Ross scooped up Wasp and sat him on his shoulder before opening up his flight deck. Karin , waiting with her flight deck open, formed a small platform for Dizzy to climb up as the servo motors in her arm were slowing to a grinding halt. She climbed the makeshift lift into the compartment when the radiation warnings on her suit began to ring like an especially mad banshee.

"Get back to the cantina, we're gonna climb up" Ryuki called out. The four remaining mechs marched in single file on their oil and blood stained path towards the hellmouth. The swarms chittering feet ,though distant, was working its way up the superstructure through open vents and cracks without hesitation. No obstacle would keep them from their prey. What worried Dizzy was that she hadn't actually seen any of them. "Why would that be a problem?" she asked herself. No amount of bravado could mask the reason. They were the dark abyss, formless and unrelenting devourer of light, without intelligence and lashing out at everything that falls into the maw , was chasing after her and her team.

No xenobiologists available to tell her their weak spots. No armory officer to provide the best weapons against them. No escape and , maybe, no survival. Thats what they were. Death incarnate. No one who has seen them has survived. Her eyes glazed over as she delved into the fear and terror that they exuded. A strange curiosity took over her imagination, creating moments she hoped she would never experience but unable to stop them from forming in her mind. She wanted something, something substantial, to make sense of it all. But nothing, just that incessant noise to tell her they were coming. The shifting dark shadows, with teeth hidden like daggers under cloaks and obsidian eyes shining through the void.

Karin noticed it , the shaking in her hands. This was not like any of the training. There were no tactics to deploy, no technological superweapon that wins the day. All that stood between her and the distended masses of human and alien biology was the armor that she rode in. If she were younger, she would have had the luxury of an inhaler to calm her breathing. Intense physical training was enough to strengthen her lungs but nothing could keep her mind from gasping for air. It was as if her body thought this was all a hallucination , some kind of vision from lack of oxygen. But the bits and bolts that rustled were as real as the slow trickle of hydraulic fluid that dripped onto her shoulders. The cold embrace of reality , oddly enough, cooled her mind. Grace under pressure some would call it. Perhaps it was just fatalism that caused her body to give up.

They reached the mess hall, growing to be an even bigger mess, with a new skylight burning above them. Most of their machines would have been dumped as mission-killed but with dwindling firepower and the fear of alien incursions keeping them inside. As such, getting up through the hole in the ceiling would require finesse that was woefully missing from their beaten and worn machines.

They stood there silently contemplating solutions with every member waiting for the others to make their voices heard before interjecting their own ideas. It seemed nothing would work. They carried too much weight, there wasn't any high-strength cabling, the actuators were shot and more complaints were tossed into the refuse pile.

Dizzy looked around, seeing all the wreckage still burning, the exposed steel frame of the ship dangling like pendulums. She thought of the ladder her father fashioned from wooden crates and steel bars tied together with rope. It didn't go too high since the metal bars were too short but the wooden steps got him high enough to the second floor window of her home to clean the windows.

"A ladder would work right" she said over the comms. "We could make steps, maybe a stair with all these dead mechs and I-bars" she suggested. No one spoke up in dissent. "Alright folks, lets get on it" Ryuki said with his hand to the pile of broken machines and scorched metal pylons.

They began clearing out the remains, creating a clean zone to be the base of their stairs against the corner of the hall. The mechs that still had both arms did the heavy lifting , while the remaining suit dragged the building materials to them. The slow , plodding pace reminded Ryuki of his time spending afternoons after school doing choirs for his parents. It seemed that the boredom was unbreakable , the monotony unshakeable until the completion of what he worked on. Then it seemed amazing that he even succeeded.

His parents had him working on odds and ends. One day it would be to reassemble a two-stroke engine, small enough to fit into the trunk of his fathers car. Another day would be to weld several pieces of metal together. Then the steering rig and counter-ballast. None of it made sense to him. They were disparate parts from a pile of junk, seemingly so different as to be meaningless together.

His father spent all his afternoons for an entire week working in his workshop. All the bits and pieces Ryuki built were gone from sight. Perhaps they were sold off or melted down. What a punishment, he thought, to have all his work just disappear. An insult upon injury it was.

A brisk spring evening , his father finally emerged from the workshop with a smile on his face. He took Ryuki out, insinuating more chores lay waiting for him. He took him around the back of the prefabricated single story blockhouse , right towards the dune buggy Ryuki helped make. It was quite the surprise.

It didn't take much effort to finish building the stair. It wasn't so much a stair as it was a series of ledges that led up into the next floor. Precarious as it was, they still need to go. With nowhere else to turn to and the threat of a swarm of bug-eyed monsters breaking through the walls, the only way forward was up those mechanical corpses.

It took what seemed like hours to get to the top. With their damaged motor functions, every step and every grasp was just one closer to toppling over. Slowly they finally made it up , with Ryuki going up last. They emerged into a dim hall with evanescent shadows cast by yellowed flickering lights.

"You know, I never thought a ship this beat up could continue to function. Very weird" Karin said amongst the clamoring robots. "Sure most of the ship should be functional, even if this one seems decades old, but sitting in an icy grave like this? What keeps it going?" she asked.

"I never asked the base commander when the base was built. The base looked state of the art , but then again this is military hardware. State of the art could be decades old" Ryuki replied. Strange then was the fact that the entire operation was rarely, ever, spoken of. Ryuki himself never heard of it until he received his punishment for insubordination. No one really seemed to care either. It was as if the entire thing was an afterthought or just plain forgotten. Why was that?

They lumbered forward with no particular direction. Maybe an elevator would come into view at the next corner. Or perhaps polyps filled with green goop would be waiting for them. Exhaustion took hold of them both mental and physical. Sleep deprivation had dulled their senses and reflexes. They were prone to hallucinations as the shadows seemed to sway under their own volition. Blinking seemed to take ages and the darkness seemed to grow thicker with every flicker of transient vision.

He noticed his hands were shaking. It was the same as before, when he first realized how much trouble they were in. It started with a tremor and slowly worked its way up his neck. A sharp pain pierced through his skull. A migraine from the tension and anxiety. Terrific luck, he thought. There were no stims for him to jab into his veins and precious few medical kits. He tried controlling his breathing only to remind himself of how shallow his breath had become. It felt as if fluid was building in his lungs, with each breath bringing up a garbled cough. Doctors always said that the bodies immune response becomes suppressed under heavy stress. The same must be happening to the others.

Wheezing,coughing and sneezing. With their bodies so starved for rest and relaxation it was only a matter of time before they began to fall apart. Was the cabin getting hotter? No, that couldn't be right, he felt his bones chill almost immediately. His body felt hot but his skin was freezing. He swore under his breath. Shock. His body was losing heat fast.

"All stop!" he yelled out. If it was happening to him, it certainly was affecting the others. "Get in your hardsuits" he ordered them. When only the sound of wheezing coughs replied, he knew they were just as sick as he was. "Wrap yourselves up, I know some of you are going into shock" he said through a series of coughs.

Wasp and Dizzy remained in their hardsuits while the others took a few minutes to put on their suits. It was fortunate then that these were specially designed winter-suits with electro-thermal layer and condensers The light-frames were small enough to allow them to fit comfortably into the pilot-decks with several ports that connected directly into the combat computers to allow for very precise maneuvers. Their exhausted minds forgotten completely about them.

Sore muscles and back pain started to afflict his team, Ryuki could see. With everyone in their hardsuits he had access to all their vitals. Neural activity indicated they were experiencing sharp acute pain. The rigors of non-stop vigilance was slowly tearing their bodies apart. He could feel it, the depression setting in. No salvation. No hope. The end was coming and it was on a slow march towards death.

No, don't think like that, he told himself. There was no time for fatalism. No time to ponder how painful death would be. He needed to do something , something to refresh their spirits. But with their food rationed to the extreme, there were few amenities he could offer.

Sleep. Thats what they needed. Solace from the days of wakefulness that they endured. It would be dangerous, in the middle of enemy territory as it was. There would need to be guard shifts. And there was no guarantee that they would wake up alive. But it was necessary. The human body , even augmented like theirs, needed time for self repair.

He led them , looking for a secure place to camp. Some place near the middle of the ship, with heavy bulkheads surrounding it. An armory would do nicely. But there were few indications that such a store of arms existed on the floor. Where would a cargo transport store their arms anyway? Why would they be armed in the first place?

The scorched panels he saw before entering inside, those seemed to be burn marks from weapons fire. Maybe it was pirates. Maybe this ship was stolen. But before he could conjure up another reason, they stumbled upon a large set of heavy doors , with explosive warning symbols plastered over it.

They punched at the door, bending it out of shape and slowly prying it off its tracks. The deadbolt locking mechanism was incredibly strong. But no one would have guessed that a platoon of mechs would be knocking on the door. The door was thoroughly weakened by the barrage, its surface covered in deep dents. Ross stepped several paces from it and then rushed at the door.

He crashed through it, breaking it into one large contorted slab Behind it was a treasure trove of small arms. Racks of rifles collecting dust and boxes of power cells waiting to be pillaged. Though the entrance was breached, the armory seemed to be the safest place to be.

At first it seemed like a small cache, probably for emergency use in case the floor was boarded by intruders. They walked around, on foot this time, checking the inventory and the state of the arsenal. As he made his survey, Ryuki slipped and slammed into the rear wall. The hollow gong was unmistakable. It seemed impossible that there was more space beyond the wall, the ships floor plan couldn't account for it.

So where did the ringing echoes come from ?