“Hold on, Kid!” I hollered, firing at the advancing Krell, trying to get him free.
The other two xenos clambered over him in desperation to get to me. I kicked at several of them, reaching a hand into the mass of bodies to try to grapple Blake. He lost his rifle, and let rip an agonised shout as the creatures dragged him down. It was no good — he was either dead now, or he would be soon. Even in his reinforced ablative plate, those things would take him apart. I lost the grip on his hand, just as the other Krell broke free of the tunnel mouth.
“Blake’s down!” I yelled. “’Ski — grenade.”
“Solid copy — on it.”
Kaminski armed an incendiary grenade and tossed it into the nest. The grenade skittered down the tunnel, flashing an amber warning-strobe as it went. In the split second before it went off, as I brought my M95 up to fire, I saw that the tunnel was now filled with xenos. Many, many more than we could hope to kill with just our squad.
“Be careful — you could blow a hole in the hull with those explosives!” Olsen wailed.
Holing the hull was the least of my worries. The grenade went off, sending Krell in every direction. I turned away from the blast at the last moment, and felt hot shrapnel penetrate my combat-armour — frag lodging itself in my lower back. The suit compensated for the wall of white noise, momentarily dampening my audio.
The M95 auto-sighted prone Krell and I fired without even thinking. Pulse after pulse went into the tunnel, splitting armoured heads and tearing off clawed limbs. Blake was down there, somewhere among the tangle of bodies and debris; but it took a good few seconds before my suit informed me that his bio-signs had finally extinguished.
Good journey, Blake.
Kaminski moved behind me. His technical kit was already hooked up to the drive chamber access terminal, running code-cracking algorithms to get us in.
The rest of the team jogged into view. More Krell were now clambering out of the hole in the floor. Martinez and Jenkins added their own rifles to the volley, and assembled outside the drive chamber.
“Glad you could finally make it. Not exactly going to plan down here.”
“Yeah, well, we met some friends on the way,” Jenkins muttered.
“We lost the Kid. Blake’s gone.”
“Ah, fuck it,” Jenkins said, shaking her head. She and Blake were close, but she didn’t dwell on his death. No time for grieving, the expression on her face said, because we might be next.
The access doors creaked open. There was another set of double-doors inside; endorsed QUANTUM-DRIVE CHAMBER — AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY.
A calm electronic voice began a looped message: “Warning. Warning. Breach doors to drive chamber are now open. This presents an extreme radiation hazard. Warning. Warning.”
A second too late, my suit bio-sensors began to trill; detecting massive radiation levels. I couldn’t let it concern me. Radiation on an op like this was always a danger, but being killed by the Krell was a more immediate risk. I rattled off a few shots into the shadows, and heard the impact against hard chitin. The things screamed, their voices creating a discordant racket with the alarm system.
Kaminski cracked the inner door, and he and Martinez moved inside. I laid down suppressing fire with Jenkins, falling back slowly as the things tested our defences. It was difficult to make much out in the intermittent light: flashes of a claw, an alien head, then the explosion of plasma as another went down. My suit counted ten, twenty, thirty targets.
“Into the airlock!” Kaminski shouted, and we were all suddenly inside, drenched in sweat and blood.
The drive chamber housed the most complex piece of technology on the ship — the energy core. Once, this might’ve been called the engine room. Now, the device contained within the chamber was so far advanced that it was no longer mechanical. The drive energy core sat in the centre of the room — an ugly-looking metal box, so big that it filled the place, adorned with even more warning signs. This was our objective.
Olsen stole a glance at the chamber, but stuck close to me as we assembled around the machine. Kaminski paused at the control terminal near the door, and sealed the inner lock. Despite the reinforced metal doors, the squealing and shrieking of the Krell was still audible. I knew that they would be through those doors in less than a minute. Then there was the scuttling and scraping overhead. The chamber was supposed to be secure, but these things had probably been on-ship for long enough to know every access corridor and every room. They had the advantage.
They’ll find a way in here soon enough, I thought. A mental image of the dead merchant captain — still strapped to his seat back on the bridge — suddenly came to mind.
The possibility that I would die out here abruptly dawned on me. The thought triggered a burst of anger — not directed at the Alliance military for sending us, nor at the idiot colonists who had flown their ship into the Quarantine Zone, but at the Krell.
My suit didn’t take any medical action to compensate for that emotion. Anger is good. It was pure and made me focused.
“Jenkins — set the charges.”
“Affirmative, Captain.”
Jenkins moved to the drive core and began unpacking her kit. She carried three demolition-packs. Each of the big metal discs had a separate control panel, and was packed with a low-yield nuclear charge.
“Wh-what are you doing?” Olsen stammered.
Jenkins kept working, but shook her head with a smile. “We’re going to destroy the generator. You should have read the mission briefing. That was your first mistake.”
“Forgetting to bring a gun was his second,” Kaminski added.
“We’re going to set these charges off,” Jenkins muttered, “and the resulting explosion will breach the Q-drive energy core. That’ll take out the main deck. The chain reaction will destroy the ship.”
“In short: gran explosión,” said Martinez.
Kaminski laughed. “There you go again. You know I hate it when you don’t speak Standard. Martinez always does this — he gets all excited and starts speaking funny.”
“El no habla la lengua,” I said. You don’t grow up in the Detroit Metro without picking up some of the lingo.
“It’s Spanish,” Martinez replied, shooting Kaminski a sideways glance.
“I thought that you were from Venus?” Kaminski said.
Olsen whimpered again. “How can you laugh at a time like this?”
“Because Kaminski is an asshole,” Martinez said, without missing a beat.
Kaminski shrugged. “It’s war.”
Thump. Thump.
“Give us enough time to fall back to the APS,” I ordered. “Set the charges with a five-minute delay. The rest of you — cállate y trabaja.”
“Affirmative.”
Thump! Thump! Thump!
They were nearly through now. Welts appeared in the metal door panels.
Jenkins programmed each charge in turn, using magnetic locks to hold them in place on the core outer shielding. Two of the charges were already primed, and she was working on the third. She positioned the charges very deliberately, very carefully, to ensure that each would do maximum damage to the core. If one charge didn’t light, then the others would act as a failsafe. There was probably a more technical way of doing this — perhaps hacking the Q-drive directly — but that would take time, and right now that was the one thing that we didn’t have.