The stairs ended and the floor leveled out. The pathway turned away from the drop off, and I heaved a sigh of relief, unplastering myself from the wall. We headed through an arched hallway that crowded overhead and squeezed our shoulders. Just as I was about to complain about the claustrophobic nature of the passage we popped out into a large room. Our lights disappeared into the darkness, not reaching the far side or the ceiling when I looked up. The sides sloped away and disappeared into the murkiness.
“I’m reading two lifeforms ahead,” said Wards. “Their life signs are weak.”
Dell nodded, and we continued forward. I felt something crunching under my feet, and I looked down. With each step we were crushing bones: femurs, skulls, hip bones, rib cages and a myriad of others of which I didn’t know the names.
I screamed.
If there had been atmosphere in the chamber my voice would have echoed around it. My suit pinged me that my heart rate was elevated to a dangerous level. Each thump pounded in my head. My breath fogged my visor. I whimpered a little bit, not wanting to move for fear of what I’d find.
Dell kneeled down and looked around us. He picked up a bone and held it close to his helmet then passed it to Wards who examined it.
“They look Terran,” said Dell. He looked around the chamber. “Odd that there aren’t any suits.”
I let out a small moan. This wasn’t how I wanted to find the colonizing fleet. Not finding anything was better than this.
“I’ve still got those two life signs,” said Wards.
Dell stood up and dusted off his hands. He moved over to me and patted me on the back. “Death is ever present in the galaxy. It must be embraced as an inevitable and accepted as unavoidable.” He started walking towards the lifeforms.
Wards took a deep breath and sighed. “He can be morbid,” she said, looking around. “I’m sure this isn’t everyone. You’d need a lot more caves for it to be an entire fleet.” She followed Dell.
I continued to stand still. Dell’s and Wards’ lights continued away from me, turning into small specks in the distance. My fear of being left alone in the dark without them overcame my fear of what I might find if I moved, so I took after them at a run.
I ran with my eyes closed. My heavy breathing, from the exertion of running, was the only sound I heard. My suit issued a proximity warning, and I opened my eyes just in time to skid to a halt so as to not run into Dell and Wards.
They were crouched next to two small things that looked like ants, at least two feet long. Each ant had four arms and two legs plus what looked like three distinct sections of body. Their helmets were molded in such a way that one could see they had mandibles and antennae.
I ignored Dell and Wards as they conversed with each other and looked past them. My headlamps fell upon an altar of some sort. It was sculpted straight from the stone with carved steps leading up to it. The ants lay at the bottom of these steps.
I made my way around the four and started up the stairs to the altar. It had deep gouges in the top and was stained with dark splotches. I looked up not expecting to see anything but my lights landed on what must have been the apse.
It was half domed over the altar hundreds of feet and extended down to ground level flaring out at least fifty feet each way. It wasn’t cut from the rock but rather made from something. I walked to it and gasped.
The entire structure was made from human bones.
I leaned in closer. Bits of something still clung to the bone in places. Something else wound between them and wrapped its way from end to end. My suit told me that it was sinew, potentially tendons from humans, and that the clinging bits were most likely flesh long since desiccated.
Stomach acid burned the back of my throat as I struggled to keep my most recent meal from ending up sloshing around in my suit. Gagging, I recoiled from the structure and put my hands on my knees. My abdomen flexed, and I felt another heave come forth. It took all of my willpower to keep from vomiting.
Sweat dripped from my brow onto my visor. The droplets trickled down leaving small rivulets that distorted my view. I tried to ignore the gnawing at the back of my mind that something poked and prodded at my thoughts. I focused on my breathing to make sure I took in even, measured breaths. After a little bit I felt steady enough to move, so I straightened up. My stomach didn’t try to eject anything through my mouth: a good sign.
I walked over, legs a little wobbly, to where Dell and Wards continued to huddle around the two ant creatures. “Are they going to make it?” I said.
Wards glanced up at me and shook her head. “No. They’re part of The Hive. It’s a singular mind shared by all within it.” She looked back down at the two. “Their connection has been broken. They wouldn’t be able to reintegrate.”
“I don’t understand why they’re down here,” said Dell. “I’m pulling all of their suit info and quarantining it for examination back on the Omanix.”
One of the ants looked at me. Its antennae flopped to the side and aimed at me. It pointed with shaking claw and said, “Uncorrupted.”
The other turned its head to look at me and said, “Untainted.”
“What do they mean?” I said.
“The Hive members have psychic abilities,” said Wards. “It’s part of how they’re able to have a hive mind.” She looked back to me. “Maybe they’ve seen something in your mind that runs counter to what happened here.”
I snorted and motioned around me. “I wouldn’t have taken part in this.”
“Or maybe they’re in the last throes of death and are babbling,” said Dell. He stood up straight with one of The Hive members over his arm. “We’ll take them to the surface, alert The Hive about what we found and send these two off.”
“Isn’t it strange that there are only two though?” said Wards as she stood with the other. “They usually travel with at least five or six. What happened to the others?”
“Ripped,” said Dell’s Hive member.
“Torn,” said Wards’ member.
“Absorbed,” they said together.
Their voices were weak. They looked like rag dolls. I felt sorry for them dying so far away from everything, in the depths of a cave that bore witness to atrocities.
“Should we find their companions?” I said as we began walking towards the exit.
“No,” said Dell. “We haven’t picked up their life signs. The Hive doesn’t care about physical vessels. It already knows they aren’t connected to the mind anymore. To The Hive, for all intents and purposes, these two and their companions are already dead.”
“It’ll probably have us leave the bodies here,” said Wards.
I wanted to protest. They should be given a burial or something, but maybe The Hive had already held a funeral for them. Maybe it had already said its goodbyes. These two were like a memory of your dead grandma; you don’t have a funeral every time you think of her.
We walked in silence into the claustrophobic hallway. I took one quick look over my shoulder and felt a wave of revulsion wash over me. The apse, the altar, even the bones strewn about on the floor was lost in the darkness. I let out a sigh of relief we were leaving. A shiver went up my spine. I knew my dreams would be haunted by this place.
“Go to Nasee Four,” said Wards member.
“Alone,” said Dell’s.
“What’s on Nasee Four?” said Wards as we climbed the stairs.
“A tribe,” said Wards’.
“Cut off,” said Dell’s. Its body went rigid, shuddered then went limp again.
Wards’ let out a small wail. “Alone,” it cried. “No one. All alone.” It whimpered until it too went limp.
Dell and Ward set down the corpses on the stairs and continued upward. I looked at the little bodies. Seeing them go in the way they did hurt. My chest tightened, and I bit my lip to not think about it. Seeing the death and destruction of the Alpha, Scort and the Vantagax had been different. I’d been removed from it either through distance or drugs, but this was first hand
. This was in my face, unaltered death. I didn’t want to think about it and hurried up the stairs to catch up to the others in order to escape.
“So,” I said as I slowed and matched the pace of the other two, “what now?”
“We go to Nasee Four,” said Dell.
“Do you think we’ll find any humans there?”
Dell shrugged. “Don’t know.”
“But it said there was a tribe there,” I said. “Cut off.”
“Maybe,” said Dell. “Maybe not.” He continued to trudge up the stairs, looking straight ahead. “After what we saw here I’m not sure I want to find the people who did this.”
I hung my head. I wasn’t sure I wanted to either. No explanation that I could come up with made the chambers below acceptable.
We returned to the surface in silence.
Chapter Six
I sat on the edge of my bed. My crew quarters on the Omanix were sparse: a bed, a desk, a chair, a wash basin, a shower, a small tablet to watch pre-loaded shows from around the Confederacy. The main luxury was that I didn’t have to share it with anyone.
I’d tried to spark up a conversation in the common areas with the Omanix’s crew, but no one cared to speak with me. Before we’d gotten to SpaciEm Wards had told me that the crew wanted to keep their distance. They were a tight knit group who had served with each other throughout the war while I was an oddity, an outlier, a being to gawk at and tell stories about to their friends and family back home.
After the three of us discovered the atrocities committed deep below SpaciEm’s surface I noticed the crew had a different light in their eyes. They still avoided me but some now had wariness in their eyes and actions. It was like they expected me to break out in the violence and murder that had occurred below.
During the entire trip to Nasee Four I interacted with no one but Dell and Wards. Baron relayed their questions through someone else. Dell kept his distance. He was professional, as he’d always been, but there was coldness, a barrier, like a wall had been built between us. Only Wards continued to speak and act as before SpaciEm. If she saw the stares or noticed the room go silent when we’d sit together in the cafeteria or work out, she never let on that it bothered her; at least in front of me.
“Do you think it was Kaur and her people?” I said to no one in particular. I’d taken to speaking aloud in my quarters as there was no one to be embarrassed around.
After SpaciEm I’d asked Wards and Dell the same questions. Wards shrugged and said something non-committal. Dell flat out said, “Yes.”
“No,” I said. I sat for a few beats listening to the hum of the ship. “Maybe. Maybe something happened to them on their trip.”
“But what could have happened to make them do those things?”
“I don’t know,” I said. There must have been thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands in that chamber. Would we have found the same on the moon in its cave system if we’d searched? Would we find the same on Nasee Four?
I tried to shut it out of my mind. SpaciEm was an anomaly. It was the work of a fringe group of colonists gone mad.
“But what if it wasn’t a fringe group? What if it was Kaur?”
“No,” I whispered.
“What if that is what happens? You go mad when you go it alone.”
I scrunched up my eyes as tight as I could. My hands balled into fists, nails biting into my palms. I pounded my thigh with my fist, the pain felt deep in the muscle. “No.”
My breathing came in ragged gasps. Tears blurred my vision. I hung my head.
“You’re alone.”
“I know,” I said. If Kaur had committed the acts on SpaciEm, and there were no other Terrans besides myself, why should they be found? Why should they not be left to rot in whatever hellhole they found themselves? Why should I work to bring to light the worst of my people?
Maybe being alone in the deep void of space had made Kaur and the colonists go insane. I’d considered that they were completely cut off from Earth. Maybe they couldn’t communicate with anyone. Maybe they had become an entity unto themselves where mental illness blossomed and madness became the norm.
Perhaps the madness spread slowly, one by one but being self-contained within the colonial fleet it couldn’t be eradicated. It fed on itself getting worse as time went on. Colonists infected one another with their insanity until it controlled everything and everyone. Maybe the sane were what we found on SpaciEm.
And here I was: a lone Terran sitting in my quarters by myself. I let my imagination bounce back and forth without any filters. No one was there to tell me to stop traveling down a specific road of thought. There was no one to reel me back in, pull me out of the depths and plant my feet back on solid ground. No one was there to prevent me from following in the footsteps of Kaur.
“You can go back.”
“I know,” I said. Earth seemed enticing. Go back to my cryo-chamber. Shed the trappings of responsibility. I didn’t want the burden of answering for crimes I hadn’t committed or succumbing to an insanity I couldn’t explain. I wanted to go back to sleep and not have to face my current reality.
Let the Confederacy and the Vantagax have their war. Let Kaur have her cult and its abominable acts. I would be asleep without the reminders of the cruelty the galaxy possessed.
“Let Dell know you’re going back.”
I shook my head. I couldn’t tell Dell I didn’t want to be a part of this anymore. I had to handle it; I couldn’t slink back to my cryo-chamber. Maybe it was too much responsibility, but I had to try.
I started to cry. Tears rolled down my cheeks. They collected around my nostrils and pooled at the tip of my nose to drip off and splatter my shirt.
This was it. I didn’t know if I could handle Nasee Four, but we were almost there. Maybe there’d be a group of people who had outrun Kaur. They’d be there to welcome me with open arms as their rescuer. We’d head off, settle somewhere with me as their leader and forget about everywhere else.
I doubted it.
Chapter Seven
The Omanix’s shuttle touched down on the surface. The door slid open to reveal a barren pock-marked landscape. I’d been briefed that Nasee Four was the fourth of four Trojans following the planet Nasee. At one time a colony had been chartered to hollow out the Trojan. They’d gotten partway done before running out of money and abandoning the project.
“How far is the hatch?” I said.
We jumped out of the shuttle. Puffs of grayish dust plumed up from our footsteps as we crossed the barren landscape. The gravity was low enough that we bounded, almost bunny hopped across the surface. Our movements reminded me of the way the first men to walk on the Moon had moved.
“Not much farther,” said Wards. She leapt ahead of us, scanning left and right as she went.
Dell followed behind me. “Remember,” he said, “do not engage anyone that we come across.”
I felt his stare penetrating the back of my helmet. His only words to me before we left the Omanix were to not engage on my own; don’t speak, don’t call out, and don’t act until he told me to do so. He had been professional but curt, and I noticed a hard edge to his tone. I didn’t know if it was me or the situation that caused him to act in such a way.
Ahead of us Wards stopped and hunched over something. “Found the hatch,” she said. “Accessing the door panel.”
“The Omanix is still picking up all fifteen life signs in the habitable area,” said Dell. “Open the door when you can.”
“Manually overriding the door security,” said Wards.
We continued to bunny hop towards her spot. The stars behind her looked like a tapestry hanging as backdrop. The stars looked so close and the gravity so weak I felt like I could launch myself into space. There’d be no goodbyes or explanations, just me flying away into the emptiness.
The hatch burst open. Wards screamed and shot into space. Dell grabbed my shoulder. My feet flew out in front of me as their momentum kept them going. I let out a s
mall cry and fell backwards onto my back into a cloud of grey dust.
“Wards,” I yelled. I reached out with my hand at the small speck that was Wards disappearing into space in the same way I had just thought about.
“I’m fine,” said Wards. “Suit’s fine.” Her voice was shaky, and we could hear her trying to control her breathing. “There was some kind of explosive on the door. Booby trapped.” She said something I didn’t understand but the intonation was one of frustration and anger. “Scan didn’t pick it up for some reason.”
“Omanix is sending the shuttle out,” said Dell. “They’re going to nab you before you get too far.” He looked at the blown hatch. “We’re still moving ahead.”
“Got it,” said Wards. “I’m going to take a little R and R. Let you do the heavy lifting.”
I laughed, half in relief and half at the joke, as Dell and I headed down the ladder into the Trojan. “See you before too long,” I said.
“Be safe,” she said. “I’m closing out this channel.”
Dell and I came to the bottom of the ladder and flicked on our headlamps. A hallway appeared before us out of the dark. It had metal grating for flooring, metal walls and massive ground to ceiling supports whose bulk dwarfed my own.
“Be careful of more traps,” said Dell.
It felt like he spoke to himself more than to us, but I still told my suit to scan for anything dangerous. “Do you know where we’re going?”
Dell gave me a small nudge and motioned with his head. “Ahead,” he said.
We plodded down the hallway in silence. The hallway was only wide enough for two people to walk side-by-side, but Dell kept as much distance between him and me as he could. If I moved a step closer to him he moved a step away from me. “You don’t trust me?” I said after we’d walked in an awkward silence for a good ten minutes.
The Terran Representative Page 4