by Rob Dearsley
More tracer fire crashed through the bay, but Hale could already see the shapeless black gathering in the hallway. A shadow-form followed them. Hale raised her gun, but paused. Every time Hale looked at them, she saw the Terran Officer in his cryo-pod.
Hale fired. The modern assault weapons were all small and underpowered. The bullets pinged harmlessly of the silhouette. What she wouldn’t give for an Imperial heavy rifle. Those things got the job done.
“Contact front.” Hutch’s voice was followed by the chatter of his rifle.
Beside Hale, Fyffe tossed out a pair of glow sticks. Their light instantly faded to almost nothing, consumed by the hungry night.
More gunfire from the front of the group, followed by the dull whump of a stun grenade and they spilt out into the crew-way.
“This is useless,” Hale reloaded her toy gun and fired another burst into the hallway. She might as well be shooting blanks. “We need some proper guns.”
“Bridge first,” Niels said.
“We aren’t going to make it without some way to actually fight this thing.”
They hurried up a ramp onto the upper level.
“The bridge is at the other end of the crew-way,” Valentine said.
The eight-metre wide passage was empty of life, and movement. No rolling shadows, just normal twilight of the emergency lighting. For a moment Hale could breathe again.
“Where is everyone?” Fyffe asked.
“Combat protocol,” Valentine answered. “Everyone’s holed up in secure areas or holding key points. Reduces blue on blue.”
It made sense, Hale guessed. But the empty hallways were spooky as hell. The low-level emergency lights threw long shadows out in front of them and up the walls. Hale’s eyes flicked from shadow to shadow, searching. Tense and ready. It gave the term ‘jumping at shadows’ a whole new meaning. Beside her, Fyffe was just as tense, too-wide eyes darting back and forth.
“You’re good,” Hale said, placing a hand on the young woman’s shoulder.
“You’re kidding, right,” Fyffe said, her eyes never leaving the ramp and the deeper darkness below.
The normal sounds of the ship, the humming of power relays, the hush of the air circulators, took on a menacing, foreboding note that put Hale’s hackles up. Every sound could be the darkness coming to strike, every movement an enemy. She hadn’t realised how much she missed the increased awareness that came with being on an Imperial cruiser until now.
Movement ahead of them.
Hale’s gun whipped up, her finger tightening on the trigger. Around her, the SDF officers brought their own weapons to bare.
“Hold fire. Hold fire!” Ellis raised his hands, letting his assault rifle swing from his combat harness. “I’m human.”
Hale kept her gun on him while she played her flashlight over his body, finally shining the light into his face. Everything looked normal.
“Gee, thanks,” Ellis said, throwing his hand up to shield his eyes.
“Tom,” Fyffe pulled the rangy sniper into a brief hug, then looked away. “I thought you were in medical.”
“Yeah, but I’m not going to let you guys have all the fun. What in all the hells is going on, anyway?”
“Talk and move, people,” Hutch said, starting forward.
Ellis fell in between Fyffe and Hale. “So, what is going on?”
Before anyone could answer, Hutch’s voice came from the front of the group. “Heads up, guys. We’ve got incoming.”
Hale’s attention snapped forward. A pair of doors hissed open a hundred meters or so down, and something stumbled out.
It was too far for their torch beams to pick out properly. The figure turned toward them, its face contorted into a silent scream, shadows spilling off it.
“Enemy contact,” Hale snapped, tracking the creature with her pistol.
Another shadow-form stumbled out, then another. They started toward Hale and her group. She kept her gun trained on the closest of the three.
The figures didn’t move.
Hale watched them, every muscle tense, straining her senses for the trouble that must be coming.
“This way,” Valentine hissed as he worked the controls of the lift. The lift doors opened and Valentine threw his glow-sticks into the cart. “Inside, now.”
The others filed through the door, Hale and Hutch covering the immobile silhouettes. They just stood there, watching. Hale shivered, their attention practically crawling over her skin.
Ellis cursed from within the lift.
“Back up,” Valentine snapped.
Hale spun to see a young girl stood in the lift. The rest of the squad fanned out around her, their torch beams panning over her body. Tendrils of darkness crawled up her legs and over her torso, only pushed back by the light. The girl’s mouth opened in a silent scream.
The girl looked up at Hale, eyes wide with fear and confusion.
Memories of darkness and emptiness flashed through Hale’s mind, stopping her in her tracks. Around her, Hutch and the others froze, unsure. Hale met the woman’s eyes. Angels, she looked scared, terrified. Memories of her own brush with the darkness seeped into Hale’s thoughts, sending a shiver along her arms that had nothing to do with the rolling cold.
“More light, quick.” Ellis grabbed for the girl.
The darkness surged up. Hutch barged Ellis aside shoving the+ girl out of the lift cart. The shadows flowed over Hutch’s prosthetic hand. Hale expected it to surge up his arm the way it had with her, but it just flowed over the marine’s mechanical hand.
Hutch fired into the growing shadow. The girl fell, screaming into darkness.
The lift doors closed
“You killed her,” Ellis snapped.
“What choice did I have! Stars damn-it all!” Hutch lashed out, his fist denting the metal of the lift. Spent, he slumped down against the wall.
At least while they were wreathed in shadow, Hale could convince herself they weren’t innocents. But seeing the girl like that. These were humans, their crewmates.
Hale’s jaw clenched. She’d played this Angels forsaken game before.
◊◊
All around Dannage, screens flickered to life showing a robed figure. Each from a slightly different angle.
His eyes kept drifting back to the crystal tube and its brain. It seemed to pulse gently within its nutrient bath. Lights flickered over its metal sheath in sequence. Red, red, green. Red, red, green. It was almost hypnotic.
Captain Dannage.
Huh? The lights slowed, his pulse slowing in time with it.
Come to me…
His body felt distant. There was something he was supposed to be doing. He needed to focus.
Red. Red. Green.
He slipped. His mind fuzzy. There was nothing but the lights, and even they started to fade away. Unimportant. What was he thinking? Where was he again? It felt like he was floating but he could feel the ground beneath his feet. Or at least something rough and hard pushing against the souls of his boots.
Rock? Was he standing on rock?
He turned his head carefully. The flickering – red, red, green – filtered through his peripheral vision. The rocky plane stretched out around him, sloping away from him into a haze that leached all the colour from the world. It all looked, felt, monochrome.
How did he get here? Where the heck was here?
“Captain Michael Dannage. At last.” The robed figure moved toward him. It towered head and shoulders above him. Its head, what he could see of it anyway, was oddly elongated, the details of the equine face lost to shadow. If the shape of the hood was anything to go on, it flared out at the top. Like the Turned.
Movement within the robes hinted at legs that didn’t bend like human ones.
“The Entropic Force grows stronger. We must stop it.”
Straight down to business then.
“Wait.” Dannage held up his hands in a ‘stop’ motion. “What is this place? Who are you?”
The creature
cocked its head. “We have little time remaining.”
Dannage had had enough of all this crap. All these voices in his head and now this. “Well damn well make time. Either answer my questions or I walk.”
It sighed, arms shifting beneath its robes. Did it have four arms? “You would not understand. Suffice to say, it is a space between worlds. Something beyond what you understand as reality. As for who I am. I think you already know that answer.”
“Loki.” The name flicked through his mind unbidden.
“Yes. That is what the Terrans called me. For a name, it will suffice.”
“But what are you?”
“Who really knows what they are?” Loki cocked his long head to one side in a bird-like motion. “Maybe what I want will suffice to end your questioning. I want the galaxy I helped create to not fall into the darkness of The Before.”
It made the galaxy? Dannage took an instinctive step back, shock rifling through him like a shot. Mist swirled around them. Was the creature just bragging? Dannage looked it up and down, its robes shifting in impatience. No, this creature was powerful and ancient. There was no room for doubt. This creature, or his kind had made this galaxy. They were the progenitors of everything he knew. Everything he wa- No. Damn it.
“Stay out of my mind,” he growled. Anger at the violation driving him forward to square off against the gangly alien. An honest to god alien. Stars, times were changing. And somehow Dannage kept finding himself at the centre of it all.
“This is all merely a mental construct.” Loki waved a hand. “Now listen. Time is short and the Entropic Force rises. Soon it will return our creation into the nothingness from which it started.”
Dannage held onto his anger, colour spilling from him into the world, a wash of rich brown and clear blue, the scent of salt on the air. Loki took a step back. “Not my first rodeo. Now tell me, what do you want?”
“A captain.”
Dannage was taken aback by the frankness of the answer. It took the wind from his sails, deflating his anger.
Before he could respond Loki continued. “It is a limitation of this ship’s design. To regain full functionality, this ship needs to be paired with a compatible commander. A human pilot.”
Dannage couldn’t help but think of the x-ships, and their automated fleet. “Shame the Terrans didn’t think of that sooner. Why should I help you?”
“If you help me, I can help you.”
“Help how?” he asked.
Loki reached out, extending a finger to tap against Dannage’s forehead. “Your unique neural morphology is no accident.”
Twenty-Five
(SDF Feynman)
Hale slipped out of the lift, going right. Hutch was a breath behind her covering the left. They’d come out in the main corridor that led to the bridge. Heavy security doors sealed the bridge. Hale let out a breath, her shoulders relaxing. They’d almost made it. They could get the power back on and deal with this Darkness.
She kept her gun up and ready as they moved toward the security doors, not trusting the situation wouldn’t go sideways. Valentine passed his flex off to Fyffe and moved past them to the door controls and tapped in his security code.
“Captain, we’ve got the virus shutdown codes,” he said stepping through into the bridge’s upper level. “Oh hells.”
Hale and Hutch were already running as the commander stumbled back, hand rubbing over his face in disbelief.
Darkness rolled toward them as shadow-forms climbed up out of the watch pit. Hale was dumbstruck. How? She couldn’t even finish the thought.
Even as her mind reeled, Hale brought her pitiful gun up and fired.
“We could still use the codes, get the lights,” Fyffe said holding up the flex.
“No.” Captain Rossini stumbled around the holo-table, clutching her side. “If we re-enable the ship, the shadow-forms will have control. We have to stop them.”
As one, the shadow-forms pivoted toward Fyffe, tendrils of shadow shooting out.
“Get out of here. Scuttle the ship.” Rossini shoved Fyffe toward the door as the shadows flowed over the captain and Rossini screamed, reaching for a grenade attached to her belt.
Hutch and Ellis both threw stun grenades at the advancing shadow-forms and dragged Valentine through the security door. Hale kept firing her gun as she ran for Fyffe and the flex, but it was like spitting in the wind.
Darkness rolled over them and for a moment there was nothing but Rossini’s scream and the soft orange glow of the flex.
Hale sighted on the rapidly diminishing glow of the flex, cold searing all way down to her bones. Her fingers numb, she pulled the trigger and the bark of the gun echoed off into the empty void around her. The flex shattered, its light winking out leaving Hale alone in the dark.
Mine.
The sounds of the ship humming to life broke through the emptiness.
◊◊
They’d lost the bridge. Lost the whole damn ship. Niels couldn’t see another option. Only the unthinkable was left to them.
Niels stumbled through the Feynman’s darkened hallways. Only Sergeant Hutch’s mechanical hand on his arm stopped him from falling. The glow sticks were running out and troopers were running low on ammo and flash grenades. Heck, they were running out of everything.
All around them, the ship groaned and pinged as the main engines burned hard, forcing the mammoth ship forward. It must be trying to break orbit. They had to get to engineering and disable the ship now.
Movement filled the darkened crew way. Dozens of shadow-forms milled through the impenetrable gloom.
The crew turned against them. Maybe this was how the ancient Terrans felt as their ships revolted against them.
Hutch pulled him into a side corridor. “Now we do need to gear up.”
“There’s an armoury just along here,” Valentine said. The Commander’s face was ashen, grief etched into the lines around his eyes.
“What then?” Ellis snapped. “What are we supposed to do now? The whole bloody ship is screwed to the seven hells!”
“No,” Fyffe said, her eyes glistening in the torchlight. “Don’t say that, Tom. We can still…”
“Still what, Kate? Go down fighting? Become one of those things! Don’t worry, I’m not going to let that happen.” His hand strayed to his sidearm. “Want me to save you a round?”
“Stop!” Valentine shoved Ellis back getting right into the man’s face. “This is not bloody helping!” He stepped back scrubbing his hands over his face. “Captain Rossini gave us an order, so that’s what I’m going to do. Help me or hand in your commission right here and now. I don’t care which.”
Niels bit back his own frustration. Apart they’d die useless deaths. If they could hold together, they could at least make their sacrifice mean something.
Footsteps from one of the side rooms were followed by the dull beam of a flashlight at the end of its battery life.
“Admiral?” Jenna said rushing to them, an armed marine trailing her.
The sight of her, alive and whole broke through the pallor over Niels’s thoughts. The first rays of sunlight on a summer’s morning.
“You made it?” He hugged her awkwardly, aware of her injured arm.
“Thanks to Mac here.” She gestured to the marine, who threw Niels an absent-minded salute.
Niels looked around at the small group. They were balanced on a knife-edge, Ellis more than ready to give up, and if he went over the edge, he’d take Fyffe with him. He’d never been one for inspirational speeches.
“Like the commander says, Captain Rossini gave us an order. Let’s get it done.” Given their reactions, he had a good idea what the captain had told them to do.
“Armoury first,” Valentine said. “If we’re going to get to engineering and scuttle the ship, we’re going to need bigger guns.”
They slipped along the hallway, in the pool of light from their flashlights. Even the emergency lights were gone now. The Darkness must have shut them do
wn.
The armoury was a smaller secondary station but was still well equipped. Ellis went for one of the anti-Turned rifles.
“I have a better idea.” Valentine pulled out a box of heavy tracer rounds. “Grab the assault rifles and load up.”
Armed, they burst back out into the crew way – it was the quickest way to engineering. Hutch and Ellis lead with stun and frag grenades, following up with heavy tracer fire. Light drones turned up to max, flying overhead.
The Marines clustered around Niels, Valentine and Jenna, protecting them as their weapons kept up a constant roar. Shadow-forms fell back under the barrage. The darkness reformed around them.
Two of the light drones went down to the tendrils of shadow. Stun grenades ripped apart the advancing darkness revealing the screaming humans beneath. Niels watched as the marines fired into their own crewmates, bile rising in his throat.
“Left. Go left.” Hutch switched around, leading them down one of the ramps to the lower level of the crew-way. “Move, people. We can cut through underneath.”
The group rushed down the ramp, spilling out onto the currently empty crew-way. Darkness seeped after them from above, coming down the ramps and over the balconies.
They ran for it, the Marines tossing out grenades to keep the writhing shadows at bay. It finally felt like they were getting ahead of things. They bundled through a bulkhead door, one of the Marines pulled the manual activation, slamming the heavy doors behind them.
“That went better than I expected.” Jenna bent double, breathing heavily. Blood seeped from a gash on her cheek.
Niels doubled over, hands on his knees, breathing hard. Nearly a dead sprint half the length of the ship. Niels straightened, taking stock. The push through the crew-way had cost them over half their ammo and nearly all their grenades.
“How much further to engineering?” Hutch asked.
Niels answered, “We’re in the engineering hull now. Main engine rooms are a few minutes away.”
“Right. Let’s move out, people.” Hutch hefted his rifle and turned toward the far side of the room where corridors curved down either side. The curve of the engineering hull was tighter than the main hulls of the ship.
