by M. R. Forbes
Could she not hear him? Did she think it was a trick? If she had been wandering around the ship since she had disappeared, she might be exhausted and confused.
“Natalia,” he shouted again. “It’s Hayden. Stop. Wait.”
A door further up opened and closed. Hayden kept climbing, ascending another five decks before coming to a halt, leaning over and gasping for air. He had tears in his eyes. Why hadn’t she stopped?
She didn’t know what she was doing. She didn’t know he wasn’t a threat. He felt the pain of it in his gut. He could barely handle the idea that she was frightened and alone. But which deck had she escaped onto? She had been too far away from him. If he had reached the stairs five minutes earlier, they might have been reunited already. Damn it.
His composure was crumbling, his strength and sanity eroding with it. He should have told her about the tapping. He should have gone with her to check the damage to Section C. He should have found a way to reach her sooner.
He lowered his head, nearly sobbing into his hand. He had to pull himself together. He had to regroup. He couldn’t help either of them if he stood there and felt sorry for himself. He looked at the stairwell door. The writing on it had been scratched out, just like the rest of the labels. Looking up, he could see the end of the stairwell above, and he counted down. Deck Five. Had Natalia gone up to Deck One? Should he look for her there?
He had to pick a door. Should he start at the top and work his way down, or should he stick with his original plan? Find the Section C access hatch and make a fresh decision from there.
He had to find the hatch first. If he assumed that there was at least one deck above Metro, beyond the elementals and the membrane sky, then the massive hold that contained the city would begin on Deck Two and end somewhere around Deck Fifteen. He tried to recount how many steps he had taken, and his rough estimate seemed about right. Section C most likely translated to Deck Seven or Eight, which meant he needed to go back down.
Or stay up and try one of these doors. But the Pilgrim was a massive ship, easily four to six kilometers long and at least a kilometer wide. Multiplied by as many as thirty decks, it left over one hundred square kilometers to search for a potentially moving target.
In other words, impossible.
But he had learned the Pilgrim was a manned vessel, and not as autonomous as he had once believed. Since there was a crew, that meant there was likely a bridge, or at least a command center. There was also likely some sort of intercom system; a means to transmit information ship-wide. If he could find that, he could call out to her. But how would that help? She couldn’t come to him. She wasn’t armed or armored like he was. But what if there were stations where she could call in and tell him where she was. That had to be better than chasing blindly after her.
He wiped the tears from his eyes. First things first. He had to determine whether or not she had survived the first few minutes after the secured hatch opened. He could swear he had heard her footsteps. He felt certain he was chasing her, and at the same time, he didn’t quite trust that he wasn’t the one hallucinating. The explosion had knocked him for a pretty big loop. What if he were hearing what he wanted to hear, and seeing what he wanted to see?
There was only one way to be sure.
He sighed thickly, glancing up at the doors above him before turning and descending two more decks.
He opened the door slowly, moving back out into a corridor nearly identical to the last, save for the position of the corpses resting forever silenced against the wall.
He never noticed the pair of human eyes tracking him, watching his every move as he abandoned the chase.
34
Hayden moved along Deck Seven, rifle up and ready. His heart was telling him to run, to go as fast as he could to where the deck’s secure hatch should be and prove to himself that Natalia was still alive.
His head knew better. The ship was still crawling with xenotrife, and who knew what else? In his excitement on the stairs, he had forgotten what Natalia had said to him before she disappeared. She had found a body. A human body. A corpse that didn’t belong to anyone in Metro.
He could have been chasing anybody, calling out Natalia's name in a fit of desperation that might have gotten him killed.
But if there were other people besides colonists and crew aboard, where the hell had they come from?
He couldn’t even begin to guess. Stowaways on the Generation ship that had somehow managed to avoid the xenotrife? A second ship that had managed to catch up with and dock to theirs? The Pilgrim was the first of its kind, but that didn’t mean it was the only one.
Or maybe there was another explanation? What if the hatches had opened before? What if a group of Metro citizens had gone out into the ship? What if they had survived? They had been in space for almost four hundred years. It could be just another piece of history that had been buried and forgotten.
What if there were no humans at all? What if what Natalia had seen was another xenotrife, and she had assumed it was human? The demons were humanoid in shape and could be mistaken for a person in a split-second glance.
But he had heard the footsteps, and someone had climbed the stairs.
His mind was running in circles, trying to solve the riddle. He forced himself to stay focused, to keep his eyes and ears at attention, listening for anything that might be coming his way. He was getting close, and-
A xenotrife turned the corner right in front of him, as surprised by his presence as he was by it. They both froze for a moment, startled, regaining themselves at the same time.
Hayden pulled the trigger on the rifle, his burst tearing into the creature’s shoulder, the impact pushing it backward. It hissed and scrambled back around the corner, leaving him to give chase. He took five quick steps to the junction, spinning to his left.
It was gone.
That couldn’t be possible.
His eyes scanned the corridor. One of the grates for the ventilation shaft was on the floor. Had it gone in there? He didn’t see any blood near the opening.
He swept his rifle across the passage, looking at the shadows on the ceiling, but seeing nothing. Where the hell was it?
Something dark and warm dropped onto the side of his head, sliding down his face.
Damn it.
He threw the rifle and his head back and up, getting a quick glimpse of the creature suspended from the ceiling and ready to drop.
Pop. Pop. Pop. Its head vanished suddenly in a spray of flesh and bone and brains, heavy slugs slamming into it and reducing it to mist. The lifeless body lost its grip on the ceiling, dropping on him. He caught it on his shoulder, pushing it off and to the ground.
He hadn’t fired, which meant someone else had.
He spun again, back the way he had come. Someone was standing there.
They sure as hell looked human. But then again, it was hard to tell.
They were wearing headgear of some kind, with large oval eyes attached to a rubbery face mask that angled out of the mouth into a tube, which wrapped around behind their back. Long, tight, rubbery sleeves emerged from a looser fitting, dirty robe cinched at the waist. They carried a pistol of some kind, a dull chrome thing with a huge barrel, the weapon so large it looked like it barely fit in their gloved hands. It was aimed right at him. Not at his armored chest. At his head.
“Drop your weapon,” they said in his language, muffled by the mask. “Do it, or you can say goodbye to your face.”
Hayden continued to stare. Natalia had been right. There were other humans on the Pilgrim.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I said drop it, meat sack.”
They pulled back on part of the gun, causing it to click. It sounded threatening enough.
“What are you doing here?” Hayden asked. “How did you get out here?”
“Drop the grepping gun, or I blow off your grepping face.”
The words came out harsh, and Hayden wasn’t an idiot. Whoever this person was, they
didn’t want to talk. But they wanted something from him. They had killed the xenotrife to keep it from killing him.
“Pozz,” Hayden said, beginning to lower the rifle.
He didn’t trust them at all. He kept his eyes steady on them as he brought the rifle down close to the pistol on his hip, hoping the stranger hadn’t seen it or didn’t realize how easily he could retrieve it.
The person took a step toward him, holding the pistol out further, shaking it threateningly. Hayden opened his hand, letting the rifle clatter onto the ground, still keeping eye contact.
At the same time, his hand fell to the pistol, and he grabbed it, raising it and firing in one quick motion.
The round caught the stranger off-guard, hitting them in the chest. The gun fell immediately from their hand, their body collapsing to the ground.
“Damn it,” Hayden said, out loud this time.
He didn’t want to have to kill them. He didn’t want to have to kill anybody. He walked over, keeping the pistol trained on them.
He stood over the body. The front of the robe was staining with their blood. He couldn’t see eyes past the dark orbs of the mask. He couldn’t see a face at all. He leaned over, grabbing at it to pull it off.
It didn’t come easily, but it slid away from the face as he pulled. He cursed again when he saw the person he had shot. A girl. She was just a girl. She looked to be around Sarah’s age.
The same question filled his thoughts. Where had she come from?
He followed the tube of the mask around to the girl’s back. He shifted her slightly so he could see the small device there, feeding oxygen into the mask. Why was she wearing it? To prevent contamination from the xenotrife?
Had Malcolm been telling the truth after all?
He patted her down, looking for anything else that might give him a clue about her. He found a pocket in her robe. There were six shells that looked like they went with the pistol she was carrying and a stack of torn paper inside. Every piece of it had been stamped with the all too familiar eagle logo of the USSF.
But what did it mean?
He had no idea. It didn’t matter right now. He had learned there were other humans alive on the Pilgrim.
He had also learned they weren’t friendly.
He leaned back down to push the girl’s eyelids closed. Then he grabbed her pistol and the shells. It seemed like a more powerful alternative to the handgun he was already carrying. He snapped it to his waist in front of Baby.
Then he left her behind, more attentive and alert than ever. It wasn’t only the xenotrife he had to worry about, but these outsiders, too. If they had come across Natalia, was there any hope she was still alive?
35
Hayden’s body trembled as he stared down at the bloodstain on the floor of Deck Seven. It was heavy and red, human blood. It had been smeared from the secure access hatch into Section C back and away from the entrance, a corpse dragged along the floor and away from the scene. A pair of boots preceded it. Large boots. Way too big to belong to Natalia.
There was no sign of her. Not unless the blood on the floor had been hers.
In his mind, he wanted to force himself to admit she was gone. That everything he had done was for nothing. He wanted to let her go, let himself grieve, and then do what he could to get the Pilgrim back on track and deliver the colony to their new home. If that meant killing everything out here that wasn’t him?
So be it.
In his heart, he knew that wasn’t an option. He had to believe Natalia was still alive, and that he would find her. He couldn’t rest. Only her cold, dead body in his arms would convince him hope was lost. Once he found her, they could work on saving the Pilgrim together. He knew their odds would be much better with her skillset to lean on.
The streak of blood moved down the corridor adjacent to the hatch. Now that Hayden had his bearings, he was able to visualize the area of Engineering only a handful of centimeters away. So close, and at the same time so far. It might as well have been another universe. He knew the section moved in that direction, and if the corridor remained relatively straight, it would come close to the waste system that he had gone to inspect. The area where he had heard the tapping.
He started in that direction, still walking carefully through the corridors. He had put the rifle on his back, preferring the stranger’s pistol instead. The size and shape of it was substantial in his hand and gave him a greater sense of security. One round from the cannon could reduce a xenotrife’s head to mush. He had checked the chambers, replacing the three missing rounds with the shells he had taken from the girl’s pockets. He had nine bullets total, and he figured with his aim he could take out nine of the demons with it.
He paused at one of the doors on the north side of the corridor. It was slightly open. He didn’t hear any noise from it, but its position made him curious. He leaned in, looking through the crack. There were a few MRE wrappers on the ground, and a dozen crates had been opened and picked through. More supplies. Someone had taken them recently.
He backed out, scanning the hallway. The main blood stain had faded after a dozen meters or so, but there were still smudges along the center of the hallway where little bits of blood and bodily fluid had leaked from the corpse. He could see it continued further down, and there was another door on the south side of the corridor fifty meters away, adjacent to Section C. It was approximately in line with the waste disposal system, making it the most likely source of the tapping. It also seemed to be where they had brought the body.
He moved to the south side of the passage, staying tight against the wall. Whoever had dragged the body could still be in there, and there was nothing he had experienced to suggest they wouldn’t kill him on sight.
He got closer to the hatch, noticing that this one was also hanging slightly open. He could hear noise from it, too. Soft whispers of low voices speaking to one another. He paused, listening. He couldn’t make out the words, but he was able to hear the different tones and pitches. There were at least four people inside, and he guessed three men and woman. Not Natalia. The voice was too familiar. Too comfortable.
He could also smell something. It was a scent he vaguely recognized but couldn’t place. It wafted out through the hatch to him, a stronger sense than the sound.
He eased closer, remaining pressed against the wall as he approached, keeping the revolver up near his face. He reached the edge of the hatch, turning his head slightly to see inside from the corner of his right eye.
The room was different from the others. It had a stairwell just inside the hatch, which led down into a bigger space where a pair of large tanks were resting near the wall, pipes running away from them and into the floor. Hayden wasn’t an Engineer, but he was willing to bet they were related to the waste system somehow.
He could see the people now. Three men and a woman. They weren’t wearing masks like the girl, but they were dressed similarly. Threadbare robes over fitted clothing, over bodies lean from either a lot of exercise or not a lot of food. All of their heads were shaved, and one of the men had what looked like a tattoo on the side of his face. Hayden was too far away to make out what it was.
There was a small device sitting in the middle of them, the top of it glowing red with heat.
On top of the device was a leg.
A human leg.
Hayden turned back, covering his mouth to keep from gagging. His heart leaped into his throat, his pulse pounding. It was one thing if she were dead. Another if they were eating her.
That didn’t mean it was Natalia’s leg. They had dragged the other body away for a reason. Was this how they had survived on the outside for so long?
He swallowed the rise in his throat, repositioning himself to take another look. He forced himself to set his eyes on the cooktop. The leg was too big to be Natalia’s.
He felt the relief, despite the grotesqueness of it all. What the hell was their existence like that it had driven them to eat another human being? He wanted to kill
them all, and he could from here. Four shots from the rifle and they would put them all to rest. Except, it was possible they knew what had happened to his wife.
He had to try to talk to them.
He returned the revolver to his hip and grabbed the rifle from his back, remembering to scan the corridor again as he did. The people inside were laughing now, and he thought he heard one of them say, “Smells so good. So much better than Hisser.”
He bit his lip to keep from gagging. Hisser? Did he mean xenotrife? These people ate them, too?
“Toko will be missed,” he heard the woman say.
He crouched down, using his shoulder to begin brushing open the hatch. It moved easily and quietly, giving him enough space to slink into the room. The kept his eyes locked on the people below, making sure they didn’t notice him. He wondered why they felt so secure down there with the hatch open and the smell making its way out. Weren’t they afraid the xenotrife would find them?
Unless they had already killed all of the creatures in the area. If they gathered in smaller, competitive groups, it might be possible to wipe them out one nest at a time.
He stood slowly, getting the rifle up and over the railing to the steps. He swept his reticle across all four of them, preparing his firing path. He repeated it a couple of times, still unnoticed. Then he tapped the muzzle of the rifle against the metal rail.
The speaking stopped. The man with the tattoo started to turn his head in Hayden’s direction. “Gizzie, is that - who the grep are you?”
Hayden’s body shook slightly, a sudden chill of fear running through it. The other side of the man’s face was heavily scarred, as though it had been melted.
“I’ll ask the questions,” Hayden said, forcing the words out without quivering. “None of you move.”
The man turned his head back to the others. “You see that shit?” he asked. “Who the grep does this grepper think he is?”
