Death system, p.23
Death System, page 23
part #3 of Zombicide Invader Series
“Don’t kill me,” the Caridian said, barely audibly, unable to maintain eye contact.
“Oh, I’m not going to kill you. Him on the other hand…” Nero picked the shakiest member of the Cybernetics trio and shot him in the face. The bullet hole in his forehead made quite an impression on the others. Nero waggled his pistol at them, ordering them to vacate.
“What do you want?” Neera asked, trying to sound unfazed, but failing miserably.
That was how Nero liked to start a conversation, with people asking for his demands.
“We’re going to take a little jog back to your ship. Just like we’d planned, sweet sister. I’m willing to call this a bump in the road.” The battleground looked like all battlegrounds: organized chaos. Bodies running, bodies dying. Blood and sand swirled; a cacophony of screams lifted up like a terrible song. His team had scattered. Too-ahka was out there toasting Xenos – bless his little oddball heart. Bak-Irp and Shawna were nowhere to be found. That didn’t mean they were dead, only missing. He spotted Lemora and waved to catch her attention. Then he happened to glance at the sky. The wormhole squatted above them, dilated, and softly pulsating.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Pointy-Snouted, Silvery-Golden Dragon
It was a mistake to count the Xenos out. Lemora knew that. The multiple species that made up the Xeno population had proved themselves resilient. They were the model of tough survivalists. Little was known about their origins. They weren’t from here. They’d come for the work just like everyone else. The mining company kept their dealings with Xenos secret. No contracts existed in the Galactic Historical Archive office, if there ever were written contracts. Many alien groups distrusted written agreements, having had no history of them in their worlds or signing contracts only to watch them be broken by the other parties, often human. The infected Xenos could be considered a separate and unique class of beings. Obviously, they were not homogeneous. Time and the cybernetic alterations had recreated them yet again.
Individually, she felt sorry for them. This existence of theirs wasn’t living, you couldn’t call it that. But in congregate, as a swarm of berserk and insatiable killing machines, she wanted them destroyed. If not destroyed, then perhaps the best thing was to abandon them as the Coalition had done – isolated and walled-off permanently from the rest of life in Terran space. She’d read about the workers and the hunters, and she’d seen both subgroups up close since they arrived. The Cybernetics engineers implanted the hunters’ brains with devices that tapped their sensory organs and input programming to control, or at least influence, their behavior. In the scant reports she digested back in her cell at XSecPen, she came across references to tanks – a stouter, immensely powerful, and defensive subgroup – but none of them had shown up yet, so perhaps they’d died out. Rarer still were the legendary spoiler abominations, hulking brutes, said to be nearly damage-proof, who were reputedly the source of the mold – Lemora doubted they were real. More likely, they were a mythological representation of the worst attributes of this mysterious, terrifyingly transformative plague that haunted PK-L7, a physical embodiment of the unknown cause behind the outbreak and the ongoing dangers lurking in this hostile place.
And yet…
•••
Nero and Neera rejoined the combined merc and escapee forces who were holding off the onslaught from the Xenos in the short term. They’d formed a staggered defensive line, a half-circle that faced the Xenos as it steadily backed its way toward the waiting ship. A third of the mercs were dead, torn apart and eaten before their eyes. No one in this impromptu cadre was a stranger to death. They fed it and then dodged past it – their whole lives had been a slow dance with death. But no soldier, fighter pilot, bomb maker, arms dealer, or cybernetic vivisectionist would claim they didn’t harbor a fear of being eaten alive. It was the credo of all life forms throughout space: don’t let them eat you. Fear of devourment was as primal as it was energizing.
Lemora’s heart was pounding, her whole head ached from the noise, tension, and pressure squeezing in constantly. She’d saved a handful of grenades, all with thumbprints, though she’d tossed a few of them into the Xenos. The mold had no effect, she’d have been surprised if it did. These things lived in the presence of mold. They touched it; they probably ate it if they still consumed rocks as they did in their pre-infected states. Mold particles no doubt permeated the air on PK-L7, although airborne exposure had never been proven. The dose was probably too low to spark a physiological change. Shrapnel still ripped their flesh, thankfully.
She felt shaky from the adrenaline, wrung out and weak-kneed. A numbness crept over her body, nerves tingling, bones rattling, and her mind detached itself and floated somewhere above her like a tethered helium balloon. She was watching herself fighting, as if her avatar were in the battle, and she wasn’t ever going to die. Not really. Yet she felt petrified at the same time. Absolutely convinced she would die, as if she were already dead, her cards dealt, and it was a bad hand she could do nothing with, except throw them in the center of the table and call it a day.
“Lemora! Lemora, get over here! I need you.” Nero beckoned. His voice in her helmet sounded like it was underwater, and far, far away. But he was right there, a few meters at most, hustling toward Neera’s ship with three others who didn’t look like fighters. Nero needed her.
Neera recognized Lemora and nodded. Her face was blank. Sweat ran through the white makeup, leaving trails like clown tears. She was moving stiffly. Had she been injured? No. As Lemora got closer, she spotted the pistol Nero held pressed against his sister’s back. The others – two humans and a Caridian – appeared as if a Carfaxian vampire drained them of their blood.
“What are we doing?” Lemora asked him.
“My sister is going to accompany us on board her ship. Aren’t you, dear?” Nero nudged her with the gun.
“Whatever.” Neera stumbled, and Nero caught her with his free hand. He stuck the gun barrel in her armpit, twisting. Neera’s face contorted in pain. “Quit it. I’m doing what you said.”
“Just checking.”
They walked up to the front of the ship. The ramp leading into the airlock chamber was deployed, so the ship resembled a pointy-snouted, silvery-golden dragon with its mouth hanging open, slack-jawed. Inside, Lemora spotted a second sealed hatch at the rear of the airlock.
“Everybody’s going, right?” Lemora asked him. “We’re all leaving here like you said?”
“As long as they’re quick about it. A promise is a promise, and I gave them my word.”
Lemora thumbed the comms button on her wrist, broadcasting to the whole team. She could see them out there, figures fighting in the dust, only a football pitch away. “It’s boogie time, my darlings. Drop what you’re doing and come aboard. We’re expecting you.”
Bak-Irp responded with a growl. “I drop what I’m doing, my ass is getting overrun. Got that?” The rat-a-tat-tat of his weapon punctuated the last sentence. “This is hairy. You hear me?”
“Loud and clear, big fella,” Nero said. “But the bus is departing. I can’t park here.”
“Hold that ship,” Shawna said. “We’re coming.”
The ramp was narrow, no wider than a two-person rover. The airlock looked like the inside of a commercial autoclave and was as large inside as a jumbo fuel-hauler truck. It was basically a long steel tube with slippery curved sides and little room to stand comfortably. The hatch at the back was round; only one person at a time would fit.
“You three wait here with Dr Pick,” Nero said. The Caridian and the other two non-combatants shuffled off. “Engineer!” Nero poked his pistol at one of the men who was holding a small remote controller. “Work out the kinks on your implants, or you’ll end up with an extra drain hole like your compadre we left back in the pit, yeah? Feel my meaning?”
The man swallowed dryly, his bulging Adam’s apple pumping as if he were choking.
“I do, Your Imperial… Your Majestic… ah, Supreme Leader…?”
Nero nodded and turned to follow his sister up to the hatch.
“Cybernetics engineer?” Lemora inquired of the man.
“I am, yes…” He was trembling; his body quaked, shivered, bucked involuntarily.
“And you can control the Xenos with that device?”
“Some of them, I can. The young adults are proving to be uniquely uncooperative.”
Lemora smiled, remembering. “Oh, I don’t know how unique that is. Teenagers,” she observed. “They know everything. And listen to no one. I was much the same at their age. A wild child.” She took the engineer gently by the arm and steered him toward the lip of the ramp. “You do your best. Help my friends and your armed escorts to return safely. I have faith in you.”
The man thumbed buttons and toggles. Lemora detected no effects on the Xenos. A foursome of hunters seized a merc whose gun had jammed. They pulled him like taffy, and he separated, spraying streams of red droplets high into the air. A jet of flames covered the four Xenos. They split apart, each running in a different direction, but none could outrun the fire.
The fire sputtered and shrank down to a trickle. Too-ahka’s last fuel canister was empty. The alien used the depleted flamethrower as a club, battering the head of a worker who thought it wise to rush the stumpy, furry creature now that it had lost the power to burn. As the worker staggered, momentarily stunned at the pummeling it received, Too-ahka leaped and tore its throat out then drank the hot, spouting liquid before it soaked into the thirsty, hardpacked soil.
“Too-ahka, come with me. We must go now.” Shawna was calling for the feeding to end.
To Lemora’s astonishment the alien left its feeding and joined the pilot, running for the ship’s ramp. They hit the treads and piled into the airlock. “Where’s Bak-Irp? I’m not leaving him,” Lemora said.
“There!” Shawna pointed to the Thassian who was trapped against the ground with a Xeno on his back, cranking his arm between his shoulder blades in a hammerlock. The pilot raised her gun. Slowly blowing out her air, she took aim and fired. The Xeno’s head exploded.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Bak-Irp was up and pumping his legs, sprinting to them.
Nero was screaming at his sister, who was hesitating at the control panel. She was spitting words at him, and he wasn’t happy. “OPEN UP THE DAMNED DOORS!” He shoved his pistol against the back of her helmet. Her posture signified defiant refusal. She was literally digging in her heels and striking out at him blindly. “ONE LAST CHANCE, NEERA, DO IT!”
“Nero! Don’t!” Lemora screamed. And she ran to stop him from making a mistake. If he killed Neera in a fit of anger, they’d never get inside the ship. Or off this planet.
But she was too late.
He pulled the trigger.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Damage Radius
Nothing happened. What the hell? Oh, shitballs. He was out of ammunition. Nero bashed Neera with the pistol grip. But she was wearing an armored helmet. It didn’t knock her out, it made her angry. She dropped to the floor like an incensed cat and scissored her legs through his, wrapping up his ankles and tripping him. Dumped on his ass in that narrow end of the airlock tube, he had trouble swinging his big gun around. He was tangled up in himself, hands sliding on the slick floor. Lemora was diving in to save him. She grabbed him under the arms and dragged him backward, avoiding Neera’s steel-toed kicks. Then Neera was up on her feet, punching at a keypad next to the hatch. The circular door curved away into a slot in the wall; it looked like a waning moon, and about halfway through the cycle she had room to squirt through to the other side, where she spun around and heel-thumped an emergency switch.
The hatchway closed with a steely, clunking noise, then came a pressurized sigh.
Neera’s disembodied voice screeched through a speaker. “Ha! Screw you, brother!”
He was standing, shrugging off Lemora who tried to restrain him. He ran to the hatchway and braced a hand on either side; his head hung low as he said, “We can still hammer out a deal. Talk to me, Neera, let’s calculate a way where we both benefit. Nobody has to be the loser here.”
“You tried to shoot me in the head!”
“Is that what this is about? You’re mad at me?” He pictured her eyes rolling, hard. Red-faced with rage, she’d be grinding her teeth like when they were kids, fighting in the baron’s sky mansion. Nero said, “Grow up, all right? Since I got arrested, you’ve been paying assassins to punch my ticket. We’re natural born killers. That’s who we are. It doesn’t have to interfere with our negotiations.” He took a deep breath. Don’t lose your temper. If she’s talking, there’s hope. “Hey, sis, c’mon. Open sesame. I’ve got your Caridian pal and the Cybernetics crew. It’s a party.”
Nothing. The silent treatment.
Well, fine. He could wait, too. He had the wormhole guy and the Xeno mind control dipshits on his side of the hatch, and she needed them. She had to strike a bargain, didn’t she?
The vibration came to him through his feet. It was mechanical, greased gears turning.
“The ramp,” Lemora said. “She’s retracting it.” Like a metallic tongue the ridged walkway withdrew into a slot, and at the same time, the airlock began to shut, the dragon’s jaws clamping down slowly. From outside, a keening whine picked up.
“They’re powering the thrusters.” Shawna emptied her machine gun into the trim belly of a Xeno who contorted, flexing its supple muscles before it backflipped off the edge of the ramp and crashed to the ground in its death throes. “The ship’s getting ready to take off. Do we stay or do we jump?”
The ramp stuck out like a pirate’s plank, a few meters off the ground, where it continued to retract, being swallowed steadily into the ship. Soon they’d be sealed in the airlock, and Neera could blast into the atmosphere, where she’d dump them like so much garbage.
Nero couldn’t believe it. He was stunned, absolutely stunned.
“I… I don’t… arrrgghhh…” he screamed at Neera locked in her flying fortress. “YOU ASSHOLE! I HATE YOU!” He started shooting uselessly at the hatch. He knew he was wasting bullets, but he didn’t care. The ricocheting slugs sparked off the metal and pinged around the airlock’s shiny interior. Any one of them might hit him. But they didn’t. He took that as a sign.
The attacking Xenos kept charging, hoisting themselves up on the last few meters of ramp, scrambling over the lip of the airlock, thrashing with outstretched claws, their bites snapping loud and fast: a chittering, stomach-turning noise. They flung thick strings of drool when they wagged their angry heads. A human scuffled among them, beating them with the butt of a shotgun, not one of the mercs, but a man wearing scratched, dirty white armor. It was Krait.
He pinned Nero with a homicidal glare and jabbed a finger at him, shaking with fury. “You were leaving me.” Krait swept his accusatory digit around the chamber. “All of you. Backstabbers! Murderers! You were going to let me die.”
“Not me, buster,” Nero said. “It’s Neera. I’m the one attempting to stop her. Be logical.”
“I am logical.” Krait swung his shotgun like a bat, knocking a young Xeno unconscious. He shoved the zombie off the ramp. The falling body knocked into two other Xenos, aggravating them. When the airlock finally closed, Nero made a quick count. The Xenos outnumbered them two to one. A few of the mercs had made it inside. An unfortunate latecomer found himself trapped between the two closing halves of the airlock which crunched him, splintering his black armor. Then it chopped him in two. The color drained from his face, and a pair of Xenos quickly emptied the upper portion of his suit, pulling out the soft parts, chomping on bones, cracking them with their teeth to suck out the marrow. The dead merc’s mouth was still moving.
The Caridian sank, horrified, into a puddle. The two Cybernetics reps wrapped themselves around each other in a heap. They’d finished taking turns with the controller; since the Xenos in the airlock hadn’t been implanted, the device had no influence over their attitudes or actions.
“Get against the hatch door. As far back as you can. NOW!” Lemora shouted.
Nero listened, as he almost always did, to his top advisor. Shawna and Bak-Irp crowded on top of him. Fuzzy was right there, too, its dish-like face incapable of human expression, yet Nero had the distinct feeling that the creature was sizing him up as if he were a menu item.
He might’ve said something, if there had been more time. Like, What the hell, Fuzzy?
But Lemora pitched a grenade at the other end of the airlock tube where the Xenos were flailing about, thrashing their long sinewy limbs, their chests puffed out – a dominance display.
The Caridian and the Cybernetics reps were too frozen in terror to move. They stared.
Too bad for them.
The grenade exploded. CRAAACCKKK!!!
Fragments of shrapnel shredded the closest Xenos. The blast blew a hole in the airlock, and when the smoke sucked out of the hole, Nero saw dirt and rocks – a way out. Although the Caridian and the engineers were spared the worst of the impact, they were still well inside the damage radius. Both reps were dead. Tiny shards of metal perforated their armor, then their bodies. The Caridian was bleeding but alive, and conscious, although barely. Blood gushed from his ears. His head was leaky. He was sitting there, blinking, with the dead reps rearranged on his lap.
“OUT. OUT NOW.” Shawna dove for the blast hole. Too-ahka beat her to it, stuffing itself through the gap – wumpft! Then Shawna went. Lemora, Krait, and Nero followed.
The Xenos and the mercs were all dead or dying. None of them was going to be a problem. As he was butt-scooting to freedom, Nero turned to Bak-Irp. “Take the Caridian.”
