The first one came at five minutes, forty-one seconds.
Santos saw it in the amber corridor — a shape detaching from the ceiling, dropping to the grating with the wet slap of chitin on metal, already moving before its legs finished extending. Big. Adult. The thorax plates fully hardened, the blade-arms tucked against its body in the pre-charge configuration she'd learned to read on Haven.
She pulled the trigger.
The machine gun bucked. Five rounds in the first burst — she could count them by the recoil, by the rhythm of brass casings hitting the deck beside her knee, by the way the barrel climbed despite the bracing she'd locked against the doorframe. Three rounds found the target. Two hit chitin and sparked. One punched through the forelimb joint and the stalker's left blade-arm went slack.
It didn't stop. Nothing about Haven's apex predator suggested that losing one arm was sufficient cause to reconsider a charge. The creature ate the distance between them — eight meters, six, four — with the low, driving speed of a thing that had been bred for exactly this kind of corridor fighting.
Ghost fired beside her. The carbine's crack was sharper than the machine gun's sustained roar, cleaner, the sound of a surgical instrument compared to a blunt one. One round. One-handed, braced against the doorframe, the stock jammed into his right shoulder without the left hand to stabilize it. The barrel wavered. The round went where he aimed it anyway — into the skull plate, dead center, because Ghost Morrison had been putting rounds into targets at five hundred meters for fifteen years and this one was four meters away and even one-handed the math worked.
The skull plate cracked. Didn't shatter — the chitin was too thick for a single rifle-caliber round to penetrate at the thickest point. But the impact checked the stalker's charge. Its head snapped sideways. Its legs stuttered, the neural disruption of a brain housing that had just absorbed kinetic energy it wasn't designed for.
Viktor shot it through the neck.
The rifle cracked once. The round entered the gap between skull plate and thorax — the same spot he'd found on the stalker in the engineering bay, the vulnerability that existed because even evolved armor had seams. The creature's forward motion translated into collapse. Its legs gave out in sequence, front to back, like a building settling into its foundations. It hit the deck three meters from the door and skidded on the metal grating, leaving a smear of dark fluid that the emergency lighting turned the color of old engine oil.
"One," Viktor said. He chambered a fresh round. Coughed. Controlled it.
Five minutes, nineteen seconds.
---
The second and third came together.
Santos heard them before she saw them — the clicking, synchronized, the sound of creatures that had been bred in adjacent cages and had learned to coordinate through the chemical pheromones smeared on the walls. They came from the corridor's far end, fifty meters out, two shapes moving in tandem, their bodies offset so that the rear stalker used the forward one as a shield.
Tactical behavior. Conditioned. The breeding logs in the recycling plant had documented aggression protocols and behavioral training, and Santos was watching the product of that training close the distance between death and her doorway.
She fired. Long burst — eight rounds, maybe ten. The corridor became a tunnel of noise and light, muzzle flash turning the amber dark into a strobe, the rounds chewing into the forward stalker's thorax and legs. The creature's chitin cracked and splintered. Fluid sprayed. It stumbled, its front legs failing, its body dropping to the grating and becoming an obstacle.
The second stalker went over it. Used the falling body as a ramp — one stride onto the dying creature's back, the next stride launching it forward, airborne for a half-second, the blade-arms extending in midair, the kill configuration deployed while the thing was still flying.
Santos shifted fire. The machine gun tracked up and right, following the arc. Rounds went wide — two into the ceiling, one into the wall, the penalty of firing at a moving target that was now two meters above the deck and closing at the speed of a car accident.
Ghost fired. Two rounds. Fast. The one-handed grip cost him — the first round hit the corridor wall, a miss that on any other day would have been impossible for a shooter of his caliber. The second found the stalker's abdomen. Low. Off-center. The round entered and didn't exit, the energy absorbed by internal mass.
The stalker hit the doorframe.
The impact bent the metal. Santos threw herself sideways — the machine gun swinging on its sling, her body rolling, the instinct of a woman who'd been dodging things that wanted to kill her since childhood. The stalker's blade-arm swept through the space she'd occupied a quarter-second earlier. The tip scored the deck plate, cutting a groove in the metal with a shriek that was worse than the gunfire.
Viktor stepped forward. Into the doorway. Into the space between the stalker and the people behind it. His rifle came up — not to shoot. To block. The barrel caught the stalker's second blade-arm mid-swing. Metal on chitin. The force drove Viktor backward a full step, his boots sliding on the grating, his body absorbing impact that his lungs couldn't afford.
He coughed. Not a controlled cough. The wet, deep, racking convulsion that happened when his body stopped negotiating and started demanding. His diaphragm spasmed. His hands weakened on the rifle. The stalker pressed forward, blade-arm scraping along the barrel, closing the distance between its mandibles and Viktor's face.
Yuki fired.
One round. The sidearm barked in her hand — the familiar kick of seven millimeters of jacketed hollow point leaving the barrel at three hundred meters per second, aimed not at the chitin or the skull plate or any of the armored surfaces that had been eating their ammunition all night. Aimed at the eye.
The stalker's sensory cluster was a patch of translucent membrane on the side of its skull plate — the only soft tissue visible on the creature's head, the biological camera that processed light and movement and fed targeting data to the nerve bundles that controlled the blade-arms. Yuki's round hit it dead center. The membrane burst. The fluid behind it sprayed sideways in a fan of translucent matter that caught the console light and turned briefly iridescent before it hit the wall.
The stalker's blade-arm stopped. Not because the creature was dead — it wasn't, not yet. Because the targeting system on the right side of its head had just gone dark, and the signals that told the arm where to swing were arriving scrambled. It turned. Disoriented. The remaining eye searched for the threat that had blinded it.
Viktor reversed the rifle. Drove the stock into the stalker's ruined eye socket like a piston — a short, violent stroke with thirty years of combat behind it and the fury of a man whose body was failing and whose will had not. The stock hit bone. Pushed through. The stalker's legs buckled. It fell sideways, blade-arms thrashing without direction, the dying spasms of a nervous system receiving terminal garbage data.
Santos shot it twice more from the floor. Close range. Into the abdomen. The machine gun's reports were flat and percussive at point-blank, and the rounds tore through the weakened chitin and found something vital. The thrashing stopped.
Viktor sagged against the doorframe. The cough came back — worse now, sustained, his entire body folding around his chest as his lungs expelled fluid that tasted of copper and rot. He spat. The glob that hit the deck was pink. Not bright red. Not the arterial color that meant immediate hemorrhage. Pink. The color that meant tissue was weeping, slowly, steadily, the internal seepage of organs that were dissolving by degrees.
"Kozlov," Santos said. She was on her feet, the machine gun up, her eyes already back on the corridor.
"I am standing." He wasn't. He was leaning. The doorframe was doing sixty percent of the work his spine should have been doing. But his hands were on the rifle and the rifle was pointed at the corridor and the corridor was what mattered.
Santos checked her belt. Counted brass. Her stomach dropped.
"Twenty-two," she said. "Maybe twenty-four."
Ghost checked his magazine. "Twenty-six."
Yuki pressed the magazine release on the sidearm. Looked at the remaining rounds. Put the magazine back in. "Three."
Three rounds. Twenty-six in the carbine. Twenty-odd in the machine gun. Viktor's rifle held — she didn't know. Enough. Maybe.
Four minutes, eight seconds.
"Chen," Yuki said.
"Bridge sequence at fifty-three percent. Containment arrays are cycling. Four minutes." His voice came from behind them, from the console, from the blue-lit corner of the engineering bay where a man with cracked ribs was trying to fold spacetime while the people protecting him ran out of the things that kept them alive.
---
The fourth stalker came from above.
Not the corridor. The ceiling. The same conduit lattice that the dead one in the engineering bay had used — the network of pipes and cable trays that ran through the station's infrastructure like veins through a body, providing pathways that human architects had never designed for and stalker physiology had adapted to.
Santos heard it. The scrape of chitin on metal, directly overhead, the sound of something large pulling itself through a space that should have been too small for it. She looked up. Saw the ceiling panel bowing — the metal flexing under weight, the rivets straining.
"Above!" she shouted, and swung the machine gun toward the ceiling.
The panel gave way at the same instant the stalker in the corridor charged.
Two threats. Two directions. Santos firing upward as the ceiling stalker dropped into the engineering bay behind the defensive line, and Ghost pivoting to the corridor where the fifth stalker was barreling down the access tunnel at full speed, blade-arms deployed, the last of the breeding facility's residents making its approach.
The ceiling stalker hit the deck two meters from Chen.
Chen didn't look up. His hands stayed on the keyboard. His eyes stayed on the screen. The bridge sequence was at sixty-one percent and the containment arrays were cycling and his fingers were doing the only thing they could do, which was type, while behind him two hundred kilos of chitin and killing architecture oriented on the sound of keystrokes and the warmth of a human body.
"CHEN!" Santos's machine gun tracked down from the ceiling, following the stalker's fall, the barrel swinging toward the creature — but the firing line crossed the console. Crossed Chen. She couldn't shoot without hitting the thing she was trying to save.
Yuki moved.
Not a decision. Decisions took time, and time was the thing they'd been spending since Haven. She crossed the engineering bay in three strides and hit the stalker from the side — her cybernetic arm extended, the metal fist driving into the creature's flank with the full force of a prosthetic limb that didn't know about muscle fatigue or adrenaline limits.
The impact was brutal. Not for the stalker — the chitin absorbed the blow the way it absorbed everything, the evolutionary armor that had defeated rifle rounds and machine gun bursts and every other human weapon they'd thrown at it. Brutal for Yuki. The impact traveled up her cybernetic arm and hit the junction where metal met flesh — the surgical interface at her shoulder, the point where the prosthetic's frame connected to her skeletal system through titanium anchors drilled into bone.
Her shoulder screamed. Not metaphor. The sensory nerves at the interface fired a burst of information that her brain interpreted as white-hot agony, the biological equivalent of an error message that said *you just hit something too hard and the hardware is not designed for this.*
But the stalker moved. The impact shoved it sideways — not far, maybe a meter, but enough to redirect the blade-arm that had been aimed at Chen's back. The chitin tip scored the console's housing instead, gouging a trench in the metal casing, missing Chen's hip by inches.
The stalker turned on her. Fast. Its mandibles opened — the grinding motion of a predator that had found a target at arm's length and was switching from blade-arms to the close-range weapon that didn't need room to swing.
Santos's machine gun roared.
She'd shifted position. Moved left. Found an angle that put the stalker between her barrel and the far wall instead of the console. The burst was six rounds — precious, irreplaceable, each one a withdrawal from a bank balance that was already overdrawn. Four hit. Two found the gaps. One went through the thorax and exited in a spray of dark fluid that painted the engineering bay's back wall.
The stalker's turn toward Yuki became a stumble. Its front legs crossed. It went down — not dead, damaged, the armor cracked and leaking but the creature still trying to orient, still trying to deploy the blade-arms, the conditioning overriding the damage signals.
Yuki drew the sidearm. Two rounds left.
She put one into the nerve cluster. Point-blank. The same spot Ghost had used, the gap between skull and thorax. The round entered and the stalker stopped. Everything stopped — the legs, the blade-arms, the mandibles, the entire biological machine going rigid and then slack and then dead in the sequence she'd seen so many times it had become familiar the way death should never be.
Two rounds left in the sidearm. One in the chamber.
In the corridor, Ghost's carbine was firing. Controlled bursts. The fifth stalker was still coming — she could hear it, the clicking legs, the blade-arms scraping the walls as it charged through a corridor too narrow for it to deploy fully. Ghost and Viktor were in the doorway, one firing, one coughing, the sounds braided together into a noise that was equal parts violence and decay.
"Bridge at eighty-seven percent!" Chen shouted. His voice cracked on the number. His hands hadn't stopped moving through the entire fight — the typing continued through the gunfire and the impact and the stalker dying two meters from his chair, the concentration of a man who had learned on Haven that the only contribution he could make to combat was completing the task that combat was buying time for.
Ghost fired. Three more rounds. Viktor fired once. The sounds in the corridor changed — the clicking stopped. The blade-arm scraping stopped. Something hit the deck with the heavy, wet finality of a body that wouldn't be getting up.
"Clear," Ghost said. His voice was thin. Stretched. The sound of a man operating at the edge of his reserves, held together by discipline and the one round he was keeping for the math that didn't work.
"How many is that?" Santos asked.
"Five dead. One wounded, unaccounted." Yuki ejected the spent casing from the sidearm. One round in the magazine. One. "Chen."
"Ninety-four percent. Ninety-seven. The containment is—" He stopped. His hands stopped. The thing that never stopped, stopped. "Sarge."
Yuki moved to the console. The screen showed the wormhole bridge interface — the routing table, the CENTCOM destination, the bridge generation sequence that had been building toward the stable connection they needed to get off this station.
The numbers were wrong.
Not the destination. Not the routing. The stability index. The metric that measured how long the bridge would hold once formed — the difference between a doorway you could walk through and a doorway that collapsed while you were inside it.
"The node's been inactive for eight months," Chen said. His voice had gone flat again. The stripped-down tone of a man delivering bad news that the data wouldn't let him soften. "The magnetic containment arrays are cycling, but they're degraded. Micro-fractures in the superconducting coils. The arrays can generate a bridge, but they can't sustain it at full stability."
"How long?"
"Two minutes. Maybe two and a half. After that, the containment fails and the bridge collapses." He looked at her. "From when I activate it. Not from when it forms."
Two minutes. To get from the engineering bay back to the shuttle. Through the concourse. Through the corridors. Through the docking coupling. Strap in. Undock. Fly into a wormhole that was already dying.
"How far is the wormhole exit point from the station?"
"Three hundred meters. The node generates the bridge at the standard deployment distance. Park will need to undock, orient, and hit the bridge aperture in under two minutes from the moment I—"
"Activate it," Yuki said.
"Sarge, the timing—"
"Activate it, Chen. Now."
His hand went to the console. Hovered over the initiation command. His fingers trembled — the ribs, the exhaustion, the understanding that the button he was about to press started a clock that would kill them all if they were one second late.
He pressed it.
The station groaned. Not a mechanical sound — a structural one, the deep bass vibration of magnetic fields spinning up through superconducting coils that hadn't carried current in eight months, the physical infrastructure of a wormhole node translating electrical power into the focused gravitational distortion that would punch a hole between here and CENTCOM.
"Bridge forming," Chen said. "Two minutes."
Yuki keyed the radio. The stolen security unit. Channel 15 — the Reaper frequency that connected them to the shuttle, to Park, to the pilot who needed to hear what was coming.
"Park. Bridge is active. Two-minute window. Undock now. Fly to the node exit point — three hundred meters, standard deployment distance. We're coming to you."
Park's voice came back immediately. No hesitation. No questions. The voice of a pilot who'd been sitting in a cockpit for an hour waiting for exactly this call.
"Copy. Undocking. I'll hold at the aperture."
"Doc — open the coupling. We're running."
"Copy."
Yuki turned to the squad. Ghost in the doorway, carbine in one hand, blood soaking through the dressing on his left arm. Viktor beside him, rifle steady, lungs drowning, the pink spit drying on his chin. Santos on the floor, machine gun across her knees, twenty-odd rounds in the belt and a face that said she'd use every one of them on whatever stood between her and the way out. Chen at the console, one hand on the interface, the other pressed against ribs that had stopped being ribs and started being a liability.
"Run," Yuki said.
They ran.
Through the engineering bay door. Into the corridor. Section C's access tunnel, ninety meters of metal grating and amber light and the knowledge that somewhere in the station's bones, one wounded stalker was still alive and unaccounted for.
Santos led. Machine gun up. Her boots hit the grating with the rhythm of someone who'd been running from things since the favela and hadn't stopped and wouldn't stop until the running killed her or the things did.
Ghost behind her. One arm pressed to his chest, the other holding the carbine, his stride long and controlled, the economy of a man who'd learned to conserve motion the way a sniper conserved rounds.
Chen next. Gasping. Each breath a cost. Each step a negotiation. His hand on the wall, his body tilted, the cracked ribs turning a ninety-meter sprint into a ninety-meter argument between will and physiology.
Viktor. Behind Chen. Covering the rear. His rifle up. His breathing a soundtrack of fluid and determination. Moving at a pace that his lungs said was impossible and his legs said was non-negotiable.
Yuki last. Sidearm out. One round. Her cybernetic shoulder throbbing from the impact with the stalker, the interface screaming complaints that she filed in the same place she filed all pain — later. Deal with it later. If there was a later.
The junction. They crossed it at speed — past the dead stalkers, past the dark fluid, past the evidence of Ghost's one-man stand. Into the main concourse. Tables and chairs and the viewport showing stars and the station's emptiness pressing in from all sides.
Through the concourse. Into Residential Section B. The corridor to the docking coupling — fifty meters. Forty. The air getting warmer as they approached the shuttle's atmosphere bleeding through the coupling seal.
"One minute thirty," Chen gasped. He was counting. Even running, even dying, even with his ribs grinding bone against bone, he was counting.
The coupling hatch was open. Doc's face in the opening — the calm, controlled face of a medic who saw four people running toward him in various states of damage and was already cataloguing injuries.
Santos went through first. Then Ghost. Doc grabbed Chen's arm and pulled him over the threshold. Viktor came next — he stumbled at the coupling, his boot catching the lip of the hatch, his body pitching forward. Doc caught him. The medic's hands on the old soldier's vest, holding him upright, the professional grip that said *I have you* without saying it.
Yuki came through last. Pulled the hatch behind her. Didn't seal it — no time.
"Park! Go!"
Park's hands were already on the controls. The shuttle's engines fired — not the gentle maneuvering thrust of orbital approach, but the full-power burn of a vehicle that needed to cover three hundred meters in less than ninety seconds.
The shuttle lurched. The coupling tore free — metal screaming, the docking port ripping loose from Station Seven's ventral surface, the physical connection between shuttle and station severed with the violence of a departure that couldn't wait for procedure.
Through the cockpit windshield, space. Stars. And ahead of them, growing, the shimmer of a wormhole bridge forming three hundred meters from a dead station's hull — a circle of bent light, smaller than the one that had taken them from Haven, less stable, the edges flickering with the visual noise of magnetic containment that was already failing.
"Fifty seconds," Chen said from the cargo bay floor where he'd fallen.
Park aimed the shuttle at the shimmer. The engines burned. The distance closed — two hundred meters, one fifty, the wormhole growing in the windshield, filling it, the light bending around its edges in patterns that hurt to look at.
"Thirty seconds."
The edges were flickering faster. The containment was going. The bridge was dying.
"Park—"
"I see it."
The shuttle hit the threshold at full burn, and the universe folded around them for the second time that day.
