The shattered edge

[arvg]

The gunfire was almost like a gentle popping, somewhere behind him.

Trudging through the snow littered decks of the ship, Alvarez was lost. His hand gripping the TAC as he tried to get a signal, waving it too and fro as he walked, occasionally slapping the small device with the back of his hand. To no avail, it still, stubbornly refused to connect him to TAC-net.

The deck lurched a moment later with the muted roar echoing through the vessel. A battle Razor... that had to mean the SCRA were storming the ship... though... he couldn't quite fathom out why they would send troops onto the ship and then razor it... then it hit him.

"Brooks, you are a moron." He muttered, trying to hold onto a railing as his TAC skittered into the snow.

He heard the growl first, immediately dropping to a knee and swinging the assualt rifle up to cover a large snow bank. He had to be in a main cargo bay, easily a quarter of a mile long. Misbegotten shapes that could have been anything, now completely buried.

His breath coiled into a slight fog, as he listened again for the noise.

It clicked... as the first of four arms seemed to coil out from behind a mound of snow, moving with an ambling menace that could only mean certain doom, of a squishy bone cracking variety would soon be descending upon a certain rather short Hispanic man with a bad temper.

"Oh, I see how it is, ese," Alvarez muttered, raising his assualt rifle to his shoulder and sighting in. "You are big, ugly, and have teeth. I ain't scared of you..."

REWWWWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRR!!!!!

The creature bellowed it's mandibles retracting and flinging siliva across the deck splattering across Alvarez's face.

Alvarez calmly wiped it away with the back of his hand, "Si, you sound like my mother in law... she was a Montoya never could stop screaming... You kinda look like her too, holmes..."

The creature made to lunge, and Alvarez let it have it with a hail of 10mm ball-bearing rounds packed into the Klashnikov's magazine, spitting rounds of fire at 9000m/s. He lowered the rifle as the beast crashed to the deck in a sodden pile of gore.

"Si, and that is how you get it done in my neighborhood," he stood up. "Too bad I never got to do that to mother Montoya, woulda spared a lot of grief..."

It kinda... vaguely... resembled a polar bear... just more teeth. He stared at it a moment, wondering what all the fuss was about... when he noticed that it wasn't alone.

While the large one had been rather easy to kill, the small ones swarming around the mound, were not. Agile, quick, and far too many of them.

Alvarez gaped at them, then at mother who he had just gunned down, and realized that he was in a lot of trouble.

"Oh... crap..." he commented, turning tail and running as fast as his short legs could propel him, back through the deck, a hundred hungry little beasties, hot on his heels.

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