Some seven hundred feet above the cursed wasteland, Beth Hudson dangled from an overhang of 'Apep' and secured another magnetic bolt to what was left of the hull. High winds were buffeting as she came close to falling when a misjudged leap caused her to tumble thirty feet and slam against the side of the crashed Mothership.

  The whiplash dazed her momentarily, still feeling the rope burns half an hour later. From then on, she had doubled the care put into the ascent, with no more heroics or second-guessing. Secure, double-check and move on. Again, she had donned a Haz-tac pressure suit, used for stealth missions inside radioactive areas. Upside down against a ledge, she tried to forget the biting cold winds, which constantly reminded her of the fall that awaited her. Beth slowly clambered up the side of the long ledge, secured a peg and lay down. Exhausted with both hands flat against her chest, she took several deep breaths and looked up at the ocean sky. Wisps of ghostly clouds were silvered with moonlight, against the pitch dark of the night, and while taking a break, she allowed herself a moment of tranquillity.

  If this place had not been so treacherous, she would have made it her hangout spot or even a hideout, somewhere away from the chaos of civilisation. Glancing at her palm readout, she tapped the glove. Orange digital numbers scrolled into view, fluctuating back and forth until they flashed a confirmation. The rad count was not enough to cook a chicken, but still within the intensive care range.

  Toasty.

  She gathered up and walked toward the hull of the ship. It creaked and yawned, as fat puffs hissed out from random gaps, with the only clear entrance being a ventilation grill. Beth sprayed a can of liquid nitrogen to shatter the frame of the grate and touched all four sides of the entrance to see if it was cool enough to traverse. Satisfied, she crawled inside and was met with long, yawning metal creaks. The rest of the air duct had been sliced off and ended abruptly over a sheer drop.

  Crawling on her belly, she shifted around and drew out the Grappler from the backpack. The Grappler was a polycarbonate launcher, resembling a nightstick and projected a strong metallic piton. It was more or less a miniature Harpoon. Lining up the shot, she fired and watched its pointed end dig deep into the other side of the chasm. With a few safety yanks, Beth used a Carabiner to attach herself to he other end of the stick and slowly winched toward the other side.

  Dangling freely, the thief secured herself with a rope and a chockstone before retracting the harpoon's end until it was again sheathed inside the nightstick. She stood flat against the wall, sidling on a narrow perch that left her on tip-toes. Not wanting to bring down the catwalk with a high-velocity shot, Beth scaled the rest of the way by hand, all the while, winds howled a mournful chorus interposed with heavy creaks from the downed spaceship. Beth hauled herself onto the catwalk and found the entrance mostly collapsed. Luckily, a section was open enough for her to crawl through, but only if she left the backpack behind. Sighing, she slipped off the bag, unsnapped a rope belt and squirmed on all fours through the claustrophobic gap.

  Halfway traversing the crawl space, a sizeable clearing was big enough for her to stand in. In front, a loose flex cable swayed dead centre among the wreckage of what looked to be an Alien elevator. Beth gave the cable a couple of urgent tugs to check it was secure and climbed up, walking up against the side until she reached the only floor not destroyed by wreckage. Swinging over to the elevator doors, and slipped in through the gap.

  Beth caught her breath and looked around; it was darker than pitch and silent but for the occasional rattle and groan of the ship. She tapped on the night-vision, and his world fell into sickly green and black. At first glance, the floor was marginally spacious, bones of small skeletons littered the floors; some were complete, others not so much. The impact hit them hard; the impaled bodies, the severed limbs and the lopped off heads. It was carnage.

  Yep, this was no Pizza party.

  The Thief crouched to examine one of the skeletons. There were one too many eye holes for her liking; these guys must have been weird-looking even for Aliens. Rising, she gave the surroundings a once-over. It appeared to be on some engineering deck, where there were metal grates which used to be the floor, now twisted and buckled. On the other side, many pipes were broken and wrenched out. Everything was in an indecipherable language and appeared to be random etchings at first, carved into what she assumed was the control desk. Nothing showed up on infrared, so he tapped off the goggles and lit up a hard beam from a pocket light. Beth ran a finger of light across the surface and lit up more details: moon shapes, three dots, two wavy lines running parallel. Searching around, she made her way through a series of fallen rooms, with downed floors that provided ramps to the next one. She finally found a room with no exits, but the numbers on her hand were going wild, which infrequently blanked out and became a set of dashes. There was nowhere to go, the room was dark and empty, broken up by a bunch of girders that had lanced through from above. Nothing made sense; the readings were erratic and off the charts, but nothing here provoked such a reaction. Then, out of instinct, she looked up and saw a clean-cut tunnel with something glowing on the other end.

  She did not like the look of that glow; it looked too intense and liable to fry her on sight. However, the promise of hidden treasure overrode any caution. She had come this far after all. Aiming high, she lost the harpoon onto a ledge below the tunnel exit and ascended. Upon arrival, she pulled herself up and moved away to the safety of the next room. This was definitely a bad sign. The Haz-tac suit was designed to exceed the highest radiation levels, and here it was being tested beyond its limits.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  Better get going, before I'm unable to. She thought and searched the room.

  He moved far from the vault to the adjacent room, which held many old charts and maps. Beth was astonished to learn that even Aliens, with their massively advanced technology, still relied on basic paper charts scratched in what passed for ink, using a penlight. Beth pulled out a group of star-charts, each one housed in a library of telescopic tubes dotted around the room. She assumed this place must have been the navigation area, or at least Archives, being so close to a vault. After a series of false starts, she finally settled on something, the Alien equivalent of a heavy blueprint that felt waxy between fingers. It resembled some schematics for a power grid, drawn in lime green so bright, she no longer needed the torchlight.

  Got you.

  The schematics led her to a particular pipeline, where she could tap and circumnavigate the ship's remaining power source. Using her Smartphone-sized codebreaker, she listened to the energy patterns like the tumblers of a safe. It would take over twenty minutes of agonising, pinpoint synchronisation before the first tumbler fell. An hour had passed when he began to get distracted by a different set of sounds. Sounds independent of that of the ship.

  Nearly...nearly...

  The waveforms eventually settled into two perfect parallel lines. Beth quietly celebrated. Bingo.

  Re-routing the power supply to the lower chambers, she turned on the only lights on the Mothership and even activated a console or two, hoping they were the right ones. Satisfied, Beth slipped the gizmo back into a pocket. More noise now. Not the ships, but something else drawing closer. They had a rhythmic tapping, quiet at first, but betrayed a distinctive intonation. It was soon joined by others, growing closer and louder, with many shuffled footfalls and guttural hisses—the sound of a horde coming closer. Hearing the sludgy footslog and guttural moans, she stood wide-eyed and frozen to the core as a multitude of mutants drew nearer.

  After a panicked moment, Beth quickly approached the nearest doorway. No luck. It was another fallen corridor, with no way to squeeze through or hide away. Upon seeing a fresh group arrive quicker than anticipated, Beth hurried back toward the map room, but slipped out of sight. They had amassed in a cursed knot of abominations, leaving her nowhere to go but back and down. She quickly passed through what appeared to be a large antechamber, only to find another dead end. Half the floor was missing, with only a skeletal girder spanning the room over a five-storey drop. Time was short and she could see a troupe of Moargs shuffling under the dim wink of emergency lights.

  The Moargs shambled into the antechamber and immediately picked up Beth's scent. They uttered a blighted chorus of hissing; a coarse, sibilant clamour that drowned out the creaks and moans of their ship. Their blank button eyes surveyed the darkness for the source, remaining crowded in one spot, while Beth gripped the underside of the girder for dear life.

  There was nothing to hook onto, so he was left to use upper-body strength. Although she had trained for long stretches, her muscles felt like hot coals in her arms. Fighting gravity, her hands may as well have screamed in protest. Down was not an option. Even if she managed to rappel, the fall would still break her bones, and the Moargs would have had the rest. Her only choice was to double-back the way she came while somehow avoiding the gaggle of monsters.

  Using the shadow as a cloak, Beth hauled up onto the girder, steadying with the poise of a ballet dancer, before squatting down at the far end. The throng of monsters was too thick to simply slip through at speed, so he would have to quietly go up and around. As luck would have it, a drainpipe led from the top of the occupied rooms to a series of others.

  He waited for them to disperse and kept low while tip-toeing at speed. She climbed onto the pipe and slowly crept across the passage, above the sea of abyssal maws that opened and shut like clams in the wash of a tide. Somewhere below, a nest of shiny, black tongues danced like agitated snakes. They could detect her scent, but could not pinpoint it, like a blind man looking for a bakery. Their stodgy, mutated forms shambled, bumbled, and waddled on, allowing Beth to crawl unseen along the drainpipe into the map room.

  All was going well until the pipe snapped off and all hell broke loose.

  Jumping down into a clear part of the map room, Beth rolled away from thrashing limbs and fled toward the tunnel entrance before they could swarm around. The Thief aimed the Harpoon at the far wall and shot it to full length. Success! Going by her gut, she deduced the cable length would leave her enough space to make it halfway down the tunnel. It was purely guesswork at that point.

  Luckily, the maths held up, and she ended up dangling halfway in the tunnel as the cable length ran out. With little to no choice, she unclipped herself and landed with a parachute roll. After a time, Beth was able to retrieve her backpack from the collapsed corridor, but going back the way she came was a lost cause. From here on in, everything was pure instinct and adrenaline. Beth improvised the exit; she guessed, fell back and tried again. Every labyrinthine corridor led to nowhere. The more dead ends she found, the more she was forced to retrace. All on the hop, all with non-stop, with restless panic.

  Meanwhile, all the commotion and ruckus of the escape had attracted a new set of Moargs; these ones were already on her tail before she had a chance to catch her breath. They swarmed the corridor like a noisy, undulating torrent of cursed horrors. Reaching out, scratching her pack, hissing with contempt and hunger. By some miracle, Beth was able to find a room with a door that could be barricaded. She hopped a marginal gap, which slowed the mass of monsters to a trickle, and heaved a couple of large crates across the doorway, each one the size of a cupboard. That would not hold the tide back for long. Allowing herself a brief respite, Beth's chest rose with tight heaves, as her face glowed shiny with sweat. The outer wall had collapsed, filling the room with a tangerine hue, looking out toward the new dawning sun.

  I made it.

  The crates barricading the door started to shift violently. Looking back, Beth desperately tore off the Haz-tac suit, allowing the flimsy wingsuit underneath to flap ferociously in the high winds. She quickly stuffed everything she needed into the backpack and slipped it on. Shaken awake by the appearance of the rabid hoard, Beth launched herself off the edge, spread her arms, and rode the currents home.