"What is going on here? Seems a bit lived in huh? " Barry exclaimed. The low dim lights weren't bright enough to make out any details of the rooms but the fact they were on meant that something was providing power. Along the floors were subtle prints on the floor. The minerals in the melting ice had coagulated around the outline of strange feet , leaving light orange stains on the floor.
The water that pooled on those prints were lukewarm, whereas the water dripping from the walls were at a mild room temperature. It wasn't too long ago that something had walked these halls. "Alright, regroup and follow those tracks", Ryuki ordered.
The prints merged with a larger group of doors in an anteroom that connected hallways to other sections of the floor. The entire team travelled towards an enormous sliding double door which seemed locked on cursory investigations.
Ramming the door with a solid armored fist wasn't enough to open it. It was sealed against mechanized interlopers. But there were always other ways to break a door down. One was to break the security.
There, on the wall behind them was a control panel. Like everything else, it had been active, quite recently in fact from the signs of moisture on the keypad. The pad was too small for a manipulator to use.
"Alright Karin, its your ball" Ryuki radioed. Karin "Kestrel" Matsui , the engineer, the computer specialist and whatever else the team needed. Her skills changed with the nature of the work. While the work was maddening for someone who had to learn each new task on her own, she relished the thought that she gained many skills in the course of struggling with frustrating tasks. Hacking a door panel , though, was much easier. Scouring the net for hack-tools was a breeze and loading them into her persocom made it into a do-all omnitool.
The torso hatch slid open and a rope ladder dropped out. Karin climbed down , her face obscured by the gold film of her helmets' visor. She moved with a slow ,deliberate pace towards the panel. Looking both ways , even, in case of errant mechs. She examined the panel, ports and displays for anything that looked like an entry into the soft-works.
There it was, a standard port. The future wasn't that different, was it, she wondered. She pulled out the retractable cable on her arm mounted persocom and plugged in. The panel lit up, the backlight on the buttons shining bright as if new. Now they waited as the hack-tools cycled through millions of exploits and tactics to overcome security measures.
"If this is one of ours, then it should be easy to hack. No one ever takes the time to pay for proper protection" Karin spoke into her radio. Text began to flash on the display, a mixture of red and greens as the hack-tools probed for security faults. Overcoming the failure-gate allowed the bits of software to have unlimited read-write access , checking and overwriting security measures one by one until finally the panel had become a blank slate upon which Karin could hijack the doors on the entire floor.
The red light next to the door flashed into a solid green. The sound of mag-locks disengaging rang through the hallway. Karin scrambled back into her suit before they breached the room. A slight nudge pushed the double doors open. With there mechs crouched, they moved through one by one.
The room was humid. Immediately after entering their vision skewed from the moisture enveloping their optics. Heating elements burned off the collecting vapor to reveal the large bay to be covered in strange fleshy growths. They dangled from the ceiling and stretched across the walls, pulsating discordantly.
"Well, I am not really surprised" Barry spoke. The spongy floor yielded to the weight of their mechs, letting loose sickening sounds as they walked over. Only a few light fixtures worked which left the bay dim and let darkness cover much of it. They moved in, spread out in a tactical formation, to confront the horrors that may wait in the shadows.
Further into the bay , the light disappeared completely with only their flood lamps to illuminate the surrounding area. They moved methodically, checking every blind spot and dark corner , hoping that nothing would attack. Each turn was an anxiety inducing chance, a probability of indescribable horror waiting for them. Nothing jumped out at them, yet the overbearing sense of dread still followed them. It seemed their shoulders were loaded with an inescapable burden of knowing that something was hunting them but lacking the knowledge to fight back against it.
Passing more wall polyps and fleshy floor , still going deeper into a foul jungle of waiting predators, they saw a weak orange glow cast onto the walls, seeping out from the periphery of their vision. "Move in" Ryuki whispered, unnecessary though it was since they had already began their maneuver before he could say a word.
Barry surveyed the roof for any wall-crawlers while Ross and Karin guarded the back of the formation. Ryuki and Reaper forged on ahead, turning into a blind corner. They froze in place when they saw it. It was like one of the polyps yet tremendously larger,dwarfing their mechs and reaching all the way up to the high ceiling of the cargo bay. It glowed orange and pulsated like a beating heart. Viscous fluid travelled through transparent appendages that had bored through the walls and floor. It was planted down with wispy hairs under its mushroom-like cap, each strand moving on its own accord like tentacles.
They approached it slowly, their flamethrowers raised and whatever other guns they had ready to fire. Rockets primed, rifles and cannons loaded , anti-infantry plates ready to burst forth with shrapnel. The giant pod puffed up and released a cloud from its cap.
A screeching sound pierced through their armored hulls. The tendrils behind the pod parted to reveal a hole and out poured powered-suits, hideously transformed into plague carriers , fleet footed and prone to explode. The hopped towards them, bursting when near. The bodies spread their entrails over the mechs before the flame throwers could burn them.
The fire cleansed the area of the fleshy polyp. The blaze ate through the suits and melted the polyp into a puddle. But more of the corrupted suits swarmed in, scurrying along on all four limbs like spiders. The flamethrowers couldn't keep up against the dozens of fast moving creatures. A pair of creatures latched onto Ryuki's mech, forcing him to aim his flamethrower into his torso. The fire spread over him as the flamethrower doused him in burning accelerant and napalm. From the corner of his eye, he saw one of the suits explode into flames to reveal a human body, warped and distorted by some kind of parasitic growth. Its skin peeled away like burning paper before burning up into a charred husk.
They found the missing scientists and what seemed to be the rest of the base staff. Whatever planted the wall-crawling sinewy vines , whatever hijacked those dormant mechs from before, they had to be behind this. Their faces seemed burned into his dark silhouettes contorted as if to scream but all that remained were empty husks commandeered by horrific parasites. So many questions were suppressed by the will to survive. Were they still alive? In pain? It didn't matter, the team was concentrated on surviving.
Karin grabbed hold of one scurrying across her visor and tossed it at the wall. The body flopped to the ground, bleeding a strange red-brown ichor. The body disintegrated upon the flames , leaving only ash and an outline of where it once hung from the wall.
They switched off who would reload, one by one consecutively changing the fuel cannisters, yelling out to each other when they began the process. The vile creatures slowly let up in the face of the blazing whirlwind. They pulled back in retreat, a strange display of intellect for such relentless creatures.
All around them were scorch marks and burning corpses. What remained of the polyp lay in a pool of green and brown liquid, its arms standing like burnt statues. Liquid metal ran down the walls to repair the damage but the nozzles had jammed causing blobs of the plasteel to collect like tarballs.
The team slowly pushed forward towards the gaping hole in the wall dripping with the silvery grey metal liquid. A plate slid off the wall and smashed into the ground ,ringing out like a gong. The ground rumbled on its impact.
"Push forward", Ryuki said in monotone. They approached the threshold , stopping for a moment as if to consider the levity of the situation. Before they could take the first step, the floor rumbled. It seemed to emanate from quite a distance away , yet that did not relieve them of the sense of foreboding.
"It could be from an upper floor. This level doesn't seem to have much else in it other than some science labs and cargo bays" Ross called in. There were too many secrets on this ship, what seemed to be a dead end could very well be the entrance to something indescribable. Another rumble vibrated through the floor and up into their pilot-decks.
"Lets keep going" Ryuki responded. His mech was the first to cross through. On the other side was an alien world teeming with ethereal lights and odd forests of fleshy vines. This side of the ship was thoroughly invaded, not a single defining characteristic of the ship was left untouched. So complete was the conversion that their deck maps that they had downloaded from the terminal Karin hacked had become close to useless. Walls had been torn open to form new hallways while bays that were expansive were too thick with vines to traverse into.
Still the rumbling persisted through all this. The green vegetation and the rumbling combined to create a gripping foreignness of the ship. Its seeming time travel, the infestation and the burning corpses all would lead one to think that they weren't even on the planet they started on.
Ahead of them they found some of the creatures that retreated but died on their escape route. Most were burned out of their suits and the parasites fried to a crisp. "Hey , take a closer look at that" Ross radioed. Ryuki zoomed in on the location Barry pointed to. There, crumpled on the floor, was a body. Most of the suit still remained. On it, the Steelhelm insignia was prominent with its blue and yellow hues , the viking helmet of the coat of arms standing out against the charred clothing.
The crew of the base. They had come here. The ships that left, possibly filled with more of these corrupted soldiers. The researchers had to be here too. It was too much for Barry. His mech doubled back to the freight elevator. "I can't , I just can't, this isn't right , none of this is right" he whispered through the radio. Reaper acted the same way when his mind cracked upon discovering the ice animals. Reaper ,though, reacted differently this time. He stood there, motionless. As if every control and motorized joint had locked up. What sounded like radio static was the low,quiet breathing of Reaper. The shock of seeing fellow soldiers warped into unrecognizable heaps had spread through his mind, knocking out his sense of place and time. His mind dived deep into a dark pit , wading in violent imagery yet unable to leave. For the time being, he suffered alone as The others chased after Barry.
As Barry bull-rushed through the wide hallway , a crash could be heard from the elevator shaft. He slowed his pace to a walk , his flamethrower ready in the mechs manipulator hand. While his finger was anxiously hovering the trigger, he was fortunate that the weapon required the double-trigger to be pulled completely to fire. A flinch of his finger wouldn't cost someone's life, unless he did it on purpose.
His light shined through the darkness. He looked up. Nothing aside from a pale yellow warning light. He looked down. The comm cable had snapped. And worse, a mass of mottled green flesh had jammed into it, partially blocking the shaft. He stepped back and dismounted from the mech.
