Tyger knew it was going to one of those really, really bad days.

Before them stood a wall made of the same biomechanical evil that lurked within the hangar and the clearing beyond.  Tyger felt a sense of doom that and wondered if the soldier, his mate, felt the same. It was hard to tell from the expression locked on her stolid face.

            “Oh, this is bad,” he said, at a loss for anything else to say past the insipidly obvious. Still the soldier had remained silent until they had explored the newfound wall about a quarter mile in both directions.

            “They are getting smarter,” the soldier said at last.

            They stood close to the wall of interlocking plant life and pulsing veins of slime; Tyger resisted the urge to poke at it with his machete. Even the soldier was keeping a healthy distance while studying its otherworldly surface. 
            “It’s keeping us out,” she continued.

            “And the creatures?”

            The soldier cast a scowl at the wall. “I’m sure that they could scale the wall with ease. Or even grow from it.”

            “Still seems a bit excessive if you ask me,” Tyger said. “It’s not as if we could hurt it anyway.”

            “Who says it thinks anything like us?” the soldier asked in return.

            A series of dull thudding sounds breaking the forest’s otherwise absolute silence brought the conversation to an abrupt close. Tyger gave a start, then drew his machete, and saw that his mate had gripped and extended her vajra, taking a combat-ready stance.

            “The hell was that?” he asked.

            “It sounded like it came from beyond the wall,” the soldier replied, relaxing somewhat after the noises ended. Still, she kept a suspicious eye on the top of the restricting barricade of alien-looking tendrils.

“Was it an explosion?”

            “I don’t know; I’ve never heard that sound bef- look!” The soldier pointed to the air, where what appeared to be several transluscent discs flew overhead, soaring nearly twenty feet above the wall, with the speed of a bird of prey in close pursuit of its quarry. They arced through the sky above the canopy, dropping through it and landing behind them, about a hundred feet away.

            “Ready yourself,” the soldier said, “we are already under attack.”  Once again, she took her combat stance and prepared her vajra.

   “Strategy?” Tyger asked desperately.

“Stay alive, until your friends can extract you from this deep shit!”

            “That sure helps,” Tyger grumbled, but the soldie, clearly keyed up to fight, didn’t reply.

            A second volley of discs landed like boulders thrown from a volcanic eruption, breaking branches as they crashed to the floor. Like a viscous colloid, they dropped to the ground, landing flat, like blobs of mucous, spreading across the surface area of the ground. Then they began to draw back into themselves of their own accord, regrouping and shimmering, their surfaces becoming opaque with the putrid colors of the creatures whose form they rapidly coalesced into. Pulsing and growing, even when they were no longer transparent, they stood still for several seconds after, taking on the shape, contours, individual body segments and components, but still shuddering, as if their insides were still forming.

            The soldier’s scream startled him out of his hypnotic captivation. He watched as she laid into the still unmoving creatures, madly charging into their ranks, swiping into the front line and sending the first of the creatures lurching into the ground before they could attempt any kind of attack, spilling the fuliginous fluid of their insides as if they were made of pudding. He lost her in the fray as she dove deeper into the forest, still wailing with defiance. And so, with a prayer and with fierce effort to break the shackles of his fear, he charged forward as well, rushing towards the assembly of creatures that had formed closest to him. He took aim with his machete and disarmed them, slashing at the tendrils that brandished their weapons and sending them flying into the canopy and the forest floor: saw blades, bolas, steel-toothed maws, and even something that looked like a wrecking ball. Apparently stunned by the sudden attack, the creatures seemed to give no further resistance as he came in close and unloaded his MAG pistol into each of their bodies. The creatures collapsed to the ground like deflated balloons, wallowing in puddles of their own rancid fluids.

            Wasting no time to gloat, he chose his next targets, slipping into a grim determination as the battle proper began. He wasn’t able to make such short work of these, as they swiped at him with their respective weapons. But they appeared sluggish, as if waking up from a long sleep.

            The next wave came after him with stealth, dropping from treetops, but in the silence of the animal-free forest, even they made enough noise to alert him. These fell to his machete, his MAG pistol having long run out of ammo. Occasionally in the fray, he received a glimpse of his mate in full combat poise, dancing and leaping between the trees in an almost-dance, slashing through her own chosen prey and evading multiple weapon strikes like a deadly acrobat. In this array of disarray, she seemed to be anything but the mere grunt off of the Second Imperium’s proverbial conveyor belt he’d originally supposed she was. Not once did he hear a gunshot; not once did she even reach for her own pistol; she and her vajra were as one, laying waste to her enemy with lightning-fast and violent efficiency. This sight distracted him on more than one occasion, a couple of times nearly to his detriment, as he dodged a sledgehammer blow from a tendril with a bludgeon that felled a nearby tree. He forced down his fear and bisected the two attackers and leaned into the fight in earnest. In the grueling heat of battle, he focused on relying on his own Felyan reflexes and the combat skills he’d developed with his crewmates to survive the mob of eldritch horrors. His machetes didn’t have the customizable reach of the soldier’s vajra, but they made short work of the first wave of creatures with less effort than expected. To his relief, his fear did not get the better of him.

            After he cleared the woods of all the creatures that he could see, the soldier, her clothes slightly more torn than before, came to his side, her expression of grim determination quite the opposite of his own half-determined, half-disturbed countenance. She sported a few new cuts that stood out on her paper white skin like maraschino juice on snow.

            “Now, we hunt,” she whispered, pressing onto him.

Tyger wasn’t sure if she was horny or simply on an adrenaline high. Still he liked the idea of resting, even the lean to seemed inviting to him right now.

            “Wait, what do you mean, ‘hunt?’”
            “I saw more creatures melt into the forest,” the soldier answered. “They’ve never done that before.”

            “Do you think someone came here?” Tyger asked, feeling the beginnings of a new kind of fear.

            “I hear no screaming,” the soldier replied. She indicated a direction further away from the direction of the hangar, and began walking.

A creeping dread started to turn Tyger’s stomach inside out. “We have to go back to the hangar,” He said urgently. The soldier paused and looked at him, clearly awaiting an explanation.

            “I think it wants something in the ship’s astronav archive,” Tyger explained. “I’m pretty sure it’s found a way to interface with the core systems.”

            “What about the antivirus?” the soldier asked.

            “Against something as sophisticated as this?” Tyger replied, “The antivirus is twenty years out of date as it is, something tells me this thing is far beyond any of your average virus attacks.”

            “Has it gotten far into the system?” the soldier asked.

            “No, not far,” Tyger said. “The access codes dad used kept it locked out for the most part. If I were to venture a guess, I’d say it’s looking for a ...”

            He paused. And a moment later, his mate, whose hand had surreptitiously slipped into his own during their walk, came to a halt as well.

            “What is it?” She asked.

Tyger slapped a hand to his face as he pictured a pair of black eyes looking at him and a small voice saying ‘really?’.

            “A back door!” The thing he needed to do struck him like the blow to the head. “Pip once taught me how to fake out pervasive viruses by creating a half dozen false backdoor protocols that would keep it in a feedback loop!”  Tyger grinned and put on a falsetto tone. “Now pay attention fuzzy boy, this shit might just save your life one day.”

The soldier looked at him disapprovingly. “This Pip sounds like a condescending little trollop.”

Tyger tilted his side from one side to the other. “She can be a little full of herself sometimes, but she’s right most of the time. Looks like that might be the case once again.”

The soldier paused, staring momentarily off into the distance deep in thought. 

            “Then go and do that,” she finally said..

            “You don’t need my help?” Tyger asked. He suddenly wanted to do anything but leave her out here alone. He’d momentarily forgotten that she’d survived for days without him up to this point, despite losing her sisters. An irrational sense of possession seized him and filled him with an even more irrational fear for her life. Involuntarily, his tail wrapped around her waist. “You don’t know how many more of those things are out here.”

            “You underestimate me,” she said. “You probably always have.”

            At those words, Tyger immediately felt like a fool. He smiled, chagrined as his tail slipped away from her waist. His mate, however, caught its tip in her hand, and she ran her fingers down its length. In spite of his fear, in spite of the situation, in spite of all rational sense, he stifled the tremor in his spine that this action produced, and managed a smile.

            “I guess I have, I’m sorry,” he said. He leaned forward and gently licked her lips. She had her mission and he had his. They would be a team, but in a different way. 

            “You be careful,” she said.

“I will,” he said shooting her a wink as he set off in the direction of the hangar.