The path curved left. Something was ahead. He stopped cold. A crumpled, shadowy mass hunched against the wall on the right. Another pulse of the light and Milton knew what it was. He discarded the helmet and boots, moved as fast as the suit would allow and dropped to his knees.
He had recognised the shape of a fellow engineer, an aquatic from Hydrainia, slouching against the wall. Milton ripped off a suit glove and felt the stubby neck. The scales were dry and crumbly.
Milton spun, searching both ways. He was about to cry out for assistance but his eye caught something else. The aquatic’s stiff claw clutched something. Squinting, he saw it was a torch. He pried it loose and pushed onto his feet.
He fidgeted with the switch and a column of light shot through cracked glass. Without hesitation, he swung the beam onto his crewmate. He choked on what he saw. He felt like his lungs were being vacuumed. Milton stumbled back against the wall and dropped to the floor.
Only a glimpse, but it stayed with him. The wall and grate were bloodstained pinkish red. Gaping wounds dotted the aquatic’s torso — same-size holes in the wall above — where a weapon had shot clean through.
Two
Milton sat in the dark with clenched jaw, unsure how to react. He thought of calling for help but hesitated; the killer might have been close. He exhaled. A cold gust from a nearby vent blew through the dead hollow, as if the ship were breathing, forcing air through its failing windpipes.
A sharp clunk cracked the silence. Milton twisted and covered the light. Another one. Nothing was visible down either side of the passage. But something hit the grating — footsteps — getting heavier and closer.
Milton shifted his weight to his feet and inched himself up the wall. His gaze caught movement of a shape in the darkness. Something lumbered along in the level below. The grate obscured Milton’s view, but he could tell the shadow didn’t resemble any crewmember he’d seen. The being came from his right. Milton dared not look away. It stopped short of passing under. Its large torso turned to look down the way it came.
Light leaked from the torch. Milton’s heart accelerated. A revealing strip escaped between the fingers of his stiff gloved hand and cast against the wall. He blocked the sliver and rolled the device in his fingers, shifting glances between his hands and the thing below. Feeling along the steel, he found the rubbery switch and delicately applied pressure. A bead of sweat tickled his cheek. Holding his breath, he pushed harder. The button clicked. The glow disappeared.
The shape shifted below. It paused, completely still. A moment passed. Milton had to breathe again. He opened his mouth and gently let the air escape his lungs. Then, stretching his throat wide, he inhaled as inaudibly as possible.
The creature snapped its head upwards. Black hollow eyes locked a dead gaze, boring into him through the grate. Milton pushed off the wall. The leg of his suit caught the underside of his boot and he tripped forward, face to face with the creature.
Panting, he scrambled to his feet and held the bottom half of the suit, sprinting as fast as the oversize spacewalk gear would allow. He looked everywhere but back. The haunting eyes stayed with him.
He turned a corner and ducked through a small doorway. The pulsing lights had changed the look of the ship. The corridors were a maze, utterly foreign.
An elevator appeared on the left. Frantically and repeatedly, he slammed his thumb on the call button. The doors eventually opened and he wasted no time getting inside. He swung round, fumbled with the controls and the lift ascended with a quiet humming. The lab levels. That’s where the closest escape pods were … hopefully.
Milton glanced down at the sagging outfit. He dropped the torch; the thud sent an echo down the shaft. With a twist of the wrist joint, the other glove came off. He set to work, furiously peeling off the rest of the suit. He unclicked the torso and bent forward, letting it flip onto the floor. The arm and leg pieces came off in sections and he shook them off, dropping them carelessly by his feet.
The elevator walls shook. The weak lights on the ceiling flickered and died. Milton wiped his brow. The lift kept moving in the dark and stopped at what he could only assume were the sterile lab levels.
He knelt and felt around. The doors opened. He found the torch and darted to the side, hiding from view. He took a shaky breath and peered around the corner, his hand hovering readily over the control to seal the doors.
He aimed the light and applied pressure to the rubber switch. The beam shot down a corridor, bouncing off loose metallic bits and pieces. Capsized lab trolleys and equipment littered the corridor. After a quick look, he clicked the button again and navigated his path with heightened awareness.
The sound of refrigeration hummed somewhere. A liquid dripped close by; his boots splashed in a wet puddle. While edging past a trolley, something made of glass cracked under his step. He had only been on this level once and was intimidated by the multiple paths he encountered. The mouth of another corridor passed on his right. Down the passage, sparking cables drooped from the ceiling, lighting the folds of a shape that was draped in a stained lab coat.
He continued in his direction, until a low whistle came from the right.
‘Psst, Milton!’
His rubbery soles squeaked on the floor as he spun to face an open doorway. Pitch blackness. He clicked on the torch and brightened the room — a devastated lab.
Something crashed to the floor. The sound of something metal and circular spinning on its edge rang louder and faster with each rotation. He moved the light towards the noise and found the bowl on the floor next to a counter. Another thing smashed and a figure sprang from the darkness, landing on the benchtop in a pouncing position, flailing its wild tail. Milton moved the light onto a yellow form; Tazman.
The Freegu’s body shivered and his head twitched at his surroundings. The dilation in his pupils had reduced his amber coloured irises to a thin circle. His hands poised ahead of him in an open-hand combat position.
‘What is going on here?’ asked Milton, stepping over a broken machine.
‘The ship is boarded,’ Tazman hurriedly whispered, twirling his forearms, ready to attack. ‘Big, big things are lurking.’
‘Yeah I saw one. Who are they, the Tyde?’
‘No. Definitely not the Tyde — something else.’
Milton took a shaky breath and lowered the beam. ‘Tazman, we have to leave, but I’m not sure I know the way to the escape pods.’
‘I do, I do,’ the simian chimed. He leapt from the counter and snatched the light. ‘It’s a bit hard to see without one of these, though,’ he said, tapping it as he would a hollow branch. He ducked low and peered out into the corridor. ‘Let’s go.’
Milton followed. Tazman moved fast in decisive direction, nimbly darting over obstacles and rubbish. His tail smoothly followed his movements, flapping on his jumps and flexing for extra balance on his landings. He light-footedly stepped up and over a trolley. Milton, trying to keep up, placed his boot on the same surface and dislodged the shelf, tripping forward as the metal clattered to the floor. He grunted and shook his boot out of the frame. He caught up to Tazman who had stopped at an intersection.
‘Are you sure you know the way?’ Milton whispered.
‘Relax, I’ve seen the blueprints,’ Tazman replied, staring out into the dark.
Of course; Tazman’s eidetic memory was his favourite party trick. He never stopped talking about it, claiming it was both a gift and a curse.
Tazman continued, taking a shortcut through a smashed glass pane that previously divided two chemical labs. The door that led into the main hallway had been wedged closed and barricaded with every supply container and piece of equipment in the room. They took a different exit, one that led out of the testing area.
‘Here we are. Here we are,’ Tazman chanted.
They reached the end of a corridor and entered a long bare passage lined with doors on either side. Tazman broke into a jog and Milton followed suit. The torch beam swung side to side as Tazman s
earched for the right entrance. Overhead lights buzzed and flickered. Warped shadows disappeared and reappeared on the floor and walls.
‘This is it,’ he said, stopping at a metal door. The worn markings depicted a hexagon above a downward pointing arrow nestled between two slanted vertical lines. The door should already have been wide open.
Tazman thumbed the button. The control panel chirped and sparked. The door creaked to the side then stopped short. Black smoke and a burning smell billowed from the control panel; the opening wasn’t big enough.
‘Budget cuts,’ Tazman spat.
Milton glanced through the door’s small window. Through the cage wire embedded in the glass, he made out weak floor lights that marked emergency paths. Almost there. He put his fingers in the gap and tried to pull the door open. Tazman joined the struggle. Milton shifted position and threw his weight back. His unfocused gaze drifted down the corridor, onto something else.
Down the hallway, the tall shadowy figure lugged itself out from around a corner and paused. Tazman also noticed the shadow. Both of them squashed against the door in an attempt to hide in the tiny alcove.
Milton peered out. The creature turned. He wasn’t sure if it turned towards or away. A flicker of light answered the question, revealing its eyes. Tazman pressed harder, his tail tucked between his legs and trailing up the door.
The invader stared down the uninhibited line of sight. The moment couldn’t have lasted more than five spuckons but it felt like a life cycle. Milton blinked. Another blink of a faulty light revealed the creature was already striding towards them.
He exchanged a brief glance with Tazman and their combined hands stabbed back into the gap. Their new motivation seemed to enlarge the opening by a hair.
The creature’s footsteps sounded like the ticking of a timer — unstoppable. The darkness concealed its features, but flashes revealed the glint of hard and sharp edges. The shadow neared an exploded light and the shower of electrical sparks reflected in its eyes. The invader passed beneath the broken source unfazed.
Then it stopped, weighted its head to one side and watched them, as if their vulnerability fostered amusement. The head slowly straightened again. The creature stood absolutely still. Milton grunted at the stubbornness of the door. He put his knee to the frame and rocked back and forward in desperation. When he looked up again, it had broken into a sprint.
‘Go! Go!’ Milton shouted.
Tazman let out a yell; his tail unfurled and swung violently, whipping Milton across the back.
Milton turned back to the door. His head felt weird. A flow of adrenaline heated his veins and at the same time he started to feel peaceful and focused. He had the clarity of a single dominating thought: if the door did not open, he and Tazman were dead.
It didn’t last. He succumbed to looking up again and his mind raced like never before. Panic. Voices and indistinguishable images. He didn’t feel as if they were his own. He shook his head, trying to will the white noise away. The door scraped open and he fell back.
Dizziness. He blinked, and stumbled in confusion. He made out the blurry sight of Tazman edging his limber body through the narrow gap. He took one step to the door before his bearings disappeared. His head bobbed. He reached around in the dark for the walls but lost his footing and felt the ground hit hard against his knee. He looked up again at the approaching mass. The tall body bounded through the dark. The eyes leapt ahead with each flicker of the light, as if the beast was being teleported closer and closer.
In the swirling reel, Milton’s anxiety disappeared once more. He pressed his hands to the floor. A tingle flowed through his arms. He pushed to his feet. His right hand felt unusually light. He twitched his fingers, inducing little tingles. He raised his palm and examined it. His flesh and veins looked normal but he felt … different.
The creature, noticing the gesture, seemed to slow in response and it stopped ahead of him. It towered over his head, looking down and reaching its long spindly fingers towards his face. He glanced at his palm again before slamming it into the creature’s abdominals. The move felt like a reflex. The contact point on his hand tingled with a tiny explosion of force. The creature was sent sliding back along the floor. It toppled forward on its hands and crouched to halt the momentum. It looked up and glared; tiny specks of light accumulated in its eyes. They looked like stars — hundreds of tiny stars flashing and disappearing again. Creation and destruction were both contained in these narrow eyes. The sight was hypnotic. The creature rose from the floor, tightening its knuckles.
Milton blinked and suddenly his upper arm was pulled to the side. Tazman’s voice shocked against his eardrums, ‘Come on!’
The dizziness faded. Milton followed Tazman through the doorway. Tazman cut across the room to the closest escape pod. The tiny hexagonal vessel had a cabin for six. Tazman bolted up the ramp and dropped into its top hatch.
Before dropping in after him, Milton paused and glanced at the room. Every other pod was still intact and unused. He climbed in and closed the lid.
With his animal grip already on the release mechanism, Tazman watched the hatch locks snap into place. The circular device thrust the locking bolts into the pod rim. As soon as the hatch secured, he slammed down the lever.
The process was just a little less than instantaneous. A metal ring around the pod lifted it from the floor and spun to inversion. The artificial gravity inside laboured against the Reconotyre’s field. Milton gripped the seat; his hair began to hover about his head. The ring shot along a chain rail before dropping the pod through an opening in the floor into a shaft. The thrusters fired up during the fall and a circular door blew open at the end. With engines blazing hot, the pod was propelled into the blue void. Soon the teardrop shape of the Reconotyre was but a distant speck.
Three
The black hollow domes locked in a stare. Blank. Dead. They watched Milton with an uncompromising focus. He felt small — unworthy to exist, even. He tried to move but his weak muscles would not permit him. Some kind of barrier surrounded him. A welling feeling of hopelessness poisoned his insides. A gripping pressure overcame him. He clutched a hand to his chest in futile desperation as he began to die.
Milton’s eyes shot open. He snapped upright, gasping for air. He calmed himself, breathed deeply and realised where he was — still in the escape pod. All he remembered of his dream were the eyes, like the pair he saw on the creature, harghs ago, on the Reconotyre. It was haunting him. In the split spuckon between dreaming and awake, he had the strong feeling he’d seen the vision a million times before. But when he came fully to his senses, he could not remember any such thing.
Tazman sprawled across three and a half seats opposite. His tail, which trailed up along the headrests, flicked and fell onto his face. He snorted and swatted it several times before it whipped back against his spread legs.
Below, the pod’s engines hissed to life. The stars in the foggy hatch window above shifted to the right as the pod adjusted its trajectory according to the fresh data scans arriving in intervals. They were still far from their destination.
Tazman had charted a course to where he calculated the Orisurrection colony would be. The remote space station housed thousands of colonists, scientists, prisoners, the genetic material of millions of species of wildlife, and everything else needed to colonise and study new worlds. Space exploration companies like Nova Corp often used such facilities as headquarters.
Milton curled into a ball in the warm spot he’d made, and shivered there. With his ear on the seat he could hear the muffled clicks of the engine as the onboard computer adjusted the thruster phasing. He inhaled and rubbed crusts from his eyes. A smidgen of visible vapour puffed out on his exhale.
The space outside wasn’t blue anymore, just black nothingness dotted with a few stars. He worried about time dilation. His folks had told him to stay away from high velocities without hyperspace. But still, Orisurrection wasn’t obscenely far, well … relatively. He might lose one o
r two Stoneia rotations. Not that a great deal would happen at home in that amount of time, and he doubted his family would even notice his lack of aging.
Milton couldn’t stop thinking about the incident with the creature — he had forced it backwards at an impossible velocity and distance. Tazman suggested the effect was due to a concentrated burst of static electricity and the dizziness was from a lack of oxygen. Milton examined his hand. It felt normal — nothing like it did back in the hallway. Maybe Tazman was right. He hoped so. And then there was the weird shiny stuff in its eyes. Forget about it, he told himself, shaking the thoughts of the incident from his mind. He had more important things to worry about.
He began to think of home, the rocky world of Stoneia and its arid cracked surface. The faces of his adoptive parents appeared in his mind’s eye and warmed him inside. He grinned and had a chuckle to himself, thinking about the funny traits of the wonderful characters of the village who had raised him. He had a contented and mischievous childhood, often having to make his own fun. The memories had almost stopped his shivering, until the prospect of never seeing his homeworld again came to mind.
At the sound of beeping, Milton perked up and shifted to the control panel block nestled between two seats. The proximity sensor blinked in the dark. Milton felt for the correct buttons. He pressed one of the lit ones and a green beam shone into the centre of the space. A holographic representation of a ship rotated there. Its sleek body was narrowed at the front with wings that pointed back like an arrow.
Tazman’s hand swooped through the light as he stretched out his limbs. After a loudly voiced yawn, he sat up, clicking his joints in several places while his tail fluttered and thumped against the seat.
‘It’s slowing to our position,’ said Milton.
The transmitter crackled and a serious-sounding female voice came through. ‘Anyone home?’
‘Yes. Hello,’ said Milton.
Rift Breaker Page 2
