She advanced a step at a time into the swirling mist, her suit AI shifting small lights onto items in the hallways to get a better look at them, categorizing and dismissing them as little or no threat, moving on. Occasionally it marked an item of interest in her HUD: a body, dead; a piece of debris sticking out of a wall at a dangerous angle; a stencil indicating water passages 40m this way, PFC 70m that way.
On her left, a door. Ice spray around the door indicated moist air blown out into the vacuum as the door seal was gradually opened. The AI marked this, and the frozen drag marks across the floor. Jan swung her weapon through the opening and inspected the room beyond.
A small cafeteria. Three bodies, still swelling, twitching. An eye burst while Jan watched, and her rising gorge needled her out of stunned immobility.
Someone had just opened this door, and killed these people by doing so. She swung herself around along the path of the frozen drag marks, off down the hall toward the PFC. She saw a flicker of light and movement in the distance.
“Zoom!” she ordered, and brought her weapon up to sight along it while her vision leapt forward.
“Low light!” The mode shifted to amplification, and her field of view went blurry green, but then resolved.
What was she seeing?
Something had one of the swelling corpses. It was mottled, and hairless, and its bulging teardrop eyes did not reflect her lamps. It turned to her and bared sharp, pointed teeth, and she could see crystals of blood flaking away at the corners of it’s lips.
It didn’t have a suit. It was dragging a writhing, bulging corpse into the lock at the end of the hall.
Jan froze.
A grue?
Every legend of haunted derelicts came back to her at once, and the vacuum-silence and swirling mist in the darkness was suddenly more than she could bear. Stories of corpses stuck in the guns and antennae after a battle, bloating and thrashing and somehow being possessed by some nameless horror from out of the unholy emptiness between the stars, something that had ridden in on a hull and waited for a body, of a hunger for still-warm flesh and blood -
Stop it, Jan! Get hold of yourself! You’re a Federal Marine. That’s madness!
But there it was. She had seen it with her own eyes, pulling a body through a lock to do who knew what to it on the other side.
No. I panicked, misinterpreted what I saw.
“Video playback of the last minute.”
Her HUD opaqued and then replaced the live augmentation feed with the recorded video from sixty seconds ago. She had been advancing, looking down at the floor, up at the wall, left to the doorway, every direction but down the hall where it must have already been dragging the body. She saw the muzzle of the weapon swing into the room, the suit lights play over everything, her HUD marking one, two, three corpses.
“Stop.” She took the time to look at the display citing body temperature as primary evidence, estimating they had been dead for several hours. They were still thrashing and twitching, visibly expanding in the vacuum, but were already dead. It was just decompression. Creepy, but explainable.
She was suddenly overcome by the intolerable feeling that the grue was standing right beside her while her screen was masked. “Visual!”
Her faceplate cleared and she jerked the rifle up, pushing the creature away - but she was alone in the corridor. The skin on her scalp tightened, her flesh prickling all along her back and arms, her stomach rolled, but she was alone. She swallowed.
“Get a grip, Wakelin.” She gripped her rifle, hefted it. She’d almost fired with no target.
She turned around, full circle; she did it again, going the other direction.
“Stop it.” She smelled her own sweat, felt it run down her nose, drip down her lip so she could taste the salt.
“Current visual inset, 1:6. Continue playback.”
She backed into a corner of the cafeteria so that the little window showed the room in front of her, and her back wasn’t so exposed. She kept looking up, expecting something to drop on her out of the low ceiling, but forced herself to watch the playback.
Her previous viewpoint rotated and followed the icy drag trail back out through the door.
“Now,” she told herself, “we’ll see what this really is.”
The image swung up. Zoomed in. Augmented.
There it was, dragging a body from the room behind. Hairless, skin lumpy and mottled, moving with a limp and shudder. Bulging eyes wide open, but dark, featureless. Mouth open, predator’s pointed canines - too many of them. Flecks of blood still dripping amid a sheen of foam. Swollen tongue darting out and back in again as it stared at her, and kept dragging a body into the tiny rotating lock, cuddling it close so as not to lose any parts in the mechanism.
Exactly as she’d seen it the first time. No suit. No breather. Triggering the lock and disappearing from view.
It had been right there, and had worked the lock.
Her bladder decided this was a good time to use the suit’s evacuation system.
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