Mare Space

"Run! Run!" Crystal's voice continued to scream through the com, as Sky Lark and Sergei continued to flee through the hallway. They zipped through dark corridors and hallways as vents lining the walls around them seemed to explode as more monstrous, abominable beings, just like the ones they saw before and were currently being chased by, emerged from the walls, emitting garbled moans as their unnatural frames lurched after them. Soon, Crystal's commands were consumed by static as the range was put to its limit.

Making a final turn, the pony and changeling saw a cargo lift enter their field of view, and it was as if a miracle had been granted to them.

"In there!" Sergei shouted. The two dashed into the lift, and Sky hurriedly pressed a holographic button on it once each was inside. As the doors shut, the creature chasing them disappeared behind the closing slabs of rectangular metal, and the elevator quickly descended.

"What... the hell... were those?!" Sergei panted a few seconds later, out of breath. Closing her eyes, Sky shook her helmeted head and gulped in a load of air.

"I... I don't kno-"

Sky was interrupted as the lift shook to a grinding halt. The doors to the elevator were suddenly split apart, and one of the bellowing creatures from seconds before tried to force its way through, its horrendously rotted and disfigured facial features slobbering a mixture of yellow saliva and putrid green liquid on the metal floor. Sergei screamed again and back up against the narrow wall in terror, while Sky turned about and bucked her back legs out, kicking the fiend's fleshy, furless body away a meager few feet. Recovering quickly, it charged forward again, claw-arms raised to kill the pony that tried to attack it, when the doors to the elevator suddenly, and abruptly slammed shut once more, sending a gurgling screech through the air as the aberration was brutally bisected by the closing entryway.

With that nasty business done, the lift began to move downward again, and when Sergei's cries died down, both passengers went silent. The beast's upper body, or, at least what was left of it, lied motionless on the ground they stood upon, though its pale, dead eyes and limbs still twitched. The second the elevator stopped for good and its doors opened, Sky stumbled out, clutching her stomach in a sick fashion, and was only able to make it a few feet forward before her helmet shifted opened, and the unicorn, unable to cope with all that had happened in just the last minute, finally threw up, her stomach expunging its half-digested contents upon the metal floor.

Sergei slowly exited and let his helmet collapse back into the armor as well, his revealed face filled more with blank shock than anything else. When a good minute passed, his expression became much more neutral as Sky herself started to recover.

"Oh... oh, dear Celestia..." Sky moaned, trying to lift herself back up on shaky lags. "What... what's happening here, Sergei? What the living hell is happening here?"

"I'm as lost as you," the medic replied, placing a hoof on her shoulder before helping her get back onto her four legs. "Those... things looked like ponies, or at least once were, but their bodies were... different... wrong. I... I don't know what happened to them. A virus, maybe? A mutagen? By the hive, I've never seen anything like those before..."

Sky's head lifted as she remembered something. "Charcoal. Oh, no, no, no... no, no, no..."

"D-don't worry about her, Sky," Sergei spoke, trying to calm the unicorn as she started to shake her white-furred, blue-maned head with her hooves in a nervous panic. "You told me she was resourceful, right? It's a big ship, and that diagram of it said a few compartments were still undamaged and using power. I'm sure she got away from those things."

Sky Lark went silent, and her small fear-induced convulsion stopped. Taking in a deep breath she looked to her comrade again with a shaken look in her eyes.

"I pray that you're right," she said. "Let's... let's see if this room has anything we can use."

Looking around, the only sights that befell the two were a workbench, and a closed door near it. Slumped next to the workbench was a long-deceased pony's corpse, dry blood covering various parts of his form. Two, deep gashes stuck out of the unfortunate pony's chest, and it wasn't hard to see his cause of death was from blood loss, judging from the trail of red that lead up to it. It was also clear that before he died, he was able to write four words, in blood, on an area just above the workbench.

CUT OFF THEIR LIMBS

After taking in the awful sight, Sky noticed something else that was lying on the workbench as she approached it. She couldn't help but sigh in a relieved voice as she inspected it.

"What did you find?" the changeling inquired from behind her, noticing her reaction.

"It's a... 211-V plasma cutter, by the looks of it," the unicorn answered, adjusting the small device's controls with her hoof. "A hoof-held mining tool that can shoot out a stream of potent energy, and is typically used to cut through less-thick minerals. If used incorrectly, it can just as easily... slice off limbs."

"You're planning on using that?" he asked. After finishing her final calibrations on the tool and magnetically attaching its base and trigger to her right hoof, she looked back at him and nodded, before her eyes trailed down to where the deceased pony sat in an unmoving state below the words he had written in his own blood.

"The biggest chance we have is to trust what he left behind, I think," she spoke. ""Cut off their limbs.""

"The bullets I saw our team fire... they didn't do anything to slow those creatures," Sergei started to agree, though uneasily. "Dismemberment sounds like a tough, but perfectly viable option. I hope."

Their conversation was adjourned as a plea went out nearby, on the other side of the door beside the workbench. The two rushed up to it the moment they heard it.

"Help! Please, if anypony's in there, let me in!" the male voice cried out. "I'm out of ammo, and there's... there's... oh!"

"Don't worry! I'm opening it!" Sky shouted back, finding out to her dismay that the door was as inanimate as a dead battery a second after speaking. She flipped open the nearby electrical box to reroute its power, shifting wires around as the pony on the other side let out a louder cry.

"Oh shit, one's here! Let me in! LET ME IN!" the voice shrieked as Sky struggled to fix the final wire. Just as she finished and Sergei inputted the commands to the door, a sick noise resembling the tearing of flesh and a muffled, choked whine shot through the crisp air. Their helmets enveloping their heads once more, the changeling and unicorn looked into the opening doorway before reeling back in horror.

Another one of the monsters was the first thing they saw, and it was savagely biting, crunching, and tearing through what little remained of a pony that was once begging for aid; the majority of which had already been reduced to torn-up strands of bloody meat and bits of cloth and bone. Upon noticing movement out of the corner of its eyes, the monstrosity lifted its bare, deformed head in their direction, crimson ichor running down its parted, mandible-like lower jaws as if cruelly parodying spaghetti sauce dripping from a foal's chin, and growled.

Jumping to her hind hooves for a better position and quickly raising her makeshift weapon in her front ones, Sky focused its sights on her target and activated the plasma cutter, sending out a burst of blue energy the moment the being charged. Bellowing upon being struck, the beam neatly sliced through both of its front legs, sending it to the ground. Unimpeded, the pair of arm-like projections on its shoulders swiftly planted their spike-claws into the ground, and it dragged itself forward toward its prey. Sky took another shot and cut one of its shoulder-arms off, and as soon as the dismembered limb landed on the ground, the being went silent and still.

Not taking a chance that it was completely dead, Sky ran forward with a roar and planted a hoof through monster's corpse, crushing its midsection with a well-placed stomp. Seeing that it wasn't coming back to life, and panting from the rush, her helmeted visage faced Sergei once more as he approached her from where he hid near the workbench.

"Dismemberment is a success, I guess," he tried, and failed, to deadpan in a vain attempt to lessen the gravity of the situation. Sky started to respond by reloading the clip on the plasma cutter, sending a spent, burning shell popping from the device to the ground, and sighing in an unamused manner before her muscles tensed up again.

"We need to move," she said, looking at the remains of the pony the creature had killed. "We need to try and link up with he crew again, and search for survivors. If that guy survived until now, others could still be alive, like you said. Charcoal could be among them."

"Then let's go," the changeling replied, confidently. Carefully watching where their booted hooves stepped, Sky and Sergei passed into the hallway in front of them, and the door soon sealed behind them.