by Jason Letts
“We’re going to escort you up to the dampener, so you can disable it,” Loris said.
Quade complied, and together they all left the control room, first taking a winding path toward his quarters so he could procure some additional tools. They assumed that the defense team sent up there had gotten lost or been insufficiently skilled to finish the job.
“One more thing I’ve got to take care of myself,”Quade grumbled.
It turned out Quade had a spacious room with draperies hanging on the walls, some kind of oil burning to cover the smell, and some acoustic guitar music playing.
The path they took was a never-ending series of ramps that took them back and forth across the echo room and up and up, far beyond where anyone had chosen to live. A mountain could’ve easily fit within the ship and been less exhausting. It got to the point where Loris wondered if they’d need to take a break and find water.
“It shouldn’t be too much farther,” Quade said.
“Haven’t these creatures ever heard of lifts? This is ridiculous,” Panic said, drawing a glance back and a grin from Quade.
“From what I can tell, these ramps were almost never used. The higher up in the ship, the less you see bodies on them. All over the ship, there are rooms against the exterior with special hatches where they could get transported from other vessels. They’re built differently than our airlocks, and inoperable as far as I can tell.”
Loris spent the next few minutes thinking about how Quade was becoming a regular old expert on the Detonans until something else got his attention. They’d turned a corner and arrived at another floor where the air seemed a little different.
“Does anyone else smell that?” he asked.
“I’ve been smelling it since I got on board,” Quade said.
Loris reached out to stop Panic and pointed down an adjoining hallway.
“No, it’s got a heavier smell, even worse than the eggs. It looks like there’s something on the floor down there.”
“I notice it, too. Let’s go take a look,” Panic said, starting forward.
“I think it’s only one more floor to the dampener,” Quade said, but ended up following the group.
As they progressed down the hall, the thing on the floor looked like a spot, then a smear. When they got a little closer, they could tell that it was a blood streak leading toward an open doorway. Suddenly afraid of what they were going to find, Loris held his breath.
“The Detonans don’t bleed like that,” Quade said helpfully.
Tasers in hand, Loris and Panic led the group to the streak and carefully lightened and peeked in the room. They immediately cringed and covered their mouths.
“Don’t look,” Panic advised the others.
Loris couldn’t help but catch one more glimpse before pulling away. The bodies of three members of the defense team had been torn to shreds. Chest cavities were ripped open and organs were strewn about. He couldn’t get the image out of his mind. The goriness of it made certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that Quade wasn’t responsible, at least not directly.
The rest of the group looked sickened, already inching away from the scene.
“Those men were mauled by a Silica. Chief Quade, did you remember to have your team continue to spray Rasher with carbon fumes?”
Quade’s face paled and his mouth dropped open, looking flabbergasted for the first time that Loris had ever seen.
“I did. I mean, we were. I guess someone forgot,” he muttered.
It was a sorry excuse that led them to an uncomfortable new reality.
“Right now we have a Silica on the loose on a ship with over ten thousand unarmed, unaware human occupants. This one hard-bodied, extremely strong creature could single-handedly overpower dozens of us if given the chance to catch them off guard. They’re fast, agile, and need only seconds to kill. And because their bodies don’t conduct electricity, these Tasers are useless against them,” Loris said.
He found his heart beating faster. This was getting more complicated than he thought. He wondered if Redhook and Lopez would be able to act fast enough to protect Brina if Rasher appeared.
“What do we do?” Quade asked, visibly worried.
It was telling that none of the defense officers needed to ask that question. Already a taser couldn’t be seen; they’d all been exchanged for torches.
“The first thing we do is scour the area for inflammable material we can use to blast Rasher with smoke. After that, we continue up to disable the dampener. As soon as we possibly can, we need to alert the Magellan about this and have them send reinforcements. If they come before he’s struck again, we search the ship,” Loris explained.
Finding something to burn didn’t turn out to be too difficult. It only took visiting a few rooms before they found the body of a Detonan. Carrying a couple of alien cadavers with them wasn’t anyone’s idea of fun, but without them they’d have almost nothing that could help. Not even their uniforms would burn.
Soon they’d returned to the ramps and were resuming their climb. Their new companions seemed like they were a major source of the ship’s odor to begin with, but they had no choice but to put up with the stench and the dropping body bits. They reached the end of the ramp and came to a narrow crawlspace leading into the dark.
It seemed like the perfect place for Rasher to hide.
Flashing a light in revealed a number of nooks and crevices. Quade went pale, but he didn’t have anything to worry about. Those braver than him went in to confirm that the space was clear.
“This shouldn’t take long,” Quade said, hunching over and venturing into the opening.
His prognosis proved incorrect as even removing a grate blocking access to the dampener required a lot of banging and eventually help from a few officers. They ended up having to use torches to sever the grate. Loris was left with nothing to do but watch the ramp for signs that the old friend who’d broken his leg was paying them a visit.
Yet more time elapsed as Quade dug into the dampener’s machinery. Only his feet were visible in the crawlspace. More banging ensued, and Quade’s curses grew less circumspect, but when he wriggled out, he had a smile on his face.
“This is all set. The dampener is permanently deactivated. I had to improvise because there were some parts I’d never seen before, but…”
Loris decided to interject before Quade had a chance to boast.
“Where’s the closest monitor we can use to transmit a message to the Magellan?”
“Even though the hardware is down, I still need to return to the control room and reboot the communications system in order to broadcast any messages,” Quade said, drawing a tired look from Loris. This seemed so much harder than it needed to be.
“Isn’t anyone on your team monitoring the status of the dampener from the control room? Surely, they can implement the reboot,” Loris said.
Quade shook his head.
“They’re watching it, sure, but they can’t perform any of these command-level functions on alien code. It’s like threading a needle in a gyroscope. Only I can get it going again.”
“One day you won’t be the only person who can do something, and I’ll be so glad,” Panic said.
They started the trek down to the control room, taking precautions every time they turned a corner and always listening for sounds of footsteps signaling that Rasher was near. Every minute was another chance of an attack somewhere on the station. Loris believed that bringing him on board could’ve enabled them to find out what made the Silica hate humans and possibly even reverse it. Now he felt responsible for those three lives lost and all the rest in jeopardy. That creature should’ve been floating in space, dead.
They made the long descent through the ship and passed some spaces occupied by refugees. Their group was a strange sight that drew a lot of attention, and Loris made the difficult call of telling everyone to stay in their rooms without letting them know why. Word would spread that something was going on, and if left to fester, that g
ossip could soon become nearly as dangerous as their unwelcome guest.
It had to be better than immediate hysteria.
When they finally made it to the control room, the staff on duty was either standing about or had their hands in their laps. One who stood near the main console was staring blankly into it until he turned to them.
“What’s going on here? Why’s everybody standing around? This isn’t a lounge,” Quade bellowed.
“We’ve started moving. The ship is accelerating rapidly,” the young man said. Quade couldn’t believe it.
“Which one of you boneheads did that? Move over.”
Quade elbowed the member of his staff away from the console and latched onto the keypad.
“You know none of us did it. You never took the time to show any of us how the system works.”
The young man’s rebuke to his superior officer was shocking to Loris, but he was even more blindsided a moment later when Quade’s furious fingers came to a sudden rest.
“I’ve been completely locked out. I have no way to stop the ship.”
CHAPTER 10
Quade smacked the side of the console with an open palm, creating a loud ringing sound. It seemed Loris had a better grasp on what was happening than Quade did, and if he was right, it would unequivocally be the biggest failure of his life.
Ten thousand people, ninety percent of the human race, were on board an enemy ship they did not control.
Getting worked up to the point that he nearly foamed at the mouth, Quade battled against the console with unmatched ferocity. Loris approached, hesitantly reaching for the man’s shoulder. Quade swiveled his head to look back at Loris and snarl.
“Give me some space to work, Commander Kiddo. I can get it back!”
“You won’t be able to get it,” Loris said.
“Yes, I can!”
Quade’s face grew red, and his anger was rubbing off on Loris, who relished the chance to give him the unvarnished truth.
“They played you! The Detonans let you take their ship, and now that it’s full of people they’re taking it back. They’ve played us all for fools.”
It hurt Loris to say it out loud, but it couldn’t be denied. He had no clue what would come next, but it wouldn’t be good. Frustrated, Panic slammed a dead Detonan she’d been carrying against the floor. Quade abruptly left the console and charged for the door.
“Where are you going?” Loris asked.
“With the dampener down, at least the Cortes should still be able to send a message. And if I can’t get that I’ll put one in a bottle and throw it out a damn window.”
Loris followed Quade and the others out of the room, hopeful that they’d be able to send a message, but ultimately unsure of how much good that would do. If they were traveling at anything resembling cruising speed, it would close off so many of their options. Boarding or off boarding would be impossible, not that the station could handle so many more passengers in the first place. The Magellan would simply follow them, unable even to fire at the engines in hopes of slowing the Incubator down.
When they arrived at the airlock, they found Brina pacing the hall, her eyes watery.
“Where are we going?” she asked by the entrance to the Cortes. Through the windshield, Loris could see stars zipping by.
“We’re going to Detonus,” Lala said from a seat near a blank screen suggesting her answer was more of a hunch than the product of any study.
“At least we’ll have a lot of time to figure this out before we get there,” Quade said as he jostled past Redhook to pass through the airlock.
“Actually, we learned we’re much closer to Detonus than we thought,” Loris said. “A week’s travel time. Half that if they decide to meet us.”
Quade shot Loris a cold look from one of the consoles before beginning to operate the computer.
“There. Easy as pie. Anyone have a message for the Magellan?”
“Tell them we’re heading straight into a fight with the Detonan armada. They need to be prepared for that, and if they get a chance to come on board here, they should be aware that there’s a Silica unaccounted for,” Panic said.
Riki’s eyes widened. Redhook had one of his usual outbursts.
“No way! Don’t tell me that. My smoker’s back in my quarters. I’d have that thing in rigor mortis before it could crack its jaws open.”
“I’m sure we have weapons to use against the Silica stored on the Cortes. The issue is being there when it decides to show its face. There are so many possible points of attack.”
“On second thought,” Quade said, bolting from his chair. “All of you are perfectly capable of sending your own messages to the Magellan. I know I can break back into that system.”
In a second he was storming down the hallway toward the control room alone. Panic quickly sent a few officers to follow him, lest he get picked off by Rasher on the way. Even if it was unlikely he’d regain control of the ship’s engines, it was better having him alive than dead.
Some time passed as they exchanged messages with the Magellan and tried to determine what to do next. They confirmed the course was set for Detonus and that they had moved to follow immediately. The unanswerable question they kept hitting against was what they would do if they actually came up against the Detonan armada. There weren’t enough plausible solutions to fit in a tea cup.
“I can’t stop the ship, but there is another problem I can help take care of,” Loris said when restlessness overcame him. “How about instead of waiting around for Rasher to attack we go out and get him?”
It wasn’t a difficult proposition to convince a group of soldiers to gang up on a single Silica, and soon they were as prepared as possible to conduct a thorough search. The size of the ship and the prospect of being stranded in a corner while an attack took place elsewhere were obvious problems. The Silica had extremely thick, hard exteriors that made them invisible to infrared scanning. Seeing Rasher was the only way to find him.
They locked up the Cortes and started by urging more of the refugees to remain in their rooms behind closed doors. Along the way, they encountered some of Quade’s new residents, who seemed to understand well enough but had little interest in following orders.
“They just give me the creeps,” Panic said as they continued down a hall.
“I know what you mean. I’m not sure Quade was being truthful when he said he hadn’t tampered with the formula. He was trying to make brawlers, juggernauts,” Loris said.
It was probably for the best that he hadn’t tried to make any women. Once they had laboriously trekked through every populated residential hallway, they began to venture out in four-man teams and sweep the ship. After hiking to the dampener and traversing so many seemingly endless hallways, the additional walking quickly caught up with Loris. The crews could communicate with each other, but no one had seen a sign of the creature. It didn’t help that some rooms were sealed shut.
After a few hours, Loris returned to the Cortes and slid into the cockpit for some solitude in which to think. Rasher must’ve known to stay hidden after his first attack. He’d wait until people were forced to go about their normal routines of making food and performing other normal activities to strike. Loris had no hope of keeping an eye on everyone or even securing populated areas.
There were way too many mice for this cat.
Loris blinked to find that he’d fallen asleep in his seat for almost five hours, an unwelcome development that didn’t help them further their cause. But maybe there wasn’t much he could do anyway. The stars continued to streak past across the windshield.
“You’re pushing yourself too hard,” said a strange voice in the seat on the opposite end of the cockpit. It was the boy, whose voice had a raspy, rough quality to it that made it tough to understand.
“And here I thought you were safe and sound aboard the Magellan,” Loris said, shaking his head. The boy leaned back against the headrest and stared out ahead. When he spoke, his mouth moved as if he
had a sock in it.
“Our fates are linked, Loris Roderick. If you don’t succeed, my people will perish in vain. My will to carry you forward goes beyond this body and extends to the fabric of the universe.”
“And yet you’re using your own voice instead of talking in people’s head,” Loris said. What the boy was saying didn’t make any sense, as usual.
“All living things adapt to their surroundings. Even I can talk,” he said, though his voice grew rougher as he went on. He rubbed his throat, pained.
“If you’re still betting on me to succeed, you must have a great tolerance for long odds.”
“The Detonan’s new weapon is the crowning achievement of all of their monstrosities, a marshaling of the very forces of order in the universe. But we have had our breakthrough, too. In the equation of the galaxy, once something is created, it can never really be lost,” he said.
Maybe it was his current plight, but Loris found himself more indulgent of the boy’s philosophizing than usual. Maybe there was some part of humanity that would carry on even if they were all wiped out.
“I’d still rather win,” Loris said at last.
“You have to see the path in your mind before you can walk it.”
The boy’s steady, childlike voice drowned out his own thoughts. Having him there in the cockpit next to him reminded Loris of their trip in the shuttle and some of the boy’s other cryptic statements about solving the two puzzles at once. He went and reached for the probe panel, swiveling it around in search of any more of those dark matter ships. Only faint green waves appeared.
He sat back and put his feet up on the console, glancing at it and recalling his brief conversation with the curious fighter pilot. It seemed like that hall of windows around the dark matter planet was already far enough away to be beyond help, but maybe those fighters had a way to catch up to them.
Connecting to the stolen tablet and bringing up the interface to send a message, Loris was again stuck with the quandary of what to say. Begging for help right away didn’t seem wise. He had to give them something they wanted in order to garner their interest and their sympathies. Staring at the screen, he pondered what he could say that they might understand.
