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“Were there really loads of them?” Hayashi asked Lau.

He shrugged, mouth twisted in contrition. “Felt like it, but I don’t know. I took out two, saw at least three more.”

“You?” Capstan asked Collins.

“Took out one, and there were three after that. Hard to tell. Maybe two more. I think they were breeding the fuckers here.”

“What?”

“The labs. It’s not a mining operation.”

Capstan nodded, lips pursed. “So what? Not our concern now. There’s at least six to eight of the fuckers out there. Or maybe hundreds. And five of us. Doesn’t matter. One door, three corridors, and we’re back on the dropship and away, but we have to assume it’s going to be a hell of fight to get there. You got thirty minutes. Check your gear and ammo.”

Collins glanced at Watts, checked her vitals. They were already improving. Nano-reknit listed twenty six minutes to go. He reloaded his assault rifle and hers, double-checked his remaining grenades and other armaments. They were still well-equipped for a fight. To while away the time, he keyed up one of the consoles and started scanning through base logs.

“Incoming,” Hayashi said quietly.

Their HUDs showed five lifesigns moving towards the C and C.

“Those things never showed up on our sensors before,” Collins said. “Why now?”

“They’re not life as our gear knows it,” Hayashi said. “These must be something else.”

“Cameras across the base are still out,” Capstan said. “Sabotaged beyond repair. We’d need new circuit boards and bio-processors. Same with all the vehicles and base shuttles.”

The lifesigns reached the western blast doors and there were three quick, sharp bangs. Pause. Three more.

“They fucking knocking now?” Lau asked.

“We assumed the scientists were all dead,” Collins said. “But are they?”

Hayashi moved to the door. “What’s the code for the view pane?” she asked.

Collins keyed up internal security and a moment later said, “Eight seven one hash D.”

Hayashi tapped the code into a small pad on the door and a thirty centimetre square panel slid aside revealing a thick glass pane with a speaker grill below it. A small crowd of people outside slumped with relief.

“Please, let us in!” the front one said. His eyes were dark and haunted, his face blood-stained.

“How do we know you’re safe?” Hayashi asked.

The scientists kept looking frantically behind themselves. “Please!” the front man repeated. “Some of our people went mad, homicidal, but we managed to hide. We’re starving! We heard gunfire, knew rescue had finally arrived. Quickly, those monsters could be here even now. We can’t see them!”

“And the ones who went mad?”

The scientist shrugged. “No idea!”

Hayashi turned to Capstan who returned her gaze with hard eyes. He ran his tongue along his top lip.

He lifted his chin to Hayashi. “Weapons up,” he said quietly. Keeping his rifle level in one hand, he keyed the override with the other.

The door hissed open and five people fell inside, faces almost melting with relief. The door whooshed shut quickly behind them and Hayashi closed the view pane. The lead man strode towards Capstan with both hands out as though he were coming in for a hug. Two more men followed close behind and two women hung back.

“You’re in charge?” the first asked. “Thank you! Thank you so much.”

Capstan backed up, took a two-handed grip on his weapon. “Stay back!”

The front scientist shot forward, preternaturally fast, and fell on Capstan like a rabid dog. The Lieutenant squeezed a quick burst of fire, but the scientist wrapped him up like an octopus even as exit wounds exploded from his back. The following two joined the first, inhumanly quick and strong, slamming the Lieutenant to the ground. Capstan’s weapon barked from inside the scrum and chunks of flesh and bone few out of the attackers, along with sprays of blood, but they continued their assault. Growling and hissing, snapping their teeth, hands rending in a blur.

Collins stepped forward and took line of sight to shoot without hitting Capstan and squeezed off three quick headshots. As each skull exploded, that body fell still.

Collins dragged the corpses off the Lieutenant, but the man stayed down, blood-stained and twitching. His throat was a ragged mess, blood pulsing out across the floor. One eye was gone, his left cheek torn away from lips to ear, bite marks all over his face, head and shoulders, right through bone, exposing muscle and brains.

He’d given as good as he’d got with his enhanced teeth. The attackers lay around him with chunks missing. Silica filaments striated their exposed bones, glistened in their wet, red tissue. It glittered in their spilled blood.

Collins pulled a med-foam can from his webbing and stood numb, staring. Where the hell did he even start? There was more injury than flesh across Capstan’s head, neck and shoulders. The Lieutenant gargled on his own blood, his remaining eye swivelled hectically in the socket. Collins sighed as Capstan’s signs all flickered to a flat line.

The C and C was strangely quiet. He turned to see Hayashi and Lau, each with a weapon levelled at the two remaining scientists.

“Look in UV,” Hayashi said.

The scientists stood as if frozen, not even blinking. Glass-like webbing criss-crossed their bodies like veins.

“Remember that last transmission?” Lau whispered.

“Poor bastards were already just puppets of those fuckers out there,” Hayashi said. “We should have looked with UV before we let them in. Stupid.”

Collins moved a little closer, weapon ready. Their eyes were as still as their bodies. “Fuck ‘em,” he said.

Hayashi and Lau fired simultaneously and the women slumped to the ground as their heads disintegrated.

“And then there were four,” Hayashi said quietly.

Collins checked the medic’s signs and was glad to see improvement rather than degradation. “Nineteen minutes until Watts is done.”

Lau sat and triggered a holo-display, began working through comms diagnostics, trying to raise Daisy. “We need her hardware!” he said to no one in particular.

Collins returned to the console he’d been studying and continued to read. Eventually he found some encrypted logs and set about cracking them. It didn’t take long with the military software on board his neural boost. “Motherfuckers.”

“What?” Lau asked.

“This breeding program has been active for over nine years,” Collins said, anger starting a hot flood in his gut. “According to this, surveys discovered previously unknown silicon-based lifeforms on this moon, most likely introduced hundreds of years ago.”

“How long? By who?”

“It doesn’t say. They live in warren-like structures in the first few metres of crust. Small, eight-limbed creatures that can reshape themselves and remould their exoskeleton. They naturally generate a tight energy field that interrupts light and sound waves, renders them silent and almost invisible.

“They were about the size of domestic cats, baseline intelligence roughly equivalent to a smart dog, no respiratory system to speak of, virtually no body heat, able to exist in vacuum and any temperature. They reshape their shells to carve through pretty much anything, including rock to make their homes, and consume silicate deposits in the crust to survive.”

Lau shook his head, stared at the floor. “Fuck me. But those things are bigger than cats!”

Collins read on silently for a few moments, flicked between reports. “The fucking idiots started genetically manipulating them. They codenamed it Project: Future Warfare, began enhancing size and strength. They wanted to breed these things into trained warriors, invisible fucking killing machines under Alliance control.”

“Shitheads!” Lau hissed.