“Jess…I couldn’t stop her…She killed him, Captain….”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Me, Dale, Teresa, and Philip were running down the dark and cramp hallways of the Alpha Ship One. We were racing toward the unknown. Dale was covered in Ursine blood. It dripped down his back as he leads the way in front. I watched as his big, bulbous body rattled as he ran. The man wasn’t known for running, and you could tell that he wasn’t used to it. He had a certain awkward way about the way he did it. Like he was limping, or dragging a dead weight as he ran. But that wasn’t too far from the truth. The guy was a big’un. He weighed at least three hundred pounds. So running was a remarkable feat for a man of his size. Being able to run at all was impressive. But he was managing just fine. And after a few minutes of exertion, the four of us reached the brig. We’d all burst in at around the same time. The sound of us collectively turning up made Jess jump. She turned around, holding a blade. The blade was covered in purple goo. It oozed and dripped onto the floor, joining an already large puddle of the stuff at her feet. Her shoes were drenched. At least an inch of her soles were submerged in the gunk. My heart skipped a beat at the sight that stared back at me.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, my eyes flickering from her to Ern’s body on the floor.
His head had been taken clean off. It was on its side, the circular ring of gory meat that once attached his head to his shoulders glared back at me in a hue of red, black and purple.
“What have you done?” I said, taking a few steps toward her. Suddenly, she raised the blade toward me. The tip of it quivered as it followed my movements. I stopped and raised my hands in the air. Dale had fallen back, along with the two Spaniards. They remained near the door, behind me. It was just me and her. Or at least that’s how it felt.
“Don’t come any closer!” she demanded, waving the blade at me.
“Think Jess, think very carefully about what you are doing!” I said, my hands still firmly in the air. The tips of my fingers had begun to shake. My nerves were tingling. Every inch of me was simultaneously hot and cold. My breathing was shallow and my heart was thumping in my chest. I thought I was going to die. And the look that she was giving me reinforced that idea.
“I don’t need to think. You’ve done enough of that for rest of us!” she sneered.
I scrunched my eyes. Sweat had dribbled into one of them, sending a shooting pain through the back of my head toward the front of my face. I grimaced and steadied myself. I had to be rational. I couldn’t overreact, and risk Jess doing something else she’d regret. As the captain of the ship, it was my responsibility to make sure that none of my crew died. Or suffered any psychotic breakdowns midflight. Unfortunately, I’d failed on both accounts so far.
“You need to calm down Jess. This won’t get you anywhere. We’re your friends. Your family. Your team. Don’t do anything you’ll regret,” I said, taking two steps toward her. She was still brandishing the bladed weapon, but her grip on it was wavering. If I made my move soon enough, I’d be able to disarm her before she did any more damage. But she wasn’t giving up easily.
“To hell with the ship, and to hell with you!” she screamed.
“Come on Jess, we’re here to help you!” I pleaded.
She straightened the blade and pointed it directly at me, keeping me in her sights. Her grip on the blade was taut and unflinching. It didn’t wobble anymore. She was serious. Serious about hurting somebody. What the hell happened in here to push her like this? What made her snap?
“You know something, Flynn? I used to idolize you. I used to think that no ship in the galaxy could have a better captain than you. You were the man. So calm, so collected. You always knew what to do. How to get us out of a bad situation. But things changed. Faster than I could ever have imagined. First, you’re a man of the people. A man of honor. A man that fights for what he believes in. Then all of a sudden you’re a coward. A man of no honor. A man that gives up and lets his crew become prisoners. A man that forgets what he used to believe in.”
I took a few steps back as she started to come toward me. My head jerked back and I caught a quick glimpse of Dale and the two Spaniards behind me. Their faces said it all. They were in shock, just like me. Then I turned my head forward and settled my sights on Jess. Behind her, in the background, I could see the dismembered body of Ern. The mass of his dead carcass created a huge blind spot behind her. And as I watched her approaching me, I realized that she was too far gone. Space had her. Rage had her. And when the two combined, it was impossible to get a person back. They were engulfed in it. Surrounded by it. Rotted to the core with it. And all that rage had boiled over. The aftermath was coming toward me with a knife.
There was nothing I could do.
“No one blames you for Raj,” I found myself saying, trying to come up with some sort of reasonable retort. But it had the opposite effect on Jess. Her anger grew and she took a few more steps toward me, now she was only a few meters away from me. I could feel her hatred permeating from her soul. She broke into a smile and started laughing manically.
“You think I blame myself for killing Raj?” she said, laughing some more. The tip of the blade bobbed up and down as she held it.
“Well, I don’t,” she said, taking another step toward me. I was backing away, but was quickly running out of room.
“Good, you shouldn’t blame yourself,” I said. “No one is to blame.”
She stopped moving and stared deep into my eyes as her hand tightened around the handle.
She waved the knife around as she spoke.
“You’re wrong, Flynn. There’s always somebody to blame! And the person to blame for Raj’s death is you. Not me,” she said. “I saved us from death. You should be grateful for that. Just like I saved you from death with Ern. He’d broken out of the Prism, and was about to create havoc on the ship. I stopped him. Permanently. Yet again, I did what you couldn’t. I protected us. I stopped us from dying. And this is the thanks I get? A confrontation? A pep talk?”
I shook my head.
“This isn’t what this is!” I said, my heart thumping in my ears.
She stepped closer. I tried to move back, but Dale’s thick body stopped me. We were trapped. All of us. And she was gaining ground by the second.
“I know what this is! This is a way that you can absolve yourselves from what happened. That way, none of you have to take any responsibility for Raj, or for the mission. But it’s all a lie. A lie that you all live. Day in, day out. A lie you tell yourselves. There was nothing I could do, you say. It was out of my hands, you cry. What more could I have done, you plead. But I know the truth.”
Dale’s arm touched mine. He handed me something. A small knife. My breathing intensified. My chest ached. My legs buckled. Surely it didn’t have to end like this? She took one step forward, by now the pointed end of the blade was a mere foot away from my face.
“You carry on lying to yourself, Flynn. You carry on convincing yourself that there was truly nothing you could have done. That fate just wasn’t on your side. That your luck had ran out. But the truth is, we were banished from Earth because of you. We were treated like this because of your decisions. Earth see you for who you are. A spineless follower. You’re no leader. That’s why you fail to make the right decisions when they matter. But I don’t. And I never will. Look at you, too scared to even do anything now!”
She took another step forward. Half a foot remained between us. Dale’s foot was tapping behind me. His right hand was placed on the small of my back, like he was holding me up, or getting ready to push me into her. I tried to relax, to calm myself down, but everything was becoming a blur. Everything was beginning to crash down on me.
“It doesn’t have to end like this,” I said, my right hand holding onto the small knife that Dale had given me. I held it tightly, most of it concealed in my closed fist. She took one more step toward me, centimeters from my face and grinned. Up close, I could see the extent of her pain. The horror th
at ran through her soul. The rot that had taken over. Space is a dangerous place. The emptiness that surrounds you can consume you. But the reality of death can push you to the edge. And at that moment, that very moment, I knew that it was all over.
For one of us at least.
“Who said anything about it ending?” she said, swinging the blade back, about to strike. I saw it coming. It was plain and obvious. I reacted in time, ducking, unclenching my fist, producing the small bladed weapon, rising up, the blade pointing upward, and driving it into her neck. It hit her carotid artery. A spray of blood hit me in the face. Two violent squirts. Her eyes became engorged. A look of disbelief stared back at me, as the dullness in her iris’s turned into a dim blackness, shortly followed by her collapsing on the floor. Not before the massive knife she’d been waving at me clanged and rattled on the ground.
She was dead. And I’d killed her. Nothing could prepare me for the wave of emotions that crashed through me. I collapsed onto the floor. Hung my body over her and pounded my fists into the metal grates. My knuckles screamed in pain. But I didn’t stop hitting the floor. I yelled. As loud as I could. Continuing to smash my closed fists into the metal, tears escaping my eyes as I came to terms with what I’d just done.
But the horrors of this journey back home were far from over. As they say, it was just the beginning.
***
“What’s done is done,” Teresa said, putting her hand on my shoulder. She squeezed it gently as Dale sidled up to me. He wrapped his arms around me and gave me a hug. We were all standing in the middle of the Prism room, looking at the destruction that surrounded us. Blood, both human and otherwise, painted the floors, walls and ceiling. Ern’s lifeless body sat in the middle of the room, a harsh reminder that the bigger they were, the messier things become.
“She’s gone,” I said, bowing my head in shame. I’d never felt so bad about anything in my life. In the space of three hours, I’d killed an alien from outer space, and one of my own crew members. But I was choosing to ignore that both of them were trying to kill me. Selective memory I guess.
“She was sick. She would have killed you,” Dale said, still embracing me.
“You don’t put a sick person down. You try and heal them. Cure them. Not kill them,” I said, squirming out of Dale’s comforting embrace. He let go of me and sighed.
“Don’t you dare blame yourself for this. She was feeling remorse over her actions back on the Ursines’ planet. She killed Raj. She ignored your orders to not play into their game. Then she had the audacity to call you a coward? She was the coward. Jess took the easy way out. She grabbed a knife, beheaded the only lead we had when it comes to understanding the Ursine threat, and to top it off, she threatened to kill you. What were you supposed to do? Let her stab you?” Dale said, walking toward the lifeless corpse of Ern and bending down. He examined the extent of the wounds she’d inflicted on him.
“She was sick in the head. Put this poor bastard through unimaginable pain,” he said, standing back up and turning toward us. “Plus, she lied about the restraints failing. Look at his wrists,” he said.
We all bent for a closer look. And sure enough, black scorched marks on his wrists revealed the true story here. He’d struggled in the restraints as she severed his head. And after killing him, she’d cut the restraints off with her knife, making it look like he’d tried to escape. But we weren’t buying it then, and we weren’t buying it now.
“Only a sick person would inflict that sort of violence on another living being. And only an even sicker person would do so knowing that the being they were killing held information that could save our planet from total annihilation.”
I nodded my head, agreeing with what Dale was saying. But it didn’t stop me from feeling rotten to the core. I’d killed one of our own. In fact, it was the first human I’d ever killed. She was my first, and I was determined for her to be my last. But with Ern dead and no way of knowing how to stop the fleet behind us from destroying everyone on Earth, I had a feeling that I’d be responsible for a hell of a lot more human deaths soon.
There was just no way I could allow that to happen.
“We can’t stand here doing nothing,” Philip said, interrupting us as he knelt down beside us. He gave the deadly destruction in front of him the attention it deserved, and then stood back up and faced me. He held his hand out for a handshake. I looked at him and shrugged my shoulders.
“What are you doing?” I asked, not too sure what the young man was implying. We’d already introduced ourselves back in the cinema room. We’d shook hands and everything. So there was no point in doing it again, surely?
“I wanted to congratulate you,” he said, still holding his hand out for the shake. I resisted the urge to shake his hand.
“Congratulate me on what exactly? All I’ve managed to do is put ourselves in danger, kill a member of my crew and lose the only tool we have to end this war before it starts. I don’t know how they do things in Spain, Philip, but on board the Alpha Ship One, congratulations are reserved for victories against our enemies, or progress on milestones. Not murdering one of your own, or letting your ship fall into disarray.”
Philip didn’t budge, his hand still held out waiting for me to precipitate.
“You are a good man, Flynn. A good captain. And in my country we greet good men with firm handshakes.”
I reluctantly shook his hand. I didn’t want to leave the guy hanging. But I didn’t agree with what he was saying. In my eyes, I was not a good man. I was a desperate man. And desperate men did things they didn’t want to do. Shaking his hand was one of them.
“Good, now we can get down to business,” Philip said, turning around and walking toward the Prism door. The automatic door swooshed open and he beckoned us over.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“To the engine room,” he said.
I looked at Dale and then at Teresa. Every time I blinked, I saw Jess’s expression on her face as I’d rammed my knife into her neck. No matter how hard I tried not to blink, when I eventually did, she’d be staring back at me. Her mouth gaped open. Her eyes engorged with both fear and astonishment. I figured that the astonishment and surprise in her final moments was because I was the one ending her life. That I’d actually managed to calculate her attack and counter it with one of my own. I guess in her last seconds she’d shown her true feelings towards me. She’d seen me as a weakling. A man with no conviction. A man who did nothing but coast through life. And she’d been surprised that that sort of man was going to end her life. It was sick really, but a smile crept across my face as I walked up to the swooshing door and joined Philip. Dale and Teresa followed.
To this day, I don’t actually know why I smiled when I thought about the look on Jess’s face when her life came to an end. But I surmise that it probably had something to do with the way she looked into my eyes as she died. There was something about proving somebody wrong that made me smile. And I’d proven to her and my remaining crew members that I wasn’t weak. That I wasn’t a coward. That I could get the job done.
But now I knew that those qualities existed in me, it also dawned on me that I’d have to do it all over again. Prove to myself that I could end this. Prove to the others that I had what it took to get us out of this alive.
But that’s when the smile disappeared. This wasn’t a fight anymore. This was a war. What we had to overcome was insurmountable. It was unthinkable. And if Roderick was right, it was going to cost most, if not all of our lives.
“What’s so interesting about the engine room?” I asked.
Philip smiled, turned to me and winked.
“If we’re going to survive the MEGATON nuke going off, we’re going to need a bit more speed,” he said.
“What the hell are you talking about? The nuke going off is the last thing we want to happen,” Dale said.
I stood there in deep thought. Then it came to me. And judging by Philip’s eyes, he recognized that I understood wher
e he was going with this. I turned to Dale and patted him on the shoulder.
“Looks like you’re going to have to buckle up for this one pal, it’s going to get bumpy.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
I’ll admit that at first, I wasn’t exactly thrilled with idea of even messing with the MEGATON nuke on board. But then, after some convincing, I got on the same wavelength as Philip. It turned out that Philip knew a thing or two about bombs. And even better, he knew a lot about this one in particular, seeing that he built the darn thing!
“You’re telling me that you know how to unarm this thing?” I’d asked upon him telling us that he’d built the bomb himself under duress.
“Yeah, I do, but disarming it won’t do anything but warn them that we’ve taken over the ship and that their plan is falling on its ass,” he’d said.
He then went on to tell us that the Ursines had forced him to build the bomb. That they didn’t have the capability to. Unfortunately, our Ursine friends couldn’t pick up a wrench and do things themselves. They relied heavily on human prisoners to build their structures, and technology. Which obviously included the assembly of the MEGATON bomb. But to their credit, they were the ones that designed the thing. They had their own scientist bears on the clock, twenty-four hours a day (or seventy-two on their planet) tinkering with design specifications, trying to get the mix just right…just right to blow Earth to atoms.
So there’s that, I guess. Not as stupid as they looked. But then again, they’d commissioned a human prisoner to build the bomb. Under their supervision that is. So I was hopeful that that’s where their ingenuity ended and their stupidity began. I hoped that they’d let Philip build the bomb without so much as testing the thing, installing fail safes or putting in a kill switch. But unfortunately my wishes were nothing but pipe dreams, and it turned out that they did all three of those things.
Stasis (Alpha Ship One Book 1) Page 18