Any ordinary human who clapped eyes on Regan in the moments following her first contact with the cyber zombies would think that either she was going mad, or they were.
She gave a fierce, soul-searing scream and her face contorted in paroxysms of rage. Her tightly corded muscles bunched up and the veins throbbed in her face as she whipped herself around in a whirlwind of destruction. Her heart thundered in her chest like the pounding of war-drums, like the baying of a fierce beast of battle. Her spiky hair stood jutted and bristled like the quills of a porcupine, and her good eye went wide and crazed.
This was the warp-spasm, described in even more poetic terms in ancient epics.
It was the reason Irish raiders had been more feared in their time than the Vikings who would eventually pillage them in turn. It was probably the reason the Romans had decided the lush, green isle immediately to the west of Britain wasn’t worth their trouble.
The psychological impact of the sight was completely lost on her lifeless opponents, of course, but that was only a secondary purpose of the spasm. It was an alteration of mind as much as one of body. From her point of view, time seemed to slow. The world shrank until it was just Regan and her weapons—one singular entity—and the nearest target. In a ruthlessly zen fashion, the two inevitably became one.
The stairwell became a slaughterhouse. Knife and axe severed decayed flesh, mangled electronic and mechanical parts. Regan made no particular attempt to “kill the head”, the quickest method of dispatching a romeri-type zombie, but necks were cut and heads split open in the due course of things, and bodies were reduced to pieces too small and disjointed to pose any threat. Grasping hands were ground into dust beneath her heel.
Her axe got lodged in the skull of a corpse that went tumbling over the railing and away. The other knife was in her hand before she noticed its absence. As more zombies appeared to take the place of the ones she’d felled, that knife and then the other were thrown away on can’t-miss opportunities and then she was punching and kicking and butting and biting, tearing chunks out of the foul things with her bare hands in her blind rage.
She was not conscious of the sword strapped to her back or the gun on her belt, or any of the less conspicuous weapons secreted about her person. She was conscious of nothing but the red haze in her eye, the screaming in her throat, and the pounding in her chest.
This was the warp-spasm, the most terrible weapon of the ancient hero Cúchulainn, dreaded above his barbed spear and his fearsome war chariot.
Regan was only human, though, and zombies could not be defeated by gouging and biting. They swarmed around and swamped her, dragging her down by sheer numbers. The distant necromancer ordered them to hold her down, press her against the stairs until she stopped moving. Alive or dead, they could take her back to the ship and then the formidable little warriorling would be his.
Meanwhile, his second wave was moving into place. The zombies had done their job. They had scattered the defenders and softened them up, made them use up their tricks and traps. He’d lost many of his soldiers in the process… but they were just bodies, after all, and he could always get more.
“We’ve got trouble,” Leo reported to Lilliana from the cargo hold. He’d hunted down the last zombie and now prowled the tops of the crates, his eyes, ears, and whiskers open for the smallest sign of further disturbance.
It hadn’t been a small sign that he’d just felt.
“What?” Lilliana’s voice asked.
“Cold feeling, like something walked over my grave,” he said. “You can’t feel it?”
“It must be something local,” Lilliana said. “Maybe something else came over.”
Leo pricked up his ears.
“If so, it’s a lot quieter than zombies,” he said. “Anyway, I didn’t feel another intrusion.”
“Nor did I,” Lilliana said. “You realize what that means, don’t you?”
“There’s a door still open.”
“Your eyes can see magic pretty well, right?”
“Better than when they were human,” Leo said. “I’ll take a reconnoiter.”
“Be careful,” Lilliana said.
“Like I’d endanger the most valuable crew member,” Leo said. “But if we’re dealing with heavy undead, do you think maybe we should wake the doc?”
“Not yet,” Lilliana said. “If things go badly enough, he’ll probably get roused without our help.”
“Roger, wilco, over, and all that,” Leo said.
Down in the alchemy bay, Galatea was almost beside herself with terror. She could hear the sounds of Regan’s battle in the stairwell, Regan’s wordless screaming and the sounds of metal on flesh, bone, and other metal.
They had destroyed the mundane door controls and she had no idea how to work the alchemical seal. Anything she could move by herself in order to block the door would be easy enough for zombies to clear away. She had no weapons and would have only the slightest idea how to use them if she had one.
“I’m going to die,” she said out loud. “I am going to die. A mere child of thirty-two. My life hasn’t even begun and I’m going to die.”
In between the sounds of battle-clash, she heard dragging, shuffling footsteps in the corridor outside. She whimpered and backed herself into the corner. A hideous figure became visible through the open door. It turned slowly to her, the red light probing into the dim lab, shining directly at her.
“For the love of space, somebody help me!” Galatea shrieked.
It took a step forward as two of its fellows came into view. Then, a potted flower fell from above and smashed against the top of the lead zombie’s head, scattering soil and ceramic shards but not doing any real damage. The trio stopped and looked up, just as a heavy metal tool box came barreling down a maintenance chute on top of them.
“What the void?” Galatea asked.
“Sorry, miss,” Handy’s voice echoed through the vents. “I didn’t want to use the tool chest until I knew the flower pot wouldn’t work. There’s a lot more flower pots up here than there are tool boxes.”
“Why are there any flower pots?”
“They make the ducts look nice. Please excuse me, miss, but there’s another group coming your way and I have to get ready for them.”
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