Chapter Thirty Six

Aaron

While Arron keeps his eyes on the orbital traffic monitors, Arma rolls the shuttle over to look at the earth below. The planet is so bright above them, with the sunlight reflecting off the huge white storm below. The virtual canopy on the ceiling lights up the inside of the cab well enough for him to actually see some things for once. Somewhere down there, the main SSS shuttle is launching off the pad ahead of the last colony rocket.

She rolls the ship back around to face them where they’re headed, readying the cannons for what they know is out there. From here, they have to carefully drift between the orbital layers on their way out to the accumulation site. As soon as he gives her the clear, she toggles the controls up to move into the next empty orbital layer that’s safe for shuttles to stay. With intense focus, they check out their surroundings for anything moving, or mischievous. The crew launch will be following their line, and it has to be clear.

While Arma continues to drift them farther out through the crowded low orbital fields, keeping her eyes on all the blinking lights surrounding them, he keeps his eyes trained on the motion tracking system. Nothing should be making any new movements anywhere near them. He was expecting to see at least something by now, but everything is quiet. It’s unsettling. He looks behind himself at the back lockers near the airlock, checking to see how fast he could grab a rifle if he needs to.

“Sweetheart, I’m gonna drop the cabin pressure down to about half ok. If something happens, or I need to get out the back in a hurry, I’d rather it not be as high.”

“You see something? What is it?”

“Just a feeling is all.” When the system pulls some of the nitrogen out of the cab and recompresses it, he can feel his suit and the fingers in his gloves stiffen up a little. “Go ahead and drop the pressure in your suit a little too, to keep things the same. Just make sure you still have enough to still talk.”

As they continue to slowly push out towards the geosynchronous orbit, Don and Vaun start bringing the larger shuttle up through the lower levels a little more quickly, to catch up to them. He wishes the circumstances were different, so he could enjoy looking outside at all the larger satellites around them, but he’s vigilantly glued to his screens. Arma is all eyes outside, looking for the anything that could be crawling around and hiding on the larger things floating about. To her, everything is incredible, and a must see.

Some of the behemoth satellites, from before their time, are dark old abandoned vestiges of the war. A few of them are larger than even the SSS main shuttle. Don had told them that they used to gather them up and push them to the moon, simply for raw materials. Parts of the strange objects are black in shadow, while others are lit up bright in the light of the sun.

When they pass close by another one of them, he glances up, and something catches his eye. The satellite’s stretched out solar panels look like they’ve been shot all to hell, and it has an almost unnoticeable soft spin to it. The second he notices the fine scratch marks all over it, Arma is already jerking the shuttle to the side in a hard strafing maneuver. The safety caps are up on the triggers, and she’s ready to unleash all hell on anything that so much as twitches.

“It shifted! Why’d it do that? It’s supposed to be dead!”

Their black shuttle should be invisible, but the thing did move. He saw it too. Maybe they still have some residual heat on them from pushing hard through the atmosphere. One thing is for sure, they’ve been seen. Arma knows better than to turn their headlights on, so instead, she switches the entire cockpit screen over to hybrid detection. That’s when they catch a glimpse of something small and warm on the back side of the satellite, slipping out of view from around the edge of it.

The new movement causes the whole object to counter-shift in the other direction again. Whatever is on it, is hiding from them. He knows what all the holes in the panels are from now, all the pointy legs on one of those damn things.

“Alright, back up a little ways from it. That thing’s got a Gatling gun on it, so don’t give it chance. If it comes around, you pump it good with the big gun.”

“We’re past it though. If we shoot in that direction…” she knows she’s made a mistake already. “We’re on the wrong side of it!”

“Hey, now hold on. It doesn’t know what we are yet. It looks like it’s been sending out a signal. Nothing’s been sent back to it yet. I’ve got the jammer up now.” The two of them have been on the cabin’s optical coms, so it couldn’t have been listening to them. “When we get far enough away, I’ll call out to Don and have em smoke it while it’s distracted by us. I’m sure they’ve picked it up by now. It’s got its backside wide open to em. Keep trained on it though, I’ll watch what’s ahead of us.”

He hears her take a breath on her side. He can see she’s got a lock on the object, reminding him that he can add target locks for her too. The other shuttle isn’t far behind them. He’s sure they have to have picked up on it by now. He gets ready to open a channel to them just in case. Before he manages to, he sees a few flashes of light come from the direction of the big ship. Not a second after, the thing crawling around on the object returns its own long string of munitions right back at them, likely everything it had all at once. He can only watch as a long spiral of glowing dots rain down towards the main shuttle.

Right when the large multi-legged bug robot tries to leap free of the satellite, it and the whole thing it was crawling on lights up in a barrage of sparks and debris spreading out towards them. Vaun comes over the coms as Don dodges the string of bullets from the robot. The can only imagine where all the stray bullets will end up.

“Doesn’t look like these little shits are going to have any etiquette out here.”

Arma tries to apologize. They did kind of screw up. “We didn’t know it was there till we were already passed it. It was hiding, and we’re pretty sure it reported on us.”

“Alright, from here on out, you see something funny, go ahead and just pop it one or two anyway. We can take some collateral on this one if we have to, but be smart about it. The crew just launched and they’re not gonna be far behind us. We’ve got maybe a half hour to clear their way. Nothing’s moved down below since we’ve gone through. Looks like it’s staying clear so far.”

When they pair both of their ships systems together, Aaron puts the video feed of the other shuttle on one of his screens, to watch them. Don’s typical jaded attitude looks to have vanished. Now, he’s all over his screens like a smoker at a slot machine. Vaun still looks pretty much as tense as he does any other day of the week. He can see that they’ve split up the traffic displays evenly between themselves and aren’t only looking at what’s nearest to them, but the entire global map. It doesn’t look like they’re ruling anything out. The other continental powers must really hate this Mars crew.

Over their private com, Arma asks him what their next move should be. She feels a little bad for letting that last one slip past them. All they can really do, is stay on course, towards the accumulation site. There isn’t much left between them and the dock now at this point anyway. They already know most of the drones moved out to the space dock a while ago.

Suddenly, Don shouts over the com. “God damn it!” He slams on the reverse thruster of his craft, plummeting behind them.

Even Arma says “oh shit” when the two of them witness multiple new yellow lines popping up on their trackers way behind them. A grip of drones they completely missed are coming out of the woodwork, and they’re all heading to intercept the colony ship starting to come up from underneath them. The crew is watching their own trackers too, and are freaking out. At the same time, a few more of them light up ahead of him and Arma. They have to keep going.

In the distance down below them, he can see what looks like distant flares shooting off towards the other SSS shuttle. The only way he can describe it, is all-out space warfare. He knew they were probably getting in over their heads, but not like this.

Vaun comes over the com, taking lead on the mission. “Arma, you stay on course and blast any of those fuckers moving ahead of you! Aaron, I need you to double my displays on your system. You’ve gotta help me line up target times. There’s too many of them. Run their trajectory, bullet paths, and time the collateral damage windows below us. I have to take the first one right now. They’re coming in fast!”

The second Vaun has an acceptable shot, he launches both of his guided missiles and moves on to the next targets. They’re still a little too far out for the cannon, so they wait a couple more seconds to narrow the distance they’ll have to lead their shots. From what they can see, the robots are holding onto some kind of rocket packs, and can really get moving. As the robots close in, thin strings of tracers start reaching out from them towards the missiles, destroying them before they can detonate. It’s going to come down to a real dogfight now.

The second Vaun’s target monitor pops up on his, he can see four objects with target locks already on them. He taps on the next one out and then looks at the overlapped flowing layers of satellites below them. Over the com link, he can hear the steady “thump thump thump” of shells from the ship’s main gun going off. Each burst is set in a short line out front of the targets. It takes a while for the rounds to travel as far as they have to go. Before the first bullets reach downrange, he has the next target timed with a good clear patch of empty space below it.

The first of the creepy robot things tries to veer away from the incoming shells, but Vaun detonates them overhead, just in time, making them scatter out wide blanketing their target. He really didn’t want to resort to that, but it’s the way things have to go now. As the first drone erupts into debris, so does two other random satellites below it. Vaun cusses up a storm and punches something with his fist in frustration. He’s really upset.

He calls out to Vaun. “Hey, I’ve got target three clear in two seconds! You’re locked on. Go for it… NOW!”

Vaun is shouting on the other end too, as he kicks out five more rounds in anger. “Fuck You! Ahaha! Tell your friends how it tastes you piece of shit!”

As the first target disappears, he keeps going. “Next one, number four on your screen, take him, clear in three seconds… two rounds only, it’s tight!”

Holly hell from a big previous burst rains down on the second target, turning the whole thing into a scattered glowing mess of hot scrap. Before the next couple of rounds can reach the third target, it fires back at them with everything in its magazine, spraying bullets at them far and wide. Don doesn’t bother trying to veer out of the way much. They’re going to get what they’re going to get.

Being so caught up in helping Vaun, the sound of the cannon on his and Arma’s own shuttle going off takes him by surprise. Arma is silent, in the zone, and all over what she has in front of her. She sends what looks like a sine wave of range-burst shells out in front of her target, leaving it no chance. As it returns fire at her, she lets her cannon auto lock on the next targets on its own. As she swerves their shuttle around hard, he tightens his harnesses even more and continues to work with Vaun on his systems. Every so often, he can hear the tick of bullets glancing off the sharp tapered ballistic ceramic nose of their shuttle.

The blunter nose of Don’s shuttle takes the rounds a bit harder, making clear knocking sounds over the com. He never sees any damage alerts on their end, but the fourth target has them in some more serious trouble. It has almost reached the Mars crew vessel, and after Don slowed his ship down as much as he did, he and Vaun are about to be passed up by it too. The Mars crewmen are becoming even more hysterical.

“It’s gonna get us! We can see it right outside! What is that thing! Oh god, it’s got a bunch of legs! It’s gonna grab onto us!” Weighing almost two hundred tons, the huge shuttle has no chance of evading anything.

Don spins his shuttle around hard, as the huge ship passes by him. He’s so close to them, he can see the drone clear as day through the virtual canopy windows. It’s holding onto what looks like a simple small solid rocket. Its gun is pointed at them, but it’s not risking firing when it’s so close. It could miss its landing that way. By the time his cannon can locks back onto it, it’s too late for him to shoot. The thing is right on top of the crew ship.

“Dump your engines now!”

The very moment the Mars crew blasts free of their main stage, the robot slams into it, being left behind. It drags big gouges down the length of the long cylindrical hull as it latches on. The engines are off, but the leftover fuel is now purging out of the gashes in its side. As soon as the others have drifted far enough away, he punches a single round straight through the big metal bug as it tries to skitter around out of sight.

Vaun only shouts out “No don’t…”, but is too late. The explosion ahead of them is massive, and ends up splitting the huge engine cell in two, sending each end hurling off in random directions. Luckily, nothing hits them, but they still get buffeted by the force of the bomb they set off.

“Uh oh. Woops! Whatever… way worth it! We’re past the point of keeping this shit clean anyway.”

The words none of them wanted to hear come across the coms. “You guys know we’re gonna come up short on our second stage rendezvous now right?”

It looks like they’re in the clear now, but the crew ship is going need a bit of a tug from the SSS shuttle. To do it, they’ll have to make another lap around the entire planet to get to the engines at the right speed. None of them like it, but it’s going to add a couple hours between them reaching the accumulations sight.

Since he and Arma have travelled so much farther out, they’re going to be getting there alone. With that much time ahead of them, they’re bound to draw out anything and everything dangerous. It’s a good idea, and a bad idea.

While Don catches up to the Mars crew, to tow them to where their orbit transfer engines are waiting, he and Arma push their oversized ion engines to their limit on their way out to the L-four dock site. The remaining three robots she’s been tracking, are well on their way to beating the two of them there. After what she did to the first batch of them, she doesn’t expect any more to be popping their heads out till then. It’s going to be a long stressful trip out there, strapped in their seats, and watching their monitors the whole time.

After a few more hours, they eventually drift farther out through what could only be called the space junkyard. It’s a strange and unsettling place full of objects they can’t see. There are no blinking lights around them anymore, and only red outlines on the virtual canopy are showing what is out there, Luckily, things are a bit more spread out this time. Not even a fast moving bullet should be able to catch them off guard through the area. While he continues to focus on all of the other ship’s monitors with Vaun, Arma diligently covers all of their own.

While Don and Vaun take turns getting some rest, he keeps watch of their ship’s surroundings for them. As awful as it is to spend a straight twelve hours of intense focus on so many things at once, he finds it to have no effect on his mind. He truly is a computer. Luckily, it’s been enough to keep all of his other random thoughts at bay.

Once the Mars colony crew joins with their orbital transfer engines and everyone is well on their way out to the site, things finally calm back down. What he finds, is that he can’t handle any more of being restrained in his seat. There’s not a damn thing left in the remaining emptiness they’re cruising through, and he’s burnt through all his patience. The only way he’s going to be watching for more of these bug things, is from down the length of his rifle. He and Arma are going to have to split up at the dock anyway, so he figures he can start getting ready early. She’ll be the one to keep the things pinned down with the cannon while he goes out there and picks them off one by one.

While she stays focused on the controls, the traffic monitors, and the guns, he carefully works his way to the back of their tiny ship, holding on firmly to the yellow ceiling hand rails. There’s nothing even the size of a grain of sand between them and the dock now, but he makes his moves by the book just in case. There’s always the chance she might need to make a sudden move. Weighing nearly three hundred pounds, he can’t be loose in the cab.

In the back, he grabs one of every weapon they have from out of the cabinets. He clips a standard rifle and flux generator platform to one of the booster packs, and then takes up one of the big flack cannons in his arms. After dealing with one of the robots up close on his first gig, he feels it’d be best to hit them with the biggest thing he has.

It’s a big relief to stretch out in the back of the shuttle and wind down for a bit. Handling four different tracking screens at robot-mind speed has his thoughts still racing. He forces them out of his mind, closes his eyes, exhales a full breath as slowly as he can, and focuses his thoughts on Arma. He imagines the sound of the heavy rain in the cab of the truck, and the water pouring down the windows. It’s like he’s really there again. When he mentally opens his eyes, she’s in his lap again, and the light is reflecting off her glossy chest. It’s dark, calming, and gets him motivated again. Like she had said, they need to get this over with so they can get back to that moment.

His little break only lasts for so long though. They’ve still got a ways to get to the site, but he figures that if he stays calm, he can cool down some before the action starts. He needs to be rational, and not fall for the chase if these things are smart enough to work together, or bait him.

“I’m gonna go outside and hang for a bit. When you slow down to the safe distance you want to engage these buggers at, I’ll go out ahead of you and get my boots down on the equipment. They’ll either have to deal with me, or they’ll have to deal with you.” If his mouth could go dry, it would right now.

You sure, it’s going to be a while. It’s going to take a while to slow down at this speed. I’m not going to use the solids unless I absolutely have to.” Her voice turns stern, but also worried. She’s been dwelling on what’s to come. “Don’t die on me Aaron, not out here.”

What she said claws deep into him. Being a hero is no reason for being reckless, but he knows better than to make a promise this time. “I know. Just don’t let them take our ship. If it gets really bad, we could still save some lives and get people back home in it.”

Without him saying it, she knows he meant without the two of them. If it comes to it, they’ll have to die again to save the others. And if they have to, they’ll use the white boxes Five put in their shuttles on Vaun and Don. “I say we clear them out well before the others even come around then.”

The confidence in her voice helps calm his nerves and give him the driven focus he needs to do what he has to. He thinks back on the days when he couldn’t manage the rage inside of him at all, when he was considering disappearing for everyone else’s sake. He’s worked so hard to come back from that, but even now, all it takes is a single stitch to pop for all of that anger to burst free. The memory of Reese slapping her ass crosses his mind like a little video. Then comes the thought of that tiny innocent chipmunk in his dream, that so insignificantly perished.

As Arma processes him through the airlock, he thinks of all the things that he resents. In his mind, he imagines Arma having to go home without him, leaving him out here to float in a graveyard of nothing forever. When they remake him from the last time his drive was updated, the first time they ever said that they loved one another will have not even happened. He feeds all of his worries, emotions, and thoughts into a pressure cooker of hateful focus.

Arma can hear it in his breathing that he’s getting worked up. She knows the sound of it well enough. It’s that animalistic power of his that gets her all hot. She feeds him even more. “Don’t let one of those things get ahold of me Aaron.”

As they creep up under the shadow of the giant space dock that all the Mars colony supplies are staged on, she puts on the reverse thrusters and slows them down to range close enough to where she can use the main cannon without there being any bullet travel delay. She can’t risk having to lead her shots this time around.

They were really only expecting to see some basic cargo pods, engines and whatnot, but it’s a whole other deal when they get a real glimpse of what’s on the dock. There’s a whole other huge shuttle, like what the crew is heading up in, and what looks like two even bigger surface landers all assembled and ready. It’s not going to be another pitiful colony attempt, where everyone dies in the end this time. The size of the endeavor is beyond what he thought could even be real. The collection of engines alone are more than the total of what he was expecting to see.

Another thing he wasn’t expecting, is the actual size of the space dock everything is staged on. He’d seen some pictures of the thing, from when its fabled existence was confirmed, but they never felt real. The thing has to be a kilometer long. One thing is for sure, it’s different from everything else, by color, structure, and age. It looks like the kind of stuff that was found on the moon, from before the war. He can only imagine what it looked like loaded with whatever it was originally made for. Word is, the war happened before any of those things ever came to fruition. Maybe it was always meant to be a Mars waypoint.

Even now, most of the dock is still empty. The space industry back before the war must’ve been beyond comprehension. They are truly riding the coat tails of those before them. He smirks, considering no matter how powerful they were back then, they still never learned how to cheat death.

The monstrous spidery robots crawling on the colony supplies have started to become restless. They know better than to dare exposing themselves for even a second to swap rounds with Arma. So as fast as they can, they scramble behind any of the equipment they can use to protect themselves. A straggler, caught out on the platform, doesn’t make it in time before she punches a round through it from very close over the very edge of main shuttle. The round ends up skipping back up off the deck of the platform, zinging off deep into space, while the scrapped robot continues to slide along, as if it were on ice.

Aaron takes the opportunity in the moment of pandemonium to sling himself around the bottom of the shuttle on his leash and jet himself off towards the underside of the dock. Like Don had suspected, these things have no intention of damaging anything there, not even as a last resort. Everything needed to establish a colony on Mars is parked right in front of them. If it gets destroyed now, no one will ever try again.

He figures if it were him trying to hijack a Mars colony, he’s wait till they had the damn thing set up on the planet first. That way, all the work would be done. It makes him wonder if that contingency has already been planned. He’d never be able to let it go if that happened. He’d ride a missile all the way to Mars to avenge that kind of shit.

When he lands in the underside tube framework of the dock, he diligently scans everything he can see for a minute, to make sure nothing is down there with him. It’s pretty dark, but his rifle has a pretty good automatic tracker of its own. It makes him wish they had the centipede with him, so it could squirm around and root out anything in the vast underbelly of the place. As soon as he gives Arma the all-clear, Sy pops up on his battle com.

He doesn’t catch what Arma quips when her face pops up on screen for a second, but he still saw the absurd reaction on her face. When it switches back to Sy, it looks like he’s in the damn bar back at SSS already, and everyone else is there with him. They’ve got the news up on the big projector behind them. He turns to it and shouts to her what the headline says. The controversial Space Securities Services saves the Mars colony crew from slaughter! Welan City Heroes!

“You see that!” Beer glasses are smacking together in the background.

One of his eyebrows are lifted, but no one can see that with his black face-lens on. “Have you talked to Don? This shit’s only just begun dude.”

Arma can’t take her eyes off of the target screen. She’s hunched over aggressively, waiting to pull the trigger any second. “We’ve got those things crawling all over hell up here. Aaron’s going in CQB style after I don’t know how many of em. It’s not looking good Sy!”

Sy moves over to his laptop sitting on the bar. “I’m putting your view feed up Aaron. Don’t be a pussy. I wanna see you tearing shit up out there. We want the animal-Aaron back.”

If he were mad before, now he’s livid. He can’t believe the horseshit that’s going on down at base while he and Arma’s asses are flapping in the wind. When he climbs up around the dark side of one of the huge landers, he quickly strips the booster pack and the other guns off himself. He clips them to the railing and carefully lays them out so they can be snatched up in a hurry. With the flack cannon tucked in tight under his arm, he attaches his lanyard to one of the handrails and pulls his knees against the white hull of the lander.

Not even taking one second to reconsider, he lets his eager need to destroy take over, and leaps up off the hull, launching himself into the light, high over the edge of where he can see. Two of the unsuspecting robots, focused on where Arma is in the shuttle, are taken off guard when he suddenly pops up out of nowhere. Even with his mind running at full speed, he barely has enough time to get a safe shot on two of the robots. No matter how quick they are to swing their guns towards him, he already has the draw on them. Shocking him out of his self-absorbed rage, the bludgeoning kicks of the thirty millimeter rounds send him hard to the end of his leash.

An eye-opening amount of damage is taken by the two robots, peeling them off of their tender holds on the deck surface. The packs of hard steel rods in the shells hardly opened up at all before reaching their targets. Not a single piece of shot misses. Lines of glowing tracer rounds, from the other three machines he saw, spray over his head as he is slung backwards in an arch around to the other side of the lander by his leash.

Only one of the things is foolish enough to chase after him over the edge and immediately takes multiple shells from Arma. The red glowing heat from a gaping hole in the thing slowly dims out, right along with its electric life force.

Unable to stop himself, he crashes upside down against the back side of the lander, hitting the back of his head hard and getting twisted sideways. In only a stroke of luck, he manages to blindly grab ahold of something with his free hand. His eyes go wide when he realizes he can feel the sharp ticking of one of those things feet through the metal he’s holding onto.

As fast as a real spider, one of the frightening bug robots skitters out from the shadows below him. As its numerous sharp spear-like feet spring out at him, he screams an awful scream of finality. Without even knowing he’s even doing it, he squeezes the trigger of his huge rifle again and again, all he can see between the flashes of light is the dread on Arma’s face as he imagines it. Four rigid arms clamp around him, slowing to a stop as they try to dig into him. After the last of the three remaining rounds he had left in the box magazine are spent, he realizes the thing on top of him is dead. He’s damn near blown it entirely in half.

When he tries to tell Arma that he’s alright, he can’t seem to get his words out. One of the claws has punched in through the lens of his helmet, completely shattering the hard duplexed surface of it. From through the huge split in the thing’s body, he can see yet another one of them creeping up on him. It’s cautious this time, not letting him get even a good glimpse of it. With all the strength his over-muscled frame can deliver, he peels the dead meatal creature off of himself, taking the whole lens of his helmet with it.

As he rapidly pulls himself back away along his lanyard in a panic, the other machine holds off on gunning him down while it clearly has the chance. He realizes now, that he’s so carelessly crawling all over what looks like some pretty important shit on the lander. The thing doesn’t want to risk putting a bunch of holes in anything important.

He still finds out how good of a shot it is when they get him with a few rounds the very second he pulls himself around the vacant edge where his leash is still clipped on. A bullet blows through the side of the buttstock of his rifle and another strikes the top of his helmet. He pats his hands all over himself, expecting to find more holes, but it looks like he’s gotten off lucky again.

In one fluid tumble, he pitches the flack cannon, takes up the standard rifle in one arm, and the arc-cannon in the other. Worrisomely, there’s no robot in sight. Unnerved, he slowly scooches himself back to the boundary of light and dark at the edge of the dock, where he knows the others are waiting for him. Remembering everyone is watching, he carefully holds the lens of the battle com on his wrist out around away from himself, to use it like a mirror. He can see two robots slinking away out of sight underneath the other main crew shuttle. A ways in the distance, he catches Arma bringing the shuttle around, herding them away from him.

He tries to exhale a breath before making his move, but then realizes he’s in complete vacuum. It feels strange, like he has still taken a breath, but not quite. He needs to get up off his ass while the others are still in retreat. When he cautiously pulls himself back around the edge of the platform, he notices something strange. One of the robots has discarded its Gatling gun and left it out on the deck near the big ship. It’s not a trap, and is simply laying there.

Cautiously, he unclips his leash, and sets himself adrift across the dock in pursuit. In preparation for an ambush, he holds his finger down on the trigger of the arc cannon pre-charging its main coil. In less than a second, the power bar turns orange. The coil won’t handle much more. If he squeezes it again, it’s going to go red and set off the full charge.

The second he reaches the back of the crew shuttle engines where he saw the robots flee, he jabs the nose of the gun out ahead of himself and pulls the trigger again. Immediately, numerous sharp claws grasp the rim of one of the thruster cones from the inside and a nightmare snaps out at him. A bright purple megawatt arc flash leaps out to meet the nasty creature, turning one of its legs into nothing but an exploding shower of hot sparks. While the thing is reeling back from the bolt of lightning he gave it, he swings around the opening of the engine with full abandon and grabs ahold of the robot. He has no idea what he was thinking, but he has enough craziness coursing through him to rip all its legs off.

Without there being any gravity, wrestling the spindly thing ends up going much worse than he had considered. The robot is still alive, but flailing wildly, kicking them up off the deck in a spin. While it’s bearing its claws into him, trying to force them through his tough suit, he wrangles his rifle around to get work the muzzle into its core. He keeps the trigger held down as long as he can while it jackhammers through all twenty rounds.

At the worst moment, while he’s spinning out of control and out has nothing left but the pistol on his chest, the last robot sprints from out of the darkness with its gun pointed at him and the dead machine still wrapped around him. What looks like the muzzle flashes he was expecting, are Arma’s cannon shells completely ripping the thing apart into nothing but mere strips of what it originally was.

Not entirely sure there aren’t any more of them left, he pulls his pistol out of its chest rig and waits for the right time to shove himself away from the dead machine curled up on him. Slowly, he floats out in the complete open back down to the dock. Below him, everything is lit up bright, bathed in light, and spectacular. If he could say “holy shit”, he would. The long flat grey tiled platform stretches out for what seems like forever. To his left, and to his right, the huge engines alone are a good two hundred feet long each. He shakes his head in disbelief.

When he lands on his feet and turns to find Arma, he finds she’s brought the shuttle much closer in. She has the headlights on, and is scanning over every little place one of those things might try to hide in the shadows. As she slowly floats past him, he makes his leap to the rear airlock.

“There anything else left babe?”

“I’m not picking anything up at all.”

“Take us around every inch of this place.”