Dix could only bring half the lights on.
Consequently, the hangar wasn't merely gloomy, it seemed downright hostile. Dalton ignored it as he finished performing his sweep of the area. Thankfully, most of the shit inside had been launched into space when the airlock had opened. He saw nothing hiding among the shadows, but Dix was right, the place was another slaughterhouse. Bullets everywhere, blood flash frozen by the gallon, and several hopper corpses.
"Okay, looks like we're clear," Dalton said, coming back over to the others. He saw Frost shoving a foot-high crate his way with her foot. She got it up against him and was holding something other than her Canister Rifle. "What are you doing?"
"Patching you up, now don't move," she replied, stepping up on the crate and cracking open an armor repair kit.
"Thanks," he said. "Now, uh, first order of business is to get a map of this place, and second order is to find a ship with FTL capabilities. Barring that, even another dropship will do. There's other space stations."
"Got it!" Dix called. "We got one! Sending a map of this place in a burst packet now."
"Perfect. Everyone, study up. Dix, where is it?"
"That's the part you're not gonna like," he replied, jogging back over. Well, loping over. You couldn't really jog in a suit of power armor. "It's on the other side of the station. We got about six hundred meters of corridors to cover."
"Of course we do," Dalton muttered. "Gimme a sec." He opened up the map Dix had sent and studied it on the overlay that projected over the interior of his visor. Once he'd figured out where they were and where they needed to go, he saw that it wasn't going to be too complex to actually get there. "Okay, we gotta take three corridors and pass through a cargo bay, and that should get us to where we need to go. Then we need to see if the damn thing works...Alder, you can fly something bigger, right?"
"Yeah, I can do it," she said. "Just get my ass in a pilot's seat, I'll handle the rest."
"Perfect. Okay, next part of the plan. Dix, help me get these two cargo haulers working again. Everyone else, empty out all the cargo we managed to store. I want all of it here, in a pile, in five minutes."
Everyone scrambled to work and Dalton felt a deep relief at that. So far, they really did seem comfortable with him giving the orders. It wasn't always so simple.
"Done," Frost said. "What should I do?"
"Keep watch," he replied.
"Check."
Her previous emotions, he noted interestedly, had almost disappeared. Almost, but not completely. Hopefully they could survive this mess and he could have a place to actually sit down and talk with her. Or she with him. Because he truly was in uncharted waters here. But no time for that now. He hustled over to the pair of cargo haulers he'd seen, Dix moving with him. They worked fast. The haulers were basically flat pieces of metal with handles and anti-grav units slapped to them. They were reliable enough and should get the job done.
"Don't suppose you got a look at their internal systems? Got some kind of idea of how fucked this station is?" Dalton asked quietly as they looked over the haulers.
"No," Dix replied, "the operating system is pretty shot."
"Fantastic."
The first hauler worked fine and he sent Dix off with it. The second required some maintenance work to get it going again, but he managed it in just two minutes and hustled it over as well. It took them another three minutes to get both cargo haulers loaded up and all the crates strapped down. They were a bit overloaded, so they wouldn't move as fast, but they should get the job done.
"Okay, I've got point with Dixon. Frost has got our six. Everyone else, stick close to the cargo. That is your job: protecting that cargo and getting it to where it needs to go. No one wander off on your own, and if you see or hear anything, you call it out. Otherwise, no talking. We want this to be quick and quiet. Just stay focused, keep it tight, and we'll all get out of here alive."
Dalton felt a twinge of guilt at that last sentence as he headed forward with Dix to check the way ahead. He knew there was a decent chance at least one of them was going to die, and also a not insignificant chance that all of them might die. But technically speaking that was always true to some degree, and you couldn't acknowledge it too much or it would be all you and your team would focus on. Frankly, it was insane how much could change in terms of performance or the fact that how far someone could go was based so much on their mood.
He and Dix got a broad, tall door open. It rose into the ceiling, revealing a cross corridor that granted access to the other hangar bays to either side of them, and another, very long corridor, dead ahead.
"Holy God," Dalton whispered.
"Man...I seen some shit in my time, but this, uh...this is a lot," Dix replied.
Utter destruction and devastation awaited their inspection. It was another abattoir. The reek of blood was almost like a mist on the air. He could taste it. There had to be some hundred corpses, no, two hundred easily, within sight. A lot of them were zerg, but too many of them were human. He saw limbs and heads and torsos and so much blood, so much raw human meat.
"What the fuck are these things?" Dalton whispered finally. "How did they even get onboard?"
"Questions for later, I wanna get the fuck out of here," Dix replied.
"You scared?" Dalton asked, looking at him in surprise.
"Let's say I'm getting a little reacquainted with anxiety."
"Then you're doing a hell of a lot better than I am, man."
"Dalton," Dix said firmly, looking at him squarely, "you can do this. We can do this."
He stared back for a moment in silence, then looked again upon the death and devastation, then sighed softly. "Guess we don't have much choice."
"Only way out is through."
"Okay, people!" he called. "Looks clear, but it's fucking gruesome, so don't lose your shit! Just like we said, keep it tight and get a move on. Don't let this shit distract you."
There were varying amounts of horrified murmurings as everyone approached and got a real sense of just how bad it was. It started off unpleasant and then got worse from there as Dalton and Dix began leading them into the tunnel. The smell was so bad that Dalton was actually tempted to activate his internal oxygen supply, but resisted the urge.
Their walk through the resupply station was a nightmare, but an eerily silent one. Save for the squelching of their boots or the snap of bone when one of them stepped on a corpse. They made sure to check down each opening, each door, each hallway. They revealed only more silent death and destruction.
They made it through the first corridor, took their turn, moved all the way down the next one, and then passed through the storage bay without any genuine issues. Dalton made a mental note of the bay. It looked like it had been in the process of being cleaned out, but they'd only got most of the way finished, not all. There were still a few stacks of what could be ridiculously valuable resources. And they were going to need every edge they could get.
When they got to the third and final stretch of corridor, the last thing that stood between them and what was hopefully a functional ship, Dalton raised his fist. The others froze behind him.
"What?" Dix whispered harshly.
"That. One o'clock, low," Dalton replied.
"It's just another corpse...whoa, what the fuck? Hold on now…"
"Yeah. Hold tight everyone, overwatch," Dalton said, and moved forward with Dix.
In the short time since discovering the zerg, he'd seen a few hundred corpses that had been cut open with blades. By now, he wouldn't say he was used to it, but he was definitely able to recognize it. There was a dead hopper by the left wall of the broad corridor, sliced nearly in two, down the middle. He would've chalked it up to friendly fire, but the wound was…
"Cauterized," Dix muttered. "Cleanly, too. Really cleanly. But it's...not like anything I've ever seen before."
"Yeah...it would take some kind of...I don't know, a blade made of fire? Energy? Plasma? I don't–"
He jerked as the lights abruptly snapped off, plunging them into darkness. They all worked frantically to activate their flashlights mounted on their suits and their rifles. Luminosity flared into being, pushing back the shadows, but not enough to give them full visibility.
"What do you think?" Dalton muttered.
"Probably just shitty wiring, this place is falling apart," Dix said.
"Yeah, but…" he hesitated as he began to hear a sound. It was rhythmic, steady, familiar. Someone was walking towards them. "That's not a hopper or a snake," he whispered harshly.
"Human?" Dix replied.
"Baker, Frost, Abner, get up here," Dalton snapped. "Something's coming!" He kept listening. "It's...it sounds like a human, but something's wrong. Too heavy."
"Power armor," Dix replied as the others hurried to join them.
"No, can't be. I don't hear metal on metal. It's...different."
"So what then?" Dix muttered.
"What is it!?" Abner demanded.
"We don't know. Just wait."
Dalton kept his gun trained on the shadows ahead. The heavy footsteps were getting louder, but they were measured, calm almost. Definitely something with two feet that more or less walked like a human. After a moment, he thought he could see some kind of vague shape among the shadows, but it was still too dark to tell. He decided to take a figurative shot in the dark, hoping to avoid having to take a lot of literal ones.
"Who goes there?!" he called.
The footsteps stopped. The figure remained obscured, just beyond the reach of their lights. A long moment of pure silence went by. Then, Dalton had the strangest sensation. He had the barest, faintest sensation of something rushing at him, and then a feeling of something swooping over his head. No, not his head, his mind. It was an unpleasant sensation, and sent a sharp chill down his spine. A second later, Dix made an unhappy noise and did the same thing.
"I don't think this thing is friendly," Frost whispered.
"Can you see what it is?" he asked.
"No, something's messing with my optics."
The conversation was snapped cleanly off as, with the sound of something powerfully igniting, a light suddenly snapped into existence. It was a flare, or that's what he thought at first. It had a definite shape, like a bar or a tube, but it was lit up like the sun, a brilliant blue-white color. And then a second one ignited across to the first, making an X, the sound tremendous in the doomed passageway. All at once, he realized he was seeing…
Blades.
Blades of...energy?
Attached to the end of something's arms. This was not a zerg, he thought, and it was a powerful and immediate notion. The light revealed the form of this new creature. It was definitely humanoid. Two arms, two legs, a head, a torso. It looked to be wearing some kind of strange armor, and it was much taller than a regular human would be, reaching easily over seven feet in height. Perhaps even approaching eight.
"What the fuck is this!?" Baker cried.
He had a notion of furious danger from the thing, and then it began walking towards them with a great sense of immediacy. It wasn't going slow, but it wasn't hurrying, either. Just long, confident strides directly towards them.
"Fire!" Dalton shouted as he squeezed the trigger.
A trio of Gauss Rifles immediately began chattering, though one of Frost's explosive canister rounds went out just before any of the other bullets did. And that was when Dalton discovered the real problem with this new whatever the hell it was: it apparently had some kind of force field around it. He grit his teeth and fought down the fear as he saw his bullets go rebounding off the shield. How was this happening!?
They kept firing, pouring as many rounds into it as they could, but its shield deflected everything. Even the canisters.
"Erik, down!" Frost screamed in a sudden panic, and then he was being yanked backwards with a surprising strength.
He watched as the blade cut cleanly through the air where he had just been standing. He actually felt the tip of it nick the front of his armor, near his neck. Then it kept going and cut cleanly through Abner's neck. Dalton stumbled backwards, hands already guiding the barrel of the Gauss back towards the unknown horror, and saw Abner's helmet, head still inside of it, come away from the rest of him. The alien shoved the corpse aside even before it had finished falling and kept coming for them.
Suddenly, a new light flooded the hallway as Dix opened up with his Perdition Flamethrowers. Dalton kept firing frantically as he fell back with Frost.
"It won't go down!" Dixon roared, and then the figure lurched out of the flames and brought its blade around in a tight arc.
It slashed over the tops of his arms, where the flamethrowers were mounted, and cut cleanly through the barrels. Dix shouted in surprised pain and then fell back.
"Put it down! Put it down!" Dalton screamed as he emptied his rifle into it.
As the flames died away, there was suddenly a brief but brilliant white flash. Dalton's gun ran dry and he began frantically reloading, but he saw that there had been a change. The shield covering it that flared whenever bullets hit it had changed into something completely different, now becoming something closer to static dancing across the surface of metal. It covered the thing in a writhing miniature lightning storm, and then abruptly snapped out of existence.
Had they overloaded it?
Even as he thought that, Frost fired a round. It landed directly over where its heart would be, were it a human, and blew a solid chunk of metal out of its armor. That was when the new alien moved with an immense speed. It slashed again, cutting cleanly through Dalton's rifle and severing the last six or so inches of it. He fell back, groping for his Slugthrower, and it took another swipe at Frost. She leaped nimbly back, narrowly avoiding it, and then Baker was there, screaming and firing directly into the creature's stomach.
The bullets chewed through its armor and began doing some real damage. A deep, deep blue blood began seeping from the wounds. The alien didn't actually make a sound, but Dalton heard a bizarre, throaty roar come from...somewhere. For a moment he thought it might really have come from the beast, but as he looked again at its strange face, he saw that it didn't even have a mouth. What the fucking hell was this creature?!
It lunged forward and drove an energy blade into Baker's gut. He screamed and staggered backwards as it tore it out. Roscoe and Alder took his place. The Firebat lit the thing up again as Alder fired a Gauss Rifle she'd found at some point. Frost fired another round and Dalton began emptying his sidearm into the creature.
Its tall, lithely muscular body did a juttering dance under the combined fire and then toppled over.
"Cease fire! Cease fire!" Dalton yelled, reloading his Slugthrower.
The flames and gunfire cut off at once. They waited. As the smoke cleared, it showed that the creature was now stretched out on the plating in an unlovely sprawl. Its armor, a curious amber color, inlaid with deep blue, was chewed up, and so was its grayish skin. Dalton stared at the body with the others for several seconds, then raised his pistol. Needed to be sure. As he took aim at the corpse, there was a sudden flash of light.
When it disappeared, so had the corpse.
"What the fuck!?" Dalton snapped, jerking back.
"Holy shit, I was not prepared for that," Dix said.
"What happened?" Alder whispered.
"Need a little help here," Baker grunted.
"Fuck!" Dalton snapped, turning around and holstering his Slugthrower.
"I've got it," Forrester said, crouching beside him. "Hold still."
Dalton felt like his brain was becoming overloaded. Too much happening too fast, but he'd dealt with that before. He looked around, making several quick decisions.
"Frost, overwatch here," he said.
"On it," she replied.
"Roscoe, provide protection on our six. Alder, with her. Dix, how bad are your weapons?" he asked, turning back to the big Firebat.
"Fucker got both, totally out of commission," he replied bitterly as he looked at his ruined forearm-mounted jets. "Took a layer of skin off, too."
"Fuck. All right, stay here, get patched up by Forrester. Mulberry, Finch, stay with the gear and guard it. Sullivan, with me. We're scouting ahead. Forrester, how long?"
"Two minutes," she grunted. "Wound was cauterized instantly, gotta sew him up." Baker let out a tight bark of pain as she worked.
"Fine. Let's go, Sullie."
"Yes, Sergeant," she replied tightly.
Dalton had a sense that Frost wanted to say something to him, but was holding back, which meant she wanted to say something to him she didn't want the others to hear. That she wasn't demanding some time to speak her mind meant that it could wait. Fine, it could wait. He was still freaking out about that...thing. It was not a zerg. There was no way it was a zerg. Besides looking completely different, it just felt completely different. The zerg so far seemed to use organic 'tech'. Natural armor, scythe arms that were hard as steel and razor sharp, spitting the spines. This thing, on the other hand, had actual metal on it and those blades were beyond high tech. And that fucking shield.
They had been perhaps twenty meters from the door they were looking for. He opened it as soon as Sullivan was in position.
"Clear," she whispered, and walked slowly in.
He joined her and they found themselves in a large bay. It was mostly empty.
"Where's the fucking ship!?" she snapped.
For a moment, Dalton almost gave into despair, as it became so overwhelming in its power that it briefly crested his own internal horizon. But then he saw something along the far wall. It was lined with airlocks and one of them, he saw, had a green light.
"There," he whispered, pointing.
"There what?" Sullivan shot back.
"The airlock! It's lit up, look! That means it's attached to something, that has to be where the ship is!"
"Fuck, I hope so."
"Come on, we need to secure the bay."
This bay was at least in somewhat better shape than the last one they'd been in. A quick sweep of it revealed a whole lot of nothing. Dalton could really feel time pressing in on him as he led Sullivan back to the corridor.
"Okay, we're clear, everyone get in here and bring the cargo," he said.
They moved fast, hustling and hurrying as they felt the press of time. Around them, the station shuddered again, producing a horrifyingly ominous groaning sound. Once they had everything inside, he passed out more quick orders, assigning Forrester to stand watch over Baker, who seemed to be clinging grimly to consciousness, put Sullie and Roscoe on perimeter watch, and put everyone else under the control of Dix to start checking out a pile of cargo that had been brought haphazardly into the bay and then abandoned.
He then took Frost and accessed the airlock to get into the ship in question. Neither said anything as she got the airlock open and they slipped inside. The ship, he saw as they passed through the airlock and came into a good-sized cargo bay, was definitely civilian. It looked to be a cargo freighter, though not a particularly big one. Maybe a dozen crew could live reliably on it. It also looked like they'd unloaded everything already when disaster had struck. Wonderful. Maybe there was another bay and it was packed full.
He doubted it. Their luck seemed to be running thin at this point. They'd be lucky if this thing had power and could get them out of the system. And it wasn't infested with zerg. Or whatever the hell else that thing had been. But as he surveyed the area, he saw no evidence of the zerg. Though he did see some blood on the floor, although by the way it looked, it was of the variety of someone carrying an injured person somewhere.
"Let's sweep this place quickly," he said.
"Right," Frost replied tightly.
They cleared the cargo bay and stepped into what Dalton realized must be a central corridor that acted as the spine of the ship, running straight down the middle, from bridge to engines. There were lights on, and that was good, but it looked pretty old and beat up. Still no slaughter, at least. They kept poking around. Directly across was another big cargo bay, this one a mirror of the first, except that it had at least a little mound of crates secured in the back.
To the left were engines and life support. They looked old and beat to shit, but basically functional. They hid no zerg. They went in the other direction then, towards the bridge. All along the left side of the corridor, (which was thankfully built big enough to handle a Marine in full power armor), they found seven living quarters, one of them bigger than the others. Though not by much. And a messhall. Along the right, they found an armory, a repair bay, a rec room, a shared shower/bathroom area, and finally...an infirmary.
"Looks like we're picking up some strays," Frost muttered as they came into the infirmary.
Three of the four beds were occupied by still figures.
"Maybe...check them," Dalton replied.
The bay wasn't quite big enough for him and his armor. Frost moved smoothly and lithely among the infirmary, first clearing it to confirm they were otherwise alone, then checking the three bodies.
"One of them is dead, the other two look to be in bad condition. One looks like he might belong to the crew, the other, I believe, is a Confederate technician," she reported.
"Coin flip if they're gonna be cool with our plan," he muttered.
"Not much choice, huh? They're in shit shape. Tech got stabbed in the gut it looks like, and not by something that gives the benefit of cauterization, and the crew member is pretty shredded, lots of cuts and at least two gunshot wounds."
"Will they live?"
"Dunno. We need to get Forrester in here."
"Well, let's finish this off."
They went forward and checked out the bridge. Once they were sure it was empty, they headed back through the ship and out the airlock. The others had brought all the cargo they could and piled it just outside the airlock door.
"Okay," Dalton said, getting everyone's attention, "ship is clear and looks to be in working condition but we don't know for sure. There's a pair of survivors in bad condition in the infirmary. Forrester, get in there with Baker, get him stabilized and comfy, then check the other two. Mulberry, help her. Alder, get to the bridge and tell me this thing can get us the fuck out of here without blowing up. Everyone else, get this shit in through the airlock and secured in the cargo bay beyond as fast as possible. Frost, keep watch."
They worked fast and hard. It took about ten minutes to get everything brought onboard the ship. The station was beginning to shudder and creak and groan a lot more regularly, and by the time they had actually finished getting the last crate onboard, it was almost regularly trembling. Dalton told them to hurry up and left Dix and Frost to guard the airlock, then hurried forward to the bridge. He found Alder in the pilot's seat, looking between four different readout screens.
"Give me good news," he said.
"We have enough power to jump a decent distance in FTL and the ship is basically functional, from what I can see. It needs work, though. Not sure if we can make it all the way in terms of power, it depends on where you're taking us," she replied.
"Okay. Cut us loose from the station and move us a safe distance away, it's getting bad."
"On it."
He watched her work with a lightning proficiency. A few seconds later he heard a loud clang reverberate through the hull and then the stars began moving as they started drifting away from the station. They had made it perhaps five hundred meters away when the whole thing suddenly went up in a massive plume of fire.
"Holy shit, good call," Alder muttered as she kept working the controls.
"Apparently," Dalton replied, looking at the screen that showed the camera pointed in that direction. The flames died off almost immediately as the oxygen vanished and all that was left was a lot of twisted metal flying off in random directions. A rain of it banged against the hull in passing.
"Where we going?" she asked.
"Here. Lemme just link up with the ship…" he muttered, working his suit's internal digital suite. He found the ship's network, meshed it with his own, then sent off the coordinates in a data packet. There was a chime a second later and Alder kept working. "There is where we need to go."
"Hmm...yeah, it's in the ship's databanks. Thule. Decent-sized moon for a gas giant...we don't have the juice to make it that far."
He sighed. "Great. So we need more. We talking a lot or a little?"
"Somewhere towards 'mid'," she replied. "We'll have to find a power station or another ship to siphon from."
"Hmm. Shit. There's a dozen places I can think of in-system right now, but I'd rather get the hell out of here and maybe try our luck at some kind of fringe station. There is a station I know, a freeport, but it's pretty dangerous...mmm, maybe we've played the odds one too many times as it is and we should-what the fuck is that?!"
"I have no goddamned idea."
They both stared out the front windows as a massive, shimmering blue-white light faded into existence somewhere ahead of them. It kept growing and growing, and then suddenly a small fleet of huge, alien vessels snapped into existence. They were immense things, silver and amber in color, curved. They looked like the armor that the mysterious entity had been wearing.
"Okay, freeport it is," Dalton said as he hastily began feeding her more coordinates.
"Yep," she agreed.
It took less than a minute for him to pass that to her and for Alder to punch them into the navigational database, spool up the FTL drive, and get them the hell out of there.