In the cargo bay, a crew of six cargo handlers with needlers had already positioned themselves to defend the ship against a breach of the personnel airlock when they felt the vertigo-inducing dimensional intrusion. They exchanged nervous glances with each other, then Lilliana’s second message was broadcast.
“Hell with this,” one of them said. “I’m locking myself in my room.”
He darted across the hold, clutching his weapon to his chest as he turned a blind corner around a pile of shipping containers. His companions heard a startled yelp terminating in an “Ack!” and then his body flew back into sight, hitting the grating of the floor with a meat-on-metal thunk.
A shambling figure lurched around the corner… a sexless, partially dessicated corpse with metal replacing the upper right quarter of its skull. A red lens protruded from above the dull black socket of the cybernetic implant like a third eye. The thing’s joints were reinforced with metal parts, as well.
Five short streams of silver converged on the grotesque mockery, piercing its necrotic flesh to little effect.
“Oh, shit,” one of the stevedores said as the zombie continued to advance and two more followed it around the corner. “Switch to poppers!”
The problem of personal weaponry on board a space going vessel is a tricky one, and needlers are one of the more practical solutions. The slim, magnetically propelled projectiles can easily pierce flesh but have absolutely no danger of piercing bulkheads, and tend to shatter or stick rather than ricochet.
However, a hit from a tiny metal needle is not likely to cause the massive tissue trauma needed to bring a human-sized animal down quickly, so the needles are typically enhanced with any of a variety of synthetic neurotoxins designed to incapacitate or kill.
None of these substances have any effect on a zombie.
Poppers, a variation on the needle with a tiny explosive charge designed to create just the sort of massive tissue trauma the basic model lacked, would have been a different story.
“Not in my hold,” Leo growled from somewhere unseen by either men or zombies. Whether he was referring to the walking abominations or the use of explosive charges was an open question. “Get out of here!”
Again, the target of his words was somewhat ambiguous, but his men took the benefit of the doubt and fled along the open space in front of the cargo bay doors, in the direction of the forward compartments. The last one out took the time to seal and lock the door behind him, then shot up the control panel with his needler.
“What’d you do that for?” one of his companion asked.
“So nobody could, you know, override it.”
The companion reached over and plucked out one of the metal needles, whose tip had just barely penetrated the outermost layer of the control panel’s casing.
“Brilliant,” he said. “Let’s move.”
As soon as Leo heard the door closing, the cargo bay went dark except for the emergency lighting strips on the edges of the catwalks.
The zombies, both the trio that had chased the cargo handlers out of the bay and two other groups Leo could see from his perch among the towers of containers, paused. The dark did not inconvenience them any more than it did him.
The sudden and drastic change in their environment, however, was enough to give the stupid creatures pause. They milled around uncertainly, turning their blank eyes and glowing red sensors all around them.
“It’s just darkness, pull yourselves together,” a crackly voice sounded within nine sets of skull implants. The zombies, beholden to their master’s voice, immediately came to attention. “Somebody’s still in the hold with you. Find him.”
Like a furry rocket, Leo pounced from above on the needle-studded zombie who’d led the first trio. A swipe of his claws with the entire force of his fall behind them snapped the thing’s head off at the neck, and Leo tucked and rolled to a safe landing in the alleyway between boxes, taking the head with him.
He looked down into the electronic eye of the head while the zombie it had so lately been attached to stumbled a few feet and then fell to the ground.
“If you were watching, I hope that gave you motion sickness,” Leo said into the red lens, before poking his clawed finger through it. At the sound of angry groans from the dispatched zombie’s two companions, he wheeled around, flinging the head at one of them before he disappeared around a corner.
His keen ears heard the satisfying crunch of the second zombie’s optic relay breaking.
He silently made his way up again to a hidden perch among the maze of boxes, then activated his communicator.
“Lilliana,” he said quietly.
“What?”
“Better get ready to walk briskly,” he said. “We’ve got zombies.”
“I figured as much,” Lilliana said.
“One bit of good news,” he said. “They’re romeri.”
“Good to know,” she said. “How many?”
“Nine on the floor,” he said. “Eight now.” His ears swiveled around. “There’s movement up on the main catwalk. There may be more in the rest of the ship.”
“Hold the hold,” Lilliana said. “But keep yourself alive. If we have to re-take the ship, we’re going to need you.”
“What are you doing?”
“Rigging up some tricks in the passages to the engine room,” Lilliana replied. “They’ll try to disable our engine.”
“How diabolically redundant,” Leo replied.
“Regan thinks she can get us going again,” Lilliana said.
“Regan thinks a hysterectomy is when somebody gets removed from history,” Leo countered. One of his ears twitched, slowly turning like a sensor dish. He flattened his back up against a box.
“Just hold the hold.”
“Not a problem,” Leo said. He killed the connection, then focused briefly with both his ears.
Bracing his feet, he pushed backwards with all his might, sending the heavy container tumbling down and listening with satisfaction to the spla-chunk sound it made.
“Dummies,” he said. “There’s a reason this game’s not called ‘Zombie And Mouse.’”
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