Valerie had dragged the two corpses as high into the wall space as she dared. The alarm still blared. It would only be a matter of time until two soldiers gone missing would get noticed. Their bulk, even reduced to dessicated husks, still made her temperature rise with the exertion.

The blood had been easy enough to clean, but there was no replacing the destroyed panel.

‘Not like it matters,’ she chastised herself as she engaged her active camouflage again and switched her vision styles. She had been operating on standard skidrell mode, but now she needed something more.

Combining pheromone sensing and thermal imaging gave her striking image of the barren corridor. She could see the diminishing trail the four troopers had left behind, reds, blues and yellows mixing in an uneven path in the air. The area around the kill site was a mess of angry purples and scarlet blobs. No helping that.

If nothing more, this combination would give her an early warning if another skidrell approached. With two meals, after completing the repairs to the superficial wounds caused by the impact, she would have about six hours of operating under low stress conditions with active camouflage. She called up a timer on her HUD to make sure the time limit wouldn’t sneak up on her.

In another corner of her vision, she called up a map of the ship. It was an approximation of the Delirium and lacked any details, but her implant would analyse and compare as she went along.

Valerie amended the plan in her to do list. Version 1.0 had failed. She now had access to Version 1.1. Her risk assessment routine worked on establishing her route and the parameters of the mission.

Her primary goal remained reaching the core of the ship and gaining access to any files or plans pertaining to the stealth technology that the Delirium employed.

Her secondary goal remained escape.

The tertiary one, to blow the pod and sink the Delirium, had defaulted to failure. It was, originally, rated with a 25% chance of success anyway, so it didn’t phase her much.

Valerie moved away from her insertion point, crawling on the wall, invisible. She preferred to not use her active camouflage at full capacity, so she was aware she’d appear as a shimmer in the air to anyone looking. The drain was vicious.

‘New objective,’ her HUD showed with dutiful enthusiasm.

‘1.1. Reach SR-drone hangar bay nearest to current location.’ Several markers were added to her map.

‘1.2. Gain access to hangar command module or equivalent.’

‘1.3. Gain updated information of enemy layout for route planning.’

‘1.4. Sabotage SR-drone hangar bay / flight units.’

‘I love me some dirty work,’ Valerie thought as she reviewed the proposed plan. She accepted the list of objectives. It would update as she got a better lay of the Delirium and its inner workings. In that regard, High Command had only supplied what little information they had gathered over time. The locations of the hangars were the only piece of certain intel she had to work with.

She wasn’t far from one marker. As expected, most of the area was automated, similar to the SRs themselves, but not deserted. The Delirium hummed and purred underneath her feet, like a great cat resting. It surprised her that they had silenced the alarm after about half an hour, but she doubted that that meant they had stopped looking for her.

The ship itself was wildly different from the Wild Summer, or any other ship aside from the Ark herself. Its corridors were spacious and bright, and the sound of the ship soothed rather than unnerve. There wasn’t a single pipe or wire in sight. The inside of the Delirium matched its shiny smooth outside shell. She took photos at intervals, through every cavernous room she passed and in every duct she hid in, but they were repetitive shots of the same silver-white alloy after a while. Skidrell engineering left little to be glimpsed from the outside.

The skidrells had not given up their search for her. Twice she ran into patrols. They were now heavily armed and armoured, no longer easy pickings. Every group had at least four members, and they all watched each other’s back. Their weapons exuded malice and danger in the way the soldiers carried them into their thin arms. She could taste the ozone coming off them, a thick and gagging taste that made her eyes water. One soldier in four had one of the electrox rifles, while the other made due with more mundane projectile weapons.

Valerie had seen what remained when one of those murderous arcs of energy hit a person. It wasn’t a pretty sight. The bio-techs had assured that she could withstand a single hit from one such weapon, but it wasn’t a prospect she was willing to test out. She bypassed most patrols by staying as high as possible, immobile until they were out of sight.

They didn’t know what they were dealing with, at least not yet. It would be best to keep it that way. She trusted in the work that had gone into making her, and she aimed to survive her first proper field test. If she did, the top brass would comission more creatures like her

‘Can’t imagine that being a good idea,’ she thought as she waited for a third agitated patrol to pass by.

Of the few words of skidrell she could understand, she only made out ‘murdered’. They had found the corpses. It had only taken three hours of her allotted six. She hoped the state of their brethren would give the aliens a moment of pause.

‘I saw what you did of the Vehement Hope, you bastards.’ Her fangs pushed up through her gums as she felt herself anger at their distress. The Delirium had murdered a whole colony ship. Ten thousand souls spilled into the vacuum of space, women and children dead, clutching at their throats and their faces, dying the worst death imaginable.

She had seen the hulk that remained, been there ahead of the Wild Summer, too late to do anything but assess losses and damages.

It almost made her lounge for the four.

Almost.

Instead, she allowed them to pass by and went on her way. The timer ticked ever down while her skin stung and was getting unpleasantly tight, as if it were shrinking. The more she stayed camouflaged, the more sensitive she became.

SR-drones were stacked one on top of the other in the hangar bay, like silver bullets in a magazine. Getting in had been reasonably easy, considering the amount of code breakers she had at her disposal. But getting to an access panel… well, that was the tricky part.

Rows upon rows of drones stretched through the belly of the Delirium. It wasn’t a single hangar, but all of them, interconnected. The ships slept in cradles, one on top of the other, in tight rows, ready for deployment. Looking down over the rail of the walkway, she could see the great accelerators that spat out drones whenever the Delirium engaged in battle.

No wonder the Summer was always outmatched in every single engagement. The Delirium could send out a hundred SRs in the time it took the Summer to launch ten Valkyries. She knew many of the skidrell craft were remote controlled, but to see the reality of the Delirium’s capabilities was sobering.

Walkways and gantries criss-crossed the cavernous underbelly of the ship. What Valerie couldn’t see were terminals, or stations that would serve as local access point into the larger network.

That put an unpleasant damper on her plans. Skidrells used a holographic interface to interact with their system, but reason dictated there would be hard access points in the eventuality of catastrophic failure.

None were visible.

Valerie surveyed the stacks of SRs. She took a running start and launched herself at the closest one, sailing over the breakneck drop. It wasn’t a perfect leap, but it got her on the middle wing of one of the craft, from which she jumped to the one next to it, a level above. It took her another hour of jumping and climbing until she reached the top of the stack, the great motors of the elevator in sight.

She nestled herself between the wings of the topmost SR and deactivated her camouflage.It had become insufferable, and she knew it would only be a matter of time until she’d have to shed that derma layer. Her body was already secreting the new coating to replace the one she had been using for far too long by that point.

A memory of taking off her bra after a long day came to mind, and it drew a sigh of nostalgia out of her.

‘What am I going to do?’ she mused as she watched the large space. Even from her vantage point, there were still no obvious places where she could try to connect to the Delirium’s network.

The SR’s smooth wing vibrated softly underneath her and was warm. Valerie had laid flat on her stomach, tail extended, and absorbed the warmth as she thought.

There was an idea.

She turned her head to the side and looked at the ugly nose of the SR drone. They would have a connection to the network. And she had studied other drones — wreckages, true — while she had trained for the mission. There were schematics uploaded into her that showed an access hatch on the top of the drone, where she could attempt a connection.

True enough, it was there. But it was already connected to the cradle via a cluster of thick silver cables. Valerie ran a claw over the surface of the cable. It cut through and almost severed one of the thinner wires inside. The protective sheath attempted to mend itself back together, but Valerie pumped a bit of acid into the claw’s pouch. It sizzled against the alien membrane, but did the job.

Working fast, for fear of somehow tripping another alarm, she dug out the spool of cable that lay nestled at the base of her cranium. The bio-techs had made the jack to clamp on to the outside of a cable, rather than connect to anything. It was impossible to know what the Delirium’s connection ports looked like, so the engineers had devised a work around.

Valerie understood next to nothing of the complex routines running inside her head. She was along for the ride as they deciphered the alien system and tried to extract information from it. As the minutes wore on, she became more and more aware of how exposed she had made herself on top of the drone elevator. It was dark, with only some lights illuminating the gantries, but every sound made her jumpy.

‘Please wait. Data retrieval in process. No estimated time to completion.’

For a moment she considered engaging her stealth, but decided against it. If she were to be discovered, she’d need to make a quick escape and the stealth up again. It wouldn’t do to waste the precious little time she still had for the active camouflage.

The SR’s background vibration changed suddenly, from a soft hum to an angry buzz. It wasn’t the only one. Many of the surrounding ships powered up at the same time.

‘Please wait. Data retrieval in process. No estimated time to completion.’

‘Fuck,’ Valerie cursed. More of the SRs were coming alive. The lift jerked, and they dropped with a shudder. A boom, far below, signalled one drone being shot out. The lift dropped again. She had to stick to the drone or get shaken off.

Another SR launched.

The drone under her was getting hotter and buzzing louder. The underside gun moved as it went through its preflight check.

Another launch. They were going faster now. Maybe the Delirium had found the Summer and engaged her, or one of the other human mega-carriers.

‘Please wait. Data retrieval in process. No estimated time to completion.’

‘Yeah, that’s not an option,’ she thought as she prepared to yank the jack away, and run. Soon she would end up below the lowest gantry and have to deal with the mess of machines at the bottom of the hangar. Dodging launchers speeding up to near sonic speed was not in her data sheet.

‘Data retrieval complete. Alarm triggered. Please vacate the area.’

“What?!”

Something pinged off the armour of the SR as it dropped to another level. Sparks flew from the point of impact.

Valerie retracted her cable and dropped back just in time for a volley of bullets to pockmark the surface of the drone. The calibre was high, but not enough that the bullets could punch through the armour plating of the SR. Another alarm started off as the lift dropped again and Valerie could see the squad of ten troopers arrayed against her. They were equipped differently from the rest she had avoided.

‘Thermal sensing optics. High calibre weapons. Secondary tracking units. They’re not taking any chances.’

Her stomach tightened as the lift dropped into another position. There was nowhere else to run to. One drone on an adjacent stack shuddered and pulled away on its positioning drives. It turned towards Valerie, main gun already spinning up.

“Are you insane?” she growled at the assembled enemies. They were about to blast apart one of their own fighters just to get rid of her.

Of course they would. The Delirium would build another SR-drone in less time than it took for her remains to cool off.

Spurred by the rising panic, she tongued another two of her glands. She had to fight before the advancing drone manoeuvred into position to fire. The soldiers on the ground fired another volley in her general direction, trying to keep her pinned. Even their six legged long-headed trackers whined in a frenzied buzz, struggling against their restraints. She very much did not want to get caught by one of those horrors.

“Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you and your entire species!” Valerie roared as her jaw distended into its lethal configuration, bleeding fangs erupting into position. “I’ll tear you limb from limb.”

And it was true. When the lift dropped low enough that the skidrells faced her, it wasn’t the sleek infiltration agent that stared them down. She was down on all fours, claws at the ready and jaws twitching as she secreted venom and acid. Her tail lashed at the armour of the drone, every nerve screaming in agony. The derma layer for active camouflage had ripped apart as her scales hardened into razor sharp points.

She launched herself to the gantry and rolled up into a ball mid-air. Bullets bounced off her carapace, silver scales ripping off as she spun towards them. She hit one skidrell and sprawled down over it, claws ripping apart its body armour like wet tissue paper.

The skidrell didn’t have time to cry out as she turned it into a purple blooded geyser. Blood had sprayed when she launched herself at the closest other soldier. It had brought its weapon to bear, but too slow.

They were all too slow, moving as if through a dream. Her jaws clamped over the soldier’s headgear, and it groaned for a moment before crumpling. She bit off its startled face and spat it aside. The corpse dropped to the metal floor, fingers twitching on the trigger of its weapon, firing wide.

Nothing touched her.

She was a crazed wraith as she disembowelled another soldier, claws cutting through crunchy cartilage and fleshy matter alike.

They had freed one of the trackers from its leash and the beast leapt into frenzied action. She caught it mid air by the scruff of its thick neck. It snapped its needle fanged jaws at her, acidic spit spattering her shimmering carapace. With a growl, she smashed it down onto the walkway, turning its head into a pulped mess of greenish viscera.

The soldiers fired on her. She allowed some shots to find their mark, only to enjoy the skidrells’ horror as bullets bounced off, harmless. They hurt more than she expected them to, but it made the skidrells falter in their bravado. Her tail skewered another one of them and it died screaming as her venom turned its insides to goo.

That broke them. They released the other trackers and tried to pull back, allowing the one of them carrying the electrox weapon a clear shot at her. It wouldn’t get the chance as she threw the tracker at him, head ripped open and spraying blood.

The skidrell screamed as the acid blood ate through its gear. She was upon it moments later, biting into its long neck and ripping off its head with a roar.

She jumped sideways as the SR drone opened fire. There was no fighting the damn thing. The electrox weapon was coded for the user, so it wouldn’t do her any good.

Valerie turned her back and ran across the walkway. The drone chased her, firing bursts of super-heated metal that ate through the gantry. She only needed to be far enough away that the stacks would cover her. The drone had very little room to move in the yawning, packed room, and she banked on that.

Even through the stim high of the glands, she still had enough self control to access the schematics she had stolen. There would be an access shaft ahead of her, two stacks over, and up on the ceiling of the hangar.

More of the drones powered on and shook free of their cradles. They fired on her, and it was all she could do to keep in ahead of them. Their fire was drawing close.

The access shaft was on the topmost part of the hangar, a single access bulwark that was only meant for automatic use by smaller drones to access the ammo stores.

She needed to climb to reach it, but all the lifts near her had started moving and dropping their loads. Her options dwindled by the second.

‘Warning. Operational limit reached. Cease expenditure or risk internal trauma. Extreme risk of irreparable damage to internal systems.’

Valerie ignored the warning and dismissed it from her HUD. She didn’t need a warning to know she had exceeded operational parameters. Stopping was not an option.

She jumped as hard as she could towards the closest elevator. Her claws cut through the alloy as she scrambled for purchase. Her sweat gland had stopped operating. Claws would have to do.

An SR turned towards her and opened fire, in the most incredible display of reckless destruction that she could ever have imagined. What separated skidrells from humans, at least until her creation, was a willingness to do anything for victory.

Valerie barely felt the impact that ripped through her. She had focused her entire attention on getting to the access port as she climbed the smooth exterior of the Delirium’s mechanism. Her claws helped her gain height as she rushed, moving side to side to avoid the SR drones and their guns. The pain flashes red hot in her mind for a single heartbeat, before her brain cut off the pain receptors in her lower body.

With a heave and a grunt of effort, she pulled off the shaft’s heavy door and slipped inside. Another round of heavy weapons fire almost took off her tail.

Valerie deactivated every one of her combat systems as she crawled into the narrowest corner she could access, two levels up and five rooms off the main supply corridor, nestled deep into the innards of the Delirium. She needed to focus all of her dwindling reserves on her healing processes, and it hurt to even think about it.

She could accomplish the mission with the entire skidrell contingent aboard the Delirium looking for her. Even if she could no longer rely on her active camouflage, she was still confident she could manage the mission.

But there was no fucking way she could do it with an entire leg missing halfway down from her thigh. Her HUD screamed at her, red and angry messages crowding her vision for attention. Losing a leg hadn’t been part of her plan, and growing one back would need body mass she could barely spare. She thought back at the corpses she had left behind and sighed, despondent.

She’d manage. Somehow.

Valerie always managed. It was why she was chosen to become the thing that frightened an entire squad of skidrell soldiers.

‘All right, let’s sort this out,’ she thought as she started reviewing all of her system errors. Healing would take hours. She’d be found much earlier than that, so now was time to devise Version 1.2.

No time like the present…