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The Drellic Saga: Books One, Two and Three

Page 13

by Mike Marlinski

Chapter Eleven

  May 1st, 2028

  During the five months that Drellic was in complete control of Hades, the crew had become accustomed to many unpleasant things that summed up a rather discouraging daily routine. The most unpleasant of these rituals was sleeping in close proximity with him. Since Drellic’s body required no sleep or nourishment, he would watch over the crew as they slept every single night, for around one hundred and fifty nights.

  Drellic frowned upon the humans’ need for sleep, as he felt it was counterproductive. But he was also sympathetic to it because of his own need for sleep before the Architects had come into his life.

  The five crew members would be forced into the rear storage compartment and tied together with safety harnesses. Drellic would then wait outside the hatchway, until he was satisfied that everyone was asleep. He would then reenter the room and float above them, throughout the remainder of the night. They were of course aware of this, but didn’t dare to speak or act against it.

  Since proclaiming his command, Drellic had taken a particular interest in Simone. It began with his enjoyment of controlling Callum’s actions by controlling hers’, but it later developed into a strange attraction that he could not explain. He consistently mocked the newer generations of humanity without mercy, but still felt drawn to Simone for some unfathomable reason. It was just as disturbing to him as it was to her.

  The crew received one meal a day. Drellic didn’t approve of any of the food that he’d discovered aboard the ship, but made a daily selection of food items that he would deem to be the healthiest. A meal with Drellic would typically consist of very small portions of nuts, fruits and vegetables. It would last for five minutes to the second, before the crew was ordered back to resume their duties.

  Richard and Sophia had developed a very strong bond, despite their restricted living situation. Even a kind word or a smile from one another, would be enough to get them through the hardest of days.

  The ship was a mere day away from Earth, and food, fuel and oxygen supplies were running dangerously low. Morale was practically non-existent.

  The only thing keeping everyone’s spirits up, was knowing that May 1st 2028, was the day they were going to attempt the impossible. With less than 24 hours, until they were scheduled to reenter the earth’s atmosphere, Callum and his shipmates were about to attempt flushing Drellic out into the vacuum of space.

  Over the past eight weeks, Sophia, Richard and Jack had been secretly rigging two makeshift explosives and had secured a safe passage way from the rear storage compartment, to the airlock, via the ship’s air vents. On the previous night, while Drellic was preoccupied in the cockpit, Jack, who was the only one small enough to make it through the vents, managed to secure one explosive to the inner door and one to the outer door. Callum and Richard were able to salvage parts of the ship’s com system, to rig a remote device to trigger the explosives.

  Everything was in place. All the crew had to do, was lay down to rest for one more night with Drellic. As long as he followed his normal routine of sealing the hatch first, then reentering while everyone was pretending to sleep, they could blow the airlock while he was still standing outside the hatchway.

  The area of the ship leading from the rear storage compartment, to the lifeboat compartment, would be airtight for several minutes, before the effects of exposure to the outside, could tear through the sealed hatchways. The lifeboats themselves would burn up inside the earth’s atmosphere within seconds, but the lifeboat compartment was also home to a single escape pod, which all five crew members could fit inside.

  From the windows in the cockpit, Drellic could clearly see the earth and moon in the distance.

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” he asked. “I can feel it.”

  Callum and Simone were once again alone in the cockpit with him. During the previous five months, Simone had been taught to become the ship’s acting co-pilot and had become rather proficient at it. She and Callum were sitting side by side, staring off into space at their home.

  “That’s it,” Callum said.

  “So close, yet so far away,” Simone added with a somber whisper. Simone then looked over at Callum with sad eyes and slowly reached for his hand. Drellic noticed her doing so and quickly ripped off her safety harness and pulled her from her seat, by her hair.

  Callum looked on in fear, as Drellic forced her to the other side of the cockpit.

  “I’ve told you how I feel about you doing that, Simone,” Drellic scolded.

  “Yes, I know,” Simone gasped. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It’ll never happen again. But look!” she yelled, while pointing out the window. “You’re almost home. You can help your people rebuild their society.”

  “Where are they?!” Drellic screamed, at both her and Callum.

  “Who?” Callum asked, as Drellic had still not released Simone from his grasp.

  “My enemies! The oppressors! They must be out here somewhere,” Drellic insisted.

  “They’re not!” Callum assured him. “They’re gone. I promise you that they’re gone!”

  “If this is a trick…” Drellic began, as he started to calm himself.

  “No, this is not a trick!” Callum shouted. “Please let her go! We’ll be there soon. Just like we promised you.”

  Drellic then gazed into Simone’s fearful eyes and calmly released her. He could feel that his emotions were getting the best of him. He could feel himself falling in love with her, but could also feel his growing jealousy of Callum. He then softly ordered Simone to return to her station.

  Drellic knew that this wasn’t the time for petty feelings. To him, this was a time for celebration. In fact, he was so happy to be so close to home that he left Callum and Simone alone in the cockpit, for the first time since he assumed command of the ship.

  “It’s finally happening tonight,” Callum said to Simone, as he held on tightly to her hand.

  “I want to see his fucking insides get torn out,” she said with a sinister smile.

  After another hour of routine navigation updates and engine burns, the crew was ordered by Drellic to bed down for the night. It was finally time to put the plan into action. He forced the crew into the rear storage compartment and tied them down with harnesses, just as he had done every night for the last five months. He then turned off the lights and said, “Tomorrow we make history and you should all be honored to be a part of it.”

  No one said a word. Drellic just chuckled quietly to himself, as he left the room. And once he sealed and locked the hatch behind him, Jack reached into a cubby hole, behind him and pulled out the detonator for the explosives. The others anxiously looked on.

  “It’s now or never,” Callum whispered. “Take us home, Mr. Sanders.”

  Jack’s hands began to shake, as he nervously pressed down on the trigger. A few seconds passed and nothing happened.

  “Are you kidding me right now?” he asked, as he violently shook the detonator and mashed down on the trigger.

  “You told us the connection was solid,” Simone angrily whispered.

  “It is!” Jack insisted.

  “Please tell me he didn’t find it,” said Richard.

  Sophia was now whimpering with fear, while rocking back and forth. “Oh god. Oh god,” she cried to herself.

  Finally after a few more tries, the bombs exploded in the airlock. A violent rush of air sent Drellic hurling towards the recently ruptured hull, and the ship was literally being pulled apart piece by piece, as debris was being violently sucked out into space.

  Drellic flew towards the huge gap in the ship’s hull at an incredible velocity, but was able to get a hold of a storage bin that had been secured to the floor.

  Meanwhile, the crew was making their way down through the ventilation system to the lifeboat compartment. They could hear the integrity of the walls around them being compromised. It would only be another minute or so before their area of the ship was breached.

 
; In a rushed, uncoordinated effort, the crew violently smashed into one another, as they continued to descend the ventilation shaft. Finally, they reached the lifeboat compartment and activated the escape pod. The sound of everything around them being sucked out into space was getting louder and louder.

  Then without warning, there was complete silence. The crew stopped what they were doing and looked around with confusion. A moment later, Drellic entered the room as a blur, then appeared before them.

  “A valiant effort,” he said, as he struggled to catch his breath. “But you have all seriously underestimated me, if you thought it was going to be that easy.”

  A few minutes later, Drellic forced the crew into the main corridor, which led to where the airlock used to be. They looked on in shock, upon discovering that Drellic had somehow patched the hull himself, using debris from the ship. Hades had lost a considerable amount of oxygen, but was once again fully pressurized.

  “It seems to me that you’ve all just lost your sleep privileges,” Drellic boasted. “Also, you should be aware that there is no way this ship will be able to reenter the atmosphere intact, in its current condition.” He then turned to Callum, smiled and said, “While I shall remain unharmed, you and your crew are doomed to burn alive with your ship.”

  The crew were struggling to breath and becoming very weak due to oxygen deprivation. Drellic grabbed the five of them with ease and placed them under his arms. He then carried them to the cockpit and placed them in their seats.

  “I wouldn’t want you to miss your own demise!” he shouted.

  Callum could see the earth and moon getting much larger in the window. He could also see on his control console that Drellic had figured out how to place a failsafe on the ship’s autopilot. Due to the failsafe, Hades was irreversibly bound for Earth and would burn up in the atmosphere within seconds, leaving the omnipotent Drellic unscathed, as usual.

  Drellic had no problem leaving the crew behind in the cockpit, knowing they were slowly dying. But before exiting, he had a sudden change of heart. He decided that he would save Simone.

  “You’re coming with me,” he said, as he carried her with him back to the aft portion of the ship.

  Callum was devastated, as he watched her disappear into the bowels of the doomed vessel. He then felt Jack, who was seated next him at his usual station, tapping his arm.

  “We can blow the whole thing,” he said to Callum, while gasping for air. “We can use the self-destruct. Drellic doesn’t know about it. We can still stop him.”

  Callum, Jack, Sophia and Richard, looked at one another with fear, but they all knew that they were out of options. Hades was drawing closer to the earth’s moon, which Callum saw as an opportunity, to use the ship’s self-destruct feature to cause it to crash into the Sea of Tranquility.

  By this time, the four of them realized that there was no way they were going to survive. They were prepared to make peace with themselves and do what was necessary to destroy Drellic. The only thing holding Callum back, was knowing that Drellic was surely planning to ride down to the earth’s surface in the escape pod with Simone. Realizing that there was a chance for Simone’s life to be spared, he did some quick thinking despite his deteriorating condition, and realized that there was still a way to save the entire crew.

  Callum activated a small security monitor and saw Drellic carrying a frightened and fragile Simone into the ship’s lone escape pod. He looked on, as Drellic sealed the two of them inside to await reentry.

  “We need our suits,” said Callum.

  “Those are probably long gone,” Richard replied. “He probably made sure to flush them.”

  “Besides, we’d never make it,” Jack added. “We’re going to be dead in minutes. It’s over.”

  Callum had a sudden rush of adrenaline and replied, “No. It’s not fucking over.”

  Callum then slowly pushed himself out of his seat and through the cockpit. As he ventured further towards the rear of the ship and closer to the crudely patched section of hull, in the former airlock section, he found that it was getting easier for him to breath. He realized that all the remaining oxygen in the ship was rushing towards the damaged section.

  With what little energy he had left, he made his way to the EVA suit locker, just outside the damaged area and found that the six pressure suits were still intact, with full oxygen tanks. As he predicted, Drellic’s desire to revel in his victory had distracted him, leaving the crew with another chance at survival.

  Callum turned to see that Richard had followed him. Together, they carried the pressure suits to the cockpit and the crew was able to successfully secure themselves inside the suits; an abundance of oxygen flooding into their lungs.

  As the four of them slowly revived themselves, Jack and Callum were able to break through Drellic’s firewall and deactivate the ship’s auto-pilot, as well as the escape pod settings. They also cut the engines and fired the reverse thrusters, bringing the ship to a halt.

  A few moments later, Hades was in orbit around the earth’s moon, and Drellic would have no choice but to leave the escape pod and confront Callum, if he wanted to reach the earth’s surface. Callum attentively watched the monitor and saw that Drellic was intentionally leaving Simone behind in the escape pod, to avoid exposing her to the dangerously low oxygen levels. Drellic was officially making his way back towards the crew.

  Sophia, Richard and Jack were all staring at Callum, in anxiety; communicating via radio, from the EVA suits.

  “If you’re going to do something, you better do it right fucking now, Callum!” Sophia screamed.

  Without any fear, Callum watched Drellic get dangerously close to the entrance to the cockpit, and tapped a key on his control console. It was a remote that caused the cockpit hatch to slam shut and lock.

  “Are you an idiot? That’s not going to stop him!” Jack yelled.

  ”Yes it will,” he replied with confidence.

  Callum then hit another control, enabling him to communicate with Drellic on the ship’s intercom.

  “Drellic, if you break down that hatch, we all die. I strongly suggest you stay where you are,” Callum ordered.

  Drellic found an intercom panel next to the hatchway and replied, “You lie.”

  “The hull’s already buckling, as it is,” Callum said. “If there’s any further damage to the ship, there’s going to be another breach. I think you know that. Are you really going to risk not seeing your home again?”

  Drellic laughed, mocking Callum’s efforts. “You’re just as dead as I am if you stay in there,” he replied.

  “We have enough oxygen in our suits for several hours. You don’t have enough oxygen for several seconds,” said Callum. “We can circle this moon a few more times, before we all die.” The crew looked at Callum with uncertainty. Drellic pondered the situation.

  “What do you propose?” he asked Callum.

  “You can survive reentry. We can’t,” Callum replied. “Give us the escape pod and we’ll make sure this ship makes it to earth. No one else has to die. We can all go home.”

  “It won’t work,” Jack insisted. “Even if he gives it to us, as soon as you open that hatch, we’re all dead.”

  “He’s running out of air,” Callum whispered. “He needs us to take the ship the rest of the way. We’ll stick him in a lifeboat.”

  Callum then switched back to the intercom to speak to Drellic. “I’m going to watch you on the monitor,” Callum said. “You’ve only got a few minutes of air left. But you’re not getting back in that pod. Seal yourself inside one of the lifeboats. Once I see you do that, we’ll set the auto pilot to return to earth and we’ll take the escape pod. Then, we all go down together.”

  Despite Drellic’s enhanced nature, he was beginning to strongly feel the effects of oxygen deprivation. He then lost all patience and responded to Callum.

  “I agree to your terms,” he said. “I’ll go down below and do as you ask. But rest
assured, this is not our last encounter.”

  Callum then released a sigh of relief and said, “Trust me. I’m looking forward to it, just as much as you are.”

  Drellic then made his way down into the lifeboat compartment and sealed himself inside one of them. It was a tight fit, but he was relieved to be breathing normally again.

  Meanwhile in the cockpit, Callum had activated the auto destruct sequence.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Jack asked.

  “The escape pod has twenty four hours of oxygen in its tank and can support the five of us for that long,” Callum replied. “We’re getting out of here and leaving this son of a bitch to rot.”

  “But we’ll never make it back!” Sophia yelled.

  “Yes we will,” Callum replied. “We can’t communicate with home, but the pod has a homing beacon. It might take a while, but Darkside will eventually pick it up and recognize it.”

  “How do you know they’ll even come for us?” Richard asked Callum.

  “I don’t. But what choice do we have?” Callum replied.

  The crew reluctantly made their way down into the lifeboat compartment. Drellic looked on from inside his lifeboat, as the crew entered the escape pod and joined Simone. The ship had become completely void of oxygen.

  Simone was beyond relieved to be rejoined by her shipmates. After taking a seat beside her, Callum sealed the pod, smiled at Simone and said, “We’re going home.”

  A moment later, he activated the escape pod and programmed it to assume a standard orbit around the moon. Drellic saw that Callum was activating the pod and became frantic.

  “No!” he screamed. “What are you doing?! It’s too soon! We’re not there yet!”

  Callum smiled, as he saw Drellic coming to the realization that he had been fooled. Without further delay, he jettisoned the escape pod, breaching the hull in the lifeboat compartment. Drellic watched in horror, as the pod rocketed away from the rest of the ship. The only things keeping Drellic’s lifeboat secured to the floor, were two flimsy metal clamps.

  The escape pod then fell away from Hades and began orbiting the moon on its own. The crew shared somber expressions, as they watched the ship they had called home for the last sixteen months, be ripped apart by the vacuum of space.

  “I can’t believe you did it,” Simone said to Callum, with a smile. The five of them became overjoyed, upon realizing that the worst was behind them. Jack then activated the pod’s homing beacon and the crew prepared for the long wait ahead.

  Six hours later, a retrieval ship from the International Space Station was dispatched by Darkside to intercept the Hades escape pod, in lunar orbit. The crew was then taken aboard the space station, which had been retrofitted with an artificial gravity system, dependent on rotating sections.

  Callum and the others were led into a secure wing of the station, which only members of Darkside had access to. They were seated in a white conference room, at a long black table. A few minutes later, Mandrake entered the room. The crew rose to their feet as he entered.

  “As you were,” he rasped, coldly.

  They then promptly returned to their seats, as Mandrake paced around the table and looked them over.

  “You’ve been out of contact for months,” he sternly said to Simone. “Now here you are, and I see you’ve brought the world a lovely souvenir from your trip.”

  The mood became awkwardly tense, as Callum and the others looked around at one another with great confusion. Mandrake, however, remained fixated on Simone. The conversation was becoming hostile.

  “You told me this couldn’t happen,” he said to her. “You told me it was impossible.” Simone’s heart began to break. She was more confused than anyone else in the room, but knew in her heart, what Mandrake was about to tell her.

  “Sir, what are you talking about? The mission was a failure. The subject was incredibly powerful and had become violent and unpredictable. He murdered Max O’Brien and tortured the rest of us for months. We had no choice but to scuttle the ship and leave him to die.”

  Mandrake maintained eye contact with Simone, as he sat down next to her. She could feel his rage dominated her.

  “Left him to die?” he asked. “Is that what you think you did?”

  Mandrake then laughed, sarcastically, and grabbed a touch screen remote control, off of the table. He tapped a few keys and brought an image up on a large flat screen monitor, at the far end of the room. He then turned his attention to the entire crew.

  “Take a look at this and tell me I’m looking at a ghost,” he said with a smirk.

  Callum and the others watched attentively, as Mandrake showed them previously recorded video footage of Hades crashing into the Rocky Mountains.

  “That’s impossible…” Callum said; his voice trailing off.

  “Keep watching,” Mandrake snickered. “It gets better.”

  Mandrake enhanced the image and zoomed in on the wreckage of the ship, which had become completely engulfed in flames. The crew looked on in horror, as a large piece of metallic debris from the ship’s hull was effortlessly thrown to the side by Drellic, who was revealed to be alive and well.

  Mandrake zoomed in on Drellic’s face. His eyes were full of hate, as he stood tall upon the mountainside and gazed out at the horizon. He stood in the middle of what looked like an ocean of fire, but remained steadfast. A split second later, he sped away, vanishing without a trace.

  Simone trembled with fear, as Callum turned to Mandrake. “Where is he now?” he asked him.

  “We don’t know,” Mandrake replied.

  “We should just stay here,” Simone said with a look of complacency. She had become completely void of emotion and utterly consumed by shock. “We should just stay here and let the world fend for itself,” she said. “Because he won’t stop. The killing won’t stop. Can’t say I blame him though.”

  Callum couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “What are you saying?” he asked Simone.

  "His cruelty can only be matched by all that he has lost,” she replied, with the same void expression and a soft monotone voice. “It's easy to hate him. But it's even easier to sympathize with him. He's a very understandable monster."

 

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