Engineering passageway, Katadromiko 52, non-system space
When Cleo materialised in the corridor outside the ROR, she was confronted by around thirty bugs, the nearest being about twenty metres away and all busy ripping panels off the walls. They stopped what they were doing and stared at her, seemingly frozen to the spot, but Cleo knew they were likely awaiting instructions from the collective mind.
She had appeared in Grogun’s image, wearing the captain’s uniform and didn’t have to wait long for the reaction she knew was coming.
They launched themselves in her direction, a snarling, snapping wall of incensed metre-tall insects surged toward her. Had it been the real Grogun, it would’ve been terrifying and she wouldn’t have stood a chance, but the holographic version stood her ground with hands on hips and a big grin on her face.
Just as the leading bugs were a fraction of a second from hitting her, she vanished. The seething cascade of hate all piled into each other and as they began picking themselves up, confused as to where their prey had gone, the holographic Grogun reappeared behind them at the corridor T-junction.
‘Oi, dumb arse dipshits,’ she hollered back up the passageway.
They all turned and, mad with anger, swarmed back the way they’d come, the leading bugs fighting over each other to be the first to get to her.
Grogun immediately took off to the right and flew down the passageway, head down like a hundred-metre sprinter.
‘Be ready with your finger hovering,’ she transmitted to the real Grogun, checking over her shoulder to see how fast they were gaining.
Gaining they were, alarmingly quickly. She thought about cheating and moving faster than a human actually could, but that might alert them to the deception. Upping her pace as much as she dared, she flashed past a right-hand junction just as another large group of bugs reached it. They stared at her as she zipped past, before realising she was the target they’d been tasked with eradicating. Without looking they piled out of the turning, straight in front of the original steam train of bugs.
The noise of them coming together had Cleo glancing over her shoulder again to witness a car crash of epic proportions. So much so, as to momentarily block the corridor. She smiled as the few seconds it took the maelstrom of bodies to sort themselves out, gave her the extra time she needed to reach the nearest hangar.
‘Airlocks now,’ she shouted.
Grogun, back in the ROR, having already removed the safeties, remotely opened both airlock doors into the hangar at the same time, enabling Cleo to sprint through and out of sight of her pursuers.
She promptly disappeared, reappearing as herself in the ROR with Grogun.
‘Wait till they’re all inside,’ she said, watching the video feed from inside the hangar.
The bugs began swarming into the large hangar. Their numbers had increased considerably from the original thirty, as the collective decision must have been to throw every nearby available asset at eliminating the captain.
‘Fuck me,’ mumbled Grogun. ‘Look how many there are. It must be more than a thousand now.’
‘Have you secured the ships in there?’ Cleo asked.
‘The mag floor should hold them,’ Grogun answered. ‘How long do I wait?’ she asked, as bugs continued to flow in through the airlock.
Cleo shrugged.
‘Until they stop coming. They won’t get in the ships will they?’
‘No, I secured them all,’ said Grogun, watching the sea of insects flowing around the hangar fruitlessly searching for her.
The number of bugs entering the hangar receded suddenly, as if someone had turned off a tap.
‘Ready?’ Cleo asked.
‘I thought you being a Theo and all that, meant you couldn’t take a life?’ said Grogun.
‘I’m not…you are.’
‘But you were part of the operation.’
‘I just ran down a corridor,’ Cleo replied, nodding at the flashing icon under Grogun’s finger. ‘About time you hit that.’
The flow of bugs had ceased. They were all in the hangar circulating and searching frantically around the rows of parked freighters for the ship’s captain who, unbeknown to them, was no longer there. Grogun touched the icon and both airlock doors closed again, trapping the surging mass of insects inside.
She ignored the warning siren that sounded as she removed the fail-safes on the atmosphere shield generator and turned it off.
The explosive decompression whipped the hangar clean of insects in a few seconds. A few of the smaller ships near the hangar exit shifted out of their neat lines, more to do with being struck by hundreds of bugs than their lesser weight causing them to move on the magnetic floor.
Even though the bugs could actually survive in the cold vacuum of space, Grogun had programmed the auto mini cannons on that side of the ship, designed to target enemy fighters that managed to get close in, to engage anything that moved.
Grogun adopted a contemptuous grin as the side of the cruiser lit up with hundreds of red laser bolts vaporising dozens of bugs a second.
‘What was it you said they called this? A turkey shoot was it?’ quizzed Grogun.
‘Yeah.’
‘On Kalameed II, we call it naive egotistical disassembly, although good fucking riddance sounds much better to me. Bastard things.’
‘Ah, crap,’ exclaimed Cleo, suddenly looking up to stare at one of the monitors displaying the exterior view behind the ship.
‘What the hell is that?’ asked Grogun, following her gaze. ‘That better not be more of the little shits.’
‘I’m afraid it is,’ admitted Cleo, pulling an apologetic expression. ‘This time on a planetary scale. Can’t you jump the ship away?’
‘I need to lock them out of propulsion first,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t got around to that yet.’
‘Did you close all the bulkhead doors in this section?’
Grogun nodded as she tapped away on the control panel.
‘Means you should be left alone for a while. Would you like me to go to main engineering and mess with their heads a bit?’ asked Cleo.
‘Couldn’t do any harm,’ Grogun mumbled as she concentrated.
Cleo was just about to disappear when Grogun turned and waved a finger at her.
‘Don’t break anything,’ she said, sternly. ‘I’m going to need everything working in there.’ Before returning her attention back to her task.
‘I’ll be very subtle,’ Cleo whispered, as she vanished once more.