"But, can I—"
"—Can you shut up and do as I say? Yes, good idea." Tripp swiped the ink on his arm to his wrist, severing the communication. He quickened his walk to a sprint and moved ahead of Wool, Baldron, and Jaycee. "First N-Vigorate, then the cells. We’re not going to have much of a ship left if this continues."
"Tripp?" Jaycee shouted from behind Baldron. "What about those monster things?"
Tripp’s temper neared to a close, "How the hell do I know, Jaycee? I know as much as you do."
"Yeah, but, they could be anywhere."
"They are anywhere. They’re outside. They’re all over the damn place," Tripp rubbed Wool’s shoulder as he faced front and continued walking. "One thing’s for sure, at any rate. We know we’re not in space. This walkway is bound to subside just like every other part of the ship. Keep moving. As long as we’re moving we’re not sitting ducks."
"What are we going to do when we get to control?" Wool asked. "Do you have a plan?"
"Yeah."
"What is it?"
"Survive."
Wool rolled her eyes. Fortunately, Tripp couldn’t see her reaction as he was ahead of her. If he’d have caught her flippant retort it might have proved to be the final straw.
Tripp was as angry as the others were frightened. He was the captain of Space Opera Beta. The human being in him was frightened, too. The captain in him, though, was a whole different person altogether. Nothing stood in his way.
"The plan right now is to survive…"
CHAPTER NINE
A trail of tiny paw prints nestled in the fine, white sand. Two on the left, two on the right, a few inches apart.
They belonged to Jelly.
For such a young cat she sure had a lot of energy. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten or had a sip of water. She felt a rumbling sensation in her stomach, underscored by a similar occurrence in the pink sky.
Jelly paused, shifted her behind in the sand and tilted her head back. A permanent smile struck across her face as the glint of the nearest white blotch of white - a sort of cloud - reflected in her pupil.
A few laps of her tongue across her mouth and she was off to the oceanfront. As she trundled ever nearer to the shore, she stopped occasionally to turn around and see if the Opera Beta was there.
It wasn’t.
She might as well have jumped through a portal for all the good her bearings were to her. Usually, she’d be on point in that respect. Geography had always been her strong point - a sense of belonging and territory.
In the infinite vastness of Pink Symphony she felt naked and alone.
The crystal blue water lapped against the white sand, turning it a strange yellow color as it rolled across, settled down, and clawed thousands of grains of sand with it into the water.
The journey to the ocean took longer than Jelly expected. Storming forwards, exercising every muscle in her body, the faster she sped the slower the ocean arrived.
A perplexing mirage for a cat.
On the way there she passed the odd fish bone. One of them resembled a ribcage with a skull in the shape of a helmet.
A quick sniff around confirmed what she knew all along. Whatever this thing was, it had well and truly expired.
She felt the pink-colored sky watch her every move. If she moved her left paw, the clouds seem to tilt to the left, like an angry lava lamp.
The right claw moved forward taking with it the clouds in the sky. They didn’t move as they had back on Earth. Calling them clouds were as comparable as possible to what they really were. More like explosions of distant galaxies; silky, smooth, as if one had poured full fat cream into a sky full of candy floss.
Jelly might well have had second thoughts about moving in any direction. The water, at least, seemed benevolent enough.
Eventually, she reached the shore. A careful probe with her infinity claws resulted in the wet sand tearing apart as expected.
The metal claws fizzed subtly as the waves crashed around her paws. She stepped forward and lowered her face, exploring the liquid with her tongue.
Two successive gulps - and success. A fully lubricated mouth. A wave of relief ran through her entire body. She felt better, energized, and ready for more.
Lap, lap, lap… the refreshing water soaked into her coarse tongue and swirled around her mouth. Above her in the sky, the white ink-like clouds bled out, creating a harmonious voice for the duration of its travel.
Jelly’s ears pricked up as she continued to drink the water.
The thought occurred to her that she should get back to the ship and alert her crew of the seemingly plentiful supply of H2O. Said thought evaporated when the oncoming ripples of water grew higher, quickly turning into medium-sized waves.
"Meow," she squealed and hopped back, fearing the wave would entrench her entirely. She loved the water, but the concept of swimming was way beyond her grasp.
In fact, she didn’t even know if she could swim.
Stepping back wasn’t enough. She had to run around and run across the sand just in time for the end of the wave to envelope her hind legs.
"Meow!" she yelped in defiance, determined to return and satisfy her thirst.
As the wave rolled back into the ocean, her eyes followed it back to the tree dead in the middle of the ocean.
It was a tree, yet it wasn’t a tree. It merely resembled one.
Jelly knew what a tree was. Fat at the bottom, thinning out in the middle, with hundreds of blossoming branches fanning out from the top. Usually brown, or dark brown, and made of wood and covered in bark. She’d got stuck in many of them during her young life.
She loved to climb the one in Jamie’s garden area. Occasionally, in her good old kitty days, she’d need rescuing.
This tree wasn’t made of wood. If it was then the wood was made of a spongy, black mucous shooting out from the water and blossoming one hundred feet in the air.
Its towering effect antagonized her.
Where there might have been branches were, instead, darkened shafts of coal about twenty feet in length. It was as if an aircraft’s wings had melted in intense heat. They curved around the midpoint, arrowing back toward the water.
The stem bulged in and out as if it was breathing. Jelly saw the bulge shoot up from the root, causing the water to rupture away. It traveled up the stem and dispersed among the twenty or so branches and died out toward their ends.
Jelly sat perfectly still and took in the sheer size of the tree. She blinked hard, expecting it to move. Of course, it had no such intention. Being an inanimate object, it didn’t care much for the strange being sitting before of it.
Being curious in nature, Jelly wanted to know more. But she’d be damned if she went into the water to quench her thirst for knowledge.
At least the place was quiet, though. The sky acted strangely. The tree added a perversely morbid air to an otherwise wistful utopia. Jelly rolled around in the wet sand and cooled herself down.
"Jelly!"
She jumped to her feet and turned around. A recognizable shape in the shifting sand seat warbled into focus. The contours of a woman named Bonnie steadily approached her.
"Hey, girl," she finished, confidently striding closer, "There you are."
Jelly hopped to her feet and meowed back.
"I know," Bonnie yelled as softly as she could. "It’s nice here, isn’t it?"
"Meow."
Bonnie let out a hearty laugh and flung her long, brown hair across her left shoulder. "Aww." She squatted to the sand and held her arms forward. "Come on, pet. Come here and give your auntie Bonnie a cuddle."
Jelly found the human’s behavior a little strange. Stuck in a strange place and with little-to-no recourse for rescue, Bonnie seemed uniquely at home.
Her demeanor was enough reassurance for Jelly. She hopped along the sand, digging her infinity claws in with each step for good measure, and raced into Bonnie’s opened hands.
She arched her back and held J
elly out at arm’s length against the sky.
"Hey, sweetie."
"Meow," Jelly licked her lips and flipped her tail around, wondering when the cuddle would commence. She lifted her right leg for balance.
"God, you’re such a gorgeous creature," Bonnie said with a deft admiration, her eyes fixated on Jelly’s. "Look at you."
Then, the cuddle came. Bonnie’s left cheek nestling safely on Jelly’s forehead.
She took a look at the blackened tree to find a waterfall of dark pink liquid gushing from a slit that tore near the top of the stem.
"Oh, look. It’s crying pink."
Jelly took a look and immediately grew concerned. She dug her titanium claws into Bonnie’s inner-suit sleeve, wanting to be set free.
"Okay, okay," Bonnie huffed. "Jeez, you’re cranky—"
The middle of the tree’s stem heaved out, as if taking in a lungful of air. A pregnant pause befell Jelly and Bonnie as they waited for it to exhale.
Where would the exhalation come from, anyway? Apart from the slit, there was no sign of a mouth anywhere on it.
The branches slumped down, appearing to weaken as the tree bent back.
"What is that?" Bonnie squinted at the alien object as it gently lilted around.
Then, a deafening blast of sound rippled in every direction from the root of the tree.
Da-da-da-dummm…
"Huh?" she said.
Dah, dah, dah…. dum.
Bonnie clamped her hands over her ears and let out a cry of pain. "Agh!"
SPLASH!
A wave crashed out across the sand. A large fish plopped to the shore and shuffled around in pain, trying to breath. Its rounded lips gaped in and out.
"Meow," Jelly kicked up some sand as she entered the prone position. Her tail bushed out, ready to attack.
"Jelly, honey, what—"
"Shhh," Jelly fixated her eyes on the fat, circular fish as it flapped across the sand and gasped for air, "Shhh."
"Sweetie? How are you saying that—"
"Mweh," Jelly coughed up a lump of pink phlegm and spat to the sand. She darted over to the fish intending to tear it to shreds.
"No, Jelly. Don’t touch it—"
The fish bounced over the damp sand in an attempt to escape its impending doom. The back end of the blue creature lifted up and shed its skin.
A bony tail shot out and slapped to the ground.
Jelly screeched to a halt, kicking sand into the air with her paws. She didn’t like what had happened and would soon be terrified of what happened next, “Muuuh."
The creature whipped its tail in retaliation. The end thwacked against the sand sending a shock wave through its bone, shattering its blue, oily skin across its body. The fish’s lips stretched back over its face. A row of sharp teeth jutted out from its skull, as the blue skin flaked away.
It had turned into a bizarre armadillo-type creature. Four small limbs, bent at the middle, with claws.
Jelly widened her eyes in terror as the creature turned to her and growled. A swish from the creature’s tail made sure Jelly took a few steps back, hoping not to get murdered.
The beast crept forward with its chunky feet and slammed its razor sharp jaws together.
Da-da-da… dum… the tree appeared to sing.
Bonnie found the whole spectacle puzzling but wasn’t afraid of the abnormality creeping towards her. She gripped her metal leg and made sure it was armed in case it tried its luck.
"What the hell is going on, here?" she turned to Jelly and raised her voice, "Come here, girl."
Jelly didn’t hear the command. She froze on the spot, scared that the creature might lunge at her.
The tree heaved and lilted to the left side as if quietly dancing to its own rendition of a classical tune. The mimicry of organs and trumpets came out like a confused amalgam of croaking wood and belches.
Bonnie recognized the attempt, finding the entire scenario eerily reminiscent of Opera Alpha.
"Is that… Beethoven’s Fifth?" she gasped, piecing the tree’s segments of harmonious rumbles together. "It is, it is…" She turned over her shoulder and saw a transparent spacecraft wreckage in the horizon. The ghost of the deserted Space Opera Alpha.
“Huh?”
Jelly, meanwhile, found herself crawling backwards on her hind legs as the recently-evolved beast threw its spindly arms forward.
"Maaw," she kept her fattened tail up and swinging around. A failed attempted to allay the creature’s desire for feline blood.
The beast growled at her, forcing the air molecules to ripple together and throw her fur on end.
"Meow," Jelly screamed back and swiped her right claw in retaliation.
So hard was the creature’s roar that the reptilian skin on its face broke apart and slapped against the sand. A gray-colored skull broke forward and shrieked, shedding the rest of its skin. Its skeletal structure fizzed and sparked, cracking onto itself.
The spine curved in the middle and sprung stems either side, meeting around its exposed organs.
A liver.
A stomach.
A pancreas.
The ribbed bones crept around its lungs and heart, forming a protective cage around them.
The pinkish under skin blistered in the intense heat from the pink sky. A sun, previously unseen, introduced itself from behind one of several milky clouds.
All the while, the tree continued its interpretation of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony across the air. Croaky and strangely harmonic, given the absence of a coherent orchestra.
Bonnie unhooked her Rez-9 firearm from her belt and pointed it at the creature. She’d seen - and had - enough, "Don’t move."
Jelly turned around and meowed at Bonnie. The look in both her eyeballs screamed don’t shoot.
"Don’t look at me in that tone of voice, young madam," Bonnie said. "Look at it. It’s in pain. I’m doing it a favor."
Jelly turned back to the creature.
It resembled more an ape than a scaly reptile. The sunburn blackened most of its skin. Tufts of hair had formed on it as it squealed in immense turmoil.
"Meow," Jelly chanced her luck and crawled nearer to the pained monstrosity writhing around in front of her.
"Enough," Bonnie cocked her Rez-9 and loomed over the crying beast. She held the gun to its head and took mercy, “Peace."
BLAM!
She shot the ape creature in the head and jumped back when the unexpected made itself known.
"What the—?
Instead of busting the primate’s head apart and disintegrating the rest of its body, it only exacerbated the transformation.
The impact of the bullet sent a bolt of electricity through its body, cracking its shoulders out a few inches. In retaliation, the ape climbed to its feet and stomped its considerably large feet to the ground.
Bonnie kept her gun pointed at the beast. "Wh-what… are you?"
The ape slammed its furry chest with both fists and roared, frightening Jelly enough for her to run behind Bonnie’s feet for protection.
"Girl, we better get out of here. Let’s go."
Bonnie walked backwards across the sand, keeping an eye on the ape-like creature as it screamed for vengeance. Pink tears shot down its face.
"That’s one ugly beast," Bonnie turned around and expected to find Opera Beta sitting in the distance.
It wasn’t there. The distant apparition of Opera Alpha in the horizon had vanished, too.
"God, I must be seeing things," she stopped in her tracks and looked down to Jelly. "Girl, where’s our ship?"
"Muuuh," Jelly lifted her shoulders up and down, indicating that she had no clue.
ROOOOAAARRRR!
The ape’s insane exclamation forced Bonnie and Jelly to pay attention to it. They turned around, slowly, in tandem, expecting to be set-upon and mauled to death.
Instead of attacking, the ape slammed its fists against the sand. A loud grunt followed before it snorted through its widened nostrils.
> Huffing around the grains of sand, it laid eyes on Jelly and grunted again. It held out its left paw, wanting Jelly to make contact.
The cat was much too afraid to oblige.
"Jelly, stay right where you are," Bonnie tuned her ears to the tree’s attempt to reproduce Beethoven’s classic symphony, "And would you stop that damn singing!"
The tree, relentless in its insistence to continue singing, upped its volume. In turn, its rendition grew more strained and perverse.
The ape appeared not to hear it.
"Meow," Jelly tried in a bid to win favor - or at the very least, time - with the hirsute freak standing before them.
"We have nowhere to go," Bonnie faced the sky for some semblance of geography, "If we run, we could end up running forever."
The light from the intense sun blanketed her face. For just a moment, she felt like she was home. Closing her eyes shut and enjoying the warmth meant the world to her, "It’s fantastic, isn’t it?"
Bonnie opened her eyes and saw the sun had split into three, larger balls of magnificence. To call it the sun was a massive anomaly. It wasn’t the sun Bonnie had enjoyed on Earth. The ball of fire she saw in the sky enlarged a few millimeters per second.
A deafening thud came from her left. "Oh, my God."
The ape had dropped onto its side, crying and moaning to itself. Much of its hair had shed and entwined amongst the grains of sands.
The grunting turned to sobbing as the ape balled up in the fetal position. As the hair shed away to reveal a pink-white skin - like that of a human being.
"Stay there, girl," Bonnie’s curiosity outshone the cat’s, which was a first in all the time they’d known each other. Jelly followed behind her careful not to draw attention to herself.
"Hey," Bonnie said at the five-foot lump of skin burying its head against its stomach, "Are you okay?"
The creature moved its arms forward and covered its face. As it groaned and kicked across the dusty ground with its feet, its ape-like voice normalized into that of a human being’s.
"Sch… sch… gwup.”
The sand sticking to its sweaty skin as it rolled around.
"Whoa," Bonnie held out her hands and tried to calm the thing down. "Hey, can you hear me?"
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