Ice
Ice reached behind her back, making sure the Mosin-Nagant was tightly strapped to her body. She allowed herself a second or two to hook her finger under the tough synthetic fabric and yank, checking it was secure. Then she gripped the weathered metal of the comms tower and began to climb.
Her real name wasn’t Ice, of course. It was Yarina Baranouskaya, but nobody called her that in the field. Too long, too awkward to pronounce. By the time you’d gotten your mouth and tongue around the name ‘Baranouskaya’, the spiders would have already swarmed your position and neatly packaged you in viscous webbing for later. Or worse.
A rusty metal girder crunched loudly and gave way beneath her combat boot. She ignored the burst of adrenaline now propagating through her bloodstream, shifted her weight left onto another one that wasn’t so rusted, and continued to climb. No point at all in panicking, even in briefly twitching a muscle. She’d long ago accepted that death was everywhere. Mors was a dangerous planet, a rocky graveyard with more predators than clean water. You learned to deal, or you became food.
Stretching prone on the tower, she took aim into the spider nest that had formed in the front of the compound in the entrance lobby.
One down. A clean shot to the thin patch of carapace where its eight eyes divided into two groups of four.
Two dead. Three. Hold, now. Breathe out, half-fill lungs. Brace your finger against the heavy tension of the Mosinka’s trigger, and pull.
Four down. Breathe. Hold. Lock on.
Five. Exhale. Pull against the Moscreep.
Someone was still alive inside the webs. Ice took a deep, fraught breath, shifted her weight perhaps a millimeter, and took aim at the viscous rope trapping a man against the wall.
Tighten against the heavy inertia. Pull the trigger.
Ice saw the man panic. His eyes bulged, and he jerked as if trying to flee his own skin, but then he realized that he felt no pain and wasn’t bleeding, and scrambled free of the webs.
She allowed herself a brief moment of triumph, then shuttered away everything but cold steel focus. There was a whole building full of those eight-limbed terrors down there.
Valdez
Valdez dropped his weight and braced his heels firmly into the floor. He gripped the rough concrete, bunched his hamstrings and heaved.
The brick crumbled. Pieces came away in his hands, the cement corroded from spider venom. The section of caved-in wall trapping the man and his daughter didn’t move an inch.
Valdez spat out a volley of curse words and tried again. More trickles of dust and grit came away in his hands. Scrabbling under the mass for something solid to hold onto, he found a patch of brick that didn’t give way, but he had absolutely no leverage to move it. His 500lb deadlift he’d achieved last week was no use here. Lifting a slab of rubble was not like pulling a barbell. The gym was a cozy sanctuary compared to this: you walked in. You warmed up on safe, springy matting. The weights were neatly structured so you’d only have to worry about strength, not balance. You didn’t have to waste half the power in your muscles struggling to orient yourself.
Nothing for it.
He dug out an injector from the pocket of his combat pants, and he slammed the payload of Dirt into his thigh.
For a few seconds, there was nothing, then the drug rippled and tore through his bloodstream. His muscles engorged, his heart pumped so fast it was no longer a beat but a one-note drone. He reached down. He worked his forearm under the fallen wall, and he shoved forward and up. Radic and Velichko darted forward, plucking the father and daughter from the wreckage.
Valdez’s vision pulsed blood-red as he paced off to comb the destruction for more survivors. An ominous, too-heavy pressure built either side of his spine. He’d taken too much.
Krivezhenko
Krivezhenko spun around and fired as the spiders swarmed, spraying the corridor with hot lead. Too many. The civilian girl at her side screamed. Krivezhenko reached down to her belt for a grenade and pulled the pin.
The blast cleared the corridor. More threats flashed at the edge of her vision. The hallway to her right was freshly filling with Megalonephila terribilis. One lunged, and its teeth were halfway to her throat before her bullets painted the corridor with its brain tissue. Too slow. She had been awake too long. Her reaction time was deteriorating.
The girl was screaming again, and her terror was understandable, but Krivezhenko needed to think - she couldn’t focus -
‘Shut up! Please!’ she thundered back, and then felt the guilt weigh a hundred pounds on her shoulders. ‘I’m sorry - don’t you have a gun? You’re old enough, you’re wearing a school uniform…’
The girl nodded, pulled herself together and reached for the little snub-nosed pistol at her belt.
The air went dark. Towering shapes blocked out the lights. The main hallway was refilling with louring eight-limbed shapes.
Krivezhenko barked a command, and the girl opened fire with her now, feet planted and arms steady like they taught in schools. The swarm of spiders thinned, but they were still coming. She plucked another grenade from her belt, yanked the pin and flung it into the maelstrom.
And then the ceiling gave way - glittering chitinous limbs reached down - they were inside the attic -
And the ones in the corridor to the left were still coming -
So hard to think - too many - only have one pair of eyes -
Krivezhenko snatched the girl to her chest with one hand, wrenched open a storage cupboard with the other and stuffed them both inside. Stupid move, she knew, but she liked her chances. The cavity was too small to fit M. terribilis inside.
She fumbled in her pocket for a vial of Dirt, and she plunged the needle into her thigh.
Ice
Something was wrong.
The shapes moving in the building were erratic, crazed. Ice couldn’t see much by now, because night was falling, but it was light enough to show that they were human and not arachnid.
She reached for her night vision lenses. The cold off-green glow confirmed her suspicions.
Valdez was hunched with his back to a radiator. Krivezhenko was wandering aimlessly, talking to the air in nonsense syllables. Davidson, Moore and Yee had forgotten that there was such thing as a gun, that they had rifles slung across their backs, and were throwing ceiling beams, rubble, whatever they could lift at the oncoming spiders.
Ice angled her scope left-right and tried to see further into the compound. Some of the unit were still lucid. Lawless and Velasquez were shepherding a gaggle of civilians out through a secured hallway. Velichko and Radic were crouched in a doorway still shooting at a pair of M. terribilis coming down the hallway.
The rest had clearly taken too much Dirt.
Ice reached into the left chest pocket of her combat jacket. Three Ozolex darts. Five people all looking pretty far gone. Ice sighed and began triaging her comrades in her head. Moore helpfully picked up a fallen ceiling beam and threw it, stunning one of the spiders and shattering a window. One less obstacle for her to shoot through.
Valdez should get the Ozolex first, she decided. Dirt overdose killed you one of two ways. One: your adrenal glands swelled to twice their normal size. You stepped a little too forcefully out of a vehicle or over a pile of rubble, and they popped like overripe fruit. You bled out internally before anyone could do anything about it. Two: you wandered into the mouth of a spider because you no longer understood what a spider was. It was just a shape - an ugly one, yes, a dour shade of dark brown or black, but you had no concept that it was a threat. No idea what ‘venom’ was, or ‘fangs’.
Judging by how Valdez was wedged lower-back-first against a radiator, not moving, he was steadily heading for option one. Krivezhenko could wait. She was gone, but still at least had a gun in her hand, and enough base reflexes left to startle when the beam went through the window. If a spider lunged, she’d probably still shoot it out of sheer muscle memory. The three berserkers could wait. Anyone well enough to pick up and throw a 200lb chunk of metal was well enough not to need Ozolex just yet.
Ice locked on Valdez. She tightened her finger against the gravelly resistance, and she fired the Ozolex dart into his left deltoid.
Next she cast about the lobby for Krivezhenko.
Ice tracked her movements as she lurched this way and that. A plume of smoke caught her attention, and she ambled over to it, reaching out to touch it. Ice opened fire. The dart struck Krivezhenko’s right thigh.
Now for the last one.
Pick one with your eyes closed, Ice told herself.
She squeezed her eyes shut for a second, then swept randomly around the lobby, and the first person she happened to see was Yee. Fixing her crosshairs on his upper arm, she fired the dart in.
Valdez sat up now, his expression confused but no longer in pain. Krivezhenko was still wandering aimlessly around the wreckage, but she was starting to look more awake now, her lips forming the word ‘shit’ instead of random nonsense syllables.
Ice strapped her rifle back in its home between her shoulder blades, and began climbing down from the comms tower. She had no power to do anything else here.