by Ofelia Negra
A burst of static came from his PDT’s comm., followed by a voice. “Marcus,” Davis started, “I’ve patched into the deck security system. It took some work, but I’ve got the door to the maintenance bay unlocked. The data board should be somewhere inside.”
“Got it. I’ll have that tram up and running soon. Marcus out.”
He shut off the comm channel and went through the door and down the corridor he’d been in before. Bypassing the door he’d come from much earlier, he continued to the end of the hall, and then turned.
“Shit!” he swore when he saw the motionless body on the floor. The flesh was stained with blood, but there was no mistaking it for human.
Though it appeared not to have any defensive wounds or injuries, it was so perfectly still that Marcus assumed that it had been killed a while ago by the great ship’s crew. Tentatively, and sticking to the wall, he started to proceed around the double swerve in the hall. To be on the safe side, before he was within reach of the thing, he unloaded a trio of shots into its head and one of its arms and legs.
He jumped at least a foot when it screamed at him after the first shot, and on reflex he unloaded several more shots into it. Breathing hard again, he backed away from the pooling blood, and then turned and rushed down the corridor and around the corner at its end.
He stopped just in time to avoid crashing into the closed lift doors, and gently touched the summons control on the holo-panel to call it. It came within seconds, and the doors whirred open to admit him. He stepped inside, and then directed the lift to go down.
His comm. sounded again, and he rolled his eyes, guessing that it was likely not going to be Hamilton. He wasn’t disappointed. “Marcus,” Davis’s voice came through. “It’s Kira. It looks like the door to the storage room is locked. There should be a key somewhere in the maintenance bay.”
The comm switched off before he could reply, so he muttered to himself instead, “Why don’t I just ask the deck crew for the key? Surely, they’d be glad to help.” He rolled his eyes again, and then when the lift stopped and the doors opened, he stepped out.
Ever on guard, he scanned the area with weapon and eyes as he started forward, climbing the short ramp to an elevated catwalk. He rounded a couple of corners, sweeping his gaze constantly, and then continued on to the door at the end. It was locked, much as Davis had warned him it would be.
Marcus looked around, searching for some place the key could be hidden. He saw a couple of bodies in the corner under the vent, mutilated and torn beyond recognition. They were human, at least; that much he could tell, but beyond that… nothing. He fought to contain his nausea as he dropped to a knee in the blood pooled around the pile of flesh and fabric and bone. Then, moving body parts around so he could search better, he felt around the heap, looking for something small, something metal.
He found the key card in the soiled trouser pocket of an engineer. He hoped that it wasn’t anyone he’d known from his time on the Pandora. He cleaned the key card off as best he could on the only piece of unsoiled fabric he could find, and then got back to his feet, turned back to the door, and slotted it into the reader under the panel. The light glowed blue as the door locks clicked, and Marcus opened the door and stepped inside.
The room beyond was dark, and the air was clouded slightly with steam or smoke. Marcus keyed his defogger again, and crept forward slowly, carefully.
There was a single vent, set into the wall across the room to the left. The fan behind the grill was running, however, so while it wasn’t impossible, Marcus thought it highly unlikely that any of those creatures would be busting through it to surprise him. In front of him was an almost featureless wall, save for the open storage unit bolted to the wall at eye level. It was empty. Five storage lockers lined the wall just inside the door, four of them locked, and the one in the middle wide open and similarly empty. On either side of the vent was a work bench. Both of them were strewn with tools and equipment that had been in the process of being repaired when the engineers had been called away, or killed.
On the bench against the window was the thing that Marcus had come up here looking for. He walked over to the bench slowly and reached out for the prone data board. Then, on a purely paranoid reflex, he withdrew his hand but a centimeter before even touching it, flexed his fingers, and waited for a surprise attack.
There was none.
Sighing to himself, he reached the rest of the way and plucked it from the tabletop effortlessly. The data card was not at all big, and therefore lacked any significant bulk to weigh him down. He carried it in the one hand, tucking it in the crook of his arm as he turned back to the door, opened it, and walked back out into the main maintenance bay area… plasma torch first.
Fluids still dripped from piping above and below Marcus as he retraced his steps for the lift. Grease still covered much surface area, as did blood and gore. He deliberately averted his gaze from anything that looked too small to be a threat, unwilling to vomit against the inside of his PDT’s helmet visor. It wouldn’t be very practical to obscure his own vision when he could come under attack at any moment.
He didn’t, he soon found. While he was suspicious of that, he was grateful for it. It offered a small reprieve, if any. Enough time to collect himself, refocus his objective… his main objective: Nikki. He reached the lift without incident and punched in the summons. He was rewarded by the instantaneous opening of the lift doors, empty still and seemingly welcoming. Defying all sense of false security, he dashed into the lift and hit the command… perhaps a little harder than he intended… to send the lift back up.
The lift deposited Marcus back on the tram level maintenance and access level, and he proceeded around successive corners once more.
As he walked, he once more found himself considering the situation at hand. Thus far, there had been no sign of the Pandora’s crew, except corpses. They’d only come across these strange, fleshy, alien creatures that seemed so intent on killing them all. Had these things already dealt with the great ship’s crew? Had they been waiting who-knew how long for a ship just like the Komet to come aboard, providing them with fresh prey? These were interesting questions. But the Pandora had a crew of more than a thousand. And while it was true that it was a massive ship, more massive than most other big ships, it was still so unlikely that all Marcus and the others had come across so far was less than a handful of corpses in varying stages of mutilation.
He was still thinking about all of that when he found that he’d returned to the tram control room. He opened the door, shut and locked it again behind him, and then walked over to the great window overlooking the tracks. He was relieved to see both Davis and Hamilton were still on the platform on the other side of the tracks, waiting… Hamilton continually on guard with his pulse rifle scanning.
Satisfied that he’d reaffirmed their continued existence, Marcus left the window and proceeded over to the tram system core, walled off from the rest of the room save the glass door that had been shattered inwards. Shards of it were all over the floor and equipment. Marcus switched his PDT’s analysis devices back on and quickly scanned the entire apparatus. When he’d located the busted data board, he switched the analysis equipment off again, and then set the spare board down on one of the machine’s flat surfaces to free up his hand. He gripped the fried data card, and pulled as hard as he could. It came loose with a fizzing sound. He frowned at it in disgust before dropping it carelessly to the floor.
Once he slotted the new data card in, he punched in a few commands on the holo panel, then closed the holo before stepping out of the alcove and returning to the window.
“Tram control computer is now online,” came the digitized, feminine voice of the ship’s interactive computer core. It came from a PA speaker above the window, and Marcus eyed it with distaste for having scared him for a moment.
The holo-panel before him blinked from red to blue, and he keyed in the summons commands for the tram. “Ship-wide tram system has been reinitializ
ed,” the ship’s computer called out to him. “All trams are now operational. Tram arriving at flight deck station. Quarantine lifted.”
“Shit,” Marcus swore, spinning on the spot and scanning the room in case some of those creatures had decided to sneak up on him. He so didn’t like the idea of the quarantine being taken away so suddenly. He didn’t know if that meant that the creatures had left the flight deck area, but he wasn’t willing to stake his life on that.
A metal grinding sound came from behind Marcus, making him jump at its suddenness. When he turned to the window again, he found that his view of the platform where Hamilton and Davis had been standing was now obscured. All he could see was the outer skin of a tram car, parked right in his way.
Marcus keyed his visual comm with Hamilton’s PDT frequency to report. “Alright, Marcus; we’re on board and heading to the Bridge. Good work.”
“Strange,” Davis said from behind Hamilton. “The quarantine just lifted.”
“Whatever was in the flight lounge must have left.” Hamilton shrugged and returned his gaze to Marcus. “That’s lucky for us. Marcus, get back to the Komet and prep it for launch. We’ll find out what we can from the Bridge and meet you there.”
“If we even live that long,” Davis said snidely. “You’re out of your league, Hamilton. This is suicide! We’re going to die out here!”
“Your lack of confidence in me is duly noted, Miss Davis. But I have a mission to complete, and that’s exactly what I am going to do… with or without you. Do we understand each other?”
“Just get us out of here alive,” Davis muttered under her breath.
“I’ll meet you both at the ship,” Marcus said with a nod before he closed off the channel again.
Heading back to the flight lounge, Marcus felt the initial dread of escaping it slowly creeping upon him once more. He couldn’t think of what he would find there; James and Johnson’s bodies so carelessly mutilated, like so many of the Pandora’s crew, left to rot. He couldn’t let those thoughts be at the forefront of his mind, couldn’t let them become so entrenched that they would make him freeze up if the things came for him again.
By the time he got to the lift, his chest felt tight, and his stomach was doing somersaults. The elevator’s floor was still stained with congealed blood and Marcus’s vomit, both of which made the smell pretty tough to bear. The pieces of the creature that had been trapped in the lift with him on the way down were there too, and he kicked them aside and kept his distance as the lift shot back up to the flight deck.
The tightness in his chest was still there when the lift doors whirred open again, revealing the familiar, but unwelcome, sight of the flight deck he’d escaped so desperately. The lights were even dimmer now than before, likely due to the thick steam that permeated the air and made everything so blurred to his vision.
Marcus forced himself to step out of the lift, forced himself not to dash back into it before the doors closed. When he heard it clamp shut behind him, he spared a single glance over his shoulder, and then started to walk.
He couldn’t shake the unease he felt, retracing his steps. When he’d been escaping the flight lounge earlier, he hadn’t had a single weapon on him, and thus hadn’t inflicted any casualties. In fact, he’d been running… scared out of his mind… away from at least half a dozen or more of the things. And while he was confident now of his ability to take one out, having taken out several of the things since then, he quailed at the thought that he would be forced into a confrontation with a throng of them.
Thankfully, he found as he continued around corner beyond corner that the corridors were empty. There was no telltale, frighteningly ominous scrabbling behind the walls or the ceiling to indicate that he was being followed. There was no horrid howling as they approached him from any which direction. At one point, Marcus thought he’d seen a shadow duck around the corner ahead of him, but when he rounded it himself with his plasma cutter ready, he saw nothing safe the stretch of the corridor, and the unlocked door at its end.
He went through the door with only the briefest of pauses, and then continued on through the security checkpoint to the door leading into the flight lounge. Before, during the quarantine, the door had been locked, sealed, separating him from the rest of the team. But now that door was unlocked, and he had no trouble opening it and stepping through into the lounge.
Immediately, Marcus found himself fighting against another reflex to vomit. The floors and seats were strewn with blood and gore from the creatures’ attacks on James and Johnson. It was thick, the blood congealing in a room made humid by long hours with little or no atmospheric recycling. Immediately, he switched on his PDT’s filtering systems so that he wouldn’t have to smell the carnage, or the start of the decay of…
And it was then that he realized that James’s and Johnson’s bodies were missing. Marcus had seen them both go down, and had heard the steady tone of their PDT monitoring systems flat-lining as the life drained from them. But despite that certainty, there was no proof of it. The blood and gore could have been from anyone, and not necessarily anyone that Marcus knew.
His comm sounded again, tearing him from the horror and the wave of uncertainty that suddenly filled his mind. He keyed in the audio comm, not wanting his emotions showing too clearly to the other surviving members of the team.
“Marcus…” Hamilton’s calm voice almost made him forget about the mystery of the bodies that should have been in the flight lounge. He started around the seats in the center of the room, towards the departure area. “We made it to the Bridge,” Hamilton continued, oblivious to Marcus’s discomfort. “It’s a mess up here… no survivors. We’re going to try and get to the command computer. Wish us luck.”
He did, and keyed the controls next to the door to open it. He continued on without another word, through the open archway onto the flight deck. As he proceeded down the long catwalk to the damaged Komet, he eyed his surroundings with great care. There were some small fires from damage around the lower deck and near the Komet on the walkway itself. But those fires were contained to whatever combustibles were keeping them alive. Sparks flew from gashes along the ship’s outer hull where it had impacted the flight deck or debris outside. The forward window had a crack in it that Marcus hadn’t noticed when he’d first left it.
But for all that, he couldn’t shake the sense that he wasn’t quite alone. Though he could see no evidence of the Pandora’s crew, or of any of those horrible creatures, he couldn’t help but feel that someone… or something… was nearby… watching him… waiting.
Ever mindful of that sense, he pressed on. The Komet seemed almost claustrophobic when Marcus boarded her. Compared to the openness of the surrounding flight deck, and the wideness of the larger ship’s corridors and rooms, Marcus felt… trapped. It wasn’t helped by the fact that the smaller ship was heavily damaged. He wasn’t even sure it would be able to leave when they were all aboard.
He walked through its short halls to the forward area that was the cockpit, and headed straight for the controls at the front. He keyed in a sequence on the physical control panel at the pilot’s station… reminded again of James as he did so… and a holo-panel appeared right in front of his face. He keyed in another sequence, hopefully to start the ship’s pre-flight check.
The holo flickered, and the Komet’s schematic appeared on it, the damaged areas flashing red while other systems flashed varying shades of green and yellow to indicate their effectiveness. The hyper-drive seemed to be working fine, though the regular engines were only working at fifty percent capacity. It would be a long flight away from the Pandora to a safe hyperspace distance, but it would be worth it.
Suddenly, there was a screech, and something landed flat, almost gracefully on the outer skin of the window. Marcus panicked. Observing it in less time than it took to raise the torch, he noticed that it was another of the two-armed-tail creatures he’d seen on the tram tracks a while ago. This one was darker than the others, almost black b
ut just as equally frightening and bloody. It looked back at him through the window, its tail swinging wildly at its rear end, before it pushed up with both of its strong arms and started to crawl along the glass.
“Hostile life form detected,” the Komet’s onboard computer warned him.
“Yeah, no shit!” Marcus said testily, his heart racing in his chest. The thing had disappeared from view now, and he spun around, expecting it to have climbed through the entrance and into the ship to get to him.
Just as he turned, however, something exploded. Fire and smoke billowed out into the hall he’d come from, and Marcus immediately hit the deck to avoid the worst of it. He still felt the intense heat pass over him, however, and thanked his quick reflexes.
The ship was shuddering violently all around him now. He needed to get out of there. A quick glance over his shoulder saw that the holo-panel had switched off; its emitters had probably been shorted in the explosion. He dashed forward, under the plume of smoke that was in his path and around the corner and out of the ship once more. Conduits in the walls around him exploded as he ran, flames licking at the outermost plates of his PDT. He did his best to ignore them all, and to keep from tripping over his own feet as he ran.
