All the little lost boys and girls (Update: 26/5/12)

[Master_Baerne]

Goddamn, Bladed Crescent. I just caught myself up on this story, and you've outdone yourself - Children of Heaven was brilliant, if disturbing; this is mindblowingly excellent, if really fucking creepy.

Seriously though, I love how you've managed to make DROP 47 seem like a real place - or at least as real as the more convincing descriptions of Hell. Everything makes sense, in-universe, which I can never seem to manage in my own writings.

[Night_stalker]

WTF was that crazy merc muttering about? Was he hallucinating, or was the virus giving him a minor and short lived connection to a hive mind?

I agree, DROP 47 seems as real as my house. And that's what's so freaky about the story. At least that's what seems to be the scariest aspect to me.

[Bladed_Crescent]

Jason Veers. Cute.

I didn't even notice that when I read it. Nice.

If you two mean Jason Voorhees, I'm sorry to say that I'm not that clever. I only just got the connection when Lady Tevar put the words together. In fact, Jason was named for General Veers from ESB and I just picked a first name at random.

Goddamn, Bladed Crescent. I just caught myself up on this story, and you've outdone yourself - Children of Heaven was brilliant, if disturbing; this is mindblowingly excellent, if really fucking creepy.

Thanks; glad you're enjoying the story so far. There's lots more to come.

Seriously though, I love how you've managed to make DROP 47 seem like a real place - or at least as real as the more convincing descriptions of Hell. Everything makes sense, in-universe, which I can never seem to manage in my own writings.

I agree, DROP 47 seems as real as my house. And that's what's so freaky about the story. At least that's what seems to be the scariest aspect to me.

Thanks. I try to bring whatever's in my mind out onto the page, so the reader can 'see' what I'm seeing, hear what I'm hearing and feel the waft of warm, stinking breath on their neck, a low rising growl crackling from over their shoulder, as a distorted silhouette reaches out...

WTF was that crazy merc muttering about?

What indeed?

[Bladed_Crescent]

In this chapter, Shannon and Abigail learn that 'deserted' does not mean 'undefended' and a few stress fractures start to appear elsewhere...

Coming up: unique employment opportunities

Chapter 43:

They sealed the door behind them, using one of the abandoned offices as an impromptu airlock. There were a pair of abandoned desks here, ancient flimsies, datascrolls and office supplies scattered about. No blood. No spent shell casings or depleted cartridges. No mummified remains or faded blood sprays. Just a long-empty office, evacuated in a rush and neglected ever since that moment. On the left-hand table, a pad of brittle yellow paper held the faded remnants of someone’s scrawled to-do list, a litany of banal activities, but one entry in particular caught Shannon’s eye:

Buy Julie’s b-day present.

“Solid,” Abigail confirmed as she turned away from their point of entry. “Opening the next one won’t leak out the lab’s air.” She took a step towards the other door, but Shannon’s arm snapped out across her chest, halting the Darkknell in her tracks. “Ah,” the taller woman nodded. “Right. I forgot.”

“You’ve been scratching at it,” Shannon said, inspecting Hutchins’s neck.

“Not that much...” there was just the slightest little hint of wheedling in Abby’s tone.

“No, and you’ve stopped yourself a few times. But once or twice you didn’t notice, or thought I wouldn’t. Now hold still.”

Abigail couldn’t help it; she grinned at the familiar tone to Shannon’s voice.“Yes, mom.”

Unlike lighter gauze bindings and breathable fabrics, sealed combat bandages were intended to provide a bulwark against further infection in hazardous conditions and to hold up against hostile environments just as well as a bodyglove. Using a squeeze tube of ancient but still effective biofoam to further seal the edges of her ‘big sister’s’ injury, Shannon at last ran her lume over it, the light in the palm-set scanner checking for imperfections in the sealant while the sensor node ran its own analysis. The medic nodded. “It looks good. No air leaks?”

Abigail ran a quick diagnostic; her HUD flashed a green wireframe. “None. Ready to move out, sir.”

The Halo’s hand came to rest on the access panel, unused for centuries, but her palm’s lume still detected the flow of power. The door was sealed and sealed tight, but it wasn’t one of the heavy security/decompression doors that had chopped the other corridor into segments. “You can stuff your ‘sir’,” Shannon said with a smile as she keyed the door open. At her command, it jerked on its track, long-neglected gears unable to open fully; only an inch, perhaps a bit more. That was more than enough.

The air howled out of the room, stirring up short-lived flurries of dust and litter that were pulled out into the decompressed hallway. It was only a small office and, as the two women hauled the door further open, the whistling pull of air slowed and softened, until everything was still and silent.

As she stepped through the door into the next cramped office, Shannon felt her equilibrium shift; the gravity plating in this section wasn’t completely down, but it wasn’t working properly either. She hesitated, remembering the crushing pull of the plates that had held her and her people down as the Masks came for them, the rage she’d felt at the Watcher’s whispered ordered to stop fighting. This isn’t like that, she told herself, hoping that that wasn’t another lie.

Like the rest of this area, the corridor was completely dark. Even blacklight needed some light to function and she snapped on a torch, letting its brilliance wash through the abandoned office. Just like the first, save for the message scrawled upon one bulkhead.

WE HAVE SINNED.

“Eleven minutes,” Shannon said, taking her first tentative step forward, the magnetics on her boots clamping against the deck. “No sightseeing.”

“Too bad. I wanted to ride the Ferris wheel.”

Shannon’s smile was audible. “Maybe next time, Three.”

~

“So,” Bujold drawled as he ambled up behind Emily. “Been a crazy day, hasn’t it?”

The doctor didn’t look up; she was on the upper floor of the botanical lab, looking through the leftover documents in one of the corner offices. Most of it was useless, of course – even Imperial batteries bled out over six centuries, but a datapad here or datascroll here had enough of a charge to let her look through them. Of course, those that did were just as worthless as those documents with depleted batteries. If their files weren’t corrupted from six centuries of decay and neglect, then they recorded the most banal information possible. Growth rates for some researcher’s pet hybrid. Records of changes to soil and liquid nutrient mixes, bacterial and rhizome metagenomics. A personal log that slowly chronicled its owner’s ongoing descent into paranoia. “Yes,” Emily answered at last as she hooked the latter file up to a small battery pack, not even sure why she was bothering – like the paper journal Shannon had found in the crew quarters, this would chronicle nothing but this long-dead man’s mental deterioration. Most of the data was damaged and incomplete anyways. Video would cut out, freeze, or jump ahead. The sound would go dead in places or got washed out with static in others.

She frowned as she looked again at the last entry: as the man recited another diatribe about his co-workers, she could hear alarms go off in the distance. What date was this made?

“Pretty crazy,” Bujold said, taking her single-syllable response as an invitation. Delphini looked up; the corper security guard was standing in the doorway, leaning against it like some old-Earth ranch-hand. All he needed was the ten-gallon hat on his head and stalk of grass between his teeth. In any other place, that pose might have seen as benign, almost comical. Here, in the pervasive gloom of the empty laboratory, half-lit by the glow from Emily’s flashlight, the security guard’s laconic slouch seemed far more menacing.

“Who would have thought that someplace like this actually existed? DROP 47,” he shook his head. “Probably find the Easter Bunny here, chewing on Santa’s jolly old gut.”

Emily made a noise, a low mmm of acknowledgement before glancing back at her work. “Of course,” Bujold continued. “We might actually survive this. We’ve got an honest-to-God Halo on our side, don’t we? I think you’ll do all right. She’s definitely sweet on you.” He leaned over the desk. “So I hope you won’t take offence if I plant myself close to you. Besides,” he smiled. “You remind me of someone.”

“Do I?” she replied distractedly.

“Yep. Someone very close to my heart.”

“I hope you get the chance to see her again.”

Bujold nodded, patting one of Emily’s hands with one of his own. “Maybe I will.”

The doctor came to her feet, pulling her hand out from under his. The wheels of the aged chair behind the desk squealed as Emiy’s abrupt movement pushed it away, bouncing against the back wall. Bujold was a tall man; even leaning over the table, he could still meet her eyes. “What do you want?” she asked.

“Like I said,” he said, making a half-assed attempt at a ‘western’ drawl. “I just want to stick right close to you. I get the feeling you’re going to be one of the survivors o’ this debacle. Tell me I’m wrong.” Those last four words came out harder, clipped and precise and in a very different accent. There was a twinkle in his eye and Emily knew that that hadn’t been a slip; he’d wanted her to hear that.

“We’re all going to survive.” The petite woman moved away, trying to slip out the door, but Bujold reached out, one arm against the wall, cutting off her retreat.

Silhouetted from the glow of her torch, Bujold was still smiling. “That a fact?”

“Yes.” Emily was pressed back against the wall, wondering if she should just duck under the corper’s arm and run for it. “It is. You heard Sha- Corporal Hayes.”

“I heard her,” Bujold admitted. “But I don’t believe her. That little performance in the tram – you think she’s going to keep us alive? I bet you’ve already got a contingency.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yeah? Maybe I’m wrong.”

“You are.”

He reached forward, taking a strand of the woman’s auburn hair and twirling it around his finger. “It could be... but the resemblance – it’s uncanny. I could swear that you’re twins. Maybe you even know her. If you did, that would make me smile.”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” Emily snapped, her eyes narrowing. “But I don’t know this person.”

“You seem awfully sure. She was very important to me. To some friends of mine. Why, I’d do anything for her. I really would.” Bujold let go of Emily’s hair, tracing his fingers down to where her corporate insignia had been on her lab coat. He tapped the fabric of her shirt, just above her breast. “She had a thing for unicorns.” He met her eyes, but whatever he was looking for in them, he didn’t seem to find it. “You sure you don’t know this woman?”

“I’m positive.”

“Well, I’m sorry to have wasted your time,” the taller man turned and took his leave. There was a touch of confusion in his eyes, as if he was afraid he’d made some mistake. “But if you think you remember her – you be sure and let me know, will you?”

“I’ll do that,” Emily seethed through clenched teeth.

Bujold offered her another folksy, dumb-but-earnest grin again, pantomiming tipping a hat to her. “Thank you kindly ma’am. If you need anything, you just let me know.”

The woman watched the man’s shadow fade back into the darkness, letting out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding.

~

There was no sound in a vacuum, of course. The air pulled out from the single small office was hardly enough to fill the many dozens of meters of hallway, side corridors and abandoned rooms, so Shannon felt rather than heard it: the grinding and lurching of ancient gears shifting, the interlocking halves of a heavy blast door drawing apart, back into the bulkheads. Abigail’s boot noiselessly crunched the smashed bits of the door’s sensor as the private moved into the next section, sweeping her carbine across the entryway. “Clear,” her voice clicked through Shannon’s earpiece.

The medic followed her ‘big sister’ through into the next section. Like the previous part of the hallway, it was empty and utterly dark, lit only by the diffuse beams coming from the womens’ torches. Abigail had attached hers to the side on the side of her carbine, Shannon carrying hers in a ‘Harries’ grip: her wrists crossed, torch parallel to the barrel of her gun. Until yesterday, she’d never killed anyone and had only fired in combat once, helping supply covering fire. Now she could feel... different, part of her mind calculating firing lines, planning how to move, what to do if a Turned appeared, crawling from that open vent. Lurching from that open door. Charging from that corridor.

It felt... wrong to be thinking about these things. But she couldn’t make herself stop. Couldn’t make herself shake the tiny part of her that wanted it, that felt... soothed by it.

“Frosty?” Abigail’s voice broke the silence and Shannon nodded.

“Frosty.”

“Next door’s ahead,” Abigail quipped as she scanned an empty incubator, desiccated plant stalks floating like dead insects in the chamber’s null gravity. “Motion tracker’s still blank. Guess these things don’t like vacuum.”

“Let’s hope so,” Shannon replied, nodding at the next door’s sensor. “Like we did before?”

“That’s affirmative, Four. I don’t fancy breathing space.”

~

They were screaming.

Always screaming. Always crying out as the flames washed over them. Men and women dancing like spastic marionettes as bulky, silver nightmares marched among them, burning everything. Flesh and wood. Bone and metal. Asphalt bubbled from the heat, heavy-treaded footprints left in the killers’ wake. One of them turned towards him, faceless but for the black visor covering its eyes, orange in the flickering lights that surrounded it. A heart beat within its chest and there was blood in its veins, but it was neither man nor woman. Not in this moment.

The pilot light of its flamer capped on. Somewhere under its helmet, he thought he heard it laughing, but he knew that was only his imagination...

Louis jerked awake, sucking a gasp of air as he looked around, half expecting a wave of fire to wash over him, half-expected to be back in Landing on that hellish night. The night when a city had burned. When they’d broken their word. The mercenary reached up and brushed a hand through his hair. It was soaked with perspiration. He took in a breath, almost grateful for the stale odour of dust and stagnant air that filled the room, mingling with the aroma of drying sweat and blood that clung to him. No ash. No burning meat.

“Just a dream,” he said to himself, scratching at the back of his head. “Just a dream.”

To his right, PO Lutzberg had picked up where Hayes had left off, trying to get a half-dead computer system to respond to his summons as their ‘good friend’ the Watcher talked him through it, but neither was getting anywhere. This part of the station was one of the sections out of the old man’s control and could only offer – virtually incomprehensible – advice. Louis listened in for a few moments, but tech problems were out of his reach at the best of times. When described by someone as bugged as the Watcher? Way above his payscale.

Delphini had retreated upstairs to look for anything useful, but this lab had been locked for six hundred years. No guns, no food, nothing worth reading. Louis wished the doctor luck, but he suspected she’d need it. He frowned, realizing they were a man light.

“Lutzberg-”

“He went upstairs,” Armin snapped distractedly, returning his attention back to his comm. “Yes, I heard you, but that doesn’t make any sense! No, slow down, I can’t follow that-”

Louis nodded, easing off the desk he’d been sitting on and left the petty officer to his work. It was hard to move, like his whole body was caught in mud; the weight of his armaments was only part of it. Aside from brief catnaps on the tram, he hadn’t slept in over a day. If it weren’t for the stims his armour’s phylactery was doping him with, he didn’t know if he’d be able to stand. The mercenary checked his small IDS and grimaced. His taps were running low. He didn’t know how Hutchins and the Halo were set for pharms, but he was going to hit empty pretty soon.

Help, a voice whispered out of the darkness. Help.

Louis looked up, trying to find the source of the noise. He glanced back at Lutzberg, but the technician was still ensconced in his work.

Help, it came again. Weak, distant. Help me.

Was it coming from upstairs? Had something gotten in? He should have heard something more than that – shots, screams – shouldn’t he? Without trying to run, Louis forced himself to move briskly up the stairs to lab’s upper level, one finger tapping on Betsy’s chassis, the auto-shotgun cradled in his arms.

Bujold was sitting on a desk, leaning back against the wall. He looked up as the gleam from Louis’s tactical flashlight fell on him. “Everything all right?” the corper asked.

“Yeah,” Hernandez replied, feeling some of the tension drain away. “Where’s Delphini?”

The guard pointed to one of the corner offices, the faint glow of reflected light washing out of its windows and open door. “Busy.”

Louis nodded, rapping on the doorframe before peering inside. “Dr. Delphini?”

“Yes?” the small woman was sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by flimsies, datapads and ‘scrolls, examining each for functionality before tossing the dead ones into a pile in one corner. She looked up. “Is everything all right?”

“Yeah,” Louis answered. It wouldn’t give the civvies any confidence in him if he started tweaking. “I just wanted to see if you’d found anything interesting.”

She shrugged. “No. Most of these systems are dead and those that aren’t – this is just a small hydroponics nursery. The most interesting thing I’ve found is this,” she picked up one ‘pad, coming smoothly to her feet. “It’s just one researcher’s personal log – most of the files are corrupt, but this last one...” she thumbed the ‘play’ button, scratching behind one ear as the vid ran, the alarms interrupting his diatribe.

“That’s a station-wide alert,” Louis realized as he leaned forward; Imperial security procedures were very good, from strategic intelligence down to base personnel. That was one reason why Earth had retained its technological edge throughout the war. The Coalition had thrown more resources into acquiring Imperial tech than they’d ever gotten back out of the project. With rare exceptions, catastrophic security breaches – particularly on high-security bases like 47 – just did not happen. “What was it for?”

The doctor shook her head. “There’s no security screen in the camera’s field of view, so there’s no way to see what other information is coming through. I don’t really know how to tell the difference between the alerts without that.”

Louis put his hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay. Besides, I think we know what that alert was about.”

“No,” Emily insisted, her tone unusually forceful. “We don’t.”

“You want help looking? I can get Bujold to-”

“I’m fine,” Delphini interrupted brusquely. “I mean... I can handle this on my own.”

The mercenary shrugged. “Then see what you can find out. If you come up with anything, let me know.” He headed back out of the office. He didn’t really expect anything from those records, even if the doctor could salvage them. But it would give her something to do. Something to focus on. This place played tricks on your mind if you weren’t...

Help, the distant voice called again. Help, please.

...careful.

In the corner, just briefly illuminated by the sweep of his flashlight, Louis saw a man in a charred suit standing there. Dead and burned, half his face rotted away.

Help, that plaintive call came again. Still distant, as if someone was just outside the lab. You were supposed to help us.

You’re not there, Louis repeated the mantra to himself. You’re not there. Go away. “Go away,” he breathed. When he looked again, the figure was gone.

I’m not seeing this, the mercenary told himself. I’m not. I’m not. I won’t. I won’t It’s over. It’s done.. He wished he could believe that, even as the voice in the darkness called again.

Help me.

Please...

~

Shannon didn’t like this part of the station. Of course, there wasn’t any part of DROP 47 that she liked. While it was possible that the station’s core was perfectly fine, somehow, she rather doubted that. Still, that didn’t change the fact that this was rapidly joining the ever-growing list of Places To Never Revisit. The malfunctioning grav plates made movement tricky; some were almost triple Earth-normal, others less than a percentage of that. Still more had shut down completely. Shell casings bounced and drifted through the airless hallway, pulled down by heavier grav fields before bouncing back up to the ceiling as they skidded onto weaker plates. A desiccated male corpse was pressed up against the ceiling, pinned there by a reversed grav field, mummified by the vacuum. Its clothes weren’t Imperial; whoever he had been, he had probably died here when the section was sealed. Trapped by whomever had attempted to seal hydroponics off from the rest of the station.

Like creeper vines claiming a building, black veins poked out of air vents and maintenance shafts, winding over the walls, the ceiling and floor like writhing worms, flash-frozen in their undulations.

“I don’t get it,” Abigail murmured as she stepped around a handful of tubules hanging limply from the ceiling, poking through the grille of an air vent. “Is this stuff still alive? How can it be?”

“Life’s hardier than you might think,” Shannon answered as she ran her lume over some of the veins. Yes; each was sheathed in a waxy cuticle that protected it from desiccation. “Some arthropods can be frozen solid for weeks and survive. Sponges, arrow worms and water bears can all enter crytobiotic states, shutting down their metabolism – even breaking down their own tissues into an amorphous mass of cells so that they can survive harsh conditions. Colonies of archaea have been resurrected after 250 million years of dormancy.” She followed the lines of branching veins, careful not to touch any of them. They might be dormant, might be harmless. Or they might not be either of those things. “That’s what moved panspermia from fringe science to valid theory.”

“Yeah, two thousand years and we still can’t decide if life began on Earth or not,” Abigail snorted. Growing up on Darkknell, she’d never once known what ‘panspermia’ or ‘cryptobiosis’ were and wouldn’t have cared if she had. The things you learned from having a Halo squadmate. “I’ll let the eggheads argue that. I just have to wonder – if we’re all the result of some fucking chunk of ice splashing down in the primordial soup... where’d that life come from?”

“Good question,” Shannon replied, still studying the growths overtaking the wall. The Watcher... he’d called this kind of growth ‘the spread’. And they were growing, extending from the pressurized sections into the vacuum. Why? These growths were few and far between, but the fact was that they were still here. They’d advanced into an incredibly hostile area, draining nutrients and resources from the rest of the... organism. It had to serve a purpose. Shannon had an idea of what it was, and she didn’t like it.

Abigail’s helmet cocked towards her. “There’s that tone again. What are you thinking?”

“Something I really don’t want to be thinking,” the shorter woman answered. About more than one thing. “Whether I’m right about it or not won’t help us right now. Let’s just keep moving and... make sure you don’t touch any of these things.” She hesitated. “I think they’re some kind of sensor organ.”

Abigail had been reaching towards one of the dangling veins, ducking her hand back at Shannon’s warning. “Has it felt us moving?”

“I don’t know,” Shannon replied. “I don’t know how sensitive they are.”

“Ah. No touching it is, then.”

~

“Dad?”

“Yes, honey, sweetie, darling? Daddy’s very busy, trying to get a very stupid man to do something right for once.”

Small hands lifted a dented, once-gleaming serving tray up to a table. There was a steaming bowl sitting on the platter, matching it in both condition and colour. “I made soup.” Chunks of a chopped ration bar floated in hot water, splashing over the top as those tiny hands adjusted the tray.

The Watcher smiled, sparing a moment to pat one of his many daughters on the head. “Thank you. Go play with the others now. I’ve got lots of work to do.”

He heard the child’s feet pad out of the room, his attention already focused back on his banks of monitors, chair squeaking and bouncing as it rolled over the cables that criss-crossed the floor, eyes darting back and forth, checking a specific status indicator against and again. “Come on,” the Watcher whispered as he cradled the bowl in his hands and slurped back a mouthful of watery gruel. “Don’t disappoint me, angel.”

~

If there had been air, the wet pops and snaps of snapping ligaments would have been clearly audible, a punctuation on Abigail’s hissed expletive. Instead, there was only silence as the third security door ground open, exposing the broken ends of the veins where its opening halves had pulled them apart, ragged tips briefly drooling fluid before internal valves closed them, small globules of ichor drifting in the near-zero gravity. Tripwires.

Of course.

Shannon felt it rather than heard it: a vibration that shuddered through the deck. Faint; under normal circumstances, it would easily be missed.

“Motion,” Abigail said, confirming Shannon’s suspicion.

She turned around, the beam of her light catching a piece of metal as it bounced out of a doorway, one of the thinner plates used on the walls here. There was a moment of stillness and then it lurched into the hallway, still stretching its long-unused muscles. How long it had slept behind the walls, she didn’t know. Only that they’d woken it up. Like the Unity thing, it was no longer recognizable as human, encased in a sleek black exoskeleton, but unlike its larger cousin, it was utterly clad in this armour, joints protected with a cloudy tegument. Moulded to fight in vacuum, its feet were equal parts fly and gecko, allowing it to stick to any surface.

It began to move through the low gravity with greater surety, recovering quickly – too quickly – from its somnolence. It had no eyes, not in the classical sense. Where its original form had once held them, there were only sensory pits, several more dotting its stretched skull, giving it a three hundred and sixty degree field of ‘vision’. Its arms split at the elbows, massive mantis-like talons laying back against its upper arms while dextrous clawed fingers stretched forth from thin, ugly hands. Obsidian talons sprouted and retracted into the inside joints of its fingers like an inverted set of brass knuckles, meant to hold and tear its prey while it fed.

Its lipless mouth was sealed with a transparent flap of skin, long teeth grinning in a permanent rictus as its tongues writhed in waking hunger. There was no trace of the person it had once been, whether man or woman. It had been changed into something awful. Killed and reborn to continue the cycle of slaughter.

It takes pieces. And puts them back together.

And it wasn’t alone. Three other Turned slouched alongside it, each of them plated and protected from the void just like the first. A swollen belly churned with acid. Arms were elongated into grappling tendrils. A mouth was distended into a lamprey’s sawing gape. Lower jaws fused and twisted in a jutting hook, like a nymph’s labial palps. Fingers fused into hacking scythes and gnarled, rending claws. Tumescent respiratory vents gleamed with liquid where the creatures had torn themselves loose from whatever support system had nourished them during their hibernation. Sleeping guardians, just waiting for someone to be stupid enough to come this way.

How many? How many more horrors did 47 have burrowed away, waiting to unveil?

As the light touched them, they charged, leaping more than running through the low gravity. Behind their sealed mouths, they were screaming, eager to rip the protecting membrane open and glut themselves on the blood meal that had so eagerly walked into their lair.

[The Vortex Empire]

Even the fucking vacuum isn't safe. Yeah, in their shoes, I'd have put a bullet in my head long before this.

[Night_stalker]

God Damn, Bladed what kind of environent can't these things live in? They've already survived hard vacuum, and God knows what else while they've been cooped up in Innsmouth's much older brother.

[Manthor]

Lovely little place you have created here Crescent.An absolute first class resort for any Chaos Space Marine to enjoy some R & R. So what force could conceivably lock this place down and make sure it was sterilised? I'm ex-military and would say with absolute certainty that were I ordered to enter such a location,with firsthand knowledge of what it involved,I'd tell my OC and upwards to shove it and desert.

Fighting for the country is one thing. Getting captured and suffering torment for the rest of my life while I mutate into an abomination of nature, my mind corroded, my brain twisted and my sense of self ripped away from me while my body is violated by an ancient biological recombinator weapon and my psyche worn down by physical deprivation and ancient psi weapons while all my comrades suffer the same fate, paranoia increasing as we struggle to survive, my immune system trying and failing to fight off an assault upon my physical shell at a cellular level requires much more than patriotism or money to motivate me.

[Chaotic Neutral]

We need a fan-fic for this that involves smurfs and lots of multi-meltas.

[Grimnosh]

We need a fan-fic for this that involves smurfs and lots of multi-meltas.

The only problem here is that the Ultrasmurfs have the codex shoved so far into thier mentality that they would immediately condem the place as being tainted by the Warp and would utterly destroy DROP 47 by all means possible despite what the Ad Mech and Inquisition would (or might) want them to do. You'd be much better off with the Relictors chapter then something as Puritan as Ultramarines, at least if you want to recover the priceless knowledge onboard.

[iborg]

Yay ! an update !

...wait, it gets worse. Again. It seems that xenomorphs would run in terror from that place.

[[R_H]]

Very nice

Yay ! an update !

...wait, it gets worse. Again. It seems that xenomorphs would run in terror from that place.

How about an update from you?

[Chaotic Neutral]

They've already survived hard vacuum, and God knows what else while they've been cooped up in Innsmouth's much older brother.

What are the difficulties with doing that anyway? What makes it so amazing?

[Night_stalker]

No air, and it's extremely cold.

[The Vortex Empire]

Sure it's cold, but as there's no air to lose heat to, freezing to death isn't an immediate worry. It would take many hours to die from the cold.

[LadyTevar]

My gods... when the Imperials designed unstoppable soldiers, they went all-out, didn't they!

[Night_stalker]

Yep, say what you will about the Imperials, but when they made something, they made it to last. Apparently, that also includes their super soldiers.

[Junghalli]

Sure it's cold, but as there's no air to lose heat to, freezing to death isn't an immediate worry. It would take many hours to die from the cold.

Plus if this environment is inside the station it may not even be cold. Heat would radiate into it from the rest of the station through the walls. The fact that corpse on the ceiling is mummified rather than frozen suggests it's warm; the water inside it has evaporated away.

I suspect a creature like this would likely have a bigger problem with overheating from its own body heat than freezing.

[Chaotic Neutral]

Not really, it can just touch the walls.

It does use magic to breath/carry out cellular functions right?

[Junghalli]

Not really, it can just touch the walls.

It'd be interesting to calculate the contact surface area required for that. Another possibility is to carry an internal heat sink - a big organ full of water, maybe - since the story already implies it relies on external support most of the time.

It does use magic to breath/carry out cellular functions right?

Tumescent respiratory vents gleamed with liquid where the creatures had torn themselves loose from whatever support system had nourished them during their hibernation.

They seem to rely on external support most of the time - which makes a lot of the problems much easier. Easiest way for it to work is if they can hold their breath for a long time (maybe half an hour or so), like sperm whales. There may be more exotic possibilities too - as I remember the Scramblers in Blindsight had an energetic anaerobic metabolism that was charged up like a battery over long periods of inactivity.

[Swindle1984]

Sure it's cold, but as there's no air to lose heat to, freezing to death isn't an immediate worry. It would take many hours to die from the cold.

So long as their "skin" isn't breached. Wouldn't a few bullet holes cause the vacuum to suck some blood and tissue out, freeze-drying the tissue surrounding the wound? And how long have they been inactive?

And how long can something with metabolisms as fast as the Turned's last without oxygen?

I'm guessing these things are going to be more short-lived and less effective than other Turned.

But now we know what that robot was fighting in vacuum.

[Swindle1984]

Also, Emily didn't respond to Bujold's phrases, so I assume she isn't one of his contacts.

[Swindle1984]

Not really, it can just touch the walls.

It'd be interesting to calculate the contact surface area required for that. Another possibility is to carry an internal heat sink - a big organ full of water, maybe - since the story already implies it relies on external support most of the time.

It does use magic to breath/carry out cellular functions right?

Tumescent respiratory vents gleamed with liquid where the creatures had torn themselves loose from whatever support system had nourished them during their hibernation.

They seem to rely on external support most of the time - which makes a lot of the problems much easier. Easiest way for it to work is if they can hold their breath for a long time (maybe half an hour or so), like sperm whales. There may be more exotic possibilities too - as I remember the Scramblers in Blindsight had an energetic anaerobic metabolism that was charged up like a battery over long periods of inactivity.

Presumably they were hooked up to the growths (since those alerted them) and those provided them with nourishment and more. If they're anaerobic, then they'd have to be SERIOUSLY altered from their human base forms. I'm guessing they can just go for a long time without air; if the growths supported them up until they detached, then their blood should be fully oxygenated. Looking at how active the Turned are, it would make sense if they had more red blood cells to provide more oxygen than a normal human; but just how fast would they metabolize it, considering rapid physical activity and freaking reassembling themselves after being dismembered?

[Bladed_Crescent]

Even the fucking vacuum isn't safe. Yeah, in their shoes, I'd have put a bullet in my head long before this.

Tch. Quitter.

God Damn, Bladed what kind of environent can't these things live in?

Magma.

Lovely little place you have created here Crescent.

Welcome to Drop 47. You'll like it so much you'll never leave.

Ever.

Yay ! an update !

...wait, it gets worse. Again. It seems that xenomorphs would run in terror from that place.

I don't know, I think they'd find it rather homey. Nice and dark, plenty of hosts/food sources, vacuum's no trouble for them (at least for brief periods of time), lots of nooks and crannies to hibernate in...

My gods... when the Imperials designed unstoppable soldiers, they went all-out, didn't they!

Yep, say what you will about the Imperials, but when they made something, they made it to last. Apparently, that also includes their super soldiers.

Why, whoever said these were soldiers?

Ah heh heh heh.

But I think you're seeing exactly why mere rumours of what DROP 47 was doing was enough to prompt the Coalition to take action. One such reason, anyways. As I think has been stated a time or two, DROP 47 has many secrets.

That image of "why" will become even sharper in coming events/flashbacks, but for the moment recall that quality was never the Imperium's problem. It was quantity.

Tum te tum te tum...

I suspect a creature like this would likely have a bigger problem with overheating from its own body heat than freezing.

They seem to rely on external support most of the time - which makes a lot of the problems much easier. Easiest way for it to work is if they can hold their breath for a long time (maybe half an hour or so), like sperm whales. There may be more exotic possibilities too - as I remember the Scramblers in Blindsight had an energetic anaerobic metabolism that was charged up like a battery over long periods of inactivity.

So long as their "skin" isn't breached. Wouldn't a few bullet holes cause the vacuum to suck some blood and tissue out, freeze-drying the tissue surrounding the wound? And how long have they been inactive?

And how long can something with metabolisms as fast as the Turned's last without oxygen?

Presumably they were hooked up to the growths (since those alerted them) and those provided them with nourishment and more. If they're anaerobic, then they'd have to be SERIOUSLY altered from their human base forms. I'm guessing they can just go for a long time without air; if the growths supported them up until they detached, then their blood should be fully oxygenated. Looking at how active the Turned are, it would make sense if they had more red blood cells to provide more oxygen than a normal human; but just how fast would they metabolize it, considering rapid physical activity and freaking reassembling themselves after being dismembered?

Hey, who's the scientician here? I'm a certified biontologist, you know!

That being said, those are concerns I considered myself in developing this particular strain (am I stealing your brains or are you stealing mine?). There won't be a complete physiological workup, but most of those issues will be touched on to some degree. Some more directly than others (I think you'll see what I mea there. Heh). Indeed before I started the flashback chapter, I wrote about the first page of the next 'current time' chapter, which actually references some of those concerns - this chapter was supposed to be longer, but I figured that this was a good break in the scene.

Apparently I need to write faster.

[Darth Nostril]

That image of "why" will become even sharper in coming events/flashbacks, but for the moment recall that quality was never the Imperium's problem. It was quantity.

Well right up until they captured that Type 3 .....

[xt828]

That image of "why" will become even sharper in coming events/flashbacks, but for the moment recall that quality was never the Imperium's problem. It was quantity.

Tum te tum te tum...

Hrmm. The thick plottens.