“What do you think you’re doing?” Sergei Ivanovich demanded. “We don’t need any Thaumaturgy now.”
Adolphus looked up from where he was laying out equipment disdainfully, his dislike written plainly on his face. Don’t provoke him. The Nazi thought silently. Just put it away and we can deal with this.
“Collecting power.” The smaller man said scornfully. “We have a source of human grade gastplasm right here and we haven’t been taking advantage of it.”
“You’ll kill the ships, no.” The Slavic soldier shook his head. “One of them helped me fight off the daemon that attacked me, we’ll find you other ghosts.”
The Technician ignored him, activating his capture device as he prepared to begin the process.
“Stop!” Sergei Ivanovich shouted, bringing up his rifle and pointing it at Adolphus. “I order you to stop!”
Things were quickly getting out of hand. “Listen,” the Nazi stood up, hands outstretched in what he hoped was a non-threatening manner, “we have to stick together if we’re going to make it out of here, Adolf I’m sure you have plenty of gastplasm already-”
“There’s no reason not to do this.” Adolphus said absently. “Just because the Slav here is too small minded to think rationally isn’t important. Knowledge told me.”
What was he going on about now?
“I am your superior officer and I am giving you an order!” The Combat Specialist had started shouting. “Turn off that device!”
“No.” The Thaumaturgic Technician pressed a button and then watched as visible light and energy started to swirl from the floating ships in bottles into the capture end of his machine. He seemed oblivious to the trouble and danger he was in. “This is rational.”
The thundering stutter of Sergei Ivanovich’s M-5 assault rifle caught them all by surprise, the commando dived for cover reflexively, hiding underneath the table, but Heinrich watched as if in slow motion as bullets pummeled into the body of his friend. Three hammer blows, each one sending gouts of blood and tissue spiraling away as they hit, the terrible damage that high caliber bullets could inflict on the human body at close range. His medical training asserted itself briefly, just long enough for it to tell him that no one could survive that, not even if he was wearing a bullet proof vest, not with the side of their head crumpled in and brains splattered over a now non-functional spirit capture device…
He brought his own pistol up and started firing, no real reason, he just did it on reflex. The former Red Army soldier was unstable, he was infected, he was now a danger. But on top of that he had killed Heinrich’s friend, had killed an amusing little man whose company he had valued very highly. A fellow fascist and a fellow Aryan, but most importantly of all, a friend. He fired from the hip, twice before the gun clicked empty (he had neglected to reload from earlier) and both shots went wild, smashing into a bookcase and the wall.
The other man turned, whirling to bring up his rifle and fire again, and the Medic saw sweat evaporating off his skin, skin that had begun to fluoresce in different colors- red, blue, green- from the disease that was ravaging his body. And there was the rifle, the barrel wide enough to swallow an elephant, casually correcting for aim… there was no hurry. It wasn’t as if he’d be able to reload his pistol in time.
Then Heinrich Fritzsch did something he’d never done before, something that he had always wondered about doing, always wondered what it would feel like with that insatiable curiosity that all humans possess to some degree or another.
He bit down and felt his false molar splinter, felt the bitter taste that had to be the prussic acid- liquid cyanide- and then his vision swirled and everything was gone…
Chapter 20
Chapter 20
Sergei watched the medic crumple to the floor, at first confused but then understanding as the man’s breathing stopped. He waited a few seconds before going to check the German’s pulse; he was dead.
Some impulse seized the Combat Specialist and he ran, not trying to find Arra, not thinking about anything but his desire to get away. He stumbled out into the corridor and ran until he collided with the door at the end -another one of the damned doors that opened first to one place and then to another. He didn’t feel cold anymore, now he felt like the coal feels in a furnace as the fire consumes it, his sweat was evaporating just from the heat of his body alone. In an instant of fury he tore off what was left of his suit, the protection that hadn’t been able to save him from a superficial cut- a cut that was definitely what was killing him now.
His hands; they were glowing. Changing colors constantly, every shade in the rainbow. With a choked off sob Sergei wrenched the door open and stepped through, it closed with finality behind him. He sat on the dusty metal of the floor and cried openly for the first since he had been a child, sobbed as tears ran down his cheeks and sizzled away one after the other. Oh lord he had killed the Technician, he had killed the Medic too even if he hadn’t actually had a chance to pull the trigger. And now he was going to die here alone of something that no gun could protect him from.
He thought about Kamila, thought about her long dark hair and how it felt to run his fingers through it. He thought about her laugh, and how she smiled at almost anything and sometimes nothing at all. He though about how she would tug on his beard and how they used to sit next to each other for hours on end, not speaking, each merely happy that the other was there. He thought about how he was never going to see her again. That thought was enough to make him stop crying. He sucked in air greedily, trying to draw in the chill of the atmosphere and cool the fire raging underneath his skin. After a few seconds he slowly pulled himself up.
In front of him was a door.
It was a door made out of solid steel, with additional strips of metal bolted to it to increase its resiliency. Rather than a knob it had a large wheel set in the center that needed to be turned to open it, above the wheel a series of identical rivets had spread across the door’s surface in the manner of lichen, nearly obscuring the letters “J(S)” inscribed in chipped paint on the steel. When Sergei laid one trembling hand on it he felt as if he were in the center of a zone of silence, the ship’s usual quiet seeming to grow deeper and more apprehensive. The metal itself was neither warm nor cool, it just was in a way that words could not adequately describe.
The Russian took a deep breath. He didn’t question that he should be the one to make the discovery, or that it should happen now when he was at his lowest ebb. Alone among the team he was the only one who belonged to an organized religion, who believed in a god outside of the powerful and malevolent entities that occasionally slipped in from outside their dimension to terrorize humanity, and he could well feel that some guardian angel or watchful saint had arranged for it to happen. He twisted the wheel until it would go no further, then freed a grenade from his belt. Sergei whispered a small prayer, closed his eyes, and then pulled the door open.
And tossed the grenade in.
Chapter 21
Chapter 21
He didn’t want to know what was inside of JS, what the Rainbow device looked like or what it had done the area around it. He had seen enough horror inside this ship for ten lifetimes, and enough was enough. The explosion when it came was muffled by the door and it went on and on and on until he knew that he must have hit something, because grenades don’t last that long after they go off, but he had no intention of trying to confirm the kill. Instead he pulled off his rifle and let it fall to the deck, then added his remaining grenades and all his ammunition. He didn’t think he’d need any of that anymore.
“Please god.” Not an oath but a heartfelt prayer as the Russian turned back to the door through which he’d entered and pulled it open.
A row of portholes looked out of one side of a long dark corridor. Past the glass was a scene of the docks of a city at night, lights covered up with half-hearted blackout measures. The low bulk of a Libert
y ship sat at anchor nearby and a soldier carrying an M-1 who wore the armband of the military police was patrolling a few hundred meters away. Posters plastered to the sides of a warehouse exhorted citizens in English to “Buy War Bonds!”
He let the door close and as soon as the latch clicked, opened it again.
A grimy curtain fluttered on the far side of the room. Against the right hand wall was a long glass cabinet with the front smashed open, broken bottles of medicine and torn medical textbooks still adorning its shelves. Two desks, one with a dismembered skeleton draped across it in the scraps of a nurses uniform. On the left was a small surgical suite, the walls stained with blood spatter and dark fluid.
Close the door, and open.
A robot the size of a large dog swiveled to look at him, wires and tubes filled with bubbling clear fluid ran to the piece of pink brain in its center. They also ran from the brain to a single human eye mounted on the top of the machine in a metal pincer that was clamped around the white and blue sphere. The pupil dilated then constricted, like a camera adjusting focus. It started to move towards him.
He slammed the door shut, heart pounding. His body was on fire, still a metaphor at least, but he felt like he had been walking on the surface of the sun. In the darkness his skin shone with the brightness of a bank of neon lights, constantly shifting colors but powerful enough that it illuminated the space he was in. How long until this killed him? How long until the growing weakness he felt in his limbs made it impossible to walk or stand?
No matter; Kamilla was waiting for him. Sergei pulled the door open again.
The mess hall, thick with dust, ghosts, and the body of the spider-man he had killed.
Close and open.
The generator room.
Close and open.
The crew quarters and the jaw tree.
Close and open.
The officers’ quarters and Hirasawa’s headless corpse.
Close and open.
Close and open.
Close and open.
Close and open.
Sergei’s hands shook as he forced his lethargic body to open the door and close it, again and again and again. He saw the rooms they had passed through before, he saw new rooms, he saw bones and corpses everywhere he looked, but he kept going. And then he finally hauled the door open one last time and found himself staring into the bridge. Reddish light streamed in through the windows, playing in the dust and on the bones of the dead. The sun was setting as he struggled to walk out onto the Colorado’s deck again, as he lifted his radio and thumbed the transmit button.
In the end the doctors’ efforts to save him were of no avail, Sergei Ivanovich Blagadov lived just long enough to make his report and warn Leyte Facility of the danger before the intense heat being released by the microscopic daemons that were consuming his soul turned his body into ashes. The ashes were later sterilized and given to his fiancé along with his (posthumously awarded) Medal for Courage.
Chapter 22
Chapter 22
Arra took her hand away from the Medic’s rapidly cooling wrist and straightened, holstering her pistol. Mentally she ran down a checklist; Grey- dead, Hirasawa- dead, Schjerfbeck- dead, Fritzsch- dead, Blagadov- missing and homicidal. That left her alone with only the ships in bottles and the dead for company. Supplies were not an issue, she had two days worth of food and water in her own pack plus whatever the Medic and the Technician had been carrying with them, but the Agency would drop the Colorado back into the dimension it had escaped from long before that became a problem.
And she had no intention of facing the same fate as the ship’s original crew.
The Greenlander paced frustratedly under the glowing ribbons of Aurorae, trying to come up with a plan. Leave the officers’ mess and keep going in the hope that she would find a way out? They had tried that and the only result was more dead when they stumbled onto enemies too powerful for them. By herself she had no chance.
“Just blow a hole in the ship they said.” Arra snarled and brought her fists down onto the table, making the desiccated corpse of the American Marine jump. “It’ll be easy they said, if you can’t get out just blow a god dam hole!” She had the explosives, maybe if she set them off in sequence she could use the sound of the charges going off to send a message in Morse code to the facility?
And then what? The Agency wouldn’t sacrifice a second team trying to find the sole survivor of the first team, not in a ship where you could wander forever in the space-distorted interior without finding what you were looking for. And if radio signals couldn’t get out then sound probably wouldn't work either. She needed a way out, she needed a workable plan, she needed-
-a window of opportunity.
The commando turned to look at the room’s sole porthole, at the ocean outside that Schjerfbeck had said was only an illusion that might explode and kill them all if they tried to reach it. It certainly looked real, what if- like the doors that opened onto random places across the ship- the window opened up to wherever this spot of ocean was, some place that the Colorado had once passed by? She had definitely seen a ship earlier, if it was near a shipping lane and she could survive long enough to be picked up… Another alternative was that the illusion would dissolve as soon as the window broke and then she’d be able to just drop down and walk back to Leyte Facility. That would be ideal, but it was probably unlikely.
Still, the woman stepped forward to lay an open palm on the cool glass, what other options did she have? “Please don’t kill me.” A quiet request to the vision outside the window. Irrational, but it wasn’t as if she had anything to pray to. Arra took two steps back then drew her gun and inhaled, sucking air through the filter on the suit. The moment her lungs were full she fired;
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Three shots to create three holes in the thick glass, a rough triangle with cracks spider-webbing between the points. There was no explosion or burst of light and she exhaled, setting the gun down on the table. A swift kick was all it took to shatter the window, then to use her foot to knock out the few remaining large fragments of glass that clung stubbornly to the frame. It seemed to have worked.
A biting wind coursed into the room, ruffling the pages of the magazines in bookcases and knocking over one of the Marine’s cardboard cartridge boxes. Real honest wind, wind that carried with it the smell of salt and the sea, a light spray of moisture picked up from the waves. It was familiar to a woman who’d grown up along the coast all her life and Arra’s nerves eased. She could hear the roar of the water and the wind, concrete things from the real world, the natural world where there was sunlight and doors always opened onto where they were supposed to open.
She carefully stripped off her Hazardous Environment Suit- it would make swimming no easier- and watched as the ships in bottles left off their seventy year old dance to float into the resistance of the wind and cluster around the open window. It was cute in a way, those tiny ships lit with St. Elmo’s fire and the colorful shine of Aurora Borealis fidgeting as if they wanted to go out the window but were afraid to do so. She left behind everything that would weigh her down, guns, ammunition, supplies, then stood before the window clutching tightly to her whale.
“He’ll protect you while I’m gone.” Her mother’s voice as she stood at the front door, bags packed and sitting on the linoleum. “Remember that. As long as you keep him with you, you’ll always be safe.” And a six year old girl had nodded solemnly and promised to keep the stuffed whale with her always, hoping that her mother would be back soon so they could name it together. Only her mother had never come back and after that it was just the confusion of the funeral, people in dark clothes shaking her hand and saying things she couldn’t understand, and then off to live with a father she had never really known. But she never lost the stuffed whale, it was small enough that when she grew older it could be kept in one pocket, and she never named it.
It was just her whale.
Arr
a tucked it away and stepped in front of the broken porthole, the tiny ships moving out of her way as she approached. The water outside looked cold- freezing really- but she was no stranger to cold water. She grasped the sides of a frame that was already frosting over under the assault of the wind and spray, and stuck her head through, turning her torso so that it would fit. The wind made her eyes water and she blinked, mentally preparing for the plunge, trying to accept the temperature and ignore it. She took another deep breath.
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