Helen Shackleton sat in the corner of a small storage alcove off the main cargo bay of Pioneer Station (Gliese-III-Alpha) and tried to process the last few hours.
Since being dragged out of hibersleep several weeks before their planned waking date, things weren’t going well. She’d had a spanner thrown at her head by one of the station’s Janebots, which were supposed to make life easier for the crew, not attempt to kill them with metal implements !
Unable to contact the command centre or anyone else on the station, she and the seven other occupants of Hiber-D made the short journey to the cargo hold – and found several other members of crew in various states of dismemberment. There was no clue as to what had happened, although one or two of the corpses seemed to be holding improvised weapons as if they’d been trying to defend themselves. No-one wanted to get too close – even Dr Whitman seemed to be spooked by the sight.
As they tried to come to terms with the death of their crewmates, Helen had seen someone approaching from a side corridor behind a row of shelving. The light was dim – during hibersleep periods the station’s internal lighting was reduced to save power – but she thought she’d recognised the form of Winston Rhisiart, the jovial Welsh deckhand from B-shift, silhouetted in the light from the bulkhead lamp behind him. Yes, it was definitely Winston – wearing odd socks again ! He was carrying what looked like a crowbar in what, when she looked more closely, was a rather elongated right hand. Actually, those arms were also rather too long, giving him a slightly simian appearance. And he hadn’t seemed to be walking all that well, rather a painful looking shamble rather than his normal jaunty stride.
As he’d rounded the end of the last shelf and moved into the brighter lights of the main hold, someone had cried out – she wasn’t sure who it was, maybe the researcher Michael Straight ? And it was obvious why – Winston had been … green. His skin was a sickly, rotting verdant colour, punctuated by red and purple blisters, and his scalp seemed to be one huge scab. He’d raised the crowbar, aiming to take a swing at Anna who’d had the misfortune to be closest. Fortunately he seemed to be very slow, clumsy and uncoordinated and Anna, mature in years as she was, dodged it easily. Then came a loud CRACK-CRACK from behind Helen, and Winston had fallen to the ground. It turned out that Madiwa Aquino had used her command privileges to open a small arms locker in the hold’s admin office and had fired two rounds from a handgun into the crewman. What followed was five minutes of arguing over whether or not Madiwa should have shot Winston rather than trying to disarm and restrain him – the prevailing (and contradictory) view from several other members of the group was that they should have tried that, but no-one seemed to want to be the one to get close to the diseased looking deckhand.
The discussion was brought to an abrupt end by a commotion in the access corridor, and they all watched in horror as more outlined shapes shuffled behind the shelves. Some were recognisable – she spotted her good friend Stephanie Took from the station’s admin office, and ‘Uncle’ Eryck Gabelhofer, everyone’s favourite cook from the kitchens on deck 2. Others she wasn’t so sure about – one was wearing the flight jacket of Commander Rojeros, the shuttle pilot, but the face was so disfigured he couldn’t be sure. All were variously discoloured with irregular skin blistering – what was wrong with their crewmates ?
This time no-one argued; as the figures rounded the end of the shelves and began to cross the hold towards them, Madiwa’s pistol rang out again, soon to be joined by others that Harker and Barry had liberated from the weapons locker. Stephanie looked at Helen and, through glazed, green tinted eyes almost seemed to recognise her. She broke into a run, viridescent hair streaming behind her and reaching out for her friend. Multiple shots slammed into Took’s torso and she fell at Helen’s feet even as the mechanic hurriedly backed away.
Harker and Francois had both raced to seal the hatchway into the access corridor to prevent more incursions. When they had returned, they both reported seeing a figure with a blue, lizard-like face scuttling away down the main passageway outside the hatch. Everyone assumed that it must have been the lights playing tricks on them, except for the fact that both were utterly convinced of what they had seen. At this point, who knew what they’d seen.
Fortunately, by now Madiwa was on her game, caffeine or not, and she moved into her smooth, efficient administration persona. She had stifled any signs of panic or hysteria, and got the group to clean up the hold. Dr Whitman had immediately pointed out that the other crew could be carrying some sort of infection and might be contagious, so Helen supervised a pair of droids while Bullneck drove the powerloader and between them they dumped all of the bodies out of the smaller cargo airlock. The hold was equipped with high pressure hoses for cleaning, so the blood and gore was also hosed into the airlock and ejected into space. It wasn’t perfect, this wasn’t a deep clean by any means but it would do for the moment. Some of the infected crew had somehow got hold of weapons (although they’d made no attempt to use them), so they tried to salvage those to add to their small arsenal.
She’d half-expected Dr Whitman to act the stereotypical mad scientist and insist on dissecting the corpses to learn their secrets, but it turned out that he’d seen the same horror films as she had and was well aware that this was a course of action that never ended well for the protagonists in the movies. So he was quite happy to consign their crewmates to the void and worry about it later.
So there they were – locked in a damp cargo hold, with the recent smell of viscera in their nostrils, and no idea of what was going on. They had no idea what had happened to the other crew – were they all crazed zombies like her friend Steff, or were there other groups of survivors in the station in the same predicament ? And what was the lizard thing that the two engineers asserted they had seen in the passageway ?
So, as the situation on Pioneer Station goes downhill, here’s our next release – eight infected crew figures, available individually or in a set. 3D-printed in grey resin, we can scale them to either 28mm or 32mm to match your existing collection.
SF28-230 – Infected Colonists – £25.00
SF28-231 – Winston Rhisiart – £4.00
SF28-232 – Tonia Ferenc – £4.00
SF28-233 – Gerem Kleregg – £4.00
SF28-234 – Stephanie Took – £4.00
SF28-235 – Andrej Krol – £4.00
SF28-236 – Charlize Ignis – £4.00
SF28-237 – Commander Markus Rojeros – £4.00
SF28-238 – ‘Uncle’ Eryck Gabelhofer – £4.00
Designed by and printed under licence from David Sheff.
Background image by Handiwork Games.
Like this:
Like Loading...
You must be logged in to post a comment.