Death system, p.18
Death System, page 18
part #3 of Zombicide Invader Series
“Shawna, cut that plate,” Nero said. Then to Krait he added, “If I didn’t need you…”
He didn’t finish the sentence.
Krait avoided making eye contact. He crawled under the control panel to show Shawna where to make the cut. It was grubby down there, and somebody had left behind a pair of pink, plastic shower shoes. His voice was soft and controlled. The whirr of the blades filled the room and then golden sparks sprayed out from under the workstation, and the steel cried as they sliced into it. The sound gave Nero an instant headache that started in his teeth and encircled his skull like a crown of concertina wire. The bright sparks flashed painfully even if he closed his eyes.
“Let’s give them space to work,” Lemora said. “Join me in the hallway, darling. Please.”
He allowed her to walk him out. His jaw felt as hard as a billiard ball as he clenched it.
“My head is killing me,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “You’ve got a lot of responsibilities.”
“I’ve got all the responsibilities! Me! This whole… game plan is mine. I dreamed it.”
“Of course, you did. We all owe you a great debt,” she said, leading him to a chair. “Now you just sit and try to relax. Let us carry the weight. That’s what a team does. We pull together.”
Was she seriously kidding? How was he supposed to relax? Didn’t she see the Xenos watching them out there? It was worse than fighting them. Those cold dead eyes. He felt them on his skin like a ghost’s icy hand, like the baron’s fist that gripped him while he slept… a corpse’s hand from out of the grave, from beyond this world… reaching back for him and not to provide comfort either but to drag him into a frigid hell where he would watch his entrails being ripped from his belly, flopping onto the floor like a basket of slimy fish; the Xenos’ eyes were like his father’s eyes… cursed, accusing… they came for revenge and would never ever stop…
“Nero? Nero, can you hear me?” It was Lemora. Her faceplate was almost touching his.
“Yes, I’m fine. You’re coming in loud and clear, Lem.”
He rested his arm on hers. But their armor kept them from making real contact. If anyone in this corrupt, dog-eat-dog world cared about him, it was her. Their relationship wasn’t romantic. Nero had no time for romance. He trusted no one. He didn’t want intimacy, wouldn’t allow anyone in that close. But they were friends, Lemora and he, and if there was one person in the world that he relied on it was her. To a certain degree, of course. Everybody had their price. A number that their betrayal would cost. But hers was probably very high – she’d ask a lot to give him up. And that was special. It was. He valued her. He hoped she knew that, too. Just like he hoped she knew that he’d only stab her in the back if he, like, really, really had to…
“Neera showed you some proof about the wormhole?” Lemora asked, matter-of-factly.
“What…?”
It was so like her to pry into his psyche while he was down, feeling depleted and tired. But he could tell she was mulling something over with that big brain of hers, tumbling it inside her head, trying to make sense out of a chunk of evidence, a tidbit of data that didn’t fit into her hypothesis. She wouldn’t let it go, either. Tenacity was a quality he admired, but it bugged the shit out of him, too. People needed to learn to move on. Life didn’t always conform to reason.
“How do you know she isn’t… exaggerating?” Lemora said. “Overpromising.”
“Say what you mean, Lem. You think she’s lying. And I’m a chump for believing her.”
Lemora said, “I’m not making any assumptions. I’m planning for contingencies, which is one of the things you love about me in case you forgot. You don’t have time for sweating the little things… like details. I love details. Inconsistencies jump out at me like clues. They tell stories.”
He was thirsty as hell; it was distracting him. Maybe he was coming down with something. He couldn’t have caught the PK-L7 mold flu. But he felt rundown. And there was so much to do. Lemora was right. He needed to believe in the team, to count on them. They needed supplies: ammo, oxygen tanks, water (which wasn’t likely), and anything else they might use against the Xenos. It was time to come together and stop the infighting. Cohesion.
“Sorry, Lem,” he said. “I’ve got a lot on my mind.” The recycled air inside his suit smelled like dirty work boots. He knew it was blowing cool, but it didn’t refresh him. It tasted like stale swamp breath, like rot. And he realized it was this place, this zombified planet; he was smelling PK-L7 despite his spacesuit. Death warmed over. Generations of Xeno madness permeated the atmosphere, and they were soaking in it up to their necks. He suddenly wanted to be clean, to take a shower and rub a thick, warm towel over his body and get a full-body massage.
“Neera’s got this Caridian scientist. She vidscreened me on a stolen link I had on my vidpad in my cell. The call was quick, but I saw him. The bughead told me how the wormhole worked. I don’t remember what he said, but it sounded right at the time. They use xenium, change it into liquid. That’s what opens the wormhole.”
Lemora nodded. She was biting her lower lip, working out a problem in her head. “The Xenos that chased Shawna and Bak-Irp, there’s something off about them. They didn’t act like the infected zombies from the Deathcan. A percentage of them – not a huge percentage but a select few – are behaving out of character for aliens who’ve had their brains hijacked by mold. It strikes me that an outside influence, a third party, may be at work here.” She sat on the dorm bed beside him. He felt the cheap cot sag. “I know you have a complicated relationship with your sister. Do you think she might be trying to kill us? That sounds awful, right? But what if she lured us here and nobody’s coming.” Lemora was a tall, beautiful woman, who had this fantastic aura of energy and edgy excitement, and whenever she told Nero news that he didn’t want to hear he tried to think of how much harder it would be to listen to it coming from a crusty old guy advisor like most of the Guild leaders had as their counselors. He was lucky she was on his team.
“Then we’re screwed,” he said.
•••
The triple-bladed saw made quick work of the steel plate. Shawna had it out, and Krait was correct – there was an air vent back there, a big one; the comms cables ran right inside it.
“Who’s going?” Krait asked.
“All of us,” Nero said.
“Wait a sec,” Bak-Irp said. “Shouldn’t we leave a few people here? I don’t want to be crawling around in a slaughterhouse chute unless I have to. That’s a deathtrap scenario. No room to maneuver. We run into Xenos, and they’ll eat us one by one like candy.” The Thassian had a good point, but Nero didn’t care. The module was a safe place for now, but having no comms made it worthless in the long run. They didn’t need a bolthole to hide in. They needed a signal.
“We’re all going,” he said. “We stick together until Neera arrives. No more splitting the team up. We’re a unit, and we need to start acting like one.”
The Thassian’s shoulders fell. He looked dejected, muttering to himself inside his helmet.
“What’s wrong, tough guy? You afraid of tight spaces?” Krait sneered.
“How about I give you a hug, and you tell me if it’s too tight for you?”
Krait held up his hand in mock surrender. “I’ll go first into the vent. I don’t mind.”
Nero said, “No. We’ll leave in the same order as when we left the cockpit. Fuzzy takes the point with the flamethrower. The Silvas go next, then Krait and Lemora. Then me in the middle. Bak-Irp and Shawna guard the rear. Anybody got a problem with that?”
Nobody did. Or if they did, they didn’t say, which was just as good.
“All right,” Nero said.
Too-ahka was already inside the hole, and he quickly and silently entered the vent, following the comms cable that ran along the bottom of the vent like a fat, juicy nerve.
“It shouldn’t be too far,” Krait said. “This whole station isn’t much of a complex. I would imagine the comms hub is centrally located. We’re starting out in the left wing of the base, if you’re standing on the runway viewing the station. They probably added this comms room in the barracks so the poor, lonely miners could call home and speak to their loved ones.” Krait seemed well-adapted to crawling inside tunnels, his slender frame oozing along.
They all climbed into the vent.
“See?” Krait said. “The first turn is up ahead. It goes to the right, toward the central part of the site, as I predicted.”
Nero had trouble seeing anything. The vent was boxy in shape, a rectangle lying on one of its short sides. It was too low for standing fully upright; the convicts had to crouch, and it made their backs ache after a few steps. Slow going, to be sure, but doable. Nero heard Bak-Irp grunting and grumbling, complaining about the cramped environment and their vulnerability.
“What’s all your whining about, Bak?”
“Nothing. Just that we can’t shoot anything we come across in here. Not unless we want to light up the other members of the team. It’s too cramped and bullets will ricochet. Too-ahka’s got his fire, but I feel like I’m naked.”
Nero shushed him. “Quiet down. Too-ahka’s on to something. Switch your headlamps off. Lights out. Maybe we’ve got company. Too-ahka’s going ahead to check things. We wait here.”
Bak-Irp passed the message to Shawna. Soon the vent was as black as a vat of tar. They were all paused like a game of stunray-tag. But nobody could see how stupid they looked. Nero pressed an armor-gloved hand to the side of the vent. He didn’t know what he was doing. Trying to pick up vibrations? What was that going to tell him? He wasn’t like the fuzzball with his alien echolocation jazz. He stood there, hunched like a dumb ape man. He switched his light back on.
“What’re you doing?” Bak-Irp said in a hoarse whisper. “You told us, ‘Lights out.’”
“I know. I wanted to see if anything changed… Hey, Shawna, are those night goggles?”
“Yes.”
“Where’d you get them?”
“The armory on the Andronicus.”
“Let me have them,” Nero said.
“No.”
Here he was trying to encourage them to be a team like Lem said, and Shawna was hogging the night vision glasses. He was about to make a fuss, but he decided against it. She was a fighter pilot, and she probably had better eyesight than he did. He had to learn to give up a little control or he was going to drive himself crazy. This situation was crazy. It didn’t need any more.
“Scoot by us,” Nero said. “See if you can get a look where your furry buddy went.”
“He’s not my buddy,” she said.
He switched his lamp off, so he didn’t blind her. He couldn’t see her, but he felt her.
She wasn’t wasting any time getting moving though. Luckily, she was nimble and not bulky even decked out in her armor. Twisting and turning, she wriggled past Bak and Nero.
“Lem, tell Krait to let Shawna by. Get her up there. She’s got night goggles, and she can talk to Too-ahka if it comes back. Make the Silvas aware. I want Shawna at the front,” Nero said.
Without a word, Shawna squeezed ahead.
Nero was in the dark, in the silence, feeling impatient as hell but keeping his cool. He still had Bak-Irp behind him. No Xeno was going to make it through the Thassian without a struggle, and if one of them tore his bodyguard to pieces, Nero wasn’t going to stand a chance either.
Suddenly the vent up ahead lit up orange and the wave of heat was so strong Nero felt it through his suit. They had light. Fuzzy was around the bend, and it must’ve crawled quite a distance because the roar of the flamethrower seemed not exactly quiet but not as loud as he expected – it was like a hot wind blowing, like somebody turned the station’s heater on full-blast.
“He’s cooking something,” Bak-Irp said in his ear. “Got his barbecue roasting.”
Nero saw Shawna holding her goggles away from her faceplate, so her vision didn’t get washed out. The orange glow disappeared, and they plunged into the abyss again. Nero wanted to move. Forward. Backward. He didn’t care. But this keeping still had him jumping out of his skin. He was impatient and he had goosebumps. Fuzzy must’ve met one of those things, which meant they were in the air vents. They were smart and they were hunting them, and Bak-Irp was right that there was no place to go in here.
Except forward.
Nero wasn’t telling the team to retreat to the dorm module. That was a dead end.
“Shawna thinks we should advance,” Lem said to him.
“Why? What can she see?”
Lemora didn’t have an answer for him. She was taking off. He couldn’t see her go, but he felt her stepping out. Felt a lot of boots hitting down on steel. STOMP STOMP STOMP. They were being so loud it was no surprise the Xenos were on to them and their plans. Nero couldn’t see, but he started duckwalking. Bak-Irp put his big mitt on his back, and he wasn’t pushing but he was physically encouraging Nero to keep going… into the darkness, the pitch darkness…
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Blind Alley Massacre
Oh shit, Shawna thought. This was disturbing. It might’ve been a lot worse, considering. But it was unnerving. The spectacle of it. The intensity of the scene wasn’t something she was prepared for, and there was no way she could ever look at Too-ahka the same way again. He wasn’t her buddy. That was what she’d told Nero. But this incident took her opinion of Too-ahka to a whole new level. And she felt sick, like her stomach was doing scissor kicks with high heels.
She’d come around the corner, following the orange glow which had to be the flamethrower. And it was. But when the fire shut down, her goggles revealed that Too-ahka was farther down the vent than she’d figured. She didn’t even make him out at first. There wasn’t any mold in the air vent, but she could discern a blockage, like somebody had dumped a load of garbage inside the void. Her goggles picked up a solid mass, and she was worried that they’d reached a blind alley. But that didn’t compute. Too-ahka had gone somewhere. She flipped on her thermals and saw that the walls were red hot and so was the lump of material radiating heat at a point about forty steps ahead – the blockage, whatever it was, looked like cooling lava. She raced to it. Because she saw something moving in there: an arm, Too-ahka’s arm, rising and falling, and she thought, oh my god, they got him. The Xenos made a real mess in here, and Too-ahka’s beckoning for me. Turns out, she was both right and wrong about the situation.
There was a real mess, but Too-ahka hadn’t been calling for her. The alien was too preoccupied with the Xenos it had found. Two of them. No – check that – three. A trio of the smart ones – they had a larger underslung lower jaw and an appendage that sprang out of their mouths like a snaky, sinuous tongue with a nasty stinger on the end. She’d seen a few examples of them before, when they were being chased outside, and then later these Xeno geniuses were hiding in the corridor outside the module barrier. She hardly recognized them here. For one, they were dead. Too-ahka had burned them. Crispy critters – their skins were black and blistered, hides peeling off in sheets like hull paint on a rusty junkyard airship. But that wasn’t what made them unrecognizable. It was what Too-ahka had done to them afterward. The one-of-a-kind alien carried out a speed dissection. Except dissection was too delicate a word. Too-ahka had butchered them. It was worse than what the zombies were doing to the humans on board the Andronicus. Because you detected the pure glee Too-ahka had taken in killing them and turning their insides out. The alien was going at them with busy fingers and teeth as if Shawna wasn’t there watching. This was worse than what she’d seen it doing to Ishnik in the cargo bay. The Xenos looked like ripped bags of steaming strawberry preserves, and Too-ahka was smeared with gooey red stuff. Gobs of Xeno guts caked up its fur, and the alien was busy gnawing on their bones, chewing meat, licking up the sauces, as its eyes rolled back into its head in ecstasy. It made a sweet purring sound. Shawna felt hot, queasy, and dizzy all at once.
She swallowed a jet of stomach acid erupting into her mouth. It made her cough.
“THE HELL IS THIS?” Matias said, coming upon the scene. He started giggling nervously. “HO-LEE MOE-LEE on a mountain of WHAAAT? I can’t even…! Bro, check it out.”
Mateo stayed glued to his clone brother’s back, so close they were like one dude. “Whoa,” he added to Matias’s appraisal. “I’ve seen some intense shit, but this here is gratuitous.”
The thing was… it seemed so private, like a ceremony they were interrupting: Too-ahka at worship. What the creature was doing to the bodies differed from what the Xenos did to their victims. This wasn’t a frenzied attack. It was methodical. Too-ahka was spiritually transported.
Shawna couldn’t talk to the alien. She didn’t think it wanted to talk to her either. Past the massacre site, she saw where the Xenos had entered the air vent. A violent rupture in the steel, the metal torn open and curled back, like when you shot a can in the desert and looked inside at the bullet holes. Punched in – but big enough to fit a human, or one of these plus-sized Xeno hunters.
Holding her breath and trying not to look at Too-ahka who was eating and drinking up the Xeno carnage, she craned to investigate the room from where the Xenos had come. Banks of computers coated in ochre dust. A wall of display monitors, everything blacked out, screens webbed with cracks. Microphones, headphones, VR rigs hung from a wall of storage hooks. There was a viewing window like the one they’d found in the comms room, and the shields were drawn up to let the piss-yellow light in. Beyond it was a view of PK-L7’s flat, cruel landscape. A ruffling of loose items in the hub. Wind. This room must be open to the outside. She couldn’t see the doors. But it didn’t have to be a door. A wall could be missing, given the scale of destruction. She didn’t spot any Xenos. That was a positive.
“We found the comms hub,” she said. “It’s been breached.”
