“Major, look out!”
The mothership instantly appeared through the mist. Karnage pulled back and yanked the emergency brake. A parachute shot out of the back of the flightpack, slowing them down, but not enough. The flightpack clipped the top edge of the ship, and something sheared off. “Rear stabilizer’s gone!” Stumpy shouted.
“Abandon balls!” Karnage and Stumpy unstrapped themselves and tumbled down onto the mothership, rolling across its surface. Karnage came to a stop facing up, and saw a pair of squidcops fly by above them in pursuit of their damaged flightpack that cavorted and frolicked until it disappeared into the mist. The squidcops followed, and the buzzing of their flightpacks slowly faded away. He turned and saw Stumpy struggling to his feet nearby.
Karnage looked down. He was standing on the squidbug mothership. Panels flickered with green light. An occasional sliver of white light cut a squiggling path along the surface.
Karnage sniffed the air. It stank of squidbug. He looked at Stumpy. “Looks like we made it, Corporal,” Karnage said.
Stumpy looked around with wide, terrified eyes. “How do we get in?”
Karnage spotted a thin streak of white light flickering towards them. He dropped his foot on it as it was about to speed by. The light curled back and started spinning around Karnage’s foot. Another sliver of white cut a zig-zag pattern across the surface of the mothership. It headed right for Karnage, and joined the first in orbiting his foot.
More and more lines of white joined the others under Karnage’s foot, until it had formed a bright quivering puddle of white. Stumpy watched in awe as the puddle spilled forward, urging them to follow it. The light rippled and ebbed across the rough surface of the ship. It flowed around panels, occasionally darted back to avoid a random burst of green, and finally pooled in a ring around a large hatch. The ring glowed brightly, then winked out. The hatch spiralled open.
Karnage turned to the disbelieving Stumpy and grinned.
“Open sesame,” he said.
MK#0: ZERO HOUR!
CHAPTER ONE
Karnage and Stumpy landed in a narrow tunnel. Long squiggly tubes of light ran along the walls, floor, and ceiling. The tubes were layered on top of each other, length-wise along the floor. Pulses of green light flowed through the tunnels at a frenetic pace, pulsing and strobing in a violent electric light show. The occasional line of white randomly twirled and flowed through the tubes, as it moved around and under the green.
Above them, the white ring of light around the hatch pulled away from its opening, and sprayed out, disappearing into the vast tubes of green. The hatch spiralled shut above them.
Stumpy shielded his eyes against the bright flashes of green. “Where are we?”
“I dunno,” Karnage said. “This doesn’t look like any part of the ship I’ve seen before.”
“I feel like I’m stuck inside a fibre optic cable or something.”
“Maybe that’s what this is,” Karnage surmised. “Like a giant fibre optic cable. Or a steam tunnel—or crawl space o’ some kind.”
“Seems kinda large to be a steam tunnel,” Stumpy said.
“Trust me, this is cramped by squidbug standards.” Karnage pointed to the squiggling green lights shooting all around them. “What do you make of all these lights?”
Stumpy studied the tubes as the lights shot through them. “Well, if I were to guess, I’d say it’s some kind of communications system. There’s something in the way that they pulsate. Like a sort of pattern to ’em, see?”
Karnage shook his head. “I ain’t no C&E guy.” A thin white streak shot through the green. Karnage pointed to it. “And what about the white lights? What about them?”
Stumpy studied them as they passed through. He shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t think they’re the same. They don’t fit the pattern.”
“Don’t fit the pattern how?”
“There’s just something about them. The green ones are a lot more focused. Direct. They’re going somewhere and they make no bones about it. But the white ones…” Stumpy pointed to one that was circling nearby. It shot off, heading back in the direction it had come from. “They’re all over the place. Like they’re trying to appear random.”
“They’re trying to appear random?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I think they are. Like a pirate broadcast. Like somebody’s hackin’ the system.”
Karnage grew excited. “Can you track where the white ones are comin’ from, Corporal? Trace ’em back to their source?”
“I don’t know.” Stumpy looked at Karnage with a glint in his eye. “But I can sure as hell try.”
CHAPTER TWO
Stumpy followed the lights through the tunnel, with Karnage close behind, his goober rifle at the ready, keeping an eye out for squidbugs.
Stumpy traced them through the pipes, sometimes doubling back as they changed direction. At one point, the white lights stopped completely. The pair paused to wait for any further sign of them, slowly growing more anxious by the minute. Just when Karnage thought they would have to double back and try to pick up the trail, a white light shot straight past them, then diverted into a tunnel opening overhead. Stumpy cursed something fierce as they tried to find somewhere they could climb up after it, but the walls of the tunnel were too smooth. Karnage finally resorted to firing goober balls up the wall of the tunnel in order to give them something to hold onto.
As they delved deeper, the green lights grew less frequent while the white became more prevalent, the tint of the tunnels slowly changing to a soft grey. The toxic stink of squidbugs became less intense, the air cooler on Karnage’s skin. It wasn’t exactly fresh, but it stung his nostrils less.
Eventually, they arrived at a section of tunnel where there was no green light at alclass="underline" just a single lone pulse of white rhythmically oscillating through the walls like a heartbeat. They traced it until they came to a hatchway where the white light was glowing in the surrounding tubes.
Karnage looked out through the hatchway into a main corridor. A single squiggling pipe ran along the wall and around the massive doors. Nothing glowed or squiggled in the hallway, save for the lone pulse of white coursing its way through the wall. It was deathly quiet.
Karnage looked back at Stumpy. “I’ll go first. You see any squidbugs try to ambush me, you—”
Sparks flew around the hatchway as the corridor echoed with loud machine gun fire. Karnage and Stumpy threw themselves against the wall of the tunnel.
The gunfire abated, and Karnage heard the faint sound of spent shells tinkling against the floor. A voice called out to them from the darkness.
“You best come out of there, you fuckknuckling fuckmonkeys, or I will blow your donkeyfucking faces off!”
Karnage grinned so broadly that it hurt. He looked at Stumpy.
“What the hell are you smiling about?” Stumpy said.
“I know that voice.” Karnage shouted out through the hatchway: “Captain Daisy Velasquez! You will stand down and cease fire! That is an order! You hear me?”
There was a long pause, and the voice called from the darkness: “Major? Is that you?”
“You’re goddamn well right it’s me,” Karnage barked. “Now stand down and cease fire!”
Karnage heard the gun reload with a loud chunk. “Prove it,” she said. “Show yourself, and maybe I’ll think about not firing.”
“What kind of backwater bohunk do you take me for, Vel? I know you. You’ll shoot first and apologize for it later!”