Where did the Extenuating Circumstances keep its shuttles? She tried to recall what she’d seen of the ship back at HQ. The docking bay was somewhere along the middle part of the ship. So that was her goal.
To get there she’d have to go past the dead crew and, hopefully, avoid running into whatever had attacked them.
No time to waste. Kira took a breath to steady herself and then hurried forward on light feet, primed to react to the smallest sound or motion.
She’d only seen corpses a few times before: once when she was a kid on Weyland, when a supercapacitor on a cargo loader had ruptured and killed two men right on the main street of Highstone. Once during the accident on Serris. And now of course, with Alan and her teammates. On the first two occasions, the images had burned into Kira’s mind until she’d considered having them removed. But she hadn’t. And she wouldn’t with the most recent memories either. They were too much a part of her.
As she approached the bodies, she looked. She had to. One man, one woman. The woman had been shot with an energy weapon. The man had been torn apart; his right arm lay separate from the rest of his body. Bullets had dented and smeared the walls around them.
A pistol protruded from under the woman’s hip.
Fighting the urge to gag, Kira stopped and pulled the weapon free. The counter on the side said 7. Seven rounds remaining. Not many, but better than nothing. The problem was, the gun wouldn’t work for her.
“Bishop!” she whispered, and held the gun up. “Can you—”
The safety on the pistol snapped off.
Good. So the UMC still wanted her alive. Without her overlays, Kira wasn’t sure if she could hit anything with the gun, but at least she wasn’t entirely helpless. Just don’t shoot a window. It would be a bad way to die.
Still keeping her voice low, she said, “Which way to the shuttles?” The ship mind ought to know where the aliens were and how best to avoid them.
A line of green arrows appeared along the top of the wall, pointing deeper into the ship. She followed them through a maze of rooms to a ladder that led toward the center of the Extenuating Circumstances.
The apparent gravity lessened as she climbed past deck after deck of the rotating hab section. Through open doorways, she heard screams and shouts, and twice she saw the muzzle flashes of machine guns reflected around corners. Once, she heard an explosion that sounded like a grenade going off, and a series of pressure doors slammed shut behind her. But she never saw whatever it was the crew was fighting.
Halfway up, the ship lurched—hard—forcing Kira to grab the ladder with both hands to avoid being thrown off. A weird, swirling sensation caused her gorge to rise and bile to flood her mouth. The Extenuating Circumstances was spinning end for end, not a good situation for a long, narrow ship. The frame wasn’t designed to withstand rotational forces.
The alarms changed tone, becoming even more shrill. Then a deep male voice emanated from the speakers in the walls: “Self-destruct in T-minus seven minutes. This is not a drill. Repeat, this is not a drill. Self-destruct in T-minus six minutes and fifty-two seconds.”
Kira’s insides went cold as ice. “Bishop! No!”
The same male voice said, “I’m sorry, Ms. Navárez. I have no other choice. I suggest you—”
Whatever else he said, Kira didn’t hear, wasn’t listening. Panic threatened to overwhelm her, but she pushed it aside; she didn’t have time for emotions. Not now. A wonderful clarity focused her mind. Her thoughts grew hard, mechanical, ruthless. Less than seven minutes to reach the shuttles. She could do it. She had to.
She scrambled forward, moving even faster than before. She’d be damned if she was going to die on the Extenuating Circumstances.
At the top of the ladders, a ring of green arrows surrounded a closed hatch. Kira pulled it open and found herself in the spherical hub that joined the different hab sections.
She turned aftward, and vertigo gripped her as she saw what seemed to be a long, narrow pit dropping away below her. The shaft was a terror of black metal and stabbing light. All the hatches in all the decks that stacked the stem of the ship had been opened, an offense that normally would have been worthy of a court-martial.
If the ship fired its engines, anyone caught in the shaft would plummet to their death.
Hundreds of meters away, toward the stern, she glimpsed troopers in power armor grappling with some thing: a mass of conflicting shapes, like a knot of shadows.
An arrow pointed into the darkness.
Kira shivered and launched herself toward the distant fight. To keep her stomach from rebelling, she chose to view the shaft as a horizontal tunnel rather than a vertical pit. She crawled along the ladder bolted to the floor/wall, using it to guide her path and keep her from drifting off course.
“Self-destruct in T-minus six minutes. This is not a drill. Repeat, this is not a drill.”
How many decks to the docking bay? Three? Four? She had only a general idea.
The ship groaned again, and the pressure door in front of her slammed shut, blocking the way. Overhead, the line of green arrows switched directions, pointing to the right. It started to blink with seizure-inducing speed.
Shit. Kira swung herself around a rack of equipment and hurried along Bishop’s detour. Time was running out. The shuttles had better be primed for departure or she’d have no chance of escaping.…
Voices sounded ahead of her. Dr. Carr saying, “—and move it! Hurry, you moron! There’s no—” A loud thud interrupted him, and the bulkheads vibrated. The doctor’s shouting shifted into a higher pitch, his words incoherent.
As Kira pulled herself through a narrow access hatch, a fist seemed to grip and squeeze her chest.
In front of her was an equipment room: racks of shelving, lockers stuffed with skinsuits, a red-labeled oxygen feed pipe at the back. Carr hung near the ceiling, his hair frazzled, one hand wound in a strap tied to several metal cases that kept bumping into him. A dead Marine lay wedged in one of the shelving units, a row of burns stitched across his back.
On the other side of the room, a large, circular hole had been cut through the hull. Midnight-blue light streamed out of the hole from what seemed to be a small boarding craft mated to the side of the Extenuating Circumstances. And within the recess moved a monster with many arms.
2.
Kira froze as the alien propelled itself into the storage room.
The creature was twice the size of a man, with semi-translucent flesh tinted shades of red and orange, like ink dissolving in water. It had a torso of sorts: a tapered ovoid a meter wide covered in a keratinous shell and studded with dozens of knobs, bumps, antennae, and what looked like small black eyes.
Six or more tentacles—she wasn’t sure how many, as they kept writhing about—extended from the ovoid, top and bottom. Textured stripes ran the length of the tentacles, and near the tips, they seemed to have cilia and an array of sharp, claw-like pincers. Two of the tentacles carried white pods with a bulbous lens. Kira didn’t know much about weapons, but she knew a laser when she saw one.
Interspersed among the tentacles were four smaller limbs, hard and bony, with surprisingly hand-like appendages. The arms remained folded close to the creature’s shell and didn’t stir.
Even in her shock, Kira found herself tallying the features of the alien, same as she would with any other organism she’d been sent to study. Carbon based? Seems like it. Radially symmetrical. No identifiable top or bottom.… Doesn’t appear to have a face. Odd. One fact in particular jumped out at her: the alien looked nothing like her suit. Whether the being was sentient or not, artificial or natural, it was definitely different from the xeno bonded with her.