For that Corporate Dime (NPC Thread - Unmaking Quest 'Red Alert')

King Ghidorah

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Jewels woke up slowly, in an unfamiliar place. The air was cool - ‘air-conditioned’ cool not ‘barely climate-regulated arctic settlement’ cool – and had the vaguely chemical taste of a regularly sterilized environment. She was lying on crisp, firm bedding, and there was something attached to her arm.

“… bringing the patient out of it now Mister Hannigan. Preliminary CSF and connectome analysis indicates she’s got a bad emotional crash coming: probably the onset of PTSD, considering, but you should be able to have a productive conversation without her melting down. We’ve got her on some powerful next-gen mood-regulators – just came out of trials a couple of months ago.”

Huh. Now that she thought about it – and her rapidly sharpening awareness was lining up a smorgasbord of things that needed thinking about – Jewels did feel remarkably calm. She had had terrible dreams: the death of worlds and the death of those who she held most dear all running together into a surreal shadow-play dance of soul-crushing emotional agony and primal, atavistic, nigh-religious terror. However, even now, as she realized that at least one of those things had actually happened, remembered where she had been, what had become of her partners and what she had found entombed within the depths of the frozen moon, a cold twinge behind her sternum was the only reaction she could muster. Everything felt strangely sharp, crystalline. Her emotions were there, but she couldn’t connect with them, like they were screaming behind a wall made of glass.

Jewels opened her eyes. The room was a small and dimly lit by overhead sodium lamps, with walls painted a placid ocean-blue. She was lying in a double bed with crisp white sheet that rustled when she moved, and there was an intravenous drip attached to her right arm, the other end of the tube terminating in a grey flat-screen console built into the wall which included a variety of slots and sockets. There was glass-fronted cabinet in one corner containing a selection of labeled orange bottles on little metal shelves, a sliding, windowless door built into one wall, and a potted plant in the corner producing little yellow flowers.

There were three other people in the room. One of them, a bald and utterly forgettable man draped in a white labcoat who looked to be in his early sixties, was just now stepping back from the console in the wall to take up a position by the door. The other two were seated beside her bed in folding metal chairs. Both wore expensive suits – one all black, save for his crisply pressed shirt, and the other in navy with a maroon tie. The first was a slim white guy who moved with practiced elegance and had a face like the world’s most approachable hatchet; He had a tablet on his lap, resting in the crook of his crossed knees, and studied her from beneath slicked-back black hair. The other was powerfully built, totally hairless, and had bright green skin that shimmered with moisture. His fingers were over-articulated with too many knuckles, and his yellow, slit-pupiled eyes took up almost half his face. He resembled nothing so much as a frog, if frogs dressed in ten-thousand credit tailored suits and regularly competed on the heavyweight boxing circuit.

The thin man spoke first.

“Ah, Miss Jewels. I see you’re finally with us. Are you comfortable? Can we get you anything ?”

Jewels stared at him. After several seconds of uncomfortable silence she said, “I could use a glass of water?”

The overbuilt amphibian reached down, and plucked something off the floor, handing it to her. Jewels adjusted herself, sitting up as much as she could without disrupting her IV– and coming to the abrupt realization in the process that the extent of her clothing was a sea-green medical gown. The object turned out to be a bottled water. Unscrewing the cap, she drank half of it in one go.

When she was finished, the thin man continued. “All set, then? Good. I apologize for the lack of formality, but there doesn’t seem to be any surname on file for you, and this conference was thrown together in a bit of a hurry. We are in a private sickbay on board the Hub. My name is Raphael Hannigan, esquire, and this is my colleague Lygblyg F’lp’sl’p’p, also esquire. In case you don’t know, that means we are attorneys. He is here on behalf of the estate of your former employer, Tedrick Koenigsburg-Heath; as per the instructions of the man’s living will, he is representing your interests in the matters we are here to discuss. I am here on behalf of the Kaalakiota Corporation’s strategic asset acquisitions department. Do you understand all of that?”

Jewels absorbed the information, slotting it into her developing picture of her new circumstances.

“So that golden fuckhead did kill Ted. That’s probably on me. I guess when these drugs wear off I’m going to have to deal with that, too,” she said, noting with mild interest that not all of her emotions were deadened; She could still feel profound exasperation, and in that spirit she took a miniscule but emphatic sip from her water-bottle.

The attorneys looked at each-other. Turning his attention back to Jewels, Lygblyg spoke for the first time. His voice, surprisingly high-pitched, burbled like a stream in springtime.

“We don’t know about any ‘golden fuckhead’. Mister Koenigsburg-Heath, of the Opealon Koenigsburg-Heaths, is currently believed to be have been slain when Fortress-Polity 428A was over-run by Xenomorphs. Our Mister Hannigan himself had to be restored from cortical backup after discovering this firsthand. However, it is not the circumstances of your employer’s death that concern us today. It’s what he did shortly before that – and the legal contingencies that have arisen as a result.”

Jewels stared. The FP had been over-run by Xenomorphs? Okay. That was fine. It wouldn’t be fine later – oh lordy would it not be fine at all - but at the moment it seemed almost logical. It answered questions, filled in blanks. She hadn’t been able to raise anyone on the rig’s transmitter because everyone – everyone – was dead. At least half of them probably had it coming for one reason or another, but even so, it was a lot.

Jewels didn’t want to think about that – it wasn’t something she could do anything about, so with no emotional component dwelling on it made no sense. Instead, she refocused her attention on other things.

“You’re talking about the mineral-rights to that terrible thing in the cave,” she said.

Hannigan’s eyebrows lifted a fraction in mild surprise. Somewhere nearby, a climate-control system began to whine.

“Not precisely,” he said. “It’s a bit of a grey area, but we have been able to determine that in spite of its… biological nature, you do, as per the wording of your contract and the mineral-rights claim filed by your departed employer, currently have ownership of the object in question.”

Hannigan paused adjusted his tie, and poked at the screen of his tablet. “I will be frank with you, Miss Jewels. Under normal circumstances, you would not be here: Our prospecting team would have, strategically, failed to retrieve you. This is a fraught time on the Hub, and you are inconvenient. However, as my colleague has made abundantly clear, should anything happen to you the claim will not be abrogated, but rather default to mister Koenigsburg-Heath’s estranged family on Opealon. That is an outcome the Corporation would like to avoid.”

Jewels looked at the water-bottle. The plastic felt cool against her fingers, the sheets crisp beneath her forearms. She wanted to take another drink just to escape from this conversation for a second, but wasn’t actually thirsty anymore.

“Look,” she said, without lifting her gaze. “I appreciate you pulling me out of that cave. I appreciate you patching me up, and pumping me full of ignore-the-bad-shit drugs. I think if I’d woken up with my momentum gone and the pressure off, and immediately had to deal with, well, what I’m dealing with, I might have done something… silly. So thanks. But can you please get to the fucking point?”

Lygblyg made a croaking noise that might have been suppressed laughter and sat up a little straighter. “Of course, Miss Jewels. Mister Hannigan has an offer for you – two offers, actually. I advise you, in my de-facto capacity as your attorney, to reject the first one until he is willing to make a far more generous bid. The potential strategic defense applications alone…well. That is beyond the purview of this conversation. The second offer, however, if you feel up to it, may yield long-term benefits; a foot in the door, so to speak. Mister Hannigan?”

Hannigan leaned forward. “Miss Jewels: Subtracting the cost of your treatment at this facility, including the quite expensive mood-regulating drugs you were just given, in exchange for all rights, claims, and privileges relating to the find in question, the Kaalakiota Corporation is willing to offer you –“

The man’s voice buzzed in Jewels’ ears as he droned on. She wasn’t shocked – couldn’t be shocked, at the moment. But even so, the number he’d just quoted her couldn’t possibly have been right. It wasn’t fuck-you money, but it was certainly real-people money; enough for her to stop crawling around in psychosis-inducing caves for a living. Enough to go elsewhere, maybe start a business, or at least invest in one. Enough to have a life.

She couldn’t really see the point in that now, though. For the past few years, all she had really wanted was to go somewhere warm with Flipper and Krade. Starting a business, investing, that had been all Krade. Jewels had dreamed of living by the water, and having silly romantic small-town adventures with the people who understood her best, maybe learning how to fish on a planet where that wouldn't entail cutting through twenty meters of ice. Now, alone, the prospect of doing it tasted like poison.

There had been another plan once, when she was first starting out, before she met her boys, or at least the feeling of a plan – but it had had more to do with proving something than with achieving an actual outcome.

Alternatively, this offer would be enough money to go home, to Cevanti - to pursue a drug-addled memory of a picture and a voice, and maybe find out just what it was these corporate assholes were buying from her, what they wanted to fuck with – and what it was she’d set loose. Enough to chase a distraction - a series of tasks, one after the other, to spin her psychological dynamo so that maybe, just maybe, she'd be able to function without being doped to the gills until... well, until she could figure out who she had become, and how that person could survive. She certainly wasn't the same person she'd been a week ago.

Her chest twinged again. The console on the wall beeped softly and the man in the labcoat frowned, returning to the console and tapping at an icon, scrolling through the resulting text.

“Fuck it, “ Jewels said. “Where do I sign?”

This has been prologue: Quest starts now
 
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King Ghidorah

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The process of actually signing over the mineral rights was over surprisingly quickly – a thumbprint on a tablet, a verbal confirmation, and in spite of Jewels’ amphibian attorney’s continued and strenuous protests, it was done.

“Well,” he croaked loosening his tie and rolling his head from one side to the other. “In forty years of practice, that may have been the single worst financial decision I have ever seen. I am in physical pain right now because of just how much money you’ve left on the table, but I suppose what’s done is done, so let’s move on to the other matter. Oh, and Raph? Congratulations.”

Hannigan smirked, leaned back his chair and swiped a finger across the screen of the tablet, ignoring his colleagues grudging acknowledgment.

“May I ask, miss Jewels, what you intend to do with your newfound financial security?”

Jewels frowned. “I don’t see how that’s your business. Like, at all.”

The corporate lawyer set down his tablet and leaned forward, placing one expertly manicured hand on his knee and gesturing with the other has he talked. “It isn’t, you are of course quite right. But it is pertinent to the second offer I have for you today. You see, if you were planning on leaving Inverxe’s orbit then as things stand, even with your newfound resources you may find– “

Suddenly, the blaring moan of a klaxon echoed from somewhere on the other side of the door. Several pre-recorded emergency announcements began to play over the intercom, one on top of another so that none could be understood. This continued for several seconds, and then stopped as abruptly as it began.

“What the fuck was that about?” asked Jewels.

Hannigan sighed. “As I was saying. The Hub is currently… damaged. To a far greater degree than I think most groundsiders realize. To the point where the emergency alert systems have had to be shut off because, functionally, the stations is now always at condition red. Even that isn’t quite working correctly, as you’ve just seen.”

Jewels looked at him intently, not quite following what, directly, this had to do with her.

“Okayyy. Continue, I guess?”

“Much of the superior, aft section of the station has lost power to its automated defenses, both internal and external. This has compromised a great many things, including the security of the primary docking bay. Commercial traffic is ongoing but high risk, passenger traffic outside of Ioun’s orbit is practically nonexistent. Obviously this an intolerable situation – which is where you come in, Miss Jewels.”

The bedbound surveyor cocked her head, trying to decide if this was leading up to an elaborate plot to kill her somehow. She’d already signed over the claim, so it seemed unlikely, but she was pretty sure she didn’t like where Hannigan was going.

“ What are you getting at here? Like, exactly? ”

Hannigan sat up a little straighter, his mouth flattening out into a grim line. “What I’m getting at is that large sections of the hub are either damaged or under the control of the unmade, or both. What I am getting at is that our security forces are scattered, and our engineers aren’t trained for this kind of thing, so conducting repairs is a nightmare. What I’m getting at, Miss Jewels, is that in spite of your recent traumas you are a surveyor, and more than that, a successful surveyor – one who has survived in the job over a period of years. You’re experienced in working with and repairing complex equipment under conditions of scarcity, extreme stress and imminent threat. Just as importantly, given the world you live in, you would not be here today if you weren’t able to throw a punch, conceal yourself in a hurry, and handle a gun.”

Lygblyg cleared his throat with a sound like a bullfrog in heat. “What my colleague is saying, Miss Jewels, albeit in a very roundabout way, is that the Kaalakiota Corporation would like to offer you a contract as a consulting specialist. Premium rates, all employee rights and privileges afforded for the duration, with limited privileges extended in perpetuity barring malfeasance or other actionable wrongdoing. It’s a very, very good deal, even – perhaps especially - for someone who has recently come into a small fortune. Also, if the station can’t lock down its airspace, you probably won’t be able to leave. So there is that, too.”

Jewels drank the remainder of her water and crumpled up the bottle. Even accounting for all of the other stuff, this was weird.

“So. From my actual hospital bed, you want to hire me to what – lead an engineering team into probably burning and possibly monster-infested territory in order get your auxiliary power systems back online?”

Hannigan consulted his tablet for a moment. “I’m not an expert in technical matters, but broadly, yes, that does seem to be the case. Also, we’ve already lost several crews to this particular task, so it will be less of a team and more one engineer and one machinist.”

“Are you trying to kill me?” Jewels asked. “Because there are easier ways to do it. If I wasn’t high as a kite right now, I would be… actually, I don’t even know. I’ve got so many emotions queued up, and half of them are fighting each other. Does that sound like a person you want to be sending to do field work?

Hannigan raised his eyebrows. “You are, physically at least, quite sound. And that sounds to me like the kind of person who can’t afford not to have something to do.”

Jewels threw the water bottle at him, more out of a sense that it was what she should have felt like doing at this time than any genuine malice, very nearly dislodging her IV. He caught it in one hand without apparent effort, the plastic crinkling softly in his grip.

She paused. If someone didn’t do this job, she couldn’t leave the station. Money or no, she did not want to be stuck on the Hub, and there was no way she was going back to Inverxe with this kind of trauma rattling around in her head: the Malaise would get her in hours, days at most. That left Cevanti, and the faint possibility of something that resembled answers.

Also, the corporate asshole was right.

After the initial emotional crash she would need something to do, immediately. And probably, after she’d cried about an ocean and a half and thought through the weirder parts of this situation with the ability to properly react, she’d need more drugs, in order to zip herself back the fuck up.

Kaalakiota offered a health-plan, didn’t they?

“Let me have my godsdamn breakdown,” she said. “If you’ve got drugs for holding this kind of crisis off, I know you’ve got shit that can get it good and godsdamn going. There are some things that I need to feel, do you understand? After that… well, once again I guess, fuck it. It’s not like I was going anywhere, apparently.”
1174/5000 words
 
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King Ghidorah

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Forty-eight hours later, Jewels sat in a pristine beige ready-room at the very edge of the ‘secure’ section of the Hub’s labyrinthine employees-only tunnels. It was lined with equipment-racks bearing weapons and tool of all kinds, metal benches and electronically secured lockers. For the fourth-time she double checked the power-cell on the stubby bullpup gauss-rifle she’d been provided with. As she secured the strap to her tactical harness and, for the third time, took inventory of her toolbelt, her hands did not shake. Her breath did not come in rapid, shallow gasps; Her eyes, however, were red with tears; they had welled up with a vengeance as soon as she’d gotten to the part of her pre-op routine where she would usually pause to make sure that Flipper was okay. The little dork had always been nervous, had, in spite of his quickness of wit and frankly scary expertise with firearms, always needed to feel protected and loved before they went subterranean – a case of mild claustrophobic anxiety that he’d never entirely managed to shake.

Jewels stood, walked over to one of the lockers, leaned her forehead against it, screwed her eyes shut and ground her knuckles into the metal until her face stopped feeling too tight.

After all the contracts were signed and the lawyers had left her alone, and the happy-drugs had worn off, she’d spent the better part of a day just… processing. The emotional crash hadn’t been explosive, as it felt like it must inevitably be – it had been incremental. A shudder here. Tears there. A sudden blaze of memory: a touch, a face, a silly remark - intimate opportunities missed. She had stalked around her little sickbay making little aborted gestures, her throat and chest filled alternately with fire and ice, struck intermittently by unbearable upwellings of love which made it feel like her lungs were being crushed, their cherished targets now forever beyond reach, and irrational terror. During the latter episodes she would huddle in the corner on the aseptic white tile, absolutely convinced that the golden beast was, somehow, lurking concealed inside her room, waiting only for her to attempt to leave.

She hadn’t really wept – yes, there had been tears, as there were now: moisture leaking from her flushed and swollen eyes, but no great wracking sobs, no blessed release. Even her desperate need to scream was denied, coming out as little choked-off squawks.

It was too big. The loss, the vicious deliberateness of the violence, the remembered sense of utter helplessness all bounced around inside her, a storm of rage and recrimination, guilt and fear and so much love, now pointed only at a memory. No physical expression could possibly be enough, and so she was just… stuck, burning and freezing by degrees. Eventually, she’d fallen asleep, and upon waking had immediately taken one of the pills with which Kaalakiota’s doctor had graciously provided her. They weren’t as strong as the intravenous mood-regulators she’d had earlier, but they at least got her moving.

That was the important thing. Once Jewels was moving, once she had momentum and a task, there was nothing she couldn’t deal with – at least, until the task was done.

The task.

Stepping away from the locker, the surveyor collected herself, and focused on the matter at hand: According to the briefing material she’d been provided with after getting good and re-medicated, she’d be heading deep into one of the restricted sections of the Hub – following a series of maintenance tunnels, shafts and concourses to a corridor for the exclusive use of the massive orbital station’s engineering corp. There was a laundry-list of things that needed doing which she was supposed to tackle as the opportunity arose, but the big essential ones were a pair of ostensibly redundant power-distribution buses. If she and her so-called ‘team’ could bring them back online then the automated defenses that ran throughout that engineering section, as well as the railguns, phaser-banks and other sophisticated auto-targeting weaponry mounted on the aft hull of the station could be remotely re-engaged. As for what obstacles they would face in the process, she had no idea – except for damage reports and the occasional staticky video-frame, the entire section was dark.

So far, thirty people had disappeared inside it trying to do what she had been hired to attempt. Even if she wasn’t existing in the shadowed aftermath of her own personal Armageddon, that wouldn’t have really bothered her: way more people than that had vanished into Inverxe’s underground caverns never to be seen again, and she’d built a career in those caves. It was an old, familiar kind of threat. It might kill her, yes – might reduce her to a blighted caricature of herself, even, but how was that different than how she felt anyway?

Jewels smiled grimly and headed for the door. The other two members of the expedition were waiting there, in a small, rugged, wheeled transport. She had met them earlier, during the rushed and abbreviated first stages of preparation, but other than a vague recollection of their names and skillsets, couldn’t remember anything about them.

Even with the drugs in her system she couldn't bring herself to care who was with her on this operation: Only who was not.
2036/5000 words
 

King Ghidorah

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Jewels’ team, on the other hand, were extremely curious about her. As they rode down a featureless, grey-tiled concourse in their rugged little buggy, the vehicle’s trapezoidal navy frame laden with equipment-cases and saddle-bags, rolling smoothly along on seemingly-unnecessary off-road tires, the two technicians would not stop trying to talk to her. She mostly wasn’t listening, seated in the back between two dark green equipment chests trying to split her focus between the environmental readings her tricorder was feeding to the HUD built into her goggles and keeping her breathing under control.

“I just want to know if you’re qualified for this,” said the machinist, a blonde woman of average height who, while energetic, clearly enjoyed pie. Although equipped with a toolbelt even more hefty than the surveyor’s own the woman wasn’t armed, which bothered the hell out of Jewels. “I mean, I know I’m not. There’s a reason I work on this station and not in the boiler-room of some dinky-ass starship or Podunk arcology. Except for the occasional accident it’s safe here. Or at least, it was safe here.”

Jewels continued to ignore her. Overhead, the lights flickered. Technically, they were already outside of the portion of the Hub that was considered ‘secure’, and although nothing was obviously broken yet, it showed in little ways. She swept her thumb across her tricorder, calling up a 3-D chart of their intended route through the station.

One definite advantage that this operation had over her old job: maps were a hell of a lot easier to follow than they were to make.

The engineer chimed in. He was tall and bald, with bright yellow skin and sightly pointed ears, and had a kind of vague dumpy ruggedness about him, as though his jumpsuit was stuffed with old burlap sacks. He was also the one driving.

“Of course she’s qualified. I’m not going to pretend I know exactly what it is a surveyor does, but what I do know sounds terrifying. I mean, carrying sensitive equipment into un-mapped cave systems on a tectonically active moon? Where everything wants to eat you? Fuck that very much.”

The overhead lighting was getting worse, the flicker more or less constant as they rolled steadily along. The view was monotonous – blue sliding pressure-doors in a blank metal wall, labeled in stark white block lettering but passing too fast to read. Occasionally, a rest-room or a hand-held fire-extinguisher.

Jewels took note of the rest-rooms. That was just the kind of easily-overlooked grotto from which shambling horrors loved to emerge when your back was turned.

The engineer continued: “Besides, I don’t think ‘qualified’ even enters into it at this point. We’re what’s available, and she’s obviously seen some shit.”

He glanced back over his shoulder, attempting an encouraging smile.

“Feel free to contribute,” he said, “Or I might start speculating.”

Jewels had resigned herself to the fact that, eventually, they would have to communicate if only for the sake of mutual survival. Still, she was absolutely not here to make friends, was not ready to invest herself emotionally, even superficially, in anybody; hell, with the particular drugs she was on, she probably wasn’t even capable of that right now.

“Please don’t,” she said.

The machinist proclaimed: “Behold, it speaks!”

“Look,” said Jewels, removing her goggles for a moment and rubbing her eyes. “We’re all here to do a job. I can’t do it without you, and you can’t do it without me. We’re in this together, so we’ll need to communicate, but I’m not… “

She sighed, putting the goggles back on and running a gloved hand through the stubble on her scalp. “I can’t do banter, right now. I get it: you’re tense, and bullshitting makes things suck less. I’ll share what I know, when I need to share it to keep us all alive, but please, I am genuinely begging you: don’t try to include me. I just... I can’t do that.”

They rode in silence for several seconds. “Oh,” said the “Engineer. “I uh… I’m sorry.”

The two technicians attempted to continue, but the enduring awkwardness rapidly put a damper on the conversation.

Eventually, mercifully, they reached the first waypoint on their route – the concourse dead-ended at a large maintenance lift, the sliding pressure-doors mangled and lying in a heap on the floor nearby. It was obvious at a glance that they had been cut from out of their frame, removed due to damage in order to make way for an earlier expedition. Now the entrance yawned, a good ten meters across. Only a pitch-black shaft visible within, lit occasionally by showers of fading embers from somewhere far above, or sudden bursts of sparks from the edges of the empty frame. As they dismounted their transport, a cool breeze tugged softly at Jewels’ clothing, air rising through the massive shaft creating suction in the corridor.

“Okay,” said the surveyor. “Stay at least ten meters back from the shaft until I say otherwise; Vertical chimneys like this are the worst.”

The plump machinist and the pointy-eared engineer looked at each other.

“Are we in danger?” asked the machinist.

Jewels queued up the motion-detection and low-light functions on her goggles and hefted the miniature gauss-rifle.

“From here on out, assume you’re always in danger. You should be treating everything like… like you’re expecting a full-grown tiger to pop out of your breakfast cereal – and not even just the box. Like, the bowl you just poured.”

The technicians backed off, busying themselves adjusting the buggy for vertical travel, and the surveyor approached the shaft. She hugged the wall, staying out of the direct line-of-sight from beyond the gaping portal until she was close enough for her tricorder to get a decent read on the interior.

Jewels frowned. Carefully, she peeked around the sparking edge of the entry.

She looked up first. According to the tricorder the shaft was empty, but that was the first thing you checked in a vertical shaft, no matter what– you looked directly above you, you checked the sides, then you looked down.

Not for the first time, it was a prudent move. The surveyor back-stepped before she'd even fully processed what she saw and something, cackling, detached from the wall above her and reached out with grasping, leafy green limbs.

The gauss-rifle shrieked, a metal-on-slate whine, and there was a blue flash as Jewels shot the thing twice in the chest, knocking it back in an explosion of black gore as it attempted to swing out onto the concourse. She caught a glimpse of battered tactical armor, white in the muzzle-flash of her weapon, of a half-green face pock-marked by leafy sores and eyes obscured by tarry black tears, and then it was gone. It plunged, still cackling, into the darkness below.

“Holy fuck,” said the engineer.

Jewels waited. Once again, she looked up. She checked the sides. She looked down. The air smelled like ozone and rotting leaves. This time, she saw only battered, scorched conduits, cables and ductwork; some were sparking, some lit by small fires. There were rails as well, and ladders, all running together into an industrial mosaic that completely obscured the walls of the shaft. Far above, at the very top of the shaft, it looked as though something was burning in earnest.

Fortunately, they were headed the other direction.
3169/5000 words
 

King Ghidorah

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The trip down the shaft was less fraught that Jewels had expected. She was accustomed to descending vertical rock-faces using pitons and cable, harness and anchor – but that was not how things were done on the Hub.

The cabin and cargo-bed of the maintenance-buggy were mounted on lockable hydraulic arms, allowing them to fold out at a right-angle from the vehicle’s frame. The suspension was mounted on a bed of variable gimbals that allowed a certain amount of latitude when it came to engaging with vertical surfaces, and the wheels could retract from their rims, which in that configuration were capable of full 360-degree rotation relative to the orientation of the vehicle and were equipped with magnetic clamps: a setup that allowed the buggy to latch onto and travel along grid-patterned rails built into the sides of elevator and maintenance shafts.

The grinding metal-on-metal hiss of the rims on the rails echoed as the three of them descended on their improvised elevator. The buggy’s headlamps lit the walls in stark shades of light and shadow, punctuated only by the glow of falling embers and small fires. Everything reeked of petrochemical lubricant, ozone and ash.

As the minutes and the floors ticked away they passed one broken pressure-door after another, all of them twisted and bent, blown outward as if by a sudden massive pressure inside the shaft; Those the intrepid little crew were not equipped to fix, but over the course of several hours Jewels and her two technicians stopped repeatedly to repair sparking conduits, extinguish small electrical fires or seal leaking ducts. After one particularly tricky such patch-job, requiring them to don respirators to avoid the clouds of leaking coolant and reposition the buggy several times, there was a sudden juddering rumble and the orange glow many hundreds of floors above them suddenly faded out.

“Huh, said the Machinist, frowning behind her mask. “I guess that was a reactor fire.” She poked at the Geiger-counter built into the dashboard, double checking the reading with her tricorder. Everything appeared within the margin of safety, but she pulled a box of rad-away stick-on patches from her tool belt and stuck one on the back of her neck anyway before passing them around to Jewels and the Engineer.

“You know these things cause cancer.” said the Engineer as he slapped one on his forehead.

“Everything causes cancer. Do they cause acute gamma-poisoning?” said the Machinist.

Jewels applied hers in silence, just behind her ear. She didn’t like how smoothly this was going –a familiar sensation that connected directly to the last thing she ever said to her boys, put her within the emotional bounds of a space she desperately didn’t want to be. She knew it wasn’t real, but suddenly the inside of her respirator smelled like an igneous cave, the tang of ancient water and batholithic granite. The surveyor could feel the drugs, like a bungee-cord wrapped around her soul, holding her back from something catastrophic.

Deliberately controlling her exhalations, she began to re-check her gear as the buggy’s drive-train re-engaged and they descended again into the depths of the station.

Eventually, they reached their destination. It wasn’t hard to spot – these doors, too, had been cut from their frame, presumably by a previous, better equipped maintenance crew. At Jewels’ insistence they circled the exit with the buggy, getting as thorough a view of what awaited them as they could before rolling up over the bottom lip and onto solid ground, the vehicle’s computer managing a smooth transformation between the vertical and horizontal modes such that all they felt was a slight bump.

The corridor before them was narrower than the one they started out in, not a concourse but a dedicated maintenance tunnel: bare steel gratings for flooring, removable gunmetal panels on every wall, and only about a meter’s clearance on either side of the buggy. There was no overhead lighting – only more removable panels, many of which were missing, revealing recently patched cables and abandoned tools.

Jewels poked at her tricorder, calling up her map once again.

“Okay,” she said. “The first bus is about two hundred meters in front of us. There should be a… what’s the word? Like a lobby but – ah, forget it. The tunnel should open up, and we should have a little more room to work.”

“I know,” said the Engineer, locking the buggies hydraulics so that the cabin and the cargo bed were once again secured to the frame. “Having room when you work on these big boys is important. Room-temperature supercon- fuck!”

They were all three blinded by the piercing glare of iodine lamps, caught in the headlights as another buggy came tearing silently down the narrow tunnel towards them, with only a few short meters between the maintenance crew and free-fall.

3950/5000 words
 

King Ghidorah

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Several things happened in rapid succession, though it seemed to all participants that the events unfolded with agonizing slowness.

Jewels bailed out of the buggy, vaulting out of the cargo-bed, pivoting and pressing herself flat against the wall-panels. The engineer attempted to follow her lead, but only managed to get part of the way out of the vehicle before impact. Glass shattered, and two sets of headlamps went dark. Metal squealed; there came a grinding shriek of a transmission under strain as the Machinist stood on the accelerator – and then the maintenance buggy was over the lip and falling free. A pair of screams echoed in the elevator shaft.

The remaining vehicle stalled just shy of the precipice, its back tire not three meters from Jewels’ position. The adaptive low-light lenses in her goggles gave her a clear view of the three passengers, but she didn’t wait until she’d fully processed what she saw – plant-like growths and black fluid, torn clothing and placid grins told her everything she need to know. There was a smell, too: almost tropical, with just a hint of plastic.

The surveyor opened fire. The gauss-rifle shrieked, a blue muzzle-flash and a staccato triple-banshee cry, and one of the shapes staggered, leaking something black and oily onto the cargo bed. The other two swarmed down off the vehicle, moving just slightly too fast for their shape and size, like recorded images on rapid playback. Retreating backwards down the corridor, glancing over her shoulder repeatedly, Jewels fought down the urge to switch to full automatic fire, forced herself to breathe. Her weapon screamed again, and another formerly-human creature stumbled and bled – but neither of her targets had fallen, and the last one was already on top of her.

Now she got a good look at her enemy. This one was wearing tactical gear, not dissimilar to her own, but less geared towards utility, more heavily armored. It was bigger than her, and its grey skin was covered in little welts from which leafy green shoots emerged. Like the one she’d encountered further up the shaft its eyes were entirely black, leaking tarry fluid.

As it reached for her, one hand deflecting the muzzle of her gun and the other grasping for her collarbone, Jewels kicked it in the stomach. The steel-re-enforced sole of her boot slammed against the creature’s body-armor with a muted thud, knocking it back a step but doing no real damage. Fortunately, while she didn’t have enough space to line up a decent shot before it was on her again, she now had all the space she could have asked for to spray the thing’s knees. An azure flash and a piercing shriek and one of the monsters legs came apart, sending it crashing down on the grated metal floor in a mess of body-armor and black blood.

“This isn’t necessary,” it said, still smiling placidly. “You could be safe here. Come and –“

Jewels stomped its face in – and saw the other two creatures staring at her. They had once been sturdy young men, and both wore gear she recognized – the same loadout as the engineer, an abundance of tools with no proper armament.

“Doesn’t this all feel pointless?” said one as she lined up her shot. “You should just –

The other rushed her, flickering forward like a glitched recording. “Let go,” it said, grabbing her by the shoulders and slamming her against the wall. The impact was jarring but not crippling; she managed to tuck her chin, avoiding whip-lashing the back of her head into the metal panels.

She pulled a knife from her belt, a long blade suitable for a variety of tasks. Vines crawled from the beneath the thing’s sleeves, emerged like the legs of spiders from the corners of its mouth as it lunged in close – and she jammed the blade into the underside of its jaw, piercing its soft palate and whatever was left of its brain.

The inhuman ruin released its grip and slumped to the ground. Its falling body rang against the metal grating, vines emerging from beneath its clothing, rapidly overtaking its twitching flesh.

Jewels pushed free before it had even hit the ground, dropping the knife and falling to one knee, lining up a shot on the remaining creature. She was breathing hard, and sweating harder. Her peripheral vision, already not great with the goggles on, had gone straight to hell. The surveyor was riding a thin line between adrenaline and panic, clinging to a weird handrail composed of ingrained experience and psychoactive medication, and was painfully aware that at any moment she could fall off that psychological cliff and become totally useless.

“Hello?” said the Engineer, a voice echoing weakly from somewhere below the lip of the elevator shaft. “Help?”

Half-way through a silent, scuttling approach the remaining ghoul turned to look, and its head came apart in a shower of magnetically accelerated metal fletchettes.

The whole affair, from first impact to final shot, had taken just over ten seconds.

Jewels held her breath, swept the corridor, made sure nothing else was bearing down on them out of the dark, and mentally lined up her next task. She was keyed up now, in the thick of it, and that meant if she was going to hold it together she had to keep feeding her brain; task after task, the dynamo had to spin.

Retrieve the knife.

Make sure they're dead.

Check the new buggy.

Double-check your six o’clock.

Save the engineer.


4832/5000 words
 

King Ghidorah

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Saving the engineer turned out to be a fairly straightforward maneuver. The point-eared man had apparently managed to scramble free of the falling buggy just in time to make a flying leap for a sheaf of conduits that extended from below the lip of elevator door. He clung there, too petrified to move, dangling above a kilometer or more of empty space.

Retrieving him was a simple matter of fetching a length of cable from the cargo bed of the remaining buggy, which seemed to be just as well-supplied as the one that had just gone spinning off into the abyss; Presumably, it had come down here with one of the previous expeditions. Jewels lashed the cable to the vehicle’s frame, improvising a crude pulley system with what she hoped was a functional catch at one end. She made sure the brakes were locked, looped one end of the cable through her tactical harness and tossed the other over the edge. She crouched down, gripped the dangling line and jumped backwards into empty space, using it to control her descent; in two truncated hops she belayed down the side of the shaft to the panicking technician’s location.

Getting back up the shaft was a little bit more difficult. Jewels’ improvised climbing gear didn’t have the smoothest mechanical action; The wall of the shaft was covered in cylindrical surfaces, which made for poor footing, and the engineer, who was surprisingly heavy, clung to her back like a frightened child. By the time she’d hauled them both over the lip the surveyor felt like her entire upper body had been worked over by large men with tiny hammers, and her quads ached furiously.

As the Engineer scrambled around behind the buggy, putting it between himself and the yawning chasm that had nearly swallowed him and sitting down heavily, Jewels levered herself upright, griding her fists into the small of her back and releasing an abrasive groan.

“Holy fuck,” said the Engineer.

“You’re welcome,” said Jewels, trudging around the vehicle to join him. “Do we need to do something about a light-source?”

He stared at her, not comprehending. “What?”

“Light source,” she repeated, breathing heavily. “The head-lamps are borked. I’ve got night-vision options in my lenses, but you probably need to see in order to work. So, light-source? Do your safety goggles have low-light lenses, or do we need to figure something else out?”

“Oh. Oh!” The man pulled a set of goggles out of his belt and put them on. They were slightly less bulky than Jewels’ own, but the lenses gave off a dull green sheen in the darkened tunnel. “They, uh, they do have low-light options. They’re not great at distances over five meters, but that doesn’t really come up too often in my line of work.”

He paused. “How did you know I had safety-goggles?”

Jewels stared at him for a moment, unblinking. It had never occurred to her that he wouldn’t have safety goggles. On Inverxe, if you were going into a cave and you were particularly attached to your eyes, you had eye protection – and if you were smart, it had night-vision options. She knew she wasn’t on Inverxe anymore, but she was in that headspace.

“You’re an engineer who does high-capacity power-distribution systems,” she said. “Safety goggles are part of the uniform.”

He nodded quickly, leaning back against the rear bumper of the buggy and releasing a shuddering breath. His bright yellow skin looked pale in the dim light. “Right, right. You got me. But seriously, holy fuck. That was just completely…fuck. How did you know what to do? Sam and I - Oh shit, Sam!”

Sam. Right. That had been the Machinist’s name.

In spite of her efforts to the contrary, Jewels could feel the loss. It wasn’t deep, it wasn’t personal, but the Machinist had seemed nice. In another time and place, Jewels would have liked to know her better, and her death was one more grain of sand in the gears of Jewels’ emotional equilibrium.

Grinding her teeth and refocusing on the present, she forcibly reminded herself that there was no golden glow at the end of this tunnel, that she did not recognize the bodies on the floor (in spite of the glimpses of another tunnel entirely that she was getting every time she turned her head). The surveyor wandered over to the vine-encrusted mess that had been the well-armored monster and drew her knife, began carving away at the vegetation that had rapidly overtaken the body after she caved in its head with her boot. It took several minutes – the vines, dripping with black ichor, kept trying to crawl up her arm while she worked – but eventually she managed to retrieve the creature’s tactical harness and belt.

“Do you know how to shoot?” she asked the engineer.

The man had his face in his hands. He wasn’t crying, but he had an increasingly vacant look about him.

“Hey!” Jewels shouted, wincing at the sound. If the gunfire hadn’t attracted anything by now then her voice probably wasn’t going to do it, but she still didn’t like being so loud. Still, it got the engineer’s attention. Jewels held up a boxy black blaster-pistol, still in its holster, a side-arm retrieved from the unmade soldier’s gear. He didn’t seem to have a primary weapon, not on him anyway, and that was ominous as hell – but it was also a problem to be dealt with when and if it actually came up.

“Do you, “ she asked again, “know how to shoot?”

The engineer shook his head, wiping his nose with the back of his sleeve. “No,” he said. “Not really. I did a two-day seminar once, but security isn’t supposed to be part of my job. I’m not licensed for it, and there’s a bunch of insurance liability stuff that the corporation -”

Jewels handed him the gun. “It’ll have to do, because there’ll be twenty-seven more of those guys, plus whatever turned them all leafy and touchy-feely in the first place. The power-selector switch will be on the chamber-housing. It probably doesn’t have a safety. Don’t point it at me. Like, even casually.”

The engineer stood up, leaning on the buggy while he took a moment to compose himself. Then he clipped the holster to his belt. To her own loadout Jewels added a second knife, several power-cells, and a pair of fragmentation grenades.

She’d never had the occasion to use a grenade before, explosive weapons not being a wise choice when exploring tectonically unstable caves. Jewels knew how they worked in theory, though, and given how things had gone so far, a heavier option didn’t seem like something she could afford to pass up.

With their loadouts expanded and their emotions, for the moment, steadied, the remaining two members of the team piled into the buggy and began to reverse down the narrow, darkened maintenance corridor. They drove slowly, the Engineer at the wheel and Jewels riding sentinel, lying flat in the cargo bed with her rifle pointing down the path ahead.

6013/5000 words
 

King Ghidorah

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Even driving backwards it took only a minute or two to cover the six-hundred meters to the first power-distribution bus, and they made the journey uninterrupted. The corridor terminated in a T-shaped junction with a cube-shaped room about ten meters on a side at its nexus and as they rolled towards it, their objective came into view.

It was mounted in a recessed hollow in the yellow-and-black-stripe-paneled wall of the chamber: a forking construct of chromed metal, like a tree made of mercury. It was twice as large as a man with each branch terminating in a cable as thick as Jewels’ waist; The massive conduits disappeared into the surrounding bulkhead like the calcified grey arteries of some long-dead titan. Top and bottom, the device was socketed into banks of complex electronics via sets of massive rubber brackets painted with bright red warnings.

A huge maintenance-panel cover emblazoned with a high-voltage warning lay on the grated floor sections in front of it; tools and half-ransacked green supply-crates were scattered all around like sacrifices to some obscene cyberpunk god.

As they traveled the last few dozen meters, Jewels sat up, hefting her stubby rifle.

“Stop the car,” she said.

The Engineer didn’t even ask why. With a nigh-imperceptible whine of break-pads, the buggy pulled up just shy of the threshold to the chamber.

Jewels climbed down off the cargo bed, biting her lip to keep from cursing at her still-aching muscles, her boots clanking on the metal floor. She crouched as low as she could without actually lying down, and, wishing her jumpsuit fit better in the thighs, crept forward until her view of the full chamber was no longer obstructed by the walls of the corridor from whence they’d come.

No threats were immediately visible, but as she scanned the room it was obvious that there had been a fight. One of the other corridors was blocked off by the smoldering wreckage of another buggy, scorched and lying on its side. There was plasma-scoring in one corner, and several floor panels were warped by heat-exposure. The threshold to the remaining corridor, rounding out the junction, was awash with blood, both black and red; vegetation and viscera spread across the floor, dripping through the gratings and caked upon the battered walls. Someone, probably multiple someones, had exploded.

Finally, Jewels looked up; When entering an unmapped chamber you always looked up.

There were six of them, clinging to the ceiling near the center of the room; former station-security, armored, like the creature whose head she’d stomped earlier, but more grotesque. Their hands had deformed into bark-like claws, their legs bifurcated into tentacular masses of vines, their jaws distended to accommodate fangs. They gripped the ceiling-panels, belly-up, with their heads turned entirely the wrong way around.

The surveyor said nothing. She eased back until the creatures were no longer in her line of sight, quietly hoping they didn’t realize she’d seen them. She stood, and crept up beside the driver’s seat, waving the engineer down out of the vehicle. She kept one eye on the chamber, and began to switch out her rifle’s magazine.

One reason Jewels had asked for this particular weapon was that, although it required a dedicated power-cell in addition to traditional ammunition, it could fire both armor-piercing fletchette-rounds and magnetite-doped molybdenum slugs. Technically, those were armor-piercing too – anything sufficiently hard and traveling at mach five is, up to a point – and their greater mass meant they had a hell of a lot more stopping power. The tradeoff was that in addition to the increased drain on the power-cell, while the fletchette configuration held one-hundred rounds the bulkier slugs could only fit thirty to a magazine. Jewels had brought three mags of each – and given that these creatures seemed to be operating on necromorph rules, or something close-to, the slugs were looking like the better option.

“There’s six of them on the ceiling,” she said. “They look weird, though. Weird-er. I’m going to try and get them all, but you need to be ready to start shooting. If they rush us, retreat behind the buggy and pick ‘em off as they squeeze ‘round the sides. It doesn’t matter how fast they are if they have to deal with a choke-point.”

“Six of what?” whispered the Engineer. Even behind the tinted lenses of his goggles, Jewels could tell the man’s eyes were wide with baffled apprehension.

Jewels finished changing out her ammunition, slapping the magazine into place in the stock of the weapon. “More unmade plant-people,” she said. “Former station security, I think. Are you ready?”

The engineer’s bright yellow skin bunched up around the corners of his mouth in a record-setting frown. “No!” he hissed.

The surveyor breathed in very deliberately, pushing past the tightness in her chest, and let it out in a deep sigh. “Me neither,” she said. “But fuck it, right? We’re here.”

The creatures, however, were not.

Jewels crept forward with her weapon trained on the ceiling and her heart pounding in her throat only to find that in the thirty-or-so seconds she’d had her eyes off them the arboreal mutants had either concealed themselves or retreated from the room entirely.

She stared, lowering her weapon and pulling out her tricorder. She scanned the room for lifesigns, then for vegetation. There were traces everywhere, but nothing coherent – nothing she could decipher.

For a moment, Jewels was acutely aware of how much she missed Krade. He would have been able to read more into this, would have had a better handle on what was happening down here – would have made her feel like they were in control of the situation.

The lonely surveyor swallowed her feelings. Tears were welling up and it was getting harder to breathe, and she simply didn’t have the time for that.

Next task. Next task. Keep it going.

“We’re clear,” she croaked.

The engineer emerged from where he’d been crouched beside back wheel of the buggy. “What?”

Jewels cleared her throat, tried again. “We’re clear,” she said. “They left while we were talking. For some weird-ass reason, which we’re probably going to regret later.” She swallowed, pointing at one a stack of half-empty crates. “Help me move those boxes.”

It was the work of only a couple of minutes to blockade the gaps on either side of their buggy. It wasn’t perfect, especially against enemies that could crawl on the ceiling, but it did leave only one entrance to the room that was clear enough to allow enemies to enter at a rate greater than one at a time. They piled a few crates there, too.

After one last once-over, Jewels took up a position in the corner opposite the corridor with the gore-caked threshold, seated upon yet another equipment crate. Weapon at hand, she watched as the engineer went to work.

For all his dumpiness, nervousness, and obvious discomfort with the situation, once the man was presented with something firmly within his wheelhouse he settle rapidly into the peculiar trance of the professionally competent. After standing for several minutes just looking disapprovingly at the fractal chrome power-distributor with his hands on his bony hips, he sighed deeply, produced a tool from his belt, and levered open a small panel beside the gaping hollow in which the device was mounted, poking and prodding at something inside it.

As he worked, he began to talk aloud, though not, seemingly, to anyone in particular.

“Okay. So. Room-temperature superconductor, 1.4 terawatt base load, whole system is still under four-hundred Celsius, but we knew that ‘cause we’re not fucking exploding. Resistors, resistors, resistors, resistors, system capacitance, containment field, corrosion buffers, power-management gremlin, coolant… well, shit, this should be working.”

He fiddled a bit more. Paused, ran a gloved hand over his bald head. He turned to look at Jewels.

“I think I’ve figured out what’s wrong. I’m going to have to actually climb in there to fix it though, which I am absolutely not supposed to do because that’s a really clever way to get vaporized.”

“…okay.” said Jewels. “Do you need my help with that?”

The man sighed happily and rolled one of his shoulders, limbering up in preparation. “No. No, I think I’ve got this.”

After all that had led up to this moment, it was almost insultingly underwhelming. The engineer bent down and retrieved a tool from the chaos on the floor, a t-shaped device with a gearbox and what looked like tiny hydraulic arms, and disappeared into the hollow. After a few seconds of silence there was the hollow shunk, a few seconds later a grunt of effort, and the grinding bass flatulence of something very heavy shifting position ever-so slightly. There was a clank, and the hiss of a pressure-seal, and then the engineer stepped back out onto the grated floor.

That I have never seen before,” he said, twirling the three-headed tool like an over-complicated baton. He was obviously very proud of himself. “The whole damn superconductor was almost five millimeters out of position. The electrical arc that gap could have generated would have raised the temperature in here by like, twelve hundred kelvin – which aside from breaking a whole bunch of other systems would be outside the superconductor’s performance envelope: 1.4 terrawatts meets sudden electrical resistance. Instant nuclear fireball. Even half a millimeter outside spec is enough to freeze out every safety relay in the section. Five is… that just doesn’t happen.”

Jewels stood up, her eyes darting nervously from one entrance to another. “That’s one down then?”

“Help me re-mount that big-ass access panel, and then I just have to reset the system.”

After several more minutes of work, with the distribution bus once again protected by its prominently-labeled wall-panel, the moment of truth arrived. The engineer re-opened the small panel off to the side, which, looking over his shoulder, Jewels could see contained a tangle of wires and a small display screen, and toggled a bright red switch.

For several seconds, nothing happened. Then, somewhere in the walls, something big went CHUNK. A bass rumble travelled through the metal floor, making the gratings sing, rapidly rising to a whine and then disappearing beyond the range of human hearing. Several more large mechanical noises rang out, some close, some distant, as relays closed and dormant systems began to wake up.

Chonk. TANG. ZWuUUUUummmmmmmmmmm.

A low, cordial hum rose from behind the large panel with the prominent warnings. All along the edges of the ceiling, in the room and up and down the corridors, little red LEDs began to glow, bathing everything in crimson emergency lighting. Somewhere, an alarm began to blare.

Jewels crossed the room, sat down in the cargo bed of the buggy. She didn’t want to relax yet – physically couldn’t relax, in fact. The job was only half done, after all. But still, it felt good to accomplish something.

The Engineer paused to admire his work one more time and, tucking the three-headed tool under his arm, turned to follow her.


7836/5000 words
 
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King Ghidorah

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The path to the final objective of the expedition was both indirect and hazardous. According to the station’s schematics, in order to reach the remaining distributor Jewels and the Engineer needed to travel five hundred meters along the maintenance corridor with the bloody mess at the threshold, one hundred meters down a spiraling access shaft built around a massive wastewater processing tower, and then then navigate a grid of crisscrossing utility ducts before finally emerging at the utility concourse which would lead them to their goal.

As the maintenance buggy rolled along the narrow corridor, its tires unaccountably silent on the grated metal flooring, the crimson emergency lights cast everything in shades of red and shadow. Riding shotgun, the hellish illumination fit Jewels’ mood. Her sense of accomplishment was fleeting, quickly replaced by a growing apprehension: Where the hell had those unmade security officers clinging to the roof gone? And why? She could only conclude they had realized they had been spotted and retreated to regroup, but the longer they failed to reappear the more worried the surveyor became. That and the fact that the Engineer had been uninterrupted while he worked on the first distribution bus struck a discordant note that reminded her again of necromorphs, and of something Krade had once said:

Girl, it’s when the mutated chucklefucks don’t behave the way you expect them to that you’re really in trouble.

They reached another junction in the corridor, and took a left, emerging onto a spiraling sheet-metal ramp cork-screwing down the circumference of a smooth cylindrical shaft some thirty meters across. There were no safety-rails, and the ramp was barely wider than the buggy. Occupying much of the central space was a massive column of pipes, tubes, filters, valves and tanks, stretching away above and below further than the eye could see, arcane in its complexity. Across its surface lights and displays flashed in silent warning and little waterfalls trickled from broken seals and shattered steel-glass panes, misting away into the abyss. In the red glare of the emergency lighting it was easy to imagine that the device was alive, that the thunder of rushing water and the metallic hiss of valves under pressure were the vital rumblings of some infinite demonic engine; It didn’t help that the entire shaft smelled like shit and blood.

Jewels began to breath faster. Her palms felt wet inside her gloves and her chest was starting to tighten. The monolith formed by the machinery, like a twisted column of ancient stone, the trickling water, the shadows and the damp… it was all too similar to the cave under Inverxe: the great underground tomb of the Three-Headed Monster, lit by eternal shades of gold.

Inside her respirator, she wet her lips with her tongue. With a hand that trembled only slightly the surveyor shifted her goggles’ display to greyscale, but even so she would swear that everything had taken on a scintillating yellow tinge.

That was the moment when the unmade attacked.

As the buggy spiraled lazily along the outside edge of the shaft they erupted from shadowed surface of the central column, leaping across the intervening space. They changed as they flew, viny appendages extending, connecting in mid-air, forming a net, and then a mesh, and then a knot of flesh and vegetation and oily black fluid with a vaguely manlike shape.

In the instant before it crashed into the buggy, Jewels had an excellent view, stark in black and white: within the humanoid tangle were six armored torsos – one in the trunk, one at the end of each limb, and one forming the head. Each torso still had arms, and heads: twelve wildly flailing sets of bark-like claws and six grinning faces, their distended mouths filled with fangs.

The amalgamated monstrosity hit the buggy with a squeal of tires and crackle of splintering wood, driving it hard into the wall. The Engineer rocked in the drivers seat, gripping the wheel for dear life – only to be caught between the wall of the shaft and Jewels’ flying body.

***​

The next thing the Surveyor knew, everything was loud, and everything was quiet, and everything was far too bright. Her head hurt, and her adrenaline was up, and something with empty black eyes and sharp teeth and breath that smelled like sewage, slate and sandalwood was right in her face. She couldn’t move her left arm, so she watched with detached approval from somewhere outside herself as she used her right arm to pull a knife from her belt and jam it to the hilt in the thing’s eye. A gout of black fluid erupted from its mouth as it recoiled, and Jewels found herself falling free – only to catch stomach-first against something narrow, hard, and unyielding. The impact punted the breath from her lungs in a stunning and painful rush.

Her vision swam into monochrome focus, although everything was still too bright. It was followed shortly by an addled-but-accurate apprehension of her situation. Jewels was folded double over a narrow metal aqueduct feeding the central filtration tower, staring down into the fathomless abyss of the crimson-lit shaft.

Presumably somewhere above her was the monster that had dropped her. Her balance was fucked, her arms didn’t want to work and she could barely get any air, just the smallest of pained inhalations. Every fiber of her being was screaming that there was a predator above her, every atavistic instinct demanding that she move. So despite the pain, with the next spasmodic inhalation, she swung a leg up, nearly sending herself tumbling into the abyss but managing a scrambling, panicked grasp for the pipe on which she hung.

Jewels couldn’t afford not to move – but she also still couldn’t breathe. Her diaphragm felt like it was made of wood, and even worse, the lack of air was bringing on other symptoms. Her already fuzzy thoughts were beginning to race – she couldn’t focus. She clung to her perch as her mouth went dry and the panic-attack that had been trying to overtake her all day pounded against her pharmaceutical barriers.

8847/5000 words
 

King Ghidorah

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The surveyor didn’t know what to do. She knew that she had to get her breathing under control, but she could still only manage quick, shallow gasps. She knew that at any moment powerful vines and wooden talons could descend from above and tear through the antiballistic weave of her tactical jumpsuit, or grip her steady so that smiling mutated mouths could rip the top of her spine out like her brainstem was a microwave burrito. She knew she had to get back on solid footing in order to have any options at all. It all ran together, priorities of the present confused by waves of fever-pitch sensation from another time and place that robbed her of all direction, all control.

When the leafy tendrils actually did descend from above and pluck her almost gently from her perch it was almost a relief. The powerful vines wrapped around her waist and lifted her until she was face-to-face with the arboreal amalgamate’s grotesque human-torso-head, close enough to reach out and touch it. The compound abomination clung to the side of the filtration tower like the first probing knot of creeping ivy affixed to the trunk of an ancient tree.

“You poor thing,” six voices cooed in unison, rattling like forest canopy in a soft breeze. “Look at you, so broken. Don’t be afraid: soon you will know the fathomless love of our mother – and the peace that is Darkseid. Is Unmaking so terrible, when existence brings such pain?”

At that moment, what Jewels wanted more than anything was for everything to stop. It was sorely tempting to just let the thing do what it was going to do if only to escape the war inside her head. Her entire body hurt, she was so tired, and she probably had a concussion. Jewels couldn’t even say for certain where she was at the moment, in the bowels of a crippled space-station or deep under inverxe. Machinery and ancient granite, red light and gold, one monster and another, it all ran together. The surveyor couldn’t reach most of her gear anyway with the thick vines encircling her belt. Except…

… except there was a plasma-grenade clipped to the equipment belt that still hung around the ravaged waist of the unmade soldier that formed the monster’s head.

Task: Acquire grenade.

Task: pull pin.


Task: Shove grenade inside hulking torso-pile plant-monster and hope you aren’t incinerated.

She wasn’t even entirely sure why she did it: Habit. Momentum. Sheer bloody-mindedness. But there was a moment of confused mutual eye-contact, blank multi-spectrum lenses reflecting blanker black eyes – and then a silent wave of a unbearable heat and a flash like the birth of the sun.

This time the surveyor was unconscious for much longer.

***​

To say things swam into focus would be an exaggeration; they swam into washed-out brightness and the lurgy, drunken uncertainty that is the domain of the borderline-blackout intoxicated and the multiply concussed. But although the ground was spinning beneath her, Jewels was on a solid metal surface now rather than hanging above a yawning abyss. Everything was still bathed in red light, and looming above her out of the formless chaos there was a face – one with golden skin.

Jewels screamed and lashed out blindly with a fist, began thrashing and clawing weakly as a hand – only one – gripped her shoulder reassuringly.

“Hey,” said a voice she recognized. Chill. It’s me.”

Breathing deeply, great heaving gasps, the surveyor rolled onto her side and threw up.

“Ew,” said the Engineer, sounding more concerned than disgusted. “Well, at least you’re awake. You’ve been out for a couple of hours. I brought enough nano-salve to fix most of your burns, and I got your shoulder back in its socket – which wasn’t easy with one hand I might add - but your pupils are two completely different sizes right now.”

He paused, his pointy-eared face appearing less hazy as he leaned in close.

“Holy fuck do you have brain-damage? Can you hear me?”

Jewels’ thoughts drifted in a warm, disjointed haze. Brain damage: Probably. She almost giggled, but then realized that was dumb. There was something you did for brain damage. It was also dumb, but it kind-of-sort-of fixed the problem.

“Got more salve?” she slurred. It came out as ‘G’murf’.

“Are… was that a word?” The engineer’s voice echoed.

Jewels screwed her eyes shut, a simple action which sent lances of pain through her skull.

“Sssalvve,” she tried again. “Gimme.”

The golden face disappeared again into the general blur. “I already treated your burns. Also, you had a lot of burns. I’m out. Though… huh, you brought a med-kit too. You’re pretty capable, so I guess that’s not surprising.”

Jewels tried to sit up, and was instantly struck down by a supreme wave of vertigo. She stayed on the floor: The floor was nice - It was cool against her face, and it didn’t move. Instead, she began to paw at her own waist, trying to retrieve her little medical pouch from her belt without moving her head to look.

A gentle hand helped her find it, sorted through it for her and handed her a small plastic tube, cap already removed.

“There. You have salve. I don’t know what you’re going to do with it, but I hope it makes you feel a little better- or what I’m going to do for that matter.”

Jewels heard a resigned sigh, tinged with despair.

“An engineer with a fucked up arm and a surveyor who’s probably dying of a brain-bleed. We’re fucked. We are fucked. And… I guess I’m sorry for that? It’s not even a little bit my fault, but we only got this far because of you so I – what the shit are you doing?”

Jewels stuck the nano-gel tube up her nose, squeezed it, and snorted as hard as she could.

There was explosion of pain in her head at the sudden muscular action, bright colors with no names flashing behind her eyes. She threw up again, just a trickle this time, then curled up and began to shake uncontrollably.

The engineer sat perfectly still for almost thirty-seconds as she convulsed. Then he panicked. “Holy fuck why? Arbiter’s manky tits why would you – right, brain damage. Shit. Shit shit shi-

“It’s okay,” said Jewels. Her lips were bleeding, bitten nearly through during her brief seizure, but even so she was abruptly looking much better. Very slowly, her head splitting fit to burst but her vision rapidly clearing, she sat up.

They were on a landing, a brief flat stretch of the sheet-metal ramp that traced the outer edge of the shaft, forming a foyer of sorts for a sealed pressure-door. Nearby, some ten meters above them, a mighty waterfall thundered down from a half-smashed-half-melted breach in the side of the filtration tower. The steaming edges of the gaping crater still glowed a dull but piercing orange. Little bits of crispy vegetation, blasted armor and burned human flesh were scattered across the ramp and stuck to the walls, tiny fires still smoldering. To Jewels’ still slightly addled mind, they were reminiscent of birthday candles.

Her left shoulder felt like the joint was full of broken glass every time she moved it – but it did move. Half of her tactical harness was burned away, and the jumpsuit beneath it looked to have been cut off deliberately, revealing the bright pink of a first-degree burn, deeper red at the edges with spots of rapidly-fading white blister, all of which was slick with a thick layer of medical salve. It itched furiously.

Abruptly, the surveyor realized that her respirator was missing, and that she wasn’t wearing her goggles – and that there was cool, sticky salve all over her face as well.

She began to take stock, gritting her teeth as her head continued to throb and her body protested. Her belt was intact, as was about half of the gear she’d packed in it. Miraculously, she even still had her gun, secured to what remained of her harness by its scorched-but-intact shoulder-strap. It remained to be seen whether the weapon worked or not

The Engineer was seated cross-legged nearby. He stared at her.

“Old surveyor trick,” she explained, slurring her words less and less as she continued with her inventory. “Nanosalve has nerve-repair subroutines on account of how often it gets used for burns. Normally it can’t get into your brain, even if you mainline it, but if you snort it the nanites travel straight up your nose-nerve. People say you’re not supposed to do it – the dead nanites can’t get back out and I guess that gives you dementia when you’re old. But if you’ve been clipped ‘round the head by a wampa, or fallen off a cliff and scrambled your brains on a rock, getting old is the last thing you’re worried about.”

“That is… horrifyingly reckless,” Said the engineer. “How do you feel?”

“Like garbage,” said Jewels. “And not like, neatly bagged garbage either. My body is a dumpster fire – but at least I’m not….oh wow, your arm is really messed up.”

Jewel’s had just noticed that the Engineer’s left arm was hanging limply, and about twenty centimeters lower than it should have been.

“Broken shoulder,” he said. There were tears in the corners of his bloodshot eyes, and his face was gaunt and sunken with pain. “But aside from a nasty case of whiplash my head is just fine, and at least one of still has a functional pair of hands. We might actually pull this off.”

10406/5000 words
 
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Against all odds, the maintenance team got back to work.

With her remaining knife, Jewels cut the sleeves from the engineer’s jumpsuit and used the material to fashion a sling for his arm. Getting him into it was a slow, painful process, but together they managed. For herself, she fished around in her medkit until she found a little packet of painkillers. She had no idea how they would interact with the mood-regulators in her system or the nanites in her brain, but she was far past the point of worrying about that; The battered surveyor retrieved a warped canteen from her belt, took a long drink of uncomfortably hot water, and swallowed two of them. A warm fuzzy feeling spread through her body, reducing stabbing pains and grinding injuries to dull, manageable aches.

The buggy was wrecked, its spine broken, the frame stove in. Jewels’ goggles and respirator were both slagged, though as they had saved her eyes and airways from the plasma-grenade she considered them well-spent. The bullpup Gauss-rifle, upon inspection, still worked, although the maximum power output was down by fifteen percent. All of the fletchette-ammo was gone, as was her sidearm, a multitool, and, naturally, her medication.

Her tricorder, however, was still functional. And more importantly, having had a full-on panic attack, Jewels was, for the moment, back on a relatively even keel.

With their wounds tended to as best they were able, the pair moved on. Their boots rang against the sheet metal ramp, the newborn waterfall thundering down the side of the cyclopean filtration tower and the emergency lighting pulsing gently. They proceeded a full two turns around the corkscrew path before finally arriving at their next waypoint – a narrow, steel-paneled maintenance tunnel with a grated floor, much like the ones they’d encountered previously. It extended from a landing cut into the wall beside the service-ramp, the sliding access doors open, seemingly stuck.

Jewels stopped, switching her tricorder to holographic display and consulting the map. Their path ahead led them through a maze of these tunnels, full of cross-corridors and access-ducts. This was the part of the expedition she was most worried about from the start – so many potential places to hide, so much opportunity for ambush.

She motioned the Engineer in close. “Listen,” she said. “I’m on at least two drugs right now, and I think one of them’s an opiate. Don’t worry, I can handle my shit – I’m functional, but I’m still flying. I’ll do my best, but you’re going to have to help me pay attention for this part. Can you do that?”

The engineer nodded, his hairless yellow face serious. “Absolutely. What are we doing?”

Jewels expanded the holo-display, a laser-tracery of green lines dancing festively in the crimson glare. “There is no way that a warren like this isn’t full of things waiting to kill us – so we are going to do our happy best to avoid anything that happens to be lurking in here so that we don’t get swarmed. I can set the tricorder to proximity scan for plant and animal life, but there’s so many shielded panels in here that the range is going to be terrible. I need you to pull out that blaster I gave you earlier, and watch our backs. Keep an eye on the ceiling, and whatever you do, don’t look around any corners unless either I or the map say its okay. Okay?”

“Okay.” Said the engineer.

What followed was the tensest part of the expedition so far. Every corridor looked the same: If they hadn’t had a functioning tricorder, it would have been very easy to get lost. Despite Jewels’ predictions however, they navigated the entire maze without encountering a single living thing. Everything was utterly still, and utterly quiet.

There were signs of earlier ambushes, and the fate of at least one previous maintenance crew – corners turned only to stumble upon massive bloodstains, plasma-score and bullet-holes, disembodied legs handing limply from overhead ductwork or viscera strewn across walls. At one point they came across an entire intact corpse, equipped for security work and missing only its head, from which Jewels gratefully retrieved a second blaster-pistol, two plasma-grenades, and a ceramic-plated tactical vest. Of the creature or creatures responsible, however, there was no sign.

By the time they emerged onto the final concourse, a high-ceilinged twenty-meter-wide avenue of black plastic tarmac and blue steel bulkheads interspersed with labeled access-panels, Jewels was feeling almost apprehensive as she had just before things went bad in the water-filtration maintenance-shaft. Glancing down the corridor behind them, she could have sworn she saw something disappear around a corner.

“Keep watching our six,” she told the Engineer, hefting her newly acquired blaster in her non-tricorder-bearing hand. “This whole thing feels fucky, and we are super-exposed. Even with how badly this has gone, there hasn’t been nearly as much resistance as I expected. And except for those first two we’ve barely seen any of the missing engineers – just security guys. I have no idea what that means, but probably something awful.”

Lit in pulsing red, they strode down the concourse.

Without transportation, it was a very long walk. They’d been at it for almost an hour, their boots thudding rhythmically on the plastic flooring, when, in the interest of not becoming hypnotized by the flashing emergency lights, the Engineer spoke up.

“So… where are you from?”

Jewels grimaced. Her goal of not becoming invested in the engineer on a personal level was already out the window. She’d saved his life a couple of times , he’d saved hers: They were friends now and there was nothing she could do about it, whether she remembered his name or not.

“Cevanti, originally,” she said. “I grew up in a squat just outside of Markov.”

The engineer blinked in surprise. “I… didn’t know that anyone on Cevanti lived outside of Markov. So are we talking about some kind of auxiliary barrier system?“

Jewels snorted in grim amusement. “A squat, I said. That means I lived in a ruin – an abandoned part of the city. No barriers, no guards.”

“Oh.”

The Engineer was silent for a moment.

“…A lot of things about you suddenly make sense.”

The exchange continued, getting pithier, but more casual. But as nice as it was to feel even remotely normal for a moment, there was a part of Jewels that deeply hated that feeling and wanted to get as far away from it as possible.

As it happened, the conversation was abruptly cut off, much to surveyor's relief and dismay.

It began as a clatter from somewhere far ahead, resolving into a group of distinct sounds as it grew closer: the whine of a transmission, the urgent shuffle and whisper of shifting vegetation, the crackle of limbs moving in ways for which they were never intended – and then, at a junction not forty meters ahead, the thing slithered from around a corner and all of Jewels’ questions of what had become of the unaccounted-for members of the earlier expeditions were efficiently, horribly answered.

11582/5000 words
 

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It was a an aggregate being, like the creature that had nearly killed them in the filtration shaft. Dozens, perhaps as many as a hundred living bodies, mostly human or humanoid but some belonging to larger intelligent species, were fused and bound together by a mass of verdant vegetation; vines, fronds and bark-sheathed tendrils dripping with oily fluid. All were in various advanced states of mutation, dismemberment, or both, dark green or greying flesh sprouting teeth and claws, leaves and bark. Stumps of limbs subdivided into fractal fronds and grasping tendrils of pulpy green plant-flesh, linking with the greater mass. Disembodied heads, eyes weeping tar and overcrowded mouths filled with overcrowded wooden fangs swung this way and that at the ends of coiling, leafy, arboreal tentacles, the stubs of their necks fused seamlessly with the vegetation.

As it dragged itself fully into view it wasn’t crawling. Not really. It was growing, and its leading edges were dragging the rest of it along, vines and hands anchoring to the walls and the floor. It had a hundred faces, and it had none. It was almost half the width of the concourse, and stretched from floor to ceiling. Jewels couldn’t even guess at its length.

Suspended within the protean thing’s shifting dendritic composition there was armor, and there were guns, and there was even a buggy, its engine protesting horribly as it helped to move the creature’s tremendous mass.

Lit in shades of red and shadow, the impression it gave was that a living garden of damned souls and dark instruments had crawled out of Hell and decided to go for a walk.



The Engineer screamed. The surveyor snatched a plasma-grenade off her belt and frantically pulled the pin, pitching it haphazardly into the thing’s path and hurling herself into a flailing sprint back the way she had come without waiting to see what happened. It took her a moment to register the sound of a second set of pounding steel-soled boots, only a few steps behind her: the engineer was running too.

Jewels’ vision pulsed, the wide black tarmac and blue steel walls running together in the crimson glare of the emergency lights. Even through the painkillers and the adrenaline her inflamed shoulder-joint was pure agony. The problem was immediate, the task well defined – as perilous as the situation was, driving herself forward was not an issue - but she didn’t know how much more her body could take. Being mechanically intact enough to function was one thing, but the surveyor could feel the sheer metabolic stress of everything she’d endured weighing her down. There was another collapse coming, and this one would be more than emotional.

A thunderous roar erupted behind the fleeing pair, cutting off the whine of the corrupted and co-opted engine, and a wave of boiling heat nearly sent them sprawling across the tarmac. The pointy-eared Engineer started to stumble to a stop, realized Jewels hadn’t broken stride, and almost fell as he second-guessed and kept running. The momentary glimpse he’d gotten as he half-turned in that moment was been just enough to show him that they were in serious trouble. While the plasma-blast had taken a chunk out of the monster, scorching it terribly and reducing a large central hemisphere to little more than glowing ash, it was regenerating explosively: smoldering white embers and blackened tendrils burst to reveal fresh green shoots which rapidly grew to replace the missing mass, creaking and groaning, a verdant hiss composed of rustles and cracks.

At most, the grenade had bought them a few seconds.

“We. Have to get. The internal. Defenses. Online” he growled between strides. It wasn’t just the effort: although the Engineer had popped a few painkillers himself before rousing Jewels, every step he took made him feel as though his left arm was going to tear free of its shattered socket. “Thing’s. Already. Back up.”

Jewels had her tricorder out, trying to find an alternate route, glancing between the holographic display and, over her shoulder, the leafy nightmare pursuing them. She had seen a time-lapse recording of the roots of a tree engulfing a ruin once, a video taken over the course of decades by some artsy bastard with too much time and money and played back at one-million times normal speed. This was like being hunted by that tree, if that tree was full of mutated corpses and wanted to piss in her soul.

Dozens of cajoling voices rang out.

“This is all so unnecessary. Why will you not simply allow yourselves to be loved? To see the beauty in which we could all share? Our new Arbiter loves all her children, and all are welcome in - ”

Not even turning to look, Jewels threw the remaining plasma grenade over her shoulder. As the blast-waved howled and a hot wind washed over them, the Engineer said. “I have. An idea. It’ s bad though.”

Jewels half-laughed, half-coughed, tasted blood as she pumped her legs furiously. Behind them, the organic cacophony of the monster regenerating mixed with the “Bad ideas. Got us this far.”

“The access panels on the wall,” said the Engineer. “There’s a duct. Runs the length. Of the hall. Not on maps. Just specs. Should be. A straight shot. To the power-bus.”

Jewels looked at an access panel, then another, then another as she thundered past them. They were plastered with warning emblems, only some of which she could understand at a glance: High voltage, high current, pressure hazard, and heat hazard were the most troubling.

“It’s fine,” said the Engineer. “Long as. Main power is off.”

Jewels glanced behind her. They had maybe ten seconds of lead time, and that wasn’t going to last. The vicious tangle of vines, equipment and mutated man-flesh was gaining again.

“How long. to open one?”

“With a blaster? Couple seconds.”

Jewels threw a fragmentation grenade over her shoulder. While loud the result was, comparatively, underwhelming. A glance confirmed it: the monster was barely damaged, barely slowed, momentarily confused if anything.

“Fuck it,” she said, and threw the last explosive. She pivoted on the ball of her lead foot on the next stride, the ring of her step like a punctuation mark, and dashed to the nearest access panel.

The engineer followed, stumbling, frantically drawing his blaster-pistol. It took a couple of tries.

The access-panel was about two meters square, heavy steel mounted to the bulkhead by hydraulic-assisted hinges and secured by a keypad lock, which the engineer promptly shot. It was a safety-feature – if the lock was non-functional, the panel opened.

The little screen erupted in a shower of orange sparks and blue flame, and with a muted hiss of pressure cylinders the panel began to move. The pair could hear the rustle, the groan, the hiss and clatter of their gargantuan pursuer, its chorus of cajoling voices singing honeyed promises. It was very, very close, and closing in at freight-train speed. They didn’t dare look.

Jewels was through the gap and pounding down a dark, narrow space barely wide and tall enough for her to stand, ducking overhanging conduits and squeezing past sheafs of cable, her boots ringing once again on metal grating before she realized that the Engineer was no longer behind her.

In the near-distance, three blaster-shots rang out. Then a fourth. Then silence, and the rustle of moving vegetation.

Gritting her teeth until her gums bled, Jewels increased her pace.

She had been here before – a mote of bruised and battered life in the claustrophobic dark, with barely enough space to move forward. Pursued by something that, in a just universe, would never have existed. Armed with a functional but still useless weapon, her only companion dead or worse.

This was just Inverxe. Hub be damned, she was back on Inverxe; And Inverxe did not forgive the stupid, did not accommodate the blind, did allow anything less than the most clever and most dangerous to survive, let alone thrive.

Jewels knew that if she came out the other end of this duct and that thing was waiting for her, as it stood she wouldn’t have an answer except to retreat. The hideous ambulatory thicket would be able to just chase her back and forth between the bus and the access hatch until she either gave up or collapsed.

The surveyor kept moving, her fatigued and drug-addled mind racing: If the grenades couldn’t stop it then the gun wouldn’t do shit; the knife would be next to useless. None of her other tools were even remotely useful.

All that left her was one last reckless trick, something Flipper had shown her just days ago.

That thought nearly stopped her in tracks; Swallowing tears, Jewels focused as best she could on maintaining her pace while doing something complex with her hands.

By the time she saw red light flashing at the end of the duct, a distant winking crimson star, she was almost done: all it took was two spare power-cells, some bandage from her medical pouch, and one of several clamps from her thus-far-unused toolkit.

Once activated, all she’d have to do was wait several seconds for the jerry-rigged device to overheat, then breach the cells: it would generate an instant plasma fireball, several times more potent than a grenade. Bandaging the power-cells together in the dark had proven a chore, and aligning the contacts was worse. Ideally there would have been three more components involved, so there was an even chance that if Jewels had to use this she’d electrocute herself and then burn to death in the ensuing plasma-meltdown. Also, in order to use it without incinerating herself she’d have to throw it at least twenty meters, and then shoot it.

It was still better than nothing.

Besides which, as she approached the end of the duct, there was a more immediate problem.

The red light at the end of the passage was beginning to shift from blaring crimson to softly-shining gold. Jewels could smell water on ancient stone. And moment to moment, she had to keep reminding herself that she could not see the shadow of a horned draconic figure creeping up the wall.

Jewels’ chest was beginning to feel too tight again, but it wasn’t unmanageable. She was pretty sure that she was due to take another dose of her mood-regulators, but in the absence of her prescribed medication the opiates were doing an okay job of keeping her chill. Even so, every instinct she had screamed at her that by approaching that light she was running out the clock on her own life.

The actual moment of revelation, when Jewels actually stepped into the light, was almost surreal. She emerged from an open panel in the hollow that housed the second power-distribution bus, identical to the previous one but shining like red mercury in the emergency lights. Everything felt too bright, and too quiet. Peeking around the side, she could see straight down the concourse – and in the distance, approaching fast in a scuttling rush of arboreal horror, her grotesque dendritic pursuer.

Jewels didn’t know what had delayed the thing, and she didn’t care. Swimming through a world that seemed increasingly dream-like, she ducked around the chromed superconductive distributor and jumped down onto the concourse, going down on one knee in a three-point landing, cursing all the while.

“ Fuck fuck shit fuck fuck fuck balls fuck fuck fuck.”

The beleaguered surveyor sprinted, nearly stumbling, until she was almost a hundred meters out from the thing that she had worked so hard reach. She clamped the contacts on her improvised plasma-mine and dropped it on the black rubber tarmac. She didn't die. The power-cell casings began to glow a dull orange, and the bandages binding them began to smoke. The air smelled of burning plastic. Jewels turned and sprinted back.

“Balls balls balls balls balls balls balls balls.”

She got down on knee. She raised the gauss-rifle.

Sighting carefully on the molten power-cells she aimed, and, exhaling slowly, Jewels fired.

13551/5000 words
 

King Ghidorah

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There was a blue flash, and then, much larger and much more intense, a white one that seemed to go on and on. It was a brilliant, stabbing light that forced the surveyor to avert her eyes and question whether she had just made a tremendous mistake.

Instinctively, she hit the deck.

A wave of volcanic heat and a concussive burst raced down the concourse. It washed over Jewels like a mattress thrown by a giant, suffocating pressure and boiling air. It was all she could do to cover her head, shut her eyes, and try not to breathe in.

The timing wasn’t ideal: She had detonated her improvised bomb when the advancing mass of vegetation and meat was still about five meters shy of the overheating power-cells. Even so, the result was spectacular. A plume of acrid black smoke rose from a glowing crater a good twenty meters across, pooling against a matching divot in the ceiling. The bulkheads to either side glowed red-hot. Beyond the immediate blast-area, strew across the concourse for as far as the eye could see, were blazing bits of vegetation, scraps of cooked flesh clinging to twisted bone, and pieces of buggy.

Jewels sat up, her heart pounding furiously. She didn’t think she had ever been so hot in her life – in fact, her exposed skin was beginning to feel tender, as though she’d been out in direct Cevanti sunlight for hours. She pulled out her cantine and drained the last of the water.

It was official – she had overdone it. And as a result, if she didn’t get climate control online in the next couple of minutes she was probably going to die of heatstroke.

Sure. Okay.

Just one more thing.


One last time, the surveyor staggered to her feet, bleeding and burned in the red glow and the scorched air, and used a piece of debris to force open the maintenance panel at the base of the power-distribution hub’s recessed fitting.

Behind the panel, there was a tangle of wires and switches – and a message flashing on a little screen.

‘Kinetic Buffer Overload

Manual Reset: Complete.

Boot System? Y/N’


Jewels stared, then blinked away furious tears. After all that, it could not possibly be this easy. Had one of the previous teams seriously gotten this far only to fall flat on their faces at the last possible moment?

That was so tragic it was almost funny.

Her vision blurred, whether from tears or her fading consciousness Jewels couldn’t say, With a trembling finger she poked the letter ‘Y’.

The deck shuddered, then shuddered again as somewhere in the bowels of the brobdingnagian station massive relays snapped closed. The red emergency lighting dimmed, then rose to a placid blue. Vents opened at the base of the walls, and cool air began to circulate through the concourse.
As the triumphant surveyor sank to her knees on the scorched and battered tarmac, klaxons began to blare.
14024/5000 words. Quest Complete!
 
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