Outpost

She stood up. A monster in the mirror. A face weeping metal. Eyes behind a mask of spines. She smashed the mirror with a grotesque club-hand.

Rye woke. Silver walls. She was standing in one of the walk-in freezers. A mouthful of rotten meat. A big slab of ribs, furred green, hung in front of her on a hook. Bite marks on the ribs. Rye spat half-chewed fat and splintered bone on to the floor. No substitute for fresh sinew, for sinking her teeth into warm flesh.

She turned to leave, but jerked to a stop. Her left hand was frozen to the wall. How long had she stood catatonic? Her clothes were stiff with ice. She tugged her hand away from the metal. Skin tore. No pain. A palm-print glued to the wall.

Rye woke. She found herself jostling with infected passengers. Stench and rot. A dozen monsters pounding at a door, scratching and hammering, trying to reach the meat. Hawaiian shirts and paper garlands. A night of limbo and pina coladas turned to hell.

Fingers raked the hatch metal. Broken nails and streaked blood. The hatch was giving way. It was wedged shut by a barricade the other side of the door. Rye heard furniture start to shift.

Bodies hurled against the door. Chairs and tables began to subside.

Rye kicked legs. She tripped the passengers. She wanted to slow them down. She wished she had her radio. She could warn the Rampart crew of impending attack. They were about to be swamped. Cornered. Killed in their beds.

The door gave way and swung open. A collapsing mountain of furniture. Rye stepped back, waiting for grenades to detonate and consume the crowd in brilliant white fire.

Nothing.

Jane and Ghost were waiting on the other side of the door, shotguns raised like a firing squad. Twin muzzle flash. Explosive roar. Scrambled brain matter.

Jane stood hazed in gunsmoke. She slotted fresh shells and racked the slide. Efficient shots, point-blank to the face like a stone-cold killer.

‘Hey,’ shouted Rye. ‘Hey, Jane.’

Jane saw her. No recognition. She raised her shotgun. Rye dived sideways to avoid the blast.

Jane and Ghost re-sealed the door. Rye lay among smouldering, headless bodies and listened as they rebuilt the barricade.

Rye’s last moments of full consciousness, the last time she was truly herself, occurred deep in the heart of the ship. She was stumbling down a stairwell. She was not alone. She found herself leading a crowd of passengers in fancy dress.

On her left was a man in a dinner suit and pig mask. Spikes pierced the pig snout. The man could never remove the mask. He would spend the rest of his short life squinting through rubber eye-holes.

On her right was a man in a bunny costume, fur matted with blood.

The stairs led down into dark water. One of the hull plates had popped a seam below the waterline when Hyperion collided with the refinery. The ship was still seaworthy but a couple of mid-section compartments were flooded.

At the bottom of the stairwell, beneath the icy water, was a door that would lead to rooms directly below the officers’ quarters. The door wouldn’t be wedged shut and it wouldn’t be strung with grenades. A blind spot. The Rampart crew wouldn’t anticipate anyone would rise out of seawater.

Rye reached the point where water lapped the stairs. She kept walking. Knee-deep, waist-deep, chest-deep, and finally submerged.

Smothering silence. Green, sub-aqueous murk. Rye walked slowly like an astronaut. The cold should have killed her but she could barely feel it. She was breathing water, but it didn’t seem to matter.

The bottom of the stairwell. A submerged electric wall lamp, sealed in a glass bubble, still burned bright. A sculpin swam past Rye’s face and darted into a floor vent.

She found the hatch. She turned the handles and pulled it open. There must have been a cupboard of bathroom supplies nearby because the water around her was filled by a blizzard of dissolved toilet paper.

Rye walked through the doorway. She looked over her shoulder. The grotesque animal forms of her companions kept pace behind her. A clown with one arm. A ballet dancer, tights lumped and stretched by tumorous growth.

More stairs. Rye climbed upward, water cascading from her clothes as she broke the surface. Her companions followed, shaking water from their animal heads, stumbling under the weight of their sodden costumes.

Her thoughts cleared for a moment and she realised the terrible carnage she was about to unleash. The refinery crew were two decks above them, eating dinner, convinced they were safe behind barricades.

Rye reached in her pocket for the grenade, then remembered she had given it away. Maybe she should trigger the sprinkler system and raise the alarm. But a moment later she could no longer remember who she was, and why she was standing in a stairwell jostled by monsters in tattered carnival costume. She joined the herd and shambled up the stairs alongside her nightmare companions towards the Rampart crew, ready to rip and tear.

Part Three FALLBACK

The Refuge