by Joshua James
Ben reached a prep area, meant for engineers to change before and after hazard shifts. Dead Shapeless littered the area, but none of them were burned or showed any signs of trauma at all. From their bodies, half human, half abstract masses of flesh, they must’ve been trying to pass as the Atlas’ crew, which was creepy but not unexpected. But they were still, silent.
How did they die? In the crash? Fire?
Against his better judgment, Ben kicked one of the dead Shapeless. It didn’t move, so he kicked it harder. Again, nothing.
If nothing else, Ben was learning about the Shapeless with each encounter. First, he’d learned that they were vulnerable. Not only were extreme temperatures and strong electrical shocks a weakness, but it also appeared that they were in some way connected. What other explanation was there for these dead Shapeless? When the ship went down, they went down too, almost like a hive-mind situation. The question remained, though: how the hell were they able to shoot down the Atlas to begin with?
Ben heard a screech echo through the halls of the ship. It was followed by the noise of a woman crying. From the sound of it, the sources were close, and they were coming his way.
Putting the grotesque sight of the dead, half-transformed Shapeless out of his mind, Ben pressed up against the doorway to the engineering prep room. He peeked around the corner.
He saw a terrified woman running down the halls of the Atlas, straight towards him. She was covered in blood, though he couldn’t tell from where. Her feet were bleeding from running on the grated metal floor, which had all manner of debris strewn about on it.
Help her, asshole! She’s probably running from whatever the hell they do here.
Ben stared at the woman as she got closer and closer. The logical part of his mind said she was already as good as dead, and all that mattered right now was the mission. Somehow, he forced himself not to move.
A Shapeless creature with the features of a UEF Navy man caught up with the woman. With its mouth opened impossibly wide, it bit down where her neck met her shoulder. The monster tore a large chunk of her flesh out with its teeth, leaving her to fall to the floor, gushing blood. Her eyes were wide, scared, and focused on him.
“Sorry,” whispered Ben.
That was a mistake.
The Shapeless snapped its head around. Blood and tendons still hung from the crevices between its razor-sharp teeth. It swung its head back and forth, sniffing at the air.
Ben figured if the monster wanted him, it could come get him. He may not have been able to save that poor woman, but he sure as hell could get some vengeance for her. After taking out one of his two white phosphorous grenades, he knocked on the door frame of the engineers’ prep room with his robotic arm. Then he pulled the pin and held it in the same metal appendage.
The Shapeless appeared suddenly in the prep-room doorway, its steps almost silent.
Ben burst out from behind the door and used his metal arm to shove the white phosphorous grenade in the monster’s mouth. The Shapeless screamed and smashed his elbow with a big claw appendage, sending Ben spinning around and wheeling away. The Shapeless rushed after him. Just as it pulled back to swipe at him again with its sharp appendage, the grenade in its mouth went off.
A bright white glow seemed to envelope the creature’s entire upper body for a split second. The Shapeless fell back, clawing at its throat, quickly morphing into all manner of shapes in its agony. In a matter of ten seconds, it was on the floor next to the woman it killed, smoke coming off the charred skin of its neck and forehead.
Ben took a second to look at the scratches on his prosthetic arms. It was one of the few times he was happy to have lost his real one.
Next, he moved on to the Atlas’ cafeteria. He discovered it was something of a holding pen at the beginning of the assimilation process. Predictably, it was horrific.
What’s with these things and cafeterias?
People who were funneled in from the outside made their way here first. Once here, the cultists forced them to strip nude before entering. Ben, waiting for the right time to move undetected, watched as frightened and confused Vassar-1 citizens were made to remove their clothes at gunpoint, adding them to a growing pile near the entrance.
Trembling, the now-nude citizens were forced to move on to the cafeteria proper. There, Shapeless in the form of UEF soldiers took measurements of their bodies, took pictures, and made them say random words and sentences. Everything about it was invasive. Private parts were handled, eyelids were pulled back to better observe eyeballs, and every part of their bodies was poked, prodded, and squeezed.
Ben was beyond angry and disgusted. All he wanted to do was grab his rifle and start firing.
The assembly line kept going until the sound of gunshots erupted outside. All the cultists and Shapeless in the ship turned and looked in the direction of the shots. The rate and amount of firing increased.
First to respond to the fighting outside were the cultists guarding the prisoners. Ben waited patiently as they ran towards the large hole in the Atlas, where people were being funneled in.
Then he took a chance.
With the bastards distracted by whatever was happening outside, Ben managed to grab one of the cultist guards. He couldn’t be more than twenty-something. With a hand over the young man’s mouth, Ben pulled him into the hallway outside the Atlas’ cafeteria. He squeezed the cultist’s neck between his chest and mechanical arm. A squeeze and a pop later, and his abductee was dead. Ben watched as the man slumped to the ground, and realized he’d been wrong before. No way was he in his twenties. More like eighteen, tops.
This is what it comes to now.
Knowing his window was short, Ben quickly took off the rags that the cultist wore. He put them on, and did his best to hide the equipment he’d brought with him. One deep breath later, he entered the cafeteria.
No one seemed to notice Ben. The others were too busy dealing with the threat outside to question his dubious appearance. Even the Shapeless didn’t look at him too closely.
Or did they?
Three Shapeless rushed past Ben, screeching. He backed up out of their way, again trying to not be seen or heard. His goal was to get to the closed bulkhead across the cafeteria. From there it was a short walk to the on-board tram transport that would take him to the command deck, and the fold engine that was directly under it.
Ben hated himself for simply walking past all those poor civilians. He couldn’t ignore their cries, yet he couldn’t acknowledge them either. All the crying and sobbing couldn’t penetrate his facade. Some even soiled themselves, but Ben didn’t wrinkle his nose.
They’re already dead. Remember, you’re trying to save those who still have a chance.
Ben paused for a second right before reaching the door out of the cafeteria. He wiped the single tear that had managed to sneak its way out. Then he pulled the lever to manually open the door.
Nothing happened.
“Shit,” Ben mumble-whispered to himself. Everything on the fake Atlas looked so authentic that he didn’t even consider that something like a manual override lever on a bulkhead wouldn’t work or even be set up to do so. That left a terrible question. How would he get out the cafeteria to the front of the ship?
There was only one real option. As much as Ben hated it, he had no choice. Through the kitchen, next to the walk-in freezer, there was a door that led to the supply rooms. From there he could get access to the halls and corridors beyond the cafeteria. The problem was that the kitchen was where the Vassar-1 citizens were being corralled into.
Calm as could be, acting like he belonged there, Ben once again entered the cafeteria. He couldn’t help but take a peek outside through the large fracture in the side of the ship. All he could see from that far away were the tell-tale red and orange streaks of super-heated bullets flying back and forth.
Ben approached the entrance to the kitchen. It was behind the long counters that soldiers used to line up at to get their chow. The closer he got,
the more screams and cries he heard from just beyond the loosely-hinged double doors to the kitchen. The Shapeless, in the form of UEF soldiers, let in small groups, maybe three or four at a time.
When Ben tried to cut the line to get in through the doors, none of the trembling, naked prisoners stopped him. They would’ve let anyone ahead of them. But the outstretched hand of a Shapeless guard impeded his progress.
“Where are you walking?” the guard asked. Such weird, slightly-off speech was common among those aliens pretending to be human. They hadn’t quite gotten it down yet, which was one of the reasons for this assimilation center.
“I’m needed back in the supply room,” answered Ben.
The Shapeless guard stared at Ben with penetrating eyes. Ben couldn’t tell if it was trying to see if he was lying, or was trying to decide if it wanted to eat him or not. It didn’t help that its face kept spasming, trying to figure out what expression it should make for the situation.
“You hurry, fast,” ordered the Shapeless guard. “Embrace the Abyss.”
Ben nodded. “Embrace the Abyss.” With that, he was allowed to pass.
As Ben put his hand on the loose double doors that led back to the kitchen, he noticed blood splatter on the circular windows on each. That, combined with the screams and cries he heard before entering, prepared him for the horror he was about to walk in on.
Or so he thought.
Up until that point, the atrocities and horrors of the Shapeless that Ben had seen were after the fact. He only saw the gruesome results, not the acts themselves. Not until he entered the kitchen.
Ben struggled against his own gag reflex as he watched people being butchered like cattle. Shapeless and cultists alike used large machete-like blades to stab, cut, and sever pieces of the defenseless people. Once they were killed in the most brutal ways possible, their bodies were fed into what looked like a large, undulating black mass of flesh. Some kind of chemical reaction was taking place, rendering the mass as a sludge that seeped into an opening at the end of a long, flexible tube running out of the kitchen. Ben had no idea what happened after that. He didn’t want to know.
Something inside Ben died in those few moments that he made his way across the blood- and gore-covered kitchen floor. It was too much. No one was ever supposed to witness that, and he wasn’t alone. Some of the cultists that assisted were overwhelmed, and vomited. He watched as two who refused to participate were cut down and fed to the black mass.
Ben rushed forward as fast as he dared without raising suspicions. He was almost to the supply room when he heard a child’s voice behind him.
Just keep moving. Keep moving. Keep your eye on the ball.
But no amount of self-motivation could stop him from turning around.
A family was huddled together, with the son clinging onto his mother’s leg. They’d just entered the kill room. The father pleaded with the soulless aliens and cultists for mercy. If not for him, he wailed, for his wife and child. The mother was comforting the son, or trying to. Ben could hear her saying that everything would be okay, even though she was clearly even more fearful than him.
For a second, Ben pictured himself as the terrified boy, with his own mother holding him close in the face of assured death. He couldn’t stand the idea of watching them getting slaughtered, especially the child. So he acted, even though it meant straying from the mission.
The first thing Ben did was stealthily pull the pin from his remaining white phosphorous grenades. Then he took his rifle out from under his borrowed rags and shot all the cultists in sight. Stunned, the family of prisoners huddled and ducked down.
There were three Shapeless inside the kill room. They shrieked and quickly transformed their limbs into bladed weapons. Ben, having already armed his grenades, peppered them with regular high-velocity bullets, then tossed said grenades. The grenades exploded, pretty much lighting the monsters up on impact. The black mass that was being fed corpses let out a low, rumbling roar.
“Run! Get the hell out of here!” yelled Ben as he backed up to one wall, trying to avoid the flailing limbs of burning, dying Shapeless. After a moment of panic, the father picked up the son, and he and his wife fled the kitchen out the same double doors that had introduced them to hell.
Ben also had no plans for sticking around. He quickly made for the supply room, then fell in his haste, slipping on the blood on the floor. The floor was so slick it took him a while on all fours to finally get up and out of the kitchen.
The supply room was completely empty. There wasn’t a single box of crackers or bag of flour on the barren shelves. Of course there wasn’t. What did the Shapeless need with human food? They’d rather the human beings themselves be the food, it seemed.
Ben ran towards the supply room exit. He was too nervous to look back and see if anything or anyone followed. All that mattered now was the mission, after his moral detour.
When Ben reached the entrance to the on-board tram, he realized a fatal flaw in his plans. The Atlas didn’t have any power, so how was the tram going to work? How was he going to get the doors open on both sides?
First things first, Ben thought. He used his robotic arm to pry open the door to the tram. He used his prosthetic leg as leverage, pulling as hard as he could on the airtight bulkhead doors. They moved; it was slow, but he saw movement. He felt pain radiate from the old scars where the metallic appendages were grafted into his muscular and skeletal systems as he strained his mechanical parts against his organic ones.
Finally, Ben got the door open. Now all he had to do was climb across the rails to the other side, to the front of the Atlas, and pry that door open as well. He couldn’t wait for all the fun that would be.
Ben slowly made his rail across the rails. There were two that fed into tracks on the tram pod, which of course was inoperable. The space between the two of them was just narrow enough that he could crawl on and over them.
As he crawled to the front of the Atlas, Ben looked out on the clearing. He saw Shapeless gathering together near the assimilation center entrance. What they were doing, he had no idea, but he knew it couldn’t be anything good.
Ben tried to ignore what was going on outside, and finally made his way to the other end of the onboard tram rails. Just as he had to gain access, he pried open the door, testing the strength of the servos and other mechanisms inside his false arm. For the first time since the terrorist attacks in Annapolis, Ben was happy to be part machine.
Once inside the front section of the Atlas, he got to work. He climbed down the access ladder to the fold engines. He planted the high explosive he’d taken from LeFay; then he went about trying to see if the Shapeless had the planet-destroying weapon hidden nearby.
UEF Navy engineers had chosen to hide their planet-killing weapon by the fold engine because it would be hard to penetrate the energy halo via standard detection methods. Even a nearspace scan would be overcome by the disruptive energy that the fold engines gave off, even when powered down. No one, not even the on-board engineers, knew about it. Ben didn’t technically have clearance himself, but his father had told him about it in broad terms.
Ben reached the false wall that was supposed to lead into the weapon chamber. In order to open it, he’d have to push down on the top right and bottom left corners at the same time. Then the wall should’ve popped open, revealing the anti-matter warhead that was housed in an equally-hidden torpedo tube, ready to launch.
“Thank God.” Ben wiped the sweat off his forehead and breathed a sigh of relief when he popped the false wall and nothing was behind it. But was that really a good thing? He was a little worried at how the Shapeless even knew to include the wall itself. LeFay could be right. They might have recreated the warhead and taken it away, enormous as it was. But that was a worry for another day. He needed to get the hell off the ship before it blew up. No doubt he was running late, and LeFay and Tomas had already planted their bombs.
Ben climbed up the ladder out of the fold engine room, an
d was startled to see an outstretched hand waiting for him at the top.
He gasped when he saw who it was. Jake Rollins, the officer who’d replaced him on the original Atlas mission.
Ben waited for a moment to see what Rollins did. He could climb back down into the fold engine room, but there was only one way in or out, and this was it. When the hand was finally retracted after several seconds, Ben cautiously climbed out, making sure that Rollins wasn’t making any aggressive moves in his direction.
“Hello, Ben.”
Ben raised his rifle. “Hello, Jake.”
Rollins held both of his hands up. He was smiling. “Whoa there. Relax.”
“Screw relaxing,” Ben said. “Talk fast. I’m in a bit of a hurry.”
“As you might have surmised, I’m not the Jake Rollins you knew.”
“No shit.”
“I thought it would be more productive talking to you with a face you know and trust.”
“That prick took my job,” Ben said. “So no, I don’t trust him, and I sure as hell don’t trust you.” He wanted to pull the trigger so badly, and perhaps he should have, but he was also curious. “Who are you? And make it quick.”
“Because you’re going to blow this place up? Sure. I wouldn’t want you to die here. No, not yet. I have use for you.” Rollins’ face morphed into that of a pale bald man with black eyes.
“I…” Ben knew this new face. He’d seen it before, right before the attack on Annapolis. It was the pale man he’d been obsessed with ever since. “I know you.”
“Indeed you do. If not by name or reputation, you know me in your heart. All living beings do.”
“Who are you? And give me one good reason why I shouldn’t blow your damn head off.”
“I’m the answer to the question of whether there’s life after death. And you shouldn’t kill me because I’m the only one who can give you what you truly want.” The Pale Man’s smile never diminished or faded. It was concrete, as if painted on his face.
