Seclurm: Devolution

by Noah Gallagher

  “We sent him to the boiler room to look for scrap metal.”

  Rosalyn blew up the images of every live camera feed on the lower floor, one by one, searching for Mitchell. She looked at all the top floor cameras next. He wasn’t anywhere.

  “SNTNL, do you have any clue where he is?”

  “I do not know, Captain. Last he was seen was heading into the boiler room. I’ll pull up the footage of him there about an hour and a half ago.”

  Footage from the boiler room appeared on her screen. She could see Mitchell dressed in grubby work clothes in need of a wash, and that thin, brown, parted hair on his head. He searched through some scrap, climbed up a ladder to search through more, and then walked toward the door. Then for some reason, he stopped, turned around, and walked around the right side of the boiler, curving around to where the camera couldn’t see. That was it—for the rest of the footage from that point until the present, there was no sign of him.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said aloud.

  “What happened?” asked Sam.

  “He walked behind the boiler and didn’t come back.”

  “What’s he doing, avoiding work? That’s the worst place I could possibly imagine to do that,” said Randy.

  “I’m concerned that something may have happened to him. Maybe…the same thing that happened to Shauna. …Al and Sam, will you get over there and very carefully see if you can find Mitchell?”

  “Will do,” Al answered with a sigh.

  “Once you’re done there, let’s all of us meet in the dining area and whatever you do, do not travel alone. Until I know otherwise, I believe we’re in danger here.”

  She stood up and walked out of the computer room and into the dining area, breathing deeply. Too anxious to sit, she stood near the table pacing, arms folded as she waited.

  “SNTNL, any ideas?”

  “No Captain, I’m afraid I haven’t seen anything more than you have.”

  “Well, keep a close watch on every camera feed. You are our eyes, and we don’t want to lose…” Rosalyn trailed off.

  She stopped pacing and stared into space for a moment.

  “Captain? Was there something more you were going to say?”

  “The system mainframe!” she said with alarm.

  She started jogging toward the hallway that led to the stairwell to the lower floor, slowly at first, but then with greater and greater haste. Her ponytail bounced on the back of her head as she left the dining room and turned right down the hall.

  By the time Randy and Terri arrived in the dining area to sit at the hexagonal center table, Rosalyn was already down the staircase to Level 1. She raced through the lounge and onto the catwalks, moving with speed that she didn’t usually try to summon.

  She caught up with Sam and Al walking down the catwalk toward the boiler room and said rapidly, “Come with me to the SNTNL mainframe! Quick!”

  Confusion was evident on their faces, but with her haste they didn’t bother stopping to ask questions. They followed her to the end of the catwalk, which connected into an enclosed, metallic hallway leading to the boiler room at a door on the left and the SNTNL mainframe room on the right. She tapped a panel to open the sliding door on their right and went inside.

  The SNTNL mainframe was the brain of the ship, with SNTNL overseeing the Novara’s multitude of intelligent systems. A single, car-sized spherical object with many blinking, neon-blue colored lights upon it and ventilation slits making lines in it was suspended in the center of the room. A collection of thick cords ran down from the ceiling, passing through the center of the sphere and to the floor. The rest of the room was circular and strewn with various bits of cords draping in the air or on the floor and screens on the walls.

  Blue light painted their bodies and clanging footsteps echoed as they stepped closer to the mainframe sphere before coming to an abrupt stop. They looked up in near unison as they heard a rumbling noise. Each of them stood motionless for a single moment that seemed an eon as they gazed upon a figure perched near the ceiling and clinging onto the large cords. Most of its body was hidden by the cords and by the darkness of the room, but the blinking blue light would occasionally illuminate an arched back with a prominently-protruding spine and a long, long, thin tail that ended in a bone-white spike.

  Sam, Al, and Rosalyn felt as if they’d been melted into paste and glued to the floor.

  The creature’s tail—something like five feet in length—was gyrating in the air in a slow, methodical manner. Without warning it suddenly swept forward, cutting half of the cords off completely. They drooped down in a haphazard manner, falling in every direction, hanging now only from the top of the large computer mainframe. Sparks spat noisily out of their ends.

  The being clinging to the cords wasted no time and cut the other half of them with a few well-placed slashes. The sphere, suddenly untethered, fell to the ground. Time seemed to move more slowly for that two or three second period as the mainframe plummeted in silence before crashing with great force against the metal floor immediately in front of the three astonished crewmates. They each fell on their backs, electrified with terror. A hailstorm of sparks and a fire kicked up right at their feet as the main source of the blue lights in the room suddenly went dark, shattered to bits. Scrambling to stand up, they looked around in semi-dark confusion as ear-shattering alarms started blaring and orange, rotating emergency lights started on.

  A low shriek came from the shrouded creature before it climbed up the severed cords and into the ceiling, out of sight, like a scuttling cockroach. They continued to hear echoes of its motion through the innards of the ship’s walls and ceilings, akin to the movement of bile through a throat. Rosalyn felt a shiver force its way through her body, and the others gasped in horror.

  When they finally gathered their bearings, Sam smashed the panel to open the door and the three of them dashed out as quickly as they possibly could. Al went for a fire extinguisher set into the nearby wall, breaking the glass with his wrench and bringing the extinguisher back into the mainframe room. He squeezed the handle and swept the stream from side to side until the fire around the busted sphere had gone out.

  A relative quiet came upon them. All that moved for a few, heavy moments were their chests, breathing quickly and heavily, and all they heard amidst their breath was the alarm sounding, echoing through every corner of the ship, punctuated by those rotating, orange emergency lights.

  They knew now, after all this time of strange happenings and concerning challenges, what their real problem was. With no SNTNL, no ship systems, no reliable communication with FAER, and no way to safely use the engines…

  There was an alien aboard their ship.

  Terri, Al, Sam, Randy, and Rosalyn surrounded the hexagonal dining table, each of them with a terror in their hearts the likes of which they had never seen nor felt. With the SNTNL mainframe destroyed, their A.I. companion and servant was gone, and the many systems overseeing comfort and ship-welfare were offline. The ship was growing cold with no heaters running, and the only lights that still worked were those that ran off batteries not connected with the mainframe or engines.

  The dining room was lit with lamps along its walls, the ceiling lights dead. Only Terri and Sam sat, shoulders forward and faces stretched with terrified frowns. Rosalyn paced slowly near her seat at the table, rubbing the sleeves on her arms and frowning. Standing, Randy massaged the bridge of his nose or his temples while he leaned on the back of his chair. Al bowed his head and breathed heavily and grimaced, leaning against the wall.

  He glanced at the three doors around them—one to the hallway, one to the kitchen, and one to the computer room—all locked tightly in hopes of keeping that thing out. He was shaken inside and out, with a trembling face and paranoid gaze. He looked at the short hallway leading to the door to the Bridge and started down it, stopping at a closet door on the left and entering cautiously. When he emerged, he carried a hardy metal pole and a line of white string. He took ou
t a bowie knife he’d carried on his person, returned to stand at his spot by the wall, and started tying the bowie knife onto the end of the pole. In a minute or two, he had a makeshift spear. He clutched it tightly in one hand and readied himself for the unexpected.

  Sam stared forward with head low as if the weight of the threat were literally placed upon his back. His black hair was obscuring part of his vision, but he didn’t bother fixing it, just as he didn’t fix the off-center set of the thin blue coat on his shoulders.

  Terri was barely keeping it together, with red eyes and an inability to sit still.

  “What are we gonna do, what are we gonna do, what are we gonna do…?!” she started muttering, her voice trembling.

  Randy was probably the most composed of them all, with a dead stare on his face, his elbows resting on the back of his chair in front of him, his hands cupped together. He and Terri hadn’t seen the alien up close, but at the time that incident happened, they had gone to the computer room after asking SNTNL where Rosalyn was, and there they had watched on the screen the live camera feed of the system mainframe room while the others entered. From their camera point-of-view they had gotten a somewhat better look, albeit a digital one, of the creature than the others had gotten just before the computers all went kaput. Lithe and limber they had described it, with abnormally tall limbs, a sleek figure, and a killer tail.

  It was clear now what happened to Shauna and to Mitchell alike, and that horrible thought was at the forefront of everyone’s mind.

  All those things processed through Rosalyn’s brain like a semi-truck barreling into her at high speeds. She stopped pacing for a minute, grasping at ideas of what to do to get everybody back together and pierce through the shock. She decided it would be better if she sat down, taking care to watch her posture and breathing. But inside she knew she was terrified, utterly terrified.

  “I…I can probably guess where everybody’s thoughts are,” she said slowly, “but we need to try to direct our energy toward a solution.”

  Sam frowned at her. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. We have to come up with some idea of how to kill that thing, or else get it off the ship.”

  Randy shook his head. “We have nothing to fight it with. And no, that cute little thing isn’t gonna do the job.” He gestured to the spear in Al’s hands, and Al returned his glare.

  “Maybe we can bash your head against it. Hardest thing in the universe,” he retorted.

  Rosalyn took a deep breath. “We can’t rush it and hope to win—you’re right, Randy. We’ll need to figure something else out. A strategy.”

  Terri burst out, “That thing has been crawling around the ship for a little over one day and it’s already killed two of us and destroyed our mainframe. We are going to die!”

  Rosalyn swallowed, grimacing and pressing down her coat onto her skin. With both the mainframe destroyed and the engines off, the ship was starting to reach very cold temperatures.

  “Keep it together, Doctor. Please. For all of us,” she said.

  Terri just shook her head and wiped her eyes, frowning widely and whimpering.

  Sam spoke up. “I don’t know what options we’ve got, Roz. We don’t even know where it is. Or what it is.”

  Randy interjected, “Do we have anything we can track it with? What about radar?”

  The crew looked to him. “That should work,” said Al.

  Sam looked uncertain. “But will it still work with the mainframe down?”

  Randy bit his lip, but nodded. “If we turn the engines on for a few minutes at a time to power it, it should still be able to search for simple vibration in the ship.”

  Rosalyn brightened a bit. “We’ll have to turn the engines on periodically anyway in order to run the oxygen regulators so we don’t suffocate. That’s a good idea, Randy.”

  Terri threw her hands in the air. “And what the hell do we do once we find out where it’s hiding? Kill it? Eject it from the ship? How? Avoid it? For how long? Until when?”

  Al growled suddenly and with brow furrowed said, “Please shut your damn mouth! We’re trying to find a solution!”

  Sam shook his head. “Terri’s right.”

  The eyes of all present went a little wider in shock.

  “We still need to fix the coolant pipe and the hull breach. Without the ship running, that all will take even longer. We don’t have the fuel to stay here for longer than maybe five or six more days, maximum, if we’re regularly turning the engines on and off. Not if we want to ever get home. And we can’t just take our sweet time to fix the coolant valve and then head home or we’ll run out of fuel and then food before we ever get anywhere.”

  Desperately she countered, “FAER’s sent the Chalet after us. We could meet up with it on our way back.”

  Randy shook his head and rolled his shoulders. “Sure, but we can’t do anything—much less leave this rock—with that alien still in tow.”

  A suffocating bleakness and stench of sweat hung in the air. The paneled metal and plastic walls around them, with their increased darkness, were starting to feel like those of a coffin. The aesthetic room design and bright, optimistic posters faded into sheer insignificance.

  But Rosalyn took a deep breath and responded anyway, settling back in her chair. “We are not dead yet. Last I checked each of us has a pulse. So why don’t we all do something with that pulse instead of just lying down and waiting for that thing to take it from us?!”

  She was shouting by the time she finished that sentence. Everyone was fixed on her.

  In a calm and collected voice that belied her rapid heartbeat, she continued, “We can scrounge for materials on the surface to make more fuel while we fix the coolant pipe. We can ration our food so it lasts longer. And we can fix the communication systems and everything else so we can be rescued by the Chalet. The only thing that is stopping any of that from happening—other than lying down and doing nothing—is that four-legged piece of garbage crawling around our ship. Unless we kill it first, you’re right, we will die anyway. And considering how it seems to be able to break through solid metal, ejecting it from the ship might not deter it for long. But when we do kill it, we can make it through and survive. It is possible if we can manage to keep it together.”

  A minute of total silence passed. Al leaned against the wall with a raised arm, the other clutching his spear. He was deep in thought as he finally said, “That thing didn’t jump down and kill us when we were in the mainframe room, even though we weren’t armed at all. Why?”

  Sam answered him with a shrug. “Maybe the fire warded it off?”

  Al slowly nodded.

  Randy scoffed. “So what, we set the ship on fire? Excellent.”

  “I think most living things are afraid of fire, Sam,” said Terri. “That doesn’t really help us.”

  Gears turned in Rosalyn’s head. “We don’t know what this thing is, but we know it’s hyper-intelligent, or it wouldn’t have known to attack the mainframe. We know it lives on this planet and survives in its atmosphere, and evidently in our own as well, somehow. But what’s the thing it went straight for after it got into the ship?”

  They looked at her and waited for her to answer her own question. “The coolant valve. It wanted us to shut the engines off. It probably wants the air temperature in here to match out there. Or at least to match the temperature of the ruins.”

  Terri cleared her throat. “So you’re saying it’s irritated by any heat?”

  “At the very least. I hope heat does even worse things to it. But it’s a place to start.”

  Al rubbed his short-cut head, and a faint smile curled his lips. “I could put some things together to exploit that.”

  Rosalyn nodded understandingly. “Where can you find the materials?”

  “Everything I’ll need should be up here on this floor. Mostly in the loading deck, I think.”

  “Let’s make that our first priority. While we’re at it, the loading deck has some other tools tha
t would probably be useful.”

  Dejected faces of the crewmates were now stern with some level of determination. A plan was forming, and it was beautiful. Rosalyn couldn’t say she felt hopeful yet, but she felt a surge of capability where there had earlier been only powerlessness. That feeling was spreading through the crew like a contagion. A vague concept of success had taken root in their minds, although they could feel only so hopeful when they remembered what they were up against. Still, the feeling breathed new life into Rosalyn.

  A few minutes ago she was fearing that someone would try to sneak into the cryo-pod and escape. Now she quelled those concerns completely. This crew was better than that.

  “There are five of us here,” she said, feeling the fear slowly drain out of her trembling body. “We should have two go to the Bridge and monitor the radar while two go with Al to sneak into the loading deck and retrieve what he needs for the weapon. Who would like to volunteer?”

  Some silence passed and guilt visibly washed over Randy, Terri, and Sam. None wanted to send the others out to their potential death, but none of them were leaping at the chance to risk their life and limbs either.

  “I can be one of them,” Rosalyn offered. She didn’t want to make her crewmates risk their lives if she wasn’t willing to.

  “I’ll go,” said Sam, slowly rising from his chair.

  Not wanting to be the guy who made a woman risk her life for him while he sat back comfortably, Randy quickly said, “I’ll go with Sam and Al, Rosalyn. You stay on the Bridge with Terri.”

  “Are you sure?” Rosalyn said, surprised at his actions. “Randy, it’s okay. I can go.”

  He put a hand on her arm and looked down at his feet and then into her eyes with soberness. “No, no…we don’t want to lose another captain. Just use that radar and do your best to keep us alive.”

  Rosalyn brightened and put her hand on his arm for a moment. Then she said, “Alright. Don’t go anywhere yet. Let’s put on some comm sets and get that radar started so we can figure out where the alien is now. You can set out when we know it’s not in your way. We’re gonna be smart about this.”