For Thirteen, the world had become suddenly, incredibly dark. He had gone from accepting all of the sensory feeds that the Elinee had to offer to a completely, utterly umbral blackness that he at first mistook for either death or blindness.
The throbbing in his head told him another story. That was a normal symptom of abnormal disconnections from the immersion system, and pain – as far as Thirteen’s experience with the matter went – precluded a state of being dead. The sudden illumination from his data pad’s notification screen ruled out blindness as well, which was nice.
It seemed that the power had simply gone out, and that was not an every day occurrence. The system logs that fed into his data pad showed that the self-protection functions of the reactor had been triggered when something had fired a massive power surge towards the larboard airlock. Right now the reactor would be undertaking its self-diagnostics, and applying any self-repair routines it needed before it was satisfied that power could be restored.
There was ultimately no telling how long that would take, and until it was done it was going to stay dark and near weightless; fortunately the kinetic generators held a small amount of their own power for situations like this.
“Simply fantastic,” Thirteen muttered bitterly. The prospects on offer to him right now were not the sort to excite him, and he didn’t imagine that the human was going to do anything short of taking full advantage of this situation.
He was certain that the human had even been responsible for the surge, and that was just another concern to add to Thirteen’s already extensive list. This particular specimen had already proved his ingenuity when the Elinee’s own missiles had been turned against it, after somehow managing to avoid dying in the initial barrage. He was not an enemy to be taken lightly, and Thirteen was beginning to see why the far less competent Zero might have been significantly outmatched.
From the system logs it had seemed that the entire larboard airlock section had received enough power to blow out the conduits. A safety mechanism should have kicked in before that was even possible, but it hadn’t. It hadn’t kicked in before the temperature in the small room sky-rocketed to (six thousand degrees) either.
Little wonder that sensor feedback had stopped after that.
The ability to cause that level of damage using nothing but a starship’s power grid showed a level of cunning that even Thirteen thought he may be ill-matched for. It was a small mercy that the special units had been deployed before the power had failed, and that they were uniquely placed to combat this form of intruder.
They were equally as monstrous as the human, after all, and hailed from a Deathworld all of their own. They were feared, respected and reviled, and without their control units connected to the Elinee’s systems they’d be free to do whatever they wanted.
Even a human wouldn’t be getting past that situation in a hurry.
+++++
“Looks like the lights are out in here as well,” Adrian complained as they carefully set foot inside the ruined room. There were still the remains of the floor in places, but it was a broken thing and he was glad that only micro-gravity seemed to remain.
“I suspect they’ve melted,” Askit observed, “along with everything else. How was it you knew how to do this?”
“A series of nasty fucking accidents,” Adrian replied as he peered around the darkness. “I can’t see shit.”
“Not a problem.” Askit pressed a button on his own Vacuum suit, and the inbuilt lamp began to glow dimly. “Your suit comes with a lamp, just like mine.”
Adrian fumbled with the various controls on his own suit until he found one that matched, and when he pressed it he filled the whole room with a nice, bright light. He turned to look at Askit with his best shit-eating grin. “Mine’s brighter.”
Askit ignored him and went to inspect the next door along, pressing his hand carefully against the cooling metal and trying to move it, but it showed no signs of budging. “Looks as though it’s all melted shut,” he reported, and ran his eye over the rest. “They all are.”
“We could go down,” Adrian suggested, looking into the ruined mess of a room below. “There’s probably a way in down there.”
“Probably,” Askit agreed, “but these edges are sharp. We might tear our suits on the way down, and you might have to leave our friendly missile behind.”
Adrian placed a strangely protective hand on the deadly missile. “I don’t really want to leave him behind.”
Askit raised an eyebrow. “The missile has been given a gender now?” he asked. “Is this a human thing, or an Adrian thing?”
“It’s a Flintstones thing,” Adrian replied, grinning at his private joke. “He’s called Bamm-Bamm because he turns things into Rubble… this is another one of those references you won’t understand.”
“I see,” Askit sighed. Adrian said a lot of things he didn’t understand, and recalled that when the humans had all been together they’d tended to do the same. There seemed to be a vast number of shared cultural experiences amongst humans, and he’d probably never know even a tenth of it. Maybe that was what drew him to the species; somehow they managed to be extremely clever and yet remarkably ignorant and erratic at the same time, and that had not only not destroyed them but had allowed them to thrive.
“Whatever we do, we’re going to have to somehow do it while avoiding being caught in an explosive decompression,” Askit mused. “There’ll be no kinetic fields strong enough to keep the air in.”
“Hm,” Adrian mumbled to himself, picking his way through the wreckage of a room until he found what he was needed. He couched down and pulled at the ruin of melted parts for some time before he finally came away with a length of metal that appeared to be some sort of half-melted pipe, and a broken chunk of something else, also metal. “I’ve got an idea. Let me show you what I’ve learned about how fucking useless your walls are.”
Askit followed his human companion towards a particularly scalded wall, and took up a point of observation to one side. Adrian planted one end of the damaged pipe to the wall, and then, with the metal chunk, struck the other with a single, powerful blow.
The pipe punched straight through the wall, and a fierce geyser of atmosphere immediately blasted from the exposed end, crystallising as it dissipated into the vacuum in a way that, under the combined light from their suits, proved to be quite beautiful.
The effect didn’t last for more than a few moments, and when it was done Adrian pulled the pipe out from the wall and made another hole. And then another, and another, until Askit realised he was drawing out some sort of rectangle.
“What in the void are you doing?” he asked as Adrian neared the completion of his strange act. “If you were hoping to prove that the walls are shitty, you’ve achieved it! Well done!”
“Not quite yet I haven’t,” Adrian said, pounding in the final hole before stepping away to admire his handiwork. “Not bad, even if I do say so myself.”
He raised his anti-tank gun and fired at the centre of the holes, and a new door was made. “Ta-da!”
Askit looked at him. “Something tells me that marines would love to have you on a proper boarding run.”
Flashing his usual mad grin, Adrian made his way back to the new door to inspect it. “Pretty good,” he said, sounding pleased with the work. “But mind the edges, some bits look sharp as all fuck.”
Askit made a point of carefully examining the opening for himself before he was prepared to go through. The edges of the door were dangerously sharp, but the room beyond seemed to contain little besides boxes and darkness.
“Well then,” he said, intrepidly following Adrian into the breach. “Let’s see where you’ve led us.”
+++++
“Not looking good for the power situation,” Adrian noted as they stepped into the new room. “Nothing but micro-“
The lights flashed on with blinding brightness, and the gravity returned in full. It was so sudden that he tripped over himself, and had to catch hold of a metal bench to avoid falling on his face. That plan fell to pieces with the bench, and he met with the floor.
“Watch your step,” Askit supplied unhelpfully, stepping over Adrian on his way to inspect the rest of the room. “You were saying something about the power situation?”
“Clearly I was wrong,” Adrian said from the floor. “Don’t worry, by the way, I’m fine!”
He got himself back to his feet without relying on alien-quality furnishings for further support, and looked around the room. “Lots of boxes.”
“It’s a storage room,” Askit observed, moving between boxes to inspect their contents.
“What is it with me cutting my way into fucking storage rooms?” Adrian asked nobody in particular as he began his own inspection. “What the fuck do you lot even have, that you need all of this goddamned space?”
He held up a piece of pre-assembled electronics. “I mean what the fuck is this?”
“Control board,” Askit replied without looking. “They all are. This place looks like it’s used to repair and build robots, so we can probably expect to see a lot of them aboard.”
“Hooray,” Adrian cheered unenthusiastically, just imagining the sorts of bullshit that life had in store today. “Maybe these ones will be invisible and spit acid? Or lightning… you know, something really fucking deadly?”
“You should probably stop giving them ideas,” Askit mused as he headed over to the large door that sealed the conventional way in. “Big door, probably a loading area on the other side.”
Adrian grunted. “Goody, probably more killer robots waiting on the other side.”
He finally found something worth looking for, and released a barking laugh of triumph as he pulled it from its box as Askit turned to watch. A shiny new pipe! It was much nicer than the plasma-scorched, heavily beaten one he now tossed back into the box with the rest.
“Really?” Askit asked. “Another one?”
“Never know when you might need a good solid pipe,” Adrian replied, tucking it safely into the tether that towed Bamm-Bamm. He wasn’t a packmule, after all, and he didn’t need to carry everything himself when he had a perfectly serviceable missile to do the job.
Askit answered that with a disappointed shake of his head, and continued inspecting the security pad until he found the port. About five seconds later the security system was once again bypassed and the little Corti hadn’t even broken a sweat. Not that Adrian was even sure if a Corti did sweat.
“Do you sweat?” he asked out of the blue. “Corti, I mean?”
“If this is one of your weird euphemisms again I’m not interested,” Askit replied testily. “The door is ready for opening, are we ready to open it?”
Adrian tapped his fingers on the increasingly pointless gun slung at his side. “Do you think we can expect another warm welcome?”
Askit pursed his lips in a clear expression of distaste. “I rather hope not, the last one was warm enough.”
Adrian nodded; it wasn’t like they could do much about it even if they were about to receive the warmest welcome so far. “I suppose there’s only one way to find out.”
“I’m really beginning to hate that way,” Askit said bitterly. “We should try and find a better one.”
Adrian shrugged, pressing his hand against the security pad – a term that was becoming remarkably loose – and stepped back to wait for whatever would happen.
The door rose slowly, and their first impression was that it was revealing a loading area much like they had expected to find. It was an enormous room filled with rows of floor-to-ceiling shelves laden with large crates, and automated machines were parked at rest near them.
Further away there was the starboard wall, with a large, closed door taking up a significant section of it. Adrian didn’t have any doubt that the other side of that door led to somewhere that didn’t exist anymore, and resolved to let the thing stay closed unless he couldn’t help it. It was surrounded by more automated machinery, these ones flat and low for transportation purposes, but they’d suffered some damage that had nothing to do with the other side of that door being blown to shit.
Something had ripped them to pieces, and that something was still there, and that something looked for all the world like a dragon had fucked robocop. It was green, it was scaly, it had a look of keen animal intelligence in its purposeful movements, and somebody had gone so far as to graft a shitload of alien technology onto it in case it wasn’t already deadly enough.
It had also turned to look towards the door whose opening had disturbed it, and Adrian found himself locking eyes with it from a distance. Even from here it looked seriously pissed off.
“What the fuck is that?” he asked, looking down at the little Corti who’d already taken up position behind him.
“That is a Vulza,” he said, “and somebody has given it guns.”
“Of course they did,” Adrian sighed. That was yet more pointless shit getting in between him and his daring rescue of a damsel in distress, who was most likely in a whole world of shit of her own, and therefore quite a bit of distress. “All these fucksticks just won’t fuck off and leave me alone!”
“I don’t mean to be a pessimist, Adrian,” Askit added, “but I think we’re a bit fucked right now.”
The cyber-dragon – or cyber-vulza, if you wanted to get technical about it – hopped down from its perch atop the hapless loading robot, now just a load of scrap and probably beyond repair with just the parts in this room, and began to stalk towards them.
There was something vaguely catlike in its movement, a predatory motion that let Adrian know it wasn’t taking them seriously. It probably thought that there wasn’t much to do here aside from ripping open their suits and enjoying the gooey insides, and from the look of the fucking thing, Adrian wasn’t sure it was wrong.
“Right,” Adrian began, “do you have any ideas on how to fight this thing? I’m assuming my ‘anti-tank’ gun will continue to be a fucking paperweight?”
“If that means ‘useless’, then yes,” Askit confirmed, his voice trembling with fear, or at least with a really vibrant sense of self-preservation. “The Celzi have used unenhanced Vulza on the battlefield, and very little can hurt them. Nobody saw a reason to make anything like this before!”
Adrian spared a moment to glare at the useless weapon. “Well, at least it’s still good for punching out doors.”
“I remember some stories from when I was younger,” Askit continued, hurrying to get the information out. “They were about an unknown alien – probably a human now that I think about it – who joined the Dominion troops and was killing Vulza left and right with a fusion sword.”
“That would be more helpful if I fucking had a fusion sword,” Adrian replied. “Try again.”
“You have a pipe, and you have a missile,” Askit snapped. “Fucking figure out which one you want to use!”
Adrian sighed; he knew it was the right thing to do, but he’d been hoping for a way around it. He looked at Bamm-Bamm, then back to the hungry maw of the Darwinian nightmare.
“Shiiit,” he said, putting his hand on the deadly weapon, removing the pipe and undoing its leash. “I guess he’s right,” he said to it quietly. “We had a good time, but now it’s time for you to go.”
“If you’re done being weird,” Askit interrupted, holding his data pad with a hand poised over the go button. “Can I do this?”
“I’m done,” Adrian said with a sniff, stepping back despite knowing that there’d be no jet of flame; it was a hard idea to get used to.
Askit hit the button and Bamm-Bamm sped off, gaining speed with every moment as it bore down on a confused looking monster. It terminated its journey with a powerful detonation that aggressively dispersed the creature, and swept the room with a shattering boom that made Adrian’s ears ache. Silence reigned for a brief moment before it was broken by the creaking sound of twisting metal, and the nearby shelves began to collapse onto what had been a seriously dangerous creature.
With the mess of shattered crates, twisted metal, and scorch marks, the whole area took on a stereotypically amusing appearance of having had a bomb hit it.
“Looks like Bamm-Bamm had a blast,” Askit observed once the debris had settled, then noticed Adrian staring at him. “What?”
“That was pretty fucking smooth, mate,” Adrian said with a laugh. “Pretty fucking smooth. Bit anti-climactic though.”
That was when the second of the monsters leapt out from hiding with a godawful roar, and landed on the wreckage that covered the first.
Askit glared at him in that special ‘I can’t believe this shit happened a second time’ kind of way. “Well… does this suit you better?”
+++++
The power was back on, and Thirteen was back in control! He’d not been able to return to full immersion fast enough to see what was going on while he’d been cut off, and what he saw had done little to please him.
Somehow the intruders had bypassed the normal passageways, and had proceeded directly into the spare parts storage room used to repair the machines in the loading warehouse. It wasn’t supposed to be directly accessible from the airlock, but as they’d so effectively breached that he didn’t see a reason why they couldn’t breach a simple wall, although that certainly made it much harder to contain them.
“Stronger walls needed,” he said, making the note before turning his attention to the damage they had caused; damage that was nothing short of obscene. The area was as completely ruined as the starboard side, and would require the same level of repair before it could be used again. That knocked out both of the docking areas, and would make the regular function of the beleaguered starship almost impossible.
The damage reports showed what had actually happened as well, and Thirteen could see the actions of a disturbed mind at play. Overloading the conduits had been an act of mad genius, exactly the sort of mad genius that the Hierarchy normally prized, but Thirteen doubted that the opportunity to recruit the intruders would arise. Perhaps if Zero hadn’t agitated them so severely, they could have become something other than deadly enemies.
Missed opportunities weren’t worth thinking about, though. Not when the Elinee was on the line.
He made short work of re-sending orders to the damage control automatons, and gave his full attention to the situation that was developing in the loading warehouse.
He watched with bated breath as the door had opened. He had leered as the the first of the Vulza had begun its trek towards them.
He had gasped in horror as it had been hit by a missile, and stared on in disbelief as the destroyed remains were covered by a wreckage of crates and shelving.
And then he fumed. This had been his first chance to deploy the beasts, and he had been looking forward to seeing them in action. He felt robbed; the human had robbed him of the experience, and it wouldn’t even really appreciate the work that had gone into creating the creatures. It had taken years, the time and money of training a half dozen Vulza, and then more time and money to sedate them and graft them, and even then only these two had survived the process. They had been monsters… beautiful, wonderful monsters!
Thirteen decided that he hated the human for this! He hated it more than he’d hated anything in his life, with the possible exception of Zero, and nothing less than tearing that awful creature apart would sate his need for vengeance.
There was no decision that needed making; Thirteen slipped into the control unit and pushed the Vulza’s consciousness to the back of its mind.
Oh yes, Thirteen was back in control now, and he could feel the software adapting to suit his brain. He felt the legs, the tail, and the wings. He felt the four anti-tank guns that had been fused with the creature’s flesh, and the kinetic control harness that covered the front of its torso like armour and allowed the creature to substantially modify its own weight and movement.
With a roar of fury, Thirteen leapt from his perch atop the highest shelves, and landed amongst the wreckage the human had caused.
He fixed eyes with the human for the first time, and roared once more. Thirteen was no Hunter but he would relish tasting the flesh of that one!
Thirteen bounded forward, studying the human as he ran. It was suited up in a combat hardened vacuum suit, and behind it stood a smaller biped in the standard variety. That looked to be a Corti, which explained why it was trying to use the human as a shield, but not what it was doing following it in the first place. Thirteen supposed that the human was resourceful enough to have acquired the Corti for whatever skill it might have, and that that most likely included the business with the missiles.
He decided that if that was the case, the Corti had earned a special death of his own, but the human came first and from what Thirteen could see it was down to a metal pipe and an anti-tank gun.
Did it intended to face an enhanced Vulza with those? The human was too bold, too cocky, too foolishly ignorant…
The human closed the door.
+++++
The door closed as slowly as it had opened, and Adrian found himself backing away from it as quickly as Askit was. “Well,” he began, “I guess I didn’t really want to go in there anyway.”
“It’s a true shame those two things weren’t standing together,” Askit mused. “But we got one! I suppose we’ll need to find another way around, unless you’re keen on Plan B?”
“First of all,” Adrian said, “let’s establish that that was a fucking space dragon and I’m not invincible? Then let’s go back to the fact that I fucking loathe Plan B.”
The door shook as it continued to close, thundering under the combined fire power of multiple sustained anti-tank weapons, and buckling in towards them with every shot that landed.
“I reckon there’s fuck all hope of that thing holding,” Adrian observed as the door grew so bent that it jammed at three quarters of the way closed. “Think we should step back into hard vacuum and have a think about it? Dragons need to breathe, right?”
“We could try downstairs,” Askit suggested, already exiting the room to the safety of the void. “But we’d better hurry. Whoever runs this place isn’t going to let us do whatever we want.”
+++++
Thirteen was getting tired of the intruders doing just about whatever they wanted. His attempts to defeat, or to even catch the human had been foiled, and by the time he had reached the door, and had subsequently smashed through it, they had escaped into hard vacuum once again. Not even the Vulza could survive for more than a few moments unprotected out there, Thirteen realised; the appropriate enhancements had not been implanted because it had never seemed like something it would need to do, a decision that now seemed like a considerable oversight.
The Vulza roared with Thirteen’s frustration; an outburst like that in a body like that could prove quite cathartic, and once he was done screaming his defiance at the fearsome alien he released his direct control of its mind and returned it to standby mode.
“Where are they?” he muttered within the immersion, and found them within moments once they re-entered undamaged areas.
Thirteen’s victory cry faltered when he noticed where they’d re-entered. Somehow they’d dropped down a level – probably through a breach in the floor – and had made their way into the munitions bay.
There were still dozens of mines and missiles all stored in bays and waiting to be loaded into their minelayers and missile racks. They were all inactive, of course, but they could be activated by the computer systems.
Thirteen’s heart nearly froze as he came to a full understanding about the situation that had just developed.
It was not a good situation, not a good situation at all, and it was time to initiate the backup plan.
+++++
“A whole fucking warehouse of the things!” Adrian laughed as he stepped into the room full of munitions. It had been more difficult to break into this one; the walls had been remarkably solid, and even the door had been tougher than usual, and now he saw why; this was where the ship stored every last bit of the munitions it had, and whoever had built the damned thing hadn’t even thought about dividing the area into sections.
Aliens were pretty strange sometimes, and their design decisions left a lot to be desired, but for the moment that fact was working out for him; he could fuck up a lot more of their shit if it was all in one place.
“Oh…” Askit murmured as he entered the room after Adrian, his eyes even wider than usual. “That’s a lot of Bamm-Bamm…”
“Poor decision of them to let us come down here, then,” Adrian replied, chuckling as he inspected the rooms contents. “Can’t believe they put all of their eggs in one basket, though.”
“Imagine I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Askit returned. “Then explain why you’re grinning like an idiot.”
“Mate,” Adrian said, his grin widening, “I don’t know about you, but if I had a shitload of bombs I probably wouldn’t put them all in the same place.”
Askit nodded slowly, looking around. “Ah.”
“Seems like a regrettable decision when the hacker who hit the ship with its own missiles is aboard,” Adrian said meaningfully. He smiled broadly at the little Corti.
Askit looked around and frowned. “You know this is a really bad plan, right? I’d be quite happy if all of these would just… not explode.”
“First of all we just need to take control of the weapons,” Adrian said, running his hand along a missile. “And then-“
The missile beeped.
Everything beeped.
With widening eyes, Adrian stared at his hand where it still rested on the metal cylinder. He realised he was holding his breath, and breathed it out in a trembling rush. “Huuuh…”
+++++