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  A room like this—a bed, a nightstand, a couch that sat two, a kitchenette with mini fridge and microwave, a coffee table and TV—was a steady place that didn’t serve as a waystation. That held a certain appeal. She had her own room on Ragnarok now, but still, that was always on the move. She wondered what living in a stationary room would be like.

  Then she stabbed a Rapoo through the heart and remembered why she was always moving. No adventure ever came from sitting still.

  The residential substation offered them little trouble. They reached the tenth and top floor and cleared it as easily as they had the rest. It was a mindless routine at that point. They swept the halls then cleared cabin after cabin in teams of two, since that was all that would fit.

  It seemed jarringly out of place to be leaning against the elevator wall, listening to smooth jazz and fighting the urge to sleep.

  They took the tunnel back to the main hub and sealed it behind them.

  “Last section,” Cody said, bringing up the scans for the team to see. “It’s a doozy, though. The R&D substation is full of top-secret projects. They don’t even store the details on the main server. All I could get was that some of them are marked ‘hazardous’, and who the hell knows what that means? But the biggest concentration of Rapoo are shacked up in there.”

  Reggie hoisted his gatling back onto his shoulder.

  “The only good news is that this substation is small,” Cody continued. “It’s one level. Basically just one big, open room. Aside from the fact that some of the projects in there might kill us if we disturb them, I doubt Jasob will be happy if we blow up all their top-secret stuff. So we should try to keep collateral damage to a minimum.”

  “‘Minimizing collateral damage’ is my middle name,” Joel said.

  The door to the R&D substation slid open.

  Sam took one step forward before a Rapoo sliced a claw across her neck.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Joel’s face was splattered with red. Fine dots, a deep red hue.

  Sam couldn’t understand why he looked so surprised. Or why he wasn’t yelling. A wound like that, to produce so much blood, it must have hurt. Maybe he’s in shock. He’s not feeling it yet. It will hit him.

  Oh, wait.

  Sam touched her neck. Her hand came away soaked in blood. She was the one with the gaping neck wound. It was her blood on his face. She was the one in shock.

  The world started to spin. She got very cold very quickly, and her knees buckled. Joel’s look of frozen terror shattered as he rushed forward to catch her.

  “Pull back!” he shouted.

  Reggie was already ten paces ahead of them, his gatling raging, keeping the rest of the horde at bay. Peppy patrolled the space between Reggie and Sam, killing all of the Rapoo that got past the barrage of blasterfire.

  Cody screamed at Reggie’s back. “Back, Reggie! Into the tunnel!”

  Reggie took one step back, and the horde followed. Every inch he gave up, the Rapoo took immediately. He was the dam, holding back the ocean. If he moved, the water would swallow them.

  “Go!” he yelled.

  Scenarios ran through Cody’s mind, as he calculated outcomes, his friends’ lives just data points in an equation. Pull back, patch Sam’s wounds, save her life, leave Reggie to die. Help Reggie, let Sam bleed out.

  There has to be another way. There has to be—

  A hand on Cody’s wrist. It was Sam, taking the decision away from him. She tore off his wristcom and threw it behind her, into the tunnel. Then she pulled a can of med-spray from a pocket on her belt and shoved it into Cody’s chest.

  “Patch me up.”

  The gash was in the side of her neck, tracing her jawline. It had missed the jugular, but she was losing enough blood that she’d pass out in seconds if it didn’t stop. Then she’d be dead a minute later.

  Cody took the spray, allowing himself no time to second-guess or recalculate. The decision was made. The med-spray was essentially an adhesive, a quick fix on the battlefield. It bound the wound and stopped the bleeding, but it would still need cleaning and to be properly examined. One sliver of Rapoo claw in the wound could cause infection. But there was no time for that now.

  Sam’s face had drained of color, along with a hefty dose of her blood. The front of her was stained red. She was a gruesome sight. She held her head up anyway.

  “No clever plans on this one. If we try to retreat, we get overrun. If we press forward, we get surrounded. We hold our ground, the mouth of this tunnel, and let them come to us.” She tapped Reggie on the shoulder, a signal that it was safe for him to back up.

  They took up position at the mouth of the tunnel—Sam with her sword, Cody and Joel holding their spears, Peppy snarling. Reggie dropped behind them, finally allowing his arms to give out, pushed to their max by the relentless vibrations of the gatling.

  Once the firing stopped, the Rapoo charged. The line of Notches became a meatgrinder. The Rapoo erupted in a mist of red and a shower of parts. Spears through hearts. Sword lopping off heads. Teeth ripping out throats.

  Reggie regained the feeling in his hands and hoisted the gatling again.

  “Switch!”

  The team parted and fell behind him for a chance to catch their breath. Without a full recharge of stamina, Reggie was only able to hold the line for a minute.

  Sam noticed his shoulders slump. She tapped him, and they swapped places again. Each time they swapped places, they lost a little ground, moving back further into the tunnel. They felt like a blockage in a garden hose, being pressed on continuously, moving closer to the end with every second. The ground became slick with blood. Their muscles burned with fatigue.

  They swapped again. Reggie could barely lift the gatling. He couldn’t feel his hands anymore. He couldn’t squeeze the trigger. But his friends had only just stepped back. They needed a break. He dropped the gatling. It slammed like a gavel down onto the deck. He drew his spear and extended the pole just in time to swat a Rapoo out of the air. He batted a second aside then impaled a third, but he couldn’t hold on to the spear with the added weight. It, too, fell to the floor.

  Rather than attempt to retrieve it, Reggie pounded his knuckles together. A weak gesture. A boxer in the tenth round with nothing left to give.

  Two Rapoo rushed him. Reggie punched down, catching one in the top of the head. He swung up to catch the other one under the chin, snapping its neck back.

  His arms had moved past the point of burning and fatigue. They were numb. Still, he managed enough force to kill. But that was pure adrenaline, and that would burn out soon. So he figured he’d better make the most of it.

  He went into a frenzy, swinging his arms like he was a windmill, knocking Rapoo out of the sky, crushing their skulls with wild haymakers. He was a golem, a lifeless thing putting itself between its people and danger. He was Gandalf.

  “You shall not pass!”

  Until one Rapoo caught him in the shoulder. It was a glancing blow, but it was the final whack to a tree trunk that had been mostly cut.

  Reggie went down.

  The Rapoo climbed on top of him, its paws pinning his shoulders to the floor. Reggie reached for the Rapoo’s throat, hoping to crush at least one more of the bastards. But the Rapoo had other plans. It clamped its jaws around Reggie’s wrist, crushing bones and severing tendons. Even if the beast let go, Reggie wouldn’t be able to flick the thing’s nose.

  Blood from his wrist dripped onto his face. He’d be blinded by his own blood, unable to see the deathblow coming. He could find a bright side even now, seconds from death.

  A brilliant light bloomed at the bottom edge of his vision. Glistening, painful, like staring into the sun. His heart slammed against his spine and ricocheted off his ribs. And then everything stopped. The crushing force around his wrist relented. The pressure on his shoulders was gone. He felt weightless.

  Something tugged on him. Pulling him toward the light? No—away from it.

  His eyes shutter
ed and regained their focus. Joel stood above him, one hand on the strap around his chest and shoulders that typically held his gatling, the other pointing a pistol at the horde.

  “Don’t die,” Joel said.

  Reggie managed to cough out a few words. “Try not to.”

  Joel set him down and applied the med-spray to Reggie’s wrist. Then, without a word, he returned to the fray.

  Reggie pressed his elbows into the floor and felt fresh waves of pain shoot through his body. Sitting upright, he realized that the light he’d seen wasn’t a doorway to the afterlife, it was a flashbang. The Rapoo were staggering and disoriented.

  The team had regained a foothold. Peppy, Sam and Joel were doing their thing, stabbing and tearing Rapoo apart. It was Cody that surprised Reggie. He stood in the center of the tunnel at the front of the line, holding Reggie’s gatling.

  The gun looked massive in Cody’s little arms. It had been a chore for Reggie to lug around, and he was more than a foot taller and weighed close to fifty pounds more. Cody wasn’t using his strength to hoist that gun, he was using the fire that burned inside him, the flame that he rarely showed, the one he often forgot existed. It lit when times were dire, when he felt backed into a corner. Or when his friends needed him.

  He shook like he was seizing, but he held the gun on target. Rapoo broke around him like a wave crashing into a rock. Sam and Joel waited to impale the survivors on the jagged shore. The force of the gun grew to be too much for him. Even with all the fires of Hell burning in his chest, Cody didn’t have the muscle to hold it long. He dropped to one knee. Still, he fired… Though his shots went low, hitting the deck at the Rapoo’s feet.

  Suddenly, the gun seemed lighter. Much lighter. He stood and realized why; he wasn’t the only one holding it anymore. Reggie stood next to him, taking some of the weight.

  Together, they held the gun high and mowed down the remainder of the Rapoo pack.

  Finally, the gatling went silent. Sam and Joel stopping slashing. Peppy stopped hunting. The team locked eyes over the carnage. Their faces were stained red. Their knuckles were white. Their faces were a pale green. They trudged further back into the tunnel, toward the main station. They found a clean spot—relatively clean, anyway—and sat. They said nothing.

  Tears cut a path through the red on Reggie’s cheeks, though he liked to think the others mistook it for sweat. Until he noticed the same streaks on Joel’s face, and Cody’s and Sam’s.

  He let his head fall back and hit the wall. His hand fell to the floor and landed on something cylindrical: Cody’s wristcom. He hadn’t seen Sam rip it off Cody’s wrist and throw it away, eliminating the option of sealing Reggie and the pack in the substation, but he pieced it together.

  He picked up the device and tossed it to Cody. “You dropped that.”

  Cody reattached it and smiled. “I should be more careful.”

  They were quiet again as they let the blood wash from their faces.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Cutting-edge space stations always have the best med-bays. If you ever need a place to almost get eaten alive or torn apart by giant space rodents, try to do it on a cutting-edge space station.

  The medical bots cleaned Reggie’s wound then injected his wrist with nanomites. The microscopic bots set about patching him together as he rested.

  Fixing Sam up was a bit more complicated. The gash in her neck had been closer to severing a major artery than they realized. A quarter inch to the left, and she would have bled out. And there was a piece of Rapoo claw stuck in the wound.

  The medical bots sedated her. They cleaned her wound and used a surgical laser to repair most of the damage. Then they injected her with nanomites to take care of the rest.

  While she and Reggie recuperated, Joel and Cody set about cleaning up the station. Cody co-opted the station’s automated janitorial and cleaning systems to assist with transporting the Rapoo carcasses to the incinerator and cleaning up the lake of blood and viscera left behind. Short-handed, they removed as many Rapoo teeth as they could, unable to just watch that income get burned and dumped into space.

  The process took several hours, but they weren’t under a time crunch, so they felt no need to rush. Cody took some extra time to browse the R&D substation. He found himself daydreaming about what it would have been like, had his life taken a different turn. He could have been working on this station, developing computer programs for groundbreaking automated medical procedures or networking protocols or the entire computer system for companies like Jasob.

  The tech and bio-mechanical projects they were working on were mind-blowing. Some of them were clearly failures, but that’s how you reached new heights in science—on top of a pile of failures.

  A pang of jealousy pinched at his chest. He was scrubbing blood off the panels where real scientists would be working in a few days. Where he should be working.

  The R&D substation quickly lost its luster.

  Cody decided to leave the rest of the clean-up to the automated systems. On his way back through the substation, something stacked along the outer wall caught his eye. He hadn’t had time during the assault to take in any details of the room; some boxes would have just blended into the background. But even from a distance, he could tell there was something interesting about them…he just couldn’t put his finger on what.

  The closer he got to them, the clearer the feeling became. Familiarity. He’d seen crates like them before. On Rever. On Kaufman.

  Layton Corp crates.

  The feeling of loss from a moment before vanished. Another tick in the conspiracy column. Regardless of what he did for a living, this was the stuff that got his blood pumping. A puzzle that needed putting together. A code that needed decoding.

  He ran to the med-bay to find Sam and Reggie getting discharged by the medical bots. Joel was laying in one of the unused gurneys, reading a comic book that he had taken from a cabin in the residential substation. Peppy was napping on the floor next to him.

  “Guys, I found it.” He was breathless, heaving his words out between gasps. “Proof.”

  “Of?” Joel was disinterested. He turned the page in his comic and laughed before Cody could respond.

  Cody maximized a picture he had taken with his wristcom. He waited for them to react. They didn’t.

  Joel peeked up from his comic when he realized he was supposed to be looking at something. “What am I looking at? Boxes? You found proof of boxes?”

  With a huff, Cody zoomed in on the words painted in red on the side of the crates. “Layton Corp. These are Layton crates. Just like on Rever and Kaufman.”

  Joel groaned and buried his face in the comic again. “I thought we settled this already?”

  “When?” Cody asked.

  “I don’t know. Didn’t I say, ‘Stop talking about stupid conspiracy stuff, it makes you sound crazy’ and then you were all, ‘They’re out to get me, they’re listening to me through my microwave’? Then you decided to listen to me because I’m smarter than you?”

  “No,” Cody said, shaking his head. “None of that ever happened.”

  “I’m pretty sure it did.”

  Cody threw his hands in the air, trying to swat Joel’s nonsense like an annoying fly. “Whatever. Look, we’ve found Layton crates at every infestation site so far. How can you not see the connection?”

  Joel slapped his comic on the table next to his hospital bed. “There have also been toilets at every infestation site so far. Maybe the critters all crawled up out of the toilet. Every site has also been a high traffic area that attracts a lot of people from all over the galaxy on a daily basis. You’re drawing conclusions without enough evidence to back it up.”

  “What are you talking about?” Cody’s voice climbed several decibels. “I just named all that evidence. Layton crates at all those sites.”

  “Circumstantial.”

  “It’s not—”

  “I object!” Joel yelled.

  Despite the dull throbbi
ng in her neck, Sam screamed as loudly as she could. “Shut up!”

  Everyone froze.

  She winced, a sudden wave of raging pain shooting through her. “Can we argue about this on the ship? When I’m sleeping and in a different room?”

  Cody clenched his jaw. The urge to continue, to win the argument, was making his eye twitch. He swallowed the desire to fight and nodded to Sam.

  Joel smirked. “I guess that means I win.”

  Cody opened his mouth to yell, but Sam shut him down with a razor-sharp stare.

  Joel walked behind Cody, chuckling the entire time, all the way back to Ragnarok.

  If he didn’t think Sam would reopen her wound beating them both to death, Cody would have turned around and punched him in the neck.

  Sam made straight for her room. She wasn’t as recovered as she made herself out to be, as evidenced by the green in her cheeks and dark purple circles under her eyes. They were all tired, but they hadn’t almost died like she had.

  Once they cleared the station, Cody resolved to put the ship in a steady drift so they could all get some rest. Though he doubted he’d be able to. His mind wouldn’t quiet.

  Layton. Again. At the site of another infestation. They were behind it, of that Cody had no doubt. But why? It couldn’t have been random. The resources it must have taken to genetically alter the ShimVens… And who knows if they’d done anything to the Rapoo? And then to have shipped them across the galaxy? It was a very large, very coordinated undertaking. What did they get out of infesting this station with Rapoo? To force a total evacuation and—

  A total evacuation.

  The station was completely empty. Maybe that was it. How else could you force an evacuation of an entire space station without issuing a blatant threat?

  He wanted to bring this realization to the team, but he knew they would just roll their eyes or make jokes. Not Sam, though. She believed him. Maybe she would go with him to explore the station more before they left.