Part 23

    It was hard to tell from here what sort of cooling system the rifle would have. Personally he thought he would prefer if it had expendable heat sinks. While that did limit the amount of rounds he'd be able to fire before it was essentially useless, the standard venting process could be not only time consuming, but also dangerous if he wasn't careful. He knew more than a few soldiers who had the telltale burn scars on their hands. If it was the newer model he would still have to find cartridges, because he wasn't already worried about a scarcity of ammo.

    He glanced across at Graves again. The rear admiral could provide him covering fire if the situation went FUBAR, and if Kevin moved quickly and quietly enough, he would be fine. This of course, assumed he would be luckier than the rest of his day had been going.

    "Graves" he stage whispered across the hall, glancing toward the monsters, just in case. "Graves!"

    "What" came the reply in a similar loud whisper.

    "I'm going for that rifle. Keep me covered."

    Graves looked down the hall, the look on his face slightly perplexed until he saw the weapon. He nodded at Kevin, then readied his pistol. Kevin flattened himself to the floor, then started crawling forward with his elbows, as silently as he could.

    The crawl was uneventful, much easier than what he had been subjected to in basic training. The main difference was that instead of crawling over and around muddied sandbags, he was now crawling over and around corpses of fellow crew mates. He was almost sure that if this had been part of his early training, he would have certainly washed out. In fact, even now it was a bit much, but it was impossible to quit here. If he figured he was done, stood up, and attempted to walk away, he surely would have been ripped apart by the toothy creatures ahead of him.

    He watched the monsters as he scooted bodily towards the ordinance specialist and the Breaker beyond. There was no pattern to their movement, but it didn't seem aimless. It was as though they were guarding the path, and the comms array beyond them, and he got the feeling he'd see something similar if he had approached from the other halls to this area. What are you doing? Are you protecting something? And if so, what?

    He guessed that he would find out soon enough. He reached Eli and checked his corpse for heat sinks after seeing that the Breaker was in fact the newer model. He found three! that was sixty shots easy, more than he had dared hope for. He knew that without proper trigger discipline they would be depleted in no time, but it seemed like his bad luck was turning.