Ice and fire

The attack came as they were loading the last group of evacuees. Contrary to Rye’s predictions, the bunny girl had managed to keep the lights on and the heaters somewhat functioning as group after group were loaded into the rotating shuttles until only the last group - O’Zaxx, a handful of scientists who usually worked on environmental systems, and the trio from the Solar Ascent - were left.

As the final scientist began the climb up a floor to the evacuation point, Dustin glanced back into the room in which they’d been sheltering, and into which his Rabyth love had returned in order to get a few milliseconds less lag for her remote controlling of the reactors. “C’mon Rye, lets get out of here and go home.”

The Rabyth had just enough time to stand up and stretch, commenting “good - tho the attacks have died down so I can probably keep everything on longer if ya want to…” before her tablet bleeped violently, and they were plunged once more into darkness. “Cogging stupid bloody fucking thing!” Rye swore, half stumbling before she activated her suit light.

Dustin and Yril’k had already been using theirs; at the sudden blackout he swung his gaze rapidly back to the stair beneath them, the torch drifting over the void in the stairwell rather than the treads that he had previously been watching. There had been no point shining a light into that central gap, it extended far too deep for the helmet light to reveal anything except more darkness below.

That was not the case now. Something was moving down there. Actually, given the way it was writhing and climbing the ice-slick edges of the treads, Dustin really hoped it was more than one something - the idea that a single entity could be clawing it’s way up towards them through that large a gap was not one he particularly wanted to entertain.

“Yril’k!” His shout was instant - but the Vex’ess warrior had noticed the incoming tide at more or less the same time as him. The two of them pointed their pistols down into the dark for a moment, then turned and bolted up the stairs, rapidly catching up with Rye who’d moved ahead of them. “Get to the shuttle!” Dustin yelled, pushing his suit’s speakers to the limit to alert O’Zaxx and the others above them. “We’ve got incoming!”

To his credit, the base commander didn’t hesitate. With one hand he shoved the nearest remaining scientist towards the door, while with the other he drew one of the pistols Dustin had given him. Reaching the stairwell, O’Zaxx shone a torch down past them before stumbling backwards at the sight of the things coming up from below. “What the…”

The flight up the stairs was a mess; with the main lights out, they only had their helmet torches to see by. That, coupled with the ice led to more than one stumble as they fled from the rising tide, helping each other up before scrambling on. Arriving at the top floor, the trio stumbled through after O’Zaxx who was already leaning his weight against the emergency door control. Even at a glance, Dustin could see it was hopeless - the things in the deep were climbing too quickly, the wheel too frozen to allow them to close the passage before their pursuit arrived. “Leave it!” He panted, tugging the commander away from the door to half run, half-scramble with them onto the landing pad.

Outside, their suit alarms blared in the gloom, the external temperature near-instantly causing a film of ice to grow on their visors before the vacsuit adjusted it’s refraction to compensate. Even so, visibility was very poor as they rushed towards the glow of the shuttle hatch, a loud scraping sound coming from behind. The pilot could clearly see what was coming - the engines were thrumming as Dustin reached the shuttle, Rye and O’Zaxx already on board. Yril’k shoved him in, turning as she did so to open fire with two pistols, the Vex’ess warrior having retrieved Dustin’s weapon as she pushed him. “Launch’k! Go’k!” Her voice came clear over the comms on a general frequency, and the pilot reacted.

Dustin could only watch horrified as the warrior opened fire at the tide of silver and red, the temperature cracking chunks off the fleshy monsters as the first wave froze on contact with the air. The silvery worms burrowed through the tide, exploding outward, their heads twisting as the Vex’ess’s rounds clipped them. Yril’k wasn’t aiming to kill - Dustin had already filled her in on the pistol’s ineffectiveness against the metallic worms, so she was using the percussive impact of the rounds to adjust their course. Instead of killing, she was forcing them into the path of other worms and the fleshy monsters behind, slowing the advancing horde.

“YRIL’K!” He yelled as the shuttle began to bank away from the landing pad. The warrior fired two final rounds, turned and bolted towards the edge of the platform on all six limbs. As she reached the precipice, muscles bunched, her blade arms dug into concrete, and she launched herself into the air. For one dreadful moment, it looked like the following mass of silver and red would reach her, tendrils of freezing flesh stretching out to drag her back - and then the shuttle rocked as she caught the edges of the door like a spider, three of her six limbs griping on as the pilot gunned the engine and put them out of reach of the twisting morass below.

Helping the Vex’ess woman inside, Dustin slammed the door shut with relief as the sound of the frozen air whistling past outside was replaced with the dull hum of the shuttle’s heating slowly bringing them back up to a reasonable temperature. Leaning against the wall as the airlock cycled, he sighed and shook his head. “Warn me next time before you try and do something like that, please? I thought we’d lost you for a moment there.”

Yril’k paused to catch her breath after the exertion of her leap to safety, then shrugged. “I was’k unsure if the shuttle’k would be able to clear’k the horde’k if they were not’k delayed. There’k was no time’k to argue.” Her voice was matter-of-fact as she turned towards the interior of the shuttle, adding “I knew I could’k jump further than’k anyone else, so I was’k the logical choice’k to ensure maximum’k chance of survival’k for the rear’k guard.”

Dustin couldn’t fault her logic, even if he wasn’t happy with it. Even Rye would have struggled to make the vertical leap the Vex’ess woman had managed, not that he’d have let either of them stay behind if he’d had a choice. Sighing, he sank into his seat in the rear of the shuttle; they were quarantined off from the pilot by a sealed bulkhead just to be safe on the transit up.

It wasn’t until the last shuttle’s occupants and crew had been fully scanned by Bleu that Dustin finally allowed himself to relax. Even then, it wasn’t proper relaxation - roughly two hundred new minds were looking to him for leadership, minds that had moreover recently had to come to terms with the idea that what they were studying was far more dangerous than at first it appeared.

The last shuttle’s occupants had been all too ready to discuss the worms and fleshy beasts that had poured out of their base, and now it seemed like practically the entirety of the new arrivals were focussed on identifying what the creatures had been. In the interests of keeping them occupied for the time being, Dustin had turned over all the suit footage he and the others had recorded, along with the sensor logs from scanning Heran’s corpse.

With the immediate threat past and hopefully no way off the icy rock for the weird alien entities, Dustin then turned his attention to more immediate matters. “So, O’Zaxx, what do you want us to do? You’re welcome to stay on board back to Earth, or we can drop you off somewhere enroute, but I’m assuming you don’t want to go back down there right now - and having seen the tidal wave of those things that nearly got Yril’k, I’m not willing to send a security team in.”

The pair were sat in Dustin’s ready room, sipping drinks and looking at a holo-display of the outpost. The monsters had retreated back underground in the aftermath of their escape - it seemed that even life that was adjusted for the chill had no wish to be outside in the cold snap that was currently causing the temperatures across that part of the planet to crater. O’Zaxx shook his head sadly. “Honestly, ambassador, if it were up to me I’d request use of your ship’s guns to destroy the base. Things that can shrug off pistol shots and keep going even as their limbs freeze off are not things I want to be close to. But, your comms officer helped route a call through to my superiors and I’ve been overruled. We’re going to establish an orbital facility to study the damn things… if you could drop my people off at the nearest starbase it’d be appreciated.”