I dodged the attack as Reaver shot it. It deflated like a balloon and fell from the wall. There was little blood, and what blood there was didn’t appear to be acidic.
“Gross,” Skrew whispered.
“Contact!” I yelled.
Four Xeno guards emerged from behind some larger storage containers and stacks, firing their rifles. Green beams struck the walls behind us as we rolled and scrambled for cover. Immediately, I sat up on one knee and readied my gun.
I shot the first one in the chest and splattered nearby boxes with its blood, which began to sizzle and smoke. Reaver shot the second in the head to the same effect.
The third decided it wanted to dance, so I drew Ebon, ran out to meet it, and cut off its legs as it passed by. I continued my spin and ran my black blade through its skull.
Beatrix was toying with hers, blocking its strikes with her mace. The strikes from her mace seemed to multiply the force she put behind her strikes. Even though her swings were subtle, each one ripped limbs from sockets and crushed exoskeleton. When the Xeno had almost run out of legs and charged her with its body, she knocked the thing’s head off. Then she chuckled and gave me a wink before propping her mace like a cane on the ground.
She picked it up again immediately and hopped away when we heard a dull crack.
I thought I was seeing things. A crack had formed where she’d touched her weapon to the deck.
“I didn’t hit it very hard,” Beatrix protested as she stared at the crack, then inspected her mace.
“I don’t think it was you necessarily,” Reaver said.
“Yeah, this ship has seen better days,” I added. “Let’s go before reinforcements arrive. Keep your eyes open and look for cracks. Avoid them if possible. I don’t want anyone falling through or opening the ship to vacuum.”
Now, I wasn’t sure it was a ship which was holding another ship within it. If it was, it was by far the biggest ship I’d ever seen. The Martian Navy had a couple massive specimens; they could carry 60 fighters each, but none had storage compartments as big as this. It would be considered a colossal waste of space, and of energy, when flying.
We got in line and walked along the edge of the hangar ship. After the close encounter with the little gray Xeno, I was able to estimate the number of the things climbing over the captured alien vessel to be closer to 10,000. Luckily, they seemed to be quite absorbed in their task, and we were too far away to be a threat.
What was that task, though? Xeno didn’t use tech, at least not what us humans considered tech. They grew everything. Their soldiers, ships, and even their weapons had similar DNA patterns, as Martian scientists had ascertained.
Xeno didn’t capture ships, at least I’d never heard of them doing it. They destroyed everything they touched. Then again, I hadn’t known they took slaves, either. Yet here I was, trying to liberate the Xeno’s slave-breeding planet.
We found a passageway, which to me looked a lot like a throat. The walls weren’t flat like they were in the storage room, which made me wonder if the hangar had been assimilated from something much larger.
The passageway was cylindrical but uneven. The walls were the iridescent colors of the Xeno, and every few feet, a glowing frog-like creature or two floating within goo-filled sections of the walls lit the way. Xeno safety lights, I mused.
The passageway undulated and twisted as it meandered to its destination, another inefficiency. I was beginning to think we weren’t on a starship after all. More likely it was a space station, or a hive, which was a good place to find a Queen.
We found another crack, in the wall this time. A strange-looking creature was tending to it, depositing little bits of clear liquid onto it. The creature was no longer than my thumb, and its tiny head was dwarfed by its wide, flat body. Each of its twelve segments was a dull black with bright orange edges, and if it noticed me, it didn’t react.
“Is good to eat?” Skrew whispered, squinting at the bug.
“Maybe,” I whispered, “but I think we should leave these things alone. It looks like a kind of Xeno maintenance robot. Judging by the look of this place, it has enough work to keep it busy. If we start killing them, we might find ourselves as frozen corpses in orbit around Druma. They’re probably the only thing holding the hive together.”
“Yeah,” Reaver said, “I was thinking the same thing. This is looking more and more like a hive.”
“And where there’s a hive,” I whispered, “there’s a Queen. And where there’s a Queen, there are soldiers. I don’t think we’ve seen the toughest Xenos yet.”
“Good,” Beatrix said. “I was becoming bored with them.”
About twenty yards later, we reached a strange junction. We could continue onward, or we could go down. Of course, the idea of “up” and “down” were relative in a space station, and even more so in a Xeno hive. Beatrix squatted at the edge of the hole and squinted down into it while Reaver and I provided cover.
“I am not certain which way the passage goes,” she whispered.
Well. No matter which direction we traveled, it would be both the right way and the wrong way. We needed to find a clue as to where the Queen might be. We needed to look for survivors from the Revenge. Neither could be done if we overthought.
“Let’s go straight,” I said. “If it looks like we’re walking in circles, we’ll either double back or take a different passage. Either way, we need to keep moving.”
They nodded and followed me on.
Our next Xeno encounter was even stranger than the first. The bug looked
