Dead Worlds (Necrospace Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

lest it kill him, eat him, or perhaps even lay eggs in his rotting flesh.
    Samuel was yelling without realizing it, and continued to fire as his light tracked the nightmarish creature. He could see bright yellow liquid clouding in front of him from multiple ragged holes in the creature’s tentacled body.
    His magazine clicked empty as the beast fled deeper into the darkness of the chamber, well out of the range of his lights. Samuel knew with certainty he’d wounded it, perhaps even mortally, but knew just as certainly that his position had been exposed to the gunner above.
    Confirming his thoughts, a salvo of bullets streaked through the water. They would have punched several holes in him had Samuel not immediately thrown himself to the side, simultaneously shutting off his gun-light and dropping the light stick as he re-loaded. Samuel knew he was taking a huge risk moving so quickly through the murky darkness but it had to be done.
    Samuel found that if he kept his eyes upwards he could just make out the intermittent muzzle flashes of the machine gun as it alternated between firing into the water around it and then toward the docks.
    As he moved, the marine could see that the gunner was standing on some of some kind of grate. He decided this was as good a vantage point as he was going to get. Toggling his combat rifle back to semi-automatic, he began firing rounds up through the grate.
    The marine expected many of his shots to be stopped or deflected by the grating, but as he had hoped, several seemed to find their mark and a body splashed into the water above him.
    As Samuel moved aside to avoid the sinking corpse, several fleshy tentacles erupted from the darkness to attack him. They fastened to his armor with unbelievable strength using dozens of tiny suckers on the bottom side of the tentacle. In the half-light, Samuel could see that several tentacles had also attached themselves to the corpse. Despite his shock, he realized that if he did not disable that gun his comrades would be in continued peril as more hostiles rushed to operate the weapon, so he held his ground. Samuel felt the tentacles slither around his legs and torso. Apparently the creature wasn’t intelligent enough to differentiate between his weapon and his arm so his aim was unwavering.
    Refusing to struggle against the tentacles wrapped around the rest of his body, he focused on his iron sights and the dim flash of the machine gun muzzle as he continued to fire. His clip went dry moments before more tentacles wrapped around his gun and wrenched it from his hands. The marine was very thankful in that moment, that command had deemed it allowable for those Reapers who wished to do so to carry their boarding knives.
    Although meant for the close confines of shipboard combat, Samuel and many of the other marines had found them incredibly useful in downspire. Samuel slid his blade from the sheath on his forearm and began slashing wildly at the tentacles as they wrenched pieces of his armor loose from his body and began to ravage the thin body glove and flesh beneath.
    Standard issue Reaper battle armor was cheap and overall considered low-tech when compared to the power suits of the Grotto Storm Troopers or elite mercenaries, though what it lacked in sophistication it made up for in overall stoutness.
    When it came to small arms fire the armor would deflect all but the most precise or direct shots, however, no Grotto engineer had ever intended to protect the soldiers from an enemy attempting to tear the armor away. Samuel felt as if he were some crustacean being assaulted by the most macabre of cephalopods. In this case, reality was much more horrifying than anything his imagination could have conjured. 
    Now that the gun above wasn’t providing even temporary illumination, Samuel was unable to see much of anything. Even if he’d been able to get a light-stick ignited all he would have seen would be the billowing clouds of the creature’s yellow blood