Brys fell to the floor, twitching. The twitching grew stronger, until the guard was flailing wildly, smashing his limbs against the floor hard enough to break bones. In seconds, the man was dead.
Raina stared down at the man, dumbstruck. She'd never seen a man die like that.
But she'd read about it. A malfunctioning blaster, set just below kill settings, could cause a chain reaction-
It took an effort to pull her mind from the safe, clean textbooks and back to the dark, cramped safe room.
Vector!
Raina dropped to her knees, hoping she was right. She opened the Joiner's eyes and was greeted by blackness. She winced, realizing there wasn't going to be an easy way to check for nervous system damage, but at least Vector was alive. Whatever chemicals the Killiks pumped through him wouldn't flow if he were dead. It was an effort of will to clear his eyes, but death would have done the job just fine.
So the files said, at least.
Kolto. He needed kolto. She took the syringe from her med pack and gave Vector a shot in the shoulder, but it wasn't much. For something like nervous system damage, she needed more.
It was almost casual, how she stepped over Brys' body to take inventory.
The room was a mess. The gravity was still low, the terminals had caved in and the monitors were cracked. A closet on the wall had a door hanging off its hinges, and the grav suits were torn and a little warped in places. A row of hooks had broken, dropping a dozen stun batons on the ground. Most of them had snapped clean in two. The medical cabinet was a wreck; there was no way the kolto dispensary would work without a computer to control it.
This was the broken safe room. That was why the guardswoman hadn't stopped here and activated the lockdown. Everything in here was broken.
Everything in here was useless.
The pounding on the door seemed to grow louder.
She needed a way to kill the rakghouls and get the team out of the base. Or at least make it out of the base. Once they escaped with any survivors, they could call in extermination crews with proper weaponry and armour. In the worst case, they could make do with the Sanguine End's weapons and turn the entire prison to ash.
When had Kaliyo gone silent?
"Kaliyo?"
Silence.
"Kaliyo, are you there?"
The comm crackled, then Darren Temple's voice spoke. "Med bay doors aren't reinforced, but we're barricading them as best we can. Any chance of reinforcements?"
"Father!" Raina didn't know whether to be relieved or more worried than ever. "Vector and I are in a safe room between the med bay and prison block. It's nonfunctional, and there are rakghouls at the doors. Vector is injured; he's unconscious. I don't know what to do; the rakghouls seem to be immune to blaster fire."
"Immune to-? Raina, the gravity isn't working in there, right? Have you adjusted the blaster settings to compensate?"
Adjusted the blaster settings?
That was right! The bolts wouldn't form properly in different gravity!
Only one other problem…
"Father," Raina said, "standard issue blasters don't allow for that level of adjustment."
There was moment of quiet on the comm. Raina thought she might have heard a muttered, "survive," and, "proper weapon," but the rakghouls' attacks on the door were too loud for her to be sure.
After a few seconds, Raina asked, "father?"
There was the sound of Darren Temple clearing his throat, then, "the lockdown hasn't activated. I suppose that means Fixer Fifteen disabled the security system before dropping us into the Tarisian underworld. Though… Raina, how many turrets are there around each safe room? Do you know where they are?"
Her father's tone matched Cipher Nine's so closely, she responded without thinking to defend Doctor Lokin. "Three. One on the ceiling and two on the floor, all just outside the door. The med bay and administration rooms have five each, and the pr-"
"You need to get to the wires between the terminal and the turrets," Darren Temple interrupted. "Can you do that?"
Raina's mind blanked. This was beyond the scope of what she'd studied.
"I have come to a decision," said Scorpio.
Raina blinked. She'd forgotten Scorpio was on the comm.
"Raina Temple, Vector Hyllus, and Kaliyo Djannis have the potential to be viable subjects. I will help preserve your lives."
Kaliyo or Cipher Nine would have said something at Scorpio's tone, but Kaliyo was still worryingly radio-silent, and the agent…
Raina took a breath, looked to Vector for strength, and asked, "what can you do, Scorpio?"
"Very little," Scorpio admitted. "Cipher Nine had possession of the only access spike he allowed me to create. Facility Kraan-295 is a closed system. However, I do have a greater understanding of the facility's schematics than an or-"
"Today, please," Darren Temple interrupted.
Raina flinched. That wasn't the way to speak to Scorpio. If she decided she didn't like someone, it usually went badly.
After a moment of silent fuming, though, Scorpio said, "the majority of the wiring is accessible via modular floor tiling. Approach the computer terminals. The area directly in front of the terminal is a focal point for the power and data transfer cables in the room."
That was all well and good, but it didn't help actually accessing the cables. Raina looked around for something to pry up the panels with, and found something hopeful. One of the spare stun batons would do. Maybe. There were several that had been slightly crushed by their fall, a few with no visible damage, and two that and been bent nearly in half.
Every second spent searching was punctuated by scratching, howling, and slamming at the door. If she didn't move fast enough, she and Vector wouldn't have to worry about anything as trivial as wiring.
As quickly as she could, Raina took one of the stun batons and bent it over a desk. In the reduced gravity, it was hard to get the leverage to twist and snap it, but she braced herself against the wall and put her weight into it. It gave with a sudden SNAP, and she caught herself on the floor, makeshift lever in hand.
The terminal was less than two meters away, so she crawled over, then wedged the broken baton in between two of the floor tiles. It popped out just as it was designed to.
Revealing another, obvious, problem.
"Which cable?" There were six under this tile alone, and she could see others underneath the panels beside it.
"The cables you need will begin as a bundle of three, each a half-centimeter in diameter." Raina tore up more panels as Scorpio spoke. "Each cable will then diverge to its turret. To activate them without an active computer, you will need to rely on their internal programming, which is rudimentary even by..."
Raina decided it would be best to tune Scorpio out for a few minutes. She knew what to do. She just needed to make sure she did it properly.
There were metal supports and pipes in between dozens of wires. Many of the wires were obviously useless, too small to carry data and power, too numerous to be for the turrets, or obviously heading off in the wrong direction, but even with Scorpio's advice, the number of candidates only narrowed down to three. Technically, she could probably narrow it down more, but that would require a way to perfectly measure the cables. None were handy.
It wasn't that any of the three were likely to start up anything dangerous, but the time it would take to splice each directly to the power line…
The door rattled and Vector gave a quiet, pained groan. Scorpio had lapsed into silence, and now the comm was silent. No sign of Kaliyo. Still, Raina didn't rush. Rushing was carelessness. Carelessness got one killed.
Though she couldn't help the personal voice of Kaliyo in her mind screaming that rakghouls "got one killed", too.
Hopefully the real Kaliyo was just hiding, silent because making noise in this prison was a death sentence now.
Alright. Time to splice a live wire in a combat situation. As she worked, Raina listed off the regulations she was violating, just to calm her nerves and distract from the number of ways she could die, like if she slipped and touched the wire, or if her blade handle and glove weren't strong enough insulators, or if she took too long and the rakghouls broke in…
The distraction wasn't working very well.
When she finished, though, she sat back with a smile and wiped her brow. Hey daddy, she thought, you're little girl's an electrician. Then she listened for the turrets firing.
Nothing. Oh, no. had she done it wrong? Maybe she'd shorted the circuits while working Though, if she wasn't dead, it still hadn't gone as badly as it could have.
No, wait. What was that sound? Raina turned to look at the med station. She couldn't figure out the sound over the rakghouls' howling.
The smell, however, was much more identifiable. Burning kolto.
It took a few seconds to disconnect the cables she'd spliced, but the makeshift electrician counted herself lucky. She hadn't set the room on fire, and now she had kolto. Sort of. It was worth the chance that the kolto was still good, so she picked up the tin of her med pack and opened the cabinet door. Kolto flooded out, and she only got a little of it, but it was something. A few sips for Vector, a little better chance for the Joiner to make it through this.
She owed Cipher Nine that much.
The door frame made a cracking sound.
"Er… status update?" Raina tried, moving to try the second wire as fast as she dared.
Her father responded, at least. "Med bay entrance is barricaded, but we don't know how long it'll hold. The turrets are a no-go. We don't have any equipment to safely cut the wires. We're looking for another way out, but unless Scorpio changes its mind and gives us a hand, I don't know what we'll do."
"Wait a second." It was hard to focus on that last sentence and working at the same time. "Scorpio, why aren't you helping my father?"
"Your progenitor has not proven himself worth the effort."
Emperor alone! "Scorpio, I'm getting my father out of here alive. If you don't help us, I'm that much more likely to die trying."
"Calculating… Highest probability of survival contingent on abandoning extraneous objectives."
Raina glared at the cable she was holding. "Now calculate the odds of me doing that. And factor in what Cipher Nine would do."
"Raina," said Darren Temple, "she has a point. If you can get out of here alive, you have to do that. If you can find a way to the facility entrance, it's possible the rakghouls haven't left the prison yet."
She almost shook her head out of habit. Dangerous, given what she was handling. The cables crackled quietly with power, barely audible between the slams on the door. "I don't think I can make it that far on my own. Even in the low gravity, Vector is too heavy for-"
"You're not taking Vector." Darren Temple actually sounded shocked. "He's unconscious. Dead weight. He'll get you both killed!"
"I'm not leaving him any more than I'm leaving you." The cables merged perfectly, and Raina heard the sound of mechanisms shifting just outside the doors. "Scorpio, get my father a way out of this facility safely. I'll be joining him soon."
She barely heard Scorpio's acknowledgment, and ignored her father's protests entirely.
It took a few seconds to check the stun batons for any that worked. Three of them did. She hooked one on her belt and managed to keep hold of the other one as she picked up Vector and slung him across her shoulders. At least the gravity was low. It made things so much easier.
Not that the rakghouls outside would care.
"Ensign Raina Temple, leave us and get out of here alive! That is an order!"
Raina looked at Vector's face, sharp-nosed and slicked with sweat, and she thought of another, a pale face with an intense, visored gaze.
"I don't take orders from you," Raina said. "Sir."
The turrets started firing, and Raina kicked the door open, catching the button and slamming the door outwards in the same motion.
There were more rakghouls than she'd thought. They filled the halls, batting at the blaster bolts they clearly found more annoying than threatening.
The turrets were on high-gravity settings. It was a good thing their fire rate was blinding. The strobe effect was probably doing as much to slow the rakghouls as the blaster bolts.
Raina stepped forward and electrocuted a rakghoul with her stun baton, then ran. Or tried to. It was a terrified, stumbling shamble, made awkward by the low gravity and by Vector ruining her center of mass, and worse by the need to stun every rakghoul in her path in the thin hallway. A rak roared in her face and got a stun baton in the eye for its trouble, but it was only one of many. She stumbled away from the swipes of two more, ones that only missed because they were half-blind and trying to escape the turret's line of fire. The smell of ionized air and the fungal, sweaty stench of the beasts filled her nose and head. The sound of blasterfire, of the rakghouls' roars and screeches, of crackling arcs of electricity from the stun baton, resonated in the narrow halls. It all turned a terrifying race for survival into a mind-bending gauntlet.
She shouldn't be here. A rakghoul lunged at her, and she almost fell into the turret's line of fire as she moved out of the way. If Kaliyo were here, she'd have bulldozed the beast with the weight of her armour. If Vector had been conscious, he could have fought off the beasts himself. Both would have moved with heedless determination. Raina barely held in a scream as another beast grabbed at her with clawed hands.
She did scream when those claws caught on her stun baton and tore it from her hand.
The scream got louder when another set of claws raked across her tricep and shoulder blade. Within a heartbeat, she felt sick. In another two, she was kneeling on the floor. Her brain was numb, her body ached, and she could feel her sense of self going ragged, like the claws had torn it to bloody shreds. One hand fumbled for her other stun baton, but she didn't have enough room to draw it.
She was going to die, and Vector was going to die. And Kaliyo and Darren and Lokin-
"STOP!"
The rakghouls, all of them, froze for an instant. Long enough. Raina drew the second baton and hit the three closest monsters with it. They went down and she clambered over them without really standing up. This time, she waved the weapon blindly, unable to even focus on aiming or picking her targets. She just did her very best to put one foot in front of the other and make sure she wasn't stumbling into any rakghouls.
At the edge of the group, just before she escaped, a rakghoul lunged for Vector. She tried to dodge, but there wasn't room. Her baton was in her other hand, trapped where it could do no good. She shifted her weight, thrust out her arm, and let the beast take her instead of her friend. It was stupid, it was against protocol and, even after everything, it brought tears to her eyes and a scream tearing through gritted teeth. But Vector was her responsibility.
She didn't look. She tried not to think. She just burst from the crowd and ran.
In seconds, she saw the next safe room. It was too far. Or too close. Or… something. If she tried to get in, the rakghouls would get her before she got through the door.
They had to make it to the med bay.
Raina ran, and cried, and would have screamed if she could have spared the breath. She hoped she was imagining the hot breath on her legs, prayed it was just a trick that she could hear howling in every direction, around every corner.
Emperor, let this be a nightmare.
How much further was it to the med bay? Was she going in the right direction? Everything hurt. Her arms and back were a piercing emptiness, her head a dull throb. Her legs burned and her back ached. Her jaw and fists were sore from clenching so tight.
Then she turned the corner and saw the med bay, and the drowning feeling in her heart turned to stabbing ice.
The med bay doors had been torn open, and rakghouls were streaming into it from up and down the hall. They were everywhere.
Everywhere.
They were all going to die.
She'd failed.