* * *
Dominique ascended two steps and walked through an opening in the dome of machinery; all other personnel cleared the area that would be under the influence of the gravity field, except two soldiers in EVA suits. They moved into the dome with her, to stand next to the trap. Dominique sat down on the gecko-skin chair. She would control the remote for the trap, deactivating it when all was ready.
The small group watched from a distance, across the hanger bay; Sparks, Bartell, Comani, and two engineers. They had established a rudimentary command center. Cams and vid monitors were arrayed to present and record the spectacle that was about to unfold.
“I’m set,” she said.
Through the pick-up, her voice sounded flat to Garrison as he alternately looked out across the forty meters to her cage, and to the monitors, showing her close-up. Under the conditions, the whole scene impacted his senses as if he were about to witness an execution. He began to doubt the wisdom of this decision. Facial muscles that had gone slack since hearing his tragic news, began to tighten again with his new concerns.
Dominique’s beauty was deepened by her altruistic act, but he could see similar signs of stress on her as small muscles in her face twitched. Something inside of him was nearing a breaking point.
“All clear,” the engineer said. He pressed a button three times causing a loud horn to sound the warning. “We’re ready,” he said with finality.
Comani had been quiet, but, by the far-away look in his eyes, there was a ghostly committee meeting going on in the man’s head. Comani said, “They are ready, also.”
Everyone knew what that meant; they had been waiting for that assurance; preparations had been made… beyond the veil.
Dominique’s next words came in a whisper; she cleared her throat to repeat more loudly, “Opening the trap.”
She zeroed out the kill switch and gave the two soldiers with her a definite nod. They were tense as they flicked the catches.
Out of the small sphere, two things tumbled into the null gravity. The men immediately seized the arms of their fellow, reeking of sweat and shit, and hustled out of the chamber, careful to avoid the small fist-sized ball that had floated into the space around the now quiescent trap.
As soon as the crewmen were out of the dome, they quickly swung a framework door, with a mounted grav projector, into the opening. With an echoing clank, like the door of an old prison cell, she was closeted with the harmless looking object.
With their burden, the two hustled across the open space to a waiting medical team. When they were clear, the engineer shouted with urgency, “GOING HEAVY.”
There was the slightest hum and a few settling creaks as gravity came up to affect parts of the dome structure. It did not penetrate the weightless inner sanctum, and Dominique barely noticed as her ears popped in the gravity-affected air pressure; her attention was riveted on the object that had already begun to blur in the place where it floated.
She did not wait for the influence to take the initiative. Slowly rising, she stepped toward it, her throat dry. Moving within a meter-and-a-half of the object, she became light-headed, then experienced a strange vertigo. It was not that of a spinning reality, but of a repeating moment. She sucked a surprised breath through her teeth, determined to hold her ground. It was no use as she heard her sharp in-breath repeated over and over in her ears. She had to step back.
“You alright?” came Garrison’s concerned voice over the remote radio that they had set up.
“Yes,” she gasped, “it’s just very intense, right there. Kinda’ confusing.” She pointed to the space in front of her. It was just that—space; the object had disappeared rapidly.
Sparks interjected, “Doctor Comani says you oughta go in… quick.” A hesitant tone conveyed this captain’s own emotional conflict. Bartell gave the two men a furtive, sideways glance, a kernel of resentment at their suggestion.
“Yes, acknowledged.” She assessed her position relative to the center, where the object had floated. She figured one long step would take her almost to that point. It would be close enough. She took a deep breath and held it in anticipation, and then moved quickly and smoothly, as far as she could in one long stride.
* * *
“Dominique. Can you hear me?” Garrison’s voice was urgent, on the edge of panic. She could hear him through a hollow space; she tried to respond. It was as if she had been transported to a translucent room, a cube of hazy crysteel. She wanted to tell him that she was fine, but no words came out.
“Dominique, I can see your mouth moving. If you’re okay, hold up your hand.”
With a great effort, did that. Apparently the Elementals had orchestrated how to move the human body, but they needed no voice. They only needed control of the body, which somehow facilitated their feeding process. Their understanding of human beings was nonexistent. A ‘voice’ was conceptual. They did not relate to human reality, and vice versa.
She was in it, or it was in her. What now? Some of her nerves ebbed. She tried walking—no success. It was strange, she wondered how much control she could exert over her body. After some intent effort, like relearning, she took a step, then another.
Despite her perceivable movement, she had no sensations or awareness of her body from this odd vantage point unless she brought a hand out in front of her. Perception remained fixed, relative to the boundaries of the cube, though the limited view of the world outside shifted from side to side. She felt like a tiny creature looking out of the inside of some type of walking machine, a resisting robot that she was trying to control.
The Elemental had taken possession of her, as planned, but it had no other human that it could suck the life energy from. It was not forcing total control as Comani had said had happened to him. Dominique mused for a moment on the analogy that came to mind: comparing the being to a terrestrial shark—essentially innocent, feeding without malice.
As the onlookers watched her on the monitor, her movements had a stilted quality to them—zombie-like. Spark’s voice came over the speaker once again. “Doctor says to get ready.”
Well, the first, nerve-racking step is done—she steeled herself for the next. She expected it to be more difficult to take than this had been.
Just then, in her compromised field of view, a change began to affect the air. A cloud of electric sparks shimmered into being and began taking on a clearly masculine outline. As it gained solidity, feminine features next held sway, and finally it settled as a naked form, lacking apparent genitalia, androgynous.
The new, strange occupant blinked, slowly looking about. Dominique remembered the ghosts had said he… it… would be confused.
This secondary presence immediately triggered the effect that was expected from the Elemental controlling her body; she braced nervously. Involuntarily, she moved toward the new person and saw her own hand rise, unbidden, into her strange view. The man-thing stood its ground, though it had no means of adhesion to the deck. Oddly, it was unaffected by the lack of gravity within the dome.
With deep intelligence it looked at Dominique with a question in its eyes. That look changed though, at the same moment that Dominique was beset by a frightening, thunderous howl. As she struggled to keep a grip on her commitment, unmistakable shock contorted the features of the sexless being. And then something that no one was ready for: the sex began to oscillate between male and female. And worse, the face and body did not remain a normal appearance as the reversing energy cycle came on. Horrible wounds flashed across the morphing form, strange moaning noises issued from its now yawning mouth.
A moment later the oscillation settled down and the strange noises were replaced with a momentary quiet that was at odds with the reality before her. The analog had taken on the features of a man in tormented agony, the surface of his body charred and blackened, blood and fluids oozing from a body completely burned free of skin.
There was a pause in the destructive roar of her delimited reality. She wrestled against her own shock to make sense of the change, to be the scientist, but the deafening barrage began anew, from within and out. Rising in pitch, it escalated to a whine as the humanoid reformed. This time into a woman who would have been nearly as beautiful as Dominique herself, were it not for the cleaved, gaping gash running from her forehead down the front of her face, as if someone had just removed an axe. One eye was lost in the horrible gore that was confronting Dominique and her succubus Elemental. She screamed inside her confinement, automatically fighting against the force that held her prisoner, despite her original expectation that she would be up to this test.
Things only got worse as the Elemental vacuumed up these realities, the corpse-like woman morphing into an overly large man. This time, the greater grotesqueness, rather than his naked, overweight body, was another instance of a lack of skin. Less bloody than the first man, the layers of fat appeared a wet, pink-white. She saw only from his torso up, but could see further degradation—some areas of his limbs lacked any kind of flesh, being only skeleton. It appeared that the man had had some kind of industrial accident involving acid; his lips and nose were burned away, leaving a hideous grimace. Dominique felt her spirit heave with a convulsion, as if she were vomiting, but her body would not follow suit.
This horrible mass changed yet again, assuming the persona of a different young woman. A shorter person, her face, mercifully, looked almost normal, aside from an expression that was chilling to look upon. Dominique shook inside her cubed reality, her distorted view jittering. She was unable to find any eyelids that she could close to shut out a far more extensive horror than she could have ever expected.
Her viewpoint tilted downward; she had the bad luck of glimpsing the upper half of the woman’s torso before it began to morph once again: she was missing both breasts, dark red circles taking their place, red rivulets running from each wound, down to… Dominique just began to see that there was something wrong with her belly. Then it changed.
A woman again, nowhere near a normal appearance, but rather, undergoing horrible changes even as she materialized in the space of Dominique’s view: gaping, ragged, mortal wounds covered the middle-aged woman, blood was pouring onto the floor of the confinement, and as she witnessed the mind-rending vision, more slicing wounds opened in the woman’s red, blood-slicked body. She began to lose definable shape from the sheer number of lacerations and the viscera sliding from her insides. This literally dissolving form began its etheric melt again, changing to something that was nearer to the floor, below Dominique’s field of view.
Dominique could hear herself screaming, though no sound left her body. She struggled, in this visual respite, to find purchase on sane reality. She struggled to do the thing that had been asked of her, to be the observer of the Elemental—to try and see if the life and death play had any effect upon her possessor.
She found something she could note, a minor observation that went against Comani’s report: what she witnessed had a forward-time occurrence, rather than the reverse. It was one simple notation. She must add to it. She forced her mind to quickly contemplate the discrepancy. Had the ghosts arranged things this way? Or was it a change in the Elemental?
She brought her metaphorical feet back to ground, struggling against biological reactions that her brain insisted she must be experiencing. Somewhere a heart hammered; she was disconnected from it, but if it reflected the actual heart in her captive body, she had some concern for her ability to live through this.
Dominique forced that concern down, focusing her critical thinking onto the horrors. Another observation came: the chaos and intensity of what she witnessed was being filtered through the same effect that accident victims report—time was moving slower. Not being able to see the morphing form had given her the space of two breaths to regroup.
Then something else happened that she recognized as important: her field of view began to tilt downward.
Commanding herself in her role as the observer, she made the effort to extract information from the moment, as difficult as it was: The Elemental is showing what appears to be intent and intelligence, following the events. The visual perspective was changing with the circumstance. It appeared that her eyes were being used by the possessing being, monitoring the reality that was alien to it; changing the viewpoint to be able to “see” what it was that had moved down to the floor.
It was the first truly encouraging sign.
And then, like a debris collision, the sight she beheld rocked her once again.
Dominique’s nightmare resumed.
This time it was a man, though she knew this not by his nakedness, but because his face was rugged and chiseled, covered with a scraggle of beard. His mouth gaped, shaping wordless forms of agony—he was only a wiggling torso. Missing arms, legs, and genitals, blood pumped from many points to spray onto the floor.
Dominique’s brain told her that she was gasping for air. Though she lacked any sense of breath, it felt like drowning.
Something shifted; a small part of her snatched at it. It was a life preserver, giving her some hope: her scope of vision on the unbearable scene shrank some. As if she had backed away, her vision zoomed out a bit. It was still all there for her to take in, but just the tiniest bit further away. It still qualified as a small relief.
It was incredible to think that what she witnessed was a series of lifetimes that belonged to just two souls.
That thought helped her further, as a new set of emotions swept in to the experience: sadness and compassion. Suddenly, for the first time, Dominique was an inclusive part of the situation. She focused strongly on these feelings, especially the sadness. The rush became a flood, and somewhere in the strange reality that held her, she began to sob.
It was grief such as she had never known in her memory. She wondered if it belonged to the poor tortured souls who were leaving the world forever, before her very eyes. She feared that it might even be her own. This examination stole some of the emotion’s power and she left off of it, opting instead for the intensity, hoping that it might add weight to the impact of what they were trying to achieve here.
The awful horror show continued before her for an uncounted time, as Dominique screamed her pain and howled her tears, feeling as if she herself were melting into something unrecognizable. She committed hard, gaining something for herself that she could not put a name to.
Something fractured. Reality changed.
* * *
There was a circle. She moved around it. In the midst of her catharsis, she found she was afloat, gone from within the incarceration of possession. The view was soft and white, like warm clouds. No longer crying, Dominique had a true sense of her breath moving deeply into and through her body. She was embraced and suffused within a radiance of golden light, etched with a brilliance that grew and grew. Outside of time, she became something else—nameless.
In this place, the word “Truth” floated into her identity—infusing and transforming her being. It fit the moment with absolute, crystalline perfection, and like a neutron star blast, that knowledge lanced outward in a cosmic event. Then the vastness was too much, Dominique could no longer hold this place.
And all at once, she was back, the scope of her vision shrunk back to the limited field of view. Within her sight she saw the end of the process: the old souls who had volunteered their entire existence were manifest in the androgynous form one more time. The confusion that had been painted upon the face to start, was now a mask of fear, and in that instant, this being did not shrink to the fetal state but, instead, with a single brief, ear-splitting shriek, it popped out of existence, leaving the high-pitched scream echoing in the otherwise dead silence.
* * *
The horrific event had lasted for nearly a minute. The observers were stunned, looking on from afar, yet seeing the gruesomeness close up with the
aid of the camscreens. All, at some point in the cascading, grisly display, had turned away. The smell of vomit caused those, who had so far defied their bodies’ reaction, to suppress continued retches, vocalizing groans instead.
Garrison had not been able to watch the monitor showing the full view either, but his main concern was not with the strange manifestations. It was with Dominique, and it was that monitor that he had watched unblinkingly.
Every muscle in his body was tensed, his throat clenched against the many times he had wanted to shout her name. His eyes brimmed with unspent emotion. As the spectacle came to a close, he was shaking. Finally, at the sound of that one brief shriek from the man-thing, he saw Dominique’s body convulse.
And that was the trigger for him. In a long-suppressed unstoppering of his anxiety, he bellowed her name into the quiet, startling the rest, and overtopping the death-scream echo.
CHAPTER 89
EVENT: DAY 22, 1945 UT
“You’ll be speared on those ansibles!” the engineer shouted.
Unhearing, Garrison broke into a run after coming around the side of the tables, heading to the enclosure.
Garrison’s state of emotion and his concern for the woman that he had become so close with, had blinded him to the invisible, gravitonic danger for just the amount of time that it took for him to get within the influences of the grav projectors.
He came to a halt at a second shout from the lead engineer; his gecko boots stuck to the deck. It was not good enough, though: he continued forward as if he’d just jumped off a cliff.
The rest of the observers watched in shock as he slammed down to the deck, his boots ripping free from the leverage of his body going horizontal.
Two gravities reached their grip across the space and yanked him hard, rapidly ramping up his speed, as he slid head first across the deck. The deck looked like a polished cliff face, and he was heading straight down it. He quickly approached the terminal velocity of his mass in two Gs.
Parallel Extinction (Extinction Encounters Book 1) Page 44
