Hayes ran full out.
The corridor threw red strips past him in stuttering ticks. His boots hit plating, slipped on something dry, caught, and kept going. The slipping was not behind him anymore. It was at his heels. Close enough that when he breathed in, he waited to feel it on the back of the suit.
Just a bit further. Medical. The left branch. The sandbox turn.
He told himself that and the telling did not make the sound drop back.
A picture tried to build in his head. He would not let it finish. Pictures got you killed in the outlands. You did not invent the thing. You made the thing prove itself.
He brought the shotgun up on the run.
It was not the double-barrel from his mother's cabin. This one was shorter in the stock, longer in the tube, a fleet weapon Smith had put in his hands until the brace learned the kick. The slugs were thick. The first time he loaded one he thought he had been handed a speargun. Training had taught him the rest: two in the tube if he was lucky, make them count, do not waste a flash in the dark unless the dark was already on him.
The dark was on him.
Hayes planted a foot, turned, and fired.
The muzzle flash ate the corridor.
For one white instant he saw it.
The thing from the hatch. Tall enough that the crown of it scraped the pipe run. Not a man. Not a bear. A black body like wet hide poured over bone that had been stretched too far. Arms too long, ending in blades that were not blades so much as fingers that had forgotten how to be fingers. The head was a long bare skull, no eyes he could use, a ridge of wet plates, and a mouth that opened more than a mouth should. Teeth in there. Too many. A gleam in the red like the growth on the bridge had stood up and learned to chase.
The slug hit it.
The hide took the hit and barely changed. A dent. A spray of black wet. That was all.
The flash died.
Hayes was already turning again, already running, the second slug a weight in the tube he did not spend.
Behind him the slipping became a scrape. Faster.
Medical was not empty when Smith got there.
They had held cargo long enough to confirm the hole, long enough to get no answer from Hayes but static, long enough for Smith to make the call he did not like.
"We move to the rendezvous. One, point. Five, you stay on my back. Two, Three, Four, rooms as we pass. You do not go past a door you have not cleared. If the glass shows Hayes, you say his name and you wait for mine."
The greens answered by number.
The mid-spine was the same red-dark as the rest of 626. Growth here was thinner, like it had started at the crown and not finished the walk down. That did not make Smith feel better.
Medical's hatch was already open.
Smith put a fist up. The line stopped.
"Slow."
They went in.
The wing still looked like a wing if you ignored what was on the beds and the floor. White walls gone gray. Glass cabinets intact. Trays out. Someone had been working when it ended. The work was still there. The workers were not.
The remains were the same as the ones in the corridor behind them.
Raisins.
That was the word that arrived and stayed. Men and women in medical white, rank tabs still on the collars, bodies shrunken in the suits and coats like the water had been taken out and the shape left behind. Mouths wide. Eyes black and dry. No wet. No rot smell the masks would admit. Just husks sitting where people had sat, one still on a stool at a monitor that would never come back on.
Four spoke first, then thought better of it.
Smith did not look at him.
"Count them. Do not touch them. We are here to see where the living went. If there are no living, we are here to see the last door they used."
One moved along the far wall. Two took the exam rooms. Three stayed on the hatch.
The last door was not a door anymore.
At the back of the wing a containment chamber sat in the bulkhead, heavy glass, warning color faded to rust. The seal should have been the strongest thing in the room. It was not.
A hole had been torn through it.
Not cut. Not blown. Torn. The edges bent outward into medical, metal peeled like the dock on the outside of the ship. Growth ringed the wound, thicker here than anywhere they had walked, wet-looking even under the tired red lights. Beyond the hole the containment room was dark. Something had been kept in there. Something had decided it was done being kept.
Smith stood at the tear and did not put his hand near it.
"Five. Light."
Five lifted the lamp.
The beam found more raisins inside the chamber. Two. Maybe three. Hard to tell. They were not sitting. They were piled, as if they had tried to get out the same way and run out of body before they reached the glass.
Smith's comm hissed. For a half-second it almost became a voice.
Then static.
He looked at the hole, then at the wing, then at the numbers waiting on his word.
"Whatever was in there is not in there now," he said. "Stay off the growth. We find Hayes. We do not go through that tear until I say."
Far above them, on the bridge stairs, a shotgun report rolled down through dead vents and came out of the medical speakers as a dull, late thump.
Smith turned his head toward the sound.
"That was him," he said. "Move."