Titan: A Science Fiction Horror Adventure (NecroVerse Book 3)

by Aaron Bunce

  “Anyone! Help!” Soraya screamed.

  “No time. We…all…die. Go!”

  “Someone!” Soraya screamed, her voice breaking. But she could hear the others on the bridge, banging on the door and yelling. They were trapped and couldn’t help.

  “Go…!” Lana said just as the elastic cuff broke, or her grip failed, she couldn’t feel her hand to tell.

  Lana screamed and toppled headfirst down the ladder well, the added thrust gravity making her fall with terrifying speed. Soraya wrenched her body to the side, unwilling to watch her hit. She couldn’t watch her die. And she knew if she didn’t move, it’d be too late for all of them.

  Without the added weight, Soraya managed to get her upper body out of the ladder well. She released her hold on the handrail—that arm numb and throbbing and pushed off.

  Her legs churned, zero-G slippers catching, gripping, slipping, and squealing against the slick floor. The engine fired on and off, burning for only a few erratic seconds before cutting out and back on again. Soraya fought gravity one moment and staggered forward in the next.

  “Failure in engine pump one. Coolant temperature warning.”

  The Betty shuddered and screeched, an emergency claxon sounding ahead in the bridge A heartbeat later, another claxon blared from the speakers in the galley. The white overhead lights abruptly cut out, replaced by yellow emergency lights.

  “Get moving, Soraya, before you get dead!”

  She hopped forward, slumped back, and pushed against the strain as the engine coughed unpredictably. But there wasn’t nearly the thrust as before, and on her own, she was fast and strong enough. Soraya crawled up the back of the closest galley chair, crouched, and launched herself forward.

  The first two steps met the resistance she expected, but the engine sputtered and cut out, and she tipped forward. Screaming against the pain and frustration, Soraya fought for a new balance, caught the ground with her hands and pushed straight towards the battery room passage.

  She made the distance in only two off-balance steps, hitting the wall hard just as the engine fired. Soraya scrabbled for the door control panel, gravity pulling on her, trying to pull her insides through her back, as it tried to rip her off her feet.

  The door beeped and started to slide open just as her feet slipped and she lost her balance. Both hands lashed out and caught the opening, silver-gray blur left in their wake. She pulled herself up and through, thrust kicking in and tearing her feet off the ground.

  “It won’t stop me,” she grunted and used the congested equipment on the wall to climb. “I’m almost there, Lana. I’m almost there.” She yelled it over and over again, but didn’t know if anyone could hear her. It helped. It drove her.

  The thrust cut out and surged right back in, an explosion rocking the Betty and almost throwing her clear of the wall. The decking shook, cables and conduit bursting from the ceiling and opposite walls. A light exploded right overhead, the diode shorting out, and then the next down the line.

  Hurry. Hurry!

  She threw everything she had into the move forward, funneling the pain, frustration, anger, and uncertainty into a primal cry. One hand hooked a conduit box and she heaved herself up, the other hand lashed out and found a hold.

  Soraya pulled herself up as fast as her aching shoulders and arms would allow, the dying ship alive with noise around her. She pulled up in line with another box, easily the largest of any she’d seen, and almost pushed right on by. But a single word stuck out, flowing in the flickering, dying light.

  BATTERY SERVICE [DISCONNECT] – see service procedure before use. Manipulation by authorized personnel only.

  The panel was covered in a locked, clear safety cover. The next panel down was almost identical, save for its label.

  MAIN POWER SERIAL BUS [DISCONNECT] – maintenance use only.

  “This is it. This has to be. First…she said disconnect the batteries. Then shut it down. Shut everything down.”

  Soraya wrenched on the battery disconnect cover, but it refused to move. She curled her fingers under the lip and pulled, but it was latched. No, locked.

  “Fucking doors and elevators,” Soraya cursed, threw her hand out, and smashed her elbow into the cover. The clear material cracked, splintering hard, but held. She reared back and hit it again, screaming as it shattered, the jagged, clear material cutting through her sleeve and into the skin and muscle underneath.

  Soraya pulled free, reached inside, and turned the heavy battery toggles, the indicator lights above each going dark in turn. Then she pulled herself over to the main junction box.

  “I don’t suppose you’ll just pop open on your own,” she grunted, and without wasting the time to check, threw her other elbow into the cover. Soraya smashed through on the fourth hit, her blood smearing the splintered material.

  “What are you doing?” a voice crackled over the speaker, just as she jammed her hand inside and wrenched the first toggle shut, then flipped the next, right down the line.

  “Protocol one must be upheld. Tal-Nurgal must be awakened. You must stop! Stop. You must stop!” the voice commanded, as the small speaker distorted and crackled.

  “Fuck you!” she cursed, and with a grunt, flipped the last switch closed. The passage immediately went dark, a series of clunking noises sounding overhead and vibrating through the walls. The rumble of the engine was gone, too, the after buzz still ringing in her ears.

  Soraya let go of the panel, let her body float away from the wall in the Zero-G, and cradled her bleeding elbows into her body. She tucked her legs up into her body and twisted about. The silence was deafening, the abrupt absence of the roaring engine and firing thrusters still somehow overwhelming her. It was intolerable–the dark, the slippery, recycled air, but she still felt the thrust gravity and heard the engine. But they weren’t real. They were lies.

  Emotions burst forth as Soraya found the outside wall with her left foot, the angry, almost violent sobs echoing loudly in the now black passage. It didn’t even sound like her. Was she losing her mind? Had she reached her breaking point?

  She pushed off and floated, clawing the darkness until she found the doorway. A solitary light glowed from the galley–an independent battery-operated backup light shining above the closed door to the bridge.

  Soraya pushed off to the galley table, the air now full of floating, bouncing, and tumbling debris. She pushed through, batting aside used food trays and shattered pieces of plastic. A dark form floated at the ladder well, and they only resolved out of the gloom when she had practically run right into them.

  It was Erik, his hands clutching tightly to the top rung of the ladder. He did not look up at her as she approached, but kept his head down. His eyes were closed, and had he not groaned slightly as she approached, she would have thought him unconscious, or worse.

  Soraya turned to look down the well, choking back a sob as she spotted Lana floating below, lazily turning in a circle. She could see her eyes, even in the wasted glow of dim backup lights. They were open, staring right up at them…open and so horribly vacant.

  “I feel the pull from beyond. It is a vast and unknown expanse of inexplicable and strange realities, beckoning me to open my mind. Their siren song is a sweet nectar, brushed across the pallet of my mind by beings I can neither see nor understand. For a sane person must see that which it believes, and only believes that which it understands. I have now witnessed the impossible become probable, the implicit the explicit, and it has broken my understanding of both. I was touched by evil, but it was not what I expected–an all-consuming darkness bent to smother the light. No. It was simply one need, one ambition, driven above all others–a singular will propagating into the unclaimed and vast abysses between belief and understanding. I am a part of it now, broken down, claimed, and reconstituted by the very fabric of its being. I no longer fear the unknown but fight to share its embrace.”

  Reconstructed

  Manis screamed, gnashed his teeth, pounded, and kicked. He
hollered for help until his mind frayed, his vocal cords shredded, and the very idea of his disjointed ribs ached. It went on for hours, days, perhaps even weeks. There was no way to tell for sure.

  It was all in his mind, as everything he tried to say couldn’t reach his lips. He could not move if he wanted to, the uncaring plastic smothering him in a strangling, airless embrace. When he couldn’t bring himself to scream into his thoughts anymore, he started to sob. It was an ugly sound–desperate, pathetic, and weak.

  He grew angry at the sound of his own feeble nature, but that only fueled desperation, as well as tears that could never form or fall.

  What is the point of all this? What did I do to you? he asked. But the dark cold beyond his airtight prison held no answers, nor did it care for him or actively seek his downfall. It was maddeningly apathetic, so he repeated those same questions into the silence of his mind over and over. He would continue to form them, until either Layla, or the monster wearing her face, deigned to answer. Maybe he would wear a hole through the fabric of the universe first, tumble into some fiendish landscape of fire and blood. That would be preferable to the nothingness of his current hell. At least then he would know he was dead, and in some small way, move on.

  Let it all end. And end is better than this torment.

  But nothing happened. Nothing he could feel, save a subtle bubbling sensation in his chest and head. Was it his heart, some sliver of him still alive? Or was it something else?

  Manis tried to think about the blood samples, those cursed vials he took from Hyde’s lab, but something blocked it out. He couldn’t seem to remember what his quarters looked like. Strange. Nor could he seem to break things down into their composite numbers. But why would he? Should he? Was it even normal to do so?

  The darkness beyond his vacuum-sealed cocoon shifted, his wide, staring eyes seeing everything and nothing at the same time. The fizzling, simmering sensation in his brain grew stronger until pinpricks of light started to form, bursting into life, and quickly fading to black. They left strange blotches of color in their wake, like burn marks on his field of vision. Unable to close his eyes or turn away, Manis watched as the ship’s dark hold burned away, bit by bit.

  Is this it? Is this what comes next? he thought, both terrified and excited by the prospect. Was he passing on, experiencing what theologians and scientists had debated for so long? What would be waiting for him on the other side?

  The pressure increased in his chest, the grating sensation of broken bones sliding together the only indicator of movement. It wasn’t exactly pain, but he struggled to identify it as pleasant, either.

  The bright spots intensified suddenly, the darkness disappearing in the manner of just a few seconds. The brightness, the pulsing, cascading colors, burned his eyes, but quickly faded. Shapes and shadows manifested, resolving quickly to form sharp lines, then three-dimensional shapes, and finally a space.

  Manis was in a narrow room, no more than a dozen feet across and perhaps twenty feet deep. Directly in the center stood Layla Misra, the churning mass of tentacles holding her aloft and filling the space. One tentacle slapped against a large conduit box on the wall to the right, while another hoisted a glowing, transparent screen to his left. More screens and featureless shapes floated around her, dotting the walls and hovering against the ceiling. It was too surreal to be real, and yet far too vivid and clear to be a dream. How was he supposed to know?

  “I am glad to see you made it here, Manis my dear. Truly glad.”

  “Made it? Where is…here? And how?” he said on impulse, and with an almost orgasmic sense of satisfaction, felt his lips move and heard his own voice. But was it real or just some cruel trick? “I don’t even know…how you…happened to my body. Crushed…me.”

  Despite being able to speak, he couldn’t seem to put all of his questions, doubts, and anger to words. There was simply too much of it at once and he didn’t have complete control over his ability to communicate. It was too much, or there was something wrong with him. He didn’t feel altogether right–his lips fuzzy, one side of his face hot and the other cold, and his eyes. There was something wrong with his eyes that he couldn’t quite articulate.

  A full garbage can sat just behind Layla and to her left. As he watched, the heaping refuse inside twitched, an empty container plopping out and onto the ground. A form wriggled inside, the pressure making the metal can pop quietly.

  “You survived a great ordeal, my dear. Great pain and suffering, the deconstruction of what and who you were. But it was not a step backwards. Please do not consider it that. This was a leap ahead. It was the first step in a remarkable journey.”

  “Journey?” he scoffed, his irritation flaring instantly. “I don’t know…what you…are talking…about,” he managed, a glimmer catching in a window to Layla’s right. He could see her reflection, strange, featureless three-dimensional shapes seemingly orbiting around her. Beyond the glass the space seemed to stretch on and on, broken only by a distant, shadowy horizon.

  “You have always been a predator, Manis. A man whose psyche and morals were bent askew, but a cunning and savvy survivor, nevertheless. Don’t break and show your belly now. A lion playing the part of the lamb will die just the same.”

  Manis swallowed, watching one of her tentacles disappear into the wall to the left and pull a screen free. The fabric of the space around him looked and felt liquid, as if the scientist, the women he knew, was molding it right before his very eyes. And yet, there was so much beyond the tight walls. There was something so much more substantial around them both.

  “I don’t know what…I wanted. But I didn’t want what you did to me. You had no right.”

  Layla laughed then, her voice cold and distant, as if his pain were of no concern. Manis’ anger grew.

  “I did what I did to save your work, to safeguard the…investment in time and money to…biopharmaceuticals. There was too much at stake. Too much to lose. I thought it was what you would want.”

  “You almost believe those lies, my dear,” Layla said, and to articulate her point, her tentacles cracked the air, moving like snapping fingers. “Your interest was not in the betterment of mankind, nor was it some misguided sense of dedication to me or my research. You were driven by your ego, the advancement of your situation, the desperate struggle to lift your head above the corporate waterline and hold it there. That is your truest fear, is it not? Perhaps more than death itself–that long, slow slide back to anonymity and invisibility?”

  “Then why am I here?” Manis asked, flustered by how much she seemed to know. She was right, but he wouldn’t admit it out loud. “Why did you…to me? What is going to happen to me?”

  Layla purred, her mouth turning up in a smile too severe to be natural. The noise and vibrations seemed to resonate down her body until every tentacle vibrated in response.

  “You are here because it worked, my dear. The pain, the pleasure, your very deconstruction, succeeded. That is why you are still here.”

  Manis searched Layla’s face, his attention fractured by the constantly moving and waving tentacles. They never seemed to still, never seemed to stop groping, flexing, and reaching. He struggled to understand, fighting to put some perspective on what being “deconstructed” might mean in a positive context. Nothing came to mind.

  “You are here because you have shown us favor, in your way, and favor must be met with the same. You are here because you took those samples off Hyde, my dear. They put you in a unique position to bargain, but one that requires you to make a choice.”

  “A choice?” he echoed and followed two tentacles with his gaze. They flexed and looped between them, hooking around two knee-high silver containers. Then, with a smooth twist, the tentacles popped them open.

  “The basis of any agreement is a choice, Manis. I know you understand. But before you answer, consider the implications of both options first.”

  “Only two options? What if I don’t like either one?”

  “It is the
nature of duality, my dear. Equal and opposing forces. There are only two options. There are only ever two,” she replied right away.

  “Were you presented with these options? When…” he asked, gesturing to the mass of tentacles that took the place of her legs.

  “In a way. Perhaps. But you have an opportunity beyond anything any of us could have dreamed of. You have the opportunity for true, elevated sentience.”

  “Sentience? In what way, and how?” Manis asked, only faintly aware of the word’s meaning. “Would that mean I would be free of my…difficulties?” he asked, unwilling to direct attention to his previous psychological shortcomings. They were absent from his mind, but not from his thoughts. They were the bogeyman, and if he considered them, they would hear and return. They seemed to always find him. Always.

  Layla nodded, her slightly puckered lips gleaming in the light. His mind stirred back to the storeroom on the Atlass when she had wrapped him in her embrace. He couldn’t seem to focus on the pain of that encounter, as if it had been deleted from his memory. All he felt was the promise of her sensual contact–macabre and horrible, and yet somehow, enticing.

  “What are my options?”

  Layla lifted the silver container on the left. “Your deconstruction allowed your brain to take control of the microbes in your body. Even now they are clustered together inside your heart, growing, changing it so they might multiply. You can use them to heal you, make you stronger–a more perfect representation of who you truly are–”

  “I wouldn’t…” he tried to interject.

  “We will show them how, guide them from afar. In a way, pass along a blueprint. And in return, you will keep your mind, your sentience, but serve our will.”

  “So, I would be alive? A better version of me, but a slave?” The last question, the thought, left a horrible taste in his mouth.

  “You would become a powerful tool in service to a greater power. An honored servant. Yes.”