Sneak Peek: The Last Angel - Predator, Prey 03 (Patreon)

Hi everyone! This week's drabble will be up later tonight or tomorrow. I have the rough draft done, and just need to edit it. In the meantime, here is a look at the upcoming third and final part of Predator, Prey. This chapter is almost done, but I'll be posting it on the 30th as a slightly-early Halloween present. Between now and then, I also hope to get a second update out. Most likely Uneasy Lay the Heads, but possibly a new chapter of Ascension or the first few chapters of Heartless. Stay tuned!

~

The door was sealed. The enemy had put the station into a security lockdown to try and contain the predator and keep it getting its hands on anything too dangerous. They’d overridden many of the existing security codes – not all, not enough to keep the predator from playing with them – but enough to slow it, enough to keep it from the most vital sections of the station.

No longer. It pressed a hand to the biometric interface. There was a ding and the sealed orange diode switched to blue as the door unlocked. The predator stepped through the archway, dropping the officer’s severed hand behind it.

Its eyes swept across the gun lockers and weapons racks inside. It paused only a second and then it got to work.

~

Cold Storage 07 was one of a dozen different large freezer bays on Vilga Orbital. It was also one of several where the Duskwalkers had dumped the bodies of the Red Hand personnel they’d killed in their takeover of the station. There was a mound of corpses here, soldiers, scientists, engineers and servicers dumped atop one another, with a smattering of other frozen forms tossed haphazardly about the room. D’varos had sworn that they had accounted for every single person on the station, that no one could have possibly survived. Clark had told him to double-check every single body.

The mercenary captain had, with strained civility, told Clark that it was a waste of time. Ferma had told him to do it anyways. “So, captain,” Clark said to D’varos, the mercenary standing behind him and looking into the storage bay. The pile of bodies here had been disturbed, a frost-coated slick of blood running down the side where something had crawled out of the mound, smeared handprints on the floor and wall as the survivor had pulled itself to its feet, climbed the wall, torn the vent open and escaped. “Everyone was accounted for?”

Clark had had to put his respirator back on. That was the only way he could tolerate the stench. Environmental controls had shown that the temperature was still well below zero, but that wasn’t the case at all. The room was warm, more so by the heat released by the decomposing bodies. One of D’varos’s men had suggested that the power outage had been responsible. If that were the case, the room should still have been cold. Judging by the state of the bodies, they’d been rotting for days. When their friend had escaped, they’d tampered with the controls on the way out. All the forensic evidence that could have identified them was pooled and rotting on the floor, intermingled with the effluvia from all the other bodies in the room. It would take a dedicated EAI team to go through everything and even then it could be days.

D’varos’s hands balled into fists. His nostril slits had closed to block off the nearly overpowering odour of decomposing bodies from a half-dozen species. “They’ll be found,” he promised. “Whoever survived here, we will find them.” He spun on his heel and marched away, barking orders into his comm. Since the blackout and the bombing of one of the station’s armouries, the Cavalier’s temper had been getting shorter.

Next to Clark, Ferma let out a deep breath through her mouth, one hand over the end of her snout. “If this isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever smelled, it’s a top contender.” she observed. “And that includes the stake out on Velmir when our ship’s refresher broke down and you couldn’t shower for four days.” When no wry rejoinder was forthcoming, she became more serious. “That toxin should have killed everyone here,” she said.

“I know.”

 “At the very least, any survivors should have suffocated in that pile.”

“I know.”

Ferma looked down at her smaller partner. “They should have listened to us.”

Clark nodded. “I know that, too.” He climbed down the short stairs into the humid, reeking room, his breath clicking through his mask. He tried to avoid contaminating the scene too much, but it was already a lost cause. He looked over the trail their survivor had left, turning his head to regard the smeared handprints on the walls, left there when their survivor had braced themselves on the bulkhead. He held up his own hand for scale. The imprint was too badly smudged to tell what kind of species had left it, but it had been something roughly his own size. He stared at the drooling smear, then back around the storage chamber. The rotting leftovers were congealing into a pool, already a finger deep in places. There was no way to pick out individual genetic traces. He tapped the broken temperature control on the wall, its cracked screen refusing to acknowledge his commands. It had been deliberately sabotaged, probably for just that reason. Still, he’d get one of D’varos’s people to fix it, to preserve what they could rather than let all their forensic evidence ooze over the deck. There was nothing here that they could use, though.

“I want to look over the notes we decoded,” he told Ferma, climbing back up the stairs. “There might be something in there that can help us find out who this is and what the Red Hand did to them.” He sighed. “I think we need to recall Ubiquitous Law.”

She stared at him for a moment. “Law’s running under stealth. To get here quick enough to matter, it will have to drop cloak and burn hard. Whatever’s out there will see it.”

“If there’s something out there,” DuPont replied, then paused. “You think I’m being alarmist?”

“I think a few dead mercenaries, a bit of arson and some offline cameras isn’t enough to risk a crew of hundreds. At least, not yet.” 

Clark thought it over. “Maybe you’re right,” he admitted. “I just haven’t had a good feeling about any part of this op.”

Ferma turned her large head towards the pile of bodies and the trail their hunter had left as it had clawed its way out of the dead. “I think I know exactly what you mean.”