“We’ve run out of time, I take it.” Kodachi observed, nonchalantly. Impending disaster seemed a way of their new life, it seemed.
“Not good.” Ranma affirmed.
“Oh, that tears it! We have to get OUT of here!” Nanami bit out. THAT particular alarm meant imminent disaster of the highest order, as if loose T-Viruses and mutant xenomorphs weren't bad enough. “No more shopping, folks, we gotta get to the shuttles NOW!”
“Where to?”
“From here, we have to take the next right, the---WHOWWW!!”
The two hybrid-hosts had just picked up Nanami, bags and all, between them and began running with increasing speed down the hall in the indicated direction.
Nanami didn’t know how long the ride lasted; of recent she’d been having entirely too many headlong flights of stark-raving terror and telescoped time to be happy with the experience. What she would later recall would be a marathon run through hell. She barely had time to recognize features in the halls streaming by and begin to shout directions before her two companions made the necessary turns, stopping where they had to to allow Nanami to slide her purloined passcode through the security doors, and get them through. The whole business had been in flickering lighting and the lurid red of the emergency backups; neither the lack of light nor the change in spectrum seemed to bother the hybrids, however, Nanami included, as she found her eyes instantly adjusting.
And the all the whole she could feel the chittering evil gathering around them, responding to their movements.
Not that they weren’t alone in their dash. No, a run through hell had to encounter some of the denizens. They’d run, leaped, and skittered over bodies in the halls, slumped where the virus or worse had claimed them. Those that did move did so in ways that instantly announced their presence as the newly unliving. Nanami supposed some of them were coworkers, colleagues, perhaps even a few innocents like herself duped into working here, but she couldn’t be bothered to shed a tear at this time; survival had its own priorities.
In any event, the three had simply smashed, slashed, and bludgeoned their way through the shambling dead, or Ranma and Kodachi had simply leapt over and past them(Nanami had the terrifying impression of flipping and bouncing off walls and ceiling). They’d paused only long enough to grab a weapon or two from the floor where they could; the three had quickly found replacements for the acid-exploded weapons Nanami had been forced to abandon back at Carthy’s apartment.
Oh, and there at been at least one drone, leaping hissing and clawing from some side corridor.
There had been no hesitation this time; the three had simply slashed and blasted the bugs, careful to get clear of the splashing acid blood this time.
That was the other frightening part of their journey. What had started out as an awkward three-legged race of a run, Nanami being borne between the two clone-hosts, had, by the time they reached the doors to the hangar gallery, become a well-oiled machine, each member-part reacting to the others near instantaneously. Nanami supposed it MIGHT be bonding under pressure, but she suspected it might be more.
“Okay, folks, let’s hope we still have a ride out of here!” She reached for the door inside-
Only to have to fight it as suction tried to pull the hatch closed. The Repository world had a lower atmospheric pressure than terrestrial normal; that meant there had to be an environmental breach.
Well, no avoiding that; they still had to get at what was inside the bay, if only to find out if they had a chance of getting out of here. The three forced the door open and were practically pulled inside by the air pressure.
Curiously enough, Nanami didn’t hear her ears pop. Another benefit of her new mutation, the scientist in her still clinically observed; after all, the bugs had shown a nasty ability to survive lower atmospheric pressures and even vacuum.
She shouldn’t have worried; the bay still had a half-dozen small craft clustered inside it. If anybody had left already, there were no signs of it.
“Which one?” Ranma shouted in the thinning air inside the bay.
“Uhm...THAT one!” Nanami pointed at the closest craft, a big engined job that might be a courier; Nanami knew biologics better than she did hardware, but the thing looked fast and more importantly it looked fueled and ready, parked nearest both the way they’d come in and to the open hangar doors. “Let’s GO!”
They sensed the encroaching presences before they saw their movement.
“Oh *shit*. Don’t you guys EVER give up?” Nanami groaned as a small pack of snarling, toothsome black shapes emerged from the shadows, encircling the three. The small hive had converged on the aberrations, and had come to exterminate the competition. ”I really REALLY hate bugs!”
“We’ll take care of these! You get the ship ready to go!” Ranma’s actions might be considered rather trusting, but he also knew he no idea of how to fly one of those spaceships. He DID know combat, however.
He and Kodachi leapt at the oncoming drones, their past fear of them forgotten in the moment.
Not wasting a moment, Nanami practically flew up the gantry way and went for the ship’s hatch, reaching for the opening mechanism. Lift, turn, and in.
At least in theory.
“What the HELL?! LOCKED?!” Of all the indignities; come all this way only to find their escape blocked by a stupid door loc-
Wait. Nanami glanced at the door insignia. EXEC DIRECTOR: D. CARTHY---AUTHORIZED ACCESS ONLY.
Oh, it figured. Who ELSE would have the best parking spot in the whole facility? Nanami grabbed for the passcard that was quickly becoming their Key to Heaven, and punched it in the hatch reader, hoping that Carthy wasn’t so paranoid that he would require a password or retinal scan. She could hear the snarling battle and sense the approaching appetites converging on her.
Nanami spun around just in time and fired off a burst with her carbine, spraying bug shell and guts across the gantry way, then turned back to the door.
Carthy hadn’t required a password or anything elaborate. Overconfident and stupid, fortunately. The hatch slid open, light pouring out from inside the awaiting ship.
“OKAY, PEOPLE! WE’RE SAILING -NOW-!” Nanami screamed into the bay. She backed into the hatch, periodically firing bursts at anything that that didn’t look or feel friendly.
Just as she got inside, a ball of limbs, chitin, and tails threw itself inside. Nanami almost put a burst into it before she recognized her new companions.
“BEHIND US!” The shout was both physical and mental. Nanami didn’t need a second one before she let off a sustained burst and a grenade for good measure out the open door. A scream of alien pain and death accompanied the subsequent explosion.
Nanami hit the emergency door release, slamming it closed.
She turned to find the two clones on the deck, a little the worse for wear, their scavenged guard uniforms torn and ripped, their ‘morphed armored skin looking cracked, scuffed, and in places bitten through, but healing before her eyes. They were panting heavily, but otherwise looked okay.
Then there came the sound of something hitting the door behind her and scratching at it. Persistent damn things.
“That will hold them, but not for long!” Nanami yelled as she hauled for the cockpit on the ship.
It wasn’t a big ship, and she found the cockpit readily enough. It was empty; looked like nobody else had thought to steal the director’s ride. The biochemist threw herself into a seat in front of the heavily instrumented console, reaching for the seat belts, then paused.
She’d had some basic instruction in shuttle piloting from her ex-boyfriend back in the day, but she knew biochemistry more than she knew hardware. Unfortunately, she lacked her ex’s particular talent for bonding with machinery, this looked more like the setup for a small STARSHIP. How the hell was she going to make sense of all this in time?
As if to punctuate that thought, Nanami heard scrambling at the windows in front of her. Sure enough, she could see a black shape on the other side of the heavy thermo-armor glass cockpit glazing. Great, those things never seemed to give up, and they had a nasty habit of getting in where they shouldn’t.
HELLO, DIRECTOR. WELCOME ABOARD.
Nanami whirled at the mechanical female voice in the cockpit.
I AM FULLY READY FOR LAUNCH. I DETECT A DECLARED LEVEL-ONE EMERGENCY IN HANGAR BAY ONE. WILL YOU BE AWAITING FURTHER PASSENGERS OR EVACUATING IMMEDIATELY?
Nanami stared at the lit console, before seeing the flashing plasma screen and its icon. CYBERDYNE SHIPBOARD AI ENGAGED.
Oh, bless Carthy’s paranoia and stupidity, but not the man himself! Of COURSE the slime wouldn’t trust his safety to a pilot who might be late or turn out to be unreliable! Of COURSE he’d pump some of his blood money sunk in his personal yacht, because this was surely what the ship was, into a state-of-the-art autopilot Artificial Intelligence. And God bless that it was dumb enough not to recognize that Carthy WASN’T aboard!
“Evacuating immediately!” Nanami practically shouted at the machine, hoping that it had a vocal interface, and NOT a voice recognition system.
COMMAND ACCEPTED. AWAIT EVACUATION ORDER, TAXI CLEAR OF HANGAR BEFORE ENGAGING EMERGENCY LIFT, OR EMERGENCY TAKEOFF?
“EMERGENCY TAKEOFF!”
DAMAGE MAY BE INCURRED TO HANGAR FACIL-
The scratching at the cockpit glass was getting louder. “DAMN THE HANGAR! GET US THE HELL OUT OF HERE!”
COMPLYING. ENGAGING EMERGENCY TAKEOFF PROTOCOLS IN 5, 4, 3,
”People, you might want to brace yourse-”
SHHHHHHHHHRRROOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW
The ship’s engines lit to life with a roar like the Devil getting a rectal exam and a kick like God kicking a field goal up aforementioned Devil’s posterior.
Which is almost exactly what happened. The ship lifted and threw itself across the bay, ploughing aside what flimsy gantry works still remained attached. Nanami had a brief impression of claws sliding off the glass, malign presences falling behind, and flames shooting past the edges of her view as the ship threaded through the open hangar bay doors into the wane daylight of the outside. Then a second kick as the ship clawed for the sky ceiling, boosting upward to clear whatever emergency the computers had detected. The horizon dropped with a speed that made even Nanami’s hybridized guts rebel.
Nanami Jinnai didn’t care. It all felt like away to her, like the sensation of being carried off on angel’s wings. She was OUT of that place.
She sat up in the seat and let the automatics take over as the ship arced into the upper atmosphere. A moment later she felt, as much as heard, her two companions crowd into the cockpit behind her, heard their murmurs of interest as they looked at the unfamiliar(and rapidly darkening) sky as the spacecraft soared for orbit.
Within moments the radiation wave slices through the complex, followed hotly by the shock wave. Organic tissues scorch and evaporate under the impact of the first, more durable structures shatter and vaporize under the arrival of the second. Acres of research complex, hundreds of life forms and un-lifeforms become light. The hell that is unleashed is in its way cleaner than the sterile Abbadon of the laboratories that it destroys; a cleansing final fire that scours away Umbrella Corps’ manmade abomination.
A fireball of white incandescence heaves up from the surface of the planet, casting its fearsome light across the desolate landscape. It is an announcement that the planet now truly is dead.
Nanami spared a moment to watch as she oversaw the flight of the escape ship away from her former employment place. She’d already discerned enough to know the ship was functioning without any problems, and had already figured that the ship was fitted with a late-model Weyland-Rockwell tachyon shunt. She had no doubt Carthy had the ship’s AI programmed to handle hyperspace jumps on command, too, so getting out of the system and not just out of the atmosphere wasn’t a problem.
That matter out of the way, she allowed herself to relax and watch the fireball rising into the stratosphere. Fireworks to end a day like today just seemed so appropriate.
“Good riddance.” she allowed as she watched the Repository burn away in nuclear fire. She hoped and wanted that EVERY facility of her former employer should go out like that.
She fished in her pockets and the bag she had managed to still have with her, looking at the collection of discs, cubes, and sample cases inside. With THAT evidence, she just might have the opportunity.
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(Posted Thu, 07 Jan 2010 16:04)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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