Cicada’s gun repeatedly launched its tiny, deadly payload. She fed ammo into the cylinder when she had time. The attackers came in waves, ghouls mixed with zombies. The rockets were on motion-sensing mode, as the ghouls did not move in a straight line. They zigged and zagged. Some charged ahead on all fours for speed, or clung to the pipes and cable bundles on the ceiling and walls.
Some of the zombies were armed, so to speak, with remote-operated turrets on their shoulders. When these appeared, Cicada transferred her gun to her metal arm and turned perpendicular to the doorway, exposing only her cybernetic side to enemy fire. She could only aim out of the corner of her eye, but as long as she put the rocket rounds in the right neighborhood, the GSMR’s guidance systems compensated.
Lilliana shrank back as the zombies’ needles pinged and zinged off the massive woman’s metal skin. Cicada laughed, loud and mad, as she watched the ammo counter on her eye overlay go down round by round.
“Bastards aren’t giving me a chance to reload,” she said. “This next bit ought to look real familiar to you. Just don’t forget what comes next.”
“What?” Lilliana asked, confused.
“I mean the part where you lock the door with me on the other side,” Cicada replied, stepping through the portal and closing it.
“Wait, don’t!” Lilliana cried, getting to her feet. The heavy door clicked shut had already clicked shut. “Damn it.”
Her show of protest aside, Lilliana’s hands were at work on the door controls almost before she knew it. She didn’t just scramble the lock code, she completely reprogrammed it. She left no loophole, no backdoor. There was no way to open the lock without plenty of lead time.
Securing the engine room was all-important, she told herself. It was the key to their survival. If they couldn’t get away from the necro-ship, they would all die, or worse. That was why it was so important to keep the undead out that she had to lock the other woman out along with them.
The fact that she herself was currently inside it was incidental…
She didn’t have time to second-guess or beat herself up, anyway. She still had to keep the stairway covered. She couldn’t seal that, or she’d run the risk of locking Regan out when she could conceivably be returning with the bar of gold that would save all their asses.
With the main entrance sealed and Cicada holding off the hordes outside it, she did have some breathing room, though, and she used it to set up a program to show feeds from the parts of the ship that had working cameras.
She did not like what she saw.
The invaders had finally breached the command deck using high explosives. The gods of demolition did not smile upon the walking dead in the way that they smiled upon Regan Bard, however, and it had taken several applications of precisely placed shaped charges to destroy the door’s locking mechanisms without turning the corridor into a hellstorm or doing serious structural damage to the ship.
As it was, the door did not slide smoothly open but only unlatched, and several ghoul claws immediately slid into the gap and began to pry it open. Dick resisted the urge to shoot at the exposed extremities… doing so would not delay entry for long, and would waste ammunition he could otherwise expend on kill shots.
As soon as he saw white, dead faces appear in the gap between the sliding doors, he opened up and scored headshots on two out of three. The third round caught a ghoul that threw itself to the side in the shoulder. The needle’s explosion a moment later knocked it to the ground and at the very least rendered its arm useless.
A retaliatory needle barrage from a mecha-zombie drove Dick away from the door’s line of sight. He retreated back to Lilliana’s console, giving the undead things a chance to really open the door and pour through. He caught several more as they rushed in, aiming for center mass on the moving targets.
The needle pop wasn’t enough to always take out the head on a zombie, but it knocked them down and took out some rather important muscle bits and—if he was very lucky—their spine. Romeri-type zombies remained animate as long as their head was attached and intact, but structural damage could still slow them down.
The ghouls scattered and spread out immediately upon entering the room as zombies continued to shuffle in. Dick unloaded the rest of his clip in a wide arc, damaging the stupid zombies and keeping the cannier ghouls back while his foot fumbled around the base of the upright console.
He found the trigger. He set off a flash bomb right before he tripped it.
A section of the floor panel detached beneath him and he fell heavily into the concealed compartment below. It had originally been a maintenance conduit, but Regan had converted it into a personal panic room for Lilliana. The sliding panel had already slid itself back into place, and with a little effort, he locked it.
The space was cozy for a woman of Lilliana’s size. It was downright cramped for him.
He hoped, the ghouls and the zombies’ minder would be left scratching their heads about his disappearance, because if they found the concealed trapdoor and blasted their way through it, he was out of places to retreat to.
It galled Dick to have retreated at all, but he couldn’t afford to let himself get injured. It was one of his life’s painful realities that he had to be aware of how devastating a comparatively minor injury like a perforated organ or lost extremity could be to him, with his condition.
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