Helen Shackleton sat with her back to the oil-stained wall in the darkened maintenance locker, trying to ignore the inhuman noises coming through the vents. Since the crew had been awakened early from their hibernation sleep cycle, her world had gone from bad to worse, to nightmare. Along with the other occupants of Hiber-D she had made her way past malfunctioning androids hell-bent on killing their former masters. They’d been ‘rescued’ by a bunch of ARCS corporation security agents, who turned out to be completely unprepared for what they found. She had seen many of their former crewmates and friends reduced to shambling zombies, and been forced to kill many of them (she preferred to think about it as putting them out of their misery – if she had to think about it at all). The survivors had fought their way to the main command centre and found Captain Dubois a mess, incapable of comprehending, let alone dealing with, what was going on aboard his station.
With a few like-minded souls, she’d tried to make it to one of the station’s pitifully few escape shuttles. By now the horrific creatures they found were getting worse. A spacesuited figure that looked at first to be another escapee started sprouting tentacles from a sleeve, with a ghoulish visage behind the shattered face plate.
Another former crewmember, mutated beyond recognition and missing half its skull, was somehow being a controlled by a parasitic monster on its back. It surprised Freja in a lab while she was looking for anything useful, and was only stopped in a fusillade of bullets from the pulse rifle that she had appropriated in Command.
The bloated wreck of one of the ARCS security team shambled after them in one of the upper level break rooms, and Helen had left the place ablaze after setting it on fire with the home-made flamethrower that she’d cobbled together from parts.
Most of the creatures they met were capable of nothing more than an awkward lumbering gait and could be stopped before they reached her, or easily outrun. But then they came across a trio of strange, dog-like beasts with multiple insectile eyes, a massive maw lined with razor sharp teeth and a terrifying turn of speed. They’d got Thompson, bringing up the rear of their little group, and tore him to shreds even as he went down fighting. Only Slater Christian, with a heavy weapon that fired explosive tipped bolts that he’d liberated from the corpse of a dead security operative, had saved their bacon. Larsson had nicknamed them Garmr, after a creature of Norwegian myth.
On the final corner before they reached the shuttle bay, something had scuttled between equipment lockers in front of them. It was a disembodied head, held aloft on what could only be described as animated entrails. She didn’t recognise the face thank goodness, it was gone before she got a good look and she really didn’t want to know which of her crewmates had met such a horrific fate.
Entering the flight bay, shuttle pilot Warner made for the nearest serviceable craft while she went into the control room to open the bay doors so they could make their escape. Something lurked behind the furthest chair – a giant, insectile horror with multiple legs and thrashing mandibles. She blasted it into chitin shards and yellow goo with her sidearm and then set the remains on fire without a second thought – of the things she’d seen today, that didn’t even make the top ten.
A noise made her look up through the control room window into the mess of girders, ducts and wiring that covered the ceiling – something was moving up there. In a flash something huge and sickly green dropped from the darkness onto Christian. A massive bulk but with a weirdly human face that she almost recognised, with four – no wait, five – limbs that each ended in an immense hand, and a prehensile tail that thrashed and knocked Larsson into a pillar. She lifted her pistol and fired through the window, disintegrating it in a shower of glass shards – and wished she hadn’t. The creature stopped dismembering what was left of Christian and turned its attention to her. At that moment, Warner came out of the shuttle hatch and the creature turned away from her and back to the pilot. She took her chance and bolted for the maintenance bay, snatching open the door to one of the large walk-in storage lockers and slamming it behind her, sliding the bolt home to lock it.
And there she sat terrified silence, alone in the dark amongst the spare hydraulic struts and replacement lubricant cans, as that thing took apart the last of her companions.
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