Heavy Metal Thunder (56 page)

You manage to force your helm on just as ice
crystals form in your tear ducts and greasy hair. You are overcome with a black,
dark feeling that drowns out all second-guessing. Without thinking you haul
yourself towards an exit. Two more holes are blasted into the side of the ship
and you know that a sniper is attacking from a hideout on one of the asteroids.
As the vacuum churns within the
Narrenschiff
you clamber into a small depressurization chamber, lock the door behind you,
then kick open the exit door. Darkness lies before you and you blast your jets
on full throttle. All is silent, but the kick of the jet behind you is a roar
of freedom in your blood, a freedom from lying fallow, the freedom to use your
killing arts, for you know that now you enter into the dance of death that is
your ultimate destiny.

A sniper in the service of the Invaders waits for
you on one of the asteroids. Now, finally, you will face the true enemy.
And
one of you will die
.

(If you have died, then you may
Regenerate
by
turning to section
312
, or, if you want to go
further back, section
179
.
)

Turn to section
247
.

You draw your handgun on the deconstructors. You
watch their red eyes bobbing wildly, casting tracers in the dark. You aim in
their general direction, then fire.

You must now compute a number that signifies
everything you’re throwing at these attackers. If you are skilled in
Weapon
Proficiency: Ranged
, and it is with the type of gun you are using, add 3 to
your total. For every
2 bullets
that you choose to fire, add 1 to your
total. Add your
Dexterity
to the total.

If the number you have created
is
4 or less, turn to section
18
.

If the number is between 5 and 9, turn to section
550
.

If the number is greater than 10, turn to section
563
.

You study the door’s rhythm. You crouch low before
it. You think of black-
sooted
workers laboring to
upkeep some machine whose intent is inscrutable. The door pounds, pounds,
pounds. You suck in a great lungful of air. Your mind kicks into action, sends
out fight-or-flight chemicals. The door slows in time as your mind speeds up.
Then it opens... and you leap forward.

If
your
Dexterity
score is 2 or more, turn to section
564
.

If your
Dexterity
score is not that high,
turn to section
503
.

Your jets flare and you arc about like a screaming
hurricane, but the tentacle only tightens about your leg: Lose
1 Blood.
Soon you are exhausted, and nearly puke inside your helm. The limb of the beast
senses your weakness and brings you crashing down into a nest of slithering
tentacles. The quivering mass of arms wrap around you, crushing you, rolling
you around.

You can barely breathe, much less scream. The things
are very powerful and you know that they could crush the life from you.
Instead, it seems that they are moving you somewhere.

If you want to roll up into a ball to minimize the
damage the tentacles can do to you, turn to section
96
.

If you have a gun and at least one bullet, you can
try to free your gun and fire at the nest of tentacles by turning to section
501
.

If you want to try to free a hand-to-hand weapon to
defend yourself, turn to section
251
.

You walk with the guard and, finally, reach the
center of the station. At a wide doorway he removes a data card from his pocket
and slides it across a panel. The door opens and you follow him inside.

The room is cluttered, narrow, and reeks of human
sweat. Inside you see the others whom the guard told you about, weary-looking
men with bags under their eyes. One man is slender, bald, with thin lips and
slitted
grey eyes. He wears a white doctor’s frock.

Another man rests in a heap on the floor. He is old
and disheveled, bearded, wiry, and you get the impression that he looked no
better before the attack. He wears green laborer’s coveralls.

The last man wears a fine managerial suit fixed with
the green STELLAR emblem. He has black hair and a neatly trimmed, white-flecked
beard. He glares at you imperiously.

“Didn’t find so much out there,”
says the guard, “except for some
kinda
killer
robots.”

“Who is that man?” barks the manager.

“Dunno,” says the guard, sitting on an empty crate
and leaning his rifle against the wall.

“I’m a soldier in the Black Lance Legion,” you say.
“I think I got separated from my unit.”

The old laborer stands suddenly, paces about tiredly.
He wheezes as he walks by you. “Jus’ about figures,” he says. “We get abandoned
by our people, people come in to help, then they abandon they own people...
jus’ about figures.”

“Figures?” you say, darkly.
“How
so.”

“That’s
jus
’ people,” the
old man wheezes. “Either
meanin
’ good but too dumb to
follow through, or out for
theyselves
and jus’
makin
’ hell all over. Worthless, man, just worthless...”

Suddenly something terrible flares up in you.
Something about the man’s words drives you beyond anger, beyond any fury you
have ever felt. Your vision goes red and your muscles tense, then coil upon
you. You feel the unendurable need to crush this man.

If you wish to slam your fist into his face, turn to
section
583
.

If you wish to push him into a wall and crush him
against it, turn to section
129
.

If you want to hold in this overwhelming urge, turn
to section
283
.

You continue down the darkened hallway and float
into the lounge. The boxes drift near the floor. You tear open one and, to your
delight, find tons of rations, snacks, even complete meals. You check a side
room and find it full of jugs of water. You spend half an hour stacking the
items in the hallway,
then
carefully push the entire
mass before you. The trip down the long hallway is a small nightmare of
organizing and reorganizing, but you are thankful that the entire length of the
hall is a straight stretch with no narrow or closed doorways.

You stop near an entrance to the docks and spend
some time reorganizing the mass of goods in a space nearby. Then you reenter
the dock command station, casting your light about for fear of the stalking
manager. You gather up the steel fuel canisters, then attach a line from your
jetpack to one of the things and refuel yourself. Your heart begins racing with
the hope of escaping this ghost station. You push the fuel canisters through
the air and slowly kick them against a wall near the rest of your supplies. Then
you return to the command station and gather up as many of the giant oxygen
tanks as you can. Another half hour passes as you come near to exhaustion
collecting your supplies together.

Then, you hear a radio sputtering in the darkness.

Turn to section
180
.

You aim down the barrel of your gun.

“Don’t do it!” says the laborer. “I - I - I can’t
cover my whole body...
you might hit me!
”

“Do it!” screams the girl. “Come on, you pussy!
Shoot!”

One shot, one kill
,
you think to yourself.
Let’s just hope the kill isn’t the girl
.

You must now compute a number that determines the
outcome of your shot. This number is your
Dexterity
. If you are skilled
in
Weapon Proficiency: Ranged
with the gun you are using, add 3 to this number.
You cannot increase your chance of a successful shot by using more than one
bullet; this is a skilled shot, and it only takes one bullet to blow someone’s
dome wide open.

If your number is 5 or less, turn to section
290
.

If your number is 6 or more, turn to section
474
.

You jog in a straight line, ignoring side halls. All
signs indicate that the ruined docks are straight ahead. You hear a radio
sputtering far behind you. You turn and look, but the halls are empty. The
manager may be following you. You continue on.

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 COMMAND STATION - AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT.”

Just before you enter, you hear the radio sputtering
again. “They’re here! They’re he-” says the voice on the radio, just before the
signal is cut off. But there is no time to deal with the manager, wherever he
is, so you rush into the dock station.

The room 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
be along the same route taken by your Black Lance Legion ship - and 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 that you could journey to
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. Unless you gain the
Computers
skill later in the adventure, you must keep this item until the text indicates
that you may discard it.

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 that you can use to gather all the food in the lounge.

If you wish to use the handcart to haul oxygen tanks
near a door to the dock, turn to section
17
.

If you wish to take the handcart to the lounge and gather
up all the food supplies you can carry, turn to section
264
.

If you wish to wait by the fuel canisters and make
sure nothing happens to them until they are full, turn to section
40
.

Visibly relieved, the men race up
the gangplank.
One of them does not look at you,
however, as he is still too angry.
Another smiles
at
you weakly.

You feel a strange, bitter stabbing in your guts.
The fact that these men did not try to kill you for your comments, and even
seemed relieved when you admitted to “joking” with them, strikes you as
horribly sad. You know that, with no time to spare, the men were desperate to
get on this ship but really had no way to challenge you. And probably that is
the way those men have felt their entire lives: Dependent on the mercy of
monsters, with only their willingness to toil and sweat as the sole card to
play in a gamble that their masters will show them some kindness and will let
them live.

You feel disgust toward this attitude - then you
remember that it’s not like you challenged the two guards, though they struck
you as pretty worthless human beings.
Because they had guns,
and a brute willingness to use them.
Then you feel disgusted with yourself.