She brought up her damage control. So much damage. She was half paralysed inside the crippled armour, and if she somehow got it off then her training wouldn’t be enough to beat him.
The two of them faced off, or the three of them including Rollo, but Rollo and his little gun weren’t a big feature of this conflict. He’d have to practically force-feed Mesmon the barrel to make much of an impression. Then Olli erupted into the drone bay, still fighting the lashing, coiling length of the Castigar.
There were two more laser scars across the Scorpion’s metal hide and the wormlike bulk of the alien was gashed and ragged. It left a smear of black ichor across the plates of the floor. Even as the pair of them burst onto the scene, the Castigar’s headmounted weapon spoke again, spraying the room with a scatter of bullets and scribbling nonsense across the far wall with its energy beam. Then Olli finally secured a cutting claw about the headmount and ripped it off, taking a chunk of the creature’s head with it. The clutch of tentacles still attached to the creature writhed in a frenzy and its length whipped madly back and forth. Mesmon was slammed one way and Solace the other. The thrashing was pure reflex by then, and mostly post-mortem. Warrior Castigar died hard, but they still died.
Unlike Tothiat, apparently, because Mesmon was scrambling up the Scorpion like a monkey, making straight for the cracked capsule that held Olli. One of her smaller arms snagged at his tattered EVA suit and he ripped the limb off in one smooth motion.
Solace levelled Mr Punch but, with only one fully functional arm, the chance of shooting Olli was too high. Instead she scrabbled against the gravity field and just flung herself at the Tothiat. Half her body was locked rigid, yet she could still pilot herself about like a remote using her gravity handles. Mesmon was straddling Olli’s capsule, one hand cocked back to strike, when she cannoned into him. She almost tore him loose altogether and got her working glove about his head, digging her fingers into his flesh as hard as she could.
With a snarl he took her wrist and tried to break it one-handed, but he couldn’t quite get enough purchase. Instead, he just jerked at her arm – pulling hard enough to slam her into the nearest wall. Simultaneously, he drove his other elbow into Olli’s clear plastic screen, cracking it into a webwork of crazed lines. Inside, the remote specialist’s face was ashen, horrified.
Solace was fighting to recover control of her own armour, so she missed the moment when Rollo vaulted up and put his pistol to Mesmon’s chest, opening a fist-sized hole. The Tothiat slammed back, one hand still hooked about the latch of Olli’s lid. For just a second, Solace thought that was that – they’d finally breached the tolerance of the man’s alien resilience.
There was hardly any blood, though. And Mesmon arched forwards, keening loud enough for Solace to hear even over the yelling of her armour’s alarms. He abandoned Olli and threw himself on Rollo, knocking the man’s gun aside and smashing him across the head. The blow was hard enough to break the captain’s neck and visibly deform his skull.
Solace’s own cry almost deafened her and it covered Olli’s shriek. A moment later the Scorpion had three different limbs on Mesmon, driving claws and clamps into his flesh. She was pulling him taut between them as though she was going to tear him into thirds. And perhaps she would have done, but he wouldn’t come apart. Solace could see the frame’s servos straining, arms juddering and whining as they tried to maintain their grisly tension.
Then both doors of the drone bay airlock were grinding open to reveal a short umbilical – the one that connected the Vulture to the flayed, airless sculpture of the Oumaru. Immediately, the atmosphere started screaming out into the tunnel. Solace began skidding towards the open hatch, resisting with her gravity handles because she just didn’t have enough working limbs to do it any other way. What she did manage to do was swing herself so that she had one foot on Rollo’s body, even as Mesmon’s dead compatriots spun or rolled past. They ragdolled bonelessly down the umbilical, into the open wound that was the Oumaru, before being sucked out into the wider universe.
‘Kit!’ she shouted, not even sure her comms were working. ‘Repair the envelope! Kittering!’
Something skidded past her as she tried to maintain her position. It was a plain metal box, but some part of her remembered its provenance and she grabbed it with her working hand. The thing Harvest had brought up from the Oumaru; the answer to why Rollo had lost his ship – and his life. Something important. Worth killing and dying for.