“What?”
“Fungus,” Marcus muttered. “Most of it’s below the surface. All we see is the bit aboveground.”
Dom got the idea all too quickly. “No point pissing away ordnance trying to stop it, then, is there?”
“You never know.” Marcus raised his binoculars to his eyes. “You just never know.”
A burst of fire out to sea got Dom’s attention. Everyone held their breath and strained to watch. The Raven fired a couple of belts into the water, but then peeled away fast when a long projection of stalk shot up from the surface, dark gray and peppered with glowing patches. Everyone watching let out a collective gasp. The things could reach a lot higher than they thought.
“Okay … can’t stop the stalk that way,” Sorotki said, dead calm. “We’ll save the ammo for its little shiny friends.”
The fuel tanker that had been moored at the platform had taken on its maximum load of imulsion, and was now a few kilometers out heading for Vectes. Dom watched it for a few moments, half-expecting it to suddenly disappear in a ball of flame, and then his radio crackled.
“Hoffman to Emerald Spar.”
Marcus responded. “Receiving you, Colonel.”
“Late to the party—apologies, Gears. Had to tear myself away from the Chairman’s valued advice. I’m inbound.”
“Fenix to Hoffman—bad timing, Colonel. Suggest you stand off and observe.”
Dom didn’t hear Hoffman’s response. He could imagine the old man chafing at the bit to grab a rifle and fight, especially as Trescu had rushed to the front line. Hoffman had his faults, but hiding behind his gold braid when there was real soldiering to be done wasn’t one of them.
“I reserve the right to ignore that if I see you getting your asses kicked,” Hoffman replied. “Standing by.”
Cole chuckled to himself. “The man’s savage.”
“What’s the old folks’ equivalent of a midlife crisis?” Baird asked. “Senile crisis?”
Cole didn’t seem to be listening. He kept flicking the controls on his Lancer one-handed, pistol-style, eyes fixed on an imaginary point just beneath the approaching Raven. “I never played against psycho glowie crabs before. Let’s do it.”
Suddenly the time in front of Dom collapsed into a fast countdown. The Raven was nearly at the rig.
“Stand to!” Trescu yelled.
Marcus raised his Lancer. “Hold this platform, Gears. Hold it.”
From this angle, Dom couldn’t see what was happening under the surface. His pulse was pounding in his ears.
“It’s reached the rig, it’s at the rig,” Sorotki said.
Dom braced, waiting for the shaft to burst from the water right below him and shower the platform with polyps. They’d be in his face right away. He’d be aiming short bursts, trying to detonate them before they got too close. He’d be—
But nothing happened.
Two seconds … three seconds … and nothing had reared up in front of him. He looked around. Everyone in the line was looking over the side, rifles angled down, lost for a few moments.
“It’s gone under!” Sorotki yelled. “Shit, it’s under the rig.”
For a stupid, stupid moment, Dom really thought the thing had just missed them, oblivious, following a blind course set by some unknown instinct, and that it would carry on until it hit something else. Then he felt the vibration in the soles of his boots.
It was like a heavy wave hitting the structure. Dom held his breath for a second, then he heard more thuds and tearing metal. Sorotki’s Raven looped back from the north.
“It’s still under the rig,” he said. “It hasn’t come out the other side. It’s gone—”
“Up,” Marcus said.
From the deck below, the lookouts started yelling.
“It’s come up through the bottom deck! Polyps! They’re coming out everywhere—”
Automatic fire rattled somewhere below. Dom, along with everyone else, rushed to the ladders to head off the polyps. The things had bypassed their first line of defense in a matter of seconds. The hastily constructed lace of hoses and pipes full of flammable fuel designed to roast the creatures as they climbed onto the platform would be no damn use at all.
And the lowest deck was where the lifeboats launched.
It was just as well nobody was planning to leave this rig before the polyps did.
Boots didn’t help much on thin metal ladders. Baird gave up and jumped the last two meters to the main deck with Sam and Cole right behind him. The noise—rifle fire, clanging metal, shouts, Ravens at a hover—was deafening. He had to cup his hand over his ear to hear the radio.
“Where’s the stalk come up? Where is it?” If it had ruptured a vapor tank, the platform was already in deep shit. “Anyone know?”
“Under the drill,” someone said. “In the well bay.”
Automatic fire and shouting was coming from every part of the rig. Baird tried to remember all the exits and ladders opening from the drilling modules. He couldn’t. He just ran for the center of the rig, found an open hatch, and aimed down it.
“Clear.” He climbed down backward, expecting something to snatch his legs from under him at any second. When he hit the deck, he could see along that exposed side of the platform. The external doors and hatches were all shut. If those things were coming up inside the rig, then they’d have to find some way to get out, too. “Hey, they’ll be crap at opening doors. No fingers.”
“How are we going to know if we’re near a vapor leak?” Sam said. “This whole place smells of imulsion.”
“Just shoot the frigging polyps,” Baird muttered. “Because if they blow, they’ll ignite it a lot better than we ever will.”
Cole put one hand flat on the metal bulkhead as if he was feeling to see if it was hot. “Hey, we got some puppies in there scratchin’ to come out. Feel it?”
Something—lots of somethings—was banging and scrabbling against the metal from the other side.
“Told you.” Baird stepped back to the rail, facing the doorway. “No thumbs.”
Sam stood to one side and Cole to the other, Lancers ready. “In three …”
“… two …”
Cole reached out and slipped the catch. “… go!”
The door burst open. Glowing polyps spewed from the opening like an avalanche of lightbulbs and meat. Baird saw the crossfire as Cole and Sam fired into the scrambling mass, and he stared into a sea of fangs that seemed to stand still like a freeze-frame. All he could take in was those open maws. His finger tightened on the trigger by pure reflex as the things exploded and spattered his face. He didn’t dare stop. It took a real effort to break off and reload. The polyps seemed to keep coming from nowhere, and then, as suddenly as they’d boiled out, they stopped.
Sam held up her hand to check fire and stepped through the door. There was a long, rattling burst, followed by a few small explosions and a flare of yellow light. Then she came out again.
“Clear,” she said, reloading. “Next?”
As they moved along the walkway, the firing and yelling continued below them. When Baird reached the end, he could see a carpet of polyps moving like a solid mass up the stairway from the deck below. The crazy Gorasni woman with the flamethrower—Aurelie—was clambering down a ladder running parallel with the stairs. The whole rig was a mesh of interconnected gantries and steps linking the different modules. That was as handy for the polyps as it was for everyone else.
Aurelie looked up at Baird. “You stand clear,” she called. “I use this anyway.”
And she did. She hooked her left arm around the ladder and leaned away from the bulkhead, somehow managing to take most of the weight of the flamethrower nozzle with her right hand. It wasn’t a smart weapon to use one-handed. She didn’t have much control over the jet direction when it ignited, and that flame shot a long way.
A frigging long way.
Baird and Cole jumped back, just escaping the arc of flaming fuel. Baird heard her yell something. He tho
ught she’d fallen, but when he looked again she’d managed to aim the jet and was playing it on the polyps that were at the top of the column trying to scale the stairs. They burned, but they didn’t burn easy. They hung on. It looked as if it was going to be a race between who let go first—or who cooked first.
Cole leaned over the rail and fired into the flaming mass of legs. Maybe it was the heat congealing their proteins, but they didn’t burst apart like a shot pumpkin this time. Then one of them detonated. The stairway and a section of the gantry bolted to it—probably rusted through at a critical point—fell away from its supports and plunged into the sea beneath, taking the polyps with it.
Aurelie was left hanging on the ladder, flushed and breathless. There was nothing beneath her now, and if anyone on the other side of that section needed to escape, they were out of luck too. The only way was back up. That was no easy climb with a red-hot chunk of metal in one hand and an arm numb from gripping the ladder.
And then it got a whole lot harder. The gantry above her suddenly filled with a jostling mass of polyps.
“Hang on, baby,” Cole yelled. He climbed up one of the safety rail stanchions to swing onto the deck above. “Keep your head down. Pest control’s comin’.”
Baird watched the polyps turn like one animal and make a rush for Cole. But there was nothing he could do to give him covering fire. Baird was below the edge of the deck, and now Cole was between him and the polyps. Cole waded into the mass of scrabbling legs like weeding a patch of grass, standing his ground and firing down just a meter or two from his boots.
Baird climbed after him. When he hauled himself onto the walkway, Cole was busy kicking away a wounded polyp while he reloaded. It didn’t seem to have enough strength left to detonate itself.
“These ain’t fun,” Cole said. He stepped over the debris, almost skidding on bile-green slime. “You still there, lady?”
Aurelie was clinging to the ladder. It took both of them to haul her onto the deck and not lose the flamethrower over the side. She dusted herself down and pointed to the bridge between the drilling section and the treatment modules.
“There are many coming up through there,” she said. “The stalk split the bulkhead. I go in—then I can keep burning them. But I need cover.”
Sam jogged down the gantry and grabbed Baird by the shoulder. “Marcus is in the well bay. He says the polyps are still coming up the stalk—how many of those things does it carry?”
“Shit, how do I know? It’s our first date.” Baird had to assume the stalk could disgorge an endless stream of polyps. He pressed his earpiece. “Hey, KR units? Any of you able to fly low and look under the rig?”
“We’re having so much fun with the door guns,” Sorotki said. Baird could hear the hammering bursts of gunfire in the background. He wasn’t sure where the Ravens were directing their fire, but wherever it was it meant the polyps were swarming over open decks now. “Let me tear myself away for a moment.”
“Can you see the stalk?”
Baird couldn’t even tell where Sorotki was now. He ran back to the end of the walkway and turned onto the next section, stopping to look over the side every few meters. He found himself looking down on the strobing rotors of a Raven wreathed in spray thrown up by the downdraft. Sorotki was almost sitting on the water.
“I see it,” Sorotki said. “Still wedged in the deck.”
“Try blowing the shit out of it. Break it off. Take their ladder away.”
“Those things still coming out, then?”
“Yeah. Just a few.” The firing around Baird seemed to merge into a continuous barrage. “Look, just shoot, will you? Cut it off.”
“It’ll just grow a new one.”
“Do it.” Baird tried to raise Marcus. “Marcus? Baird here. We’re trying a new tack. Two-Three-Nine’s going to try to pulp the stalk from the side. Keep your head down in case of freak ricochets.”
“Understood.”
“Where are the rest of—”
Baird was silenced out by a sequence of loud bangs. Then there was a much louder bang, a longer booming explosion, and a ball of flame shot out horizontally at the accommodation end of the platform. Metal creaked and groaned. Baird felt a jolt through the soles of his boots.
“Ahh shit,” Marcus said. “What was that?”
“Something blew out a compartment near the living quarters.” Baird could see a steady stream of smoke. “We’ve got a real fire now by the look of it.”
Gradin cut into the comm circuit. “I’ve sent a damage control team to deal with it. If the rig burns, the polyps will be academic. And so will we.”
“You handle the fire, we’ll handle the polyps,” Marcus said. “Sorotki? Mitchell? Do what Baird says. Sever that stalk.”
Baird was at the instinctive reaction stage now. His mouth was dry with terror, but the rest of his body carried on with business as usual, doing split-second things he couldn’t have managed if he’d stopped to think about them rationally. There was something even more devoted to preserving Baird than Baird himself. It was that primal part of his brain that really didn’t give a shit about his mind or his soul or anything beyond keeping the meat alive.
The small remaining scrap of Thinking Baird observed that reflex with amazement every time. He decided that was how those frigging crazy Raven pilots functioned most of the time.
Smoke and flame belched from the rig just fifty meters away from the hovering Raven. Sorotki was still holding the helicopter steady just above the water. Metal structures could have fallen and shredded his rotors, another explosion could have sent him crashing into the sea, and there was no telling what could burst from the water and take him down with it. But he just seemed to park in midair while Mitchell got a steady lock on the stalk.
Baird could see the rapid muzzle flash as Mitchell fired between the platform’s legs. Sam elbowed Baird to get his attention.
“Hey, we’re not out of polyps yet. Move it.”
“Yeah, okay. Lead me to ’em.”
Cole jogged up to them. “Somebody oughta check those lifeboats are still around if this all goes to shit.”
There was another loud boom. A hatch just in front of them burst open, maybe from the shock wave, and more polyps spilled out. Baird decided he’d take grubs any day. Even a tank-sized Corpser was somehow less hideous. It was the fact that these things swarmed. They were knee-high and they just kept coming, blindly single-minded, triggering some primal dread of being drowned in a wave of exploding meat.
Sam took out the first rank. The three of them were getting into a routine now, like an old-style rifle platoon forming ranks and reloading while the other sustained fire. Polyp debris spattered the metal walkway. When the firing stopped, Baird’s ears were ringing.
“Stalk down.” That was Mitchell’s voice in his earpiece. The Raven lifted and circled. “I think I’ve put a few holes in the rig, but the stalk’s pulped now.”
“Okay, let’s mop up the stragglers,” Sam said.
Firing continued from all directions. As they worked their way along gantries picking off the remaining polyps, the noise thinned out and became more sporadic. Voices started calling in on the comm net.
“No more polyps coming through,” Marcus said. “How are we doing?”
“Running out of targets.” That was Rossi. “Everyone okay?”
“Two rig crew missing,” Jace said. “Hey, can anyone give us a hand with this fire?”
The accommodation section was now belching black smoke. The threat had shifted from polyps to something that had previously held the top award for Worst Possible Shit to Happen on a Rig. Baird hoped all that flammable fuel Marcus had piped to the decks to repel the polyps wasn’t leaking.
Hoffman’s voice cut in. “Is the platform secure? Can’t see anything else moving from up here.”
“Just finishing up,” Marcus said. “KR units, stand by for casevacs.”
The relative quiet that suddenly fell across the rig was weird. Baird cou
ld hear the whoosh and thump of the waves again, and metal clanging as people ran along gantries. Raven engines faded in and out on the wind.
Then there was a dull, echoing thud. Baird thought it was something settling from the damage, maybe the fire spreading and buckling plates, but then he heard Marcus, and knew it wasn’t.
“Shit,” Marcus said. “Stalk! We got another stalk! More polyps, coming through the other side of the well bay!”
So Mitchell was right. There was another stalk to take its buddy’s place.
“Shit,” Baird said, and ran for the center of the platform.
Dom never paused to consider what would kill him first, a polyp or a vapor explosion. He was living a second at a time, unable to think outside the moment until the mass of polyps he was firing into finally slowed or stopped.
The creatures boiled up through a buckled sheet of steel and met a hail of automatic fire from Marcus, a Gorasni driller, and four of the roughnecks. Dom wasn’t surprised to see Trescu burst into the compartment and open fire as well. It just seemed a regular thing for the guy to do.
But the polyps kept coming. Every minute or two there was a long pause, as if the stalk had run out of ammo, and then it would start up again. Dom had lost track of the time. Hours, minutes? Minutes. Maybe fifteen. Maybe thirty. He couldn’t stop to check.
“Where else are they getting in?” Marcus yelled, reloading. “Can we get a fuel hose down here and burn them out?”
“They burst one of the vapor tanks,” the driller said. “Yeah, you kill them. You kill us, too. The whole damn rig.”
Another explosion shook the metal grating Dom was standing on. The polyps rushed out of another gap in the deck. It was now impossible to tell what damage was down to exploding polyps igniting gas leaks, and what was part of the chain of disaster set off by the initial fire under the living quarters. All anyone could do was stand and fight and try not to die. The thickening fog of black smoke made that a challenge.
“Where’s all that smoke coming from?” Marcus yelled.
Dom couldn’t tell if it was drifting or if they were right underneath the seat of a fire. “Dunno. But we can’t stay in here much longer without breathing apparatus.”