Chapter 21
Thatcher
With Ysa pressed protectively behind me, I led the way into the cell with the pulsing knot of darkness on the wall.
It was very tempting to fetch a flamethrower, but I did not think fire would be enough.
Ysa’s plan was a good one, very good. We’d drive the creature off our walls and into the Shadow Unit soldier.
That would possibly create a very dangerous, deadly opponent, but it would also present us with a chance to truly kill it.
I rather liked the way things were coming together.
“Call the captain,” I said under my breath.
“They need to converge on our location and provide backup, and end the sweep of the ship.” With the soldier pinned to the wall in the other cell, they did not need to search for him.
We could, however, use the help of the rest of the crew for the takedown.
Especially the Sineater; he would be useful.
Normally, I thought our crew could handle anything, but right now, I even wished the Vagabond’s gladiators could be here.
We’d survive this, I told myself over and over as I visually inspected each of the black tendrils.
I’d shoot the thickest veins first, then hack away at the thinner ones.
This time, I had to make absolutely certain not so much as a speck managed to slither away.
Especially with Ysa right behind me, in the thick of things.
I’d much prefer to send her away, but I did not trust that the entity wouldn’t try to trap her, or follow her.
It had it out for her from the start, and I did not think it had changed its objectives. Whatever they were.
I made sure Ysa was behind me, just in case it attacked again with acid like last time.
With a glance over my shoulder, I flicked the control at my collar and allowed my helmet to close around my head.
Ysa took that as her cue, and she dropped her hand to her belt.
Something hummed, flickered, and then a shimmer of blue enveloped her front.
A personal shield, one she had probably rigged herself.
So that’s how she’d protected herself last time. Good.
I raised my rifle, took a steadying breath, and aimed.
Backup wasn’t here yet. Ysa was only now reaching out to the captain to tell him of our find.
I knew we shouldn’t wait. The moment it finished its fight for dominance over the Shadow Unit soldier’s control, he’d attack.
They’d attack. We’d lose our chance to fully drive it into the human’s body, and this might never end.
The shot blazed a hole in the thickest of the black vines, and something squealed, awful, sharp, high-pitched.
I did not hesitate, did not wait, squeezing off shot after shot with precision, circling around the thick, bulging knot at the center to cut off each vein.
I braced myself, made sure Ysa was still safely behind her shield and my back, then blasted the knot as well.
It exploded, and like last time, acid sprayed thick and viscous.
I was briefly blinded by it as it coated the faceplate of my helmet, but none of it burned through the armor, holding steady thanks to Ysa’s tweaks.
Then my little engineer swore, and I thought perhaps the armor had failed and I just didn’t notice.
That was possible, as some parts of my body had been so damaged that the nerves would never fully recover.
My processor did not warn me of any danger, though.
I saw it too when I moved to cut the smaller tendrils with my knife: a burst of claws from the tips of my fingers.
A force field had come down in front of the cell we were now in, effectively locking us into the tight space with the entity clinging to the wall.
It had to be the creature’s doing. It wasn’t fighting back, but withering and twitching, curling in on itself and appearing to burrow deeper into the wall.
I cut into it, digging, clawing, destroying.
Acid burned the metal claws at my fingertips and ate at my gloves.
Whatever Ysa had done to strengthen my armor against this attack, it was beginning to fail, too.
I was so close, though, I could taste victory.
The entity lay in shriveled, broken pieces around my feet, and what remained was rapidly getting smaller.
I grasped it, pulled, and with a pop it broke free.
I saw a last little piece slither away, but it went into the skin at the back of the soldier’s neck.
Through that hole, I could see the entity, now part of the soldier, drop to the ground in the other cell.
I raised my rifle to the hole, took aim, and fired repeatedly.
The first shot struck, but after that, the soldier rolled lightning-fast across the ground and out of view.
What I could see of the neighboring cell was limited, but the force field in front of it seemed intact, like it was in front of ours.
I was breathing heavily, and sweat coated the back of my neck and dripped down my spine.
Adrenaline made my heart pump furiously in my chest, and warnings pinged across my processor, telling me I was overheated.
My nanobots were working to heal the smallest burns on my fingertips and smooth out the pitting along my claws caused by the acid.
Not trusting it one bit, I turned slowly to look at Ysa.
One eye on the hole, but my head cocked so I could see her too.
She was pale, her hand pressed to her mouth, shock filling her eyes.
I thought for a very brief moment that she had finally realized what a monster I was, and that she’d discovered she was scared of me after all.
Nothing was further from the truth. She reached for my hands, heedless of the claws still sticking through my gloves at the fingertips.
“It didn’t hold! I’m sorry, Thatcher! Does it hurt?
” She was concerned for me; my chest ached knowing that.
I couldn’t recall the last time someone had been worried about my well-being. Except her.
“It held long enough,” I said gruffly. There were absolutely no sounds coming from the other side of the wall.
I checked to see if I could see the creature, but there was only a small sliver of floor and force field visible through the hole.
We inspected the wall and the shriveled remains together and had to conclude there was no threat hiding there.
The entity appeared to have gone fully into the Shadow Unit soldier, as planned.
I couldn’t help but wonder if it hadn’t gone a bit too smoothly, our only obstacle the force field that now trapped us.
“Did you reach the captain?” I asked Ysa when I had finished a second check, then kicked all the yucky black remains into the corner farthest away from us.
I flicked the button on my helmet as well, releasing it back into the collar of my armor.
When she gave me a wide-eyed head shake, I felt something hard knot inside my belly.
Worry. That wasn’t the answer I was hoping for; it meant something was interfering, and there was only one answer to the question of who. Had this been a trap?
Ysa was as concerned about this as I was; I could tell from the furrow on her brow.
Hairs had come undone from her braid, and they curled, wispy and cute, around her face.
The pointed tips of her ears twitched, and her crossed-bone earrings glinted silver on her earlobes.
She was concentrating, hard, and she wasn’t liking what she saw on the handheld scanner she held.
“I think the entity managed to pull down all the bulkheads across the ship. Everyone is trapped wherever they were when it happened. That means no backup is coming, Thatch.” She pulled out her datapad and hunkered down on the ground so she could cradle it in her lap.
Her mouth pursed as her hands flew over the touchscreen, doing all kinds of technical things that went far beyond my understanding.
I saw schematics of the ship, but far more often there were diagrams with data or lines of code.
It looked like the kind of shit Mitnick liked to stare at in his free time, like it was fun.
“Yup,” Ysa said. “It managed to trap everyone before it went into that soldier’s body.
” She lifted her head and cocked it to the side, her elfin ears twitching even more.
“Do you hear that?” she said. “The engine’s tone has shifted.
I think we’re speeding up.” She swore. “I need to get control of our helm, and I need to see if I can reach Mitnick. If a manual override doesn’t work, he’s our best bet. ”
I paced the cell in front of her. “Okay, what do you need? How can I help?” The cell next to us was suspiciously quiet, and I was beginning to think that was because the entity hadn’t gone into the soldier at all.
It had just tricked us into thinking so.
I hated that Ysa was the one who had to solve this puzzle, and I knew the entity knew it too.
The longer we sat here, trapped, the more I feared it would do something to try to kill us.
“We need to restore comms, but I need to access that panel over there to do it,” Ysa said.
She pointed, and of course it was a panel directly across from us, outside the force field that trapped us.
“I’ll need to disable the shield first,” she muttered, and got up, pulling out the multi-tool dangling from her belt.
She glanced once at the box of tools I’d left at the entrance to the brig, but she did not comment on my failure to bring them.