There didn’t seem to be any way to open it. There were no wheels or knobs.
On the outboard bulkhead, though, was another patch of glowing blue fungus. It was just occupying a vaguely oval spot on the wall.
Following a hunch, Berg pulled out a knife and scraped at the fungus. He was careful to avoid getting it on his armor. The Dreen often used enzymes and acids to attack armor.
The fungus turned out to be puffy and liquid filled. When the knife cut through the outer layer, it squirted liquid that quickly ran down the face of the metal. Once scraped away, the fungus revealed a pad with glowing symbols. They were definitely alien and looked something like cuneiform. Berg used the hilt of the knife to avoid the messy goo covering it and pressed a couple of the symbols. On the second try, the hatch opened, the doorway dilating away as if the metal was flexible.
The space within was lit with dim red light and was the size of a cargo elevator. Whatever race had once owned this ship, they had apparently done some of their own fighter maintenance in this bay and form apparently followed function.
Inside there was another patch of fungus covering a similar pad of symbols. Pressing the one that had opened the door didn’t have any effect. Pressing the first one that he’d tried closed the door. Okay, he could open and close it. Now to figure out how to get to the next level. There were three more symbols. The first two apparently did nothing. The third started the lift. At the next level the lift door opened automatically.
The immediate view was of the alcove that had the window in it and it was clear. Peeking around the hatch, though, he was amazed. The lift opened onto a massive area, about forty feet high and possibly stretching all the way across the ship. It was apparent he’d found the hangar bay.
There were more piles of green poop as well as stalactite type formations hanging from the ceiling. He had no clue what any of them were for and intended to avoid them for the time being. What he didn’t see was anything moving in the weird purple-green light of the hangar. There appeared to be no Dreen at all.
But if any of the Marines had made it into the ship, they were probably going to have made it through the open bay doors. His had closed quickly after he entered, so who knew how many had made it in. But they were probably in the fighter bays, still.
The interior bulkhead, seen from this side, had massive struts attached to it. They looked, at first, like some sort of reinforcing. Then Berg realized that the whole upper bulkhead could be lifted like a clamshell door. He had an immediate vision of aliens pulling fighters out of the bay that required more maintenance than could be done on site. Replacing an engine, maybe. The doors didn’t look as if they’d been used in years. Maybe decades.
He used a remote camera to peek around the corner of the alcove. He was surprised to find no internal security or even any technicians. He wasn’t sure what a Dreen technician might look like, but he was surprised there weren’t any.
Nobody in view, though. He walked as quietly as he could down to the next fighter bay and wiped at the dirt on the window. Shining a flashlight in, he couldn’t see any movement.
On the fourth bay, he saw a suit of human armor. It was wrapped into the mound of poop on the bay.
Hurrying to the lift, he scraped and punched his way down until he was in the fighter bay. But it was apparent he was too late. From the remains of the stenciling on the suit, it was apparent that Lance Corporal Mario Uribe wouldn’t be playing twenty questions again. The material of the mound had penetrated the suit in multiple places, eating through the joints and doing who knows what on the interior.
Berg set a grenade for twenty-second delay, boarded the elevator and headed back up. As he passed the window there was a muffled thump and the window splashed green.
Himes had to duck as the hatch closed but he made it into the bay and slid to a stop just in front of a pile of green poop.
“Uck,” he muttered, climbing off the board.
The most interesting thing in the compartment was definitely the pile of poop. It was sitting on some sort of lift and might control it. Getting it to open up the bay and let him out was a top priority.
He approached it cautiously, though. The Dreen were nasty creatures and this was for sure a Dreen product. There were still occasional outbreaks of the monsters on Earth, each luridly detailed in the news. He wasn’t sure what it could do to his armor, but he also didn’t want to find out the hard way.
That left the problem of what to poke it with. It was just waiting to be poked, but there wasn’t so much as a scrap of paper in the bay and he didn’t want to do it with his suit-claw. So he finally leaned down and poked it with his gun.
The pile erupted immediately, swarming up the gun barrel and engulfing the tip while pulling him downwards towards the mass of Dreen fungus.
He was only half surprised but he let out a scream anyway then bit down on his fire trigger.
A stream of 14.5mm rounds from his Mojo Gun blasted into the pile, splashing green across the compartment and ripping free the pseudopod that had his gun entrapped. The bit of barrel that still had fungus on it was smoking. He wasn’t sure if that was from the heat of the gun or from the material trying to eat it, so he walked over to the wall and scraped as much of the stuff off on it as he could. It didn’t seem to have damaged the barrel, but he wasn’t planning on poking it again.
He looked up as a light flashed at the rear of the compartment. Ducking down, he could see there was a dirty window there. Something was flashing a light into the compartment. He started to duck back, trying not to let a Dreen security team find him, but then recognized the vague silhouette of a Wyvern suit.
“Hey!” he shouted, stepping forward into view. “Get me out of here!”
Smith had made it into one of the bays as well and was equally fascinated by the pile of poop. Disdaining his gun, the lance corporal drew his monoknife and poked at it. He managed to drop the knife fast enough that the pseudopod did not get his suit-claw. But he also lost his knife.
“Mothergrapper,” the cannoneer snarled.
He examined the pile a bit more closely, then grinned. Backing off, he set the cannon for exploding-rounds, single-shot and placed the laser target designator on the point where the thick cable entered the back of the pile.
One shot was all it took. The cable whipped through the air, spraying green slime liberally into the compartment, then sealed and retracted into the wall.
Smith waited a few moments, then watched as the glow slowly faded from the pile. In less than a minute, it turned brown and began to settle, like a falling soufflé. In a couple of minutes it was just a brown liquid nastiness on the floor.
His knife was half eaten away so he left it where it lay and began to explore the rest of the compartment. He’d just found the door when it opened, nearly triggering another shot.
“Damn, man, what are you doing just hanging around in here?” Himes asked. “We got Dreen to kill!”
“CO has the controls,” Spectre said. “Standby. Engaging.”
The sequence happened too fast for the eye to follow. The speckle of Dreen ships swelled enormously, there was a brief flash and then they receded, fire flashing harmlessly off the ship’s warp field.
“Replay on all screens,” Spectre said. “Did we get anything?”
“Negative, Conn,” the TACO replied. “We might have gotten a piece of one of the destroyers but we missed Sierra Nine.”
The Blade was concentrating on the ship that was designated as a carrier, a long ovoid that was essentially featureless except for its mottled green-brown skin and spiked exterior.