Kamak barely made it out the door of Kiz’s office before another impact rattled the station. To Vo was still waiting outside, but the Doccan guard was nowhere to be seen.
“Damn it, where’s my guard?” Kiz shouted.
“He ran away,” To Vo said.
“Must’ve decided it was logical to bail on you,” Kamak snapped back. He grabbed To Vo and shoved her towards the exit. “Come on, move. We’re leaving.”
Another rattling impact and the sound of a large explosion emphasized Kamak’s point. They started running in the direction of the hangar -followed, for some reason, by Kiz Timeka.
“Aren’t your ships the other way?”
“Yes, the other way, the same direction as the explosions, Kamak,” Kiz said. “Get me on your ship and off this station.”
Kamak could’ve made a large number of sarcastic comments about the irony of the situation, but he saved them for later. There’d be plenty of time for mockery when, and if, they got off the station alive.
“Tooley, are you seeing anything on your end?”
“Not a fucking thing,” Tooley said. “Guest hangar’s on the far side of whatever the fuck is going on. Only thing I’ve seen is some of Timeka’s boys flying away as fast as they can. Or trying to, at least. They’re mostly exploding.”
“They’re shooting down starfighters with kinetics?”
The impacts shaking the station could only be caused by kinetic projectiles, a rare and highly impractical choice for stellar warfare. The station was a large, slow moving target, but it was also close to the gravity well of the nearby sun, which made aiming more difficult.
“Doesn’t look like it,” Tooley noted. “Conventional energy weapons, as far as I can tell.”
“So, split munitions, or-”
Another impact rattled the station, and Kamak decided that speculating on his opponents weaponry could wait. He took the lead, cursing his luck, cursing Morrakesh, and cursing the universe at large as he did so. This should’ve been his masterstroke, and now it was just another disaster.
As he sprinted down the hall, Kamak took a second to glare backwards at Kiz. She was half the reason the situation had gone to shit so badly. In an ideal world, Kamak’s message would’ve gone out to the entire Timeka board of directors. Instead, Kiz had intercepted it for herself, presumably to steal all the glory of stopping Timeka’s graverobbing problem. Now all of Kamak’s hopes for survival were pinned on one bitch. At least Tooley had gotten him used to that dynamic.
The station rattled with a heavy impact once more, one that felt much closer this time. Curiously, only seconds after the impact, the klaxons blaring throughout the station fell silent. Somehow, the silence didn’t make Kamak feel safe.
His instincts proved reliable once again, when the lights went out. A few strips of safety lights illuminated the edges of the hallway, but other than their scant red glow, the hallway was pitch black.
“Well, that’s the central power shot,” Kamak said. “Must’ve hit the central core.”
“Can’t be,” Kiz said.
“You have another explanation for why the lights are out?”
“I don’t know, but they can’t have hit the core,” Kiz protested. “The entire station is built around it. If they’d bombarded that, the entire place would be falling apart.”
Kamak stopped dead in his tracks and held up a hand, causing Kiz and To Vo to grind to a halt behind him. Kiz nearly questioned the sudden pause, but Kamak shushed her with one hand and drew his pistol with the other.
“Move. Fast. Quiet,” Kamak whispered.
“What the fuck are you doing, Kamak?” Kiz shouted. “We need to get out of here now!”
The moment her petulant screaming stopped, the sound of skittering limbs and strange, alien babbling echoed down the hall back at them. Kamak glared daggers at Kiz while he aimed his gun into the empty blackness.
“The power’s down because it’s been cut,” Kamak said. “Those impacts weren’t a bombardment-”
The skittering sounds started to get louder and louder.
“-they were boarding parties.”
The first spindly limb appeared in the dull red glow of the emergency lights, and Kamak took a shot at it. He heard a squeal of pain, and the limb retracted. One small arm retracted, and a hundred more emerged in its place.
The many-armed alien they had seen on Morrakesh’s ship lunged from the shadows, its circular body spinning in spirals as it skittered forward on all of its dozens of limbs. Based solely on the way it rapidly spun in their direction like a child doing cartwheels, Kamak might’ve thought it amusing, but he’d seen one of those things rip a grown man to shreds and eat the pieces. He took aim at the spinning alien and kept firing until it stopped moving. Kiz quietly gasped in horror as the unknown alien skidded to a dead stop at her feet, myriad limbs motionless and dead.
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“Quiet’s shot,” Kamak snapped. “Now move. Fast.”
Kiz didn’t stop to question him this time. All three broke into a dead sprint down the hallway as the shouts of incomprehensible alien tongues grew louder and more frenzied behind them. Kamak kept one hand on his gun and the other on his communicator as he ran.
“Farsus, those fucked up aliens are on the station,” Kamak said. “Get the guys, get the guns, and shoot anything with more than four limbs. Do not let them get near the Hermit.”
“We’ve seen no trouble so far,” Farsus said. When the violence had started, he’d not sat around waiting for Kamak’s approval to grab a gun. “I believe most of the intruders are on your end of the station.”
“I believe it,” Kamak said. He could hear a cacophony of skittering behind him. The sheer number of limbs each alien had made it impossible to estimate just how many were after him, but he would hazard a guess at “a lot”.
Kamak’s dead sprint through the dark halls took him to a crossroads in the station’s corridors, with three hallways branching off from the now-inactive elevator entrance. That was good. Multiple options meant some of the aliens might go the wrong way. But before anyone else could go the wrong way, Kamak needed to know the right way.
“Alright, Kiz, which way are the stairs?”
“What stairs?”
If not for the skittering horde of aliens that were no doubt all too close behind them, Kamak might have turned the gun on Kiz.
“The fucking stairs,” he snapped. “The stairs you walk down when the power’s out and the fucking elevator doesn’t work!”
“We don’t-”
“Of course you fucking don’t!”
Kamak bent down and dug his fingers into the small crease between the elevator door and the floor. The elevator doors on the station opened by sliding upwards, adding the weight of gravity to the already difficult task of prying the door open. To Vo bent down to help, while Kiz pressed her back against the wall and stared fearfully at the darkness.
“Your station is in violation of GC Employee Health and Safety Guideline Ten-Twenty One B,” To Vo grunted. The elevator door actually started to budge after she said that, as if quoting bullshit regulations gave her strength.
“There’s a ladder in the elevator shaft,” Kiz hissed.
“A ladder is not handicap accessible,” To Vo snapped back. The heavy metal door started to give way, and Kamak tugged with all his might to make it move just a few more inches.
“Kiz, fucking do something,” Kamak grunted. He could hear the horde getting closer, and the crack they’d opened up was barely wide enough to stick a hand through.
“Give me your gun,” Kiz said. “I’ll hold them off.”
“How stupid do you think I am? You want to live, lift the door,” Kamak demanded.
As the skittering got too close to ignore, Kiz Timeka bent down and very reluctantly did manual labor for what was very likely the first, and very likely the last, time in her life. Weak as she was, the extra pair of hands gave them the necessary strength to lift the door. It slid upwards with a loud groan, almost loud enough to disguise the sound of the approaching aliens.
Kamak took one hand off the door and grabbed his gun. It was hard to aim and lift at the same time, but the alien’s tangled mass of limbs made for a fairly easy target. He pulled the trigger until he felt the power cell overheating and watched the bodies drop. Every flash of plasma fire illuminated the dark hallway, lighting up the bodies of the dead -and the grasping arms of those yet to die, crawling over the bodies of their fallen brothers.
Despite having dealt with the Doccan on more than one occasion, who also held no inherent fear of death nor concern for the lives of their kin, the horde’s ambivalence to the massacre unnerved Kamak. The Doccan simply ignored the bodies and moved on with their objective, cold and clinical. They couldn’t mourn if they tried. These many-armed freaks of nature clearly felt emotion, but did not let it interrupt them. They were driven—and deranged—in a way Kamak could not comprehend. He avoided thinking about it by making use of a few spare seconds to pull on the elevator door with both hands.
With a satisfying metallic thud, the elevator door slid open just wide enough that Kamak could reasonably squeeze beneath it. He took a quick glance inside the empty shaft, and spotted the ladder on the far wall. It would be a short jump—another glaring health and safety violation from the Timeka corporation—but Kamak was confident he could make it. It would just be a matter of timing their jumps to make sure the heavy metal door didn’t come crashing down on top of them. Kamak glanced over his shoulder to see how much time they had.
A pair of snapping pincers inches away from Kamak’s nose answered that question for him. None.
A lifetime spent dodging, and firing, bullets had given Kamak a strong sense of situational awareness, and a stronger sense of rapid situational logistics. Every problem broke down into math one way or another. In this case, the problem was a horde of flesh-eating aliens, plus a jump across an elevator shaft. Zero time to shout a meaningful warning. One door that would rapidly close. One hand to grab the ladder rungs. One hand free to grab someone else. Two people to grab.
One person left behind.
Kamak didn’t think. He acted. Solved the problem. One hand, one grab, one jump, one door closing. Act first, create a new situation, deal with new problems. He reached out a hand, grabbed, jumped, and let the elevator door slam down behind him. He managed to latch on to the ladder with his free hand, and let his guest on the jump swing low and manage to grab on to the rungs of the ladder as well. Only when he was safely in place, and heard the elevator door slam down with a sickening crunch, did Kamak appraise his new situation.
To Vo was on the ladder. Kiz was partially crushed by the elevator door. Blood was leaking from her mouth, and the excited chattering of their alien enemies said they were right on top of her. Kamak was confused.
He’d had the option, the choice, between the one woman in the galaxy capable of solving all his problems and To Vo La Su, whose name he couldn’t even remember half the time, and for some reason, he had chosen To Vo. His instincts had picked the paper pushing ex-cop over his best chance at survival. He couldn’t wrap his head around his own logic.
While Kamak struggled to make sense of his own actions, Kiz struggled with the consequences of them. She could no longer feel her legs, which may have been a blessing considering some of the sounds she could hear behind her. She tried to grab on to either side of the elevator doorway and pull herself free, but her mangled body lacked the strength to move. She struggled in vain, never moving an inch, until the desperate shock wore off, and she came to one inevitable conclusion. She looked up, and found that Kamak had traced this path to the same end.
The barrel of a pistol pointed right between Kiz’s eyes, though the hand that held it trembled. For the second time in his life, Kamak held a member of the Timeka family at gunpoint. Out of mercy, not malice, but that mattered very little. Against his better judgment, Kamak looked Kiz in the eyes. She couldn’t even speak, but in that moment, Kamak knew exactly what she was thinking.
Just like dad.