by Ofelia Negra
Just as he reached the boarding ramp, a massive explosion knocked him forward. He flew over a meter in the air and crashed head-and-shoulders first into the guardrail. Sliding down to the plates of the catwalk, Marcus shook his head clear, trying to remove the dizziness he suddenly felt. Smoke was thick, dark, heavy around him, and when he found himself free of most of the dizziness, Marcus looked over his shoulder to see the forward hull of the Komet disappear as something beneath gave way. The ship crashed with a booming clang to the lower deck.
***
6
VI
The destruction of the shuttle quickly became the least serious of Marcus’s problems. The creature that had been crawling on the outer hull of the Komet had made it off before the explosions, and was suddenly on his back. Its disgustingly vein-y arms were wrapped tightly around his chest, and its tail kept his legs together and immobile as it dragged him down to the catwalk. He was vaguely aware of impacts against the PDT’s shoulder plate, and looked around to see that it was trying to sink its teeth into the tough metal.
He blasted its head off with the plasma torch, and then fell backwards to pin its body between his back and the deck plates. It howled, but its arms remained tight around his chest, trying to crush him. Marcus brought the torch around, aimed as best he could, and severed the thing’s tail. Almost instantly, its arms went slack, and he could breathe again.
An angry howling came from somewhere far off… too far to be an immediate threat. Marcus pulled himself back to his feet, and shook off the creature’s corpse. It wasn’t lost on him that there was blood from the creature now staining his PDT’s plates.
“Great,” he muttered to himself darkly. He shot the destroyed shuttle a rueful look. “Just great!”
Suddenly, Marcus’s comm holo was back up. Still caught up in the adrenaline of the creature’s attack, and the sudden destruction of the Komet, it took Marcus off guard, and he aimed his plasma torch at it without thinking. When he saw that it was only Kira Davis, he relaxed a little, and lowered his weapon.
“What the hell is happening down there?” Hamilton said as he came into view behind Davis. “What happened to the shuttle?”
“I don’t know,” Marcus said, still trying to shake away the ringing in his ears. “I was starting the pre-flight, and then the entire thing just started coming apart around me. I think I heard the onboard computer mention something about a critical hull breach.”
“That was our ride home,” Davis snapped. “It’s the only way off this ship.”
“Kira…” Hamilton started.
“No, Hamilton!” she exclaimed. “This changes everything!”
“Just let me think, damn it!” Hamilton bit back testily. “Can you access the command computer?”
Davis looked away as she tried something, and Marcus locked his holo so that it wouldn’t switch off automatically when he started walking. He started down the catwalk slowly, and absently reached behind his belt to pluck a charge cartridge for the plasma torch. He reloaded the cutter and checked the status dial before he re-entered the departure area of the flight lounge.
“It’s no good,” Davis said with an exasperated sigh. “There’s an executive lockdown of all primary systems. Without the Captain’s authorization, I can’t access them.”
“Well? Where’s the Captain?”
Davis worked again at whatever controls weren’t visible in the holo, and Marcus stopped and waited in the flight lounge. “Here he is. Captain Benson Matthews. Location: Med-lab. Status: deceased.”
Marcus and Hamilton reacted in the same instant. “What? How?” they said together.
“I can’t access that information,” Davis said after a moment. “Find the Captain, and you’ll find his PDT. With his authorisation codes, I can crack this computer wide open.”
“Damn it!” Hamilton swore, looking up at something Marcus couldn’t see, or hadn’t heard. “Marcus, I’m sending the tram back to your location. Get to the Medical Deck and find that PDT as fast as you can.”
“What was that?” Davis whispered suddenly, following Hamilton’s gaze now and staring up at the ceiling.
Marcus heard the sound of wrenching metal, and a horrid, familiar screech. But they weren’t close, weren’t… real. They were coming from the holo.
“Holy shit! Come on, get out of here!”
“Hamilton?” Marcus cried. “Hamilton! Davis!” But it was no use. The screen went dead, after a brief glimpse of what looked like another one of those tailed creatures.
So now he had more work cut out for him. Now he knew that he couldn’t just link up with the others, especially not now that the Komet had been destroyed. Hamilton and Davis would be trying to ascertain other ways off the ship, while he, Marcus, ran their errands for them.
But on the other hand, this one errand didn’t seem such a bad one. It saddened Marcus to learn that Captain Matthews was dead. While he personally hadn’t had many dealings with the Captain during his time aboard, he’d deeply respected the man. He ran a good ship, commanded an excellent crew. Somehow, Marcus expected that he’d have been holed up with survivors somewhere, or that his body would have littered the decks, torn apart by the creatures as he fought alongside his crew to rid his ship of the menace. But for his body to be in the med-lab, then it only meant that he had died before the invading creatures had threatened his ship.
He shook the thoughts from his mind, attempting to clear his head as he proceeded through the flight lounge for the third time in a matter of hours. Ignoring the evidence of earlier carnage was easier now, though not by much. He found himself consciously able to avoid looking around and the pooled blood and chunks of gore.
When he approached the door leading to the tram station, opposite the security checkpoint, he opened it and stepped through into the corridor beyond. The hall was empty, save the shells of Hamilton’s and Davis’s spent pulse rifle and pistol ammo. Halfway the length down the hall was a turn off, and Marcus glanced down it briefly to see more blood smeared along the walls and floor, along with more gore. No spent casings there, though, and the LED above the door read as lavatory, so Marcus didn’t bother with it. He continued on to the lift at the end, and keyed in the summons and waited.
The lift arrived swiftly, and after Marcus was safely inside… safely being relative to the situation… he keyed the controls and waited as it whisked him down to the tram platform. Once there, he wasted no time in dashing over to the tram, which was already waiting for him, its hatch wide open and the boarding ramp extended.
He walked across the ramp and checked out the tram quickly for unwelcome guests before returning to the holo-panel facing the door. It was a simple layout, and Marcus was relieved to find that it hadn’t become complicated in the years since he’d been on board. The panel showed a diagram of the Pandora, split off into multiple sections which were determined by tram platform locations. When he found the medical section on the diagram, he thumbed it.
The door behind him snapped shut with a hiss, followed by a dull whirring as the boarding ramp was sucked back into the tram’s deck. Certain that he was, at least for the time being, safe in the cabin, Marcus fell back onto his rump on the nearest seat. He set his plasma torch down next to him, and then set about removing his helmet. It wasn’t going to be an overly long trip through the Pandora, but it was enough time for him to wind down a little, and relax.
The squealing of the tram’s braking system told Marcus that he was close to his destination. Tram travel was still as fast as he remembered. He’d made the trip from the flight zone to medical in a matter of minutes, not nearly as much time to rest but enough to calm, a little, his hammering heart. He quickly replaced his PDT’s helmet and secured it before picking up his torch and standing.
When the tram door opened, he stepped through without hesitating… and then froze.
The lights on this platform were a little subdued. When he looked up, only briefly, he saw that a few of the illumination panels set into
the high ceiling had been smashed. Glass crunched under his feet. There was blood splattered against the nearby wall to Marcus’s left, and the ruined, almost shredded corpse of a walking creature in the corner near the door up ahead.
But the thing that caught him off guard most was… survivors? Ahead of him, slightly at an angle to his departure, was the hall leading off the platform and into the medical section proper. It was blocked off by what looked like a couple of shelving stacks, knocked over onto their sides. And in front of those, on the platform-side of the doorway and the blockage, lay a bloodied and mangled corpse, propped up lifelessly against someone who was clearly still alive.
The woman wore the grey-patched white outfit of the Pandora’s medical staff. She had short, blonde hair to her shoulders, and a bloody bandage was wrapped around her eyes and forehead. Instantly, Marcus’s gut wrenched inside him, and he rushed over to her, unable to stop himself thinking of how this woman could be the one person he hoped it wasn’t. But when he checked the identity tag on her uniform, he breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t Nikki. That didn’t, however, alleviate the horror at the state of the woman.
“Are you OK?” he asked her frantically, dropping to his knees and once more setting his torch aside.
The woman paid him no mind as she turned her sightless gaze down at the dead crewmate in her arms. “Shhh…” she cooed gently, as if she thought the corpse was still alive. “Shhh, it’s all right, McCain. He’s here. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
She chuckled then as she ran her hand over what Marcus now realized wasn’t even a complete corpse. It was bloody, and missing its arms and legs and everything above its lower jaw. But the woman didn’t seem to realize this.
“I knew you’d come,” she said suddenly, looking up at Marcus, though he doubted she could see him with that makeshift blindfold in place. “Just like you said! I…” she faltered and staggered back, her elbow crashing into the deck. Marcus watched helplessly as she reached around behind the body of “McCain” and lifted something small, metallic, and functional. “I saved this… for you.”
She raised her hand slowly, lifting the device higher for Marcus to grasp. But as he started to reach for it, suddenly her arm slackened. The device slipped from her slightly turned hand, and her arm fell into her lap, motionless. She gasped once, twice, and the slumped backwards against the wall.
“Do you need help, ma’am?” Marcus asked her, genuinely concerned. With the bloody rag in the way, he couldn’t tell if he even knew this woman from his last stint on board. She could have been a friend.
But she ignored his words, turning her half-covered face up to the ceiling and whispering a prayer. “God protect me,” she murmured, exhaling with the last syllable. “I should have…” And then she was silent, motionless. She slid down the wall sideways until her head hit the deck.
Marcus felt a wave of sadness roll over him then, guilt that he hadn’t been able to help her. If only he’d arrived a couple of minutes earlier, he might have been able to administer a medical canister, to stabilizer her at the very least. But he’d failed in even that respect. And because she was now dead, Marcus had no one, again, to answer his questions. He wanted to know if there were other survivors. The knowledge that this woman had survived this long rekindled hope in Marcus that there were other crew-members out there that had as well.
Perhaps even Nikki?
He looked over to his right, through the open archway into the departure waiting area. Most of the seats there were covered in corpses that had stained the linen they were wrapped in with blood. More corpses had been lined up much the same on the floor. Marcus breathed a sigh of despair, and then scooped up the device the medical officer had proffered before standing up straight once more.
He didn’t know what it was. Some parts of it looked like they directly interfaced with the magnetic module he’d already slotted into place. But the device as a whole didn’t look like any stasis unit that Marcus had ever worked with, and he’d worked with a few. So instead, he checked to make sure that the area was, for the moment, safe, then he flicked on his PDT’s analysis module and held the device for a moment over the scanner set into the wrist plate on his right arm.
It took a moment, but when the holo flickered to view with a detailed analysis of the device, and a schematic, Marcus found himself smiling, despite the situation. He went over the analysis three times to be sure before he flicked the holo off. He turned the magnetic module over in his hand a few times, trying to determine on his own where the right connection points were. When he found them, he effortlessly plugged it into the matching slots on the already present stasis module. The whole device thrummed with life, and the indicator on the topside of the new module blinked green.
He went over it all again to be sure that it was connected properly. He found that the new device’s installation apparently had no effect on the magnetic module. The indicators on that were still showing up green, and the energy display indicator was still registering the same amount of reserve as before, and was unobscured.
Marcus brought up the PDT’s analysis of the magnetic module again and then keyed in a more detailed description of how the device worked. A small diagram appeared above a slew of text and started to animate for his benefit. He ignored it completely as he skimmed the text below it. It had a comprehensive description on what the device would do, and how he could trigger its effect. Marcus was glad to see, tacked to the bottom of the description that the magnetic module worked off his PDT’s internal power rather than the stored energy of the magnetic module it was attached to.
Closing the holo again, he gently tapped the only control on the magnetic module, and then extended his hand, palm out, to the shelves that were blocking the doorway in front of him. He keyed the control again and his arm jerked only slightly as the projector in his palm slip exerted an anti-gravity field out toward the shelves.
“This… could be useful,” he muttered to himself as he carelessly deposited the stack against the wall, where it wouldn’t hinder him. He went back to the dead medical officer and picked up the plasma torch from the floor before returning to the now mostly-cleared doorway and stepping through it into the corridor.
The hall between the tram platform and door at the other end… indicated by the overhead LED as Security Station… wasn’t long. But there was a steady trail of half-congealed blood the entire length of it. Several bloodstained-linen-wrapped corpses littered the hallway, as if they’d been dumped and forgotten long ago. Marcus ignored them as best he could, ever grateful on how effective his suit’s filtration system was at keeping the smell of decay from making him puke.
He keyed the release when he reached the door at the end of the hall, and it slid up into the ceiling to admit him.
When he stepped through, his PDT scratched out the usual static of someone trying to contact him. He froze instantly and scanned the room he’d just walked into before he answered it by opening his vid link.
“Marcus, are you there?” Hamilton’s voice came through before the holo cleared up enough interference for Marcus to see the accompanying face. He felt the beginnings of a smile creep up on his face, until he remembered that Hamilton wouldn’t see it past the helmet. He was, however, glad to see that Hamilton had survived. He couldn’t see Davis behind him, though, and wondered if she hadn’t.
“I’m here.” Marcus looked around again carefully, creeping into the room and freezing in fright at the sound of the door shutting behind him. “What happened? Are you OK? Did you and Miss Davis get away from that thing safely?” Those were only a few of his questions.
“We were attacked!” Hamilton said almost breathlessly. “Kira’s gone! One minute she was there, then… I can’t believe I lost her.”
Marcus sighed ruefully, and his shoulders fell with the weight of the news. They were now, possibly… it wasn’t confirmed yet that she was dead… down to two… from five.
Things hadn’t gone in their favor much at all
since they’d jumped into the system. So much had gone wrong. At first it had just been a matter of miscalculation; approaching the Pandora at an angle insufficient enough to avoid major debris from the planet mining. Damaged, they’d crashed into the flight deck and lost their ship. Then in the flight lounge, ship quarantine measures had been tripped and they’d encountered the alien things that had proceeded to tear first into Johnson and then James like they were nothing more than a flimsy ration pack. Those things had been on the prowl since, it seemed, for Marcus, Hamilton and Davis. He’d always doubted that they’d give up unless they were sure the last people left standing were dead.
But what did that say about the Pandora’s crew? Did that mean that they were all dead as well? Dead like the blind medical technician from the tram platform he’d just left behind, and her friend McCain? Dead like Captain Matthews, whose death was still a mystery to them? Or were they dead like Johnson and James… every last one of them torn to pieces by the aliens until there was nothing more than pooled blood and broken bodies? Did that extend to Nikki?
