Virtrew had been relaxing in the starboard docking array. He’d been feeling inspired and creative for the past ten-day… it was too late to alter the structure of the current station, but he had ideas for the next. He was off-shift, so he’d picked up his data tablet, a bowl full of Vzk’tk salad, and carried them off to a starboard docking ports for some quiet while he put together models. The main docking arms were as wide as a planetary highway and seemed almost as long; Virtrew liked to find a seat somewhere in the middle and draw.
He’d been putting the finishing touches on a rough two-dimensional representation of a new docking array, one inspired by the curling ferns he’d seen in the station’s growing arboretum. The design was quite attractive, in his admittedly-biased opinion, but was also very functional, and he looked forward to giving it to the station commander to present to the central administration. He’d been finding new ideas in all kinds of strange places recently… as if he was looking at alien construction with new eyes and seeing the merits in all of them.
Then he felt it: a deep dread. He looked up and saw the Hunter pack ship diving at the docking array, visible through the transparent crystal sheets that made up the tops of the docking arms – Virtrew’s own design.
He leapt to his feet, tablet forgotten, as the Hunter ship impacted. Its sharp nose smashed through the side of the docking arm a third of the way further down from where Virtrew stood; the shock rippled up the structure of the station, knocking him from his feet, and he felt the entire structure shudder as the station’s safeties used kinetic thrusters to try to counter the impact.
Far down the arm, he could see the Hunter ship’s nose stabbing into the station. He could see the nose drop open like a bird’s beak; he could see the first of the dreaded creatures invading the station.
Virtrew did the sensible thing and ran in the opposite direction.
“Lev! Let me in! Lev! Of all the inbred… filthy… sucking… -” Keegi pounded on the dome while trying to find a profanity that properly encompassed the situation.
He’d nearly been knocked away into space when the Hunter ship impacted the starboard main docking arm, but fortunately he’d brought his thruster pack and was able to push himself back. Then he’d carefully thrust down towards the bottom of the dome, near the station proper, and found one of the airlocks located along the edge.
The problem was the lock had to be operated from the inside, and Keegi couldn’t contact Lev nor any of his assistants. The Hunters were broadcasting a jamming signal, and Keegi couldn’t reach a hardline. The station was huge and barely populated… he couldn’t just thrust to one of the other ports and hope someone was on the other side. The only place he knew someone was present was the dome, which is why he was pressed against the crystal sheeting like a hylp fly, begging for someone to notice him.
Preferably someone who didn’t plan to eat him!
He pounded on the crystal dome once again, unsure whether his meagre thumps could even be heard inside. By the stars, Lev!
-I’m coming!-
Keegi poked at his wrist-comp, wondering if the jamming had ceased for a brief moment. It was forgotten a moment later as the huge Guvnuragnaguvendrugun burst out of the bushes, galloping to the airlock. Keegi saw the holographic interface burst into being under Lev’s hand and scrambled over to the external door that opened moments later. He stomped and spit impatiently, willing the airlock cycle to move faster, but the machinery wouldn’t be hurried – which Keegi thought was entirely ungrateful, considering he was one of the beings who helped install it!
Finally, the airlock was pressurized and the inner door swung inward. Keegi was already bolting in, paws grasping at his helmet release.
“Keegi… Hunters!” Lev’s voice shook, and his flanks were the colour of terror.
The Gaoian’s helmet popped off, and he flexed his muzzle, making his ears pop. “I know! I know. Just… give me a moment.”
“What should we do? What can we do?!”
Keegi looked out beyond the dome, at the menacing ship embedded in the distant docking arm. “I… don’t know!”
Locayl were not meant for running.
The docking arm was a long, wide, and very open thoroughfare. Virtrew’s stumpy legs drove him along with all the speed his panic could muster, but the Hunters had seen him almost immediately and were pursuing even faster than he could run.
There were terminals dotting the length of the arm, and Virtrew would pause and quickly activate the kinetic fields that separated each section. But the fields were meant to stop escaping atmosphere in the event of a breach, not pulse fire, and the time spent erecting the fields was time not spent running. If anything the Hunters seemed amused at his desperate antics… it took them mere moments to weaken the fields enough to allow solid objects through, and then they were on his heels again.
Virtrew marveled at his own mind. Terror infused every fiber of his being, and yet his perceptions seemed sharpened to a razor edge. He felt hyper-aware, like colours had gained extra meaning, like he could hear the buzz of the kinetic fields and the whisper of the air circulators, as if he could feel the plating beneath his feet flex from the mass of evil that was hanging off the station’s arm. His thoughts had never been so clear or so fast.
Unfortunately his body couldn’t keep up, and his turbocharged brain only meant that he felt the pain all the more exquisitely as a pulse blast caught him in the leg, reducing the bone just below his right knee into fragments and crushing the flesh around it. Virtrew cried out in agony as the limb collapsed underneath him, sending him crashing to the deck and tumbling.
For a moment there was nothing but the pain, as another part of his mind noted that he was on the ground, helpless, and waited for the next blast to finish him off. The finishing shot didn’t come, and he managed to labour up onto his arms, peeking over his shoulder. Three Hunters were approaching, slowly, savouring the moment.
Three was too many. One was too many! And now he couldn’t run. There was nothing he could do. He could only wait and hope they’d kill him quickly, before they began to eat him-
-No, fight!-
Fire ignited in his belly. Pain turned to anger; not at the fact that they were going to kill him, but that they thought they could do it so easily! Like he was nothing, an annoyance, a toy! And then they were going to invade the station and do it to the others. They were going to kill the crew, his crew!
No. They would not!
He managed to start crawling, dragging himself forward with his four arms and one good leg. His shattered leg was forgotten… if he’d had a fusion sword he’d have struck it off himself, discarding the useless weight. It bounced behind him as he crawled, bent at a horrid and unnatural angle, and surely the Hunters thought it was hilarious. Fine, let them be distracted!
He made his agonizing way to the next terminal, the UI springing into being at his touch. A quick few presses and the last kinetic field between himself and the Hunters clicked into being. The Hunters immediately began pounding it with pulse blasts in a leisurely manner – it was merely the last desperate act of doomed prey.
But Virtrew wasn’t finished with the terminal. He went deeper into the menus, pulling up administrative interfaces he’d never seen before but still navigated with ease. He sought the management of the gravity in the section… he wasn’t a technician but he shunted power regardless. A warning came up, and he overrode it with a code he wasn’t supposed to know. He didn’t question where the knowledge came from, merely satisfied with knowing that he wasn’t helpless.
There was a buzzing sound behind him as an object – perhaps several objects – pushed their way through the kinetic field. A burst of kinetic energy caught him in the back, in his upper shoulder, and he was smashed against the wall and terminal. He tumbled to the ground again, crying out in anguish. Again he found his anger, and with his good pair of arms struggled upward, turning around to flop against the wall in a sitting position, the terminal within reach.
He saw one of the Hunters advancing – apparently just one of the horrid six-legged predators had been granted the right to finish him. He glared at the creature as it advanced… it was cautious, confused at his lack of fear. It was too bad Hunters rarely bothered to speak to their prey, as he would have told it he’d run out of fear moments before. It wasn’t useful, so he’d thrown it away.
Now there was only anticipation, eagerness. It seemed he owed his mater an apology – he had come to space to cause destruction. But he could make it Artful.
“Going to eat me, eh?” Virtrew spat at the hideous face of the Hunter. The creature hissed, not even bothering to aim its guns, instead flexing its claws in grim promise. A peaceful lassitude had come over him, and though his leg and shoulder were agonizing, the pain just didn’t matter. Instead he felt intense satisfaction. “I hope you like your meat cold.” With the last of his strength he slapped a palm on the nearby control pad.
The lights went black, and the entire station heaved.
In the distant medbay, the lone human made a noise of sorrow.
“Virtrew rerouted all the power flowing into that arm of the station into the gravity plates of the corridor, overloading them. They put out ten thousand times their maximum rated output before they burned out. The entire arm was snapped off by the stresses, cutting off the Hunter ship and giving us a reprieve. It was really quite an inspired action,” Cavvi said, and Trrkitzzkt hid his astonishment at hearing actual admiration and pride in the Corti’s voice.
“Virtrew was an architect, not a technician,” Trrkitzzkt pointed out. “I’m surprised he knew how.”
“Obviously he had hidden talents,” Cavvi replied.
“Apparently.”
Keegi and Levaraggan were in shock.
They had watched as the starboard docking arm had seemed to implode, an entire corridor section collapsing flat before detonating into a burst of shattered metal and crystal shards. Two thirds of the arm snapped off completely, drifting away and carrying the Hunter ship with it.
They were also in shock because they knew – knew – that Virtrew had died in the implosion. They weren’t sure how… the arm had been too far away, and they were at the wrong angle to see inside. But they were sure that the Locayl was gone, having sacrificed himself to buy them time.
Just time. Because while perhaps a Hunter or two had been killed in the implosion, the amputated section must have had enough emergency power left to sustain emergency kinetic fields and hold the atmosphere in long enough for the Hunters to make it back to their ship. As the pair watched, the insect-like ship withdrew from the severed arm, then dove downward, past the arboretum. Anger could be seen in the way the ship flew; the Hunters did not like being outsmarted by prey.
Moments later the station had shaken again – the Hunters piercing the installation from a different, more secure spot. But the shaking had not been sharp… the station shook and shook, like simply piercing the hull hadn’t been enough. The Hunter ship must have been continuing to thrust, burrowing ever deeper, like a parasite into flesh. There was a brief pause, like an indrawn breath, and then the shaking resumed, harder and briefer, then ended.
The attackers emerged again from behind the curve of the station’s hull, and the pair could see wreckage hanging from the reinforced front of the vessel, like scraps of flesh hanging from a predator’s teeth. The ship turned and dove again, to the bottom of the station, near the reactors and utility areas. There was another sharp jolt, then nothing.
Levaraggan stared. “What… what are they doing?”
The answer was given a moment later as a spray drifted into view from the second impact site – a torrent of frozen atmosphere.
“Move! Move!” K’al roared as the crew was caught in a sudden windstorm.
They’d all felt the ship pierce the hull again, but apparently piercing hadn’t been sufficient for the Hunters’ needs. The enemy ship had pierced and then dug, thrusting hard, pushing itself in through the bulkheads, through compartment after compartment, until the needle-like nose of the ship breached the inner shaft itself. The Hunter ship must have been almost entirely buried in the outer hull to extend so far.
The Hunters didn’t invade. If they had, K’al had nearly twenty pulse pistols and five pulse rifles waiting for them. A pitifully small force, and the entirety of the limited stock of the armory provided to a station still in construction, but more then enough to handle the Hunters had they been kind enough to breach in ones and twos like they’d be forced to do through the small breaching tube of their ship. Nearly fifty of K’al’s crew were mustered together in the central shaft, while the remainder were making their way upward, towards the command areas, with orders to lock the doors behind them and signal that the station was in distress. The Hunters had pushed in several decks below and on the opposite side of the shaft, giving them a perfect elevated position to rain fire down upon them.
The Hunters were neither so kind, nor so foolish. Almost the moment the armored proboscis on the front of the ship had come into view, the ship had reverse, pulling out along the same path it’d come in. A squeal of air turned into a roar, as the entire atmosphere of the inner shaft vented out through the giant hole left behind. A few emergency kinetic fields made a futile effort to hold back the mass of air, but the volume was simply too much – the notion of the inner shaft being breached short of the total loss of the station had never been considered. If anything, their sudden failure only made the decompression even more explosive.
Two crew were blown over the railing that surrounded the shaft, torn away by the torrent of air. If there was a mercy it was that they’d certainly be dead or unconscious by the time they reached vacuum. A Corti engineer next to K’al was lifted into the air, but with reflexes he didn’t even know he had the commander managed to snag the unfortunate being and reel him back in.
The group rushed for the nearest doors out of the shaft, their commander on their heels. There were too many of them to push through a single door, so they split radially into five groups, each heading to the nearest escape. K’al had a moment of pride as they moved with precision, the Vzk’tk and Rrrtktktkp’ch of the crew helping pull along the smaller, lighter Corti and Molmir, the heavy, blockish Unnoi trailing behind to snatch any being who got lifted off their feet.
It was a fight to get through the door… the inner compartments were venting into the shaft, through the door, and K’al’s larger size gave the air more surface area to push against. A Vzk’tk, Jjpbb, leaned out to snag the hand of Aprir, the Corti K’al was pulling along, leaving the commander’s hands free to grab the edges of the door and pull himself in.
“Commander!” someone shouted in front of him, pointing.
He turned, seeing that his group had lost someone, a Vzk’tk named Thyrk who had been knocked to the ground. Thyrk was clutching at the deck, unable to do more than lift his head lest the outrush of air push him even further away.
K’al dropped to the deck, hooking two of his legs around the door and gripping as best as he could with the two arms on that side. He actually let himself slide back out into the shaft, reaching for the fallen crew member. He strained, reaching as far as he could, while Thyrk struggled as well. The other teams had made it through their doors, sealing them behind them – unfortunately, that meant the door K’al clutched was the only outlet for the pressure. Their hands twisted just barely out of each other’s reach.
-I can’t make it!-
K’al didn’t care how he was able to hear him over the rushing air. “Yes, you can! Reach!”
Thyrk pushed forward, crawling forward by microns. Their fingertips almost touched. Then a gust caught the Vzk’tk and shoved him back.
-I can’t!-
“You can!”
After that last burst the pressure began to ease. Unfortunately that meant that the atmosphere left inside the hull was beginning to run out. Soon there wouldn’t be anything left to breathe, even if they shut down sections of the station and reallocated the atmosphere. But K’al wasn’t going to leave his crew behind!
-Leave me, close it!-
“No! Come on!”
He refused to give up, although his vision was starting to get spotty. Even then he could still see the moment when Thyrk made the decision. He could see the welder steel himself. Vzk’tk tended to be somewhat subservient, desperate for the approval of their Rrrtktktkp’ch cousins, well aware that the other species was far more clever. But in that moment Thyrk did the math, and knew his commander was wrong. So he did what was needed. He shoved downward, lifting himself off the deck. The torrent of air caught him, tossing him away.
“No!” K’al stared at where Thyrk had been a split-second before. There was nothing that he could do. He felt the other crew seize his feet and legs, hauling their commander back inside. The door slid shut, the escaping atmosphere reducing to an ear-piercing shriek… then silence.
He crawled forward on his four knees, leaning against the sealed door. He was certain he felt it, although it had to be his imagination: he felt the moment Thyrk lost consciousness. Felt the moment the lowly welder died. K’al felt like he’d lost a portion of himself… like he hadn’t entirely escaped the shaft. For a moment he could do nothing but lean against the door and shiver.
-We need you-
K’al glanced up. Dozens of eyes were watching him, the same distress echoed in all of them. He wasn’t sure who had spoken… it could have been any of them.
There was no time for mourning. His crew needed him. He stood up and looked them over… if any thought less of him for his moment of weakness, there was no evidence of it.
“Let’s go. They’re not done, and neither are we.”
Keegi and Lev had watched the burst of frozen atmosphere expand away from the station. Their eyes weren’t sharp enough to spot the pale dots against the blackness of space, the dots that had once been living beings, but they knew they were there. Inside, their crewmates were dying… they could feel it.
“What do we do?” Lev asked softly. Keegi had no answer. His claws were pricking his paws, and he was certain he’d never felt so angry in his life. But his claws were nothing compared to a Hunter’s, and they had no weapons.
What could they do?
Cavvi was frightened but not surprised when the diagram of the station had suddenly turned a vast swath of orange, indicating pressure loss.
Breaching the inner shaft was merely a means to an end – it impeded the defenders, yes, but it wasn’t enough on its own. The station was too large, the Hunters too few… it would be impossible to prevent the defenders from going to ground – unless the Hunters left no ground to go to. That was why she wasn’t surprised to see a breach warning on the lower utility decks… and the alerts that popped up on her screen a short while afterward, indicating that the tertiary atmospheric reprocessor had been destroyed, followed shortly thereafter by the secondary.
The Hunters were going to choke the crew into submission.
First, punch a hole straight through the heart of the station so that the main shaft was exposed to space. Then penetrate the lower decks and claim the machinery that kept the air that remained breathable. From there they could simply continue punching holes in the hull, venting compartments and corralling the defenders into smaller and smaller sections until they were concentrated together… ripe for the harvest. Or they could simply wait, and let the crew come to them in a desperate bid to restart the last reprocessor.
Cavvi’s scientific mind analyzed the situation with calm interest. Meanwhile her more practical side gibbered with panic. What were they going to do? What was she going to do!?
She glanced over at the human, who was sitting cross-legged on the medical bed that had become “hers”, staring at nothing as she usually did. Her expression was strangely intent, though there was no way to know what she was thinking. Cavvi was faintly envious – oh, to be human! To be spared the burdens of awareness, responsibility, or intellect!
The human’s face twisted with displeasure. Perhaps she had gas? Cavvi edged away.
Alas, a prodigious mind was a Corti’s blessing and curse. She had to figure out some way of putting it to use.
Were the Hunters advancing or waiting? Was there any way to determine where they were? A fully functional station would of course have presence monitors in every section, but 9384-mlikl was still being built, and Hunters were difficult to separate from machinery in the first place. What alternatives were there? What sensors would still have power? She resisted an urge to stomp her foot.
Gravity. The gravity plating still functioned, and the network was tied into the hardlines, separate from communications. Every plate had an integrated sensor so it could monitor its own output and any interfering gravity fields. All mass generated gravitons – even a heavy, cybernetically-enhanced carnivorous space monster.
Cavvi dashed over to her workstation. She had a moment to be thankful that the safeguards had yet to be installed during construction as she answered a password request with an empty line. A moment’s navigation brought her to the gravity network.
She had specialized in biology, not technology, but navigating the parameters of the gravity plating came to her easily, almost instinctively. Soon she was receiving telemetry from every gravity plate on the station, numbers that danced with every flex of the structure, with the movement of the nearby moon, with the storms of the gas giant. But would the movement of bodies on board stand out? She overlaid a delta map on top of the display of the station – a model that had yet to be updated with the grim fate of the starboard arm.
The map displayed a solid layer of noise. Cavvi adjusted the parameters, eliminating variations that affected too large an area at once, or were too slow to be artificial, and other signals that couldn’t possibly be caused by a living being. The yellow faded, becoming sharper, until small dots hovered over the parts of the station that were still livable.
A large mass was near the top of the shaft: the crew. As she watched a large portion split off, making its way to the very top of the station and the command areas. A smaller mass stayed behind. She knew the larger mass were those crew members who didn’t have weapons, who were being sent away to where they would be safe. The smaller group was the armed group. K’al’bktktk’r was with them.
Cavvi paused. How did she know this? It was a reasonable guess, of course, but she felt certain, as sure as if K’al had sent her a message himself.
She dismissed the question as unimportant as the lower sections of the station resolved. There was a large blotch at the outer hull – the Hunter ship, moving slightly in the puncture wound it had inflicted upon the station. Two decks above the ship and in the middle of the station there was another mass, which would split into smaller dots and then re-merge. The Hunters, apparently opting to wait for the station crew to come to them.
Or perhaps not? As she watched, a small dot separated from the larger, moving into the corridors. The dot began to move upward, through the emergency stairwells, drifting outwards to the outer hull. Cavvi puzzled… where were they going?
After a moment their track revealed itself: the Hunters were moving in a direct route toward the lifts to the station arboretum. The gravimetric map was fuzzier in that area due to the presence of the trees, but she was sure the large dot near the bottom side of the dome represented at least one crew member. Her strange omniscence made itself known again in the form of certainty that the dot was actually two crew: Keegi and Levaraggan.
How could she warn them? The comms were dead, thanks to the relentless electronic noise being broadcast by the Hunter pack ship. Could she hope that they might have the same inspiration she had?
Once she would have considered the idea ridiculous, but over the last handful of diurnals she had been slowly coming to the realization that perhaps this crew wasn’t composed of the normal collection of brainless dolts. They’d been anticipating her needs more often, respecting her desire for silence, and yet when they spoke sometimes they said things that made them sound almost Corti-like. At the same time she’d felt more satisfaction in assisting them, and their presence wasn’t nearly as irritating as once it had been.
Was it connected to this strange knowing? Were they, too, experiencing odd insights?
Perhaps it was time to trust in them. She made a copy of her gravimetric analyzer, and left it right inside the gravity plate systems where anyone could find it. Then she glared at the small, unmoving blob of yellow light inside the graphical image of the dome. Not far away, another blob was closing in.
“Come on, you stupid furball,” Cavvi hissed. “It’s obvious!”
“I have an idea,” Keegi blurted suddenly. He moved back to the terminal next to the airlock. He tapped and dove into menus, accessing portions of the station network he’d never had cause to examine before but nonetheless navigated with familiar ease. “Nearly all the station systems are still in `debug’ mode,” he explained. “That includes the gravity plating. If we can graph the feedback variations on the plates-”
“You can chart the movement of mass, and thus the Hunters,” Lev completed, impressed.
“Yes. I’ll just need to come up with-…” The Gaoian’s voice trailed off.
“What? What is it?”
“There’s already a program to do it here,” Keegi replied, mystified. “It has Doctor Cavvi’s identifier on it. She wrote it. How would she know?”
“You can ask her that later,” Lev replied impatiently. “Use it!”
“Right, right…” He tapped the symbol, and the holo shifted to show a wireframe model of the station. An obsolete model, thanks to the destroyed starboard docking ring.
He had to resist a chitter of delight as the model was suddenly covered in a yellow mass, one that faded and globbed together into several masses of light. Near the top of the station was the largest mass, the gathered crew. In the middle was a smaller group, moving downward, the armed group lead by the station commander. Near the bottom was a yet smaller blob, the Hunters themselves. And on the other side of the station, above the commander’s group, and moving in the opposite direction-
“Oh. Oh, spit.”
“What? Don’t say things like that and not explain!”
Keegi craned his neck upward toward his friend. “A Hunter is coming here.”
“What?” Lev’s flanks had turned such a vivid shade of green they seemed to glow. “What… what are we going to do?”
“We hide! The gardens are dense enough, even you can disappear in the grove-”
“We’re not the targets! These are! They’re coming for the arboretum!” Lev gestured broadly at the surrounding greenery, at the young trees and bushes which had only just found purchase in their artificial environment. “They breached the central shaft, Keegi… the station’s lost a huge amount of breathables, and the reclaimers aren’t running! The last major pressurized space is the dome, and the only oxygen generators still operating are these! If we hide, they’ll breach the dome, or set fire to it. Then you and I will just be the ones to die first. If the Hunters have damaged the reprocessors, then we need these plants!”
Keegi stared at him, his muzzle hanging open. Fear made his fur stand on end. Fear and resignation. “Then… I guess we make a stand.”
He closed his eyes for a moment, gathering his courage, then looked up at his companion. “Please tell me you have a weapon of some sort.” Lev held up a vibro-cutter, meant for trimming plants. Keegi sighed, taking the knife from him. “Well, maybe we can sculpt a menacing topiary.”
He blinked as an idea occurred to him; he looked down at his suit. Then he began to jog, headed in the direction of the lifts into the station. “Come on!”
“We can’t beat Hunters with a knife!”
“We won’t have to. We can even the odds in other ways.”
A single Hunter emerged from the lift, the twin pulse guns embedded in its arms tracking back and forth, corpse-white lips pulled away from its dagger-like teeth.
Normally the two Hunters would advance as a group, but the species was not stupid, and painful lessons at the hands of humans and their allies had taught them caution. The first was a vanguard, a beta who would search for traps and other deviousness. Once whatever stratagems the prey had revealed themselves, or the beta declared the way safe, the others of the group would move up.
It did not seem to be the case in the dome as the Hunter moved forward. It was known that at least two prey were present in the dome – it had been trivial to simply look through the transparent dome as the Swarm-ship had flown in during the attack. The greenery in the dome provided an ideal place to hide, and the Hunter scanned the area carefully.
It didn’t see the prey at first… no, it was scent that caught its attention. The delicious odor of meat and fear. It turned, following the slight draft. There – through some bushes a bipedal shape could be barely seen. The Hunter hissed with delight and loosed a trio of pulse blasts. The raw kinetic energy tore through the bush with ease, smashing into the huddled shape and knocking it away like a toy. The figure was slammed back against a tree behind it, limp and unmoving.
The Hunter stormed forward, eager to confirm the kill and reward itself with a small taste. The figure – one of the prey EVA suits – lay bonelessly at the bottom of the tree. The Hunter advanced slowly, wary of any traps, but the white-clad figure did not move.
It found out why a moment later as it reached down and lifted the suit with a cybernetic limb. Its claws pierced the fabric, hissing filling the silence as the suit deflated. The Hunter snarled, shredding the decoy with fury at the deception.