Heavy Metal Thunder (44 page)

The scared man stares at you for a long time. His
gun lowers slowly.

“Put your gun back up, idiot!” says the smiling
revolutionary. “Hell is wrong with you?”

“Ever since we were kids...” the other mutters.
“Always pulling me along, getting me into stupid situations...”

“What?” says the smiling
revolutionary.
He pauses in thought, then screams, “
Damn you!
” He turns
slightly,
his eyes waver to his friend - then the lawman
fires over and over, drilling both men. They slam into each other, hacking on
blood, as thick rivulets of blood spring out of them both. They crash to the
ground in one another’s arms.

You gain
1 XP
for being such a smooth
operator.

Suddenly the lawman looks at you. “What?” you say.

“Uh... well...” he stammers.

“What?!
Haven’t you ever wasted a ton of dudes before? Believe
me,
this kind of thing happens all the time.”

“I, uh,” he says, trying to recover himself, gun
shaking in his hands. “I
gotta
get outta here. Fight
some crime, or something.
Something.”
He stares ahead
and marches out of the room.

“Right on!” you say.
“
Wha
-a-
atever
, bro.”
You
search the bodies of the dead and find the following gear.

Krieger-Colt Pump-Action Shotgun
(Shotgun, bulk 3)

4 Shotgun Shells (bulk 1)

Cold Cock Auto (Handgun, bulk 2
,
has the serial number scratched off)

4 Handgun bullets (bulk 1)

When you are ready to hit the all-you-can-eat buffet
(and scoop up some XP), turn to section
260
.

You and the other two come to a crossroads in the
hallway. The guard relays your location into his radio. “Okay!” the manager
squawks on the other end. “The backup generator is down the hall that ends at
the
northside
door. Those machines should come right
up through the
southside
door... any minute now!”

The guard nods to you, says, “I’m going to attach my
grapple-rope to that
northside
entrance, so I can
fire right into them as they’re coming.”

“I - I’m going with you!” says the laborer, nodding
to his companion and eyeing you distrustfully.

You look about. “If we set our hooks in one of these
side halls, we could hit the machines from their sides. They might be more
vulnerable, and we could be out of danger ourselves.”

“Yeah,” says the guard, “but what if they go right
by us? There’d be vacuum coming in and if they got by us, we’d have one hell of
a time trying to maneuver behind them. You got a point, man, but... I’m gonna
face ’
em
head-on.”

You consider that both plans have their strong and
weak points. The guard and laborer run to their positions in the
northside
. You do not have long to decide, for you can
already hear the rumbling of the deconstructors.

If you want to set up beside the others and face the
deconstructors head-on, turn to section
542
.

If you would rather latch your hook at the far end
of a side hall and hit the deconstructors from their flanks, turn to section
91
.

You grab of a chunk of something fierce. “Here
boys!” you shout. “Fetch!” You toss the chunk into the mass. One dog gets
plastered in the face and rolls down into the pack, knocking off several and
causing others to fight wildly among
themselves
.

While the dogs regroup, you dive under the pillar
and push through the rubble. You hear several dogs jump down into the room
behind you. You rise to your knees on the far side of the pillar. You feel
ahead in the darkness and find a control panel. You pull a small emergency
latch and an unseen door opens, flooding the chamber with light. You enter and
shut the door behind you. The barking of the dogs disappears suddenly.

You have survived your encounter with the dogs: Gain
2 XP.

Turn to section
187
.

You swing your weapon as the shrieking man swings
his rifle. You catch him full in the face, silencing his bellows and stopping
the momentum of his swing. He staggers backward, pupils dilated oddly, and you
bash his head once more. He falls against a wall, blind from pain. You bring
your weapon crashing down onto his temple, which caves in, and a geyser of
cherry
kool-aid
spews from his mouth before he
topples at your feet, dead.

Turn to section
530
.

The red emergency lights glare with portents of doom
as you pass through the hall, wary of the manager. The hallway ends at a
curving branch. Many doors are labeled for entrances to the docks.
Strange, to think that a vacuum lies just beyond those walls.
You follow signs along one wall until you come to a door marked, “DOCK COMM
STATION - AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT.”

The dock command station is dark, but still has
gravity and air. You notch your helm into place and click the light on. Unlike the
gentle tan of the hallway, the command station is steel-grey. The room is huge,
full of control panels, chairs, papers, equipment everywhere. A window covers
the entire front section. You look
out,
see the vast
expanse of a ruined dock. Blasted hulls float, charred and weightless. You even
see a clump of red ice which may have once been a man. A large steel net
rotates slowly just outside the window; you can use that, later, to haul your
supplies through space.

Far down the station you see two service vehicles
and protruding fuel lines. You jog to the area and find steel canisters. You
haul them to the fuel lines,
then
jam a line into one.
The pump is labeled, “LIQUID HYDROGEN - CAUTION!” While you cannot remember if
the Black Lance Legion used anything different for their machines, nothing
really tells you otherwise. You turn the pump on and the canister jerks a
little while the pump hums with life. You breathe a sigh of relief,
then
jam more steel canisters onto separate pumps.

You take a quick glance at the equipment littering
the room. Nothing seems useful - then you notice a bulky hand-held computer
with a wide screen labeled, “STELLAR NAVIGATION UNIT”. Upon closer examination,
it seems the device is full of star charts, maps of the Asteroid Belt, and even
notes the locations of other STELLAR stations. The nearest station, another
asteroid mining complex, while still incredibly far away, seems that it might
even be along the same route taken by your Black Lance Legion ship, as well as
the hunting Invader ship. Of course, the estimate is approximate; minor
deviations in flight paths in space can end up at vastly different points.
Still, the machine provides some hope, for the next station is a place to which
you could journey and at least get some kind of ship.

If you are skilled in the use of
Computers
,
you can download the navigation data directly into your helm computer.
Otherwise, you must take the
Navigation Computer (bulk 3)
with you. If
you do not have enough room in your inventory, you must discard enough items to
leave room for the necessary computer.

The transport vehicles seem to be empty of fuel. In
another corner you find a huge array of steel O2 tanks and an electronic
handcart. While the fuel pumps hum, you haul oxygen tanks onto the hand cart,
then
push them into the hall near an entrance to the docks.
You lift one off and carefully set it down - then, realizing your need for
speed, kick the whole cart over and dump them all noisily into the hallway. You
continue the process several times. As you work the robot moves back and forth
down the hallway, gathering food and water for you.

Suddenly, an explosion rocks the hall. You panic for
a moment, thinking the hull has been breached and that you will lose your
supplies. Nothing happens. You jog down the hallway,
then
see smoke drifting out from the main comp station. You peer inside. The place
is a mess, with hundreds of thousands of
dollars worth
of equipment in shambles. Then you see a smear on the wall, something like hair
plastered into ketchup. A severed finger juts out of the doorway. You enter and
slip on something banana-peel style and crash to the floor. You look about.
Either someone has chosen to dump a cartload of barbecued sausage links for a
discount meat sale, or you have indeed caught the manager in your trap. Since
there are no for-sale signs around, you’re betting on the latter. You laugh
with relief,
then
continue on with your work.

You and the labor-bot amass a ton of supplies.
Perhaps an hour passes in this way. Then, without warning, the lights flicker
and go black. Even the red alarms continue on for only a few seconds, before
they, too, are cut off. The whir of the air conditioning system clicks
off,
and you rise off the floor slowly. You can hear
rumbling, grinding, far away. The backup generators have been destroyed and
more deconstructors are tearing their way through the station. The end is near.
You kick off a wall and check the fuel canisters. You disconnect one, glad to
see that it is full, then attach a line from your jetpack and refuel yourself.
You seal the canisters, then kick them into the hallway and gather them near
the rest of your supplies. The robot floats down a side hallway, treads moving
uselessly, head whirling in confusion.

Near exhaustion, your heart races with the hope of
escaping this ghost station. You kick off and stop at the door to the ruined
dock, so that you can follow through with the last part of your plan to escape
from the ghost station.

You gain
2 XP
for killing the conniving
manager. Turn to section
555
.

You find
Reika
in a
semi-private corner, sitting on a stack of boxes with a sullen look on her
face. A window with a view of the stars is before her, but you have the
impression that she’s not really looking. Her face looks pinched, hard, and her
laborers’ coveralls look rougher than usual. You decide she’s probably had a
rough life.

If you want to talk to her, turn to section
346
.

If you don’t want to give her the chance to dump her
problems on you, turn to section
492
.

You fire and the laborer’s head whips back. The girl
screams,
then
tears herself away from him as he
crumbles into a heap on the floor, body twitching, blood pouring freely from
his mouth and the back of his ruined head.

“Smooth operator,” you mutter under your breath:
Gain
1 XP.
But the girl glares at you, her face contorted by several
emotions at once. While she’s glad she is now safe, she’s extremely pissed that
you fired a gun so near her head.

She’ll get over it
,
you think.
Cause
she knows I’ll shoot her if
she doesn’t
.

Be sure to erase one bullet from your inventory,
then
turn to section
479
.

You glide over the silent, grey landscape to a field
of waving tentacles. Your helm light flashes on the slender, monstrous dancers,
each a little taller than a man. One quivers near your face and,
creeped
out, you step off and float backwards. Just then something
like a vice
slams shut on your ankle and jerks
you to
the side. Cursing, you see that some tentacle, much longer than the others, has
wrapped around your leg and is pulling you toward its brothers.

If you have a gun and at least one bullet, and want
to blast the tentacle, turn to section
581
.

If you have a hand-to-hand weapon and want to use it
against the thing, turn to section
101
.

If you want to try and wiggle free and fly out of
its range, turn to section
343
.

They don’t make ‘
em
like
this anymore! The lock jumps around but does not shatter into a million pieces
when you kick it. You have to hold onto the tops of the lockers to keep
yourself from floating away.

If you have a
Strength
score of 3 or more and
want to really tear into the lock, turn to section
130
.

Even if your Strength is not that high, if you still
want to show this thing that it’s not the size of the boat, it’s the motion of
your foot slamming into it, turn to section
70
.

You squeeze through the horrible confinement and
come to a dark, open space: Gain
1 XP.
You rise to your knees and feel
ahead in the darkness and find a control panel. You pull a small emergency
latch and an unseen door opens, flooding the chamber with light. You enter and
shut the door behind you. The barking of the dogs disappears suddenly.