Читать книгу Imminent Domain - SEAN KOPING - Страница 9

April 20^th 2021

0655 hours

Gossamer Muse Super Cruise-liner

Deck Seven, Main Atrium lobby-level

The creature hissed and whipped its two tails forward. Two spikes like the one that killed Jin-Lao flew at me. I barely managed to duck one while the other struck and lodged itself firmly into the side of my OICWv2 which I had instinctively used as a shield. The creature hissed angrily and charged down the stair. I dropped my now damaged assault rifle and ran for my life.

Outside the sun had come up so the hallways weren’t as pitch-black dark as they had been when we first arrived. It could have been that my eyes had adjusted to the dark or that I was just scared out of my mind but as I ran down the winding hallways at full sprint I had no trouble seeing my way. Neither did the creature at my heels. As I rounded a bend I could see Portly standing at the door-way, where I had left him, with his Chinese M4A1 assault rifle.

“Good-old, Portland,” I thought as I ran to him. That was until he raised the rifle and aimed right at me. It was then I realized the son-of-a-bitch had his eyes shut tightly. The multiple barrels of the M4A1 roared to life flashed angrily as they spun at 8000 RPM.

Time, technology and Chinese genius had overcome the weight, complexity and external power issues that had prevented the earlier creation of effective usable single-operator mini-guns on the modern battle-field. The M4A1 Ultra-lite triple pulse assault rifle was a five barreled hydraulic operated mini-gun that could fire three thousand five hundred 5.56mm rounds a minute from two cylindrical magazines, one in the stock; the other just after the gun’s fore-grip. A monster of an assault rifle originally intended to be used as an infantry support weapon and to take down fast-moving aircraft. It was light-weight, water-proof, and fired devastating armor-piercing bullets.

I dropped to the deck and slid toward portly as if he were the home-plate in a base-ball game as super-machine gun fire sliced through the air just above my head. The second creature let out a blood curdling squeal. Shredded by a torrent of bullets it tumbled down the hallway carried by its own momentum into the path of more of Portly’s gun-fire.

I slid to a halt at Portly’s feet. The five barrels of his M4A1 were still spinning furiously even-though all the ammunition had been spent. His eyes shut tightly he repeated the phrase, “I am not a Red-shirt.” Over and over like some weird mantra.

“You can lay off the trigger now,” I said looking up at Portly, “I think you got him.”

Surprised he opened his eyes and looked down at me on the floor next to him. I was soaked to the bone ,out of breath and pissed.

“Thank god you’re back!” Portly cried cheerfully.

I let out a half-hearted chuckle.

He helped me to my feet, “You’re bleeding,” he observed.

“I’m fine,” I said. I had taken a round to the shoulder. It hurt.

While I rifled through my pockets for a field dressing Portly went over to the dead creature with his scanner gizmo. Then I heard a familiar voice call out my name.

Portly turned, startled, his weapon raised with its barrels spinning impotently.

It was Sabre. The cavalry had arrived. Blade, Sabre and Soul-train. The three soldiers approached us cautiously and secured the area before Sabre put aside her OICWv2 and immediately started tending to my shoulder.

“You always this unlucky or do you go out looking for trouble?” she smiled warmly as she sat me gently on the floor.

“No. ‘Trouble’ usually seems to know where i am most of the time.” I sighed exhaustedly.

Her twin-brother glanced at me rolled his eyes and shook his head as he walked past us. “Geez…, get a room,” he groaned.

Train walked right past me to Portly and the dead creature. To my surprise he did not seem phased by the extraordinary sight at all. Train kicked the creature’s dead carcass.

“Looks like we got another “Crusty” here!” he announced to the others.

“You do this?” He asked over his shoulder as Sabre removed the shoulder plate of my body-armor.

“No. That one’s his.”

Portly proudly patted the Chinese assault rifle that hung at his waist until it clumsily slipped from his grip and clattered to the floor.

“Looks like he nearly took you out too,” Train observed.

“The one I killed is down the hall in the arrival lounge,” I offered quickly changing the subject

Train signaled to Blade who headed down the hall-way alone to confirm the kill.

“Then that makes four,” Sabre said as she ripped open a packet of gauze dressing with her teeth and proceeded to wrap my wounded shoulder.

“We ran into two of those bad boys on our way here. One of them “Crusties” damn near dragged Huck off. We had to chase the damn thing down two decks just to get him back. The bastard nearly tore his leg off! We had the Chinese, with us, take him top-side for medical treatment while we came to get you,” Sabre offered as she tightened the dressing.

“As if we could stop her,” Train added jokingly.

“The two Chinese, Tan and Jin-Lao are dead,” I added, “What the hell’s going on?”

“The shit’s hit the fan,” Train said giving Portly the signal to wrap up his data and specimen collecting. “Just before the COM went down those ‘Pod things’ Colt and his team found in engineering started hatching. Then all hell broke loose. Some kind of “pod-people” started attacking Colt’s team.”

“Colt and Priest barely made it top-side,” Sabre added re-attaching the damaged shoulder-plate. I nodded in thanks.” They lost a Tech and a Chinese commando.”

“The head of the Tech-team, Dr. Myers thinks the ‘Podies’ might be the passengers and crew,” Train continued checking his watch, “the Chinese are planting explosive charges on some of the upper decks and locking down exits with fast drying iron-polymer foam the techs brought with them. The plan is to hold the ‘Podies’ here for extraction and examination by Medical-teams that are supposedly en-route now.”

“Supposedly en-route?”

“We don’t know for sure. We lost contact with the PWR Ops-Center when the Podies started moving,” Train explained.

“Great,” I sighed.

“How is he, Sabre?”

“He’s o.k. Only a bullet wound, Sir. No artery or major-organ damage.” she responded, her tone ripe with relief. Still, her comment hurt more than the bullet.

Train raised an annoyed eye-brow the armed Technician who shied away embarrassed.

“You’re pretty lucky. Looks like those giant crab-things shoot off some sort venomous spiked barb projectile laden with some virulent cyto-toxin and myo-toxin cock-tail,” Sabre explained. “Very nasty. Very painful.”

Without warning Blade came running back down the hall-way yelling,

“Multiple hostiles in bound! Let’s book!”

I knew then, that the situation had to have gone from bad to much, much worse because the usually stoic Blade hardly ever exhibited emotion; least of all panic.

Sabre pulled me to my feet and we were off. Bounding down the semi-lit hall-ways of the G.M. we could not return to the upper decks the way the others had come. The colonel had ordered the Chinese to seal off those passages, with the fast drying iron-polymer foam, to halt the advance of the ‘Podies.’ Since the ship was too big for a small force like ours to lock-down on such short notice it was hoped that a few sealed pathways and strategically planted explosives would discourage to Podies if they attempted to move top-side.

Train led us to an upper-deck and, to my surprise, a functioning elevator. The techs were definitely earning their pay today, I thought as we boarded the elevator.

The ‘Podies,’ as train referred to them, were on the move. And since the ship was sinking and all the outer doors were sealed they had only one way out. One way off this ship…. and that would be through us. And if Doctor Palmer was correct and it was the Passengers and crew of the Gossammer Muse we didn’t have nearly enough ammunition to stop all forty-five hundred of them.

The elaborately mirrored elevator shuddered gently and slowly started its ascent up the cruise-ship. We all stood silently, then, softly above us the haunting melody of Celine Dion’s ‘My heart will go on” started playing. No one said a word until Portly turned to me and awkwardly broke the silence,

“I love this song.”