Notes :
Sorry for switching things up. Since I'm going to make this public soonish, I felt it best to rearrange the schedule.
For the first time in almost a decade, I played a game of Space Station, well, not 13 now, but 14. I had an absolute blast and got inspired to write about it.
This is the ending of the second round of the game, which had gone horribly, horribly wrong, as you'll no doubt see. Yes, I was part of the horde of undead.
Of course, this contains a TON of artistic license, as I'm sure anyone who has played the game or seen someone do so will realize. But it was fun to write and I hadn't done a good horde shootout in a while. Plus, last stands tend to be fairly rare in my novels, by necessity.
For those who don't know SS14, the only basics you need to know is :
Nanotransen is a megacorp that owns Space Station 14 and Centcom is it's central command, where personnel evacuate to when things go horribly wrong.
The Syndicate are enemies of Nanotransen.
I hope you'll enjoy it ! The artillery lore file will be posted on wednesday.
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"Attention, all personnel. The emergency shuttle from: Space Station 14 will dock in...thirty seconds."
The death squad lieutenant barely even blinked as the announcement blared through the lounge, checking her pulse rifle's charge levels as her troops set up around her. Soldiers checked their own rifles, while the machinegunner made sure his weapon was stable, his assistant laying out ammunition cans right next to him, ready to swap the belt at a moment's notice.
"Remember, we must save whatever assets we can! This space station was hideously expensive, and the personnel-"
The lieutenant gritted her teeth as the centcom official spoke up.
"The personnel, in a few seconds, is about to burst out of those doors, and try to eat us alive." She pointed at the airlocks, currently showing empty space. "We've already agreed not to nuke the damn station, to preserve your 'assets'. But unless you want to end up as something's dinner, shut the hell up and let us do our jobs."
The corporate drone opened his mouth, then closed it.
Whether he was going to rally and find enough courage -or stupidity- to harangue the soldier, no one would ever know, as alarm klaxons blared, and the space behind the windows began to waver.
Then, in a bright blue flash of cherenkov radiation, the shuttle was there. Perfectly docked. The wonders of bluespace technology...
For a second, nothing happened.
Then the outer airlock doors opened.
Something which probably had been a botanist, but now was a rotting corpse, stumbled mindlessly into the airlock. Then it sighted the soldiers and the corporate drone in the lounge.
It opened its mouth impossible wide, and even through the intervening steel and glass, the lieutenant heard the howl. It began low, then rose as more and more undead throat joined it.
The zombie threw itself against the inner airlock doors, and unfortunately, wired as they were for emergency evacuation, they opened. So long as there was atmosphere on both sides, the entire system was made to allow everyone to get out in a hurry, in case the shuttle was compromised.
The lieutenant shouldered her pulse rifle, took a split second to make sure of her target...and pulled the trigger.
The zombie dropped like a sack of potatoes, its brain instantly reduced to atoms, alongside half of its skull.
Unfortunately, it was far from alone.
Without warning bodies filled the airlock. Tens, hundreds of undead crammed into the confined space.
The death squad opened fire. Streams of coherent particles, bolts of searing plasma and even old fashioned bullets slammed into the horde.
Precision wasn't technically required. In such a dense press of bodies the soldiers were going to hit something.
But unfortunately, zombies cared little for the integrity of their bodies. So long as the brain endured, they were almost invulnerable, requiring so much damage that you had to practically dismember them for the virus to finally realize the host was no longer viable and expire.
So the undead came, bursting out of the airlock like a rotting tide of filth. Most were already back with the reaper, the death squad placing their shots well, but many were still animate, pushing the corpses aside. Most were shambling messes, more bone than flesh due to the overwhelming firepower directed their way. But others were more intact, and ran towards the soldiers.
The lieutenant calmly took a step aside as one of the zombies made it to her. Some kind of female chemist, though most of her face had been chewed off by whoever had infected her. She idly noted that the undead also had electrical burns.
Not that it mattered. The zombie stumbled past the lieutenant, losing its balance, and she vaporized its neck with a well placed pulse shot, before whirling back to face the airlocks.
More undead were starting to pour out, more than her troops could handle. She yelled out.
"Grenades!"
There was a brief pause in the firing, during which the horde surged out of the airlock as one, massive block, only failing in overrunning the troops by getting in each other's way and the withering fire of the machinegunner, sweeping low to scythe their legs off, causing the undead to fall and trip the ones behind them.
Then menacing black cylinders sailed through the air, and a split second later the outer half of the lounge turned from an abattoir to something the english language couldn't properly describe, let alone have a word for.
The explosions painted every surface, ornamental shrub and piece of furniture with liquefied organs and pulverized bones, a haze of vaporized blood hanged in the air, the sudden silence lasting a second, only to be broken by the blaring alarms, the station's automated systems howling in protest at the destruction unleashed upon it.
Thankfully, centcom was made to last, and though the bulkheads on the side of the lounge had seen better days, the armored windows that flanked the airlocks barely blinked, to say nothing of the hull.
But already, there was movement in the depths of the shuttle, more undead rushing towards the airlock, undeterred by the massacre of their kind. A couple of more waves like this, and they'd have cleared out the bulk of the enemy. Then they could sweep the shuttle, and start the long process of sanitizing the space station it had been meant to evacuate. It would be tough, but-
There was a strangled cough by her side, and the lieutenant looked, horrified, at the centcom official.
He was standing there, looking dazed.
His mask, improperly secured by a bureaucrat that did little more than shuffle paperwork all day long, laid on his torso, hanging by what few straps remained secure...the rest blown off by the explosions.
Explosions that had just filled the air with vaporized zombie blood.
The lieutenant turned around. But the official's eyes had already become filled with something that wasn't human, and the newly created zombie pounced on her before she could bring her rifle to bear.
Teeth, reinforced by a bioweapon so advanced even nanotransen was struggling to understand it, bit straight through reinforced armor plating and thermal dispersion fabric, and the lieutenant's scream ended in a gurgle as the zombie tore her throat out.
The rest of the squad froze for a single, critical second.
But they were well trained, and the sergeant bellowed orders as he spun around.
The official was reduced to a smoking pile of ash before he could take more than four steps.
But the lieutenant...
The zombie that had once lead the death squad unit sprang to its feet, and though the undead could not use weapons, it did wear the same outfit it had in life, and the advanced armor that could not defeat undead teeth shrugged off the pulse rounds like they were little more than thrown rocks.
The soldier in front of the sergeant screamed as her former CO pounced on her and ripped her to shreds.
Her death bought the sergeant just enough time to prime and throw the armor piercing grenade.
The entire station shook as the plasma charge detonated, vaporizing both women, one undead and the other rapidly reanimating, and tore a hole straight through the hull plating. Tough as it may be, Centcom's hull wasn't meant to survive being hit by weapons meant to take down Syndicate combat mechs.
The death squad cared little. They had magnetic boots and their armor was fully enclosed, with an autonomous air supply, part spacesuit, part engine of death.
Unfortunately, the zombies didn't care either. Hard vacuum didn't inconvenience something that did not live, and if anything, the air rushing out of the shuttle helped give them a boost of speed.
Not that it mattered. With two of the death squad down, and their attention diverted, they had been unable to stem the tide. They might have, had the airlocks been able to close, now that the atmosphere was compromised, but safety interlocks prevented them from trying to slam down on the tide of rotting flesh, and the safety systems opened valves and began to pump in more air to try and keep the 'evacuees' alive long enough for them to make it deeper in, even opening the airlocks leading further into the station to help with evacuation.
"Pull back!" Ordered the sergeant as the zombies rushed them.
His men, a credit to their uniform, fell back in good order, firing as they took each step, felling zombie after zombie. Even the heavy machinegunner fell back in good order, hefting his heavy weapon with no doubt blistering profanity, though the radio didn't carry it.
Then the machinegun ran dry.
And the horde, barely kept in check, surged forward before the assistant could react.
The machinegunner managed to swing his weapon, crushing the skull of a zombie. Then a split second later he vanished under the tide, whatever screams he uttered as the undead ate him alive mercifully unheard thanks to his muted microphone and the loud rush of air exiting through the breach.
The sergeant was unceremoniously pushed through the airlock leading deeper into the station by one of his subordinates, the door closing as the undead dogpiled the dutiful man.
For a single, endless instant, the sergeant's gaze met with the eyes of the man, seeing the endless pain as the zombies tore his armor off, as teeth sank into his flesh...
Then he saw what the soldier was holding, and the NCO dove out of the airlock and took cover a split second before the grenade went off.
That wasn't an armor piercing grenade. Or a regular frag. The NCO had no idea where his subordinate had gotten ahold of a Syndicate molecular wire grenade, but the explosive shredded everything. The soldier, the airlock doors, every undead in a five meters radius, all reduced to ribbons in an instant, only the armored hull managing to survive the hit from the lethal filaments.
Horrific as the weapon was, it bought the sergeant time. He looked at the arrival corridor, and realized that there was only two other soldiers, of the full squad they had started with.
"Go!" He yelled to the furthest of his subordinate. "Enact protocol Omega! We'll buy you time!"
The soldier nodded, and tossed down his weapon as he ran at a dead sprint for the center of the station. Where he was going, he wouldn't need a gun. And every second counted.
The sergeant stood up, and the last remaining soldier formed up with him.
The young woman didn't say anything. She didn't need to.
They were both dead already. The only question was whether they could buy their colleague enough time to do what he had been ordered to, or would fail and haunt the station as reanimated sacks of meat, feasting upon the administrative personnel and spreading the taint ever onwards, until the entire system was gone.
After all, centcom was linked by regular, automated shuttle flights to every installation in the star system, and even several beyond. If this got out to one of the main starports, that anchored the trade lanes back to Earth...
It wasn't something that could be allowed to happen. Far better protocol Omega than the navy having to glass half a dozen worlds and incinerate fifty times as many stations. And that's if they were lucky.
The undead surged back through the shredded hall, and they both opened fire. This time, the hull breach was behind the dead, and the rushing air slowed them down. Not to mention the greater confines forced them in each other's way.
The two soldiers fell back, step by step, firing ceaselessly. But every undead they dropped was just mashed to paste under the press of their fellows, still clawing for living flesh.
The sergeant's pulse rifle ran dry, and he tossed it at the undead, slowing them down by a fraction of a second, just enough to draw his mateba revolver and-
A disk slid into its slot. The codes within were accepted.
And Nanotransen's Central Command Station briefly became a newborn star as its self destruct sequence unleashed its thermonuclear fury upon the universe.