infested outbreak

The scent of something acrid billows through the scrubbed air, sharp and metallic on the tongue. Something beeps far over my shoulder, frantic and shrill, but going untended. I can hear, somewhere deeper in the ship, the sound of muffled voices - just as frantic as the beeping console, but dulled by distance. I can feel the firm press of the desk against my back through my jumpsuit, keenly aware that the plasteel shell around the circuits and wires is far flimsier than I would like.

"Pavel?"

It takes me a few moments to realize someone has spoken, not too far to my left.

"Pavel?" The voice repeats.

"Rok?" I echo, voice trembling more than I was hoping.

He doesn't speak any more, my fellow junior engineer's boots echoing on the floor as he ducks under the desk console too, squishing both of us in the small space. He presses something in my hands that turns out to be a Dera, which I fumble and almost drop - the weapon is awkward and blocky in my hands. I don't even know where he got it. We hadn't been given rifles yet, being juniors on a transport ship.

"Picked it up off a corpse," Rok says, as if he had heard my thoughts. "I think some of the salvage we brought on had... something in it."

I start to speak but the scream of straining metal followed by a sickening ripping noise fills the server room, somewhere on the other side of the laser gate. The acrid smell gets worse, followed by something like rotting meat. I hear Rok gag next to me, and the gun trembles in my hands. We can catch glimpses of whatever just breached the room from between the gaps in the swooping structure of the desk, and I almost wish that we didn't have to. A horde of twisted lumps of tortured flesh have started to extrude through the new gap, a tide of meat and twisted limbs sprouting with unidentifiable growths and hundreds of tiny, glowing points like eyes bugling wherever they pleased like welts on skin.

One at the forefront of the horde stood vaguely upright, limbs danging to the floor limply, one longer than the other, and what was probably its head bearing a crown-like structure, like a mockery of some bygone royalty. It moved a bit like it was smelling for something, before stumbling toward the direction of our shared desk.

"It *sees* us, Rok," I whispered sharply, but he didn't answer. His hands were shaking as he gripped the Spectra he had armed himself with tightly as he could. "There are too many."

He doesn't reply, again, but I look over to see him swallow hard, sweat beading down his face and neck. He steels himself and--

Stands upright and aims the Spectra he probably barely knows how to use as a tool like a weapon. A strangled noise escapes my throat, stumbling forward a little as I try and keep a grip on the rifle in my hands. I hear a few shots go over and the stomach-turning sound of impacts on wet flesh, but there's a keening, inhuman howl from the horde followed by the rhythmless pounding of countless feet or feet-like appendages on the metal floor. I squeeze my eyes shut and wait for the tide of flesh to overtake us and put an end to this--

Something metal clatters to the floor somewhere behind us, and I manage to open my eyes in time to see a metal grate from the ship's filtration system skid a few metres away from the place it landed, and something... else drop down from within.

I can hardly tell what colour the figure is, it's so caked with gore, but here and there the ship lights reflect off of golden adornments, and a red glow seems to emanate from within. It takes a second to straighten up from where it landed, and it has a feminine figure under the dripping viscera, with ribbons and other danging adornments hanging from it like a ceremonial battle-cruiser. It isn't holding a weapon, but the last thing my eyes linger on as steel-clad muscles tense and coil is that matching sets of blades as long as a man's arm have started to unfurl from its wrists.

In a flash, it is no longer standing a few metres away, the air cut through like a physical thing as it vaults between me and Rok over the desk followed by a flash of gold and the churning trail of ribbons - it's moved so fast and with so much decisiveness that one of the ribbons slices a small track in my cheek that I'm barely conscious of. The smell of copper and a wave of sudden heat follows in the wake of the sudden movement, and then the sound of rending flesh.

Rok is staring, gun barely held in his hands, and I'm dumbfounded, still trying to process what, exactly, just happened and that we're not dead. I see his mouth moving slightly but he isn't saying anything audible. I can't make myself look at the scene in front of us, so I just stare at him, until-

"Warframe," he mutters, like he's just seen a god.

My head swivels forward so fast it almost hurts. The figure - the *Warframe* - is stepping so lightly among the horde that it seems like it were just playing a game. It pirouettes behind the crowned monster before driving its claws through the thing effortlessly, wrenching them free to duck and spin toward another infested thing and slicing it in half, cleanly. Its claws sent sparks across the floor as the skitter over the surface on their way to rend another infested thing into a pile of twitching meat.

"That?" I ask dumbly.

"Follow her," Rok says breathlessly, and I boggle.

"What?"

"Follow her, or we're going to die," he insists.

I turn from him back to the Warframe, who is now standing above the churned remains of the things that had been barely feeling Rok's gunfire moments earlier. She looks over her shoulder at us and I wither, even if no eyes stare out of that smooth, metal face. I'd heard of what these things did, seen the security footage in basic training. They'd had to clean some of those crews of what few ships we could recover with hoses.

The Warframe twitched her head toward the opening in the wall, and I realized that she was *waiting* for us.