The hollow click echoed off the tiles. A high, predatory sound, an insect’s chitter. The magazine was empty.

She was still coming. She towered to the ceiling, her eight-limbed body glistening in the low light. Venom and ropy digestive fluids dripped from her fangs.

Nothing for it. Captain Kane Ulyanov rolled beneath a fallen ceiling beam, and he dug out his last vial of Dirt, and he shoved the injector into his outer thigh.

The dose might kill him before the spider did. The drug was called Dirt for a reason. It was a reference to death. Someone mentioned the phrase ‘dirt nap’ or ‘six feet of dirt’ and the name stuck. Already there had been a deep ache below his floating ribs these last few hours. His adrenal glands were swollen. Someone was yelling on comms, but his brain no longer parsed language. He understood one or two words at most.

The drug coursed through his bloodstream. His heart accelerated, his muscles engorged. The readout on his left suit sleeve said 200/110, heart rate 160, adrenaline level 1000ng/dl, brain activity moderately compromised. He wasn’t sure what any of it meant any more.

Ulyanov rolled out from under the beam. He threw up his fists like they taught him in hand-to-hand combat class. He balanced his weight loosely on the balls of his feet, his legs forming coiled suspension not so unlike hers. She sprang forward, fangs dripping. She was still hungry, still frenzied. All the human bodies snared in webs throughout the complex, and yet she wanted one more.

He threw a combination and perhaps stunned the spider a little, ignoring the crunch of small bones in his hands. At six feet eight, he was just about tall enough to reach the thing’s head.

Loops of webbing shot out. Her jaws snapped shut on his shoulder. By luck he thrashed and kicked his way free before the venom glands engaged and pumped the corrosion in.

Another snap of her jaws drew blood from his left forearm. Time to end this. He wouldn’t get lucky a third time. Ulyanov threw his weight forward and up, latching his arm around the seam of chitinous plates where the spider’s head fused with its chest to form the cephalothorax. Locking his legs around the thing’s body, he twisted onto its back, and he put every ounce of his waning strength into the elbow strike. One. Two. Three. The force of the blow split his right ulna into two shards. Doesn’t matter. No choice. Another axe-blow from his elbow, and finally the spider’s carapace shattered, and it dropped to the tiles as its brain matter spilled.

Ulyanov screamed a command to his failing muscles, and somehow summoned enough strength to wrench himself out from under the spider’s corpse.

The signs on the walls meant nothing now. Letters and numbers were just noise, weighted with no more meaning than static on a screen.

Still his legs remembered where the med bay was. His feet followed ancient subroutines, like a cat pouncing on a rat or mouse. The brain forgets, but bone and sinew understand. His body carried him down the corridor, emptily, mindlessly, like a strip of meat twitching in the pan because that is what meat does when exposed to salt.

And the building’s AI locked onto him via the few cameras still working, and its robotics array engaged, slipping a needle into his shoulder, weaving a cast for his shattered right forearm.