Valerie had been unconscious for far too long if the interminable list of warnings on her HUD was to be believed. But, baring a very sick joke from the universe, she was still alive. That… was good, pain and all. And she was still in the pod, meaning the skidrells hadn’t discovered her. Yet.

No time like the moment to get working. She sent a short signal to the systems on-board her pod, asking for a status report. The reply came back wrapped in red, angry warnings. Anything that could go wrong did, along with some things that had no business doing so.

Lovely.

She traced the list of events back to the moment of launch. It was all going according to plan at that moment, except that the storm proved to be a bit more enthusiastic than the initial models suggested. Valerie’s pod was launched and, almost immediately, the storm blew her off course. Her fake missile took some glancing anti-air hits, and those pushed her far away from her intended target.

Everything else after that went, more or less, according to specs. Her auxiliary payloads had detached and detonated as the pod dug into the skin of the alien vessel, and the pod itself splintered away from the explosions, to appear like an oversized piece of shrapnel. It explained the bumpy ride and the splitting headache. During those moments, she had lost consciousness.

Another ping got back the results of a short range scan of the vicinity of the pod. No movement, no life-signs, no communication bursts. Good. Maybe she didn’t end up close to the reactor core of the Delirium, as intended, but she was still somewhere safe, all things considered.

‘Let’s get out of here and get on with work,’ Valerie urged herself as she sent forward the code for the pod to open. She still had the main explosive payload secured, and a ping to it returned green status. Deploying that would blow a sizeable chunk out of the alien craft, but it was to be used as a last option or not at all.

The pod refused to obey her command. It cracked open a couple of inches, but the rest was the sound of grinding servos. An error flashed on Valerie’s HUD. Something was blocking the mechanism. The cause couldn’t be identified.

‘Damn.’

Inside, she had just enough room to breathe. When they designed the pod, her comfort had been the furthest thing from the minds of the engineers. They had made it to withstand violent insertion and to deliver its cargo, alive and in only one piece. Valerie mumbled a few choice words for those engineers, but decided on saving those up for when she’d meet with them face to face. The thought of banging their skulls together gave her a moment of pleasure in the dire circumstances.

She tried to push forward with her arms. She had them crossed at her chest, and the pod’s inside was modelled so that she wouldn’t have any kind of wiggle room for a snug fit. The cracked exterior allowed her the barest of movement, but it wasn’t enough to push against whatever was holding her trapped.

Valerie stabbed the roof of her mouth with her prehensile tongue, drawing the rich, coppery taste of her enhanced blood. The filament on the tip of her tongue extended and dug into the glands secreted away in there. She would have preferred to not use them yet, but she was already running behind schedule. Her primary objective was to get away from the insertion point the moment the pod came to a stop. Nobody expected her to lose consciousness upon entry.

A micro-dose would be enough to get her free.

When she pushed again, the pod’s structure crumpled like paper under her strength, together with the panel that held it from opening. Valerie erupted out of the wreckage with a sound like a detonating grenade. She ripped apart the pod’s forward half and extracted herself through the rend. She needed a moment to calm down and get off the stim high. A micro-dose had been more than enough as her heart threatened to rip out of her chest.

‘Lucky I don’t need to breathe any more,’ she thought as she tried to figure out where she was. The pod looked to have embedded itself into a crawl space between walls. Valerie took stock of the situation. It would be impossible to retrieve the explosive charge mounted at the opposite end of the metal cylinder. She reached inside and recovered some of her gear, but nothing else. The space was about as large as the inside of the pod. She stretched as much as she could in the cramped space, and her bones popped into proper position and alignment again. Her tail extended as well and held her tight in place while she dug out her supplies and her weapon.

It wouldn’t be long until whatever the Delirium used as a repair crew worked their way to her. The first stage explosives had deployed, as intended, to draw attention away from the actual cargo so she’d have time to get out and be on her way. She could stay and fight her way through whatever came, but that was a stupid plan. Her threat assessment routines agreed.

She tasted the air with a flick of her tongue.

It wasn’t air, of course. Most of the usual suspects were there, but the atmosphere was ammonia, mostly. The pressure was also thrice that aboard the Wild Summer, but they had built Valerie to withstand much more.

They had assured her she would detect the reactor’s waste discharge in the air. The elements she looked for weren’t present, even in trace amounts, in the surrounding atmosphere.

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‘Right then, I’m way off target. Need to move.’

Down seemed like a good idea. And as far away as possible, as quickly as possible. Ideally, she would have closed off the pod to buy herself as much time as possible before detection, but that couldn’t be helped now. Her in-cranium implants were busy calculating her likely location, uploading schematics as they drew their conclusions. The most probable position was one of the SR-drone storage ports, or somewhere near that. Most of the systems in that area would be automated, which added minutes to the estimated time until discovery.

Valerie scurried down through the crawl space, body laid flat against the smooth metal wall. She used her claws to steady herself and go down and towards the keel of the Delirium. Her missile had been aimed at hitting the aft side if all things went to plan, but her programs suggested she was somewhere near the bow. It was a wonder she had survived her ballistic trajectory at all, as she had been right in the line of fire for the anti-air guns.

The boys and girls of the Valkyrie squad must have been making things too chaotic for the enemy just then. She spared a moment’s thought, and a brief prayer, for the six braves that delivered her. She hoped they escaped with their lives. And if they hadn’t, she would drink to their memory once she got back to the Ark.

If she reached the reactor and got solid intel about the cloaking technology the Delirium used, it would pay in full for any lives lost for this fool's mission. That included her lost humanity.

‘Bad time to mope. Wouldn’t it be a kick in the pants if the Delirium is automated entirely?’

Valerie stopped her tight descent. Even as she tried to move without disturbing cables and conduits, going lower had become impossible. The walls had closed in tight enough that she couldn’t squeeze further. Going back up was an option, but a poor one. She could hear the faint echoes of metal scraping on metal. Moments later, an alarm started reverberating through the ship, high and shrill.

She switched vision modes and kept looking for a way out. The alarm was trouble, yes, but it wasn’t out of mission parameters. It would do her no good to get riled up.

And sure enough, she found what she needed. Up some ways, one panel emitted a different thermal reading. She ran the tips of her fingers along the smooth surface of the wall until she found a seam. The skidrells built everything so smooth and seamless, but Valerie knew there always existed a seam somewhere. She jammed a tungsten steel claw through the seam and pulled to the side. Light flooded the small space as she pushed open the panel and slid out into a shimmering corridor.

‘You’re making a cock up of things, Valerie,’ she chastised herself as the alarm redoubled in volume. She couldn’t hide in the too bright, mirror shined space, and panic stabbed at her for a moment. From down the corridor came the sounds of armoured footsteps, accompanied by skidrell voices. She didn’t need a translator to understand the word for ‘intruder’.

With no other option left just then, Valerie tongued another gland. Her smooth, gilded skin felt as if it burned and then tightened. The pain blinded her for a moment. She launched herself at the tall ceiling of the corridor and faded from view just as four skidrells came up her exit position, speaking in their oddly melodious tones. They were armed with projectile weapons, armoured lightly, and set about checking out the bent panel underneath her.

Moments later, one of them sang a command, and they split into two groups. Two of them followed the bend of the corridor, weapons held at the ready. A cold dread washed over Valerie as she tasted the oil on the weapons, and the sharp tang of the igniting powder.

The other group pried open the wall pane and crawled inside to check. Valerie smiled at that as she moved into a better position. Her sweat glands helped her stick to the strange alloy the skidrells used in their ship construction, but it was best if she didn’t rely too much on its properties. Like all of her abilities, it came with a cost. Already, she felt the effects of her active camouflage and the cost it exacted. Her head swam as her energy reserved drained.

Without a sound, and covered by the scraping and banging of the two soldiers, she reached inside her thigh cavity and slid out her diamond bladed knife. The flesh made no sound as it opened up to allow retrieval and then mended back. Her tail moved down. She brought out the spike on the tip of her tail and the glands along her back pumped venom into the sacks lining the length of her extra appendage.

She waited with bated breath.

The first trooper stuck its head inside the opening and called something to his colleague.

Valerie struck downward with her tail. The spike punched through the top of the trooper’s head and straight down into its throat. Only a grunt escaped the creature as it tried weakly to struggle. It only let out a soft, muffled gurgle. She injected her venom and the skidrell’s organs melted inside its chest cavity. Otherwise, the skidrells showed an upsetting tendency to regenerate from the strangest of wounds.

When the one in the crawl space pulled back to see why its companion wasn’t answering, Valerie dropped on top of it with her knife raised and ready. She pulled out her bloodied tail just as the blade cut through the trooper’s throat, bright purple blood squirting over her. She stabbed with her tail through the lightweight body armour the creature wore. It would have died screaming, but she wrapped her free hand over its split jaw, holding tight until she was certain it died. Its three green eyes with cross shaped irises stared at her in horror and an all too human display of hatred.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she whispered as she packed the corpse into the tight space. “You started all of this, not us.”

She dragged the other corpse inside as well and followed in for a moment. The killings bought her mere minutes, and she needed to replenish her wasted reserves.

Valerie hated this part.

With little time to waste, she opened up her jaw. It hadn’t been designed to do this painlessly, to split apart and distend to the sides like a reptilian abomination. Two rows of large fangs, nestled inside the jawbone, pushed out through the soft tissue of her mouth. She bit a sizeable chunk out of the first corpse and drank in the liquefied mixture of purple viscera. The venom, once used, turned the skidrell insides into a compatible source of nutrition for Valerie’s physiology, meant to help her survive behind the enemy’s lines.

The bio-techs who worked on her had acknowledged and allowed for a single modification based on her own feedback. They ignored everything else, deemed it ‘working as intended’, or considered too trite to bother with. But on one point Valerie had stood her ground with absolute conviction until they saw no choice but to relent.

She could turn off her sense of taste. And she couldn’t be more grateful for this.