‘You’re such a fucking pussy,’ Mudge said. I couldn’t see him but somehow I could hear the grin he’d have on his face.
‘Shut up, Mudge. Morag, open the door.’ I think she was about to argue but it made sense. She only had one pistol, which freed up one of her hands. Cat and I covered her while Mudge pointed his assault rifle back up the stairway.
It was the smell that got us first. People had died and died bad. The coppery tang of a lot of blood was almost overpowered by the burned-pork smell of cooked flesh from laser or black light fire. Then of course there was the smell of shit. People soil themselves when they are afraid or when they die, and bowels rupture when the lower abdomen is treated to sufficient trauma.
I followed Cat through. The red emergency lighting coupled with the flickering light made it look like hell. The carpet of dead people helped give that impression as well. How had this happened so quickly? This was like smoothly executed genocide.
‘Them?’ Cat asked as she scanned the area. We were all thinking it. Just for a moment I wondered if everything we’d done had just been a Them psy-op, a precursor for an attack on the home system. I knew better, or I hoped I did.
‘Look at the wounds,’ I said. ‘That’s not from shards or black beam.’ Cat glanced down momentarily.
‘Tight grouping as well — good shooting,’ she said. She was right. A short burst to the body and then double tap to the head. Except for the ones that had been mutilated. Morag turned to one side and threw up. She was heaving, leaning on the rock wall next to the door.
‘Pull yourself together!’ I snapped. She glared at me. I hated saying it but we needed everyone working here. She straightened up, pistol at the ready. Thing is, she’d had the correct reaction. I should want to throw up. I shouldn’t be so used to this shit. Most of the corpses had been shot or just torn up. It was easy to see why Cat had thought it was Them. Some had had their genitals gouged out and their faces sawn off. I didn’t like that, not at all, and I didn’t want that to happen to me or anyone else here.
‘It’s a psyche job,’ Mudge whispered. I wasn’t sure but I thought that something had moved at the furthest range of my magnified optics. It was difficult to tell, my flash compensators were struggling with the flickering light. It was confusing my lowlight capability as well. ‘Fear of castration and loss of identity, it’s a standard and quick way of causing fear.’ Even Mudge was sounding grim.
‘Its certainly fucking playing with my calm,’ Cat growled.
‘Okay, we head back to the ship, keeping an eye out for Pagan,’ I said.
We started moving, constantly scanning our surroundings. There were still people alive down here but they looked terrified and we didn’t stop to chat. We could hear whimpering and screaming from the wounded and nearly dead. This had been done in the time we’d spent in Trace’s office.
I whipped my head to the right. Old instincts were telling me that something was moving in the shadows. I switched to thermographics, painting the area in multi-hued heat-haze patterns. It was difficult to pick out what was going on in the mass of hot pipes. Space was cold. Any habitat in space needed a lot of heating. If my imagination wasn’t playing tricks on me, then whoever or whatever it was must be able to shield their heat signature to a degree.
We rounded a corner onto the main thoroughfare. Broken neon signs flickered and in one case provided an ongoing shower of sparks. More corpses.
‘Uh, Jake?’ Cat said. I looked over. Past her, against the station’s thick external rock wall, one of the security force’s light mechs lay in a heap on the ground. We moved over using it for cover.
The mech had been torn apart. There was little evidence of heavy weapon fire. It looked like something had ripped parts off until it had got to the pilot. Around the mech were several dead guards. Again most of their wounds looked like they’d been inflicted in hand-to-hand by something with claws and possibly teeth. All over the walls I could see where rounds from the mech’s autocannon had impacted into the rock.
I shoved both the pistols into my coat pockets and grabbed one of the guards’ M-19s. The palm link connected and ran a diagnostic of the weapon. It was fully functional but the magazine was empty, as was the grenade launcher. I started to reload. Morag was doing the same as Cat and Mudge covered.
‘There’s something there,’ Cat whispered as I felt my blood turn to iced water. We all looked up. I wanted to ask her if she was sure but that was a stupid question and wishful thinking. I put a fourth grenade, a stun baton, into the grenade launcher and chambered it by working the pump mechanism. Morag was moments behind me.
‘Mudge, watch our back,’ I told him as we knelt down behind the wreckage of the mech, looking to where Cat was pointing. I had my shoulder laser still scanning behind me.
It took me a moment, but then I saw it. It was strange, some kind of animal, moving on all fours, slinking carefully in the shadows about six hundred metres further down the main thoroughfare towards the docking area. Something made me glance to one side. I cycled through normal vision, lowlight and thermographic but could see nothing. I just couldn’t shake the feeling I was being stalked.
I glanced down at the wreckage of the mech.
‘Morag? Can you hack this mech’s systems?’ I asked.
‘It’s inoperative or I would’ve been able to pilot it,’ Cat hissed.
‘It might be compromised by Demiurge,’ Morag said. I didn’t like the idea of sending Morag anywhere near Demiurge but I was thinking that we were running out of options.
‘Hopefully not the operating system. I need you to hack in and release the smartlink safety on the autocannon,’ I told her tersely. Hoping there was enough of the old NCO left in me that she wouldn’t argue. She didn’t. Instead she slung her assault rifle and climbed into the mech cockpit. She ended up sitting on the torn-up corpse of the pilot while looking for a port.
‘He’s in the way,’ she complained.
‘It’s moving!’ Cat said. Her words were punctuated by a short burst of automatic fire.
‘Corpse hack!’ I told Morag, barely registering her look of horror.
Whatever it was came loping straight down the middle of the thoroughfare straight towards us. It was low and had the look of a predatory animal as it bounded in and out of pools of flickering light. I joined Cat in firing short controlled bursts at it. As it crested a pile of corpses less than four hundred metres away I saw how pointless the frangible rounds were. Nearly all were hitting it but they were just sparking off some heavy-duty armour.
Morag plugged herself into one of the dead pilot’s jacks. He was still connected to the mech. She went through his systems. It was like necrophilia but the mech twitched. I heard the hum from its auxiliary batteries and part of the cockpit lit up. Morag managed to move the pilot’s fingers to release the mech’s grip on the autocannon.
‘Cat!’ I scrambled over the wreckage of the mech and reached for the weapon. It was armed with an autocannon because a railgun, plasma weapon or heavy lasers would be more likely to breach something. Two hundred metres. It was going to be a bitch to aim. The autocannon looked like an oversized assault rifle. I grabbed the handgrip and tucked the butt under my arm. Most of my hand fitted into the trigger. One hundred metres. Cat grabbed the barrel and lifted it up trying to aim. Fifty metres. I pulled the trigger.
I screamed as I dislocated my right shoulder. The recoil shot the massive weapon back and out of my grip. Cat threw herself to the side, but the muzzle flash caught her and burned the right side of her body, setting the bodybuilder’s top she was wearing alight. We were going to die doing something stupid, something that had been my idea.
Still on fire, Cat grabbed the weapon again. It was on us. It leaped into the air as I rolled and grabbed the trigger with my left hand and pushed it down. I tried to keep it held down as the autocannon bucked all over the sand. The thing all but leaped into the weapon’s fire. Even the velocity of the twenty-millimetre rounds didn’t halt its pounce but it knocked it off kilter and into Cat, who in a feat of adrenalin-fuelled strength pushed it off. I had a moment to be appalled that this thing was still moving. It was a flailing mass of mechanical, armoured limbs, which were beating and clawing at the ground, kicking up a lot of bloody sand. I didn’t understand how it could still be moving. There was movement off to my right but I had no time to worry about that.