Sam grimaced as he aimed the gun and couldn’t fire as often or aim as well as he normally would, but even if he hadn’t been wounded there were too many aliens for two to keep track of.
One of them managed to sneak up onto the elevator platform unseen, and it prepared to lunge for Terri just as Rosalyn turned to notice it.
“LOOK OUT!” she screamed.
Terri tried to move her gun, but the creature moved too fast. It knocked her down and spat out a thick spray of purplish acid that landed squarely on her left arm. Her eyes went big as dishes and she howled in horrible pain as the acid ate away at the flesh of her bicep. Sam turned and blasted the alien off of her, its head disappearing. Rosalyn fell to her knees, trembling, beside Terri, and before she could even think of how to tend the wound, the arm was separated from Terri’s body, acid burning the remains of her arm to a stump below her shoulder, cauterizing the wound. Terri wept and cried out, her entire body shaking, barely able to sense the swarm of aliens that continued to climb up to the elevator platform. She was staring into Rosalyn’s empathetic eyes thinking thoughts unknown as she fell unconscious from the shock, leaving Sam and Rosalyn alone in the chaos.
A cloaked figure leapt up suddenly and gracefully from the gap, knocking aside aliens as it did. It landed beside Terri with a loud thud, and time seemed to stop as Sam and Rosalyn looked at it stupefied, able to see its features clearly for the first time.
It was a little over seven feet tall, with grayish skin and a shaven head. The features were human-like, looking slightly feminine, and its build was powerful and the limbs long. It wore a brown, tarnished cloak, had bound its feet with wrapped cloth, and the eyes…something was notable about those eyes.
It stooped down and wordlessly picked up Terri’s gun, then turned and started blasting at the swarm that was settling onto the platform. It dashed right up to the creatures, kicking with strong limbs and smacking them with the side of the gun when it wasn’t firing, beating them away with jaw-dropping power. It commanded Sam and Rosalyn’s attention, as well as the aliens’, and fought them with inhuman fierceness and speed. In just fifteen seconds, the entire platform was clear of aliens, and some of the ones who climbed up next seemed to move with a bit less of their usual reckless speed.
The elevator arrived then, and the shaft doors slid open. Dumbfounded by what they saw, it took Sam and Rosalyn longer than it should have to get through the doors. Sam went over to Terri, painfully heaving her over his shoulders, and then stepped into the elevator.
“Come on, Roz!” he screamed, ready to slam the button down and get them all to safety.
Rosalyn started for the elevator, but turned back just beside it to look at the human-shaped alien fighting off the hordes for them. A monstrous, translucent alien had jumped up and was trying to wrestle her to the ground.
Rosalyn was startled when she realized she thought of this humanoid, alien creature as a “her”. Yet there was something…familiar about her.
Backing up nearly through the elevator doors, Rosalyn took one last look at the alien, who turned back to meet Rosalyn’s gaze, the wounded acid-monster still wrestling with her. She gave a faint smile and nod to Rosalyn—and to Sam and Terri behind her—with features, however different, looking unmistakable.
“Rosalyn,” the alien said with a voice that was both human and alien all at once, low and on a strange wavelength. “Thank you.”
Rosalyn’s eyes went wide as she stepped backward into the elevator, and she could see that this creature meant to fight the aliens to the death so the crewmates could get to the cryo-pod safely. Sam hit the button and it started moving up. They watched silently, breathing heavily as their friend…the one they thought was dead…gave her life for them.
“Shauna,” Rosalyn said softly, reverently, with a tear in her eye.
In complete astonishment she and Sam watched Shauna battling below them until the elevator passed through the ceiling and obscured their sight of the room below, leaving them with their own shattered thoughts.
21
The long elevator ride eventually took them up to a cramped hallway that felt like the innards of a computer server room. There were few lights and little space to maneuver. Rosalyn took Sam’s gun once again and went in front while Sam followed bearing an unconscious Terri on his shoulders.
Rosalyn’s heart felt like it had been turned upside down. As she rushed through the halls, she reevaluated all the events of the past several days. Sam attempted to do the same, but he was so exhausted from lack of sleep—probably awake for over twenty-four hours straight now, barring naps—that it was all he could do to carry his crewmate’s body and move quickly.
Down below in the deep innards of the city, they could feel the rumbling energy reactor starting to move closer and closer to catastrophic failure. They knew they had mere minutes to spare.
The halls wound around with few deviations from the critical path until finally they reached a larger room with a wide path and much scattered debris that Rosalyn remembered passing through. After taking some time to orient herself, she picked a direction and started jogging again.
Pretty soon, Sam thought, hoping to motivate himself as he ran huffing and puffing, we’ll be away and safe for good…
What a beautiful thought that was. To put all of this behind them forever.
Rosalyn’s mind went over all the strange things she’d seen since Shauna had disappeared. The cloaked figure that Terri and Randy had seen running from the ship into the ruins. SNTNL’s “emergency mode”. The places that “SNTNL” led them all to. “SNTNL’s” knowledge gained from the alien computers. Rosalyn and the cryo-pod ending up in that hangar. It all made sense now.
They saw no sign of any more aliens as they ran, considering all of them would have been drawn to the heat of the reactor. The entire city looked at peace for once, like the incident that had happened here had finally been put to rest. There was no chance now of anyone else being overcome by Seclurm, thanks to each of them. Shauna first and foremost.
Rosalyn couldn’t imagine what the woman had been through in these past few terrible days, and she wept knowing her fate. Her true fate.
They came to a junction with one direction leading to the reparation room. Rosalyn was caught off guard as she considered for a moment on the possibility of bringing poor Terri there, with her missing arm. That room had displayed inexplicable and remarkable healing capabilities—who knew whether she might end up regrowing her arm?
Loud rumblings deep in the ruins—mountain-moving explosions—reminded her tragically that there was no time. She cursed their awful circumstances, wishing this hadn’t happened to Terri. But she had to remember that the fact any of them survived at all was an absolute miracle.
They reached an open doorway into a cavernous room functioning as a small hangar. There sat the cryo-pod, set upon tiny landing gear legs, and just beyond it a long wall comprised of a shifting, transparent material like falling dust. After looking around hastily to clear the area, Rosalyn rushed to the pod—which was still open—and threw down her gun.
The pod was clean and the air fresh, a stark change from what they had just endured. Rosalyn quickly tore off her filthy outer clothes and threw them onto the ground outside, encouraging Sam to do the same so the flecks of Seclurm present on their clothes wouldn’t survive the trip. They did the same for Terri, undressing her to her underclothes.
“Here, let me help you get her in there,” she said, taking Terri’s shoulders. Together, she and Sam lifted her into the cryo-pod and onto the cryo-cell itself centered in the pod. Until they knew the extent of Terri’s wounds, it was wise to get her in the pod and frozen as soon as possible. She stirred slightly, moaning, her stump of an arm looking very bad. With a few tapped buttons, the glass lid closed over the pod and a freezing, gaseous substance started pumping into it. In a few moments she was cryonically frozen, her body processes completely stalled until she would be reawakened in however many months’ or years�
� time.
After making sure and agreeing with Sam that everything looked in order, Rosalyn hit the button by the door to lock it shut while Sam went to the small computer panel on the wall to punch in the details of their escape. They would need to wrap around the atmosphere a time or two to gain the speed necessary to leave the planetoid like a satellite. From there, the pod would be able to move through space at a slow rate, its rockets holding up for as long as they could, eventually to run out of fuel and leave it moving through space in a straight shot towards their destination. Until they decided what that destination would be, Sam simply set the pod to take them far, far away from the mountain.
Sam and Rosalyn strapped themselves in on the frigidly cold benches rounding the small pod as it started to take off, its rockets blasting alight to maneuver the pod automatically through the strange veil between them and the outside. It moved slowly, weakly, but just enough to get them where they needed to go in time.
Dressed in boxer briefs, Sam took a glance at Terri, peacefully frozen there in the cell. “It wasn’t long ago that I was setting you in here,” he remarked with a stupefied shake of his head. “This has not gone the way we all thought it would. Not at all.”
“No, it hasn’t,” Rosalyn replied, clutching the blood-soaked cloth on her wounded hand. She wore only her black bra and underwear. She lay back and thought of all they had lost in coming to this horrible place. Lives tragically ended, billions of dollars down the drain. FAER would be furious. But Rosalyn wasn’t so concerned about that.
In seconds they were flying high above the surface of the planetoid, the mountain shrinking and shrinking until they could see the entirety of it in the small window of the pod. The Novara stood where it had been left, damaged and broken, by the entrance to the ruins. There was light in the sky. The surface of 730-X Zacuali, rocky and barren, had entered a new day, and the storms had calmed.
They heard a boom and saw the mountain explode. Smoke billowed up in massive plumes, and the Novara was halfway obliterated in the blaze. Rosalyn and Sam both wondered for a moment at whether “SNTNL”—Shauna—had thought to set the Novara to self-destruct as well, considering traces of Seclurm remained in its laboratory systems and in the corpse of the alien. Watching it closely they recognized that its engines were turned on; they were overheating and trembling ferociously. Not a minute later, another enormous explosion rocked the Novara, and the two heaved a sigh of relief mingled with melancholy at the sight of it all. Smoke eventually cleared and they watched the spot where the Novara once stood, full of billions of dollars’ worth of expensive machinery, computer systems, and tons and tons of valuable minerals, now a pile of debris and ash.
There was no question about it: FAER would not be happy with Sam and Rosalyn and Terri when they got home. But Rosalyn felt, at least, that she was prepared to argue her case before them if and when the time came. She could rest confident in the knowledge that what she had done had been for the good of humankind.
Three lives had been saved, and a very likely future disaster averted. Whatever angry words they would lash out at her with, Rosalyn would know that she did the right thing.
She and Sam turned to a discussion about where to send the pod. There was, of course, too much danger in attempting to remain on the surface of 730-X Zacuali in such a small craft what with its near-constant storms, and orbiting the minor planet would not work either; when the limited fuel of the pod gave out, it would be pulled back to the surface.
That left them, then, with two choices: sending the cryo-pod home to Earth—a trip that would take upwards of sixty years—or towards TE-551, the nearest space station from which their “rescue” vessel, the Chalet, was being sent and was supposed to arrive in no more than eight months. TE-551 was the clear winner, except there was a somewhat high chance of the cryo-pod being destroyed or damaged as it passed through the asteroid belt that lay between the station and them.
Sam frowned as he considered what was happening. Really considered it. It had never hit him until this discussion, on the brink of real action, that he could be stuck in space for decades before returning home, if they ever did.
“You alright, Sam?” Rosalyn asked.
He scratched his chin and said softly, “No. I’m worried. My girlfriend back home…if we aren’t picked up by the Chalet, she’s gonna think I’m dead. Everyone’s gonna think we’re dead.” He imagined losing her and could scarcely comprehend the scenario. Before leaving on this trip, he was unsure about the prospect of being away from her for merely a year-and-a-half or two years. Now he knew that was nothing.
Rosalyn thought for a long moment about possible solutions, her weary and wounded and starving body not helping her to think clearly. “I can send out a transmission,” she realized.
“No one’s close enough to hear the weak signal this thing can send out,” he pointed out.
“It’s preemptive. This pod is able to periodically send out a radio signal. I think it will send it out once a week or so. We can still set our course for TE-551, and the signal we send out should reach the Chalet wherever our course intercepts, letting them know we’re there.” She licked her lips. “It’s not a hundred percent certain to work. Something can still go very wrong. But it’s a better chance, I would think, than being stuck in cryo-sleep for sixty years on our way to Earth.”
He sat back and thought for a long moment before he nodded. “I think that’s our only option. Alright, I’ll stay quiet and set the coordinates while you record the message.”
Sam found a computer panel on the wall and started putting in their destination coordinates. Rosalyn felt grave soberness as she got up and walked over to an opposite computer panel, distinctly aware that this was the final thing they were going to do before being put to sleep for a long time—a few months hopefully, but possibly far, far longer than that. If they survived the journey at all.
But she wasn’t concerned. Not anymore. After what they had just survived, why be worried about anything?
Recording this message was a monumental event. Yet really it was only her standing here in a pod spiraling an empty rock, soon to be surrounded by sleep-inducing, frigid gas and then launched out into the dead of outer space.
Tapping the record button for the radio signal, Rosalyn waited a moment, took a breath to sustain her trembling, weakened body, and then started speaking. “My name is Rosalyn Pulman, acting captain of the mining vessel Novara. The Novara is now destroyed. I’m recording this message aboard the Novara’s cryo-pod with my surviving crewmates Samuel Tokoharu and Terri Jones. My message is a warning to those at the Foundation for Astronautical and Extraterrestrial Research, to whom we were employed. My crew members Albert Chittering, Mitchell Phelps, Randall White, and—Shauna Beele, captain of the Novara—are dead. Doctor Terri Jones has been badly wounded and placed in the cryo-cell aboard this pod. We are bound on a course for the space station TE-551, hoping to be intercepted by the Chalet which has been deployed to rescue us on 730-X Zacuali. Let the crew of the Chalet know that the crew they were sent to rescue is aboard this cryo-pod bound for TE-551. In addition, let whoever opens this pod know that a full twenty-four-hour quarantine must be instituted upon our awakening.
“What we found on 730-X Zacuali was an alien civilization long abandoned. We encountered a multitude of hostile alien organisms made by a mutation-causing, biochemical substance called Seclurm. The substance has been deemed by all of us to be effectively a weapon of mass destruction, capable of destroying all life on Earth if it were to find its way there. For that reason, we destroyed the alien city and all traces of Seclurm.
“I repeat, this message is an S.O.S. to the Chalet and to anyone else who hears this transmission. We request the aid of any who are able, and we must be quarantined upon revival. The date of recording is May 6th, 2079.”
She fought back tears at the thought of what the future held. Sam had finished putting in the coordinates, and the pod began to change direction slightly as it circled the
planetoid. Both of them sat back down.
Rosalyn turned to her friend and said, “Sam. Thanks again for saving my life.”
He smiled. “You already returned the favor multiple times over.” He looked exhausted, ready to collapse.
“Before you conk out, can you get this entire pod to fill with the cryonic gas? I don’t know about you, but I don’t fancy sitting here doing nothing for the next eight months or more.”
“I don’t know, we do have a lot to talk about after all that’s happened.” He laughed softly and then nodded. “The pod is not built for that, but there’s a valve here at the base of the cell. If we yank off the bolt it’ll leak out and we can finally get to sleep. I’ll grab a wrench from one of these compartments and get to it.”
Sam ruffled through a compartment for a wrench, eventually finding one of the proper size. Rosalyn watched him work, admiring him greatly.
She felt a great weight on her back still from the deaths of all but two of her crewmates. But she simply sighed and reminded herself that she had done all she could. The best she could.
Sam tested the wrench on the valve with success. “This is the one. You might want to get ready.”
Rosalyn steeled herself, the weight of it all hitting her more and more. She went to her bench and lay down on it, strapping herself down with seatbelts.
Sam looked at her and gave as much of a friendly smile as he could. “Well, I’ll see you when I see you, Rosalyn. I’m glad you were with us. Although I’m sure FAER will have our heads when they find us.”
He started undoing the valve.
Rosalyn looked at him. “I feel the same. We’ll be alright, I think. Us three—the survivors. Whatever FAER does, or anybody else, we’ll be sticking together after all of this.”
He smiled brighter, perhaps more than could be reasonably expected to give in a situation like this. The valve popped off, and icy-cold gas started escaping through it. Sam hurried to lay down on his side of the bench, strapping himself in opposite from where Rosalyn lay.
Seclurm: Devolution Page 34
