by Ben Stevens
2
Faster than anyone could react, the world around Jon and his friends literally unraveled.
A bright flash of brilliant amethyst light filled the viewport for a split second, causing Jon to squint and shield his eyes. Before he could mutter the words, “What in the…?” a second flash occurred. It vanished as abruptly as it had appeared and, in its place, hovering in the sky as if it were a thing in itself, placed by the hand of the Creator, and not simply an absence of thingness, was a tear in space. A growing, yawning portal outlined by a spasmodic perimeter of black and white cubes in various sizes, all flashing and expanding.
A buzzing sound, so loud as to overpower the hum of the transport and the wind outside, instantly cocooned the vessel, and the vibrations shivered through it from stem to stern. Panicked realization hit Jon like the angry, pointed finger of a wrathful god sending lightning to the earth to smite his foes.
“A Drop!”
Jon risked a glance behind him, out of reflex and concern for his friends. Maya’s eyes were wide with terror as her gaze met his. Carbine was awakened rudely, while Lucy was already on her feet and making her way to the cockpit.
As his stomach rose into his chest, Jon felt the transport lurch and sway, whether from Ratt jerking on the controls or from some outside force, he could not say. His knees began to buckle and give. He reached out and steadied himself on Ratt’s chair, fighting to maintain his balance.
“You can’t fly in!” Lucy screamed as she arrived in the cockpit. “You must avoid it!”
“I know!” a panicked Ratt screamed back through gritted teeth, pulling so hard on the dual-handled controls that wiry cords in his thin arms bulged and popped.
The crackling electric rift of blue and purple continued to grow before them, even as Ratt pulled the ship into a steep climb. The expansion of the Drop seemed to keep pace with them, but Ratt climbed higher, and Jon continued to hope.
Paralyzed with awe, Jon stared at the gaping mouth of the Drop. He thought he could see glimpses of stars amongst an infinite backdrop beyond the snapping tendrils of light and flashing cubes that decorated the curtains of the rift’s opening.
“Oh my...” The words tumbled out of his mouth like small stones falling from the fading grip of a dying man’s hand.
Time dilated, and Jon became aware of one single inward breath that stretched into what felt like a minute or more. The ship continued its sharp climb, higher and higher, yet the snapping eel-like tendrils that ringed the inside of the Drop’s opening inched closer and closer, filling up more and more of the viewport until they were all he could see.
The climb had become so steep that Jon fought mightily to keep from falling backward into the hold. Lucy, on the other hand, had no trouble at all, thanks to the magnetic pads in her feet. Jon threw another glance backward. Maya had managed to strap herself into her chair with the heavy-duty shoulder restraints. Carbine was now fully awake, confused and yelling, although Jon could not hear a word he said.
His gaze once again met Maya’s. Although he knew he had no control over the outcome of this disaster, Jon bravely nodded at her, trying to assuage some of her fear and worry.
“Oh, shit!” Jon heard Ratt exclaim, and turned around to see what was wrong now.
A massive creature almost twice the size of the transport appeared out of the vast darkness on the other side of the Drop and shot toward the climbing ship.
Jon only caught a glimpse of it. It was totally alien; he had never seen anything like it before. Its body was bell-shaped, its skin, if one could call it that, transparent. Inside its giant, limbless body, Jon spied clusters of crimson threads and assumed they must be the alien’s organs. Floating in the center of the diaphanous body was what looked to be a Mech-sized blob of partially cooked egg whites. Dangling beneath this bizarre bell hung a dozen or so vine-like appendages, seemingly as delicate as the rest of the thing’s body. Each one flashed with lights and electricity, similar to the arcs produced by the Drop itself.
The speed at which the next events took place prevented any further examination, for although it was surely unintentional, the aim of the Drop-Beastie was spot on. Like a bullet from a sling, the alien creature shot out of the Drop just as they were on the cusp of escaping it and struck the transport head-on.
The already steeply angled ship bucked and heaved, forcing Jon to clutch the chair with both hands to keep from falling back into the bulkhead. A tingling ran through his fingers. Before he could even question the sensation’s origin, its intensity raced to vibration, heat, and pain. He hurt, and he sensed the source of his pain was his hands, or perhaps the chair that they were hanging on to. He willed his hands to open and found to his dismay that he could not let go.
The Drop-Beast electrocuted the ship!
Out of the corner of his eye, Jon saw Lucy become detached from the floor and float upward. He quickly realized the ship was frozen somewhere between climbing and falling. Its engines had suddenly cut out, adding another issue to the growing list of disastrous effects of contact with the alien jellyfish. Lucy’s levitation act only lasted for a second before being interrupted by the pilot’s console exploding in a shower of sparks and steel.
The blast from the console ripped through the cabin, flipping Jon over the chair, which he was still anchored to, like a windsock in a gale storm. Lucy, on the other hand, was flung forcefully back to the rear of the ship, striking a wall above the stairway before tumbling down further into the cargo hold.
A dozen arcs of electricity, identical to the kind seen on the edges of a Drop, shot out of the console and lanced Ratt’s body with their forked tongues. They pierced him like skewers, causing him to twitch violently, but one lone tendril missed, shooting past into the passenger cabin, where it struck Maya. Jon heard Maya yelp in surprise, but her voice was quickly drowned out by Ratt’s agonized screams. Within seconds, though, he mercifully passed out. Merciful for him, but not so much for everyone else.
A shower of sparks rained down on Maya and Carbine from the ruined console. The lights in the cabin went out, adding to the eldritch glow of the streaming blue Drop light and its shadows. Jon looked back to Maya to make sure she was okay. Carbine—damn him—still hadn’t buckled himself and probably wouldn’t be able to at this point; his arms were locked in a wrestling match with the two halves of his harness, which dangled out from the sides of the chair. The ship was falling, Jon was sure of it, and beginning to go into a barrel roll. He decided that something must be done, and pulling himself up even with the plane of Ratt’s chair, began to climb over it, into the lap of the passed-out kid.
Gotta try to save us! How hard can flying this bucket be?
Trying not to smother or hurt the kid, Jon climbed onto Ratt and took hold of the controls just as the creeping barrel roll came into its own and the ship went full-on upside down, paused for a minute, and then completed its roll straight into a nosedive.
A nosedive right into the Drop.
Oh shit, Jon thought to himself as he surveyed the scene. The controls were shot; there was nothing he could do. He pulled and jockeyed the hand control wheel repeatedly, eliciting no response. The viewport filled again with the dark maw of the Drop and its wreath of electric tentacles and flashing cubes. Jon reflexively braced for an impact that never came, and then as suddenly as the whole episode had begun, their world plunged into darkness.
Zero gravity overcame them. Jon was sure that the ship was still pointed “down” in a nosedive, but that seemed meaningless now. They were in the Drop. The sea of stars he had seen on the other side of the rift before was gone, and now there was nothing but what looked like thick, rolling clouds of darkness. Not clouds in the dark, but clouds of dark, thick as clay and so close, they sheathed the ship like a coat of paint. Jon felt as if they were flying straight down a smokestack or a pit of quicksand.
The waves of silt-like smoke that rolled against the windows created strange, hypnotic patterns. Jon froze in place and calmed his anx
ious breathing—which he hadn’t even been aware of before—and waited for any sign of impact or further danger, but none came. He concluded that the immediate, life-threatening danger had passed, and sprang back into action, yelling over his shoulder.
“Is everyone all right? Maya?” His voice rang out, loud as the booms had been in the deathly quiet of the cabin.
“We’re okay,” Maya replied, her words slurred on the edges as if she were drunk. “What about Lucy? Ratt?”
Jon pulled and swung himself out of the chair and off the kid, examining Ratt as best he could in the low light. Not seeing any obvious wounds or bleeding, he pulled himself closer and leaned his ear up to the kid’s mouth. Jon released a sigh of relief when he felt Ratt’s soft breath against his cheek.
“He’s alive!” Jon exclaimed as he came back upright. Just then, Lucy appeared in the stairwell, crawling on all fours. LED flashlights, mounted to the lapels of her new trench coat, cast twin beams, illuminating the cabin with soft cones of blue-white light. Jon could see better now, thanks to Lucy’s torches, and glanced over the scene. He needed to visually verify that Maya was indeed okay, as well as his buddy.
“Carbine!” he exclaimed, happy his mate had been lucky enough to remain uninjured in his unbuckled state.
“Right!” Carbine snapped back affirmatively and went straight to work.
Lucy made her way fully into the cabin and pushed off the floor where she had been crawling, hovering in a gentle float toward the center of the room.
“What the hell happened?” she asked no one in particular.
“Something came out of the Drop and hit us. Fried the ship, then we fell in,” Jon explained. “Ratt was hit with something, electricity, I think. But it didn’t look right.”
“I was hit too, but just barely,” Maya mumbled groggily as if she had just woken from a deep sleep.
“Are you all right?” Jon asked, scanning her body for any sign of a wound.
“Yeah,” she said, rubbing her left temple with her fingertips. “I think so.”
“Wait, in? Into the Drop?” Carbine’s eyes were as wide as full moons.
“Yeah. I think we’re on the other side. It’s all cloudy or silty out there. I’m not sure which. It’s weird,” Jon reported.
“No. We can’t be on the other side. It doesn’t work that way, otherwise, none of the Displaced would be trapped on Earth. No, we are in some place we don’t want to be, a bardo of kinds. An in-between,” Maya said, her voice wavering with something Jon had seldom heard from her before—fear.
As if cued by the dread in her voice, Jon turned to look out the viewport at the smothering silt-clouds. He started to turn away, but something caught his eye in the swirling patterns. Still holding on to the chair with one hand, Jon pushed himself to float closer to the window.
There!
Something recognizable formed in the swirling patterns of chaos. A gestalt. A…
Face!
Jon started, pulling back awkwardly from the glass just as a humanoid face, constructed out of the swirling smoke, pressed itself against the outside of the window and opened its mouth in a silent scream.
Jon’s startled cry and sudden, jerky movement caught everyone’s attention.
“What is it?” Lucy asked, gliding over to him. Jon recovered from his zero-g tailspin and pointed to the swirling miasma outside.
“There! I saw someone.”
Lucy followed the direction of his gesture.
“All I see is cloud-stuff,” she said.
“Not someone. Something.” Maya’s words carried much weight as they fell on the ears of her guardians.
“What do you mean? What was it?” Jon asked.
“They don’t have a name in your language. They are the agents of this place—not Earth, but Hell.”
“What? Like Harvesters?”
“Yes, but different. These things aren’t so much beings in Hell. They are a part of Hell itself, part of the actual pocket dimension. A cog in the super-dimensional machinery. Built-in prison wardens. They keep the damned. We need to get out of here.”
Maya’s tone betrayed her feelings—worry, fear, the need for haste. She leaned forward in her chair, her round eyes wide with apprehension.
Lucy reached the front of the cabin, where Ratt remained strapped into the pilot’s seat, Jon floating nearby. She pulled herself into position, straddling Ratt’s lap, and began to examine what was left of the controls.
Jon frowned, struggling to comprehend Maya’s explanation. Before he could inquire further, the ship lurched once more, and a sound like a torrent of hail on a metal roof filled the cabin. Maya, Jon, and Carbine all flinched. Only Lucy retained her calm demeanor, flicking her eyes toward the window for a second before resuming her examination of the control panel.
“What now?” Carbine said, his tone betraying exhausted annoyance.
Jon looked around the cabin in a vain attempt to track the source of the noise, but it seemed to come from all sides at once: the ominous crashing of a thousand fists knocking into the ship. Gooseflesh rippled across Jon’s skin as he looked out into the smoky silt-storm. Shapes of half-men coalesced out of nothing, screaming their rage and beating on the hull before melting back into smoke-stuff.
“They know we are here. Lucy, can you turn the ship around? The Drop might still be open!” The urgency in Maya’s voice made Jon feel impotent.
“No, my lady, the systems aren’t responding. I am attempting to repair now, or at least reboot the system off my own fusion unit,” Lucy shouted back over the bang, bang, tap that was growing in intensity.
Dammit! Jon continued to glance around the cabin, frantically looking for something, anything he could do to help. Useless.
“What do they want, Maya?” he asked.
“They want us gone, Jon.”
Bang! The ship lurched.
“They are a defense mechanism.”
Bang! Bang! The ship lurched again.
“They are to this bardo, this place, this…”
Bang! Bang! Bang!
When the ship rocked this time, Jon could hear the ship’s frame twisting and groaning under some intense pressure. The hairs on his neck stood at attention as straight as any New Breed soldier ever did.
“They are to this no-place like white blood cells are to your body!”
Bang! Groan! Bang! The sudden shriek of crumpling metal was deafening.
Jon, still listening to Maya and the tumultuous storm of ghost-fists, snapped his head in the direction of the nearest wall, and in shocked awe watched it buckle and collapse inwards as if it were being crushed from the outside in the fist of an enormous Heavy Mech.
Just as quickly, he turned his stare back to Maya.
“They know we’re here! And we are the foreign body!” She closed her eyes, centering herself. A moment later, she began to sing softly to herself.
Come on! Come and get some! Jon pushed off the wall to shoot across the cabin toward the stairwell. As he passed Carbine, he noticed his friend was loading a magazine into a Lawnmower rifle, retrieved from its storage place beneath the seat. Jon didn’t stop his drift or even look back, but hollered back to Carbine as he floated on, “No shooting, bud! Melee weapons only!”
He pushed and pulled his way through the zero-gravity environment with the ease of a seasoned astronaut, though he lacked the grace. This ability was not born from any training, experience, or even natural talent. His ability to get from the cabin to the cargo bay with such speed was simply the result of his serum-heightened reflexes and his body’s newfound ability to take quite a punishment, enhanced by a full-blown, panic-induced adrenaline rush. Jon nearly bent the last rail he pull-pushed off of. He bounced and smacked his way down the corridor, leaving a trail of dents in his wake. He felt zero pain. Nothing slowed him down or even caused him to blink, but he was far too preoccupied with the events of the next few minutes to appreciate his new stamina.
The spaciousness of the cargo hold amplifi
ed the horrific shrieks of the buckling ship’s structure. Focused as he was, Jon didn’t pause to look around or stop. He shot straight for the locker he knew contained his hammer and armor. Maybe, just maybe, he could don his armor and helmet, go out the airlock, and ward off these white-blood-cell bastards.
No sooner had he had finished the thought, he stopped as suddenly as if he had impaled himself on an enemy spear or invasive beast’s horn. His heart and hopes sank.
There is no airlock. There is just the door…
His carefully aimed last push and drift had brought him to his destination, and he collided with the locker with surprising force, smashing the door partway in.
If I open the door, all our air will leak out into the vacuum. And if I do nothing, then the creatures will break through, and all our air will go out into the vacuum anyway. If only there weren’t a vacuum!
Jon punched the locker in frustration, his knuckles nearly breaking through it. He pulled back a fist and went to swing again.
What if there isn’t a vacuum? The thought came from somewhere, he knew not where, but it made sense. Did he actually know that this bardo, this no-place, was a vacuum? Yes, they were floating in what seemed to be zero-gravity, but did that have to mean zero-atmosphere?
Not necessarily! There was still hope, no matter how slight. With that thought, his fist relaxed, and he began to savagely rip and tear open the defunct locker door. A large chunk came off its hinge in Jon’s hand. Without looking, he tossed it over his shoulder and reached inside the locker to withdraw his hammer, its stars glowing in all their might and glory. He would protect the goddess or die trying.
When he returned to the cabin, he could see that it had further crumpled in on itself and continued to collapse with every passing second. Carbine had pulled a knife, his other hand gripping his chair, waiting and ready to push off in whatever direction he and his knife might be needed—for all the good it would do.
