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The pods were designed to take damage, as were the combat suits and the men who wore then. Even so, the landing had been rougher than ideal and only fourteen of the twenty men were in condition to emerge from the vessel, rifles in hand and trained on the surrounding environs as they fanned out from the upside-down vessel.
"Sound off," Zhiang subvocalized into his throat-mounted microphone as one eye scanned the area and the other compiled the data streaming across a series of translucent windows projected by the H.U.D. across his field of view. With a flick of his head, he snapped the monocle back into place so he could get his pinyin translations; the last thing he needed now was to miss some critical bit of information because he couldn't understand an accent or word.
Visible-spectrum light filled the room, radiating from glowing strips at the edges where the walls met the ceiling and floor, and they quickly determined they were in a drab white cube more than a hundred meters to a side, an open archway leading out the only visible feature.
"Carlston; I can barely walk," the first voice responded.
"Oberg; I’m fine, if we take it at a trot."
"Santiago; ready for action."
"Murchison; I can’t feel my right foot. I’m hoping that makes it easier to deal with."
They continued like that; even if fourteen men had left the pod, only a dozen were going to be worth much in a firefight. It confirmed the readings on his helmet as he flipped through the troop diagnostics. Three life signs completely stopped, one erratic, and a slew of wounds. Not a soldier in the group was uninjured; Zhiang’s own left elbow and wrist shot pain whenever he moved them too sharply. The only option was to ignore it, the suit already compensating with localized injections of painkillers and anti-inflammatories.
"Form up, if you can so much as walk," Zhiang called, the twelve men fit for duty being joined by another, limping badly but looking determined through the ballistic faceplate on his helmet. Dark grey patches on the man's suit showed where the self-sealing feature had proved functional.
"We’re going in. The rest," Motioning to remaining men, "hold this room as a fallback position and maintain radio silence unless there's an emergency. Remember, if it moves, shoot it. If it stays still in a threatening fashion, shoot it anyway." A gallows chuckle ran through the men.
While the injured moved as well as they could to secure the room, the ambulatory exited through the arched portal. Pouring out with rifles trained in all directions, they were greeted by a hall that curved gently out of sight in either direction, periodically studded with arches that spoke of rooms beyond. These had seamless plates of white substance filling them, however, with no obvious means of coaxing them open. Zhiang decided to advance by leapfrogging in three groups from archway to archway, with a fourth keeping the group’s back covered. No other infiltration forces were showing up on Zhiang’s sensors, which he hoped simply meant that there was interference from the alien architecture. The idea that they might be the sole hope for humanity was too unsettling to dwell on.
"These corridors," A Brazilian named Santiago muttered in the expected thickly-accented English. "They all look the same. None of the doors open and no way to open them."
"What did you expect?" Returned a dark-skinned Italian that everyone simply called Ciao, pronouncing his words painstakingly. "Doorknobs and map directories in the heart of an alien warship?"
"Cut the chatter," Zhiang remonstrated as his trio leapfrogged to the front. He was, however, a little disconcerted by the endlessly smooth white corridors with the strips of light. Monitors in those, I wouldn’t doubt, he thought to himself, eyeing them. Nothing we can do about it, though. We don’t have enough bullets to take them all out if they’re even there.
It was almost an hour before they came to the split in the corridor.
"All this time and not one alien," muttered the limping Dobson. An American, his English was clear at least. "They have to know we’re here, so why aren’t they showing up to do something?"
"Maybe they plan to let us wander aimlessly until we starve to death," Santiago said off-handedly as they looked down either fork of the passage. After all, the Angel was larger than some countries back on Earth.
"We don’t have time to just poke around at our leisure and backtrack to every split," Zhiang said. "Oberg, take Hashizawa, Jefferies, Carlston, Ciao, and Dereks and go right. Check in with me every fifteen minutes or if something comes up. If you come to another split, Hashizawa, you get Carlston and Dereks, but no groups smaller than three."
"Sir," The other men responded, saluting before advancing down the right fork. Nodding to the six men still with him, Zhiang took them left.
It was only ten minutes before Zhiang’s radio sprang to life. Instead of Oberg’s group, it was the fortified position back at the penetration sight.
"Zhisheng!" A voice yelled over the roaring of rifles. He was speaking in Chinese, which thankfully only Zhiang seemed to understand. "Zhisheng, gods aloft! They’re coming out of the walls! Watch out for the wa-..." Then the voice stopped. No cries or grunts of pain, just instant silence. The last of the gunfire cut off, leaving only the faint crackle of background static. It was over before Zhiang could do more than call the man’s name.
"Wulong! Come in, Wulong! Barnett! Sampson!" No voices responded, and the other men in his group stared with nervous fear. They didn't seem to know what had been said, but they had heard the gunfire, the panic in the voice, and, finally, the all-consuming silence. Zhiang almost spat—a bad idea in a helmet—then touched one of the buttons on his hip, opening another radio channel.
"Oberg, this is Zhisheng. We have a situation."
Silence. It stretched on for several seconds before Zhiang tried again, with similar results.
"Must be something between us," Dobson said nervously. "Blocking the radio."
"But they’re closer to us than they we are to the insert point," said Black, British and the youngest man in Zhiang’s group. "If we could hear them..."
"This doesn’t change the mission objectives," Zhiang said firmly, his voice strong as he could make it. "Oberg’s group knows that too. All that matters is success. If there’s a thousand of us or just one on this ship when it goes up, it doesn’t matter."
He pulled up Black and the pair leapfrogged to the front of the column. They slid into the next archway, eyes scanning as a pair of Americans—Spears and McDougal—moved ahead of them. Then was Santiago and Murchison, the group’s lone Canadian. At the rear, Dobson moved up before Zhiang and Black took the column lead again.
Advancing in that fashion, they covered ground safely but slowly. Time began to drag on and their pace quickened of its own unconscious accord, urgency mingling with repressed fear. Each man was watching their own version of the other group’s last moments play across their imagination more than their surroundings.
An hour. Two hours. Then, finally, another fork in the passage.
"Are we going to split up again?" Black asked, a nervous edge to his voice.
"No," Zhiang decided instantly, to the visible relief of his men. "This is taking too long. We can’t get any of these doors open, and at the rate we’re going, we really will starve before we find anything." Zhiang cast a look at the injured Dobson, who blanched slightly but nodded. "We go right, at a trot."
They moved quickly, through the ever-unchanging white hallways with glowing edges and closed doors. It makes the eyes lazy, Zhiang thought, this scenery that never changes. Perhaps these aliens have no love of art, or at least consider it differently than we do? His suits sensors weren't picking up anything unusual in light spectrums outside the visual, so it wasn't a difference in physical perception.
When the hallway suddenly blossomed into an open arcade, the old caution reasserted itself immediately and the men fell into their pairs. Spears and McDougal stood inside the doorway, on either side, with Dobson behind McDougal. Santiago and Murchison swun
g out, kneeling, to either side of the doorway, followed by Zhiang and Black, back-to-back and rifles raised.
The arcade was a rectangle twenty meters wide and ten times that in length, ringed with open archways. The ceiling was twice as tall as that of the hallways, the height of three large men standing on one another’s shoulders. Other than that, however, it may as well have been the hallways they had been through, with only smooth white metal and glowing strips of light.
It was almost enough to relax them, until something appeared in the closest doorway along the right wall. Rifles swung towards it and almost fired before everyone's IFF pinged friendlies and they recognized a United Nation’s Galactic Defense League emblem on a streamlined, ferramic-plated hostile environment tactical suit.
"Oberg’s group?" Murchison asked hopefully.
"Doesn’t look like it," Zhiang said back, making a few hand signals that the other figure returned before motioning behind him. Three more figures, similarly attired, emerged. Zhiang’s radio then crackled to life.
"First Lieutenant Michael Green, United States Marine Corps."
"First Lieutenant Zhiang Zhisheng, People’s Liberation Army Space Forces."
"God bless you," The marine breathed gruffly, accent as thick as if he were chewing on his words despite being American. "I thought my men were the only ones who made it onto this abysmal piece of junk. These all you’ve got?"
"I had a second group, but we lost contact when we split up."
"Then you made it in luckier than we did," He grunted. "Our pod was cut in half by those damn walls. Lost a lot of good men."
"This day will be famous for the losing of good men, Lt. Green," Zhiang sighed heavily. Then noticed that the two groups had closed on each other, talking together, pounding each other on the back as a congratulations for having made it. If there were two groups, then it was likely there were at least a few more; it lifted a heavy weight from all their shoulders.
"What are your plans?" Zhiang asked.
"We’re pretty much roving blind. From what I can tell, our pod hit about a third of the way down the Angel’s main body, close to the forward section. That’s about on target...the brain-cases planetside figured if we could get to the center of the ship around this area, we should be close to the main power source or whatever command core is running this thing."
"So you will continue to move inward from here?"
"That’s the best bet we can figure on," Green shrugged. "But this entire area seems abandoned. Just empty halls and sealed doors. We tried a grenade on one of the doorways, but it just scratched it up bad and dented it a little. We’d have to unload half the Becks we have on us to bust open just one of them and it'd heal up right after anyway. Besides, we figure we can move quicker if we don’t have to worry about any little green men wanting revenge for their architecture."
Zhiang flicked something on his belt, switching his radio over to a private channel with Green. The American raised his eyebrows when he noticed, but Zhiang nodded to him and the marine adjusted his radio to match.
"In that case, I have something important to tell you." He repeated what few details there were concerning Wulong’s last transmission, during which Green’s face turned grim.
"I see...that does change things," He mused with obvious distaste. "We can’t lower our guard, even here."
"But at the same time, we need haste," Zhiang added. "We have probably dallied long enough as it is."
"You’re right," Green sighed, then flicked his radio back to the open channel. "Okay you dogs, don’t forget we’re still on the clock. We’ve got a score to settle with our alien friends here, and we wanna make sure Uncle Sam lands the last blow." The other marines with him gave a strange 'hoo-ah!' shout and, with a wave, started to move.
It was already too late.
When he had time to think about it later, Zhiang would compare it to a sculpture of frozen mercury swiftly melting, except in reverse and coming out of a wall. As it was, it happened so quickly he only had time to widen his eyes and half-raise his rifle before the thing was fully formed.
It had a body like some sort of six-legged metal spider, a bloated spherical thorax and a thin, shiny metal prism for an abdomen, the head withered and vestigial. Clinging to the wall, it swiveled that pitiful head about, jawless and possessed of no obvious eyes.
By the time Zhiang's rifle was up and a round squeezed off, the spider had already leapt off the wall, landing on Green’s back as he was half-way through turning to see what Zhiang had started shouting about.
As it struck, wickedly sharp legs seemed to melt partially into the suit—they did not leave cuts in it but passed like water through a sieve—and Green simply...stopped. Without any visible reaction, no jerking or gasping or stiffening, his turn seamlessly ended with him crumpling into a motionless pile on the floor. The metal thing perched atop him was already scanning for a new victim when a second shot from Zhiang sent it splashing across the floor, a water balloon rather than a monster. The drops of the creature had not even settled when they began flowing back together, forming a long puddle with six thin projections, a chrome shadow.
Movement around him brought Zhiang out of the mental torpor through which his body had been reacting. Turning sharply, he saw two more of the spiders, one already clinging to a stopped Dobson. Santiago, back-to-back with Murchison, was drawing a bead on a spider still on the wall, but his shot was too late, and it leapt onto Spears, catching him in the side as he tried to dodge, stopping him as well.
"Run!" Zhiang shouted, grabbing Black with one hand and sending a spray of bullets at another spider coming out of the wall. "There’s too many!"
Soldiers' legs ate ground as they broke for the nearest exit away from the emerging attackers—the middle of the long wall opposite where the Marines had entered. A few men jettisoned their packs as they ran, the sudden loss of an extra twenty kilos allowing them to demand greater speed from furiously pumping limbs. Springing and scuttling, the spiders pursued in a disordered frenzy. They had gone nearly five minutes before the last one was lost to sight behind them. They went another fifteen before they stopped, leaning against the wall and panting heavily from running in the suits so far, so fast. With a vague flash of jealousy, Zhiang thought about the newest-generation combat suits the Indians had, with passive muscular augmentation that they said could let a man run at a hundred and twenty kilometers an hour.
Zhiang glanced around between gasps and noticed that, though Dobson and Spears were gone, one of the marines had seen fit to follow his lead. When he trusted himself to speak again, Zhiang queried the new soldier.
"Your name?"
"Richard Barkley, sir," The thick-shouldered man answered, visibly unsure if he was supposed to be treating the Chinese officer as his new C.O. or if circumstances now required he go on alone. "Folks just call me Brick, though."
"Well, Brick, welcome to the group."
"Sir," That from McDougal, "What...what were those things? Were they the aliens?"
"Do you think the Chinese officers had a special briefing on what was inside this accursed thing that they neglected to give you?" Zhiang snapped back, immediately regretting it. His men were obviously panicked and nervous; they needed him for stability. "I have no idea...but they seem to have stopped following us for now. They’re probably what got Wulong and the others, though."
"More importantly, where do we go from here?" Santiago interjected.
"We follow this hall, until we come across something worth coming across," Zhiang grunted, quickly pairing Brick with the partnerless McDougal—that both men were Americans might help them deal with the madness their mission had become—before leading the group down the hallway with the quick caution that was becoming second nature.