by Phil Maxey
As he sat up, his black and white cat Hex jumped up on his bed and started to claw at the sheet. “Hey, stop that shit, I told you, not the bed.” He had looked after Hex for eight years and she still clawed everything, but he felt like he needed to scold her in the faint hope she might listen one day.
Hex looked up at him and meowed.
“Yeah, I know, you want feeding.”
Her security collar caught the sun and he had to turn his eyes away as the blinding light momentarily made his eyes burn.
Blinking he pulled back the sheet, and swung his legs out of the bed. Man, I’m thirsty.
“Fetch me a drink!” he said to the cat that was now on the rug, looking up at him near the bottom of the bed. “Nothing? You know I could trade you in for one of those new fancy home helper robots, you know that right?”
Hex meowed again.
Evan smiled, and got up. “Okay, some water and smelly tinned meat coming right up.”
As he walked across the floor littered with clothes and pieces of electronic equipment, he stopped, hearing a noise from outside his door in the hallway.
Odd, there are no children on this floor.
Quickly climbing into his favorite comfy black slacks, he walked to the door and opened it. A little way along the simple but stylish hallway was a little girl, playing with some dolls, singing to herself.
He went to ask her who she was, or where her parents were, but she seemed so at home with the game she was playing that he went back inside and closed the door.
Hex was looking at him again, meowing.
“Yup, okay, okay, such a complainer, I’m getting it now.”
He walked to the fridge. The clear door allowed him to see that it was empty. “Must get some more crater juice,” he said to Hex as she slid past his heels.
He reached to open the top cupboard when a huge explosion outside shook him and the building, causing him to duck. “What the hell?” he said with his back up against his kitchen unit. He looked down for his cat, but she was gone. Standing he ran forward into his living area. “Hex!” he shouted but she was nowhere to be seen.
He looked at his hands, they were red. His whole room was red from the light outside.
He slowly walked to his drapes, and pulled them back. “What—”
Outside his apartment window where there should have been an ocean was only desert. He opened the door to his balcony and stepped out. The floor was almost too hot for his feet to touch, but the scene in front of him was the only thing that mattered. The city between where he was and where the ocean used to be was on fire, and the sky was a mixture of blackened smoke and crimson flames.
His brain stumbled from one possibility to another, but what he was witnessing made no sense. He heard a noise behind him. Turning he could see Hex in his living room.
He ran back inside, picking Hex up and placing her on his bed. “We have to leave, something’s happened Hex, where’s the damn cat box?”
Scrambling around his room, he pulled out drawers and opened cupboards, throwing the contents over his shoulder. “Where the hell is it.”
A knock came from his door.
The little girl?
Running over to the door he pulled it open. The little girl was standing where she was sitting before, but now she looked different. Her skin was pale blue and where her eyes had been, there was only black mist, which swirled and circled around her.
No.
Just as Evan was closing the door, the little girl grinned and stretched out her misshapen hand.
“What the fuck is happening!” he shouted with his back to the door, which then shuddered.
“No, you can’t have me!”
He looked at the mess of his room. “Hex where are you?”
His door shook again, this time more violently. “No!” Evan shouted, although why he couldn’t understand.
“Evan, let me in. Please Evan.”
A man’s voice he recognized vibrated through the door.
“Warden?”
It made no sense why Murlock would be outside the door of his apartment.
“Evan, you have to help me, I need to feed, Evan. Just open th—” The person’s voice became distorted and garbled like they were choking on their own blood.
“Evan. Now!”
Again, something slammed into his door, and again, each time with more strength, until he knew it was going to come inside, and there was nothing he could do about it.
“NO!”
Evan woke up in his medical bed covered in sweat. The lights in the room where thankfully still low, but his eyes seemed not to burn as before.
Thirsty.
He vaguely remembered water being to his left, so he sluggishly looked in that direction and sighed, thankful that a new bottle was sitting there.
Looking at the clear partition he could see this time no one was watching him. Unscrewing the bottle, he drunk the clear liquid down enjoying the coolness flow through him.
He let his hand with the bottle drop to his lap and took a deep breath. He was beginning to realize what may have happened to him.
CHAPTER 36
Elisa looked over the ship’s inventory. After what happened to Evan, she now had two roles, XO and trying to organize the ship’s operations. Evan had started the process before leaving for the lunar colony, but unfortunately whatever system he was implementing was so complex that it was taking her hours just to understand what his intention was.
“Coffee?” said Luke walking into the officer’s break room. “You look like you could use it.”
She smiled. “Sure. How’s Evan?”
“Last I looked sleeping, but he seems okay,” he said, selecting two coffees on the particle printer.
Elisa looked up from the lists of texts below her on the table screen. “My great grandmother was into ghosts and spirits and all that. She used to say that an evil spirit can take hold of a person, make them do things they wouldn’t otherwise do.” She smiled again. “I know this is different, ghosts and spirits were just humanity’s way to try to understand the unknown, but—”
“But the hidden appears to be something that goes way beyond our understanding?” he said handing her the coffee.
“I guess, I don’t know, I think I’ve been looking at Evan’s plans for the ship’s new operations for too long.”
“We need to learn more, maybe we can come up with some kind of way to stop this thing. We don’t even know what its intentions are, it could have killed the team in the pump control room, but for some reason, chose to communicate a nursery rhyme?” Luke shook his head. “If there’s a pattern here I’m not seeing it.”
“Do we know anything more about the rhyme?”
“Ship? The Nursery rhyme that the hidden communicated, please recite it now.”
“Blow wind, blow—”
“Stop, from now on, please use a female voice. Start again.”
“Blow wind, blow, and go, mill, go:
“That the miller may grind his corn;
“That the baker may take it, and into rolls make it.
“And bring us some hot in the morn.”
They both sat silently.
“It’s about taking something, and turning it into something else?” said Elisa, “Is it referring to humans? We have seen how it manipulates and changes them.”
“Could be, we need to do more analysis. At least now we have plenty of fuel for the Anti-matter reactor and drives. But we need to look for survivors, even if we only find one person throughout the whole of the system, it would have been worth the search.”
Elisa nodded. “Do you think we are safe on this ship from it?”
“Every other ship, station and base we have come across has been infected by it, so I have to figure there’s a reason we are all still alive. Either it’s the anti-matter drives, or something else, but for now I’ll take what we can get. How are the ship’s systems looking?”
“Evan was working on reorganizing things, but
it’s proving difficult to understand.”
Luke laughed. “Hopefully he’ll be back on his feet soon.” He looked more thoughtful. “Tantalus is now a lifeboat, or an island or however you want to look at it, and it needs to change. I said before that we’re no longer a prison ship, well we need to start making those changes physical. The cells need to become proper living quarters, and even though the particle printer does an excellent job at replicating coffee beans, we need to see if we can grow food onboard.”
Elisa smiled and nodded.
“It’s going to be a lot of work, but I don’t see what other choice we have. If the hidden for some reason won’t touch us here, then here is where we need to call home.”
* * * * *
Ashley Manning walked along the male cellblock gantry. All the walls that were once clear were now opaque, and their doors were closed. She laughed to herself. Now the people here had their freedom, the first thing they did was to close themselves off from the others around them. But it made sense. The first thing they lost upon entering Tantalus was their privacy. She also presumed that most cells were now singly inhabited.
She stood and looked down at the main hall four stories below. She had been to Tantalus once before, and the hall she was observing was very different to how it looked previously. What was once a large open space with some tables and chairs, now had multiple canopies of small stalls that during the ship’s daytime had become a market of sorts. A similar area in the female cellblock had taken on the same role.
She was surrounded by con-men, murderers, rapists, and everything in between but yet she knew she was safe. Not because of the new uniform she now wore, but because even the most violent had a will to live, and right now all anyone could think to do on the ship was to survive another day.
A noise made her turn around. Seth was a few meters away.
“Can’t sleep either?” he said, standing next to her with his hands over the guardrail.
“I like to walk around when the ship is quiet, clear my head for the next day, you?”
He smiled. “I just can’t sleep.”
She nodded.
“So, you used to be a cop?”
“Technically I still am. I’m not sure what the retirement procedure is for the end of the world, but I still got my badge.”
“Glad we’re on the same side then.”
“How long until we arrive at the Mars colony?”
“We’re about half way through the journey so another five days.”
“So, you have seen whatever the hidden is?”
“Yeah, it’s not something you forget.”
“Any idea what the hell it is?”
Seth puffed out his cheeks. “Some kind of life form that for some reason got it in its head that we were a threat.”
“Well we have been a threat to most other species in our history.”
Seth smiled. “Yeah, that is true.” He noticed she was looking down to their right, at the strange patchwork of walls that made up the Archon syndicates zone. “What is it?”
“What’s your take on the Archons?”
“I would put them firmly in the category of crazy as a bag of rocks.”
Ashley laughed.
He smiled. “I’m serious. They don’t like to use any of the ship’s systems. They use running water to bathe, they don’t cut their hair, they make their own clothes. They really are living in the twenty first century still. I would have thought, being a member of the Justice Force, you would know quite a bit about them?”
“Before my time. After the uprising of 2197, most were killed or driven off world, now they are just a scary bedtime story for children. A partner of mine was on scene at the bombing of 2210, said he had seen nothing like it before. That was the last time anyone had seen anything from them.”
“And now there’s a few hundred of them down there, doing who knows what.”
“Yeah, makes you think.”
CHAPTER 37
Luke sat in his seat on the bridge, looking at the impressive Mars colony on the main screen. Towers, sixteen hundred meters high and spheres which seemed to hang in the thin Martian atmosphere were all crowded together.
He went to say something when the elevator door to the bridge opened. Evan walked forward quietly. “Good to have you back Ensign Knowles,” said Luke, knowing who it was without having to turn around.
“Umm yup, good to be back, thank you sir,” he said, smiling apologetically, then sat in his position at the back of the room.
“Haywood, any signs or energy output down there?”
“None that I can see, Captain.”
Elisa stepped forward. “Are there any readings from the source of the video we received from Mars when all this started?”
Haywood tapped away at his screen. “None, that I can see, Ma’am.”
Luke tapped the arm of his seat. “I refuse to believe that all five million of the Mars colony are dead or have become those things. I want six RRVs sent down with two IMs in each, we’ll use them to explore as much of the base as possible.”
“Maybe we should send a squad down there as well,’ said Seth.
“After what happened—” he wasn’t sure how to refer to Evan’s incident “—during the last mission, we hold off sending any of us down there, unless we need too. We have the IMs let’s use them.”
Evan tapped his console’s screen a few times. “IMs and the RRVs will be ready to go in approximately ten minutes, sir.”
“Good, let’s hope they find survivors.”
Evan looked at those in front of him doing their jobs and smiled. It felt good to be back on the bridge, but even though the drugs Omar gave him knocked him out for hours on end, he still felt tired.
Soon a small fleet of the cuboid Rapid Response Vehicles that were designed to recapture inmates, were moving towards the surface of Mars. The group broke into two parts and landed at two separate landing pads. A strong wind of iron oxide dust and rocks swirled around the RRVs as the IMs disembarked and moved towards their respective docking bay doors.
“Those doors won’t be easy to open even with IMs,” said Weber.
The crew on the bridge watched the IMs move to the large unlocking mechanism, and try to turn it. It didn’t move.
“What’s the problem?”
Evan scanned the mechanism via the nearest IM. “Both the mechanisms are jammed somehow, like they were fused together. We would need ten times as many IMs to make it move.”
“Okay, suggestions?”
“Why don’t we just blast the doors, all the IMs have plasma cannons,” said Seth.
Luke looked at Weber. “Would they get through?”
Weber nodded. “A concentrated blast, from each team at the same time should be enough.”
“Make it happen.”
Seth selected the necessary options on his screen, and both teams of IMs stood in front of their respective doors, their arms raised.
“Three, two, one, fire!” said Seth.
A blast of white light emanated from each team’s weapons, hitting the doors at the same time. A small explosion made the IMs sway backwards, while rocks flew up and dust drifted slowly back down blocking the view of the new opening.
Sensor warnings started going off across all the IM’s feeds.
“What am I seeing?” said Luke, leaning forward in his seat.
“Umm, err, multiple, umm hundreds of movement signatures, they are right—” Evan looked up at an IM’s feed as the source of the movement became obvious. People started falling out of the jagged holes in both doors, like sand pouring from a jar. The IM’s view suddenly was smothered with arms and legs, eyes and fingers. As were all the other IM’s feeds.
“What the—” said Seth.
“Switch to the Tantalus’s view of the area,” said Luke.
The main screen changed to a view looking down upon the landing pads, which now looked like they were covered in ants. Thousands of bodies flowed from the docking bay doors, spill
ing out onto the desert. In turn, each of the IM’s connections went down, quickly followed by the connections to the RRVs.
“I think we found the people of the Mars colony,” said Weber coldly.
“Zoom in I want to see them up close,” said Luke.
The screen view grew closer and closer to the swarm of movement, until they could see them clearly.
“They’re not people anymore—” said Elisa.
Most of those on the main screens view were partial people, arms, legs, feet were missing, while small swirls of black mist intermingled with them.
Luke sat back in his seat, and sighed as the flow continued from the docking bay doors. “We getting any readings from the IMs or the RRVs?”
Seth tapped his screen. “None that I can see.”
“What’s the next closest EA base?”
“Stations twelve to eighteen in the belt.”
“Watkins, plot a course to the nearest of those—”
“Yes, Captain.”
“—and Knowles, see if it’s possible to manufacture more IMs.”
CHAPTER 38
Luke tapped the back of his wrist. “Lieutenant Manning, report to the officer’s break room.”
A short while after the elevator doors opened and Ashley entered. Luke tapped the table screen, closing the profiles that were displayed there.
“What can I do for you, Captain?”
“Take a seat, Lieutenant. There’s an issue I was hoping you could help me out with.”
“Okay.”
“You never had any children, correct?”
Ashley was surprised by the question. “Umm, not sure what that has to do with anything?”
“I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important to what I’m about to ask you.”
“No, I’ve never chosen to have a child. Why?”
“There’s a young girl, and she’s not really got anyone to stay with.”
Ashley started to raise her hands. “Oh, I really don’t know much about children, that was always my sister’s shtick. I’m sure there are a lot of women on this ship that can take care of a kid.”
