UNSC Ishimura
Stern Docking Bay
Remains of Pelican Trireme-196
The crackle and pop of a nearby fire burning was the first thing he heard, the acrid smell of burning plastics invading his nostrils. Isaac Clark blinked slowly, his eyes stinging as smoke wafted around his head. The orange glow of the fire was blotted out momentarily by a shape moving past.
"Get up, son, you'll live," Cromwell's voice grated against Isaac's ears, and strong hands gripped him below his armpits and heaved him to his feet. He swayed a little, leaned back until he felt his power harness clink against a steel wall.
"What happened?," Isaac asked, his voice coming out in a hoarse rasp.
"We crashed," Cromwell answered wryly, then turned and started heading out of the Pelican's troop bay. As Isaac began to follow, he noticed for the first time that the dropship was upside-down. Seat restraints hung lazily from above his head, and an open med kit lay at the opening to the troop bay.
"…how's our coms?" Cromwell's voice floated in through the opening as he came to it, and Isaac stuck his head out in time to see the pilot shake her head.
"No good, Sergeant. We lost our transmitter coming down. Only way we're going to be able to talk to the Trireme and get an ETA on our reinforcements is if we take a long walk out a short airlock and sign it to them," Connelly answered, wiping her hands on her pants as she spoke.
"Well, fuck me," Cromwell sighed. "Alright, guess all we can do is find somewhere to sit tight."
"Hey," Jessi Simmons said, stepping up beside Isaac. "We were pretty lucky that no one got hurt."
"Yeah," Isaac said, looking out at the small group of people. Sinj had climbed up onto the low walkway that ran through the shuttle bay and was walking slowly along it deeper into the Ishimura.
"Alright, pack your shit and let's-"
Cromwell was cut short as a loud, ominous groan filled the shuttle bay. Everyone was set on edge, weapons held at the ready, but when the next groan came, Isaac realised it had not come from anyone living.
"Oh, shit," he whispered, staring wide-eyed at the dented shuttle bay door. Another groan ripped through the room, and as Isaac watched, the door shifted slightly, and the sound of air hissing away under pressure reached his ears.
"Christ! Everyone, seal your suits and get your arses into gear!," Cromwell shouted, hefting his own small knapsack filled with supplies. "Sinj! Find us a way out of here before that fucking door blows!"
The huge alien warrior bounded off at speed down the long walkway, headed for a set of doors at the far end, deeper into the ship, even as the humans scrambled up the ladder and began to follow him.
"Move it already!," Connelly cried out as she pushed Isaac down the walkway, then broke out into a dead run down the corridor. The sound of booted feet slapping against titanium catwalk filled the bay as another groan echoed off the metallic walls, and air began whistling out into space more quickly.
With a hundred metres of walkway to go, the door groaned again and this time the difference in air pressure was much more noticeable; everyone was now struggling visibly against the outracing air as the moved towards the now open doors and Sinj.
"Hit your magnetics!," Cromwell shouted, and everyone turned on their magnetic boots as the door groaned again and finally gave way. Almost everyone. Amanda Connelly was swept past as the decompression sucked anything not bolted down out into space.
Her screams echoed in Isaac's helmet as she flew out into the void, struggling vainly as she began a never-ending journey through the dark.
"Oh, Jesus," he heard Jessi sob, even as the first people made it through the open doorway, Sinj waving his long arms and counting the people as they past him. Isaac felt a gentle impact against his back as Sinj slapped him there, then closed the doors.
Everyone waited in silence as the airlock re-pressurized, visible streams of air hissing in. Isaac looked around the small room, his eyes settling on one of two doors that lead deeper into the ship; the one marked Entrance Lobby. But he wasn't looking at the markings, so much as the scrawled writing across the door.
"'Cut off their limbs?' What the fuck?," he heard one of the Marines say as he too noticed it. "Cut off whose limbs?"
"Fuck that, man," another Marine spoke. "Who gives a shit what it says, I think it's written in blood."
"Shut your mouths," Cromwell snapped. "We go about this like any other mission. I don't care if someone went nuts with Space Fever and killed everyone, then started writing shit on the walls."
"That seems unlikely, Sergeant," Jessi said. "A ship this size, I doubt just one person could kill everyone aboard."
"They could if they did it the right way: grab a vac-suit, vent the atmosphere, then kill anyone who managed to survive. Whatever is going on here, we find the info we need, wait for the big boys to show up," Cromwell answered. "Sinj, get ready to open that door."
"Everyone else, check your weapons, and be ready for anything. If we run into trouble, it'll be tight quarters all the way through, so check your spacing, don't bunch up and for fuck's sake, don't go around a corner or through a door blindly," he finished.
"What about Connelly?," Petty Officer Yeats asked.
"What about her? She's gone, nothing any of us can do."
Isaac shuffled uneasily as the Marines checked over their assault rifles and sidearms, then reluctantly removed his own pistol and checked it over. Popped the clip, cleared the breach, dry fired into the wall. Satisfied that it was useable, he reloaded and re-holstered it.
"Everyone in the clear?," Cromwell asked, to which he received a round of 'Yessirs'. "Alright, good. Sinj, open the door. Fulton and Barnes, cover."
Sinj moved closer to the door, clutching his plasma rifle in one enormous hand, the other reaching out to the holo-panel in the centre of the door, the two nominated Marines shuffling around to bring their rifles to bear on anything that might be on the other side.
More advanced holographic displays was one of the technologies gifted to humanity from the Sangheili as the aliens vied for redemption from the atrocities they had committed over the course of the UNSC/Covenant War. It had been a gift that humanity was only too eager to accept, much like the new point-defence pulse lasers standard on most new ships and, of course, FTL communications.
Isaac shook the thoughts from his head as the door hummed as it slid apart, the two nominated Marines sweeping the inner lobby with their rifles. The shorter of the two, bearing the name-patch 'Fulton' took a cautious step forward, then halted in the doorway.
"What's the hold-up, private," Cromwell asked, moving up behind the younger man. He peered over Fulton's shoulder, let out a long, low whistle. "Christ, what happened in here?"
The lobby was a mess; a couple of trash cans had been overturned, their contents spread liberally about the room. Along one side of the room was a low wall, with a glass top, the glass featuring any number of cracks spider-webbed across it. The walls, the floor, the glass, even the ceiling was coated in dried up blood, but there were no bodies to be seen.
The small team shuffled out into the lobby, the overheads flickering on as they detected movement beneath them, casting a sickly glow across the room; the lights had taken a few splashes of blood, too.
Isaac's hand fell to his hip holster, and he drew the pistol that rested there, suddenly forgetting his habitual distaste for the necessity of the weapon.
"My God," Jessi said, moving closer to Isaac. Isaac said nothing, his eyes roving over the room slowly looking for some clue as to what might have happened here. He cringed away from Sinj as the massive alien shouldered his way past, before dropping into a crouch near one of the low-set couches in the room.
"This is a bad omen," Sinj growled out, his four-fingered hand caressing the inactive plasma blade at his side.
"Yeah, no shit," Cromwell said, grimacing distastefully at the door on the left side of the room as it refused to budge. The Staff Sergeant turned and eyed the security door that led into the lobby control booth, and the maintenance tunnels that honeycombed this are of the ship beyond the booth.
"Clark, Fulton, go into the control booth and see what you can do about this door, I think it's gone into a security lockdown or something," he said, gesturing to the booth. Isaac nodded and began moving deeper into the room, toward the indicated door, forcing Jessi to relinquish her hold on his arm. He bit back a small smile as she latched onto Sinj instead, causing the Sangheili to grunt his displeasure.
"Hey," Isaac said to the Marine that was accompanying him into the control booth as they moved through the door. "Ever see anything like this before?"
"Me? Hell no!," Fulton replied from behind his helmets combat shield. "This is only my second operation, and the first one was just escort duty for some mangoes."
"Great," Isaac muttered as he approached the small stand of controls in the corner of the long, narrow booth that was closest to the lobby entrance on the other side of the glass. He bent down closer to the control panel, examining it closely.
"Did you hear that?," Fulton's voice interrupted his inspection, and Isaac half-turned to face the young Marine. The other man was looking up at the ceiling, his rifle half-raised, as though waiting for something to jump out at him.
"Hear what?," Isaac asked, his hand slowly inching for his pistol, as he too scanned the ceiling futilely; there was no way he could see through the quarter-inch titanium panelling any more than Fulton could.
"Guess it was nothing," Fulton replied after a moment, but it was clear to Isaac that he wasn't about to let his guard down. Isaac nodded absently to himself, then turned back to the controls. He reached out to tap Y for 'Yes' at the flashing prompt on the small screen that read: CANCEL SECURITY LOCKDOWN?
Just as his hand hovered an inch above it, Cromwell's voice erupted in his ear and he jumped in fright.
"What the fuck is taking so long, Clark?" Isaac grit his teeth; as a Lieutenant, he outranked the Staff Sergeant considerably. Unfortunately, given the nature of this little assignment, even a Marine Corps Private outranked and Engineering Corps Lieutenant, so there was little that Isaac could do about Cromwell treating him like one of his subordinates.
"Just about got it, Sergeant," Isaac answered, then tapped the Y key. Immediately, the locked door on the far side of the lobby hummed and sprung apart.
"Nice work, now get your arses-," Cromwell was cut off as the lights flickered, then died altogether. "Flashlights!"
Light began to cast its warm glow across the room again, but before anyone could even get their bearings, the horrible screech of metal being torn apart by something harder than it resonated through the lobby and the control room. The ceiling of the lobby came alive as a chunk of titanium fell into the room, and a dark shape followed it to the ground.
Tall and spindly, the thing seemed to be all claws and teeth, and one of the Marines cried out as his rifle spat depleted uranium slugs. The thing seemed to take a half-dozen hits to the chest, from what Isaac could see before he was thrown to the ground, Fulton landing beside him, as the reinforced shatterproof glass was perforated as the panicking Marine fired blindly around the room.
With a scream that Isaac was sure he would never be able to forget, the Marine was tossed through the now shattered glass, minus his right arm and trailing arterial gouts of blood as he flew across the booth into the far wall.
"Holy shit!," Isaac heard Fulton shout, then the booth lit up with muzzle flashes as the private fired his weapon. Bullets whizzed by his head as he leaned forward, firing his sidearm with fervour and hitting nothing.
"Fall back, everyone fall back," Cromwell's voice exploded in Isaac's ears, and as he stood he could make out dark figures moving through the doorway he had opened, and the inhumanly tall and thin monsters, pointed, spear-like arms reaching toward them. A flash of light, and one of the monsters was down, screaming and flailing about as it tried to continue its attack minus its lower half.
Sinj's plasma blade flashed again, and another creature fell in two halves, then the warrior was gone and the door snapped shut behind him.
"C'mon! This way!," Fulton shouted, grabbing Isaac's arm and dragging him to the rear end of the booth, toward a door Isaac hadn't noticed before. The last thing Isaac saw before passing through that door was one of those things scrambling through the shattered glass after them.
"You alright?," Fulton asked, releasing Isaac to get a better grip on his rifle as they hurried down the new corridor. Isaac nodded dumbly, stumbled as the sound of metal tearing reached his ears from somewhere behind him; they were coming through the door.
"Keep moving," Isaac said, speeding up as Fulton turned around and moved backwards quickly, rifle up and aiming back at the door.
"No shit."
They rounded a corner and Isaac's face lit up behind his helmet as he spied what lay at the end of this service tunnel.
"Service elevator! Our ticket outta here," Isaac smiled back at his Marine companion, just in time to see the first muzzle flashes.
"Here the fuckers come!," Fulton shouted above the din of his own rifle and the cries of pain and rage the creatures emitted with each hit. The nine millimetre DU rounds were designed to deal with energy shields and powered armour, so it was a shock to see the things taking hit after hit without even slowing down.
For Fulton, the tight quarters meant this wasn't anything more than a point-shooting gallery, albeit one in which the targets wouldn't go down. The rifle clicked on empty, and Fulton turned and dashed for Isaac and the elevator, the Engineer covering him the whole way the boom of his sidearm.
"Close it, close it, close it!," Fulton shrieked, diving through the entryway to the elevator as Isaac jabbed the 'Close Door' button. As the doors slowly ground shut, Fulton swung around, his own sidearm up, and fired three times fast into the chest of the freakish ghoul at the front of the pack, two rounds hitting their marks and the other going stray, hitting the thing in the shoulder…and blowing its' arm right off.
Finally, the doors came together with a 'ding', shutting off the nightmarish view of those unstoppable bastards for the two occupants of the elevator. As the service lift began its slow descent, the dulcet jazz tones of Coltrane began playing, and the two men, panting hard with fear and exhaustion, slowly turned to each other and shared a grimace behind their visors.
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A/N: And there you have it, sorry for the long-ass wait, this has actually been ready for posting for a while, just kept on forgetting to actually post it. Review, please.
This IS my first horror fic, so any suggestions or tips for writing this kind of story would be appreciated.