The Thing: from the Depths of Hell

by V Bertolaccini

  “What do think it wants?” Kruger asked.

  “That I am not sure of!”

  “Could it just be evil?” Kruger asked, trying to see if they thought of it as the paranormal devil that it looked like.

  “I cannot answer that! But it could also be defending itself by getting rid of us. It surely has not seen anything like us! That can be proven by its original behavior, and it slowly adapting itself to this dimension, spacecraft, and us. It is learning more and more!”

  “It has to be after the spacecraft too!” Major Ripley answered firmly. “Everything it has done has been more or less to get the spacecraft!”

  “And we will be probably here for a long time,” Kruger continued.

  Major Ripley began talking to someone on his communicator, and asked Mitchel, “What form does this multidimensional alien take in its own dimension, or dimensions, which it is adapting itself from? And what do you call it, if you had to give it some form of identification?”

  “I am not sure I can answer all that, as it is through dimensions, and not just one, and has different energy states in them all. It is more an entity! We have not fully realized what it is! It is in the depths of space, at the most different region from out environment, as it can get. So I doubt if we will ever be able to compare it! We have so little, and know so little about its identity that it could even be embarrassing if we gave anymore.”

  “And they may not fully believe you?” Major Ripley moaned, as he listened to the response from the military control center. “And they want to know if we can properly back up the claims?”

  “Exactly! They will need to know everything that they can about it, as they will need to destroy it!”

  “We need as much as possible in detecting it too, or capturing it – if we cannot destroy it! And they can throw it back out there, where it belongs.”

  Chapter 28

  The G1 Explosion

  The G1 explosion, made of all the deadliest G1 weapons, blasted out with the most hideous lurch Kruger had ever felt, going straight threw him and everyone around him, in the military control center, throwing everything outwards, with such a force that for the seconds that it lasted virtually everyone there must have visualized it was the end of everything, and Kruger saw a blinding ghostly whiteness, as he banged his head against a wall.

  The president and General Chisholm started arguing with Colonel Pratt over what had happened, over the explosion having such an impact, throwing them into objects, and people being injured all over the place.

  They had guaranteed nothing more than a small wave of force reaching there, with all the precautions and energy fields and other things used to stop any shockwave.

  For a few seconds Kruger had actually thought that they had been going to kill them by blowing them up, and perhaps cover the defeat the military would have, while stopping it getting the spacecraft to get to the Earth.

  He wondered what the consequences of it getting to the Earth would be. There biggest achievement ever would be turned to the worst disaster ever.

  He imagined what the G1 explosion would have been like if the energy screen had not been used around the explosion, and he imagined a powerful flare, blasting into his surroundings, instantly disintegrating everyone and everything.

  It was mind-boggling! It was irrevocably raving madness?

  Some fragile items were shattered and scattered all over the place.

  Many people lay on the floor, while medical people came in and attended to them.

  After the president and General Chisholm had left, he left as well, and found injured people and damage everywhere he traveled in the vehicle.

  The worst was the nearest to the targeted area, and there were seriously injured people being taken out of the regions, and being reported all over the media.

  The president even gave an interview apologizing to everyone, and the people in the zones near the explosion, and condemned Colonel Pratt for not foreseeing it, and clearing all the zones, and warning people more, and allowing to get injured when they could have been safely protected by various things in safer regions.

  Chapter 29

  The Explosions

  The explosions were startling and destroyed everything in seconds, and the alien had to fight to stop itself being entirely destroyed, and would have failed if the life forms had fully known of its existence in other dimensions and had fully attacked it there.

  The magnitude of it was beyond its comprehension, and it even admired them for creating it, and even showing its existence to it.

  It also could not comprehend how they had managed to survive it. The entire spacecraft should have been destroyed in seconds, and it kept using its senses to detect it, and found it fully functioning, and with the life forms still aboard.

  After a long time it began probing the zone it had been in, and found total emptiness, an immense hollow zone in the spacecraft, and it managed replace itself there, after a few failed attempts at trying to move into the occupied spacecraft, and it kept itself in the destroyed zone seeking to escape, and searching what had happened there.

  It did everything to increase its powers and structure, as it drifted about, and had a deadly encounter with the energy shield that they had put around it, and like the outer energy screen of the spacecraft it was unable to go through it, and it examined it.

  The explosion had blasted into the energy shield bubble, and nothing in it had survived, and it remained there by controlling its forces, and drawing together and restoring its elements.

  It had become far more conscious since the explosions, while it had changed itself to help survive any further reoccurrences, and it had improved its powers, and had moved around the energy sphere examining it for weaknesses, and learned to control its formation and powers.

  If only it could harness such powers that the explosion had, it could move on to a new form, far greater and powerful enough to do what it had never even visualized doing.

  It floated endlessly through the nothingness, on a quest, trying to reach its ultimate goal, which it was never sure what it would find with, drifting and weaving, occasionally astounded, wondering what the life forms would do with it, and if it would slowly drain away with the loss of energy, with its size shrinking down to an implausible size, and it realized that the life forms would surely scan and check it, which it was sure they had not done, and it realized that it should find a way to conceal itself from all their detection systems, as they may want to check or repair the explosion zone, and it could escape, and would find a new way of destroying them, and stop anything further happening again, and make sure that it the last threat of destruction.

  Chapter 30

  The Explosion Investigation

  The energy bubble around the explosion zone was examined in great detail in intense examinations, and it was found and reported to have no breaches and to have not allowed anything to escape.

  No traces of the alien were found anywhere aboard or detected inside energy bubble, and it was found to be a vacuum inside, instead of what normal explosion remains would leave, and have powerfully compressed gasses, and even the paranormal scientists survey of it, in other dimensions, showed the same results.

  It was concluded by all that the alien no longer existed, and would no longer threaten to destroy them all, and the military were congratulated for the work that they had done, and actually beating such a scenario, and everyone in the end saw that the explosion damage to the rest of the spacecraft should be ignored, and warnings and other actions would be used if the explosions were to be used again, and they continued to repair all the damage that they could to either continue with the voyage or return home.

  As all the damage was being repaired and people recovered Kruger started to realize something, and that they had missed something, and that the alien had to sneak aboard as it could not enter the energy shield, and though they had tried small energy shields on it, it would not have been able to escape the energy screen used around the
explosions, as it would have escaped.

  He was positive of the fact, and thought that they had missed it, and he also realized why the alien had not just attacked the control center and taken control of the spacecraft, as there was an energy screen there, which had been activated a few times through the events, which had been powerful enough to stop it.

  Another investigation into Don came about when it was realized that nobody knew anything about him or who he was – unlike Kruger and the others, as people knew him, and though they had forgotten many things, they still remembered him.

  Don was someone who should not be there, and the fact that the alien had been another copy of him confused things further, and many people aboard believed that nobody should leave the spacecraft at all, unless there was an emergency.

  A full investigation into Don would never come up with anything worthwhile, and he might have been caused by some form of accident by the alien when it had copied him. Yet when they did more tests on him, on him being older, they discovered that he was far older than they had originally estimated, and Kruger now thought that he was him from the future, and that somehow he had been thrown back in time, and he thought that at some point in the future something would happen that would throw him back in time, and that he would have to go through it all over again, and he started to realize that Don could be keeping more secrets than he had thought, and that he had not just lost his memory, and was avoiding doing things because he was avoiding altering history, and his own history, and creating fatal problems.

  Chapter 31

  The Opening

  Many scientists wanted more investigations to be done and the president and military decided in the end to allow the energy bubble around the explosion zone to be examined more closely, and them to remove the energy shield, by slowly opening small holes in it to allow air in, and to fill the vacuum in, and to remove the entire shield from around the zone.

  The idea was done slowly, and the ship’s air supplies at the region were increased to compensate, and they soon filled the entire region in the energy bubble with air, and removed the entire shield from there, and the media showed the immense hole in the spacecraft, and how the scientists were investigating it.

  Kruger gasped a few times when they opened it, wondering what the consequences would be, and saw that they had handled everything, and that nothing had happened.

  He realized that it was better that they did it now, as he would not like the alien if it were still there to get to the Earth, and he would rather they handled the problem there, and correctly.

  Near the laboratory of paranormal scientists Kruger got another surprise when he met other scientists there, from different regions of the ship, who were arriving there to do work, and he realized from what they told him that they thought there could be a problem, and that they thought there was a chance of the alien still being there, and though the scientists wished that they should not have taken the energy screen down that it was better for them to handle the problem there and then.

  At the laboratory he realized that they had clearly predicted that they would take the energy shield down for a long time, and had been at work on hundreds of elaborate contraptions that they had invented for their purposes, and that they had clearly been working like crazy to build for a long time, with the majority of the large laboratory covered in tools and equipment, and their contraption of hundreds of parts being fitted together at the center, and parts being tested there, with immense power supply cables coming in through areas of the floor to give them as much power as possible.

  Not only that after some time he started to realize that far more was behind it than he had thought, and that him taking a break away from the outer spacecraft, and relaxing in his quarters, with Marsha, had left him out of touch with what was happening.

  Yet he had checked all media updates, and nobody had contacted him about anything!

  After some time he managed to get to talk to Bryan, when he managed to pull himself away from his work for something to eat.

  “Why was I not informed of anything?” he asked, worriedly.

  “Good one! But they did not need you! Or for the moment, anyway ...”

  “What’s happening then?”

  “As you know the energy shield was taken down?”

  “Right! It was!”

  “Well that thing was still there! And it managed to hide itself!”

  Even though he had suspected it was he felt like fainting or something, and felt deeply annoyed, as he knew what was going happen, and he was trapped, and he had to go through the whole situation again, and very well could be killed this time around!

  “Great! They could have done a lot of things! They had it as a prisoner, and trapped in there. They could even have created a gap leading out of the spacecraft from it with an energy shield tunnel, to stop it escaping, and taken it out through the outer energy shield, and if it refused to leave shrink the energy bubble until it either left through it or decrease the energy bubble to a size that it could be removed through the tunnel, and thrown out into that world ...”

  “Good one! But they thought it never existed there, and would not have gone to that length for nothing ...”

  The next thing that happened shocked Kruger further, and further than ever before, as his communicator announced a message to him, and he answered the message, from someone at the military control center, who told him that Marsha Pendleton had been killed by the alien.

  Chapter 32

  The Monster Returns

  Kruger was staggered, and was even more shocked when he met Don, and found out that he was more staggered than him, as it was the first time that he had seen him properly react to anything. Even when he had attacked the alien with the weapon in the bar he had reacted little, and he sensed that he had known that the weapon would not kill it, or do anything other than make it angry, and perhaps attack them or something.

  The alien was now killing people in a rampage through the spacecraft. It had developed a great deal since it had been blown up, and trapped in the energy bubble, and had developed a method of leaping from location to location, avoiding any traps or repeats of what happened.

  Its leaps were instantaneous, and it never appeared at the same location twice, and they had problems avoiding it – other than the fact that it was possessed with doing as much damage to them and their property as it could. It had waged war on them, and it was ready to fight for its survival.

  When Kruger returned to the laboratory, Mitchel and Bryan were working and making all the scientists work like crazy to finish their project, which they all called the STP1, and they only stopped to greet him as he entered.

  What they were building was beyond his imagination, and the majority of the scientists there, and he knew that they could not get anything out them, but worked on fascinated with the technology, especially as most had not even properly encountered new technology, which was virtually a thing of the past.

  The thing had lost shape and did not resemble anything, and would not be noticed by anyone.

  The alien could appear there at any time, kill them all, and not even bother with it!

  When Mitchel finally stopped for a drink, Kruger marched over, and asked him, “How are we going to catch that thing now? It leaps about the ship too randomly, and has not actually been found to arrive at the same location twice. They are unable to predict its moments!”

  Kruger spotted a brief glimpse of disappointment, but saw that he had known it, and had thought of the answer.

  “We have compensated for all that, and you forget we came up with a way to detect it in other dimensions!”

  He took Kruger over to the equipment that they had used to detect it, and showed him its location in the ship.

  “How come this is not at the control center?” he moaned.

  “Or why don’t we have another model created for them? Well, for one thing it moves too fast, and it moves within seconds of attacking each area, and the fact that it would
now take too long for us or them to create another, and they would have a hard time building more as there are not enough of some of the parts aboard!”

  “So what now?”

  “We have a better idea?” he replied, finishing his drink, and pointing at what they were building, and he quickly left him and returned to building it!

  Chapter 33

  The Space/Time Project

  For a moment Kruger heart leaped as though something strange had happened, as though something had vanished.

  The scientists had not even finished building the STP1 when they had heard about the attack on the control center, and he knew that they had not been able to get the energy shield up in time.

  He had never realized how determined Mitchel and Bryan were, and could become, until now, and he watched them start activating their equipment, even though it had not been tested.

  All the scientists stood back as it burst into life, using massive amounts of energy, through the attached cables, with the shear energy making the very ship about them vibrate, and lurch.

  It was then that something strange had happened, and Kruger wished he had forced Mitchel into giving more information on what they were doing.

  White translucent lights appeared magically around them, floating inertly in mid-air, in front of their eyes, like stars in space, and Mitchel continued activating controls, and energy discharges fired out at regions of them, and they simultaneously increased their light to bright whiteness, and the power being used could be felt in vibrations and whirling sounds.

  A vociferous blast of gleams of light exploded out, and the lights rotated, with fuzzy multidimensional forms rotating behind them, clearly from time shifts, and some formed clustered layers.