Abyssal Ascent (Part II)

Ramona and Ingvar walk down the quiet, cobweb drenched halls of Hyperion’s research station. There’s a long moment of silence as the two investigate the haunting structure. There was ample evidence that whatever lifeforms had taken over the station were alien, hostile, and operated with invasive intent. “Why does it feel like you don’t care if you live or die anymore, Mona?”

“Cause you’ve always had crazy good insight, cabrón.” Ramona beams her thoughts directly through her partner’s comms channel and stops outside a portion of the hall that links to Medbay and a restaurant titled ‘Heaven Tomorrow’. She fingered the shredded synthflesh at her wounded throat, “This is kind of a line of work where a fear of death isn’t exactly encouraged, ain’t it?”

“Suppose so…” Ingvar sighs, “You remember when we were kids at the same orphanage?”

“Vaguely,” Ramona pulls out her Lucky Star cigarette pack, flicking one out and staring at it for a moment. “I know we were in the same orphanage, I guess… but the past blends together for me, you know? Like a great, grey ghost, or a fog.”

“Mm, that’s unfortunate. We had a funny way of meeting each other, you know.” The older man chuckles, reaching out to push the cigarette back down into her pack. “You kicked footballs into your head during the physical exercise class period. I kept belly laughing. Who was this weird butt monkey who couldn’t kick a ball?”

Ramona’s eyes flash for a moment and dull, “...hm, it sounds familiar. But I admit, I’ve never been one to live in the past. Especially when something that can rip our throat out rests nearby.” The cyborg woman stared ahead with dead eyes, her lips static as she continued to beam thoughts directly into her partner’s comms. “Sounds amusing though, I guess.”

“Mm… it was, makes me wonder what changed.” The older man’s extended hand withers to his side, “On a less depressing note; who or what was knocking at the door to the Shuttle?”

“The answer to that is complicated,” both Ramona and Ingvar froze as a third, gentle voice with a subtle German accent chimed in. “But the short answer is that I was the knocker. Dr. Karl Sebastian Friedrich Strauss IV, though I’ll accept Dr. Strauss or Friedrich.”

Both Ingvar and Ramona put their hands on their weapons and draw them, staring intently at a smartly dressed businessman in a suit with ebon locks pulled back into a well maintained ponytail. His hair is slicked back in the way businessmen favor, a shit-eating grin on his clean shaved facade.

“I submit myself as hostage, my captors. I can assure you NanoSec will pay well for my return.” The beautiful man wore a confident smile as he placed his hands behind his head and then fell to his knees, smirking with smug intent as both Ramona and Ingvar exchanged looks.”Well?”

“We weren’t born yesterday, pendejo.” Ramona’s lips curl into a static smile as her distorted voice slithers out of Ingvar’s comm. She places her blade at Friedrich’s neck. The internal cautery churns out a glowing red heat, she grins as the smug smile bleeds away from the businessman’s lips and hard fear quickly takes its place. “You wouldn’t be offering yourself without some price, I know better than to trust some fluffed up puto in a suit.”

“Ach! L-Listen! I was-I am the Chief of Research of Hy-Hyperion S-S-Station!” he stammers as he begins pleading for his life. “I-I can tell you anything. I just wanted help recovering my Project!”

“Then you’ll go down with your station,” Ramona’s mirthless voice drips with deep seeded bloodlust through their shared channel as she raises her weapon to behead him. It’s Ingvar who stops her from delivering her coup de grace.

“Mona, wait… tell us more about your project and we’ll consider it,” he gruffly intones, making eye contact with a now very disappointed Ramona. “...your project wouldn’t happen to be related to the buggy looking person-thing we ran into would it?”

“Hmph, should start calling you Doc Spider if that’s the case,” Ramona sheaths her sword and delivers a punishing kick to Friedrich’s gut. Something about that corporate rat’s face ticked her off. “Fine, I’ll play ball, tell us about your stupid project pendejo.”

“...gentler with our hostage, Mona,” Ingvar sighs and approaches the groaning, crumpled businessman. He yelps as he’s hoisted up by the scruff of his collar by the pirate’s steel arm. “Doctor Strauss, you’re in custody of the Space Pirates of the Black Argonaut.”

“Black… Argonaut?” Friedrich grunts, blood trickling down his chin as he struggled to suck in the very air that Ramona viscerally kicked out of his lungs. “...I…see…”

“He’s going to have trouble talking like this…” Ingvar frowned.

Friedrich pointed towards the shuttered restaurant labeled ‘Heaven Tomorrow’ in dead neon lights. He spits up a sanguine glob onto the stained tile floors, “Project… in… there.”

“Don’t need to tell me twice,” Ramona approaches a utility console by the restaurant and plucks a jack out from the back of her head. She plugs it into the console trying to slice through the firewall, but seconds after she plugs the jack in a massive jolt of electricity surges through her system. The jack unclips and tethers back into her smouldering head. Ramona falls back and crashes against the floor limp.

“Mona!” Ingvar rushes over to his fallen cyborg comrade, a frown carving deep wrinkles into his stony face as it becomes clear she’s been knocked unconscious. “You damn rat-in-a-suit! You knew that was going to happen didn’t you?”

Friedrich grins, taking a few more shallow gulps of air before he seemed, finally, to be able to talk again. “She is impulsive, that one. I tried to warn her that my Project is a bio-hacker.”

“A bio-hacker? I’ve read about those… a purely organic organism who can tap into computer signals and manipulate them wirelessly.” Ingvar lifts Ramona himself, her hardware always made her heavier than her small statute might indicate. “Did that bio-hacker fry her circuits?”

“Potentially if her hardware is low-quality,” Friedrich sighs, holding his still unsettled gut, “...but from the kick I experienced, I’m guessing all of your cyborg friend’s hardware is military grade.”

“Tch,” now this guy was starting to piss off Ingvar. “You know a lot. How about you shed some light on the situation with those damn bugs.”

“Latrodectus neuroguignolis, a fascinating creature that my colleagues believe to be a lost genus of Black Widow that adapted to survive the cold void of space.” Friedrich smiles warmly, “They cannot begin to understand the value and significance of these creatures. It is no meager spider as they seem to think.”

“If it was… I don’t think the entire station would be overrun with spider-human chimeras.” Ingvar scowls at the shuttered restaurant, only to stir as Ramona coughs up a cloud of dark smoke. “Mona!”

“Mmm, your girl is hardy.” Friedrich grins, “In order to get into the restaurant where my Project seems to be barricading herself, we’ll need to get to the Engineering wing of the station.”

“Her? Your project is… a person?” Ingvar frowns as he holds his stirring partner in his steel arm, “A woman?”

“Did you think a bio-hacker would be a petree dish with neurons and electrodes?” Friedrich scoffs and brushes his tailored suit off. “Of course I used a living specimen.”

For a moment the barely conscious Ramona and the smouldering Ingvar, always and ever at odds, were in complete and utter agreement. Friedrich Strauss was a deeply wretched soul.

“Ingvar…” the cyborg's voice came through his comm unit. The older man felt his heart stir. For a moment he entertained the vain idea that he might be someone who could protect the vicious Ramona Reyes. She glowers up at him, her distorted voice ekeing through his comms; “Mierda, how long was I out?”

“Only about a minute,” he helped her to her feet. The cyborg ran a quick diagnostic on herself, frowning as she made visual contact with Friedrich’s grinning mug. She wanted to kick him again. Ramona beams her thoughts into Ingvar’s comms, “...diagnostics are coming up clean. Just got a splitting headache.”

“Are you feeling well enough to make the trek to Engineering?”

“Should be fine,” she scowls over at Friedrich, wearing his normal smug grin. “We gotta drag this lizard with us?

“Das tut mir lied!” Friedrich scoffs and frowns, hands planting flush on his hips. “I’ll have you know you’ll benefit from my scientific expertise and technological acumen! There’s a good chance I might even be able to fashion you a new vox transceiver from spare parts. So a little humility. Benefit from the knowledge I’ve worked so hard to accumulate!”

“Too bad we gotta benefit from the rest of you too, pendejo.” Ramona’s distorted voice crackled through Ingvar’s comm unit. Together they start walking down the webbed halls towards the Engineering wing of the station. They pass by a number of advertisements that flicker on and off. “What will we be doing in Engineering anyway?”

“We’ll be cutting power to the restaurant in specific,” Friedrich peels away webbing that keeps getting caught on his luxury suit. “Without computers to manipulate, the bio-hacker is incapable of maintaining lockdown.”

Ingvar frowns, “This hacker got a name or are you going to keep referring to them like an object?”

“Jessica X. She’s a designer clone with hand picked chimerisms to maximize her capacity to analyze and compute vast amounts of data as well as wirelessly manipulate and influence software processes.” Friedrich sighs wistfully, “Could call her my masterpiece really. A stroke of sheer genius.”

“Stroke is a word for it,” Ramona bitterly intones through Ingvar’s transceiver, “You like you’re getting off on the sound of your own voice, Doc Puto.”

“Scheißkopf,” Friedrich hisses below his breath. He tersely huffs as they march through yet another overwebbed section. “You must have questions about the ‘spiders’. We have time before we reach engineering. Ask them.”

The pirates keep their hands tight over their weapons, all around them shadows moved in unlit sections of the jungle of silky web and sticky steel. The skittering of bony, overlong limbs scratching against the walls and each other was impossible to ignore.

And yet none of these creatures attacked them yet, not after that initial shock. If nothing else these questions would pull their minds away from their inhuman stalkers.

“Alright,” Ingvar sighs, glancing back to check Ramona’s wounded throat, the fear he felt in that moment. She’d never understand it herself, would she? , “You said these are spiders that adapted to the cold void of space. But you sounded skeptical that this is the whole story.”

“Aha, you’re quite perceptive for low-life scum.” Friedrich flashes a pearly banner of too-perfect teeth. “These creatures are much more complex than spiders that once thrived on Earth’s soil. They’ve twin sets of spinnerets for creating two different classes of web.”

“Two different kinds of webbing?” Ingvar squints and scans the shadows with anxious mien. The shapes of them crawling through the webbing and maintaining their obscurity in shadow is unmistakable. Were they mindless? Or was this a calculated strategem on their part? “”How does that lead to these spider-things?”

“I’m getting to that you impertinent brute,” Friedrich sighs and adjusts his spectacles with his pinky out. “The first set of spinnerets organizes the webbing structures you see here and it is similar in composition to spider’s silk. It serves the very same purpose as well.”

The old man scowls, “To hunt?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.” The glib scientist sighs with relief as they stand to approach the Engineering wing of the station. He gesticulates broadly, preparing to drone on as Ramona runs a clawed finger along the edge of her weapon to test its sharpness. “The second set of spinnerets are far more interesting however: they create a neural webbing that covers the myelin sheath and core neuron cells throughout the entirety of an organism’s nervous system.”

“Wait a minute,” Ingvar stops short, Ramona glowers back at him while Friedrich all-too-theatrically spins around on his foot as if to offer a grandiose bow. The older man scowls at the smug researcher. “...an organism's nervous system? The spiders apply that neural silk inside a host’s body?”

“I don’t follow any of this shit,” Ramona bluntly transmits through comms with slight distortion. “Get to the point and make it simple or I’m harvesting your damn cajones.”

“Hah, very well.” Friedrich plants a hand on his hip, ”To answer your question Mister Black Argonaut, yes, they apply that silk from within a host’s body. This allows them to hijack the total command of their nervous system. To simplify it even further: the organisms you call creatures that scutter all around us? They were once my fellow crew members.”

Ramona’s eyes widen and Ingvar’s jaw drops, both pirates lower their weapons. The older man shakes his head and snaps his pistol over Friedrich's face. “You’re screwing with me Doc! These aren’t just spider mutants but spider zombies?! How stupid do you think we are!”

Friedrich collapses to the ground, grinning defiantly past a broken bleeding nose. “I speak the truth Ingvar Sturluson, owner and pilot of the Black Argonaut. Born in August of 2191 Common Era in Nytt Oslo on Mars. Lost your parents at the outbreak of the War, registered youth at the Red Star Orphanage. Started a career in Law Enforcement as an Investigator for the Planetside Security Office, and found yourself conscripted into the Martian Military.”

Ingvar blanched and Ramona double-takes back at the Doctor who suddenly went from smug fopp to something much more sinister. The older man rubs at a dull ache in his temple, “What the hell… how do you know this? How do you know my life history?”

Ramona’s distorted voice hisses through the comms, “No one’s asking you to go dig up the past you puto–”

“Ramona Reyes, born Miguel Hidalgo in September of 2197 Common Era in Nueva Tijuana on Mars, a cyborg hacker and melee specialist of the Black Argonaut. Abandoned by your parents at the outbreak of the War, registered youth at the Red Star Orphanage. Joined the Sprawl Reaver criminal syndicate as an assassin. They traded your contract over to NanoSec’s military technology affiliate and you were conscripted into the War on behalf of Mars.”

The cyborg launches off the ground and stabs her sword through Friedrich’s torso. Ramona pins him into the tiled floor with her weapon. Her words seethe with bitter venom through Ingvar’s comms, “I said the past stays buried! Stay down or I will burn you from the inside out!”

“Mona… the spider-things, arachnoids, whatever they are. They’re approaching!” The older man warns. “Of all the rotten timing!” Ingvar scowls, glaring now at Friedrich as he glowered with that smug smile he’d grown to hate in his short time knowing him. “You know something, don't you Doctor Strauss. Why did they wait til now to attack us? Tell me!”

“Because my dear captors,” Friedrich’s eyes pulse with a radiant blue light, “Like ants in a colony, the hive will ever scramble to the defense of its Queen when she’s in danger.”

“What does that even mean?” Ramona complained and heats up her sword in the intellectual’s wound, a burst of heat begins cooking him from the inside and dispelling foul odor in the air. And yet Friedrich continues to smile in a strangely alien detached interest. It only pisses her off more, “Speak clearly for once pendejo!”

“The spider-human hybrids on board this station will stop at nothing to save me.” Friedrich glowers up at the two pirates. “You might think I am your captive. But I assure you and your petty low-life scum, you’re no more than twin flies in my web.”

(To be continued.)