journey to the lift was conducted in silence, the four rounding the corner and reaching the doors to the lift. Stevens rapidly hammered the cracked plastic button even after it illuminated a gentle yellow, indicating the system had acknowledged his request and the cage was rolling down the shaft. Behind the sealed door they could hear the screeching of gears, the grinding of the lift as it slowly came to a halt and the doors hissed open, revealing the interior…
And the creature that awaited inside.
At first, JT couldn't recognise the creatures: the few he'd seen had been from the front as they advanced on him, he was yet to see their back: the other side of their distended ribs that met in the centre of its back, its spine a thick ridge of dark bone that flowed along the contours of its back and dripped away from its body into the razor-tipped tail that uncoiled from its body like a deadly snake, swinging lazily back and forth. Four ridged spines rose from its back, made from the same toughened material as the rest of its leathery hide, the organic pipes angling upwards and away from its hulking torso. At the sound of the doors opening it twisted at its waist, glaring eyelessly over its shoulders and opening its dripping mouth with a rasping hiss. With a clatter of resinous claws against metal plating it tried to spin on the spot and bear down on the four people, but the two Marines were quicker than it, lifting their rifles and spraying a salvo of automatic gunfire, crisscrossing its torso and finding its gaping maw. The soft slugs shredded its teeth, spraying fragments of enamel and spatters of ochre across the walls of the cage, its skull tearing open under the clatter of gunfire and erupting in a putrid spray of acid that made the steel structure warp and melt. The creature crumpled to the floor, thrashing wildly and smashing its limbs against the walls, a gurgling wail oozing from its lips.
"I'm not getting in there with that," Dawes grimaced, spitting on dormant creature, "Pull it out."
Stepping gingerly over the carcass, Stevens kicked and prodded the corpse with his boots, grunting with the exertion as he moved the heavy beast, then beckoned to the other three people to join him, Evelyn in particular.
In the corner of the lift, previously hidden from view by the bulk of the creature, there lay a man, his limbs held down by a thick secreted liquid to the walls and floor, a natural glue-like substance the alien must have produced to render him immobile. A stream of acid had struck him when the creature had been taken down, a smouldering wound that had chewed through his thigh vomiting bilious green smoke that reeked of chemicals and melted flesh, but he hadn't screamed when he'd taken the acrid spume: his head was obscured by mass of tumour-like material, a pale yellow pulsating mass of rubbery flesh that enveloped his face and remained in place by the ten-inch fingers that dug into the back of his head. A coil of powerful muscle looped around his neck, constricting as if it sensed the presence of the new people and the danger they could pose to it.
"The fuck is that?" Stevens asked. Everyone shook their head, unable to comprehend the sight before them. "What should we do, medevac this guy? If we can pull him off the wall, I mean."
"No," Evelyn shook her head, warily stepping around the carcass on the floor and into the lift, moving around the prone figure and examining his head. With something to keep her attention and pull her away from the gunplay and life-threatening dangers she was facing, she seemed to be able to focus a lot more, something she'd demonstrated when tending to the injured Marines. "This creature looks like it would leave marks similar to the ones similar to those I found on the missing engineer, and Naki, too. Claw marks at the back of the head, like fingers holding him: rope burns or marks on his neck like he'd been strangled."
"And both of those men had those snake things burst out their stomachs?" Stevens nodded his head. "I'm seeing a pattern. So that thing puts a snake in your guts that eats its way out. What happens if we pull it off?"
"I don't know," Evelyn shook her head. She reached out, gingerly touching the rubbery flesh of one of the bony spines wrapped around the head of the man. The creature responded with a clicking hiss, tensing its legs and constricting its tail even more. The tips of its elongated digits drew blood from the back of his head, and any flesh visible beneath the living mask started to turn purple as the airflow was cut off. Evelyn stepped back, away from the creature, and it seemed to relax a little, the legs and tail slackening off.
"I think if we pull it off, it'll tear his face off."
"Tough choice," Dawes said, stepping in behind Evelyn. "Take it off and it tears their face off. Leave it alone and it'll eventually drill through their ribcage. Either way, they're gonna die."
"I know what way I'd rather go, given the choice," Stevens said, stepping forwards and unsheathing his knife. He grabbed the top of the creature, ignoring its hissing, then pried the blade in between its underside and the mans face, levering it back as he pulled. The man started to spasm and jerk as the creature was peeled away, its protesting hisses becoming louder and louder as its grip on the host became weaker and weaker. With a wet belching noise, it slipped away from the mans face, tail thrashing and dripping thick wet mucus before spewing a fine acidic spray from a number of pores on its fleshy underside. The corrosive mist settled on the mans face, started to melt the flesh down to the bone as he thrashed his head soundlessly from side to side, his limbs and body held in place by the resinous cocoon. Still struggling with the alien arachnid, Stevens could see the flesh of the man bubble and liquefy before his eyes, could see the bone start to crumble and the pulsating pink mass of his brain as it oozed and trickled into the acrid soup that was forming in the hollowed skull.
The man was dead, his end no less graphic and bloody than what would have happened had the creature been allowed to implant its demonic seed, but with the host dead the parasite still had a job to fulfil, and the Marine holding it seemed as likely a candidate as any. Slippery in his grip, the creature started to flip and squirm in Stevens' hands, wrapping its tail around his forearm and trying to crawl up his arm towards his face. He slammed the small creature against the wall of the lift again and again, each blow weakening its grip a little more until it fell limply to the floor. Stevens quickly finished the job by pulling his handgun from his holster and squeezed off a trio of rounds from his handgun, each bullet smashing into the soft, pink underside of the creature and spraying acid blood across the floor. Muttering under his breath, he dropped the knife, its blade now a soft, shapeless mess from the contact with the acid spray, and he looked at his fingertips, the skin there smouldering from the exposure to the defensive measures of the animal. He resisted the urge to put the damaged skin to his mouth – he didn't want his teeth or his tongue to fizz and melt. He opened one of the pouches on his belt, pulled out a sterile dressing and dabbed his fingertips, gritting his teeth while he motioned for JT to enter the lift behind him.
"Is it safe?" he asked, peering into the cage, at the dead bodies and the acid damage to the walls.
"Take your chances in here, or take the stairs," Stevens shrugged his shoulders. "I'm taking the lift. Your girlfriend's taking the lift. Make your choice before those things come around the corner."
JT muttered something under his breath and stepped carefully into the lift, warily eyeing the corpses and thumbing the bottom-most button on the control panel, stepping back from doors and watching them slide shut before the cage started its short journey three levels down.
"We get down to the shuttle bay," Stevens said, wrapping the dressing around his hand and readying his pulse rifle again. "Meet up with the dropship there, get some real ammo loaded into these weapons. From there… I guess we'll see what the new guys bring to the table, see if command has any ideas once they've read through those reports I sent through."
"What about us?" Evelyn asked.
"Can't send you back to your normal duties, can we? We'll think of something, don't worry."
The doors to the lift slid open as it came to a shuddering halt at the bottom of the shaft, opening up in a large chamber almost fifty meters square. An airlock lay on the floor in the centre of the chamber, a thick door set flush against the deck plates and surrounded by the yellow and black stripes of hazard tape. The entrance to the elevator was set in one corner, beside an office area made from a skeletal structure of steel overlaid with sheets of reinforced class. In the event of a breech or airlock malfunction, it could protect someone from the vacuum of space, and was where the deck sergeant could normally be found when he was on duty. In the opposite corner of the hangar to the office, a quartet of yellow exoskeletons stood a silent vigil over the units that housed their recharge sockets.
The shuttle bay was eerily quiet and deserted: no deck sergeant, and no maintenance team stripping down and cleaning the powerloaders. Although they could be hiding behind one of the barrels of jet fuel or engine parts, JT thought that would be unlikely.
"Well, we got here," Stevens announced, walking into the office and dusting off the seat before sitting down and tending to his wounds. Dawes followed and sat on the seat beside him, allowing Evelyn to look over her cuts and burns, doing what she could with what little medical supplies they carried and salvaging anything else from the emergency first aid kit stored in the office area. "We didn't clear a path, but we got here. Thank Christ."
"There's no shuttles here," JT said, feeling his shoulders slump. "Don't we have some onboard?"
"There was one," Stevens shrugged his shoulders. "Cray took it over to one of the other ships a few days ago. Were you thinking of evacuating on your own?"
"It might've crossed my mind," he admitted. "With those creatures between us and the rest of the ship we're cut off: we couldn't get anyone else here, could we?"
"Well, we'll work on that when the rest of the Marines get here," Stevens was confident that the men and women approaching the ship would bring superior firepower with them that would help turn the tide of the battle; he knew that if his men in the barracks had been loaded with HEAP rounds, then the story would be different, and there'd be more than just two Marines and a pair of civvies to greet the cavalry.
While Stevens contemplated this, the still of shuttle bay was broken as a klaxon blared to life and a series of yellow strobes that ran the length of the bay blinked to life, warning everyone who may have been in the hangar that there was an incoming shuttle, and the automatic docking procedure was about to start.
"Stay in the office here," Stevens warned them as he stood guard by the open door, panning his rifle from side to side. "You don't want to get caught in the way of any machinery out there. Last thing we want is for the doc to have to reattach an arm."
They all watched from the safety of the office while dormant machinery running the length of the ceiling shuddered to life and the airlock on the floor cracked opening, giving a loud hiss as the atmosphere within the sealed chamber below mixed with the rest of the ship and equalised. Two pairs of mechanical arms, each tipped with a large flat clamp, lowered themselves into the opening, then with a deafening clang, grabbed the docked vessel and hauled it from the airlock. As the dropship rose into view like the head of a sea serpent crowning a wave, its underside opened up, a trio of support struts unfolding from their housing and the main ramp whining open like a mouth. The airlock doors cycled shut and the mechanical arms on the ceiling trundled along their tracks, pulling the vehicle away from the lock and setting it down on the deck beside it. As soon as it touched down, the Marines within the vehicle started pouring out the main ramp: all wearing the same shell-type armour and uniform as Stevens and Dawes, most armed with the same type of weapons: a couple carried heavier weapons supported by a hydraulic support integrated into their armour, lengthy weapons they swung smoothly from side to side as they marched across the open hanger to the small office.
The soldier leading the squad didn't carry a weapon in his hand, but he had an incinerator slung over one shoulder and a pulse rifle over the other. He nodded to the four people in the room, dismissed all formalities with Stevens and Dawes as they went to salute.
"Stevens, what's the deal? Where's the rest of the squad?"
"This is it," he waved to Dawes. "Wiped out, they stormed our barracks. Softlsugs don't do shit unless you get them in the mouth, and canister rounds only work point-blank. Please, tell me you've got something that packs a little more of a punch…"
"Intel says they bleed acid. Is it safe to spray that around near the hull? It might cause a breech."
"I'd rather suck vacuum then have my face chewed off by one of those things. Or taken alive for… whatever."
"For those things… those spiders," Evelyn murmured, slowly trying to piece things together in her mind. "The spiders make the snakes, then the snakes… the snakes… they grow?"
"Understood," Gunnery Sergeant Green nodded, looking warily at Evelyn as she continued to mutter things to no one in particular. He turned to look at one of the soldiers standing behind him. "Private, get these two Marines issued with some armour piercing rounds. Secure all entry points to the hangar: get a couple of people strapped into those loaders and stack as much machinery as you can to block those other doors. You!"
JT attention, previously focussed on the hustle and bustle of the Marines as they rushed back and forth across the hanger, snapped back to Green as he clicked his fingers and pointed at him. "Me?" he asked, bewildered.
"You're the pilot, right?"
"A pilot, yeah," he nodded in agreement.
"I need you to brief the vom-com jockeys over there on the ship and its bridge: access codes, login protocol, any quirks the system may have that might impede their operation of the ship."
"Vom-coms?" JT frowned, looking around for anything that might vaguely fit that description. "What are they doing to the ship?"
"We're turning around, going back to Gamma, leaving the fleet and getting this infestation sorted out. Pull up in dry dock, I guess. We gotta get there, and that's why we've brought the vom-com jockeys."
"Vom-com jockey's an abbreviation of vomit-comet jockey. What us grunts call most of the pilots: drop-happy speed freaks that like nothing more than the roar of an afterburner," Stevens felt he had to explain to military slang to the civilians if only to keep them in the loop and up to speed.
"So I'm a vom-com jockey?" JT mused aloud.
"No, you're a civ," Stevens shook his head, turning his back on JT. "Don't go getting delusions of grandeur. How do you plan on getting them to the bridge? It was almost wall-to-wall in the barracks; Christ knows how you're planning on getting through there. Better weapons are one thing, but it's best not to get too cocky."
"What about the airshafts? Move a squad through the vents, up the ship and directly into the bridge. It'll take some time…"
"We got the shafts sealed off before it all kicked off," Stevens shook his head. "Keep those things confined as much as we could. At least, that was the theory behind it all. Didn't take into account the resourcefulness of the bastards."
"Sound enough theory. Would've done the same thing myself," Green nodded his head. "Limits our options in getting to the bridge, though. Anyone feel like a skin-crawl?"
"Three miles of ship hull and open space doesn't sit well with me," Stevens shook his head, knowing that although some of the men there would be able to do a spacewalk, there would be others who couldn't. "I wouldn't like to see the vom-coms slip into an enviro-suit, too. Poor bastards wouldn't know what to do in hard vacuum without a cockpit surrounding them."
"So we've secured a beachhead with nowhere to go," Green nodded. "Interesting. Ask that pilot if there's any other way he knows of to get into the bridge: any way we can get those vom-coms through."
"No way through," JT shook his head: he'd been eavesdropping on the conversation between the corporal and the gunnery sergeant, and couldn't help but blurt his answer out without being invited to throw in his response. "But… I mean, there's more than just one way to skin a cat, you know what I mean?"
"Not sure I do, civ," Green shook his head.
"You're wanting to turn us around, get us back to Gamma where we can get deloused or whatever to get rid of these things. All I'm saying is, the bridge isn't the only way to move this craft."
"Do I have to beat this out of you?"
"Engineering," JT shook his head as he returned to the admin office of the hanger. Green and Stevens followed closely behind him as he booted up the terminal there, accessing the schematics of the lower decks of the hydroponics deck. He highlighted one section of the decks, zoomed in, then stabbed a button that generated a three dimensional representation of the ship. The shuttle bay they were currently in flashed red, and a beam of light the same colour snaked through the layout to a large chamber near the rear of the craft. "We can get to the engineering deck from here. Minimal controls as far as navigation goes, but we can get there and shut down the main engines, slam on a little reverse thrust to bring us to a complete stop. From there… hell, I don't know, maybe some kind of tractor beam or tug to pull us back, at least until we can get back into the bridge."
"And you can get us to engineering from here?"
"Conduits, access tunnels, small service corridors. I'm not saying it's going to be a cakewalk, but it'll be easier than trying to fight our way through those things, weapons or not."
"And where do we come out?" Stevens asked, warily eyeing the route as he rotated the hologram. "Engineering's a big place."
"Control buffers are on the first sub-level of the engineering deck, but we're on the lowest level, we'll come out at the bottom of the Inferno: we'll have to make our way up."
"That's not good," Stevens shook his head. "The first guy who went missing, who I assume was the first person to be infected by one of those spider-things, they found him on the outskirts of the Inferno. Wherever these things came from, it's slap bang in the middle of there."
"Like demons from Hell," Evelyn nodded her agreement, standing at the doorway to the admin office. "The spiders make the snakes and the snakes grow and grow and mature."
"What she's saying makes sense," Stevens nodded, despite the dirty look Green was giving her. "She's the first person aboard that encountered these things, and I think she's right: everything seems linked, it just sounds crazy. I don't like the idea of marching into the middle of what could be a hot-zone just to turn off the engines. Isn't there any other way to get to any other controls?"
JT shook his head slowly. "When you're pulling as many late shifts as I do, there's not much to do other than read a lot. The only reason I know about this little trick is it's in one of the operational manuals. If we ever get boarded by a raider party, we slam the brakes on and disable the ship until we get picked up by a Marine rescue party."
"Then we've got no choice," Green shrugged his shoulders. "Taking vom-coms through service tunnels or teaching them how to space-walk: I know what I'd rather do. That proximity to the reactor and engines, what are we looking at by way of collateral damage? A stray shot or anything like that."
"Can your rounds punch through the hull of this craft?" JT asked, motioning vaguely to the weapons they carried. "The casing around the reactor core's more than twice as thick as that, there's a lot of power in there that has to be contained."
"A grenade wouldn't dent the hull: we should be fine with our rounds. Doesn't mean we need to go nuts, we'll check our targets."
"There could be people down there, too," Stevens warned. "They took the injured alive, and if there's any chance we can save them, then I want to make sure we do just that. And if it's too late… then they're better off dead."
"Not sure I follow," Green absentmindedly thumbed three grenades into the launcher attached to his rifle before hauling back on the heavy slide, snapping a round into the breech with a satisfying ratchet sound.
"There's these spider things, we found one in the lift attached to some poor bastards face. We pulled it off, and it sprayed him with acid, killed him outright. If we left the spider on him, it would have put a serpent-like creature down his gullet, which would eventually tear its way out of his rib cage. This much we've seen evidence of, and when they stormed the barracks, those creatures made a point of pulling away the injured: not taking them out to eliminate a potential threat, but removing them from the battle. Why? I can only assume it's to let more of those spiders get to them, to make more serpents."
"Now you're making as much sense as the retard doctor there," Green snorted before his jaw was rocked by a brutal punch, his head slamming to one side and bouncing off the wall as JT squared off against him, more than ready to throw another punch if the need arose. Stunned by the blow, Green staggered back a little, his weapon clattering to the desk as it fell from his hands. An entourage of Marines appeared behind him, weapons drawn and pointing at JT's chest, but Green waved them back from the confrontation.
"Got some balls, civ," he glowered.
"Promised a Marine a long time ago I'd keep an eye out for Evie, and I've laid out bigger men for less than what you just called her. Try doing something like that again," JT growled, the sudden change in his character more than startling: Stevens was a surprised as anyone else, and noted that Evelyn was just as taken aback by his reaction. "Go on, I fucking dare you."
Green stood stoic before JT, rubbing at his jaw, then called over his shoulder.
"Give this ballsy fucker a weapon. Civ just offered to take point when we go through to engineering."
