“How many?” Foster sat cross-legged on the floor frantically tapping on the tablet’s two-dimensional screen. Scrolling through multiple windows on a flat plane was always frustratingly inefficient. “Because it sounds like there’s a lot of them!”

  Silence.

  “Hoover,” the scientist looked up to the roof of the elevator and saw the metal beginning to bend suspiciously inward in certain places. “Fuck me!” He swore a little too loudly under his breath. What he needed was time. Time to get a handle on their current situation. But every new scratch and tear warned him they were running out of it. “How many?!”

  Finally, Hoover responded to the scientist’s abnormally panicked question, “I can’t really get an accurate count on them.”

  “Why not?” Foster highlighted a section of the station nearest to the Popper Drive and expanded the view to include the engine room’s critical subsystems. “What do you mean you can’t get an accurate count? You were able to connect to them in the corridor just an hour ago.”

  “How should I know? Maybe it’s just more space magic bullshit!” Hoover sounded like he was mimicking his creator’s angst. “All I can say is I’m having trouble communicating with each individual machine.”

  To Foster’s immediate left and right, Justine and Joseph had their guns drawn. With more thuds pelting the top of the elevator, each one had taken up defensive positions on opposite ends of the compartment.

  “Foster? Talk to me.” Never one to hesitate, the FBI agent seemed more than primed to obliterate anything stupid enough to poke its head inside.

  “Give me a second.” On the tablet, Foster accessed the reactor’s primary operating system and began locking out certain pathways from whatever was happening. As he did, he noticed that something else was racing just as fast to keep them open. “Why is the system fighting me!?”

  “The reactor and laboratory levels have been put on alert.”

  “How is that possible?” Foster pressed on the wrong window, and something referring to “Advanced Protocols” came up. “Damn it, Hoover! I thought you locked all that down while we were in the storage facility.”

  “Locked down? I thought this place wasn’t connected.”

  “I’m trying to secure the engines now!” Justine’s question went unanswered as the unintended window was closed out. Then, the hurried scientist pressed on the image of a large conduit that branched out into sixteen smaller energy lines. “How much of the station has the system corrupted?”

  “I did lock it down, asshole!” Working in tandem, Hoover had his own obstacles to deal with while trying to reestablish contact with the prisoner storage facility. “The upper level is still uncorrupted. But I warned you that this place didn’t have one single integrated system, just a series of smaller ones.”

  “That’s why we left the phone. So, we would retain control.”

  “That may be why we left the phone.” Hoover spat out, sounding a little bit frustrated at the turn of events. “But that doesn’t automatically mean everything will work perfectly.”

  “Can they block our escape route?”

  Hoover ran a series of quick probability programs that took much longer than Foster would have liked. “No,” the AI finally said, sounding mildly confident in his assessment. “The areas we control, we will continue to control.”

  As more thuds pelted the roof, Justine carefully followed each one with the business end of her Slinger. Tensing from the anticipation of a fight, she asked. “If that’s true, then what the hell is raining down on top of the elevator?”

  “Things we don’t control.”

  “Thanks for the rock-solid intel, Hoover.” Justine checked her ammo gauge. With over fifty percent left, she thought to herself that she had more than enough for a prolonged firefight. “I don’t like the tight space. But at least we’ve got plenty of ammo.”

  Too busy securing the station’s engines, Foster paid little attention to her assessments. This indifference continued even when she hurried over to him and scooped up his gun without saying a word. And it wasn’t until she made it back to her original position that he looked up and said, “aren’t you being a little too greedy?”

  “I don’t think so.” She said flatly from behind vigilant eyes. “Besides, you’re busy.”

  “True.” Foster turned back to his tablet. “Still, you could have asked.”

  “Foster...” Those vigilant eyes became almost like steel. “Stop wasting time talking to me and finish whatever you’re doing.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He said while his fingers flew across the touch screen. Twenty seconds later, when the last pathway was encrypted, he closed out the program and shoved the tablet back in his satchel. “The connections from the reactor to the engines have been secured. At least we’re not going to fall into the black hole before we have a chance to escape.”

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Wonderful,” Joseph said sarcastically. “Remind me to do a dance later.”

  Before anyone else had a chance to lament their doom, something dangerous began tearing its way through the top of the compartment. Justine signaled for Joseph’s attention, but he was already on it.

  “Be careful where you fire.” She remembered what Hoover had said back at the bank about level ten and what it could do to the human heart. “I don’t want to have to perform CPR in the middle of a firefight.”

  “No!” Hoover screamed. “Firing your weapons in the elevator would be a very bad idea. You could damage a critical system or even worse, crack the outer hull. One stray shot and everyone would be sucked out into space through a hole about the size of a golf ball.”

  Foster pictured all of them being squashed down to the size of a worm while Joseph looked down at his seemingly useless weapon with a puzzled look on his face. “So how are we supposed to fend these things off?”

  Justine let her weapons fall within a couple of inches of Foster’s face. And for the first time since meeting her, he felt the fear a criminal must have felt each time she brought her wrath down upon them.

  “Simple.” Justine spotted the first breach in the overhead ceiling. A tiny pincer began to poke and feel its way around for anything to kill. In response, she pulled back on the triggers and held them firmly in place until the Slinger’s tip began to glow a bright blue. “Just imagine these things are bayonets… and charge.”

  From the outside of the space station, the outer hull of the transport tube looked just like an actual tube. The average person would say it looked like a pneumatic tube at a bank drive thru. The kind that delivers your money and, if you’re with a child, a lollipop. Dull by intention, an architect would be kind in describing its design as utilitarian.

  But for two quick minutes, Foster was transported back to his childhood home. He was sitting in the back yard on the Fourth of July. And his father was standing right next to him about to ignite the dark with a mixture of chemicals and fire that always took his breath. Only it wasn’t fireworks lighting up the night sky.

  It was Justine Rushing.

  “The little shits are everywhere!” She rammed the end of her plasma gun into a group of half-formed entities as they dropped clumsily down from the ceiling. Unlike hitting them with a plasma charge, the shockers sent them bouncing around the compartment like ground spinners shooting sparks off in every direction.

  “Stop doing that!” Joseph screamed as one of the machines ricocheted off his shoulder and fell to the floor with a massive thud. “You’re supposed to be protecting us.”

  “I am protecting you.” A little winded from doing most of the work, Justine kicked one of the goo monsters in his direction, forcing the deputy to strike with his charged Slinger. Once the weapon was discharged, the defunct entity twisted in a circle so fast that the sparks it gave off looked like an unbroken circle of light. “I’m just doing it with more style than you’re used to.”

  “That would be an understatement.” Foster said, but he couldn’t help but wonder what other fireworks she had up her sleeve next.

  “Please don’t encourage her!” Joseph managed as he dispatched a monster of his own.

  After another long, drawn-out minute, the elevator came to a halt, and the doors slid open onto the floor of the storage facility. One final machine reared its menacing eye at Justine. Pissed off and tired, she stomped down on the mechanical monster with her soiled pink Nike. The damaged machine’s whirring teeth ground to a halt.

  Justine hesitated, wanting to look the damn thing in the eye. And for a second, humans and machines stared into each other’s souls.

  “I think it might be trying to communicate with you.” Joseph kicked at a knee-high pile of machines blocking his path to the door. The whole pile tumbled onto the thing she was holding captive. The sudden proximity of its brethren sent the machine’s tiny legs helplessly flailing.

  In response to this pathetic attempt to keep fighting, Justine dispatched the whole lot of them without a moment’s hesitation. “Hopefully… it was trying to say goodbye. Foster,” she called out. “Are we safe?”

  Foster closed out what he was looking at and rose to his feet. With a sour look on his face, he pressed on the section of the hull which he previously coated with the WOW spray. The blue reticle reappeared, and he performed the same procedure as before.

  “I think everyone should take a look at this before we head out.” They maneuvered past the twisted metal bodies littering the floor and joined him by the observation wall. Together, they watched Foster use the OLER to zoom in on one of the cables. Instantly, their stomachs sank from what appeared to be their impending doom.

  “What are those things?” Justine asked like she was a final girl from a cheap 80’s horror movie. “Scratch that! Do I even want to know?”

  “Probably not.” He panned the image upward toward the looming power cable. Once there, they saw hundreds of out of focus things crawling along the metal casing. Realizing the image was unclear, the tiny machines embedded within the organic resin zoomed in until everyone could clearly see that those out of focus things were more of those goo monsters.

  “Well,” Justine leaned closer to the OLER display for a better look. “That’s utterly horrifying.”

  “Agreed. But what are they doing?” Joseph kicked another machine away from his feet, sending its frail body into the corridor. “Are they trying to sabotage the cable?”

  “Looks like it. But I think they're headed for a bigger prize.” Justine took control of the screen from Foster and panned the image toward the end of the cable where a bright stream of thrust burned brightly against the inky black of space. “They’re going for the engine.”

  “It’s worse than that.” Foster corrected her by sliding the image to yet another, fully engorged cable. “They’re going for all the engines.”

  “They’re trying to scuttle the station?” Joseph asked with a look of building dread. “Why now?”

  “I can’t be completely sure.” Foster grimaced as he patted his satchel contemplatively. “But I think sending the prisoners home the way we did was seen by the space station’s security programs as an unscheduled call.”

  “And what? This is their failsafe response?” Justine asked the question even though she already knew the answer.

  “This is a prison after all.” Foster tried very hard to keep his face placid as one more mystery burrowed into his head. “Maybe there’s something worse than murderers here that they don’t want to let out.”

  Nervously looking at one another, they each knew what would happen if those things finished their mission before they reached the escape ship. Those engines were the only thing keeping this place from being torn apart. And without them, it was game over.

  So, without needing to state the obvious, the intrepid explorers bolted from the elevator and toward their only hope of leaving this station alive.