Cleaning Up After The Ancients - Chapter 105

Chapter 105 - Just Another Tuesday - Part 5

“Okay, we’re out.” The voice of Vala’s borrowed body announced over the radio.

“Still can’t believe he told Vala to drive.” Mitchell muttered moments later.

“I’m sorry.” Vala shot back in clear annoyance. “Is anyone else here qualified to drive a spaceship? No? That’s what I thought.”

“Miss Mal Doran.” Pendergast’s voice interjected tiredly. “You’re on an open line, you need to flick the switch back down to turn it off.”

Eventus could practically hear Vala’s cringe over the line. “Oh, right. Sorry.”

A tiny blip of static signaled what the Lantean assumed was Vala turning off her radio, and Pendergast let out a sigh. 

“Sorry about that.”

“It’s all right.” Eventus returned, still grinning to himself at the byplay. “I’m lifting the lockdown now.”

A few code strings was all it took, and while there wasn’t any noticeable effect he knew the various deadbolts and magnetic locks across the facility had just disengaged themselves. In theory he could now shut down the main reactor, however that power would be needed for the data backup. And it wasn’t like he would have to return to a control room after since the computer core could just as easily facilitate the shutdown.

With that he left the room at a light jog, using the mental interface on his handscanner to dodge around the greatest concentrations of detectable lifeforms on his trek to the stairway that would take him the two levels down to where the computer core sat.

Opening the final bulkhead door before the string of corridors that would take him to the stairway, Eventus could only stare dumbly at the shambling heavily mutated human body for a moment before recalling the psychic death imprint that he’d completely forgotten about with everything else he had been busy focusing on since.

Almost like it had been waiting for that revelation, the creature turned and Eventus cringed at the wriggling mass of tentacles that had seemingly replaced most of its face.

That was enough for him, raising his weapon, he discharged a single pulse of blue phasic plasma at the creature's head all but disintegrating the fleshy structure and causing the rest of its body to collapse onto the ground.

“Eventus?” Pendergast’s voice called out from the radio.

“I was wrong!” He yelled, running past the still twitching body of the mutative type dimensional horror as a secondary head began to grow out of the remains of its shoulders.

An ear piercing shriek suddenly echoed out through the corridors as other horrors sensed the energy released by the discharge of his weapon.

“What was that!?” Pendergast demanded.

“Class three dimensional horror!” Eventus answered as he rounded a corner, only to stumble slightly as something large fell from the ceiling and skittered off his personal shield.

He swung his arm, mentally reconfiguring the shield geometry around his arm into a two foot long energy blade mere molecules thick that bisected the pale Giger like creature before it could recover.

“Half my bridge crew is bleeding from their noses!” Pendergast exclaimed.

“That happens with class three's!”

He skidded to a halt as he reached the stairway, grimacing at the beautiful strands of webbinglike crystalline light that choked the passageway to the floors above and below.

Taking a moment to glance down the side corridors and confirm he wasn't about to be jumped. He mentally flipped through the settings on his weapon before pointing it at the stairwell and pulling the trigger.

A beam of greenish energy lanced out, impacting the crystalline strands before diffracting away from the structure in a kaleidoscope of light.

“The path to the computer core is blocked by a prismatic web of some kind, and I have no way to clear it with the weapon I have on hand.”

Technically it might have been possible to cut through it with his shield, but he wasn't going to risk that sort of experimentation under combat circumstances where his shield was the only thing standing between him and certain death.

“Can you bypass?” Pendergast asked.

“Maybe.” Eventus admitted truthfully. “But I'm not going to make the attempt, so tell Doctor Jackson I–”

The floors underneath his feet burst upwards, and Eventus had a brief glimpse of writhing tentacles before he was engulfed by darkness.

“Eventus!?” Pendergast yelled in alarm.

“Can't talk! Being eaten!” Eventus got out as he struggled to reconfigure his shield.

The green glow of his shield intensified as blades rippled outwards in a twisting pattern, the light just enough to make out the undulating walls of grey flesh that surrounded him before they were torn apart by the energy of his shield.

He shuddered in disgust, opalescent fluid dripping off the still active energy of his shield as he looked around to see if any more of the creatures were nearby.

Thankfully it didn't seem so, and a quick glance upwards showed he'd been pulled down through two floors. Either a lucky break, or the universe messing with him since that would put him less than fifty meters from the station's computer core.

“Never mind what I said a minute ago.” Eventus offered. “It looks like I'll be able to make it to the computer core after all.

Orienting himself, he took a step forward and for a brief moment the damaged corridor he was in appeared to transform into the dark interior passageway of a Wraith hiveship. But with a blink it was gone as the source of the psychic intrusion failed to find any lasting purchase in his mind.

Another shriek, this one closer, and he switched his weapon to rapid fire pulse mode before continuing down the hall towards his destination.

The heavy steps of a quadrupedal creature in motion began to become noticeable as he neared, not entirely unsurprising at this point given the core was probably one of the highest power draws remaining on the station.

Even without the sound however the battered apart doorways would have been indicator enough that something large had forced its way through.

Ducking though one of those, Eventus saw the horror before it saw him, a large almost cat shaped creature with long shivering needle-like spines along its head and back in a twisted facsimile of hair.

His weapon snapped up without thought, loosing a series of blue energy bolts at the creature. The first hit home, leaving a light scorching on its almost neon blue hide. The rest however swerved away before they could impact as the spines began to vibrate at speeds high enough to make the air seemingly shimmer as a high pitched whine filled the corridor.

“Aw fuck.” He exclaimed, rapidly switching his weapon to beam mode as the creature lunged at him.

His follow up beam punched through the distortion field around the creature mid lunge to score a glancing blow against one of its hind legs, and then it was on him.

Warning signals began to blare in his mind as his shield began to rapidly deplete its power reserves fighting off the spatial distortion the creature was generating around itself. But that was the least of his worries as the creature’s snapping jaws went directly for his weapon arm.

He momentarily disengaged his shield's inertial compensator, letting the creature's weight push him backwards while releasing his weapon to drop from his engaged hand so he could grab it with his other.

It continued to struggle to bite through the flaring shield covering his right arm as his back hit the floor, however that just meant its head was in the perfect position for his weapon to come up under it and fire a phasic lance of energy directly through its skull.

The distortion field winked out and the creature collapsed bonelessly onto him. And Eventus took a moment to catch his breath before pushing the body off him.

“What the hell was that!?” Pendergast demanded.

“Class three dimensional horror.” Eventus explained between unsteady breaths as he pulled himself back to his feet. “The whine was it–”

A small screeching monkey-like form lunged out of a nearby vent to wrap itself around his head, its tiny hands clawing uselessly against his shield as the diffused psychic pressure from earlier focused itself into a proverbial battering ram against his mental defenses.

His free hand snapped up, grabbing the creature around its midsection and ripping it off his head before slamming it into the wall with enough shield enhanced force to leave it nothing but a smear of greenish fluids.

“Fucking psychic fear monkeys.” He grumbled as he trudged up to the large reinforced doors to the computer core. 

Door sensors detected his control gene, opening the claw marked aperture at his approach to reveal a well lit circular room with a central control station and walls that were covered by the multicolored crystal protrusions of the station's central processing bank.

Eventus walked up to the control station, the large doors grinding shut behind him, and with barely a minute's work was holding a foot long datacrystal.

“All right.” He informed Pendergast. “I have the datacrystal and am shutting down the subspace tap… Now.”

In time with that last word he hit the enter key to initialize the shutdown, and for a moment the entire room went dark before emergency lighting came on to illuminate the room in its dreary off blue glow.

“Okay, it’s done, get me out of here.”

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Author’s Note: Man, I’m exhausted just from writing that chapter. So you better believe Eventus is just done with everything right now. But isn't that always how it goes when you have to fight your way through Eldritch Horrors?