“Get going.” Blest pushed him along. I stuck an R3 in Follee’s gloved hands. “Use this. Here, safety on. Safety off. Get it? You point it at bad guys and shoot if some come trying to blow your head off.”
Follee gave a vigorous nod.
Wren looked at me, a flushed look of uncertainty there—Are you sure you want this guy along?
No, I wasn’t sure, Wren, I answered her voiceless expression but I didn’t see too many options here other than signing the poor guy’s death warrant leaving him behind.
Noss powered down the ship, save for shields. We rushed to the cargo exit pad, so it left no easily traceable signature. I booby trapped the hatch with my regular batch of tricks—explosives and high voltage. If Skugs managed to penetrate it, we’d be stranded here—an unwholesome thought. Alastar, I could do nothing for now. I’d spidered her to a safe landing place a few hundred yards away, couched in thick, gummy shadows.
My breath hissed out a ragged whisper through my mask. We hurried out onto the docking pavilion, keeping to the wall. Blest and Noss gave covering fire while Wren sprinted ahead in a crouching trot to get the air lock to the station open, even as the Skug vessels, beetle-like shapes, swarmed closer. I could tell they were Skug by the lady-bug shape of their hulls, and the crude symbology writ on their sides: a long spiked anvil with a red slash through it. What significance it had, I’d never known. Something to do with some industrial accident that had maimed them.
The air lock, about a hundred yards away, was intact, another thing that puzzled me.
Blest cursed as I hustled Follee along, a slow bastard by anyone’s standards. Barked into the com to get his ass down and lie flat on his stomach while fire ripped around us. Wren had the air lock mechanism figured out; tada, the doors suddenly jerked open to the square chamber beyond. We would have blasted it to shit if it were too stubborn to open. We dragged our hides in before the Skug blasters could rifle us with holes. They’d be landing and assembling their own teams. Whether they went after us on foot, or went for our ships, remained to be seen.
The chamber pressurized, then the inner lock opened automatically. We spilled out into a hall.
Surprisingly, the air lock wasn’t seized. Blasting it as a last resort would flood the whole station in vacuum, but I was guessing the station had backup systems for that.
“The air is breathable,” said Wren, “according to our suit sensors.”
I motioned them down the dusky corridor to the right, Follee making googly eyes at the state-of-the-art tech. The lumo shields draping the walls, the fibrofane shock and sound bafflers, the intricate myriads of sensors and scanners for contagion, contraband and weaponry, luckily manned by no one in these brave new times. There were even a dozen emergency suits hanging behind glass showcases.
Not far down the hall we peered through more massive glass windows into broken laboratories, shattered tables and lab equipment, benches askew. Bins of chemicals lay strewn on the metal-plated floor; sealants, robot parts, component boards scattered everywhere. It looked as if the place hadn’t been walked through in an eon though. A weird, ambient violet, self-perpetuating glow permeated the surroundings, as if some ancient power still lived here and was still in operation. How, I couldn’t guess. Maybe solar power still up and running, as I’d speculated earlier? I eyed the grey crystal fibrofane panels on the wall. Dead camera eyes watched us like insects. Noss opened his mouth to speak, but I signaled him to silence.
We hustled down a wide stairwell, another corridor to a lower level that opened into what looked like a giant depot. The space was enormous. The domed ceiling rose unfathomably high. Monstrous shapes, mechanical things, loomed out of the artificial gloom, like ill-conceived ghosts. Wren’s jaw dropped, as did Blest’s who had curbed his wise-guy tongue for once. We all walked smitten to silence.
I listened for the expected flurry of enemy fire and feet. Nothing. Only a faint, faraway echo of boots on metal—wary and hesitant. Then another, louder, duller thud of metal—like a ship’s landing pads touching down. “If we’re lucky, we can lose those gooks,” I whispered. “They’ll go looking somewhere else.” Somehow my own words sounded comical and naive in this ancient murk. I didn’t believe my own vain hope for a second.
I recalled typical Skug physiology. A cross between a mutant warrior and a walking mummy. Once human, these mutants were victims of some plague or chemical spill disaster. Freaks, albino genetic rejects forced to wear headgear in the form of blue-grey fabric scarfs wrapped around their misshapen skulls. Reputed to have dull white horns peeking up on their oversized heads and tusks protruding from cheeks with black nozzles affixed to noses with wire mesh where mouths should be. If such mutations were accurate, I assumed the nozzles facilitated breathing. Maybe they siphoned drugged up gas there? I didn’t want to meet one of the mutants face to face, or for that matter, ever.
Even through the filtered ages of decades, I tasted the faint waft of death here. Ancient death. Old corpses lay strewn about the feet of the mechanical monsters on the steel paneled floor, victims struck down from the look of their eyeless sockets, by some mysterious, brutal force.
My mind traveled back to a distant memory, a time when my father took me to some natural caves outside our home town on Jaunus. Strange how memory is jogged by the weirdest of triggers. I was scared shitless of bats and snakes and anything fluttery and crawly, but my father took me down there anyway, where the drip-drip of water from stalactites and the cloying darkness had my knees knocking. Despite the
