Marie's boots clanged against the metal grating of the deck. Her shadows, disfigured by the flickering glow of the lights lining the edges of the hallway, danced on the walls around her. The deeper she moved, the more signs of the infected she spotted - gouges on the metal bulkheads, foul ichor splashed against a the jammed door of a storage unit. Strange and alien growths began to show up on the walls and ceiling, a web of thin and twisted strands spreading across the surfaces, pulsating with unknown energy. The tendrils grew thicker the deeper Marie ventured. Soon, they were twining themselves through light housings, pushing out the illumination strips and leaving them hanging, displaced and forlorn, sending out spasms of light into the dark hallway.
The engineer kept a tight grip on her weapons, alert for signs of danger ahead and constantly checking her line of retreat - but no **** of flesh and claw came at her.
A few more steps, and the hallway around her widened into a large, elongated space, filled with cheap-looking desks and chairs. Each work-station was half-hidden by a partially opaque divider, a half-heated and inadequate attempt at carving out individual work stations at a manageable price. Through the dividers, distorted but still recognizable, the familiar red-tinted lockdown warning blared at Marie from two dozen flashing console screens.
Suppressing a shudder, Marie warily entered the room. Keeping her weapons at the ready, she scanned the corporate nameplates set beside each workstation, until she spotted the name and title she was looking for.
A. Lemar - Chief of Security
She spotted the nameplate at the far end of the room, set into the wall beside a yawning doorway. No cheap open-concept workstation for A. Lemar - the Chief had rated a private office.
Marie trotted closer. Unnervingly, she saw that the office door had been torn from its moorings and tossed aside carelessly by some unknown assailant. The office beyond was a chaotic sight - datapads and chips scattered on the ground, furniture smashed and broken. The alien vines Marie had spotted in the hallway were already curling around the empty doorway and crawling in through the cracks in the tinted plastglass that had served as the Chief's window out into the larger security office.
Marie took another look around, then entered cautiously.
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