Gravity Well

[Unseelie]

Forty marines slipped forty gas-masks over their heads, released their breath, and pulled air deep into their burning lungs. Nerve toxins, aboard ship, and apparently...bears? Willows, the real Willows, had contacted them over secure comms...actually a civilian network, rather than ship comms. Told them to get to a specific docking bay, and take out what appeared to be a boarding craft packed with shock troops...

Breathing deep, the Marines started running down halls. They'd been told to avoid lifts, which were apparently acting up. They'd been told to disregard any commands over ship comms, all of them were false.


At first, it was a simple rawness in the cheeks...the squad hadn't run in gas-masks for a while, and many of them put it off to the difficulty they had breathing through the filters, but it grew worse, so that every time they breathed, as the air flew in and out, as their lungs filled and their cheeks sucked, pulling air over the filters, raw, wet flesh smacked down over the teeth and bones of their jaws, they swallowed the spittle, and the blood, for a time, as the foam bubbled from their cheeks. After a minute, a marine flicked his comm unit on, and gasped "sir, I'm...sir, there's something wrong here.." The men glanced around, and noticed that they weren't the only ones in pain, saw the determined set of shoulders, above and beyond a simple run, the tightness in the jaw from clenched teeth...They looked around, and the first man started coughing, as the foam of dissolving lipids, livid lines of fat dissolved in his throat and lungs, swimming in the water of millions of ruptured cells began to fill his bronchial sacks.

With every breath, the powder had poured into the marines, laying into the soft tissues inside the mouths, throats, and lungs of forty marines, settling onto the fatty deposits and the lipid cell membranes, and tearing molecule after molecule off, a simple ionic binding far stronger than the covalent connections that held a cell together. One soldier, and then another collapsed, chocking on their own cellular fluids. The commander ordered the masks off, and a few managed to claw them off their heads, dieing. In minutes, the hallway was empty, nothing but bodies littering the floor. Pinkish liquid poured from the mouths of those who'd gotten their masks off, and blood dripped from the filters of those who had not.

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