Virginia Sokolova
The Metacer were a hive race, and while her education on them was brief, she knew the basics of their organization: The queen would be in the reactor compartment, incubating eggs in the hundreds in the ambient heat. Beneath her was the control bugs, who each could control nearly a dozen drones and formed complex hierarchies to serve their queen and function as synapses of a sort in a larger hive brain.
So she would need to cut it out at the base.
Making it to a maintenance locker, Ginny had fit herself into one of the soft-shell emergency spacesuits, hooking her comm into the helmet. “Check check, you hear me John?” she looks sidelong, she hadn’t caught sight of one of the bugs yet, but she had heard them down the halls, and it was likely they would notice her eventually. It was another deck down to the upper reactor level, which was behind a shielded door, one whose hydraulics and heavy steel would alert every bug on the station. “Need you to get an angle on the bottom of the station, keep trained on my comm’s location.”
So, she would need to think of another way in. The engineering team was likely to have heavier duty tools, and potentially access codes or schematics that might make entry possible. Problem is, if they’re dead, that means the Metacer are in atmospherics. A poor blaster shot in a room of compressed gasses is far from ideal, so she had already adjusted the capacitors in her revolver for quarter-loads. She hoped the lower power setting would reduce the noise, but still pack enough of a punch to take down a bug.
Coming down the ladder, she would hear the chittering of bugs. She took a long, shallow breath to control herself: too loud, and she would alert them to her presence. She was light enough on her feet, keeping a low profile and being careful not to move too quickly to disturb the air. She’d inch along, keeping against the wall to avoid being spotted between bulkheads.
Making it to the door of atmospherics, it was obvious that the bugs had made it there first: Scorch marks on the walls indicated that they had some form of blaster, torn walls from mandibles were much more aggressive indication. She raised her arm and peeked around the corner of the doorway.
Blood was everywhere, evidently the bugs were hungry, and it only made her heart sank as she realized they were probably tearing more survivors to pieces across the station. Mangled chunks of meat and shattered bones strewn about, uniforms only so many tattered cloths. That chittering was loud enough for her to know that one of them was unseen in the room.
When the chittering paused, she sprung into action.
Rounding the corner with her arm outstretched, she was less than her height away from the creature, who seemed surprised. The ring-shaped ridge on his head gave her only a moment’s pause, but the sharp discharge of the revolver sent a bolt of energy into its eye socket. The lower power setting still blew a chunk out of its head, and it screeched in pain, whipping its mandibles wildly, almost severing her hand had she not drawn it back towards her chest.
This put her on her backfoot, knocking her to the ground with her weapon against her chest, the intricate web of air pipes splayed above her and the reeling beast quickly recovering with adrenaline. The ranger leans herself up quickly, her hands holding her weapon stable as she follows it up, severing that crest and with it, its control over nearly a dozen other bugs. It advances, slashing its scythe-like legs and lacerating her lower left leg at the shin, cutting through her fatigues and the soft-shelled spacesuit as if it weren't there and eating into flesh.
A third shot would blow a mandible off, along with the other half of its head, and it would drop to the floor lifelessly. A red slick was growing against the plastic outer shell of her leg. Cursing under her breath, she would reach into her pack. Drawing a tube of bio-gel, she could hear the screeching of feral bugs. That was a good sign that the control bugs were spread thin enough that she had a chance to slip by them.
The ranger bit into the webbing of her glove as she pressed the bio-gel into the wound in her lower leg, grunting in pain. She was supposed to clean the wound first, but she didn’t have the time, or the wherewithal to do so in her adrenaline high.
She rose to her feet, her legs still wobbling with some heavy breathing, now able to survey the room that she was now alone in. There was a severed hand still attached to a toolbox that was still latched shut. Pulling it free of the last remains of its owner with some unease, the Texarkanan would place it on the main control panel for the atmospheric station. Opening the holo-screen, she would see readouts for temperature and chemistry. The reactor room was far too hot outside the core, and many of the temperature-regulating systems were nonresponsive. She turned on the fans and coolant for the rest of the station, hoping to stave off overheat how she could.
Opening the toolbox, there was a lot of tools available, and a shattered glass holopad. She hooked the pad up to the screen and began parsing through its contents. Most of the work to restore the temperature was beyond her capability, but now she had schematics for all the piping and access to the chamber, just as she hoped. The primary maintenance shaft opened right into the ceiling of the reactor, and the door was still functional. While the thought of venting the reactor came across her mind, the metacer could handle airless zero-g better than she could.
Instead, she’d need to place the beacon deep inside the reactor, in just the right location for Lockman to crack open the reactor vessel and kill the Queen in the explosive decompression.
