Around the corner ahead of the team shambles some eldritch form between an anthropoid and an abomination. Three uneven legs carry a mouth large enough to swallow a bag of bowling balls like candy, reaching from just above its legs to the top of its being. Its bulbous, blobular cranium is speckled with sprouts of eyestalks like maggots wriggling in rotten flesh. Tendrils reach out sporadically from its body, wiping their slime across the walls and ceiling. Three arms as long as the creature is tall carry an assortment of organs in their talons, dripping with both red and green blood.

  Still screaming, still shambling forward to the kneeling warriors trying to maintain consciousness, drool drips from the fiend’s vertical maw when the low rumble from before rolls down the corridor once again. The shambling creature stops.

  “Go silent!” yells the dame, putting a hand to the ears of her wolf helm as if flipping a switch that isn’t there.

  Is that some kind of touch-activated technology? How could something like that work? They have all kinds of gizmos and gadgets in that armor.

  She wastes no time and fires her carbine with one hand as she pulls her saber from her side with the other, charging the fiend like a dog rushing to maim an intruder.

  Behind her, Konrad and Aurick turn around, carbines raised; from there comes the source of the low rumbling horror. They silence their helmets as ordered.

  The two warriors open fire as three of the devilish hounds, now as hulking as oxen, crawl around the corner like they’re dragging a plow behind them. Their hinds have melded into the sickening mass they drag along, a pulpous conglomerate of tentacles and snapping hound snouts with one massive, gaping maw filled with glinting rows of teeth as thin and sharp as razors. The razored maw is large enough to swallow them whole, not that it wouldn’t take the time to chew them to shreds.

  Konrad and Aurick, continuing to fire on the conglomerated monstrosity, aim first for the oxen-hounds, but their rounds do nothing to slow the abomination’s crawl. Nothing to break the purple-red hide of the conjoined beasts.

  Aurick rips a grenade off his black belt and throws it into the creature’s giant maw. The bomb explodes in a thunderous exaltation of death, shattering the blue-white lights above the abomination and sending chunks of flesh and broken bits of teeth at the warriors.

  How did he arm that? Looked like he just chucked it. Must be part of his space tech.

  The charging dame’s rounds hit her mark but also merely impact on her foe, the daunting, screaming horror, scratching it with superficial damage.

  The creature shudders at the blows, at least giving her time to close the gap. Her saber in her offhand, she slashes at the fiend’s reaching talons tangled with entrails, cleaving off the wicked hand, releasing a fountain of green blood.

  Another claw strikes her, slamming her to the ground. The fiend presses her down as if to squeeze blood from a lemon, clenching to rend through her armor with its hideous talons.

  But, Gustav has risen to aid his sergeant, dropping his carbine, swinging his blade with two hands. He slices through the arm, freeing the dame. The bold swordsman returns to a forward guard and closes the gap between himself and the horror.

  Throwing entrails at Gustav’s head with its last hand, the fiend then lashes at the swordsman with its tendrils, but the stoic warrior bats everything away with casual, uncommitted flicks of his blade.

  With the gap closed, Gustav lunges, thrusting his sword into the fiend’s mouth, but the creature catches the blade in its teeth and slams its last claw into Gustav’s head. The warrior staggers, refusing to fall, then throws his weight into the blade, pressing it deeper into the fiend’s mouth. Green blood oozes out from between its jagged teeth.

  Konrad and Aurick stare into the darkness at the gaping hole blown by the grenade, green blood gushing out onto the monstrosity’s purple-red flesh. The writhing, wailing creature’s multitude of yellow eyes glow with ire, their vengeful gaze fixed upon the red soldiers. The two warriors draw their side arms and charge side by side behind round after hot, blue round.

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  Konrad slams his mace down on the head of one of the hounds, crushing its skull. Green blood splatters across his armor. He jams his carbine into the snapping mouth of another hound, sending a dozen pills down the beast’s throat, overdosing the creature on blue space bullets.

  Aurick cleaves the head of a hound, rips his axe from its bloody skull, then moves in on the monstrosity’s main mass. Cleaving the creature’s grasping claws and tendrils as he moves in, he reaches its body and begins hacking at the biting, lumpy heads. Tendrils reach again for his arms and head, but a swift turn of his axe severs them, fending off the monstrosity’s meager assault.

  Sergeant Dame gets to her feet. In a desperate, gutsy move, she slams into Gustav’s back, forcing his sword even deeper into the fiend with another green spurt gushing through the monster’s teeth.

  The creature staggers in pain, then wraps what’s left of its arms and tendrils around the two warriors to crush them in a kamikaze bear hug.

  As the limbs close in, Sergeant Dame puts her back to Gustav’s, slashing at the enclosing cage in a wild flurry of blows, slicing through limbs and tendrils like a hot knife through hoses made of butter.

  The terrible creature still refuses to die, writhing in a struggle for dominance over its attackers.

  Gustav tugs at his blade, trying to pull it from the fiend. The creature’s massive jaws hold it tight, winning out over the strength of the warrior.

  But Gustav, also refusing to yield, pulls an ace from his sleeve: the sword alights in fire, giving the man the edge he needs. In a downward, blazing cleave, he frees his fiery blade.

  Raising his sword overhead, the warrior hacks away at the monster, his sword cauterizing the fresh wounds, burning the abomination’s flesh and loosing a thin cloud of black smoke.

  Always play your hand close to the chest. No idea where that fire came from, but I like this Gustav guy.

  I’m even starting to like Sergeant. She’s got real moxie. I still don’t think Earth women should be sent into battle, but who am I to make judgments on alien dames? Who am I to make judgments on anyone? I’m just a space squid.

  And somehow, seeing those things doesn’t make me feel like such a monster. Yeah, I’m ugly, and my blood is green, but at least I don’t scream like a locomotive whistle.

  Gustav walks over to Konrad and Aurick, who are still pummeling and hacking away at the monstrosity as it slowly slips into a death coma.

  I’m not convinced they’ve killed that thing so easily. I wonder if it can molt like I did. Or maybe it has some other trick. Seems like even though they put the monsters down, the things still came back and melded together into one living horror. Hm. Reminds me of the monstrosity in the lake trying to get me to let it eat me—must be the same idea.

  Konrad sees the swordsman. Gustav signals to him to turn his sound back on, tapping an ear atop his helm. Konrad signals to Aurick, and they both hurry toward their comrade, turning on their sound as they go.

  “What on Vulfos is that?” asks Aurick, pointing at Gustav’s blade. “Psychic fire? You bastard! How could you?”

  He really was playing close to his chest.

  “Step aside,” says Gustav. He walks closer to the monstrosity, its brutalized corpse spurting green blood like an eldritch fountain that belongs in the square of some city in Hell.

  He points his flaming sword. The other warriors watch in either fascination or horror. Or both. The sword goes cold, the flames withering away like the flames of candles caught in a strong breeze, leaving nothing but a simple blade.

  In an instant, the monstrosity bursts into flames, utter immolation consuming it. The bright flames burn as if blown back in a massive gust of wind, lighting up the corridor in an orange-white glow and sending black smoke of the atrocity’s burning flesh on down the hallway.

  The warrior lowers his sword, and the flames slowly die away, leaving nothing but a charred mound of black smoldering in the darkness.

  “That’s how. That’s why,” says Gustav. “I believe Sergeant gave us orders to get to the main deck.”

  “If we live,” begins Sergeant Dame, “we’ll talk about this later, Gustav. Our only fight now is against the enemies of the Emperor. I don’t count you as among them.”

  I wonder if I can do that. Setting things on fire just by pointing at them would be the bees' knees. What a nifty trick. I wonder why they’re all so bothered by it.

  “What?” asks Aurick. “Gustav is my sworn brother as much as any other guardsman, but he’s broken the law of the Emperor. That was psychic fire! Are we just supposed to ignore that?”

  “Yes,” says Sergeant Dame.

  “Heard, Sergeant.”

  Damn. Good call, Sergeant.

  The warriors gather their dropped carbines and move out toward their objective: the main deck.