Time is a valuable thing. If it was not valuable you would simply be happy and content, for you had time to kill, to waste, and to expend.
Guess who doesn't have time anymore.
That monster.
"Mark!" the order came through.
Nine guns trained themselves ahead. Two of them were bigger than the others: Marine Number One and Gabriel, both carrying the high-caliber submachinegun.
It was designed for killing Marines; the bullet would penetrate marine armor, or, failing a proper penetration, cause severe spalling and injury to anyone hiding behind metal.
They would be conserving their ammo, because they knew that the weapon was not intended for suppressive fire. All of the guns fired and kept up the barrage for 10 entire seconds.
Suit sensors began to go dark as they detected high energy emissions in the area. If these energy emissions stayed too long, then the Knights and the Marines would have to revert to analog sensors, and potentially the Mark-I eyeball.
Gabriel stepped in front of the simple civilian door that stood between the hallway and the storage deck; that was a silly move.
One of the Marines swore angrily.
Intense light bounced through some of the holes in that station door ahead, which was not bulletproof.
Charles understood: Gabriel was following the simple church doctrine of preserving human experience. The kid was thinking about the fact that five unarmored humans were in the same hallway and that his armor would stand a better chance of surviving the energy on the other side.
To everyone else in the world who wasn't a naïve fanatic, this was a very silly move. You weren't going to cure stupidity, and whatever was on the other side of the door had every right—natural, divine, and, if this was an alien invader, even the legal precedent—to blind burn and otherwise exterminate the fools who thought to stand against it. The station crew might be brave, but they were already dead by many accounts. It was noble for Gabe to take this position. Maybe the church really believed in the human experience, and maybe Gabe was playing the long odds that if any of them survived to tell the tale, it would be good advertising.
Then again, maybe nobody else thought about these things, and Gabe had accidentally, or worse, purposefully, moved to a really stupid location.
Either way, he was going to protect the station crew for at least a few seconds before that laser bore a hole through the door, through Gabriel, and into their eyes, before igniting the body and mercifully ending their suffering.
The Marines, understanding the situation and realizing how close one of their number was to dying, took drastic action. One of them shouldered into the decorative paneling adjacent to the door; the other kicked. Both had the same goal. It was simply achieved: They broke down the station wall and acquired a look at whatever was on the other side.
There was still enough atmosphere in the hallway that everyone could hear the distinctive fully automatic chatter as the church slugger wielded by Gabriel began to spit the four-to-one pattern of uranium and osmium shells into the room. He only had about twenty seconds of firing time. That was three hundred and fifty bullets.
The door was white hot; nobody looked directly at it. Maybe Gabe did.
Gabe stopped firing. Owningsburg boomed over communicators.
"Shoot that thing!"
The context was not clear on what the marine captain was talking about. Something seen outside, presumably.
Gabriel could not see the monster, nor could the marine on his left, Marine One. Both submachineguns opened up. Within the instant, they were much louder than the rifles, which tried their best to keep up with what for any human would have been overwhelming fire.
Gabriel swatted molten door out of the way, feeling a growing, scorching heat radiate through his armor. Coolant began to vent from his suit. He had been exposed to high heat, and cooling systems were already operating at the critical level. He was likely to have at least a few burns on his body if he lived.
It was not considered a pleasant way to go, even if it was relatively quick as far as deaths went—that is, being cooked alive in your own suit like a crab. But at least for the Knights, that was what they signed up for.
Gabe's potential injuries notwithstanding, Charles focused on the crash to the right of the station. There was a shattering roar as the station vibrated and flames burst in through bullet holes. Air density increased, not that anyone in their pressurized suits could tell. Charles, who never turned environmental sensors off, could only dread the event that created more pressure outside the station, or raised the temperature enough to create a shock like that.
The crew looked towards the empty wall that hid an explosion. Gabriel looked. Charles looked. Marine Two looked.
The chatter of the guns stopped, but only for a split second. Marine One reopened their fire, this time up fifteen degrees and with more of a deliberate aim.
Five shells left the chamber. Four casings bounced off Gabriel's torso. Gabe's attention turned by the third, and the final uranium bullet was followed by one sanctioned by the church of Ludd.
The gun was swatted away. The hand of the marine broke. A giant claw grabbed the head of MarineOne. A second one sliced at Gabe's shoulder, barely missing a crack where the shoulder met the neck. The sickening scrape of metal was thin, just like the barely burning atmosphere.
The gun clattered across the ground. Charles dove for it.
"Hallway," the voice communique was public. It was Marine Two.
Too close now to aim, the beast's "shoulder" nearly bowled him over. Gabe knelt and prepared to drive his arm claw into the somewhat exposed "rib cage" of the beast. Clearly aware, and apparently unable to crush Marine One's skull, the beast cast aside Marine One and promptly flung Gabriel through the doorway into storage, grabbing him and throwing him like a sumo wrestler throws a fat child. The laser on the creature's face was on, and it was pointed at the church slugger on the ground. Charles reached for the gun. It wouldn't have much ammo, just the feed strip that broke away from Marine One.
"PILOT!" It was Captain Owningsburg.
Charles couldn't stop his momentum. Marine Two had the opportunity to dump 2 rounds into the beast before it kicked up the floor tile and dove upon station security. The ammunition that had the best chance of penetrating the monster's armor began to explode and pop like so many deadly firecrackers. One caught in Marine Two's boot; they didn't seem to notice.
Two of station security were running back up the stairs. The captain and the two dumb ones fired their weapons. Nine bullets found their mark, the monster. A few bounced off the marines.
The three split. The one on the left, which was the right of the hallway only seconds ago, was the target. A 7-foot long tail of something more brittle than steel slapped Charles in the face, crushing his digital feed. The HUD briefly flickered before reverting to analog. He didn't think about why it hadn't sliced through his face.
Marine Onestaggered and was still. Either he was stunned and the machine was performing its routine stabilization routine, or he was dead and it was performing the same stabilization routine.
"HALLWAY!" Captain Owningsburg finished his order.
Charles and the marine blasted the beast even as it lunged to decapitate the captain. Gabe crashed into some part of storage, and vibrations from the cache shook the floor of the station.
"I'm in the hallway..." Charles had long enough to realize that there was more than one friendly fire pact on the station right now.
Bullets were faster than the monster. Twenty big ones ripped through the "ceiling" of the station. There was only one casualty: the captain. The beast turned and ran towards the center of the station. Six bullets chased after it, all smaller-caliber rifles. Itstail nearly bristled, and sparks flew as bullets ricocheted off it. One caught the dying captain and finished him.
The beast was on the stairs. The tail end of the bullets from the pilot's shuttle turret suppressed the two cogent marines. They were not fast enough to chase effectively anyway. Gabriel was standing up.
"Shoot the stairway," Marine Two was local. He and Charles did. Gabe didn't have an angle.
A white steam was pouring from the stairwell. The station hallway shuddered and creaked. The pilot's scream echoed on communications, followed by a near panic from Captain Owningsburg.
"Cover… no, shoot back, shoot back!"
Oscar, still waiting on the outside of the station for the beast to have been "flushed out," could see what had happened. The beast had accelerated up a stairwell and burst through that narrow metal ceiling, never designed for load. It had consumed its propellant to seal the deal. If the demon was anything like humans, that propellant was its emergency zero-G maneuverability. It had punctured the cockpit of the shuttle and in doing so reoriented the chaingun to narrowly miss the captain and instead take out his lieutenant.
The mechanics of why and how the pilot had screamed was up to the listener.
"The beast must have deduced the shuttle's location from the pattern of the bullets in the hallway. Madness, what a quick little thinker." Oscar understood, but to him the thought was not eloquent.
Speaking of propellant, Oscar lept off the station. He wouldn't get much of an angle, but one angle was all you needed. The shuttle was obscured by the station for Oscar. But if he drifted a little, it wouldn't be. There was an Amat marine on the other side; hopefully it wasn't the lieutenant.
Oscar briefly felt bad for everyone with a wimpy assault rifle. That beast needed stopping power, and every weapon mankind had recorded making was for defeating man alone. His own machine for dropping armored vehicles and drones was one of the only chances they had to kill that juggernaut. And now stop the hijacked shuttle.
Oscar didn't get the shot.
By the time he detected the shuttle, it had accelerated past storage. It was a long shot, but he took it anyway. The ammo's value was rapidly falling; any odd piece of scrap dislodged might tell a story.
He couldn't tell if he hit. The engine winked out in the distance half a minute later, presumably under control. The shuttle was just another lost twinkling star now.
Odd. The pilot's death should have triggered an automated landing routine. Either the pilot was alive, or the beast—really it should have been called an alien—had a workaround.
"What do you make of that, JJ?"
"Make of what? I ain't seen a thing!"
It occurred to Oscar that Jason was watching the maintenance tunnel the beast had entered, as ordered.
"You didn't move once you heard the hallway command?"
"For all I knew, the beast was gonna run scared back up the chimney."
A fair point.
T-12 minutes till shuttle arrival.
The ancient hymnal was stuck in Jason's head.
"Wasted it all just to watch you go."