“It’s an elevator,” Powell said.
“Okay, point. Guess we’ll just have to kill it.”
Berg stepped out of the elevator and looked around. As far as he could tell, it was just another of the seemingly endless corridors of the ship. There was a short corridor to a T intersection with the usual color-coded markers. This time, though, one of the purple ones was flashing.
He looked at that and blinked his eyes, then limped down the passage it indicated. There was a hatch about thirty meters down but before he could open it, it slid aside, revealing two thorn-throwers and a dog-demon.
He dropped the machine gun and drew his pistols automatically. One of the thorn-throwers had its back turned but the other fired immediately. Too soon, because the burst of thorns went by Berg with an evil whistling sound.
His .50 caliber round went right into its thorn projector, which, since it was mounted in the thing’s snout, meant right through its brain case.
A second round caught the spinning thorn-thrower in the side; a third went through its head. The fourth through seventh of the magazine were expended on the charging dog-demon, which slid to a stop a few feet from his boots.
“I gotta get a better job,” Berg said, reloading with one of his few remaining magazines. He was so hot and dehydrated, his vision was wobbly and his coordination was off. For that matter, he swore he’d heard voices a minute ago. Or at least a voice whispering in an alien tongue. He managed to seat the mag after dropping it only once and holstered his pistol. He started to pick up the machine gun, then just left it where it had dropped and continued to lurch down the corridor.
Beyond was a room filled with what looked like control positions and computers. At least, that was what his struggling brain was telling him. He thought he saw a mermaid for a second, but then resolved it as a bunch of the alien script on one wall. Sure looked like a mermaid if you sort of turned your head, though. He tilted his head back and forth and snorted. If you were hallucinating, maybe.
The control positions were arranged sort of like an auditorium with the door entering at the base and the positions stretching up to his left. He wondered for a second why that would be and then looked to his right. He had to lean back, carefully, to see what the operators would have seen. It was a big screen that was actually active, showing a series of colored lights scattered across its face. Some of them had alien script next to them and a few had what looked a lot like arrows. Some were purple, others blue. There were two blue ones right in the middle of the screen and one way off to the side. There was another cluster of blue on the left side of the screen. Near the edge on the left there were some orange ones. And one about halfway up the left-hand side. As he watched, it vanished for a moment, appeared again near the two blue dots, then vanished again, reappearing in its original location.
At almost the same time he felt the ship begin rumbling from fire along the port side. Then there was a thump, felt more than heard, and a klaxon began to ring.
One of the orange dots on the far left had a sort of diamond around it. The diamond began to flash and the whine of the main gun started up again.
“Okay, I know where this is going,” Berg said. He really hoped he met the creators of this ship some day because they were so much like humans it was scary. “I am in the ship’s tactical room. Purple is the Dreen. Orange is us and the Hexosehr. And the Blade’s fighting this thing, now. And I think we hit it. I wonder if I can turn it off?”
“You cannot,” a voice whispered over his communicator. “Continue. Follow the flashes.”
Okay, either he was hallucinating again or… No, that one had been clear. And in English.
“Okay,” Berg said, lurching forward. There was another hatch on the far side of the room and the control panel was flashing. “Okay, I can do this. Either it’s a fever dream or… something stranger. But I can do this.”
“We can do this,” Miller argued.
“It’s grapping insane,” Powell replied. “But we’re all gonna die, anyway, so why not?”
“Lurch, you get the left leg,” Miller continued. “Neely, the right. I’ve got the demo.”
“And the duct tape,” Lyle said. “Don’t forget the duct tape.”
“What do I do?” the first sergeant asked.
“Pray like hell this works,” Miller said. “And pick up the demo if I drop it. And keep that grapping beak away from my armor if you can.”
The rhino had managed to make it around the far bend and now was humping into view, grunting under its breath and rolling its beady eyes at the humans in the corridor.
“Wait for it,” Miller said, crouching on his knees a bare couple of meters from the stuck rhino. “Wait for it to get stuck in the turn.”
The rhino lurched to its left, crumpling the steel of the bulkhead and gathering room for the turn. Then it lurched forward, smashing the other side and tried to spin in place, getting jammed between the forward bulkhead and the port.
“Now!” Miller snapped.
Lyle slid forward on his belly wheels, then came up, holding onto the left leg of the beast. Neely slid forward, also, grabbing the right.
Miller flipped onto his back and pushed off from the bulkhead, sliding under the rhino as the two Wyverns struggled to lift the thing into the air. Its claws raked bare inches from his Wyvern, struggling to gain purchase on its smaller tormentors.
Powell slid forward and straddled the SEAL, grabbing the underside of the thing’s beak and straining to lift it. The rhino’s eyes rolled bare inches from his cameras and it was much closer than he ever wanted to be to a rhino-tank again in his life.
“Emplaced,” Miller said, grabbing the thing’s legs and sliding out from under the monster. “Get back!”
All three of the Marines released almost simultaneously and Lyle and Neely grabbed the SEAL, dragging him back just as the rhino pawed at where he had been.
“Seven, six, five…” Miller counted.
“It’s charging,” the first sergeant pointed out. “Down!”
The rhino, though, could duck its head now, and pointed the charging ball of plasma right at the four Wyvern suits cowering on the floor.
“Two… one…”
The plasma fired at almost the same moment as the improvised explosive strapped to the beast’s underside. Almost. In fact, it fired precisely four milliseconds afterwards. But that was long enough to lift the multiton rhino nearly a foot, so the plasma blasted past the Marines and the SEAL and, in fact, impacted directly on the door of the lift.
Rhino-tanks were, in fact, very well armored. But four kilos of octocellulose duct-taped to its belly exceeded its rated design limits. The center of the massive organic tank exploded all over the corridor, raining intestines, stomachs and other less identifiable bits in every direction.
Furthermore, the SEAL had slid way back on the tank, figuring that the armor would fall off the farther it went to the rear. Thus the powerful explosive lifted the massive creature up and forward.
Right on the four cowering suits.
“Well, Todd,” First Sergeant Powell said. “This is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into. My first gunny warned me never to work with SEALs. I knew I should have listened to him.”
“Excuse me, First Sergeant,” Lyle said. “But do I hear claws approaching?”
“Cool,” Berg muttered, leaning back and looking up at another massive viewscreen. This one was speckled with stars, somehow giving an impression of three dimensions. The conditions were too complicated for him to figure out but he was pretty sure it was great intel on the Dreen. Some of the markings had to be details of the Dreen empire. Probably other races, as well.