"Do we have any weapons?" Captain Rollk was the first to speak up, his voice projecting loud enough for the entire bar to hear.
"I do, sort of," the bartender replied in a somewhat flustered tone. He reached under the bar and pulled out a long metal tube, with a claw-like appendage on the end. "It's a nerve inhibitor, like the cops use back on Earth. We keep it around in case one of our patrons gets too rowdy."
"You wanna stop a lizard army with a freaking pain stick?" A voice spoke up from the other side of the room. It was a large, rather imposing man. Rollk looked him up and down as he approached with his chest puffed up.
"Can you offer alternatives?" the captain replied in a matter-of-fact way.
The man continued walking until he reached the table. He slammed his fists down on the rickety wooden structure, rattling its contents.
"And who the hell put you in charge, alien?" Jack could smell the alcohol on the large gentleman's breath.
Without a sound, Rollk got up from his booth and dashed towards the unruly patron with cat-like grace. Now, only inches away from him, the disparity in their sizes was clearly noticeable. But even though he only reached up to his chest, the Zargon captain seemed to tower over the man. He was looking him right in the eyes, with his hands neatly clasped behind his back. No expression could be read on his face, and he clearly did not seem impressed or intimidated by the large man.
"I am called Rollk, not Alien," the captain said with a nearly imperceptible grin on his face as he extended his arm towards the other man.
With a sloppy motion, the irate patron swung his arm towards Rollk's open hand, knocking it away. Undeterred, the Zargon resumed his initial position, straight as an arrow with his hands behind his back. The drunk man launched his arm for a second time, this time aimed at the captain's face. Before Jack could react, or even process what was about to happen, the man was on the floor, and Rollk's hands were returned to their original position, behind his back. He spoke up once again, this time more forcefully:
"My name is Captain Rollk, of the Zargon Pathfinding Guild. I have fought the Kharlath, and I have survived. If you would also like to survive, do as I say." He walked towards the middle of the room, and continued: "We will need to barricade the entrance. Everything not bolted down needs to be brought to the center of the room. Those of you with combat training, look for anything that might be fashioned into a weapon. Everyone else, work on the barricade."
In a rather disorganized fashion, the entire bar set to work. Soon enough, an assortment of furniture, equipment, and various other items were clumped up in the center of the room. Under the captain's diligent supervision, Alfred and Anil each grabbed a weapon, a butcher's knife and a large metal pipe, and a rabble of burly looking men and women followed suit. In a matter of minutes, half the bar's patrons were armed with an array of cooking utensils, broken bottles, and various blunt instruments, and half the establishment's furniture was propped up against the door. One of the aforementioned burly men, armed with a table leg, walked up to Rollk. The captain tensed up, almost imperceptibly.
"I'm Edgar Jones, I work maintenance on this station," the Zargon returned to his relaxed demeanor. "I know where we can get some real weapons." Rollk gestured towards the man to approach: "Speak."
"Directly below the security quarters next door, there's an armory. We have guns there, nothing really fancy but a couple dozen plasma pistols and a few rifles would be much better than cutlery and furniture." He gestured towards a sealed panel behind the bar. "There's service ducts connecting every room in this wing of the station, but we need someone small enough to fit in them, and nimble enough to navigate them with no equipment."
"I can do it!" Jack volunteered. He didn't know exactly why he said it, and he started regretting it almost immediately, but he didn't let it show. With renewed confidence, he once again proclaimed: "Back on Magellan, I used to go rock climbing every summer. If I can climb mountains in 1.3Gs, I can go down a few meters of service ducts in 0.9." It was a lie, but not one anyone present could catch him in. With the panel promptly unscrewed, the young recruit was soon lowered down into the ducts. Edgar, the maintenance worker, placed a firm hand on his shoulder as Jack crouched down in the ducts.
"All you have to do is crawl forward for about fifty meters. There's gonna be two shafts going down; make sure you don't fall in them. Once you reach the third shaft, then you can descend. That's the tricky part. It's about an 8-meter drop, I think, so you can't jump straight down, or you will break your legs. But it should be narrow enough that you can just scale it down with your arms and legs pressed against the walls, like this," he pushed his fingers into his palm to illustrate the motion Jack was supposed to do. He was familiar with it, in theory. "Once you're down there, you should see another hatch like this one, on your left." He lifted up the service hatch and turned it around, revealing a small handle. "This is the emergency release; pull it three times at 2-second intervals and the screws should come loose, and you can get into the armory."
Jack nodded as he turned his attention towards the tunnel. He turned on his flashlight, put it in his mouth, and started slowly crawling through the narrow tube.
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"Good luck!" Edgar gave him an encouraging smile as he ventured deeper into the ducts.
With the light from the bar getting smaller, and only a tiny flashlight for company, Jack couldn't help but feel trapped, both metaphorically and literally. There was no backing out now. But why did he even offer to do this in the first place? Surely, someone else would have volunteered, maybe even someone who was actually capable of pulling it off. "Eve would have volunteered." The thought struck him like lightning. Is that why he chose to risk his life? For a girl he had just met? He was now at the first vertical shaft. With a clumsy gesture, he lurched his body over it. His chest made a muffled 'thud' sound as it scraped against the metal edge of the opening. With a groan, he dragged the lower half of his body over the duct and resumed his crawl. He could hear distant sounds of fighting, and wondered if they had reached the bar yet. "What if I manage to get there with the weapons, and everyone is already dead?" he thought to himself. "Or what if they never make it in, and I break my legs here for nothing?" Selfishly, he thought of both alternatives as equally terrible. His left arm suddenly fell through the ground as he flopped onto his belly. The flashlight jumped out of his mouth and disappeared into the void, with a loud bang announcing its arrival on the lower floor. He had reached the second shaft.
Jack stopped for a few moments and pondered his next course of action. He could press on in the dark, but that would lower his already slim chances of making it out. Going down for it and climbing back up seemed equally unfeasible. Of course, he could simply descend to the lower level here, and continue towards the Armory, but Edgar had specifically told him to climb down at the third shaft. There must have been a reason. After what seemed like forever, he finally came to a decision. He turned on the display on his wristpad, set the brightness to maximum, and lurched over the second gap, this time more successfully. The faint light was just enough for him to see where he was going, and he continued crawling with renewed vigor. Surely, losing his flashlight was his fill of bad luck for the time being. He made his way towards the third opening and slowly began his descent.
With his knees almost pressed to his chest, and his heels dug into the wall, Jack slowly but surely began lowering himself down. The pins on the back of his jacket scraped against the surface of the duct, making a cacophonous screech with every movement, but at least it drowned out any other noise coming from outside. After what seemed like hours, he could finally make out the ground below. But there was another problem. The lower duct was much taller than the one he had just climbed down from, which meant that he would have to jump down from higher than he expected. He tried to orient himself so that he would fall standing up, but to no avail; he was stuck in his current position. Jack took a healthy breath, braced himself, and slowly relaxed his body. A sharp pain coursed through his body as he fell down on his behind. With the air knocked out of his lungs, he took a few moments to recover before he gritted his teeth and jumped up to his feet.
Being able to stand up again more than made up for the unpleasantness of his fall. He took a moment to stretch and crack his back, and then looked around to assess his surroundings. The way back was sealed with insta-foam; he was lucky that he hadn't gone down the second shaft after all. In the darkness, he could barely make out a hatch. He paced up and down the corridor a few times to make sure there were no other alternatives. On the far end, about 10 meters further, there was a locked door. Besides it and the hatch, there were no other access points. The hatch led to the armory; this was it.
Jack took a deep breath and pressed his ear against the cold metal hatch. He could make out no sounds from inside, but he wasn't sure if this was a relief or not. He took another breath, grabbed onto the handle, and pulled it down in one decisive motion. It clicked. He counted two seconds and pulled it down again. Another click. Two more seconds and a final click, and the hatch came loose. He gently placed it on the ground, as silently as he could, and crawled out into the room. He looked around without standing up. He was behind a shelf that obscured his view of most of the armory, but even with his obstructed view, it was obvious that a fight had taken place here. The walls were singed with plasma, and the air smelled of sweat and burned flesh. For a moment, Jack was paralyzed. He was so focused on the challenge of getting through the ducts that he didn't even consider what dangers might have awaited him on the other side. He quickly snapped himself out of it and prepared for whatever was going to come next. He hadn't come all this way just to run back empty-handed. Crawling under the shelf, he could get a much better look at the rest of the room. The armory was in total chaos, and bodies were strewn all over the place. Mostly human, mutilated beyond recognition. He had seen corpses before, of course, but not like this. He had never seen the face of someone who died without knowing it, the sheer terror of that last split second, realizing that their existence had ended without their knowledge or consent. And he had never seen what a Kharlath energy lance does to a living being. He could feel vomit bubbling up in his throat, but he swallowed his spit, as he swallowed his fear. There were no signs of anyone living in the entire room, and there were plenty of weapons. With a last deep breath, he climbed out from under the shelf.
He picked up a large bag still clinging to the shoulder of a woman and emptied its contents on the floor: a towel, a can of deodorant, a change of clothes, some fuzzy self-heating socks—the kind he always wanted but never got around to buying—and a book. Paperback, old school. All these things were once the treasured possessions of somebody, but now they were just objects, forever orphaned in a split second. He picked up the book and glanced at it. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. He had tried to read it once but gave up before he finished it. "I wonder if she knew how it ends," he thought to himself. He put it back in the bag, without asking himself why. He didn't know this woman's name or anything else about her, but he could find out how the book ends for her. An insignificant gesture, but the only one he could think of.
With the bag loosely strung around his shoulder, Jack began to gather all the weapons he could find. He picked up a plasma pistol off the ground and felt its weight in his hand. It was heavier than he expected and felt unnatural to hold, completely unlike the guns he had access to back on Magellan. Those were for pest control; this was a weapon of war. He quickly threw it in his bag and picked up another, and another, each one feeling more and more natural in his hand. After several minutes of scrounging around, Jack could feel the bag weigh down on his shoulder. Just as he turned to leave, a blood-curdling scream stopped him dead in his tracks.