F1 Licenseware/F1 Licenseware - Volume 1.iso/disks/085b.dms/085b.adf/Novella/BlackDawnNovella2

Text File | 1992-02-26 | 45KB | 811 lines

@                                                                  [5]
                                                                 R & R

Before Medtech Ward could finish swiping his card through the keyhole
of his bunk, he had been grabbed from behind and manhandled through
the door into the storeroom behind him. Now, he was sitting on an
upturned pail, watching two guys in reversed balaclavas seal the door
behind them and point pretty vicious semiautomatics in his face. He
didn't need this, it had been a long day and he wanted to get some
sleep while Dade had been taken away for 'interrogation'.
  "Ward."
  "Yes," he had difficulty in preventing his voice from wavering.
  "You are aware of most pertinent details in operation Black Dawn,
yes?"
  "I am permitted to give you my name, rank and number and..."
  "Shut up," one of the men said, "we know all that crap, hear us
out." He leant against a low steel shelf. Ward noticed that he was
wearing a gold cross on a chain, tight around his neck.
  "Dade is a prototype of a new supermarine they're wanting to
develop. Willing only to obey orders, whatever they may be, some kind
of kamikaze soldier. Some of us don't like that."
  The other of the two, both marines, Ward guessed, started speaking
as he paced around the confined room slowly.
  "The new look soldier will be modified. Genetically, surgically,
psychologically. Brainwashed. Loses his identity. Not nice, eh?
  "Are you with us?"
  "Hold it," Ward said, trying to get it straight in his head, "Why
would the military want to do that? There's been no serious
interplanetary conflict in decades. Do they think the Ganymede thing
is going to turn to war?"
  "It's nothing to do with shipping regulations," the first marine
dismissed, "it's to do with attacks from elsewhere."
  The second took his cue.
  "Okay, did you ever wonder how the mutations on Arrach started? No?
See, scientists can already do everything they want with human DNA,
they have been able for years, you know that. So the research on
Arrach must have come from other sources, right? Some nonhuman
sources. Alien DNA. Current rumours indicate that it came from corpses
in a crashed ship in a cave somewhere in the Darkworld system.
  "See, this ship must have been armed to the teeth with all kinds of
alien laser shit, probably stuff we can't possibly understand. They
must have figured that chances are, if they've come so close to human
civilisation already, they'll be back. So our scientists started
looking for weaknesses in the alien biology. The research on Arrach
found that the creatures studied reproduce via a viral strain that
mutates other organisms into their own kind. Unfortunately they
discovered it the hard way."
  "Those alien dickheads screwed them in more ways that one," the
other marine chipped in."
  "And the Dawn system went the same way?" Ward asked.
  "That's right," the marine stopped pacing and pulled a plastic crate
out from under a shelf, then sat on it, his gun still pointed in
Ward's general direction. "Dade survived and is down there because he
somehow has a natural immunity to the virus that allows him to walk
safely through the creatures' lair."
  "No," Ward shook his head, "I was there at Dade's briefing. They've
given him a safe time limit for exposure. If he outstays his welcome
they were going to detonate microexplosives in his circulatory system.
I know: I implanted the damn things. I even saw them try to detonate
them, but he got out of their range. Why would they do that?"
  "You're a medic, work it out," the marine on the crate suggested.
  Ward pondered for a moment. Kyler, behind his mask, guessed he was
slowly coming around to their way of thinking.
  "After a certain period of exposure, or intimate physical contact,"
he contemplated out loud, "the virus would become intrinsic to his
system. He would become a 'carrier', and could therefore spread the
virus to others. THAT's why they didn't want you to kill him on Storm
- the transporter had wiped out all the microorganisms on Dade's body,
rendering him safe."
  Kyler was nodding.
  "Perry was protecting his own ass," Ward realised. "Son of a bitch."
  "The Corps want to alter all our DNAs to incorporate Dade's
immunity, to make fighting any possible invasion more balanced a
conflict. We've already appropriated samples of the DNA to use on
ourselves should we need to. They also want to brainwash us to follow
their suicidal orders. We're not going to let them do that, but our
team needs a medic. Are you with us?"
  Ward nodded:
  "When do we start?"
  "Six days," Kyler answered, putting his gun away.

@                                                                  [6]
                                                             Flashback

"...Jack..."
  Dade spun around, but Kyler was not there.
  Suddenly he physically felt his brain expanding. Synapses reached
out and grabbed each other furiously. Neurons made waves of grey
matter over the inside of his skull. He sank to the floor and seized
handfuls of hair as he experienced utter sensory overload...

                                  *

...the crisp repetitive thunking of lead impacting at speed onto and
into compressed snow rotated Dade ninety degrees, to watch a section
of sheet ice walling being drilled apart by sentry-fire. This time it
was a class five: a free-floating, silent orb of sensory equipment and
firepower. The thing could scan from one end of the spectrum to the
other, if you moved - it saw you, if you changed TV channels in a
kilometre radius of a class five, it knew what you were watching
before you took your finger off the remote control.
  As the wall, suitably dissected, took a lash of fireblue electricity
from the droid's disrupter attachment and burst apart in a cloud of
powdery snow, Dade realised that this particular sentry had been
programmed with a fondness for stunners.
  Dade pointed his recently acquired pulse rifle. With these things
there was no need to aim.
  The air, filled with the thick cloud of a vengeful blizzard,
suddenly began to heat up...

                                  *

...Dade shouldered into the corner of the dank passage at speed,
releasing another volley of pulse fire from where he came and without
stopping charged headlong down the new continuation of the corridor.
  Behind him the whooping screech of the batlike creatures grew and
shrank rapidly like a smoke-alarm with a stutter, as they flew
bloodthirstily onward, swallowing the trail of Dade's scent.
  The corridor was long and doorless, branchless, and bleakly dark
ahead where the overheads were malfunctioning. Faint LEDs could be
barely perceived in the blackness. Dade's adrenaline-charged sprint
created reverberating echoes up and down the tunnel, as his feet
pounded dreamlike against the soft earthy rock into which the station
was built.
  The cloud of mutants, inseparably intent on feast, needing only the
traction of air, devoured the distance between themselves and Dade
with their bloodred veined wings and dagger-like teeth. He dared not
look back. Instead, he focused on the conclusion of the corridor, a
battered malfunctional supply machine, disorganised red digits reading
out garbage as if some alien language.
  Realising his disrupter was loaded with it's battery's last charge,
Dade flicked the power setting to Full, and pointed it roughly ahead
of him. One charge could not take out a swarm of vampires, but it
could blow a hole through that machine.
  He pulled the trigger and seconds later was diving through the
flaming remains of the battered supply terminal and falling headlong
into the mistygreen depths of the base's supply-chute system.

                                  *

...Dade peered from the balcony, fearful that the persistent ululating
moan was too orchestrated to be machinery, too emotional to be
artificial.
  The hall below was lit by a random scattering of long ebony candles,
each one sitting in three hours of pooling black wax among the
bloodstained floor. The light was barely enough to define the strung
out corpses of a dozen priests, nailed in crude mockeries of the
crucifixion to the far wall, and the swaying bodies of another dozen
live ones, chanting, hunched in various states of mutation. Dade edged
closer.
  If his endocrine system had not been regulated, the sight at the
head of the hall would have given him a week's dose of adrenaline.
  There sat, dripping with eerie scarlet hues from the only working
bloodsplattered overhead, a horned image straight from one of Dante's
hallucinatory visions. A mutant, bound with ballooning rings of muscle
and sinew, vaguely humanoid in form but for the fact that it appeared
quadrupedal, with a pair of unnatural black horns twisting from the
forehead and a second face set into its chest, undoubtedly the result
of two hosts mutating together. On more detailed scrutiny it boasted
the snout of a dog, from which faint wisps of burning breath emerged
with every periodical exhalation.
  Surely the Devil Himself.
  He'd heard some strange tales regarding the priests on Monastary,
none of which he could remember, but these worshippers, embalmed in
scarlet, were humbling themselves in front of a physical being.
Something they supposed to be an embodiment or minion of their deity.
  Dade strained to hear their words.
  #"...Cerberus Cerberus Cerberus..."
  These fools believed they were praying to the canine guardian of
Hades itself, while its mutant DNA strands worked themselves loose
within their blood, slowly integrated with their own cells.
  He primed a fusion grenade.
  #"...Cerberus Cerberus Cerberus..."
  According to legend, it could only be overcome by filling both its
mouths with earth.
  On the other hand...
  The grenade flew soundlessly and landed with a soft thump behind the
dogthing's squat. There was a three second delay - silence - before an
eruption of white flame clawed a deep gash out of the beast's torso,
sending two of its limbs in different directions. The creature fell
fumbling to the floor, thrashing its forelegs. Dade followed through
with five quick blasts from his shotgun, stilling the mutant hellspawn
forever.
  The priests, far from being grateful, had already begun to pour up
the spiral staircase to the balcony. Dade slapped another autoload
refill cartridge into the shotgun.
  After, just before Perry transported him back to the ship, he went
down into the hall proper, pumped three more shots into each of the
dog's faces then made to leave.
  He stopped inexplicably, turned back, and grimly stuffed a handful
of debris into each mouth.

                                  *

...The Fitzgerald sped towards the centre of the Dawn system. Outside
of the angular beast's metal hull there were barely another two
hundred organisms still suffering life. Inside, medical technicians
squirted drugs into Dade's tensed upper-arm.
  "Your final mission, Corporal," Irvin said almost excitedly as he
oversaw the proceedings. He rubbed his thinly bearded chin as though
he was admiring a work of art. "Dawn Station Orbital Research
Platform. Previous population one hundred ninetysix; mainly
solarphysicists, engineers, technicians, and their families. Orbits
the red giant, Dawn, at a distance of 1.8 AUs. Local temperature of
578 degrees is prevented from interfering with station integrity by a
conversion field which extracts the station's energy needs and
deflects waste heat around it and harmlessly into space. It means
we'll have to transport you down in a shuttle, transporter beams are
disrupted by the field's influence. Rotational gravity was upgraded
ten years ago to graviton generation plates located in an inaccessible
lower sublevel, so there's no chance of the centifrugal cramps. 80% of
the lifeform readings are coming from the uppermost level level, but
there's movement scanning up everywhere, so it's possible there's
automatons. Just watch your back, okay, we've come this far..."
  Dade listened like a drive listens to a disk. Perry was sitting some
way behind him, absently cleaning behind his fingernails with the nib
of his decorative fountain pen, Dade could see an indistinct reflect
in the polished chrome of the briefing-room's single door. Whenever he
saw the inherent leer at the corner of Perry's mouth it approximated a
suppressed emotion Dade could only compare with the rush of blowing a
mutant's stupid face off. In another state of mind he might have
called it hatred. Vengeance.
  It was an emotion he would have been eager to explore.

                                  *

"...Jack..."
  Dade spun around, but Kyler was not there.

@                                                                  [7]
                                                               Hell...

The receiver vomited another twenty seconds of interference into
Dade's ear, then Kyler's voice rang out again on max volume, filling
the empty chamber, though he was still whispering.
  "Jack..."
  Dade shook the earpiece from its position in a sudden, violent,
movement, half voluntary, half through the shock of waking, as his
head was filled with an instantaneous flickbook of stillshots
somewhere between deja vu and total recall. He...
  He remembered...
  "Yes," he found himself saying, pushing the receiver back.
  "Listen, Jack, hold tight. We've mutinied, taken control of the
Fitzgerald. We've deactivated your implanted explosives and we're
coming down to get you. Make a position near the south lock on level
one, our shuttle is in the final stages of the docking sequence, we
should be with you in less than five minutes."
  "Hey, Kyler, I'm cornered down in the galley on two," Dade shouted
back at him, mentally placing his few memories into the context of his
current situation. "The doors are sealed but it's getting hot, there's
a swarm of horned, salivating monsters outside in the corridor and
they're doing their best to kick their way in."
  As if to substantiate his statement the thick alloy door further
buckled in the middle, with a groan of metal. The whole of Dawn
Station was screaming with the beasts. He'd capped over thirty already
but they still kept coming.
  "We know, we'll do our best to get to you," Kyler's voice seemed
distant suddenly, the transmission was breaking up.
  Dade checked his bandolier for ammo clips, selected one of the four
remaining at random, and slapped it into the assault rifle he had
acquired the previous day during the Angel Colony mission. The ammo
readout rearranged itself to show 99 in red digits.
  The galley had been stripped of all moveable objects, he'd come
across them barricading a corridor earlier, but there were still the
telltale signs of the rooms purpose: excessive plumbing, power units,
wide, rotating extractor fans in the ceiling and an omnipresent odour
of stale food or dead meat.
  The door bent in on itself again, putting up one last stubborn
resistance. Dade winced and pointed his weapon. Distantly, there was
the sound of complaining metal as Kyler's shuttlecraft grasped the
docking lip.
  Suddenly the door violently folded in on itself and a repulsive
vision of depravity stumbled through after it. The snarling beast was
welcomed in by an assault of rapid-fire hollow-points that smeared its
face over its shoulders.
  The creature's place was taken by another before its body hit the
floor. Dade didn't even bother to release his trigger finger.
  He'd cut down eight before his clip ran out. They'd gained a foot on
him for every one of them he'd wasted. He was still on the floor,
pressed up against the wall, and now he had to reload. They'd get him
for sure.
  Instead, he pulled the AJC45 from his boot where he had stashed it,
aimed it between the goatlike horns of the first demon in the wave,
and squeezed the trigger with a desperation.
  The second thing was on him before he'd let off his sixth round. It
sank its claws into his taught ribcage at the side of his chest then
retrieved its hand, covered in blood. Dade swung the butt of the
assault rifle into its face, relishing the savage crack as the brittle
jawbone snapped clean off.
  The creature's lower face drooped moronically, its tongue gushing
scarlet saliva as it pondered where it was to sink its upper jaw into.
Dade brought the rifle back across the other side of its face, turning
its left cheekbone into a free-floating compound fracture. It sprawled
to Dade's side deliriously. Another two creatures entered the room,
growling obscene animal curses, as their prey rolled away into another
corner, reloading his rifle.
  The wounded beast and its two companions pounced and were on him
somewhere during the time it took the ammo readout to run from 00 to
99. Some misplaced light from a ceiling fan glanced off a raised claw
and Dade looked up to meet his fate, only to have his face covered
with the dripping mess of one of the grey creatures' intestines.
  A swarthy-faced marine was standing in the doorway among the
corpses, pumping another shotgun slug into his weapon's chamber.
  Before the remaining mutants could effect 180 degrees he had
disembowelled them both. Dade found himself sitting amid a fair-sized
bucketful of diseased offal.
  Kyler appeared behind the first marine.
  "Good work, Sadiq. Come on, Dade, let's get the hell out of here."
  Clutching his flesh-wound, Dade agreed by conduct that this was a
good idea.
  The only corridor leading in and out of the galley was pretty much
as Dade had left it, give or take ten or twelve semi-liquid mutant
cadavers. A trail of carnage led towards a ladder to the upper level.
Besides Kyler and Sadiq there were two others Dade felt like he should
have known. The names of Conrad and Ward lingered temptingly near the
tip of his tongue but eluded him. There were three others in the group
in various states of bloodiness, and each was also wielding an
improbably large weapon of their choice. Mostly pulse rifles, but Dade
spied the odd disrupter among them.
  He caught up with Kyler.
  "Okay, what's the situation. Where, when am I?" he asked
breathlessly.
  "What can you remember?" the surly sergeant asked.
  "Ice planets, bat creatures, sentry drones, devil worshippers... the
name 'Cerberus'," Dade said vaguely, as they reached the foot of the
ladders. Marines began to ascend. "How long is it since Storm?"
  "A week," Kyler replied. "Since then the Fitzgerald has taken you
all over the Dawn system. You've wiped out every lifeform for
lightyears. Single-handed. Admirable, really. That's why we're helping
you out here, that and various other reasons. You'll see," He raised
an eyebrow. "Don't you remember any of it?"
  "Bits," Dade shrugged wearily as Kyler started to climb the ladder.
  "All you need to know for the moment," the first man shouted down at
him, "is that we're taking the shuttlecraft back to the Fitzgerald,
then we're going to blow this place and hyperspace to Barnards Star
where we're going to look for asylum."
  Dade grunted satisfaction and followed him with unsure feet. His
wound was beginning to bother him.
  He was met by a humble-looking private at the top.
  "One of the barricades has been torn down," he was saying to Kyler,
"some of them must now have access to our position."
  "Conrad!" Kyler shouted into the assembled bustle of marines. "Get
on the M.T."
  "Nothing," Conrad returned. "Nothing moving but us and the automated
ventilation."
  They were in a wide open-plan area with elevators against one wall
and the emergency ladder in one corner. There were two corridors
leading away, two marines on each.
  "Stay on it," Kyler instructed, then addressed the platoon as a
whole. "Okay, it's two minutes to the ship, stay alert, the things
could be around here anywhere."
  On cue, without warning, screams gargled with gunfire red-alerted
the team. A marine had left a bloody stain where the mutant had
grabbed him around a corner into the corridor. Sadiq was spitting
bullets out of view over a wide area. Either he couldn't see what he
was aiming at, or there were a helluva lot of them.
  Kyler thought best to presume the latter.
  "Retreat!" he shouted, grabbing the now faint Dade roughly by the
arm, "Fall back to the shuttle!"
  Marines rushed into the second corridor, Conrad making sweeps with
the motion-tracker, Sadiq and his partner adopting covering positions,
shuffling backwards while laying down defensive fire with their
automatics.
  For Dade it became a blur of motion as Kyler took most of his weight
and half-dragged Dade after him. Familiar gunfire was punctuated with
random occasional inhuman screams or explosions. Blood-loss made him
light-headed, and consciousness toyed with checking out. Kyler threw
him down into a corner of the corridor where a firedoor had
automatically sealed itself, barring any progress.
  "Ward," Kyler growled, as he began an override of the door's
circuitry, "wake this guy up."
  The medtech stuffed his handgun down the front of his jeans and
slammed his case down with the other. It opened on contact with the
floor and Dade was dimly aware of the technician slapping some
gelatinous substance over his wounds.
  "Congealant," Ward said over the sound of gunfire and nearing
danger. "Stops the blood-loss. I'll give him something to open his
eyes."
  He flicked a clear plastic hypodermic a few times and slipped it
with ease into Dade's arm.
  "Whassat?" the fallen marine muttered half-consciously.
  "Speed, actually," Ward admitted. "An extremely concentrated dose."
  Dade's eyes flicked open.
  A front line of four were creating a incessant shimmering sheet of
lead at waist height, cutting the attacking mutants in half. Weight of
numbers was gaining the mutants ground, seemingly they had no regard
for their own lives. Only Sadiq consciously looked in their eyes as he
fought, chancing he could see the pleading humanity behind those
bloodied whites, some last vestige of the victims' will driving the
genetically twisted human forms into his waving spear of shots. It
made him feel perversely good.
  Dade joined the affray, adding another thirty rounds per second to
the onslaught. The light ahead in the corridor was dim, illy defining
the muscled bulk of the top-heavy demons as they bounded and forced
themselves onwards with a quadrupedal motion that could shift  without
warning to an upright bipedal which filled the corridor. Swarms, Dade
knew, usually referred to small things that flew in clouds. These
things were bigger than men and walked, but it was still a swarm. He
could not see anything beyond their impenetrable bulk.
  There was the whirr of motors behind him, and Kyler began to shout
retreat orders: the door was open. The escape recommenced, the small
group of marines letting the recoil of their weapons push them
backwards in a barely textbook withdrawal. They tried to reload
alternately, but break in fire still allowed the mutants a yard for
every clip swapped.
  The shuttle was docked at the airlock at the far end of the corridor
beyond the door. It was a linear route to escape, unclouded by
infestation. Kyler ran ahead, slapped the mechanism for the inner
lock. The opaque white glass divided into four and vanished into the
walls.
  "Come on!" the leader urged, rushing into the lock and pulling Wade
in after him.
  Dade emptied his last clip and turned into a dead run towards his
sergeant. Sadiq followed, pushing grenades into his pulse-rifle's
undercarriage.
  Behind them, the creatures were on Conrad and his men. There were
the spluttered screams of vomited blood as gray inhuman fists punched
entirely through an armoured torso like it was butter wrapped in
tissue. Dade saw Conrad spin out of his rearguard and into a sprint as
another marine was divided laterally at gut-height by claws
like scythes.
  Kyler had punched CLOSE before the marine had tumbled through.
Conrad hit the deck on the right side of the door a microsecond before
it sealed.
  The five survivors were stuffed inside the airlock, which was
probably designed for three. The inner lock was being charged by the
swarm, the fact that it was designed to withstand explosive
decompression meant nothing to the creatures. There was an external
view of the docked shuttle on a monitor set into one wall. It showed
the Fitzgerald in the distance, maintaining a safe but within reach
forced orbit of the station.
  "Okay, marines, we're safe, we made it," Kyler breathed. "Time to go
home."
  He activated the outer lock to the shuttle.
  A dagger-clawed hand lunged through the gap even before the pressure
had equalised, grabbing Sadiq by the hip and yanking his complaining
body into the shuttle.
  The attacking creature snarled teeth stained with Sadiq's blood,
which even now was ejaculating out of a deep bite wound that almost
severed his left arm from its shoulder.
  Conrad went for his gun.
  "Aim!" Kyler warned. "The shuttle's our only escape."
  Shots peppered the creature's skin.
  Despite the pain Sadiq had not dropped his weapon, he pulled it up
in between himself and the beast and squeezed the trigger. The force
of the grenade and the powder-burns blew the two apart, the creature
backflipping deeper into the shuttle, Sadiq collapsing to the floor.
  "Seal the door," Ward said urgently. "Seal it now."
  Sadiq was dragging himself by one arm towards the lock.
  Most grenades were set to three second delay.
  The medic hit the instruction to close himself the instant the
grenade fried the mutant from the inside and at once detached the
shuttle into the big black and set it imploding on itself. Vacuum
stole a few litres of air before the outer lock secured an airtight
seal.
  Everybody was looking at Ward.
  "I had to," he panted. "We'd all be dead."
  Dade turned his head from the monitor as pixelised images of Sadiq
and the shuttle tumbled through the light-distorting effects of the
station's diversion-field.
  Kyler assumed control.
  "Okay," he said, "Sadiq's gone, so have a lot of the others. We
still got to get out of here. I'm now open to suggestions."
  "We're damned," Conrad was messing with his chain. "No flesh will be
spared."
  "Cut that God crap," Kyler snapped. "Think like a marine, not the
son of a preacherman. Now, we know we can't teleport out of here, the
field they've got set up around this place interferes too much with
the beaming process, so we have to think of something else."
  "Can't we turn the field off?" Dade said suddenly. "There must be a
way of shutting it down. Then the Fitzgerald can beam us back on board
without problems."
  "Will the ship have enough time to get us out of the blast-sphere
when this baby overheats and blows?" the sergeant checked.
  "And what about the time it will take for the mutation to set in?"
Dade butted in.
  "The virus?" Ward said, "Don't worry, Corporal, we've been immunised
against the mutation from research the Corps performed on your cells.
As for the escape time, I read the station schematics before we left
the Fitzgerald, and there should be a good ten minutes before the
temperature reaches critical. Provided they're ready for us on the
Fitzgerald, with the hyperdrive on standby we can leave the system
with at least five minutes to spare."
  "It'll be close," Dade breathed.
  "Hey," Kyler slapped his shoulder comradely, "if it were easy,
anybody could do it." He tapped his comm, "Okay, Quamara, come in
Quamara."
  "Go ahead, sarge," the corporal's voice came though faintly, loud
enough for all four marines to hear.
  "How's it going out there?" Kyler asked.
  "Dacka Quamara and Braag Daema's team are handling the show on the
Fitzgerald," Ward explained to Dade.
  "Improbably smooth," Quamara replied in a disconcerted tone.
"There's reports, unconfirmed at this time, that some of the captive
marines we imprisoned in the hold during the mutiny, Perry included,
have escaped and are on the loose in the ship. There's a security team
checking it out, but we've lost contact with them. Graemon seems to
think getting too close to the station is playing hell with our
communications, but we can't be certain."
  "Okay, you stay on top of that," Kyler said, "In the meantime, fire
up the hyperdrive and prepare to get a lock on our positions. We're
powering down the field in ten and we need to be out of here asap. You
got it?"
  "Check, sarge," Quamara's voice deteriorated into static.
  "Okay, the control-room for the field is at the other side of the
station," Kyler said authoritatively, checking out the hinged walls of
the airlock, "less than thirty feet from the north lock in fact..."
  Dade was beginning to guess what the leader had in mind. The corners
of his mouth began to curl.
  "We can either shoot our way through that little lot on the other
side of these doors," he continued, "or... we can take advantage of
the vacuum-suits in these lockers."

@                                                                  [8]
                                                           ...and Gone

Quamara had watched as lifesigns all over the ship had blinked out
over the past ten minutes, and there was nothing he and his team of
ten could do but watch as the bridge door was lazered into lava by a
thin shaft of intense red-shift EMR which pierced the air, ripping
through three consoles in its way before turning a microscopic tube of
flesh through Daema's shoulder into plasma.
  The beam gave its origin as the mouth of a gun held by Perry, as
innumerable marines burst through onto the deck, brandishing heavy
assault weapons like they were toys.
  The bridge comtech reached for a mic but was drilled into quarters
by a solid burst of firepower.
  Weighing odds, Quamara reluctantly raised his hands...

                                  *

At the very edges of the station the graviton pull was at its weakest,
and it was zero difficulty to haul a quarter-weight body out of the
airlock and onto the station's 'roof'. Dade had spacewalked around a
spinning orbital station before, but never one with the flat-roof
afforded by graviton plates. Walking across the top of the station,
through a minefield of antennae and dishes was stupidly easy. There
was the drag of the regulation magnetic boots, but they were making
good time. And not a mutant in sight.
  The heat dispersion field made a circumference of the whole station
twenty metres above the foursome's heads, and everything beyond took
the distortion with little breakup of clarity. The red giant looked
uncomfortably close, it reminded Dade of a vast scarlet beachball
permanently on the verge of smacking him in the face.
  Distant and pixelised by the field the Fitzgerald was performing a
U-turn. Fuel economy regulations and structural designs on the new
starships meant that this involved the frequent repositioning of the
engines so that they pointed in the right direction to propel the
craft to the desired destination. Right now the vast chemical fusion
factories were orbiting the main body of the craft, looking for the
correct alignment.
  Further ahead, in front of Dade, Conrad was the first to reach the
far side of the roof. He had activated the north lock and was waving
Kyler to follow him down and in.

                                  *

The control chamber was already sealed. On the safe side of twelve
inches of ceramocarbide firedoor half a dozen semi-mutated humans were
sprawled in various states of DNA-decay. Someone had blown a hole
through one of the walls to the exterior of the base. The safety
computer had sealed the gap immediately, but not before every last
gasp of breathable air had been sucked from the room. Mass suicide,
Dade guessed, the thought had crossed his own mind a few times.
  Kyler, as squad comtech as well as leader, was punching instructions
into the computer to release a fresh supply of oxygen into the chamber
before his team removed their suits. Then he started to access the
control application for the dispersion field.
  "Can you get in?" Dade asked, removing his helmet.
  "Shouldn't be much of a problem," Kyler said vaguely, pushing
buttons and keys, "I've now entered the application, ie I've found the
switch. Now all it wants are the control codes."
  "Like a password?" Ward frowned.
  "No," Kyler replied without looking away from the screen, "it just
requires the user to know what they're talking about... there!"
  Sometimes a persistent sound can only be heard after it has
disappeared. The hum of the field generators was only noticeable by
its absence. Suddenly the station was naked.
  Dade thought he felt the temperature rise, but it was only the blood
being pumped harder and harder through his dilating veins, blushing
his skin and making him feel light-headed.
  "Okay," Kyler called urgently into his comm, "Quamara, the field's
down, get us the hell out of here."
  Silence.
  "Well, hello... Sergeant Kyler, isn't it?"
  Perry.
  "We wondered where your team was hiding," the lieutenant's voice
drawled like fingernails on blackboard. "Nobody thought you'd be brave
enough to board Dawn station itself. Not with all those demons running
around."
  Demons? Conrad mouthed.
  "Perry, you bastard," Dade spat, "beam us off this base now, before
the whole thing goes nova and takes you with it."
  "Hmmm..." Perry mocked, "I don't think I will, actually. Your
corporal here on the bridge has kindly offered to release control of
the ship back to its rightful commanders and take us back to Kane,
wasn't that kind of him?"
  "I had no choice, man," Quamara's voice cut in for a second. There
was the sound of rifle butt meeting jaw.
  "Oh, do be quiet," Perry said aside.
  "So you're just going to leave us here with these aliens?" Kyler
rhetorically queried.
  "Yes," Perry replied after a moment's faked hesitation, "I think I
will leave you there. But 'aliens'? Close, Sergeant, but no cigar.
Surely you don't buy into that 'crashed alien ship' story."
  "Demons," Conrad finally said aloud.
  "Conrad?" Perry seemed moderately surprised. "Yes, I thought it
would be you, you always did have a fondness for that religion thing,
didn't you? Well, it turns out you freaks were right all along.
Almost, anyway. Don't quite know how it works, but it seems like one
of our bases in the Darkworld system chanced upon the gates of Hades
itself."
  "On Kane?" Kyler said incredulously.
  "Wild, huh?" Perry said with a touch of insanity in his tone. "We've
had researchers extrapolating all kinds of metaphors from the
discovery, but the cutting edge is that we've found something
somewhere between Dante and Revelations and it isn't very nice. Not
nice at all."
  "So I've been wiping out the legions of the damned?" Dade
patronised. "With an AJC45?"
  "Think about it, Dade," Perry argued casually. "The worshippers, the
two-headed dog, the vampire creatures, the gorgon creature you
encountered on Crypt. All based on classical myth. Something out here
is keen on recreating every evil from religious scripture."
  "Something?" Conrad didn't want an answer.
  "Something," Perry repeated. "We just called him Old Nick."
  Dade, Kyler and Ward weren't buying a word of this but Conrad was
twisting his crucifix chain into plaits. Nobody said anything.
  "I heard a good theory the other day," Perry said ponderously, "you
may like to hear it. There are some who believe the virulent nature of
the demons' reproductive system is a metaphor for the evil inherent in
every man. Evil is contagious. The popular belief is that any man has
the potential for evil."
  "But Dade was immune," pointed out Ward, "and now so are we."
  "So I guess that makes you angels," Perry mused, then bluntly
severed communications.
  Dade noticed the heat. He turned urgently to Kyler.
  "We've got eight minutes twenty. There has to be another way off
this place."
  "There's nothing," Kyler returned. "We checked already. The only
route the base staff had to escape were the pods in the main living
quarters, but they were all used during the panic when the beasts took
over."
  "Could there be any left?"
  "None, we checked already."
  Ward grabbed at his chin with urgent thought at the edge of the
conversation, and lost himself in a sudden paroxysm of mental
argument.
  "What is it?" Dade noticed a smile appearing behind the med-tech's
eyes.
  "The black box," Ward concluded in a satisfied whisper, staring at
Kyler.
  Kyler met the smile with one of his own, some kind of understanding
had taken place.
  "I think he's found us a way out of here," the commtech announced.
  "The black box," repeated Ward, "the main computer chips which store
every event that occurs on the station. They're stored in a separate
room on the lower level which can be detached in case of emergency.
It's an escape pod for the black-box recorder, so the outside world
can find out what went wrong on the station. It's fitted with a manual
launch mechanism, too."
  "Okay, marines," Kyler was working on opening the door already,
"Someone's gotta say this, so: Let's kick ass!"

                                  *

Introspective: Dade.
  The doors slide apart noiselessly. They grate like the gates of
hell, metal against metal, but the sound of a nearby beating heart
drowns out the sound. So many doors have opened since Arrach. Doors
with death concealed beyond the seal, doors to escape, doors closed
for security, doors of the mind - narrowly ajar portals to fear,
animal instinct, the lower consciousness.
  The well-oiled door to the adrenal gland irises apart. His veins
welcome the fluid like the partner they haven't seen since breakfast.
  Kick ass.

                                  *

Dade watched the large blue vein down his forearm swell and bulge as
he forced the heel of his hand painfully into the grip of the pulse
rifle. His index finger wavered over the trigger. The Speed was taking
full effect.
  The corridor presented itself. Empty and dark, not a mutant in
sight. Night-time, so the light-strips were motion-activated. Kyler
took a tin coffeecup from a desk and tossed it ahead of him. The
sensors picked it up and illuminated the full stretch of passage.
  The cup landed in the first creature's mouth as the mayhem
commenced.
  Dade was spitting fire before he was even fully aware of the attack.
  Taking steps forward with genocidal intent he was only vaguely aware
of the three others moving with him, distantly conscious of their
firepower's addition to his attack. The corridor was wall-to-wall
already, a hideous baddy-bag of assorted gelatinous scum. Genetic
flotsam.
  A shooting gallery.
  Dade's shells were not tearing them apart, he was swallowing them,
ripping their wet skin into shreds with his fantasised vampiric
canines and gulping hunks of mutant flesh in huge choking mouthfuls.
His fire did not penetrate but envelop.
  When they were at hand-to-hand range long taloned fists reached out
with frenzied lashes but the four carried on their irrational advance.
It was like some kind of Mexican stand-off performed by men with
terminal impatience.
  Then they were in the midst of the creatures, four cones of
exploding shells joining man to mutant, eruptions of lifeblood raining
from slashes and pissing from bullet-wounds. Dade hardly noticed as,
beside him, nightmare hands grasped Conrad by the legs and chest, then
separated the two with strength like the will of a jealous god.
Ignorant companions of the beast fed on the spilt organs as Conrad's
racial siblings blew the demons limb from festering limb.
  Dade took a deep and agonizing wound cleaving apart muscle, hip
through to knee. He barely blinked, rather fed the offender with a
feast of whitehot lead.
  Ward was shouting instructions from an adjoining corridor. He knew
the way. Dade followed him, Kyler at his side making a brief reload.
  The path ahead was clear, the route back was filled with the one-
minded pursuing mutants, their disgustingly long tongues lolling out
of their jaws, hungering the rich sensation of taste. Ward carried on,
Kyler and Dade took the ecstasy of rearguard, laying down the
continuing blaze without interruption.
  A stray shot took out the lighting system. Now all the trio could
see were the clambering silhouettes of the horned beasts, illuminated
in white orange flares. If the demons could see anything it would be
only the flame reflected off the glistening surfaces of their killers'
eyes, and the fire burning within.
  "Here!" Ward managed to express himself above the roar of unchained
passion. "Into the lift!"
  Something thudded heavily into his back and he choked on a last
intake of breath before it had even touched his lungs. Numb with shock
he looked incredulously down to see a grasping grey fist protruding
from his stomach. Looking to the looming Kyler and Dade, he gargled on
his entrails as he and his hidden attacker were consumed in a what
seemed a cloud of a thousand horny fireflies.
  Unloading the last of his ammo into Ward's murderer, Dade stepped
over the smoking tangle of bodies and into the elevator, knuckling the
control panel with the bony point of his fist. Kyler entered
backwards, using his last clip to keep the mutant horde at bay.
  They were close enough to share bad breath when the automatic doors
met in the middle.
  The interior of the lift was peppered with shot and vinegared with
the rich sauce of human and semihuman blood. Looking each other down
as they caught their breath, the two marines realised they were both
covered in the stuff, and hardly any of it was their own.
  "I hope you've had your AIDS shots," Dade panted, discarding his
empty rifle and again drawing his hardy fortyfive. He had less than
ten shots left.
  The lift was taking them to the lowest level of the station... very
slowly. Dade suspected mechanical failure, the whole place was heating
up to an unbearable temperature. He could feel his pores yawning,
parched with lack of sweat.
  "Two minutes," Kyler said nervously. "Ish."
  Dade nodded acknowledgement slowly, he could hear the stomping
beneath them of innumerable taloned hoofs.
  "How many?" Dade said with an intake of breath through teeth gritted
against the pain of his wounds.
  A motion tracker was still hanging from Kyler's belt.
  "Don't know," he replied, "Lots. Over twenty."
  Dade swallowed a dry gulp. Kyler was looking grim.
  "I'm empty," he admitted sheepishly. His ammo counter was flashing
up zeros. "You're going to have to cover me."
  Dade stared at his own handgun, then nodded dispassionately to
Kyler. They slapped palms comradely. Their hands grasped on contact
and a silent understanding took place.
  Kyler wrenched a length of jagged loose metal from the structure,
and brandished it crudely.
  The lift chimed, and the door motors began to groan. This was as low
as it went. The lowest accessible level of the station, a short length
of nearly man-height engineering access tunnel leading straight into
the computer's memory backup. The black box.
  The doors opened onto the ninth circle of hell. Its demon swarm
snarled in unholy unison.
  Kyler at his side, Dade leapt into the fire.

                                  *

Perry sat smoking his fifth cigar by the window in the Fitzgerald's
observation blister, watching the turquoise hue from the engines in
hyperdrive colour the thick auburn smoke as it twisted away towards
the air filters. Irvin approached from behind.
  "Sir," he said shortly.
  "Have you rounded up all the remaining mutineers?" Perry murmured,
sucking the rich taste of the cigar into his lungs.
  "Yessir," Irvin confirmed, "After casualties, nine of them. Quamara,
six of Destray's team, Graemon, and that series four android from
security. We're holding them in the cells."
  "And Dawn?"
  "Destroyed," Irvin replied. "Went critical thirty minutes ago,
nothing could have survived it."
  He cleared his throat and pondered his words.
  "However..." he continued, "our long range sensors are picking
something up, sir, among the debris."
  Perry raised an eyebrow for Irvin to carry on.
  "It's the station's black box escape pod," he elaborated, "making
away from the blast at speed."
  "Any lifesigns?" Perry asked worriedly.
  "Our sensors can't penetrate the hull, sir," Irvin reminded him.
"It's built to protect the data within from radiation corruption.
Shall we return to investigate?"
  "What are the chances of Dade being on board?"
  "Slim," Irvin admitted, "it may have been an automatic launch."
  "Then leave it," Perry decided.
  "Sir," he turned to leave, then stopped. "Oh, sir, we'll be pulling
out of hyperspace in a few hours, navigation need to know where to
take the ship once we reach the system."
  "Kane," Perry ordered. "Take us to Kane."
  Irvin smiled curiously.
  "Where shall I tell the crew we're going?"
  Perry took a long hard breath on his cigar.
  "Hell," he said. "Tell them we're going to hell."