It didn't make any sense. The metal husk ,the shell cracked open further. Its innards sloshed and dripped onto the cold ground. Its body heat formed wisps of moisture as the flesh met the chilled air. What is this, what the hell is it. Ryuki murmered unintelligibly, his words unable form a coherent thought. Nothing, not even the speculative xenobiology primers he had taken, had prepared him for this sight. This completely alien organism, successfully melded to a combat frame so utterly that both it and its adoptive body functioned as one. The arms still contained vestiges of the ferromagnetic pistons and the myomer super-structure, yet so efficiently joined as to look like bone and skin in the heaping mass of mottled flesh. The piston fluid leaked in spurts like black blood. Errant electrical activity morphed the textured fluid into crystalline forms till it lost consistency.
The team had already began to assemble around the husk. Their eyes widened at the sight of metal and flesh entwined in a heap of scrap. Slack jawed, none mustered a single word. As they stood standing motionless, their breath fogged the air ,their body heat mixing in with those of the dead machine. The sound of ice cracking snapped the team out of their daze.
"Well , I guess this isn't a bug hunt anymore huh?" Reaper said.
The walls rumbled again. The cavern would surely collapse the rate that the ice shelf was breaking. None of it was normal. An Ice shelf this thick should be stable ,even with an external force acting on it. Ryuki saw tiny cracks crawling up the walls. Then the realization came to him, that whatever was causing the ice to break was internal. Something was happening to the planetoid. He didn't mention this thought to anyone lest he spark hysteria. There was no way off the snow ball anyway.
"We're going row by row and killing what ever else is in here. Prep flamers and HEAT rounds, shoot anything that doesn't respond to comms. I want the spiders at the entrance to guard against anything getting out of here" Ryuki ordered.
They hustled to their mechs. Ryuki's calm attitude assuaged the others. What seemed to be impossibility became a routine event. Their minds shifted to managing the start up procedures, switching munitions types and preparing fire control systems.
Wasp thought to herself, so what if we just saw a dead xeno. We've got orders to carry out. The nagging fear was pushed away , replaced with duty.
The team split into three groups. Wasp, Reaper and Dizzy piloted the two spider-tanks at the entrance. Karin and Barry took their mechs up the right side of the hangar while Ross and Ryuki took the left. The plan was to progress one row at a time with both teams checking the same row by walking to the middle and then back,tapping each mech with the stock of their rifles as the walked through.
The hangar was unlit. Only their spotlights revealed the darkness. Shadows stretched and contorted as the lights passed over them. An eerie sensation crawled over Ryuki and his team. In those shadows, something could be waiting. Each hollow tap led them further into the shadows, farther and farther from the gleaming lights of the spider-tanks and deeper into the unknown.
Ryuki radioed his team as often as possible. Keep their minds out of the darkness, keep them from scaring themselves. The regular breaks in the silence alleviated the loneliness of the ordeal. Deep underground, with no idea if rescue would come and the prospect of facing their own machines commandeered against them, one could only feel desperation and isolation. Ryuki made the effort to be brave against the fear of uncertainty. He knew what they felt and knew how dangerous it would be for them to lose themselves in anxiety.
"Row 15 cleared, move up to the next one. Keep any eye for movement behind us" he radioed in. The others called back acknowledging him. The simple act of saying "roger" over the radio drained the anxiety enough for them to concentrate at the job at hand. But the further down the hangar, the dimmer the lights became as the volumetric darkness began to overtake even their own mechs. Their four mechs, far from any point of escape, were perilously courting danger with each hollow resonance.
Dizzy's team was calm in opposition to Ryuki's . Though there were only three of them to the two spider-tanks, the thick metal skin provided a sense of protection that was oddly missing from the heavily armed Zephyrs. The heaters provided sufficient warmth from the biting cold, a half full coffee mug provided much needed sustenance. The spider's automated alert system kept her team up to date to even the most mundane happenings. While the others struggled with isolation, Dizzy's team was becoming acquainted with the rarity of boredom.
In the midst of boredom the team began casual conversation to alleviate the ennui.
"I can't believe I am stuck on this forsaken ice ball. Frak, we don't even have a way off it! No ship around to take us off this dump. What the frak are we supposed to do?" Dizzy lamented.
In the other spider, Reaper and Wasp argued whether rescue would arrive in the absence of any communications.
"You know it too, the comms in the HQ were trashed. Couldn't get anything offworld. They would have to know something's wrong when no one's giving the daily report, right? They wouldn't just leave us here?" Reaper asked.
"Frak, they dropped us off here, they probably wouldn't care if we're still alive" Wasp retorted.
"Well, Im not going to just wait for the cold to kill me. I want out and I know the Cap feels the same way. I mean, theres a hangar here, maybe we'll find a ship ?" Dizzyreplied.
"Yeah and it'll be infested with xenos" Reaper radioed back.
Methodically searching the hangar for signs of what could only be considered an infestation was driving Ryuki's team close to the edge of nervous breakdown. The short radio chats were becoming inane as they tried to redirect their attention from the utter otherness of what they were searching for. How to get the perfectly brewed cup of coffee was the rallying point for them, far from Ryuki's intention with the regular radio talk. They were losing their situation awareness and only bad things would come of it. Their minds were too scattered, Ryuki knew it was just a mater of time before the inky darkness grabs hold of them.
"Keep the chatter down, we're hear to look for infiltrators, not recipes for peach cobbler" he radioed. The slight static in the message turned his words into phantom sounds , like a ghost speaking through inanimate objects. The static became noticeable the deeper they went. As they approached the end of the hangar, a strange clicking sound rattled through their radios. The interference was intermittent but strong, like a high powered device was malfunctioning. The only thing Ryuki could think of that was able to generate a EM field strong enough to do that had to be an rail gun capacitor bank. "Stay alert, somethings out there" he radioed calmly.
The team spread out into staggered formation. A faint spark , hidden by the deactivated hulks , popped close to the ground. Bright flakes of light bounced on the ground as something slid across it. Ryuki lifted his rifle and primed his rockets. Karin and Ross prepped their flamethrowers. Barry shivered before unlocking the master-arm of his rail gun. The slow misshapen body walked on heavy steps. The ground vibrated as it closed on them. With their lights frantically scanning the darkness, the unknown enemy grew more sinister in the flailing shadows.
Bolts of electricity raced across the floor as violent hum rose above the plodding foot steps. In the cover of the silent warmachines, it continued to approach, the hum growing louder. The capacitors were close to exploding. It wouldn't have been a problem if it weren't for the micro-fusion generator that powered the weapon.
"Fall back, fall back! Go go !" Ryuki screamed through the radio. The mechs slowly changed directions as the tracks in their feet expanded. Ryuki drove his Zephyr backwards to keep his eyes on the incoming hot-bot. The others dashed as fast as possible to the other end of the hangar.
The radios crackled with energy as the electromagnetic field began to collapse around the reactor core. The capacitors, began to pop, till one exploded in a flash of molten metal. The reactor core continued to consume its fuel, all failsafes failing utterly. Its fuel pellet, sitting inside a bilious sack that consumed the solid reactor body, burned hot. The heat from the pellet turned the bile to plasma, the plasma further burning through field . Finally, the fusion was fed by the bile , a strange mixture of thorium and inorganic fluids , its reaction now increasing. The violent collapse of the field tore the now fleshy gun-arm that hung fused to the hunchback mech, its red mooneye exploding into pus and sparks. The pulse of electromagnetic energy as the fusion reaction collapsed on itself surged through the air at the speed of light.
Ryuki's team was lucky. Not enough fuel for a pulse of destructive proportions. The EMP was contained by the rows of inactive mechs, forming a sort of impromptu cage to contain the energy. Some ammunition cooked off, exploding several of the walkers.
Tanks filled with combustible fuel burst into flames as superheated shrapnel pierced their walls.The heat of the flames released the pressure on the fire-suppression nozzles on the sides of the walls and roof with their foaming dispersants spraying onto the blaze.
A flurry of chatter erupted alongside the blaze. Confusion set in and in the haste to figure out what was happening; one of the spider tanks began firing. Communication was jumbled as the others attempted to switch channels only to hear frantic screaming. It was Reaper, completely consumed with fear, who was firing. After a few shells whizzed above their heads, a ruckus burst from the comms. Dizzy grabbed hold of the controls , punching Reaper into ground.
"Cap, Reaper went crazy when he saw you guys running ahead of a bunch of explosions. I had to knock him out. " Dizzy called in, her voice cracking with anxiety.
The fire died out leaving behind smoldering wreckage and rows of charred machines. With the last glint of light they saw what they thought would be their headquarters lay in ash. With no guarantees that there wouldn't be more infested machines , there were few choices left to them. Go back up and wait for the ice the shattered the metal walls. Or go further down, to the source of the massive power drain. Neither option seemed to have any possibility of survival, lest a rescue boat burst through the ice shelf to save them.
There was little else they could do. Ryuki explained that staying in the hangar would just be a waiting game for more of those things. The elevator platform had swayed in the time they were in the hangar and there was no other way back up if that broke. Going further down would have just brought them even farther from rescue. And whether rescue would arrive was even less certain.
"We're in this till the end. Might as well find out why" Ross spoke up as the others stayed silent. "If worst case scenario is that rescue never shows up and theres no way off this rock, we might as well spend it either figuring out what's was draining all the power or blowing up a lot of stuff. I get the feeling we'll get to do both" he finished.
In the wake of fatalism, a sort of courage developed. Facing death's chasm with no where else to turn, with the sound of metal whining against the weight of crushing ice, against the silent depths, there really was only one option, to march forward. Sitting still, waiting for the cold embrace to overcome them seemed too passive. They were trained to be soldiers. "We're going to do this professionally", Ryuki said.
With their shelter in a precarious condition and the planetoid seemingly breaking apart, they ventured back on the platform. Everything they could carry within mechanical limits were packed, stowed and hauled to the platform. "Show of hands, who wants to go down first?"
Ryuki moved first onto the platform with Ross and Karin coming along. The skids were well iced now with a thin layer of liquid water giving them a frictionless surface. It was easy enough to have the Zephyrs pull them onto the platform. The more unwieldy spider-tanks would go last, in case a full scale battle broke out below. In a fast fight, they would be the first the fail.
