Lyle felt the crunch of alien tissues beneath his booted feet as the bastard’s head exploded against the wall with a sickening spray of blood and what he assumed was brain matter. The alien soldier – who bore marks of such high visibility that Lyle assumed he was a commander – slumped to the ground, its neck still squirting blood at a regular rhythm.
A second later, Lyle was himself on the ground, on his back, though he did have all of his tissues intact. He drew the rifle from under his back, cursing it for not being softer, and looked back and forth down the hall, drawing himself up into a crouch.
“Bastards shoulda never come on my ship,” he said, using the back of his hand to wipe flecks of blood from his cheek.
Distressed shouting drew Lyle’s gaze in the general direction of engineering, though he couldn’t yet spot the source; the fact that he recognized the shouting as human further garnered his interest, though he progressed slowly, using the rifle as though it were an extension of his jaw, sweeping back and forth and listening for anything that might give his foes away.
Daring to expose himself, he rolled across a perpendicular corridor down which he guessed was whoever was shouting. Lyle strained his ears, but could only catch snippets…
“Take that, ye crummy bastard, and one for yer motha, too, aye…” followed by the sickening crunch of something hard tearing through bone, sinew, and flesh. Lyle could only hope that it was alien. The shouting ceased. He broke into a run, fearing that whatever survivor he had heard was wounded or killed, and only hoping that he could reach them in time.
At the far end, he could see only a crouching figure, and another with an enormous chunk of its head taken out, blood pooling around its head. Taking the crouching figure square in his sights, Lyle crouched and spoke normally; “Who’s that?”
A smile spread across the lips of the figure, and Lyle instantly recognized it as human. Hearing the accented voice this close only cemented his recognition; “Not gonna shoot me, are ye, laddeh?”
“Ah, shit, Wallace, what…what did you do it?”
The ship’s cook – Joel Wallace – rose to his feet, ignoring Lyle’s question, though the blood-stained wrench in his right hand left little need for question. A small shudder worked its way up Lyle’s back, but he said nothing. Wallace had been with the crew for years, and while he’d always been rowdy and boisterous, Lyle never could have imagined him capable of such a blatantly violent act.
The man was probably unstable.
Without a word, Lyle unstrapped the alien’s harness from its chitinous shoulders and tossed it to Wallace, who wore it across his chest like a bandolier, alien weapons clattering against one another as he shifted it. As he did so, Wallace stepped into the dim light given off by one of the hall lamps, and Lyle could see that the man’s overalls were tarred in alien gore; he wondered how many of them the Scotsman had felled.
Lyle closed his eyes, and saw
“Y’all right there, laddeh?” Wallace asked, idly fiddling with one of the larger blades strapped to his stolen bandolier.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Alarms blared, and panic ensued. What the hell is the purpose of alarms, anyway? Lyle mused. Not like people can really go anywhere. It’ll just make them stick their stupid heads out, and expose them to even more danger. The ship’s paltry security teams assembled, armed, and then spread out again to cover all of the airlocks as instructed by the captain, whose complete lack of tactical sense bordered on disgusting.
If it were up to Lyle, he’d lock all of the unarmed civilians in engineering, give them a couple guards, decompress the rest of the ship except for one airlock so that he’d know where the aliens were certain to come from, and then hunker down and prepare. That way, there’d be no idiot civvies in the way when the shooting started.
No one asked Lyle, though.
In fact, he’d been essentially told he was on his own, and so he’d acted accordingly, procuring weapons from an abandoned security locker, and stripping off unnecessary elements of his attire. Lyle had never before fired a rifle, but he figured that if everything went well, he wouldn’t have to. He wasn’t an optimist, though.
-- 1-23-2007
The Fuschia Dream’s Sergeant-at-arms, Darius Orlovsky, stood before the airlock, framed by the massive doors. Lyle watched as Orlovsky pulled a cigarette from a breast pocket, thought the better of it, and put it behind his ear; he hoped that indecision wasn’t one of the more significant side-effects of the man’s nerves.
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