compartments. He nudged himself closer, then reached out and touched it.
“Leira, look at this. Is this what I think it is?”
She closed in. “It—oh. Yeah. That’s Dark Metal. The whole wall is made of it.”
“I saw a few bulkheads along the way that I wondered about, but I thought, who uses Dark Metal as a building material? I mean, some of our tech uses Dark Metal in structural components, like the mechs. But this looks like a solid bulkhead of the stuff.” He turned to Leira, catching her stunned gaze through her visor. “Wow doesn’t cover it. This is an unreal amount of material investment for simple bulkheads. Makes me wonder how much Dark Metal they have access to, you know?”
“If it’s that cheap for them, then how—” Leira said, but Dash heard nothing, as a shape fell on him, slamming him down with brutal force.
7
A flicker of thought whipped through Dash’s confusion—
If I’d been wearing one of the old vac suits, I’d be dead now.
He impacted the deck hard enough to make his ears ring when his helmet smashed into the unyielding alloy, but the tough armor flexed, cushioning the blow. Something black and metallic pressed him down, an immense mass pinning him. He caught a glimpse of chrome-silver blades—
No, not blades. Teeth.
—which gleamed brightly in his helmet lamp, then snapped closed on his head.
For the second time, the armor saved him, the helmet shrugging off the crushing snap of huge jaws lined with gleaming teeth. They drew back, then struck again, this time closing on his arm and scraping shallow furrows in his biceps armor. It pinned his gun hand to the floor. In desperation, he flicked his wrist, sending the mag-pistol tumbling up and away. He snatched at it with his free hand, grabbed at it, caught it, reversed it, and then jammed it into the thing that was rearing back for another strike.
All Dash could see was teeth.
His vision swam with glittering teeth, long and sharp, and so many that they filled his vision as Dash pulled the trigger, firing at point-blank range.
As he did, he hoped Leira was clear, but he had no choice. The mag shot slammed into and through the monstrosity still driving him against the deck, spraying fragments and blobs of viscous fluid along the projectile’s path. He managed a second shot as it struck again, jaws once more snapping closed around his helmet, which resounded with an ominous crack. The creature reared back, three more rounds tearing through it as Leira got a clear view and began firing with ruthless abandon.
The animal, or robot, or whatever it was, spasmed and writhed, then went still.
Somehow, it still had Dash pinned to the deck. It had mass. He had to ask Leira for help moving it, which required her to brace her feet against the Dark Metal bulkhead and push. It rolled heavily to one side, letting Dash regain his feet.
Blood pounding in his ears as his adrenaline-fueled heart banged away, Dash returned his mag-pistol to his other hand, aiming at the unknown enemy.
“Knew it was too quiet in here,” Dash said, eyes never leaving the massive form that leaked oily fluids.
“It’s quiet again.” Leira suppressed a delicate shudder. “That thing was fast.”
“Thing is right,” Dash murmured, leaning close to examine the kill.
The silent shape was black, sinuous, about three meters long, and caught somewhere between an eel and a lizard. The body itself was metallic, and clearly synthetic, with a gaping mouth full of chromium-bright teeth. They weren’t as long as a knife, but damned close, and there seemed to be an impossible amount of them in the mouth.
“Crowded in there.” Dash touched his boot to one of the gleaming fangs. There was no response, but that meant nothing.
Leira moved closer, making Dash stiffen with nerves. “Uh, Leira, let’s make sure it’s actually dead, beyond a simple tap with my boot?”
She grabbed a broken length of conduit and poked the vile-looking thing, hard enough to score the outer covering. It didn’t move.
“I think it’s actually dead,” she said.
Dash nodded but kept his mag-pistol pointed at it. “Doesn’t look much like a Deeper.” His pulse finally returned to something closer to normal.
“About six legs too few and no eyes, no ears, and no sign of where it came from?”
“My nightmares.” Dash looked up. A compartment gaped open in the deck above them. “Hell, we weren’t even that close, really. And we weren’t exactly thumping our way around.”
“No eyes means some other type of