Chapter 6 – A Sticky Situation
“Talk to me, Hilde! What’s going on?” Shi shouted over the rising cacophony of the ship around them.
Hilde was already trying the console she had been setting up on, hammering the buttons and shaking her head. “Can’t get anything for sure until the system is fully up and running. It looks like everything is coming online, though. Something triggered it, I just don’t know what or from where. Um…maybe five minutes till everything’s ready to go? That’s insane!”
Shi heard Briar uttering a prayer to Erisaya, Murissa was stalking in a circle around them, alert and ready to spring at a moment’s notice to stick her blades into whatever may come. The magic flows were fading now that the startup was on track and moving fast, but new auras were forming all around them, faint and indistinct through the bulkheads. They couldn’t risk getting caught up in something with that much magical power without a clue what it was doing. “Hilde, where’s the nearest airlock? We’re getting out of here now!”
Hilde hit a few more keys on the console. “One more thing, commander; it looks like some executive-level command came in and started this, I just don’t know where it came from.” She reactivated the hologram display from her tablet. “Airlock…here! Ventral hatch is down the stairs over there, then straight down the corridor, a hundred feet!”
“Murissa, Kaylee, go!” Shi motioned with her revolver toward the stairs. Murissa was already on the move, Kaylee a few steps behind. Hilde hurried away from the console, leaving the heaviest of her gear behind, and Briar followed, his head darting around, eyes wide behind her faceplate. “What is it, Briar?”
“It was distant, somewhere above us in the cargo areas we passed by,” Briar said, his green eyes wide with fear. “For just a moment, I sensed living beings amongst the magic flows. For just a moment I could sense their life energy, multiple beings, and then they were gone.”
“That’s not ominous…” Hilde muttered as she hurried down the stairs.
“We’ll worry about it later,” Shi replied, following once Briar had started down the steps. The dim emergency lighting clicked off as more power came online, the brighter lights in the ceiling bathing them in white fluorescence, though several of the panels were partially covered by more of the black sealant. The corridor here was much narrower than above, reserved mainly for maintenance access for the engines.
Ahead, Murissa had reached the first pressure door that led to the airlock, and was reaching for the panel to open it when she recoiled. “This stuff…it’s melting,” she rumbled, standing straight, her helmet brushing the ceiling.
“What?” Shi hurried up behind her, squeezing around Kaylee. Sure enough, the sealant that had been splattered over the panel had taken on a glossy sheen and was starting to stream down the wall. A very faint magical aura had started forming around it, though it pulsed weakly. No time to analyze it, though. Shi flicked her fingers, calling forth her own magic, hitting the door release with an invisible arcane hand.
The locking bolts retracted with a series of metallic clangs, allowing the doors to slide apart. More of the sealant was on the other side, likewise more viscous now, stretching between the doors like some kind of mucus. At the far end of the corridor, Shi saw the entrance to the airlock staging room, the door splashed with sealant, and more patches around the corridor, likewise running down the walls in the freshly activated gravity. “Hurry, let’s get out of here!”
Murissa stood motionless.
Shi gave the big ferakatian a shove. “Murissa! Move it! That’s an order!”
Growling and flicking her tail, Murissa lashed out with one of her blades, cutting through the goopy strands hanging between the doors and stepped through, though she moved with an unusual stiffness. She was spooked.
Kaylee followed, stiff in her own movements as she tried to look in every direction at once to see what had gotten Murissa in such a state.
“I don’t understand this…it’s still just reading the same as it was before,” Briar said, tapping the scanner. “Not even a temperature change or anything in the sealant to indicate why it’s flowing now.”
They’d barely made it halfway down the corridor when Murissa suddenly stopped, and Kaylee bumped into her, though even with the pilot’s bulk, the ferakatian barely seemed to feel it. “Damn it, Murissa, come on! We’re almost there! Move your big ass!” the pilot spat.
“Wait! What are those?!” Murissa snarled, motioning with her blade. She shifted her stance, angling herself so that she presented a slimmer obstacle to those behind her and giving them a look around her, keeping one blade toward whatever it was she saw.
Ahead of them, the sealant was moving. Not just flowing down the walls, but gathering in pools on the deck plates, flowing together rapidly. The pools, half a dozen of them, started to expand, swelling like black bubbles, then swiftly rose from the deck. At first they were mostly shapeless masses, rising to about six feet in height, then they shifted again, a quartet of wavering, tentacle-like limbs expanding from the central mass.
Shi couldn’t immediately recall having seen anything like them before, whatever they were. Briar uttered another prayer as the things started shambling toward them. Shi’s second revolver was suddenly in hand. “They’re hostiles! Deal with them!”
The corridor shook as Kaylee fired her launcher, and even with the noise dampeners in her helmet, Shi winced at the force of the blast in such a narrow space, watching as the hot shell casing was ejected and clattered against the wall and rolled behind them. The shambling forms shredded and splattered as the rubberized, ‘less-than-lethal’ round filled the corridor in an inescapable cone, exactly what the deck gun was meant to do. Flecks of black splattered all over Kaylee and Murissa, some on Shi’s faceplate, probably on Hilde and Briar too.
Then the things started to reform, drawing themselves back together in the span of a few heartbeats.
“Well, that’s not good…” Hilde muttered, raising her SMG warrily to her shoulder. She fired off a short burst from the submachine gun, the subsonic, rubberized rounds peppering the closest shambling mass, the holes the rounds had made quickly filling themselves back in, having no apparent effects otherwise.
Murissa tensed, ready to spring, though her leading blade wavered in her grasp.
“What in the hell…?” Kaylee said, taking a step back. Shi thought she was commenting on the apparent lack of effect from her weapon, but then Shi saw more of the black rubber surging from a panel in the ceiling, completely covering the airlock door and walls around it in a thick layer of black. Several more large masses swelled, dripped from the ceiling, then formed more of the tentacled shamblers.
The nearest one lashed out at Murissa with one of its tentacles. The ferakatian, already tensed for action, shifted the blade she held toward the masses and swiped, severing the tentacle in one smooth motion. The severed mass thumped against her thigh, splashing black rubber on her like blood as it fell to the floor and rolled behind her. The severed tentacle immediately lost its form,swelling up like a balloon before it popped, splashing spots of black rubber ‘blood’ over their suits.
The tentacle retracted, but started to reform almost instantly as another whipped out at Murissa, followed quickly by three more from the other approaching masses. The ferakatian swiped at the first one, severed it neatly, the appendage whipping by Shi’s head and splattering against Briar’s chest, leaving an inky smear as it fell to the floor and popped, sending more of the goop to splatter upon them. The other two were just as deftly severed by the twin blades, though they were deflected to either side of the corridor, splattering against the walls.
Behind the shamblers, the sealant coating the door rippled, started growing its own larger tentacles.
Shi glanced behind them, saw the corridor empty, all of the sealant that had been splattered about apparently having gathered in front of them. “Fall back!” she shouted, motioning Briar by her with the barrel of one of her guns. Briar winced as he touched the sticky mass on his chest, the stuff sticking and spreading like a thick mucus that he wiped on his leg as he scurried away. Kaylee fired off another round from her big gun as Hilde started backward, giving them a few more seconds as the things were ripped apart again, forcing them to reform. Kaylee walked backwards, keeping the launcher’s barrel between her and the shambling masses.
As Murissa started backward, Shi took aim around her. Instead of squeezing the trigger of one of her guns, though, she shifted her wrist, aimed the wand, and spoke the command word. Fire erupted from the wand, narrowly missing Murissa as it filled the corridor in front of them. It didn’t reach nearly far enough to have gotten them all or reach the door, but the four lead shamblers started thrashing wildly, dripping and deforming, melting as black smoke rolled from them.
Fire worked well it seemed. Shi glanced at the wand, saw the last of the magic fade from its crystal, both it and the carbon fiber cracking as the magic vanished. Well, she hadn’t expected much from it anyway. She glanced behind her, took a few more steps back.
“I’m going to make a hole! Turn your mag-boots up to max and brace for decompression!” Shi holstered one of her revolvers, drew her big boy from her chest harness and half-cocked the hammer, then spun the cylinder to the specific round she wanted. She had five different rounds loaded in the gun, each with a different purpose.
Just as she was about to thumb the hammer all the way back to start the charge-up sequence, Murissa shouted. “Wait! My suit just lost integrity!”
“What?!” Shi blinked. Why now? How had that even happened?
“Me too!” Kaylee said, her voice pitching higher with worry.
“It’s the sealant! When it splashed on us!” Hilde said. “It’s eating through our suits!”
Just as she said it, Shi’s helmet display flashed a red indicator as a warning alarm sounded. Sure enough, a hole had opened on her suit’s leg. Glancing downward, she saw a growing black spot, several of them in fact, from where the severed tentacle had splattered them. Her faceplate was starting to grow several patches of black as well. Damn it!
“It won’t come off!” Briar said in a panic, trying to wipe his hand against the bulkhead, leaving thin, sticky strands as he pulled his hand away, which was nearly completely covered by the black stuff.
As the flames from the wand died down, the other shamblers started forward. Shi twisted, fanned the hammer with the heel of her palm, and unloaded the cylinder on her regular revolver, so fast it sounded like an automatic weapon, each of the big magnum rounds tearing through a different target. The rounds were a lighter composite material instead of lead, enchanted to actually be non-lethal, if rather painful, but the rubber shamblers shuddered and fell forward, quivering and writhing as they started to reform themselves, noticeably slower than before.
Despite her apparent success, more of the rubber flowed from the ceiling and floor now, forming more of the things. Too many!
“Fall back to engineering!” Shi jogged backward, holstering her special revolver before she broke open her empty gun, ejecting the spent shells as she snatched one of her speedloaders, slamming six new rounds home before snapping the revolver closed. Shi uttered several arcane words, working her free hand in a quick series of intricate motions, then thrust it forward. Blue-white flame leapt from her fingers and spread down the corridor, consuming the shambling masses. This time, however, as they began to writhe and melt, the fire suppression systems kicked in, spraying chemicals and extinguishing the magically conjured fire.
Shi growled in frustration, her tail thrashing back and forth at having her spell so quickly counteracted, noting that the things hadn’t been nearly as damaged as she’d hoped in the short time they’d been on fire. She stepped through the door, and Kaylee quickly hit the panel to close it. Shi could see the growing black patches on her suit, saw the bigger one on Murissa’s thigh where the severed tentacle had landed, and saw that Briar’s chest was almost entirely covered already.
Shi also noticed a particularly large black spot growing on her faceplate, could see it deforming as the reinforced plastic was consumed by the stuff and quickly popped the seal on the helmet, tossing it aside as she started undoing other seals on her suit. “Everyone get your suits off before that stuff touches you! And get back up those stairs and away from this door! We need to regroup and find another way out!”
Uh oh! Seems that things have gone properly sideways now! A shame all that rubber is eating their suits and the girls have to strip, though…real shame.
As the situation intensifies, what can Red Team do to get out of this black, rubbery mess?
Stay tuned for next week’s chapter to find out!
Until then, Urban out!
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