"Crrrrch... Rendev.... C Le..." The radio wave popped and hissed in Junebug's ear as she forced herself to her feet. Toggling a switch on her helmet bought up a diagnostic display, radio carrier wave strength pulsed red. The high ambient iron in the rock must be shielding the signal at least it wasn't damage to the equipment itself. Still she had enough of the message to understand that he wasn't going to try to climb down. That was smart because they didn't have any rope to repel and she was in no condition to climb back up. Unfortunately her submachine gun was still up there and even if Neil realized that the weapon wouldn't survive a seven story fall.

Woozily, she forced herself to her hands and knees and retrived her pistol. The sour orange stench was nearly overpowering from the corpse of the thing she had killed. It still shivered and twitched occasionaly but the damage had been too extensive for any hope of regeneration. Her pistol still radiated heat as she picked it up, ejected the empty magazine and clicked a fresh tube into place. She cocked the weapon, removed the magazine and replaced the missing round before reloading. Putting one up the spout gave you an extra round, it wasn't much but no one ever complained about having too many rounds.

Her whole body ached as she made her way down the ventilation access tunnel. No doubt she had traded a falls worth of broken bones for an equivalent number of brusises and contusions and from the pain in her lower back she would probably piss blood for a week. That was cheap a the price but she none the less pulled one of the analgesic tabs on the side of her armor and flooded her system with short term pain killers and stimulants. That too would cost later, which was fine with Junebug providing she got a later in which to suffer the inevitable crash.

The ventilation system wove its way through the rock like the twisting intestines of the station. Periodically she had to stop to deactivate large fans to step through them. She made certain to reactivate them once she was passed. No so much because she was worried about not being able to get air to the stations decimated population but because they would rather effectively chop to pieces anything that followed her.

After about ten minutes she began to see traces of alien activity, scrape marks in the dust leading down from more vaulted overhead shafts. This had to be the base line chamber on D level which meant she had to get up a level to meet up with Neil.

"Neil, come in," she said, trying the radio futilely. Reluctantly and with gun raised she followed the vent and the strange tracks deeper into the bowels of the asteroid. The rotting orange scent grew denser as she moved and she noticed that the tunnels here seemed newer, or at least better maintained and she started moving more stealthily, by now the drugs had well and truely kicked and and while she was aware of the pain, it was distanced by the pharmaceuticals flowing through her system, the cocktail contained a mild anti inflammatory too which was a good thing or she would be crashing out by now. 

Rounding a corner she finally found what she was looking for, a large red access door that lead to a vertical stairway. Beyond the door however was a stranger sight. A dozen of the creatures, perhaps a little smaller than the one she had killed were gathered around a glass box the size of a shipping container. Beyond them was a glass wall which sectioned of an area of cave. Two men, looking quite unphased by the aliens, were behind the glass watching proccedings. The smaller creatures were tearing at that box, which must have been made of transparent aluminum now that she had a chance to take it in. They struck repeatedly at it with their talons doing little more than marring the surface. Inside the box was a much larger version of the aliens she had seen. The thing was the size of a large horse and had long serrated legs like a preying mantis. Its shell was a glistening black but it appeared that holes had been drilled into the thing at intervals and tubes and wires were fed directly into its carapace.

"What the actual fuck..." Sayeeda breathed as she ducked back around the corner.

"Booster play back the last 10 seconds of footage at a 50 percent mask. Pause footage." Inside the secured partition the men had video feeds to other locations in the facility. It was hard to tell from the grainy enhanced images but from the number of screens it was clear they weren't ignorant of what was going on. Lab equipment was tucked away in one corner, including the dissected corpse of one of the juvenile creatures. Sayeeda pressed her back against the wall for a moment and tried to parse the disperate information she had gathered. The picture it began to form in her mind was not pretty. Reaching down to her belt she drew a red banded grenade from the ruins of her webbing and rolled the dial to 20 seconds, the longest setting the weapon had. Then she took a deep breath primed the grenade, rolled the bomb across the floor at the creatures and darted up the stairs.

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Dr Erwin Chang looked up from his view of the xenomorphs in surprise as a metal cylinder rolled across the stone floor before claning to a stop against the containment cell. At first he thought this was some novel strategy by the larvae to free the captured adult but then his mind caught up with his eyes and he realised it was human tech. He looked to the fire door that was already swinging shut in supply and reached for the security vid controls to wind back a few seconds. Before he could touch them the strange cylinder shattered in a puff and a finely distributed haze seemed to fill the air. Some sort of petrolium or oil product. There was a flash of light and a sudden searing so intense that Chang's eyes were destroyed even before the overpressure of the blast shattered his aluminium shield and cut the remainder of his pulped body to bloody rags.

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Junebug had covered nearly a hundred meters before the blast went off. The ignighter charge setting of teh bunker busting fuel air explosive with force that was incredible no matter how many times you saw it. The blast was attenuated by the stone stairway but the hallways served as natural channels. It knocked her off her feet and electric lights flickered and died behind her. Dust fell in a cloud as the reverberations of the blast rocked through the station. She needed to find Neil. She tried to push herself to her feet but her battered body refused to respond for a moment. Fine, rest here for a minute and then find Neil.

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