They crept softly down the hallway, the lights flickered on ahead of them and off behind them. Pausing for a moment, Jack realized that the lights would give them away anyway, picked up his pace keeping his footsteps as silent as possible.
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She saw it before he did and with her muted mumbling unable to be heard over their footsteps, she tapped him and got no response. She then sent out a small electric shock into his shoulder and he turned towards her.
“Yeah, I just saw it too.”
They crept around the corner and peeked. Through half a mile of darkness, he wasn’t sure if he could see anything. She zapped him again and they traded places.
“Five.” “Small,” then she put her thumbs together and crawled her fingers.
“Crabs” he spit, “what about the big one?”
She shook her head, negative.
He switched back to the front and ran to the door. Once they were inside he had a heated discussion with the Terminal AI and she looked at him like he was crazy. She stared at what he called his Cryo-Pod for long moments. She looked at everything a lot with slightly-widened, inquisitive eyes. Eventually, she broke off her stare as he started calling out numbers and letters that she then entered into the keypad.
*Beep Click*
“Nice.” He was looking over her shoulder.
It opened and a stretchy, plastic-like seal liquified as it poured to the floor. Inside were small lockers to the side, some sort of light brown liquid in what looked like the water sacks on the top of the bottom drawer. Vertically placed in the middle was a gleaming rifle, an AK-47. She eagerly grabbed it, found ammunition, and popped in a magazine. She turned around to look at him with a cocky grin, the barrel angled to the ceiling.
*Blam!*
“Did you just… try to shoot me?” Jack asked from behind his shield, it wouldn’t have stopped the first but it would stop the second.
She didn’t respond though, she was looking over the rifle with confusion herself. She started to strip it in front of him. As she looked over each bullet they figured it out. They were prepared for something to go wrong they managed to not pick up any of the ricochets.
“So it’s your electricity huh? Hey, what are you doing?” Jack started to step back. Her fingers sparkled with electricity as she wagged two of them back and forth.
“Shit! That hurt!” He grumbled moodily, he couldn’t manage to get angry though, his Body rejuvenated and his mind cleared.
“Well just give me some warning before you do that next time.”
Her grin was overshadowed by him undressing completely as he took off what remained of his jumpsuit. It didn’t take long, the rags he was wearing were absolutely shredded, it wasn’t more than a pair of stripped shorts, a desperately maintained belt-loop, and a collar that miserably managed to hold the scraps of his shirt up, he was honestly surprised that he hadn’t already been forced to run around naked. His Med-shelled shoulder gave him little trouble, the electricity made it hard and a bit brittle. The electricity had
Her eyes widened and she turned her back to him in a flush.
He shrugged at her modesty and finished zipping up his new suit.
She was still turned around when he found a female jumpsuit and flung it over her head as he continued his rummaging.
She walked towards the Terminal behind him and then furtively started to change.
He bumped the top of the head then quickly turned around, and a sudden wash of heat flushed down his face. She seemed to sense some part of his reaction and in a flash, she had the rest of the suit on and zipped up. She looked back with a fragile but brave look then started pocketing, attaching, and picking up her kit.
They decided, or moreover, Jack decided and Yuma agreed that she’d bring him to where her people lived. He was surprised at her ability to move around the ship; through Cryo-Bays long abandoned. They pulled back wall panels in abandoned office rooms to create narrow gaps through which they squeezed through walls made of thin layers of soft metal with a hollow core. As they squeezed and shouldered through the walls they paused as occasional chittering echoed through.
“Are there supposed to be crabs here?”
Her only response was a pause as she turned half towards him. A quick shake of the head and she was moving on. Jack made sure to stay close behind her. He had been roughly calculating their path in his head. That lasted until the fourth switchback, he wasn’t even aware that the path turned gently but as he reflected on his footsteps it must have been over a 1000 meters. A couple of degrees difference builds over distance. Short story long, he was lost and utterly dependent on his mute patient-companion. He was trying to stay as relaxed as possible. When he got tense, he got hot and that’s when he started feeling his heartbeat in his head.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
They doubled back and back again, through more hallways and corridors and secret paths. He kept a loose eye on things. Even he could tell that she probably hadn’t been expecting to find blood splattered through most of her secret routes. They crossed a hallway with something different, it now had a long streak of blood going down the hall and around the corner. Jack fought down a small grin at how ridiculous it looked, he knew those crabs were clever. Yuma took a step to follow it.
Jack placed a hand gently on her shoulder, trembling she sent out a snapping current into him. He pretended it didn’t hurt.
“Hey. I don’t know how you feel but there are probably others that are counting on you, we should go to your home.”
She paused, then with a quick glance to meet his eyes she reached under the door pad and quickly shocked it open with two of her fingers. He was impressed, she was getting pretty good with that.
She knew that it wasn’t supposed to be like this. She had already doubled back several times, there had been obvious signs on the main routes, bloody hand and fingerprints and less obvious ones, certain things not where they used to be. Wires that leaned the opposite way. That’s what she had already doubled back to the secondary routes. They were heading down a secret split on a tertiary path. Only the eldest and the recon leaders should know about this one. Even if the crabs had found her people. She pulled out a cannibalized haphazard-looking tablet she had picked up somewhere on the way and started to tap away as the text flashed by.
Jack figured she was probably a scout of some sort and something went bad. From his mind floated a series of questions.
How long HAD he been in Cryo? She had people and knew all of these routes. She didn’t just wake up. Why wasn’t he woken up with her group? In fact, why was his Cryo-Pod separate from the rest? They hadn’t crossed any single Cryo-Pod rooms.
She was ready. So was he. They crouched down in what looked like a maintenance tunnel and turned into a large room. He was surprised by how little it shocked him. He had been expecting just about anything but there wasn’t anyone at all.
Jack joined in making sure the room was empty of threats. Besides a stray crab she managed to sneak up on and he gladly stomped. After finding no other threats and seeing Yuma start to study the walls and pathways, he decided to explore a bit himself. This wasn’t going how either of them had hoped and he needed to take his brain off of autopilot.
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The man-crab was the most advanced of his kin. It did not like this. It did not like this at all. Alone, she was aggravating enough, now there was a second variable. It pulped a crab that bumped into it. It was Level 20. It wasn’t used to failure.
This was not promised by either the machine or the man. His failure had led the female human this way. The other was new, but not entirely unknown. He had been tasked with finishing the female human’s group that had been exploring this direction. Now it had two humans to kill and they were running somewhere on the ship. His intelligence was excellent for being the best of the 12th generation but its reasoning skills were limited. This lab was supposed to be far from the inferior humans’ hidden homes and interference. This was where the 13th generation, the “Perfect Crab” should have been born. The lead brain-crabs had been destroyed.
It looked around at the half-finished hybrids strewn around the room, how could these abominations ever be more perfect than it?
A sour, carbonic tang sat in the air. In the dim lighting of the room, on the charred and blackened corpse of the brain-crab he saw an unfamiliar large wad of clear fluid and a small smear of blood suspended within it. Perhaps the Great Old Crab did smile upon them.
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It was obvious even to him, that crabs had attacked her home, a lot of crabs. He managed to figure that out as he fought an only-slightly desperate retreat back through the room’s primary door. His back slammed against the door after it closed. He took a deep breath and started to think. There was no way they would have lived in what looked like a repurposed Cryo-Bay with deconstructed machines, private areas made of metal and other material, and what was definitely a row of Cryo-Shitters if the crabs were this close to their home. The thought of going to the bathroom reminded him of how empty his stomach was.
In a desperate move to not spook her more, after telling her about the crabs at her front door, he recommended that they try the blood smear. She started to give him a look but she wasn’t sure if he missed it or if he was ignoring it as he crouched going back through the tunnel they had taken in.
The smear stopped two turns down. At the end of the streak were two of the crabs leading a group of the tiny scavenger crabs as they picked apart scraps of flesh and dead crab off the ground. The next second the two crabs dropped dead adding to the pile.
“You think that was a bit loud eh?” A bit annoyed by the loud bangs he still appreciated her accuracy, two shots-two crabs. One bullet had struck something vital through a mouth and the other bang dead through the base of an eye-stalk.
She saw something at the scene and took off down the corridor. Surripidously opening the Magno-Tube, Jack cleared the scene and followed. Shit she was fast.
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He got to her as she was huffing and trying to remove a wall panel. They found two people jammed into a wall-storage panel. One was obviously dead. The other, close enough as he figured it. She tried to untangled them, slick with blood and squeezed into the panel.
Tired of standing around in a hallway he pushed her aside and dragged out both of the bodies. He picked up the one that was still alive and slung him over his shoulder. The other body he convinced her to leave. As he flung the somewhat, now at second glance, elderly survivor over his shoulder he responded to her look, “We’re not operating on him here. If a crab comes by he will definitely die.” That wasn’t the look she was giving the brute, it was for slinging the heavily wounded man over his shoulder like a sack of crab-meat.
She led the way and frequently turned back to check on their passenger, saw him disassemble the abandoned body with the Magno-Tube.