When the Devil Dances

“What’s wrong?” Shari asked, nodding at the door. “Left or right?”

“I dunno,” Wendy said. “There’s only supposed to be one door.” She palmed the controls for the right-hand door, but it wouldn’t open even after she punched in the override code. Neither would the left-hand door. But they’d dealt with that before.

“Blast the right door,” she said.

Shari stepped forward and carefully pointed the nitrogen wand at the center of the door; she had been splashed lightly once, painfully, and had, thereafter, donned one of the hazardous materials suits. The light ramex suits were no proof against Posleen railgun rounds, but they were dandy for keeping off the occasional splashes of hyper-cold liquid.

Normally the door would harden and turn brittle; the memory plastic was not proof against the cold of the liquid nitrogen. In this case it simply cascaded to the floor and ran off to the side, rapidly boiling off.

“Step back,” Wendy warned. “That stuff could make you anoxic in a heartbeat. Interesting, the door looks like memory plastic, but it’s blasplas.”

“What’s that mean?” Shari asked, exhaustedly. The trek had drained her to the floor.

“It means somebody wants it looking absolutely normal, but impenetrable,” Wendy said. “Try the left door; we don’t have time for mysteries.”

The second door immediately turned to gray and then white, the memory plastic hardening from the cryogenic bath. When the fog began to clear she stepped forward and placed the punch gun against the door, firing it and shattering the brittle plastic.

The Posleen normal on the other side looked down at the suddenly disappeared door then up at the human blocking the doorway and started to raise his boma blade.

Shari let out a yell and pointed the wand at the Posleen, firing a stream of the liquid into his face.

The normal let out a shrill garbled cry that only served to open his mouth to the stream. Shrilling in pain it tumbled backwards into the room as Wendy leaned over Shari and fired two bursts into his chest. The first burst bounced off of and shattered the flattened breast bone that armored the Posleen’s chest and, but the second burst pierced through to the heart and the normal slumped to the ground as if genuflecting.

Wendy swept the rest of the room but, as far as she could tell, it was all clear.

The vast chamber was obviously a mixing room of some sort, nutrients from the smell of it. There was a rich stench of ammonia and phosphate in the air and the floor was lined with massive tanks, ten or twelve feet high and thirty or forty feet across. The room was gigantic; the ceiling was high with large fans at the top and it was at least a hundred or a hundred and fifty yards across.

The doorway had opened onto a small metal-grate platform. A catwalk led from it, between rows of tanks, to a door on the wall in the distance. In the middle it was bisected by another catwalk that crossed the room side to side and there was a large control station at the intersection.

Wendy waved the others in and trotted towards the center. It had been decided that since the greatest threat was the Posleen coming up behind them, Elgars would cover the rear. She was backed up by Billy, who had his pistol and reloads for her. Shari had the nitrogen tank and the bag full of uniforms and respirators while Shannon carried Amber. Wendy led the way, both as the second best fighter and the one who knew the route.

The children followed wearily behind her. The trek had been long and extremely tiring, but they understood that they had to keep up. One of the adults, usually Wendy, would carry the youngest ones from time to time. And they slowed down for them when they felt they could. But the children had grown up with the war and the Posleen were the ultimate bogey-men; they would keep running until they dropped of exhaustion or were told to stop by an adult.

Wendy had reached the intersection before the captain entered the room. When she got there she consulted her map, but the last “secure” area would, according to the map, be through the right-hand door. She considered it then walked over, palming the pad. From the inside, the door opened easily. Sticking her head through, she checked the far room. It was, as the map said, a storage room for the nutrient materials. She waved the rest to follow and waited for them to catch up.

Elgars swept her rifle from side to side, turning to cover back and sides as she closed up the group. As she passed through the intersection something seemed to scream at her from the back of her mind. She had learned to listen to these little internal comments and she did now, looking around the room for whatever threat the voice was trying to tell her of.

After a moment she leaned her rifle up against the console and considered it thoughtfully while rubbing the bridge of her nose.

Wendy checked the far room again, but it was still clear. When she saw Elgars put her rifle down she swore.