A second ghoul quickly joined the first outside the alchemy lab.
Ghouls were not brainless like zombies. They had minds, and while those minds were not up to such tasks as piloting a starship or engaging in polite conversation, cunning and cruelty were well within their grasp.
They were also not sexless, like zombies eventually became. The withered but still obvious manhood of these two ghouls only added to the horror their naked, pale bodies instilled in Galatea. Ghouls were not just animated corpses… they were once-living people who had become something disturbingly other, just human enough in their jerky movements to be uncanny.
The pair of ghouls could tell they had her cornered, and were taking their time.
They knew how frightened she was. They knew that even if there had been some avenue of escape inside the cramped workroom they stood outside, she was too frightened to take it, enveloped as she was by their aura of chilling fear.
They looked at each other, then at her, their yellow eyes gleaming with malice. As one, they raised hands with bony fingers that had lengthened into pointy talons and bared their jagged teeth.
As one, they stepped forward.
As one, they were crushed beneath the heavy hospital bed which suddenly dropped from above them.
“Oh, now you’re just plain being ridiculous!” Galatea shouted into the vent, once she’d recovered from her shock.
No response came.
From beneath the bed, stirrings and groanings. Yellow eyes opened. Claw-like hands stretched out, and the ghouls began crawling towards her, dragging their broken bodies along the floor.
Galatea shrieked and climbed up on a work table.
“If you have any more ideas, Handy, now’s the time!” Galatea said.
The injured ghouls inched closer, revenge painted across their ghastly bloodless faces.
Lilliana sat in the corner of the engine room. She’d pulled a black elbow-length glove on her right hand, with wire-thin retractable claws in the finger tips. Her left hand cradled the unfamiliar weight of a bolt launcher.
She was watching the door which led to the stairs, but she had the wall console relaying audio for her and she had her ears open for signs of anything approaching the main entrance.
She listened with more fear than she’d care to admit to the sounds which came from the corridors connecting the engine room to the main cargo hold via a maze of redesigned and repartitioned store rooms.
She heard the sounds of doors opening as their locking mechanisms were disabled or destroyed. She heard the shuffling clunky footsteps of zombies. She heard the occasional bangs and booms as her traps were discovered by the hapless undead.
The sounds were distant at first, but they got closer. Nothing she had done… nothing she could do… would hold back an undead army forever.
Unlike many of the crew, Lilliana wasn’t a fighter. She was a survivor. If she could run and outwit an opponent, she would do that. If she could fortify and outlast an opponent, she would do that. Signing on with the Rebellion was the ultimate act of running away… once aboard, there was nowhere else to run. She’d fortified her position as best as she could, but she couldn’t outlast the undead.
The computer buzzed an alert. Something was descending the stairs. She took her eyes off the doorway to check the screen, and the amount of relief she felt at the sight of the hulking Caledonian cyborg was pathetic.
The look on Cicada’s face when she saw Lilliana suggested that she shared that estimation
“Now, isn’t this an interesting turn?” the big woman said. “Cover the stairs as best as you can. I’ve got this.”
To Lilliana’s horror, she unlocked the main door and set it to stay open.
“They’ll get in!” Lilliana said.
Cicada tsked softly.
“They’ll get in anyway,” she said. “Unless I kill them first.”
The Caravan model vessel had been intended for a much larger crew than that which now manned it, and this fact was reflected in the size and quality of the medical facilities located at the bottom of the forward compartment, beneath the crew quarters, near the galley. The integral equipment within it had been state-of-the-art, a century and a half before, the last word in modern health care until the next word came along.
Some components, such as the regeneration bays and the imaging extractor, had been more thoroughly taken advantage of than Galatea in the time since the ship had come to be known as Shays Rebellion. Other pieces had been left untouched, and were in such good condition that if they were removed from their retractable housings, they would have fetched a hefty sum for the retro appeal, if nothing else.
The three zombies and pair of ghouls were not interested in antiques. They moved through the clean, well-lit space of white plastic and gleaming metal and headed straight to the rear of the room, near the very front of the ship. Here there were three rows of drawers set into the wall, like filing cabinets: cryo units for those whose animation had been suspended, on either a temporary or permanent basis. The ghouls turned to stand guard while the zombies began opening the compartments in search of potential recruits for their master.
The foul creatures, oblivious to everything but their task, did not notice the middle drawer on the far right sliding open by itself. The keen hunting senses of the predatory ghouls detected the almost silent movement, though, and they turned to see a hand almost as pale as their own gripping the top of the compartment’s side, an immense fire opal glittering in a ring on its finger.
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