wheeze within the flickering mess of his helm’s interior.
Above him the roof was a jumbled mass of burned-out pipelines, hanging like vines from the darkness. Somewhere up ahead a red light rotated in rhythm with a superfluous warning klaxon. He heard crashes from further back, further down: the resounding clang of iron-edged boots against metal, the hard clunk of magazines being loaded.
Hjortur pushed himself back to his feet. The enclosed corridor ran away from him, plunging down steeply, winding into the bowels of the conveyer’s enginarium. The metal around him was hot. He staggered along it, reeling from the walls, breaking off shards of steel as his armour snagged against them. He felt enclosed, hemmed in, cornered.
He sensed a movement – twenty metres behind, stealthy like the others had been.
Not stealthy enough.
Hjortur twisted at the waist and squeezed a round away, watching the projectile streak off into the dark through blood-screened eyes. He couldn’t make out his victim but heard the sounds of his death: the crack of breaking armour, the wet schlick of flesh parting, the stifled boom of detonation.
No screams. The hunters that closed on him didn’t scream. He didn’t know what they were. Human, perhaps. If so, they were heavily augmented and stuffed with bionics, for they moved liked he did and hit almost as hard. That was worrying. It shouldn’t have been possible.
He started to limp off again, and the bestial phlegm-growl of his broken breathing hummed in his ears. His retinal display screamed at him, detailing pedantically just how badly he’d been torn up: two lungs gone, chest cavity flooded, seventy minor fractures and six big ones. His skin was a mess of partly-clotted plasma and slowly knitting tissue, all seething with a contradictory mix of stimms and pain suppressors.
Pretty bad. He was breaking up, just like the ship around him.
He heard more footsteps clattering down the corridor, then silence as the hunters crouched down into firing positions. He broke into a sprint, wincing as lances of white-hot pain shot up his shattered shins.
A second later and the corridor filled with solid rounds, crashing and cracking from the walls and filling the narrow space with spinning clouds of metal. He felt the heavy bang of projectiles thudding into his back, tearing fresh gouges in the weakened ceramite and burrowing down towards the flesh beneath.
He reached a T-junction and threw himself around the corner into cover, clanking against the floor and panting, waiting for the hail of fire to break off.
The junction was dark. The air tasted of engine oil and ship-bilge. He could hardly see five paces into the murk. When he blinked, blood cascaded down his cheeks.
The gunfire ceased. He waited two more seconds, enough for the first of them to get up and run down the corridor after him. He could smell them coming, sense their unfamiliar odour even over the stinking melange of the lower decks.
What are you? What kind of creatures are you?
As the first one approached he burst back to his feet, powering his huge, ravaged body into motion, swinging round into the corridor he’d just run down and flexing his claw-hand to gouge.
His pursuer skidded to a halt, suddenly confronted by a vast armoured behemoth rearing up out of the oily shadows. The hunter tried to scramble backwards, but his momentum carried him into lethal range.
Hjortur lashed out with his claws. Their disruptor field had long since burned out, but the dented blades still punched through the hunter’s armour, skewering him. Hjortur lashed out, churning up the hunter’s ribcage and flinging him hard against the nearside wall. The hunter’s torso broke open into a flailing ball of skin-scraps and sinew.
Another one was too close. The hunter scrambled back out of claw-range, his black limbs skittering on the metal like an insect’s.
Hjortur pounced, slicing his claw down and dragging the hunter back. The impaled warrior tried to turn, tried to get a weapon hand into position, but it was all far too slow.
Hjortur crashed his other fist down, mashing the hunter’s helm, visor and skull into a glass-flecked soup of pulp. Blood splashed up along Hjortur’s forearms, adding to the riot of streaks and stains already there.
He felt solid rounds crack against his armour again – one, two, three direct hits, rocking him backwards. A shot slammed between the gaping cracks in his breastplate, punching through flesh, grinding into the bone beneath.
Hjortur growled as he swung round, searching for a target in the dark, blinking to clear his vision of