<strong><span class="bbc_u">Rebekah Graham and Sean Gallager</span></strong><br/><br/>The guard remained impassive as Sean spoke, until he touched her weapon.  The butt of the rifle lashed out like a bolt of lightning, catching Sean in the jaw with an audible<em>crack</em>.  It wasn't enough to knock someone like him out, but if he was lucky enough to survive ARCTICA and get an x-ray someday in the future, he'd find that she'd made twin hairline cracks that snaked up the right of his mandible like fissures in a glacier.  In the short term, the entire lower half of his face felt numb and distant.  The right side of his jaw was swelling up like a sponge in water, and blood was already trickling down from a gash on his lower cheek.<br/><br/>"Holy shit," she said, sounding surprised.  She lowered her rifle so that it rested against her chest, and reached out to Sean.  At some unseen command, the tint in her visor melted away, revealing dim green eyes set deep within a dark, round face. "What the fuck did you do that for?" she asked breathlessly, looking genuinely concerned.<br/><br/>Her eyes suddenly fixed on a point behind Sean and Rebekah, going wide with alarm and horror.  The rifle swung back up, her finger on the trigger.<br/><br/>"<em>GET DOWN!</em>" she screamed.<br/><br/><hr/><br/><strong><span class="bbc_u">Zoey Calhoun and Alec Llewellyn</span></strong><br/><br/>The retrieval of the bag was uneventful at first.  Zoey's temporary room had not changed much since she had left it a minute earlier: the blanket on the cot had bunched up against the wall during the long bank, partially obscuring the window.  They could just see the tip of the wing out the small portal, bouncing ferociously in what looked to be a blizzard.<br/><br/>Out in the hallway, the soldiers ignored them, their rifles intent on the rear of the aircraft.  Zoey and Alec made good time despite the odd angle, and were halfway back to the front of the corridor when they saw the guard at the door looking at them with wide eyes, her rifle flickering up to a firing position at an astonishing speed.<br/><br/>No, she wasn't looking at them.  She was looking<em>past</em>them.<br/><br/>"<em>GET DOWN!</em>" she screamed.<br/><br/><hr/><br/>"Hold!" one of the soldiers, the woman who had ordered Alec out of his room, shouted.  "Hold fire!"<br/><br/>They held.<br/><br/>At the rear of the corridor, perhaps eight meters from where Alec and Zoey and ten meters from where Rebekah and Sean stood, a patch of the ceiling half a meter wide was glowing a bright red.  The grate holes vanished as the metal bubbled and melted, vanishing as the struts fused together into a thin sheet of boiling matter.  It began to bulge downwards, growing hotter and hotter until it glowed, an angry red dome surrounded by bubbling orange.<br/><br/>"Jie, back!" the same woman shouted.  The soldier nearest the melthole slowly edged back in a half-crouch, his rifle unwavering.  Zoey may recognize him as the same man who had knocked on her door.<br/><br/>The dome burst.<br/><br/>A spray of white-red droplets showered the end of the corridor.  The molten metal burned smoking holes through the prefab walls of the rooms and formed angry, smoldering lumps on the grate floor.  The doorway where Jie had been standing sagged, having received the worst of the onslaught.<br/><br/>"Contact," Jie said, his voice brittle ice.  The smell of ozone was suddenly cloying, overpowering, sickening.  Inky black smoke poured from the hole where the dome of molten metal had been.<br/><br/>No... not smoke.  Not quite.  It moved too slowly, too rigidly.  It didn't catch air or drift, didn't swirl or disperse like smoke should, but<em>floated</em>through the air like a gob of ink dropped in clear water.  It coalesced, guided by some unknown intelligence.  A single thick trunk tested the air lazily, poking this way and that.  It glittered like obsidian in the sterile light, pulsing and throbbing, unseen tendrils coiling just beneath the surface of its nebulous exterior.<br/><br/>"Hold your fire!"<br/><br/>The eldritch tendril extended with a sudden speed that it's sluggish movement had not previously hinted at.  The "smoke" dropped to the floor, now moving like thick fudge poured from the lip of a ladle.  There, it piled upon itself and seemed to harden, like a mound of wet sand dribbled from a child's bucket drying beneath a summer sun.  You suddenly realize that this "cloud" was neither a liquid or a gas, but a swarm.<br/><br/>"Wh--" Jie began.<br/><br/>The swarm whirred to life.  A dozen tentacles suddenly manifested from the black sand, cables of ductile obsidian, lashing and thrashing.  They ranged in length from a half meter to a few centimeters, some as thick as your finger, others as fine as your hair.  They attached themselves to the grated metal floor and gripped the plastic walls on either side.  The central mass of the swarm hardened and coalesced into a solid core from which the tentacles pulsed and flowed, an egg-shaped capsule slightly smaller than your head.  The bottom of the core was concave, a smooth featureless black pit.  As you watched, the pit began to spin at a tremendous speed, it's color shifting from black to red to white until it was so bright that even glancing at it would leave a painful afterimage.  A cone of white-blue superheated air guttered into existence within the concave, which now vaguely resembled a miniature jet engine.  The grated floor beneath it immediately started to spit and bubble, even as the metallic thing lifted itself a half meter above it on its cables.<br/><br/>While most were covered with a fine vellum-like fuzz, the largest of these cables was tipped with a hooked barb.  It lashed out like a whip, faster than your eye could track, and punched a bloody hole through Jie's visor.  His question, never to be heard, died on his lips.<br/><br/>The thing had come to life, killed Jie, and begun surging forward within the span of a single second.<br/><br/>No order needed to be given.  The soldiers opened fire simultaneously, their rifles thunder incarnate.