Oh, I had a bad feeling.

I stepped forward slowly, circling the web of connections. The only sound was my bad knee grinding and the despairing repeat of the distress signal. 2.0 said, Uh, where are we going?

I have to check something. I angled around to a break between two tables where there was a void in the connections. I eased forward and managed to fall/crouch down on the floor near the sprawled body of the human.

The thing is, I had realized there was no odor of decomp. The death had to have happened at least months ago, if not more than a planetary year, or years, if it was the incident that had kicked off the major contamination spread. But the shape of the body I could see under the white growth didn’t look all sunken and gross or dried out.

The white crystalline substance was grainy, and it grew out of the human’s ears and mouth. I had to edge forward at an angle and then lower my head down to get a view of the human’s face. The skin had blue-white blotchy patches standing out against the light tan. That might be decay, and it might be the same process that had changed the Targets’ skin color and texture. I saw the eyes were blue. And they were looking at me.

I scrambled away from it, out of the circle of racks and tables. I couldn’t get up because of my knee and I was afraid to turn my back on it to use the wall to climb to my feet.

2.0 said, I know violence isn’t the solution to everything, but in this case …

In this case, yeah.

I pointed my right arm energy weapon at the human’s head, upped the intensity as far as it would go, and fired.

The white material flashed and emitted a faint odor I couldn’t identify. The human still looked at me, expressionless. Their eyes were crusted with dried fluid, unable to blink. Oh, why can’t anything be easy, just this once?

I tried to kill it three times. Until 2.0 said, Those scars and marks on the floor around it could be projectile and energy weapon impacts. Somebody else has tried to kill it, multiple times, from different directions and with different weapons.

Great. Tried to kill it, and tried to blow up the entrance to this chamber, but had been stopped before they could use an explosive big enough. The contamination must have done something to the human host’s organic tissue, a self-protection function.

I was reluctant to go over there and put my fist through its head because (a) I thought I was immune to code contamination but maybe not if I actually got remnant on my organic parts and (b) if energy weapons wouldn’t work, punching probably wouldn’t, either. I needed to be smart about this.

I made myself turn around and use the wall to drag myself up so I could stand. There are tools in the shaft. We need to find something that can smash it, or a bigger explosive. I know, I can barely stand and walk, so this was me being really optimistic right now.