Chapter 32: Chapter 32: Boarders.

Every time I escaped the giant zombie, the fast one would come back. I never could track where it went or when it was coming, but it always seemed to zero in on my visor. Just like the combat suits outside Headquarters, it wanted to crack me like a lobster and scoop out the tasty bits.

An explosion shook the deck just as I dodged away from the giant zombie. The slight tremor was enough to throw it off balance for a split second, but I was unable to capitalize on even this minor vulnerability.

“Just so you know! Grenades make these things really, really angry!” Sam’s voice was high pitched. This time it was not excitement that I heard.

“We made it out of the corridor, but the big one is trying to squeeze in. Sam is holding it back but we won’t be able to stay away from it in here. I seriously hope you have a plan for this, Z!” The doctor sounded no less stressed.

I had to focus on the fight in front of me first, no matter how much I wanted to go to their aid right now. There had to be a way to end the stalemate before either the giant caught me and crushed me to a pulp, or the sneaky one managed to cut its way through the MHU somehow. A part of me was honestly curious how they did that.

The rest of me would much rather investigate the phenomena in a properly controlled testing environment.

My current actions were not providing me with any advantage or information that could change the variables of the fight in my favor. I needed to test a new hypothesis.

There was something that had been at the back of my brain for a while. I brushed the sneak away to clear my vision and compressed the exosuit to its limit. Then I jumped long, avoiding the giant zombies frustrated roar and flooded the MHU with my nanites.

It still took time to do so, and my unwelcome rider arrived before I was done. A small black scratch grew in the corner of my visor for a fraction of a second. Then I had it.

The implant zombie froze as my nanites began to attack it from the inside. Unfortunately, splitting my attention made me slow.

I realized my error at the same time the giant zombie grabbed onto me. With my nanites flooding the exosuit it was like I could feel its grip pulling me in. One second I was trying to keep hold of the implant zombie and at least weaken it.

The next the giant zombie was pulling me in with brutal strength.

Somehow I manged to get an arm around the things head and keep it from biting down and crushing me inside the exosuit. The implant zombie was crushed between us, but was not yet dead. The black line in the corner of my visor grew.

I hadn’t realized quite how powerful the MHU was until that moment. The giant zombie was powerful, easily strong enough to send me flying when it struck. But could not break my mechanical grip no matter how it struggled. I was too close for it to punch now that I was grappling it.

Then the visor in front of me cracked and started to fracture.

I began draining both at the same time. The familiar feeling of strain hit like a truck. It was almost like I was trying to carry my entire lab on my back, uphill. The implant zombie started to shake, but it still managed to punch its claws through my visor.

I flinched to the side. The claws barely reached my cheek, but they dug in with cruel force. Concentrating on keeping the giant pinned, draining both, and keeping from having my eyes gouged out almost made me falter.

The implant zombie withdrew its bloodied claws. It struck again, dragging a single sharpened digit down my face.

In the next instant, the Wampus Cat latched onto the claw and bit it savagely, ripping chunks of flesh away. The claw withdrew once more, this time trailing even more of its own thick blood.

A follow up strike never came. The implant zombie finally slumped, too weak to continue the fight.

My nanites came rushing back through me before pouring into the giant zombie. The drumbeat of pain that had accompanied the last time my nanites had invaded a giant was starting up again. Slight sparks of pain swam up through the link.

It’s wild attempts to free itself slowed, then finally stopped. Last time I had already been deep in nanite bloat. This time, I could not afford to lose consciousness once the deed was done.

The flash that accompanied a successful drain nearly blinded me as the giant began to shrivel into greasy ash. The pain I expected was less intense this time. Perhaps I was simply getting used to it. There was no way to know.

The Wampus Cat began licking my face where the blood continued to dribble down. I still needed to find a name for the little fuzzball.

“Thanks for the help. But that still isn’t good for you.”

The Wampus Cat trilled and kept licking.

My understanding of the MHU had become instinctual once my nanites spread throughout the exosuit. I triggered the functional jets to get back in the fight, arcing up towards the corridor. Explosions still shook the bulkheads every now and then.

“Coming up the corridor now. Mind the explosives so you don’t kill me, please.”

“For fuck’s sake, Z, this thing’s a fuckin’ tank! Get your ass over here quick!”

A few zombies were attempting to enter a side compartment around the other giant zombie. The larger one would try and squeeze its way into the room only to get knocked back by explosives every time. Without the grenades, its reach was unimpeded.

I plowed through the zombies and slammed into the giant, knocking it half out of the opening. My visor shattered further, armor glass spilling out as one huge arm backhanded me. The double impact- its fist and the bulkhead I bounced off- rattled me, but I still managed to grab hold of its arm and brace my armored boot against its face.

It struggled mightily, but it was still trapped half inside the doorway. I drove my nanites through the exosuit’s frame and into the beast, fighting to hang on as my nanites delved deeper in.

“Keep the smaller ones off me if you can. Killing this thing is going to take all my attention.”

A part of me noted how detached I sounded. Ever since I’d woken back up from my journey to find these two survivors and my subsequent conversations with them, I could feel myself falling into old habits.

That distant, arrogant, and uncaring persona was something that I’d already determined was something that needed to change, yet here I was acting like the petty concerns of everyday humanity were beneath me.

A part of me welcomed the pain that came like tiny burning grains of sand working their way through my body. The rational part of me knew that self inflicted punishments were rarely useful for personal growth. My conscience agreed. Though I could rationalize with the best of them, I could also realize when I was attempting to bullshit myself.

But changing one’s behavior is never an easy thing. Even when one knows it is for the best.

“Oh my.”

“Damn, Z. That thing is practically melting. You sure this ain’t some kind of black magic stuff?”

The giant zombie collapsed into an even more skeletal form, puffs of ash wafting outward as I disentangled myself from the corpse. I bumped into several other corpses with neat holes in them along the way.

It looked like Sam had indeed taken care of the other zombies while I was occupied. And there were a lot more of them than I’d expected. They nearly blocked the corridor.

“Z, your face. You’re bleeding,” Doctor Delveccio said as she motioned for me to exit the MHU. She was putting a pistol away with what looked like practiced ease as she fished in her suit pockets for various instruments.

The exosuit popped open with a creaking noise. It had been heavily battered, being used as a giant zombie’s plaything. It looked about like I felt. The bruises that adrenaline had kept me from feeling made their presence known.

“This probably looks worse than it is.”

Talking caused the open wounds on my face to bleed more, which also seemed to hurt even more now than the moments that I had actually got them.

“Good thing, too. You look like shit, Z.”

“Head wounds tend to bleed a lot. Are you feeling lightheaded? Sensitivity to light or sound?” The woman peppered me with more questions as she sprayed something on my face. It seemed to loosen the drying blood that she wiped away like spilled juice at the same time it coated the gouges on my cheek and the long scratch that went from my forehead nearly to my jawline.

I tried to use my nanites to help pull the wounds together. The lattice zippers helped some, I thought.

“Stop that. I need to clean the wounds out first. Lord only knows what filth was living on those things’ claws.”

Rather than respond, I tried to force out the dirt on my own. I nodded distractedly, which caused her to grab my head to hold it steady while she worked.

“So, giant bulletproof zombies, sneaky bastard zombies, what else? Tank zombies?”

“Hush, Sam. Let me finish fixing his face first.”

“Oh shit. Sorry, man.” Sam seemed to be a younger man. I had initially expected him to be older, somehow. He did not seem to be a bad young man. Excitable, maybe.

Well, he wasn’t coldly arrogant prick at least.

“Okay, that will do for now. I’ll need to change that dressing later, but I can probably do that once we’re underway. Do you think that’s the last of the zombies we’ll find here?”

A note of tension entered her voice at the end. That made sense. Any sane person would be disturbed by recent events.

“There may well be more in the mess hall, but I believe this should be it for the cargo area. The noise of the fight would draw in any others. Most likely. We’d best keep our guard up, though.”

I turned to Sam in the armored suit.

“Thank you for keeping those other zombies off of me while I drained the big one. When I do that, I don’t have much attention left to spare for anything else. They could have killed me, reaching in through my visor while I couldn’t fight back.”

“Dude, no problem. No problem at all. That big fucker had us dead to rights.”

“I did not expect to see another one like that. Let alone two. These were also aboard a ship.”

That made me wonder. The sample size was too small for a definitive answer, currently.

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“Alright, are we good to go? The sooner we start the wake up cycle, the sooner we can get underway.”

“Yeah, I’m good.”

The combat suit seemed to scratch where the back of a human head would be. I wondered if Sam realized he was doing that unconsciously.

“Be ready in a moment. The MHU suit jets are damaged again, but I will be able to keep up. Thank you for helping keep me alive as well, Doctor Delveccio.”

“Thank me by not getting clawed up by giant zombies, then. You need to keep that head of yours firmly attached to your shoulders, not digesting in a zombie gut. I still want to pick your brain about these nanites of yours later.”

I remembered the Wampus Cat and supplied it with a new bottle before climbing back into the exosuit carefully. Experiment Number One (soon to be renamed) took the nipple with a happy trill. The personnel hatch clanked shut behind me and I followed the other two aft.

Nanite bloat made me feel slightly queasy as we silently flew through the massive empty hold. The far bulkhead was mostly hidden in darkness that slowly revealed neat several stacks of cargo crates pushed all the way to the back.

“Any idea what’s in these?” I asked.

“Spare parts, alloy metal stock, some emergency supplies, and a short shipment of machine parts for a factory Earthside that will probably never see them. At least, that’s what the manifest said.”

I marveled at the information one could gain from such short sequences of letters an numbers. Space faring logistics apparently had its depths and complexities, too.

Down between the stacks was our entry into the engineering section. The hatch was closed. That could be a good thing, meaning zombies could not have gotten in there. Or bad, meaning any zombies inside could not have easily gotten out.

“Careful. There’s no telling what’s in there now.”

“Right.” Doctor Delveccio nodded as Sam echoed her.

I opened the hatch and stood to the side, giving them a clear shot at whatever might be inside. No howls echoed out. My two companions held their fire.

“Alright, let’s see what we’ve got in here.”

The engine room was dimly lit and still. No trash or debris floated in the small pools of light.

“Anybody see anything?”

“No. You’ve got the best sensors, Sam. Anything on your end?”

“Nada. I think we’re clear.”

“What do you need from us to start waking the ship?” Sam did not respond for a moment.

“Shouldn’t be too bad. I just need to key in the wake up sequence from the main terminal here, and then follow the manual startup sequence. That’s hard coded into the terminal so the reactor goes through a completely safe initial burn.”

“What can we expect? I’m assuming the lights won’t just come on and we’re good to go,” Doctor Delveccio turned in place, hand on her pistol as she scrutinized the shadows.

“Bound to be a bit noisy. The reactor startup sequence especially, but the pumps and the air mixers will not be quiet when they get going.”

“In that case, I’ll go shut the hatch. If there are any zombies left on board, they’ll not be sleeping through that.”

“Got it,” Sam replied, kneeling down to bring up the main engineering console. He did not exit the combat suit to do so. I completely agreed with such caution.

The main hatch shut with a nearly silent clink. The Hog Mauler was a far cry from the other ship I’d been on. Other than the areas that the zombies had made a mess of, it seemed to be in much better repair.

A scream from behind me had me rushing back before my brain processed what was happening.

“Z! Help!”

The voice that shouted was the doctor. Which mean the scream had to be from Sam. I burst back into the room in time to see what looked like a normal zombie somehow cut the combat suit’s arm completely off as Sam brace it in front of him to keep it away.

A second later I crashed into them both, grabbing the zombie with one gauntlet as I rolled away and began to drain it on instinct.

The thing weakly swatted at me as my nanites forced their way into it. Only when it swung its withered arms and brushed against the MHU, deep gouges formed in the metal. I gripped it tighter, squeezing the surprisingly tough thing against me as the drain caused my breathing to become ragged and sweat pour off my face and over my wounds.

Seconds ticked by as I began to feel hot, scorching hot as the zombie started to glow and the nanites began to rush back into my body. Nanite bloat instantly jumped from queasy and uncomfortable to dangerous threat.

My colony swelled to even higher levels than ever before. Once again my HUD died. I tried to still the nanites as they moved inside me, but with every breath and every heartbeat they surged through me. I felt blood began to drip from my nose. Dark blood speckled what little armor glass was left.

I heard Doctor Delveccio say something but I could not spare the attention for it. Even pushing nanites into the exosuit only reduced the pressure inside me by minuscule amounts. I nudged the suit jets, coming closer to the engineering console that Sam’s combat suit was slumped over.

The backplate was open. That information was irrelevant to my continued survival, so I ignored it. A small part of me said that it was important.

But my goal was within my reach, now.

As I suspected, there were rogue nanites within the engineering section.

Even with the massive overpopulation of my colony, I knew that I had to play it smart. Driving my nanites carefully forward, I avoided the traps that the rogues tried to lure my colony into. Most of them, at least.

The power node provided some relief, once I wrested control of it away from the rogues. After that victory though, the hostile nanites only continued their attacks. No, they redoubled them.

I could feel my stamina levels still falling as I recklessly forced even more into the battle, crushing the wave of rogues with my own colony. I found another power node. Then another. A fourth and the nanite bloat within me finally decreased to manageable levels.

But that was not the end.

There were still rogues somewhere in the system. My colony spread out, scouting through the hardware in thin threads that snaked their way back to me.

Dimly, I became aware of the world around me. Not through my own eyes, but through sensors and cameras set up throughout the engineering section. Somehow my colony had contacted these systems and routed the information back to me, even powered down as they were.

Well. Mostly powered down. There was a slight trickle of power pulsing through the network. And that is how I found the last power node, and the last of the rogue nanites.

They were clustered around what looked like a food processing unit. It looked like a small break room, from the device architecture I could feel. If the rogue nanites had access to the food processing unit, wouldn’t that make infecting the crew almost undetectable?

Facing the massive numbers that my colony had grown to made the outcome inevitable. I spent several long moments scouring every place I could reach, searching for the slightest evidence of any rogues that might be hiding somewhere.

But there were none. The rogue nanites almost mindlessly attacked once something touched their domain. Sure, they laid traps and fake outs to draw my nanites into immolating themselves in high power current, but they showed no actual intelligence so far.

I found nothing, and kept finding nothing until an uncomfortable feeling assaulted me. It was my stomach, demanding food now.

“Doctor Zolnikov? I think there is something is wrong with Sam.”

I hurried over to where our catgirl veterinarian stood over the third member of our party. He was sweating, pale, and seemed to be comatose.

“He was raving, screaming and thrashing about. I had to put him under, but I can’t for the life of me tell precisely what is wrong.

“His heart rate is through the roof at the same time his core temperature started dropping. Then it skyrocketed. That thing did not manage to cut him when it chopped into his suit, but something must have gotten into him.”

At long last, it finally looked like something that was actually within my specialty.

“I think I know what’s going on. Don’t worry. He’s got a bad reaction to something going on with his nanites, but I can fix him. I just won’t be much use for anything else after until I get some food and sleep.”

“What’s going on?”

“Nanite rejection. Simple fix. Not easy, but at least it is simple.”

“And that means...?”

“I just have to convince his colony to play nice.”

I rubbed my tired eyes and sat down, placing one hand over Sam’s brow and the other over his chest.

Then I got to work.

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