Xenonauts: Crimson Dagger

by Stephen, Lee

  “Is there anything flashing on any of these screens to indicate directions?” Mikhail asked. “A place to go for a ship that is about to explode, some means of ejection?”

  Nina scoured the displays. The image of the ship exploding was everywhere. There were red lights flashing, but none of them seemed indicative of any instruction or guidance.

  “Come on,” Mikhail murmured under his breath. “How are you getting out of this, you alien son of a whore?” He had no idea what the entity’s means of escape was, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that among the few options he and Nina had remaining, this was the only one that bore any potential to be life-saving. A glance at the hieroglyphic countdown revealed that a quarter of the symbols were already gone. They were running out of time. “We could look here for ten minutes and not find a clue. Come, we must leave now. We will find the escape route on our own.”

  Touching his good arm, Nina said, “Mikhail, if you are right, would not every alien on this ship be going to the same place?”

  “If I am right,” he said, “there are no other aliens left.” That presence needed a human for a reason. Kneeling down next to Hemingway, Mikhail felt the American captain for a pulse. There was none. Nina had shot him straight through the heart. If she was taken over by that entity, the next heart to receive a bullet would be his. Glancing back to her as she reloaded her submachine gun, he offered the obligatory warning. “Nina, if you feel a presence in your mind, resist it. Both our lives depend on it.”

  “I will, captain.”

  Mikhail nodded. “Let’s go.” Reclaiming the alien rifle—the only weapon that seemed effective against the guardians—he led Nina out of the bridge.

  Much like the bridge, the corridors of the spacecraft were aglow with red flashing lights. The pulse, unrelenting in its consistency, resonated on as the pair tracked down the hall. At the direction they were traveling, they were following the ship’s downward tilt. Mikhail had opted to exit the bridge through the door Hemingway and his team had entered through; he’d been everywhere else and seen no signs of an escape method.

  Where was that thing escaping to? The brief connection he’d shared with the entity had only served to inform him of the alien’s state and intentions. He hadn’t been able to determine anything concrete, such as where the being was or where it was headed. He had an inkling that either the center or the rear of the vessel held the answer, if only for the fact that they hadn’t come across anything resembling a means of escape in the forward section. Assuming the ship’s interior was symmetrical—an assumption that could have easily been wrong—there’d be nothing in the opposite wing to the one they’d first entered. He was being led by educated guesses. It was better than being led by an alien presence.

  The pain in Mikhail’s shoulder was nearly unbearable. Though he still maintained the functionality of both arms, the last thing he wanted to do was have to fire that alien weapon again. Stopping at the first intersection he and Nina came across, he scanned all four directions. Nikolai’s lifeless body lay sprawled further down one of the corridors. In fact, the very room Mikhail had scrambled into to escape the first guardian could be seen, only several doors down. It all confirmed his symmetrical theory.

  Continuing forward, he left the intersection behind him, traveling deeper into the vessel. This was the same route Hemingway had taken after they’d split into two teams, except Mikhail was moving in the opposite direction. Doors lined both sides of the hall. The escape route could be in any of these—how can we check them all with such little time? Moving to the first in a long row of doors, Mikhail opened it. Human-sized tubes were lined up across its far wall, some sort of liquid churning within. Fascinating, but not a means of escape. Onto the next. “Check the doors on the other side, quickly!” Nina affirmed, and they began working their way down.

  One room after the other, one glance within after another, yet nothing helpful was discovered. Supply rooms followed rooms with corpses strewn about from the crash, which followed rooms with no discernible purpose. Still, there was nothing that resembled a means to escape.

  Mikhail’s heart rate increased with each pulse of the spacecraft’s alarm. The countdown ticker had been down a quarter when they’d left the bridge. It had to be past the halfway point now. “Come on!” he shouted, slamming his palm against a metallic door frame as yet another fruitless room revealed itself. Nina echoed similar frustration.

  Reaching another intersection, Mikhail found himself having to choose between two directions. Off toward the ship’s starboard, or angled back toward the aft section. Without hesitation, he bolted toward the aft section, Nina hot on his heels. It took barely ten steps before he found something, unmistakable even amid the pulsing red warning lights. It was exactly the kind of clue he was hoping to find.

  A blood trail. Thin, purple blood. Not human.

  “Mikhail, look,” Nina said, pointing to the trail in the same moment he saw it.

  Look, indeed. The trail led from one of the side doors straight down the hall toward the back of the ship. The entity had been injured—that much Mikhail had sensed already. It was crawling toward its escape. That this trail looked suspiciously like something crawling on the floor had to be more than coincidence. “Let’s go,” he said, sprinting down the corridor.

  The blood trail continued down the center of the hall until finally turning inside a room with an opened door. More than ever, Mikhail was positive this was where they needed to go. His legs moved faster. “It is in there!” He knew it. “Be ready for—”

  Anything.

  Skidding to a halt a few meters from their destination, Mikhail and Nina’s stares locked onto the door’s opening. Bright, rotating white lights flashed from within the room. A low rumble emanated into the halls. It lasted several seconds before the red pulsing of the warning lights once again became the only illumination.

  What was that? His pace picking up and his alien rifle awkwardly lifted to his shoulder, Mikhail reached the open door at a full-on sprint. Whirling into the room, he scanned it for a target. There was none to be found.

  Inside the room was a row of metallic capsules, their fronts opened like segmented doorways, their interiors hollow except for a feature that was completely recognizable. Seats. Each capsule had one—a pristine, white, seemingly cushioned seat. Designed for something similar to, but not quite, human. Above each capsule was a large, circular opening.

  Following the blood trail, Mikhail realized it led straight to where one of the capsules surely would have stood, but was now missing. It escaped. His focus shifted to Nina and himself. “Get in one of those capsules, quickly!”

  Nina rushed toward the nearest one, abandoning her weapons as she leapt into the seat. Placing her arms on the armrests, she looked in every direction. Nothing happened. Eyes panicked, she turned to Mikhail. “What do we do?”

  Hands on his head, Mikhail hurried to Nina’s capsule. There were controls within, but nothing looked familiar. How were these things activated? “Is there a button? A lever, something obvious?”

  Nina’s hands raced, hitting every button and pressing in every indentation within reach. Again, nothing. Finally, her eyes came to rest on a single button separated from the rest—right along the inner wall of the capsule. The moment she slammed it in, the capsule came to life. The walls shifted and slid, prompting Mikhail to leap back to avoid being sliced in two. Within seconds, Nina was contained in a perfect metallic sphere. The only features on its surface were a transparent slit through which the sniper was peering out, and a ring around the middle of the sphere, complete with glowing lights. Slowly, the ring began to spin.

  It was exactly what they had seen from the hallway—they must have only been moments behind the escaping being. Now knowing what to do, Mikhail needed only to claim a capsule for himself. Whatever these capsules were and wherever they were going, it was better than where they were now. With Nina taken care of, Mikhail offered the sniper a thumbs up from outside the wind
ow.

  Suddenly, Nina’s eyes widened. Banging on the window, she shouted at the top of her lungs, pointing for Mikhail to turn around. The moment he did, he saw why she was screaming.

  It was a guardian. The massive green robot was lumbering around the door, red rifle in hand. The moment Mikhail came into view, it raised its weapon and fired.

  Mikhail was already in mid-leap. Landing sideways on his shoulder, he yowled as the guardian stepped toward him. Behind them both, Nina’s capsule soared upward through the hole in the ceiling. But Mikhail didn’t have time to care. Rolling along the floor to avoid another blast, he righted himself against the wall and raised his own alien weapon. The guardian and he fired simultaneously.

  A searing pain struck Mikhail. It hit harder than the shot to his shoulder—burned more than the time he’d broken his leg jumping from the roof of his house as a teenager. The robot’s weapon had struck him on the left side of his hip; he could feel the middle of his torso burning. Through screams of torment, he fired at the robot again. His first shot had struck the guardian, knocking it backward. The second finished the job. The robot crashed against the floor with a metallic thud. Mikhail dropped his weapon, leaned his head back, and screamed at the top of his lungs.

  Burning. Everything was burning. His thigh, his abdomen. He couldn’t bring himself to look. The smell of melting skin was indicative enough.

  Get to one of the capsules! Eyes blinded by tears, Mikhail fought to pull himself toward the closest capsule. The first time he put any weight on his damaged shoulder, he collapsed with a yell.

  The red lights continued to flash—the pulse was ceaseless. Once again, Mikhail focused on the capsule. Whimpering, he clawed at the floor with his good arm. Slowly, he dragged himself forward for almost a foot. Then pain struck again, and again, his arms gave way.

  He was in the same position as the creature that had invaded his mind—crawling desperately toward his escape pod, trailing blood. This was why it couldn’t set the self-destruct sequence itself. It would have never made it from the bridge to the capsule in time.

  Again, Mikhail pulled himself forward. Again, Mikhail screamed, and again, his body failed him. He wasn’t even a quarter of the way across the room. He may as well have had a kilometer to go. He realized he was going to die.

  You have eight apples. If you divide them equally into two, how many apples does each side have?

  His body offered a final attempt at movement, accompanied by a final shutdown of his muscles. He had nothing left. His fingernails scraped against the floor, resulting in no progress despite the effort. But he exerted the effort.

  Can I go play in my room?

  No. You are supposed to be sick today. An obviously exaggerated claim.

  There were four apples. She was smart enough to know. She just needed to try.

  The floor vibrated. A low rumble emerged through the halls. The core was overloading. Reaching forward, Mikhail strained to move again. But his consciousness was already fading.

  She was so beautiful. The first time he’d held her, he was in love. It grew stronger every day.

  Mikhail’s body went limp. He laid his forehead on the floor. The overload began.

  Papa loves you, Kseniya. He loves you so much. Hand trembling, he reached shakily into his pocket to pull out his wallet. He kept a photo of her there. He wanted to see his daughter one more time. See those brown eyes and that smile one more time.

  But there wasn’t enough time.

  The detonation vaporized the spacecraft and extinguished all life within a five-mile radius. The rocky lowlands offered the troops outside no cover against the blast, and even if it had, there’d have been no time to reach them. The shockwave was simply too fast. In a span of five seconds, thousands of men perished.

  Captain Mikhail Kirov was the first.

  * * *

  NINA’S HEART POUNDED. The curvature of the Earth grew more and more defined with each passing second, the darkness of space looming above the capsule as it rocketed skyward. Despite its breakneck speed of ascent, no effects of g-force or inertia could be felt within.

  Pushing back her hair, Nina looked frantically in every direction. Buttons flickered and flashed, displays with hieroglyphs shifted and scrolled. It was overwhelming.

  Blue gave way to black, and the hue of the planet Earth dimmed beneath the brightness of the Milky Way. Then, as suddenly as the capsule had accelerated, it stopped.

  Weightlessness ensued as Nina lifted off the surface of the chair. Each strand of her hair took on a life of its own, swaying from side to side as if she was floating underwater. Eyes widening and heart calming for the first time since the ascent, Nina stared out of the window.

  Stars. Brighter than she’d ever seen them from her world below. Purple ribbons stretched across the expanse of deep space, the arms of the galaxy vibrant and limitless. Amid the blackness, there was sheer beauty. Sheer beauty.

  Nina was breathless.

  Something jetted out of the console directly beneath her—some type of instrument attached to a metal stalk. Starting back, she shrieked as it hovered in front of her face. There was a whir. The instrument head pivoted up and down her body, a flicker of red light pulsing as if she was being scanned. The instrument stopped. Its head rose back to her. Silence.

  Suddenly, an unearthly thumping noise, even louder than the pulse in the crashed spacecraft, wailed inside the capsule. The instrument retracted—the stalk was sucked back into its housing. With a lurch, the capsule plummeted back toward the atmosphere. Sweat fell from Nina’s brow; hyperventilation hit her. Faster and faster, she zoomed straight down.

  Only when it had fallen all the way back to the crash site did the capsule slam to a dead stop, momentum nonexistent within its spherical housing. The capsule tilted forward until Nina fell out of the chair and tumbled against the glass, staring straight down at the massive crater where the spacecraft had once stood. Once again, its surface opened.

  Nina was released several meters above the ground. Gone was the mire that had existed there earlier, the mud blown away by the explosion of the alien spacecraft. What met Nina was glassed rock and uprooted earth. No amount of knee-bending could break the impact. As she slammed into the surface, her legs snapped at the shins. She wailed in tortuous agony. Above her, the capsule closed, righted itself, and shot into the sky.

  Only the rain provided a sense of motion to the desolate wasteland that had once been the landscape of Kirkjubæjarklaustur. There were no troops moving. There were no vehicles. There was nothing. The crater stretched beyond the original width of the spacecraft, reaching to the very hills that Nina, Mikhail, and the strike team had initially trekked down. It was as if the Apocalypse had rained down upon the tip of southern Iceland.

  Moaning hoarsely, Nina rolled her neck to the side to shield half of her face from the rain. Her legs were twisted across the rocks, the blood from her compound fractures staining the pools of water around her. Jaw trembling, she went numb. The subtle motion of her breathing was the only indication that she was alive. But she was alive.

  In the hours that followed, American and Soviet forces converged on the crater. They found no traces of the spacecraft that had once been there, nor of the reptiles that had so staunchly held off the American offensive. They found no evidence of the alien presence at all. But they did find a woman, exhausted and soaked to the core, sprawled out in the crater. A woman who was never supposed to have been there at all.

  Nina Andrianova was carried away from the scene, placed on a gurney, and taken to a military hospital in the heart of Kirkjubæjarklaustur. Despite the size of the explosion, the hospital was virtually empty.

  There was no one else to treat.

  6

  Friday, April 25rd, 1958

  1800 hours

  Two days later

  “NINA.”

  Slinging her sniper rifle from her shoulder, Nina waited for the now-drenched Kirov to approach her. “Nina Andrianova, captain,” sh
e said. “I apologize for not being at my post.”

  “Nina?”

  Kirov leapt back as soon as he picked up the flashlight. Steadying herself on the mud-slicked floor, Nina followed the captain’s gaze—right to the alien face. Her heart nearly stopped.

  The man clapped his hands loudly. “Nina!”

  Nina’s eyes jolted opened. “Behind you!” she shouted. Then she went still.

  She wasn’t on a ship. There were no aliens around her. Everything was quiet. Her gaze focused on the bald-headed man looking down at her, who glanced briefly behind him to see if anything was there. Nothing was. Laying her head back, Nina’s heart settled.

  The man, middle-aged and wearing a white lab coat, looked back at her. “Everything all right?” He was American.

  Closing her eyes, she nodded her head. She was in a hospital bed, not a spacecraft. No weapons were firing, no aliens attacking. She was safe. “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Can you tell me your name and date of birth, please?”

  It was standard medical questioning. “Nina Yustina Andrianova. Umm.” The man, whom she could only presume was a doctor, patiently raised an eyebrow. “August 14th, 1922.”

  Leaning closer, the man studied her. “And what’s the last thing you remember?”

  Eyes narrowing, she thought back. They’d entered the spaceship through the hole started by the dig team. But the dig team was dead. What happened inside the ship? “I remember…” Extraterrestrials. They were fighting extraterrestrials. Reptiles. But what else? “…we split up, into two teams. The Soviets and Americans.” Forehead wrinkling, she tried to think harder. But nothing else came.

  “When you woke up, you said, ‘Behind you.’ Does that mean something?”

  “Behind you,” she repeated quietly. Why had she shouted that? When she moved her arm to touch her forehead in thought, the man quickly stopped her.