The sergeant and her men aren’t running for long before they come to a T-intersection, turning left to run to the door at the end of their last long corridor.
Sergeant Dame as she taps on a panel by the door.
“Damn it. It’s locked,” she says, continuing to mash the buttons. “Aurick, can you hack back into the ship’s system to try and communicate with whoever’s in there?”
“Already on it, Sergeant. I’ll do what I can.”
“Konrad, pull security on the door. Gustav and I will pull security on the hallway.”
“Heard, Sergeant.”
The warriors move into their positions while Aurick works from a combination of the panel next to the door and, I assume, whatever tools are inside his helmet.
They’ve got all kinds of gadgets. I can’t even imagine how those things work. Fiery, blue rounds. Colored screens that show all manner of information. Radios in their helmets. I bet that armor even makes them stronger. That must be how a dame can fight like that. Still, she’s got more moxie than most men I’ve met.
Their society must be fiercely devoted to war to put a woman in such a position, though. Wish I knew more. Not really, though. This is still all too much for me. I could really go for a smoke while we wait, though.
There’s a faint, high-pitched sound echoing down the corridors.
“Do you hear that, Sergeant, or is it just me?” asks Gustav.
“Afraid Wildheart is getting to you?” she asks. “Don’t worry. I hear it too. No telling what foul things that’s coming from.”
“It sounds … like laughing,” says Gustav.
“Indeed. It does,” says Sergeant Dame.
“I don’t know if I’m making any progress,” says Aurick.
“You’d better make something happen,” says Konrad. “I’m tired of staring at this door.”
“It’s no use,” says Aurick. “They’ve uploaded a dozen securities I have no means of getting around.”
“Try just opening the door,” says Sergeant Dame.
“I’ve tried. I’ll try again,” says Aurick. “Can’t we just have Gustav blow the thing open with his mind?”
“Could you do that, Gustav? Worst case?” asks Sergeant Dame.
“Perhaps.” The warrior’s answer is slow and troubled.
“You’re worried about the strain.”
“Worried? No. Do I understand the risk? Yes. Every time I open my mind to those powers, I’m gambling with my sanity. That’s simple enough when I’m training on my own, but if I lose my grip here, you’re all dead with me.”
“It’s a last resort then.”
“Yes.”
“At least we have that,” says Aurick. “Whatever happens, Gustav, I think I understand where your heart’s really at. For Vulfos. For the Vulfreich.”
“For the Vulfreich,” echoes Konrad.
“We all stand with you, Gustav. For the Vulfreich,” says Sergeant Dame.
“For the Vulfreich,” says Gustav. “And for my wife. For my son.”
This is a real team. They’re not just people thrown together and told to fight. They share something that’s bigger than themselves, and that unites them. I used to share that with men. Sort of. I wonder if I’ll ever have that again. Who knows? God knows.
The warriors go silent again. Aurick taps away at the panel for the door. Konrad, carbine high and ready, stands pointing at the door. Gustav and Sergeant Dame, also high and ready, stand pointing at the entrance to the corridor. And then, the wicked laughing rings out once again.
“It’s closer,” says Konrad. “I can hear it now. Do you want me to stay on the door, Sergeant?”
“For now, yes,” she says. “Be ready for that to change.”
“Heard, Sergeant.”
“There are more now,” says Gustav. “A lot more.”
“Gustav, arm a grenade,” says Sergeant Dame. “Throw it to the end of the corridor. You’ll detonate it when we’re being overrun.”
“Heard.”
He does as she says, throwing a grenade all the way to the end of the corridor. It hits the grated floor with a metal clang.
Are they arming and detonating these with controls inside their helmets? What a useful capability. And that throw was duck soup for him. He must have chucked that thing almost a hundred yards like it was nothing. And left left-handed. That space armor has to give him that kind of power.
Boy, I’d love to get my hands on something like that. Too bad I don’t have hands. Maybe Roger can help me with something like that. I’m sure the tin can knows a thing or two about putting together a tin suit.
“You still have two left, right?” asks Sergeant Dame.
“Yes.”
“We’ll use yours first, then I’ll start throwing mine. Hopefully, that’s all we’ll need. How’s that door coming, Aurick?”
“I’m making some progress, actually. No promises though.”
“Good enough,” says Sergeant Dame.
The cacophony of wicked laughs marches closer, growing louder, almost to roar. The two warriors securing the corridor clench their carbines tight, index fingers wrapped around their triggers. Konrad glances down the corridor and then back to the door. Aurick taps even more furiously on the panel.
Goblinoids crawl like roaches around the corners at the end of the corridor. Skin as black as space, their glowing, yellow, beady eyes lock on to the feast before them. They skitter on long limbs, always reaching, always grabbing, always keeping them low so that their bare, emaciated bellies scrape across the metal grates like voracious serpents slithering on the hunt. Their tongues hang out of mouths wide with starving, maniacal grins, salivation dripping as the skinny, lanky creatures dream of their next macabre meal.
The warriors waste no time firing like it’s open season. The blue rounds fly down the hall and hammer the goblins, shattering bones in green bursts of blood.
Do those carbines ever run out of rounds? Those packs on their belts have to be for something. Surely, there are more rounds. I can’t even begin to imagine how all that works.
The black creatures’ corpses pile up like heaps of sandbags. The corridor becomes so crowded with death, the creatures start taking to the walls and ceiling, all the while laughing like madmen in a loony bin.
“Now!” calls Sergeant Dame.
The sound from the explosion roars down the hall, the blast shattering the lights above it, flinging bodies and limbs in all directions. A few goblins thrown forward shake of the concussive blow, stand, and start to run at the warriors before they’re cut down by the blue pills.
Even the dead still seem to stare and laugh.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
More and more come crawling from the darkness, the corpses of their cohorts nothing more than hills to climb over and around.
Even the dead… Perhaps that’s the real power of these terrible things: they stare into your eyes like brats shoving grubby little hands where they don’t belong, reaching until they find that part of you that’s mad. Then, they pull and tug at it until it breaks loose, opening up a spring of hellish emotions to drive you to the edge and make you jump, dashing your sick brains out on the stones below.
I hate these things. I hope they all die. They remind me of every terrible death I’ve ever seen, and I get the sense they think that’s funny. But maybe they’re onto something… Maybe the best we can do is stare it all down and laugh.
Gustav throws another grenade, detonating it in mid-air once it reaches the intersection of the halls. He immediately launches his last grenade right after. Hitting the grated floor, it lands several yards closer, at the edge of the darkness. The wave of goblins scuttles past the grenade, the rapid fire of the carbines not enough to hold them.
One of the goblins sees Gustav’s grenade, picks it up, rears back to throw, and dies in another black blast of concussive force that fills the far end of the corridor.
Sergeant Dame throws her first grenade into the darkness past where Gustav had thrown his. Exploding in mid-air, it sets the horde back one more time, yet still more and more crawl around the corners, their beady yellow eyes ever staring at the warriors.
“Konrad!” yells Sergeant Dame.
He runs to get online, leaving the door unguarded.
“By Voltyr and for the Emperor!” he yells with glee.
Almost shoulder to shoulder, they fire on the throng of goblins, barely holding them at bay.
“Should have called sooner, Sergeant,” says Konrad in utter delight as his gun sings its staccato notes in battle like a choir man in church. A weird church, but a church nonetheless.
At the other end of the corridor, the goblins pile the scattered bodies and limbs of their cohorts into barricades, blocking the sight and fire of the warriors. More flood in, scuttling from cover to cover.
Sergeant Dame throws another grenade, trying to destroy the barricades. While the bomb’s blast does little to topple the corpse walls, it at least squeezes squeals of death from those hiding behind them. But, by now, the creatures have advanced at least halfway to the warriors. There, the fatalist fiends pile more bodies in the dark hallway for more barricades.
“Aurick?!” yells Sergeant Dame.
“I’m trying! I’m trying!”
“Keep working, sworn brother!” yells Konrad. “I’m confident in you!”
“Even if we open the door,” says Gustav, “there’s no telling if we’ll be able to shut it. Our fight is here, regardless.”
“We might have reinforcements on the other side,” says Konrad. “The main deck is the rally point after all.”
“If there were reinforcements, they’d have opened the door already,” says Sergeant Dame in a grim voice with a hint of despair. “The best we can hope for is to get through the door and to shut it.”
Gustav draws his blade.
“What are you doing?” asks Sergeant Dame.
“Buying more time.”
He points the cold, steely blade down the hall. A jet of flames, like the tail of a rocket the size of the corridor, consumes the entire hallway. Gustav holds the burst of flame for only a moment, but when it is gone, the entire corridor is charred, made even blacker by the absence of direct light. The corpse barricades are burned to smoldering crisps. The mad goblins continue to charge.
“How many can there be?!” cries Konrad.
“Enough to take an imperial conqueror,” says Sergeant Dame. “Thousands, at least.”
Imperial conqueror: That sounds like a classification of ship, if I’ve ever heard one. Means about as much as a single leaf blowing in the wind.
The flames having burned back the throng to the end of the corridor, Sergeant Dame throws her last grenade all the way through the smoke and darkness. It smacks against the steel wall with a clang, then explodes before falling to the ground.
“Your turn, Konrad. Grenades!”
He throws his first just where Sergeant Dame threw hers. After the burst, they give the juncture time to fill again. Then he throws his second. More time. Then his third.
Konrad runs from the line to Aurick, grabbing his two grenades in one hand, then rushes back to the line to throw one. The throng has already pressed closer, but Konrad nails his mark despite the darkness, striking a goblin in the head with the metal canister. The bomb explodes, annihilating the horde’s advance. Yet still, they creep and crawl, hungering for the flesh beneath the red armor.
Timing his next throw, Konrad sends the final grenade.
“Last one,” he says before it explodes. The final burst roars down the hall. “We can’t hold them back with just carbines.”
“We hold them back,” says Gustav. “We hold them back! That’s all that matters. Hell doesn’t care if we can or can’t: all that matters is that we do. And we will. We will hold them back.”
That man’s fighting more than just a firefight against alien abominations.
The warriors continue firing their carbines. Konrad grabs a cartridge from his belt, pulls the old cartridge out, and slams the new cartridge into the carbine in less than a second. Sergeant Dame and Gustav do the same at different times.
But, even under the rapid fire of these skilled soldiers, the goblins continue to encroach through the force of sheer numbers, rebuilding their barricades to help them advance further and further, closer and closer to the cornered warriors fighting for their lives.
Not just for their lives. For their leader, their Emperor. Their home. Their hope and love for a truer, better society, whatever that looks like to them, and whatever it really is.
“Let them get closer, Gustav,” says Sergeant Dame. “Immolate on my command.”
“For the Vulfreich,” says Gustav as if his teeth are grit beneath his helmet, never turning his gaze from his targets.
“Can you get the door or not, Aurick?” asks Sergeant Dame, her frustration beginning to boil out.
“I’m almost there. One more block, I think. Maybe two.”
“Keep trying, sworn brother! You can do it!” yells Konrad over a dozen blasts from his carbine.
Is this their final stand? Am I watching them come this far just to die to these freaks because they’re outnumbered? Why? Why would you show me this, Dave? Why would you make me watch this without being able to do anything? They’re all going to die, and all I can do is watch.
A goblin leaps at Konrad. He blasts it right in the chest.
Is that the point?
“Now, Gustav!”
Do you want me to see…
The horde has advanced so far that they’re within spitting distance. Sergeant Dame and Konrad fire away, holding them off while Gustav raises his sword to focus his mind.
…the price that others are paying?
In an instant, once again, a jet of fire fills the corridor. Gustav drops his carbine, and the flames dissipate. He falls to his knees and grabs his head with his free hand, leaning on his soldier’s blade like a sick man leans on a staff.
If you think that will make me care…
“Gustav!” yells Konrad.
“Keep fighting!” yells Sergeant Dame.
…you’re damn right.
“Damn it!” yells Aurick. “That was supposed to be it! It was a dead end! It’s like they’re rerouting as I go. There’s no way in, damn it. They’ve got us locked!” He punches the console with an armored fist, shattering the controls. “Wait…”
The screen in front of him flashes one word: ‘Opening. Opening. Opening.’
“It’s opening,” he says. “It’s opening!”
“Tell it to open faster!” yells Sergeant Dame.
Gustav is back on his feet, firing, but his time between rounds is much slower, as if he’s struggling to focus.
The goblinoids have rebuilt their barricades to halfway down the hall.
“There’re more than ever now!” yells Konrad, having the time of his life. “Glory to Voltyr! Glory to the Emperor!”
The three warriors continue firing, bursting the creatures’ skulls and shattering their bones.
“Konrad, secure the door!” yells Sergeant Dame.
“Heard, Sergeant.” He breaks from the line and moves to the door, pointing his carbine at the steel panels as they slide apart.
“Look out!” yells Aurick to Konrad as he jumps between the panels and presses them open faster with his back and arm, his carbine pointed into the room to cover his reckless action.
Sergeant fires her carbine with one arm and draws her saber with the other. A goblin leaps at her; she slashes it down while still firing down the corridor.
“It’s open!” yells Konrad as Aurick runs into the room. Konrad slips right in behind him.
Sergeant and Gustav back toward the door together.
“Can you give us one more, Gustav?”
“For the Vulfreich.” He fires another round from his carbine. “For Madlina!” He raises his sword. “For Ludvig!”
One more jet of flames consumes the goblinoid throng.
“Agh!” screams Gustav, dropping his sword and carbine as he falls to his hands and knees again.
Sergeant Dame hangs her saber at her side. She pulls his arm around her shoulders, still firing down the hall.
Gustav hangs his sword on his side, grabs his carbine, and feebly stands, forcing himself back into the fight. Together, they back through the doorway, firing rapidly until they watch the metal doors slide shut in front of them.