by J. N. Chaney
“We must be too far underground,” suggested Abigail.
I lowered my hand and sighed. “This is going to be tough if I can’t get Siggy on the line. We might have to bring a repeater system with us to amplify the signal.”
She smirked. “Careful, Jace. You almost sound like you know what you’re doing.”
There was a sudden bang, like metal hitting metal, coming from the cave we had just arrived from.
Abigail and I reached for our guns, instinctively, aiming at the large opening across the room from our position.
We waited, breathing quick, sharp breaths, a sudden burst of adrenaline coursing through our veins. The silence in the room was suddenly so thick and claustrophobic.
And the pounding in the cave was growing louder.
I squeezed the grip of my rifle, letting out a slow breath that filled the freezing cold air in front of me like steam.
That was when we saw it.
A hulking, monstrous thing, hunching forward and dragging its hands, but still nearly as tall as the cave itself. Its body was covered in a thick coat of white fur, so much that you couldn’t see its eyes.
The animal reached up, gripping the edge of the doorway. When it did, I finally noticed the shape of its hands, each consisting of three large claws. I imagined one of those would easily be enough to impale me, should I be so unlucky.
The creature paused, taking a moment to look into the room. It tilted its head, but didn’t seem to notice us. I wondered if it saw the light from my pad and the console.
But the creature didn’t seem to care. Instead, it stared out into the room, at nothing in particular, strangely still and quiet.
The light of the pad shined on its face, but I still couldn’t see its eyes. Where was it looking? What did it see?
The animal took another whiff of air, then stepped forward and into the room.
Abigail swallowed, and in the silence of this place, it echoed louder than it should have.
Fuck, I thought.
The beast’s head perked up, pausing as its ears reached their peak.
I turned, looking over my shoulder at the hall behind us. If we moved quickly, we could get there and bottleneck this animal inside. That would make for an easy target, so long as we kept our distance. Better than a room as large as this one.
Abigail noticed me. I flicked my eyes back and forth to the door, letting her know the plan. She seemed to grasp it, giving me a slight nod. Good, we were in agreement.
The creature took another step towards us, still keeping its ears up. By this point, I was beginning to understand how it worked. We were only a few meters away, so I wagered it couldn’t see us. Not the same way we could see it.
But I wasn’t a zoologist, and I didn’t have time to sit here and analyze whatever the hell this thing was. All I knew was that I had to move, shoot, and kill this bastard dead.
Abigail stared at me, holding her breath, and waited.
I moved my eyes back to the monster, letting them linger on him for a few seconds, making sure he wasn’t moving, and then finally returned to Abigail. With a quick nod, I gave her the signal to move, and suddenly she did.
I grabbed the pad on the counter and we bolted for the hall behind us.
The moment we moved, I heard the monster grunt, letting out a wheeze that resembled a clogged engine, followed by a snarling yelp. It slammed its two arms against the ground, pounding them in rage, and took off in our direction, sending echoing booms throughout the facility with every terrible step.
We filed through the corridor entrance and into the rear. I turned my whole body back around, swinging my barrel and taking aim at the opening. Abigail did the same, and the second the white-furred creature came into view, we unloaded on it.
The hall was narrow, and the animal had a hard time fitting in. It tried to squeeze through, swiping its claws at us, but remained out of range. The doorway cracked, breaking as the pressure built. It wouldn’t hold for long.
I kept firing. The creature seemed to absorb the bullets, so full of rage and fury, barely moved. I stepped back, one foot at a time, keeping my distance.
The animal roared, slamming its shoulders into the doorway.
“Enough of this!” barked Abigail. She ran up closer to it, just out of range from its claws.
In one fluid motion, Abby brought her weapon up to the animal’s mouth. The creature snapped at her, but not before she fired one last shot into its mouth.
Brains splattered out the back of its skull, spraying its white coat with green blood as its face dropped lifelessly to the floor.
The floor rumbled as the animal collapsed before us.
We watched it for a moment, neither of us saying a word. Maybe we were being cautious, considering this animal had just taken a magazine’s worth of bullets and still managed to get itself halfway through the hall. “I think you got it,” Abigail finally muttered.
I edged my way closer to the monster, keeping my rifle aimed on him, ready to shoot if, somehow, he’d survived a direct shot to the face. It wouldn’t be the first time an animal’s brain was in a place other than its head, rare as it might be.
With my barrel, I nudged its head, lifting its chin to see its lifeless face. For the first time, I managed to get a decent view of its eyes…or the lack thereof, since it didn’t seem to have any. Instead, there were only black spots where the eyes should be, nestled between white fur.
I let the head fall and hit the floor again. “I think we’re good,” I said.
“Do you think these things killed the colonists?” asked Abigail.
“Maybe,” I said, looking up at the collapsed wall where the door had been. How were we going to get out of here?
I stepped over the creature’s leg and felt the debris beneath my foot, but didn’t put much pressure on it. Moving it might pull down the rest of the ceiling, and I couldn’t have that.
I glanced at Abigail’s wrist-pad, which was still shining bright enough to fill the corridor. “Can you take pictures with that thing?” I asked.
“Huh? What for?” she asked.
“The signal down here is shit, but if we can work our way a few levels higher, we might be able to get a message to Siggy,” I said, walking back over to her. “Probably not a direct call, but images might send easier.”
“Okay,” she said. “But what do you want pictures of?”
I looked at the dead monster at my feet. “What do you think?”
She scoffed. “Right. Let me just pull up the camera app.”
I got out of the way, taking a step behind her, and tried to make out the next room. It looked similar to the last, filled with consoles and machines, many of them blinking a variety of colored lights. I still couldn’t believe this place had power.
Abigail walked closer to the animal and began snapping pictures.
“Make sure you get the face,” I said.
She did, snapping multiple angles. We’d have to attach a written message to the images. Something like, Dear idiots, we found some deadly animals. Don’t leave the ship. That would probably do the trick.
Abigail wiped some sweat from her forehead, backing up toward me. “I think that’s enough,” she said, lowering her arm. She swallowed, then took out a small container of water and sipped it, gasping as she put it away. “What now? Where are we going?”
I stared into the darkness before us. “Deeper,” I muttered, finally stepping out of the hall and into the next room. “We just keep going deeper.”
Five
I hadn’t realized it at first, but we were still following the path to the source of the transmission. Despite the tunnel we took and the fight in that last room, our overall course never changed. Unless we discovered a way out of here soon, we were still going to accomplish our mission, simply by following the path ahead of us.
That was fine with me. We didn’t come all the way down here just to wind up with nothing. Of course, at this point, I was more concerned with escaping thes
e godsforsaken catacombs than finding whatever black box was sending out that signal.
Best case scenario had me running across a staircase to the surface, going up to catch my breath, and finally coming back with some bigger and badder guns at my side.
But I knew the odds of that happening were slim. Whatever was ahead, we’d have to deal with what we had, and hope for the best.
Strangely, Abigail spotted a staircase soon, although it only went down. I nearly laughed when I saw it. Keep it up, I thought, pretending that this place could hear me. I’m loving the irony.
A minute later, we passed from one hall to the next, only to discover a side room with multiple devices. Pods, actually, if I remembered right.
Several of them appeared to be active, if the lights were to be believed. As I neared them, I became even more certain, since the bed inside matched the ones from Titan almost exactly. “Do you recognize these?” asked Abigail, who must have noticed my slack jawed expression.
“Yeah,” I said, peering inside before touching one of the pods’ cases. “I’ve seen them before…back on the Moon.”
“Titan?” she asked. “They don’t look like the ones from the medical bay. Are you certain?”
I nodded. “There were more on another deck. Not medical pods.”
“What were they for?” she asked.
“Long term stasis, best that I could tell,” I said. “Athena told me that was where Lex was born.”
Abigail stopped. “What?”
I turned around and looked at her. “I’ve been meaning to tell you, but it turns out Lex was born on Titan about two thousand years ago. Her parents were killed in some sort of terrorist attack, and then the scientists stuck her in a cryo-pod, just like these. When everyone left the ship and took off, no one bothered to wake her up.”
Athena’s mouth dropped. “And you kept this all to yourself?!”
“I’ve been a little busy,” I said.
She scoffed. “When did you even learn about this in the first place? Was it before the last battle with Brigham?”
I said nothing.
“It was, wasn’t it!” she snapped.
I shrugged. “Hard to remember.”
She let out a groan of frustration. “I swear to gods. Was there anything else? Any other revelations you forgot to share?”
I thought for a moment while we continued walking. “Now that you mention it, Athena also told me the folks who left Earth were just a bunch of laborers that rebelled against some rich immortals.”
She stopped again. “Wait…what?”
* * *
After relaying everything I could remember, Abigail was uncharacteristically quiet for some time. I figured she just needed to process everything I’d just told her. After all, it’s not every day you learn the true history of your ancestors. I tossed in the words Transient and Eternal, taking a second to explain them as best I could, and while I couldn’t give her the same level of detail Athena had, I liked to think I did a decent job of it.
“Thank you for telling me, Jace,” Abigail said, after a while. The tone in her voice had turned gentle, like all the frustration had drained, replaced by contemplation. “I’ll have to speak with Dr. Hitchens about all this.”
“I meant to do that at some point,” I said.
She only nodded, staring at the floor in front of her as we walked.
I realized all of this must be a lot for her to take in. It certainly had been for me. If she needed time to think, I’d give it to her.
We walked through the abandoned building for gods-knew-how-long. Our path kept us moving forward, on towards the beacon. It was just ahead now, not much further. Twenty meters, maybe, according to my pad.
Abigail was still quiet, her eyes lost in thought.
I decided she’d had long enough to wallow. I needed my partner ready for whatever lay ahead of us. “Abigail,” I whispered, pausing to check the chamber of my rifle, ensuring I was set. I gripped the gun, aiming straight ahead of us at the open door, not far from the beacon. “Are you ready?”
She paused and looked at me. I stared back at her, waiting for her to realize what I was saying.
A second later, she blinked, finally understanding. She took the pistol and cocked it, giving me a short nod. Good. She was back. No more thinking. No more internal debating. That was the sort of thing that got you killed.
“Watch my back,” I said as we stepped forward.
The light on my gun shined through the opening. As I entered it, I found a room covered in ice and stalagmites, wrought with age and decay, frozen over. Computer systems lined the walls, some of them still powered on. One of them stood out, its wide, fat body standing taller and larger than any other, with a cracked screen on the front of it.
I eased closer to it, trying to get a better look.
I retrieved my pad to verify that this was the right spot.
“Is this it?” asked Abigail.
“Looks like it,” I muttered, putting the pad away and wiping some frost from the nearby machine. The screen was nearly frozen over, its contents difficult to read.
Make that impossible, I thought, realizing that whatever I found would almost certainly be in a foreign language.
Abigail eased herself closer. “Let me see,” she said, nudging into me. She tapped the screen, causing it to change. “Hey, look at that.”
“Be careful,” I said. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
Several lines of text appeared, each in a different color. It had to be a menu, an interface to guide users, not unlike the one on my ship.
Abigail tapped what seemed like a random menu item, bringing up another screen. It flickered rapidly for a moment before reverting to the previous menu. “Must be buggy,” I said.
“After sitting here for so long in—” She glanced around the cavern. “—these conditions, I’m surprised it still works at all.” She tapped the screen, trying another menu option.
Like the previous one, when Abigail clicked the new option, the screen bugged out and returned to the first interface.
She cursed under breath. “Hold on. I’ll try again.”
I watched her select multiple options, each without success. It might take her days to figure this out, but even then, we still wouldn’t be able to read the text.
“Relax,” I told her, placing a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s head topside and see if we can get those repeaters set up. Might be better to have Dressler and Siggy doing this. This isn’t our area of expertise. What do you—”
A sudden thud shook the floor under my feet. I felt the vibration rattle up my legs. I turned around, gun pointed and ready.
Abigail raised her weapon, covering one of the other doorways. There were three connections to this room, one on every wall, except the side with the terminal. If we were attacked, it could come from any direction.
I waited, listening intently. I could almost feel my heart pounding inside my chest, and every breath I took echoed in this place, louder than I could have expected.
That was when I heard the second thud, so much louder than the first.
I got a sense of the direction. Straight ahead of me—to the right of the computer. Abby swung around to face it, too, each of us backing up so we had plenty of time to shoot.
THOM.
THOM.
The pounding had grown faster, louder than before. Those were footsteps, but slow and heavy. Another one of those monsters.
THOM.
THOM.
THOM.
My gun’s light shined against the ice, far ahead and beyond the doorway, until it faded into darkness. There, in the shadow of the frozen hall, I spotted a reflection, glistening as it moved like waving grass.
The monster stepped forward, revealing its long, white hair, thick and full with the light of my pad. The dark spots where its eyes should be stared blankly in my direction, and its ears perked up, the same as the last.
I noticed this one was smaller, thinner.
I guessed it was still young. Maybe we’d killed its parent, or perhaps it was only the runt of a larger group.
Either way, things were about to get messy.
THOM.
My eyes widened. The animal had been standing totally motionless. Where had that sound come from?
THOM.
THOM.
I slowly turned to my right, following the new noise. It was another hallway, different from where the first creature stood.
THOM.
THOM.
THOM.
A shadow crept against the wall on the other side of the doorway, the monstrous beast dragging both its massive arms.
With my left hand, I slowly nudged Abigail, tipping my head toward the only remaining path, the opening behind us.
She resisted for only a split-second, dropping her natural defenses when she understood what I was telling her, and reached down and took my hand, giving it a gentle squeeze.
Good, I thought. She understands. Okay.
THOM.
Another footstep and I finally saw the claws, slowly coming around the tunnel.
THOM.
The rest of the beast came into view, pausing when it reached the threshold of the room.
The first animal bent its head towards the second, then let out a loud bark.
The second tilted his head, flicking his ears, and then returned the noise with something similar. A deeper grunt.
The first stood tall, raising up its hands and pounding its chest, barking once more.
This was it. We had to go. Fight or flight. Run or die. “Move!” I snapped, leaping back and firing.
Bullets shot across the room as the two monsters yelped. The combined noise of gunfire and screaming hit my ears with so much intensity that I thought I might go deaf.
I ran backwards, nearly tripping on the ice. The two beasts lunged at me, their long arms coming so close they nearly took my stomach from me.
I fled into the rear hall, firing blindly behind me, no concern for what I hit. Abigail was already at the back of the corridor, turned toward me with her gun extended. “Get down!” she shouted.
I slid beneath her, pivoting on the ice to face the animals. Abigail fired her pistol, shots hitting each of the creatures.