by Aaron Bunce
That creeping, crawling sensation bit into her legs, twice as strong as before. She lurched forward a step, awkwardly tilting and kicking her leg out. The shiver coursed up her back and bounced into her arms, the tingle threatening to push away all sensation. But that wasn’t even the worst of it. An immense pulling sensation grabbed at her eyes, somehow emanating from the shape scratched on the engine’s shiny surface.
Lex felt it pulling her in, digging past her eyes and into her brain, sinking in like a barbed harpoon from which she couldn’t pull away.
Ayo…what is this? she thought, desperately trying to keep her legs from moving. But he didn’t answer. He wasn’t even there, but trapped back with Jacoby and the others, banished by whatever strange power Erik was radiating.
Lex was out in the open then, moving towards the pulse engine with jerky, uncontrolled steps. She struggled, fighting to pull her eyes off the symbol–a wide sphere with curling, vine-like shapes growing out of its base.
Erik spoke as something clattered ahead in the space to the right of the pulse engine. Lex fought with every available bit of strength and wrenched on her neck and eyes, struggling to pull them towards his voice. He was close, just beyond the ship’s drive…she just needed to see.
The pain flared in her eyes, as if they were skewered and she were trying to move them off axis, away from their design. Then they shifted, a tremor and faint twitch, but just enough to break eye contact. It all tumbled loose in her head, cascading down through her chest and finally, her legs–the bits of her abruptly broke free, disassembling and pulling back together.
Lex focused in on a sizable jumble of cables and wires strung along the floor. They snaked up and into what looked like a door access panel, the wires coming out the other side disappearing into a loose panel on the pulse engine. Several strange symbols flashed and scrolled on the small screen–odd, alien shapes, and Lex immediately looked away. They didn’t pull on her eyes like the others, but she wasn’t taking any chances.
She moved forward, the symbol Erik etched into the metal gently tugging on her insides. There were more around her, too, seemingly imbedded in every surface of the space. But what was it and what had it done to her head?
She turned back and looked to the pressure door. The plan. Open it and let the others in.
Erik spoke then, Shane’s painful groans responding immediately.
“…stop hurting…!” the big man moaned, the rest of his words garbled.
The plea and the pain in his voice hooked her with even more force than Erik’s strange symbol. She practically jumped forward, sliding into the space between the pulse engine and the far wall. Then she saw them.
Behind the ship’s engine, its beating heart, stood a small tool station. Emiko hung from a winch in the ceiling, suspended by a single length of chain, its length wrapped around her chest and stomach. Her head sagged forward as she slowly rotated, her straight black hair covering her face. Her sleeves and pant legs had been removed, the skin beneath covered with tapestry of angry, bleeding wounds.
Lex felt the pull on her eyes again as she watched the nurse turn, but her anger overrode the draw this time. Erik had cut the strange symbol into her flesh, over and over.
Movement flickered to the right, behind two sizable ventilation ducts. Erik stepped back, just coming into view, and then moved forward and disappeared again. Chains jingled.
“You feel her. Don’t you?” the young man asked.
Lex heard the unmistakable sound of metal cut into skin, the big man’s immediate grunt and wheeze. She moved forward on instinct, using her passive senses to guide her as she fought to not stare at Emiko’s mutilated state. She was only three to four feet away from the duct and abruptly stopped, then quietly leaned over and lifted a large wrench off the ground.
Emiko shifted next to her and groaned. The blade cut again. And Lex moved forward, steps quiet and measured. She rounded the corner, side stepped, raised the makeshift weapon over her head, and swung.
-1:45 Until Entry
The wrench hit the back of Erik’s head with a satisfying thud, the technician tipping sideways and sprawling to the ground. Something fell from his hand and clattered to the ground–a utility knife, the short blade covered in dark blood. She scooped the knife off the floor and stuffed it into her suit.
Shane moaned, the words, his voice, garbled beyond recognition. The big man was pinned in place, held in place by two lengths of chain fastened to hooks in the wall.
How did Erik get him up there by himself?
“…you,” Shane groaned, his eyes flitting erratically.
“Hold on. You’re safe now. Both of you.”
Like Emiko, Shane’s Planitex jumpsuit was shredded, his arms, legs, and chest covered in bleeding cuts. Not just cuts, but the symbol–a perfect orb with a host of what looked like tentacles emerging from the bottom.
Lex felt each of the cuts pulling on her, but she looked away. Then stretched up and pulled the gag out of the big man’s mouth.
“There. I’ll go let the others in and we’ll get you down.” But Shane shook his head violently.
“No. Him. Erik…”
“It’s fine. He’s out…” Lex said and gestured to the floor. Her eyes flicked down to the spot. It took her brain a second to register that the dark floor was empty. Shit!
“That hurt, Lex. Naughty-Naughty.”
Damn it.
She spun just in time to spot Erik a half dozen paces away, a long, dark shape lifting to level right at her. She reared back and threw the wrench with everything she had, just as the muzzle flashed.
An invisible fist punched into her right hip, jarring her a quarter turn away. Lex snarled and kicked off with her left foot. The wrench hit, bouncing off the rifle’s top rail and smacking Erik right in the face. He grunted and stepped back, the rifle discharging again. The second shot missed somewhere to the right.
Lex didn’t feel the pain until she pushed with her right foot, a hot, agonizing jolt firing down from her hip. She lurched, wobbled, but caught her balance and threw her weight into him, knocking the rifle’s barrel aside just as it went off. The round hit somewhere above, but the flash washed out her vision.
“The back of the head? I expected more from you, Lex. The soldier. The warrior, attacking from behind?” Erik snarled and shoved the rifle hard. The force almost tore her loose and sent her reeling.
They twirled together and Lex fought for a grip on the rifle. She pulled herself in close as the rifle discharged again.
“I expected more from you. What kind of…freak…chains a person to the wall and cuts on them?” she asked, uninterested in the answer. She needed to divide his focus. Keep him thinking about something other than the weapon in his hands.
“Come on, Lex. Look at how beautiful they are now...” he said.
She felt Erik’s voice, his words wash over her—a shiver up her spine, the sapping cold deep in her gut that pushed out to every strand of muscle. It was a toxin that threatened to leave her paralyzed. Fear. Terror. Undiluted and sphincter clenching. But she’d felt that fear before and knew it would only have power over her if she let it.
“Rule one, shithead,” Lex yelled and snapped her right fist over the rifle and into his face. Then she wrenched the rifle up, ducked under the barrel, and drove her fist hard into his stomach.
Erik spluttered and lurched backwards, but she twisted and pushed away from his movement, breaking one hand’s grip on the weapon. Then, with pain screaming in her hip, she kicked him hard in the stomach, the force adding to his turn, breaking his other hand’s grip, and sending him tumbling backwards.
“Don’t ever touch my fucking weapon,” she finished, jamming the butt into her shoulder and leveling it at his face.
Erik looked up at her from the ground, a trickle of blood flowing from his nose. His eyes sat like empty holes, almost disappearing against the bruised skin around them. He didn’t chuckle, cry out, or curse. He just stared.
“Ge
t up. Now!”
“I knew that you would come, Lex. She showed me this very moment. All I had to do was play my part, and wait,” he started to say and paused, pushing his way up to his knees.
“Move. Now. To your feet! Go.”
“I put that wrench there. Didn’t you ever stop to wonder, why it was just sitting out in the open, all by itself?” He grabbed ahold of the pulse engine for leverage and stood.
Her gaze locked onto a black band–a watch on his wrist. The screen glowed to life as he moved. The digital readout shifted, two numbers moving faster than the others. A clock, a timer, counting down.
-1:32:24
Erik followed her gaze to the glowing screen, and he chuckled.
“Tick tock. Tick tock. I wish you could feel her like I do, see things the way she helps me see them. So close now. So awfully close. Every second, the void between us grows smaller. Soon–”
“Shut up and move! To the airlock. Go! Go!”
“I knew you would find your way in here. It was inevitable. Because she wanted it to be. The same way I know you won’t kill me. Because you’ll never make it down to the surface without me. That blabber mouth with her rubber face and empty soul doesn’t know half the stuff she claims. Only I know…”
Lex grabbed him by the collar and spun him around, reached down and pulled the watch free, then shoved him hard towards the airlock.
“If you’re asking me to trust you behind the controls of this ship, you’ve got something other than brains in that head of yours. Now open that airlock. Now!”
“Tick tock. Tick tock.” Erik chuckled, his voice an eerie, slippery sound.
Lex glanced down to the watch–1:28:55–the shifting number making her belly squirm uncomfortably.
We have time. We have time, she told herself.
Erik slowed again, the barrel of the rifle hitting between his shoulder blades. She nudged him forward, but he resisted.
“Tick-tock. Tick-tock.”
“I said…open the damned airlock,” she growled, her arm shaking in response. Ayo’s words bubbled up He didn’t want her to kill him. They needed him alive to analyze and find out what was happening and why.
“You know, when I purged the atmosphere from the passage, I strongly considered opening all the hatches in the fore compartments, too. Slowly, of course. Do you want to know why?” Erik continued forward, but slowly.
“I don’t give a shit why you do what you do. Just…move!”
They made it all the way down the passage and to the airlock door, the cold rifle’s barrel pushing into his back, seemingly quashing further argument. Lex clenched her jaw as he settled before the data point on the ground and stopped, his arms hanging lazily at his side.
-1:29:03
“Damnit, Erik. Pick it up and open the airlock.”
He chuckled quickly—an almost inhuman noise, one that seemed to buzz like insects in the air around her. Then he slowly started to bend over
“I said I almost cracked a hatch up there. Did you hear? So, I could I bleed off the air and watch you all gasp and thrash, like fish floating to the surface of an oxygen-deprived pond. Can you imagine it? Can you?”
Lex’s finger flinched, the rifle clicking and whining to life in response.
“The only thing I want to see or hear from you right now is you…bending over…and opening the damned hatch. Now!”
-1:27:59
Erik slowly stooped over and scooped the device off the ground. He swiped the screen awake and pushed on a holographic icon.
“I almost did it, even though I wanted nothing more,” he whispered, breathing heavily.
Lex saw a warning pop up on the screen. Erik swiped it away quickly, but not fast enough to keep her from seeing it.
[Warning–emergency ventilation louvres are–{open}–{locked}]
[Unintended cabin depressurization may result!]
{Manual override is needed}
It hit Lex just as he flipped into another screen, a streaming mass of code flooding from the top down. She dropped the rifle and ripped his right arm down, but Erik grunted and spun away. He hunched his back and wrenched around, shielding the data point with his body.
“Don’t do it! You little…”
A claxon sounded as Erik chuckled again. Lex shoved him forward hard and into the corner, the impact snapping his head back.
“It was…so hard to…wait. Because I,” Erik grunted, pushing her back and then stabbed at the concealed device, “wanted you to watch.”
She punched her left fist between his right arm and his body, hooked outwards, and wrenched the limb away with all her strength. He spun with the force and they toppled into the airlock, his index finger pointing like a dagger as he tried to reach the screen.
Lex drove her knee for his groin but missed and hit his thigh, then caught his hands and wrenched them apart. Erik grunted, and strangely, started to laugh.
“I’ve seen all this, Lex. Seen them die. Seen that you aren’t strong enough to stop me. Seen what I will do to you after. It all comes down to you,” Erik hissed, that strange and alien chill washing over him again.
He went still and then started pulling his hand towards the screen. She braced and pushed with all her strength, but his hands continued to close.
“What? No witty one-liner? No threat, smirk, or snort? Come on, I expected more fight from you. I knew your tough-as-nails façade was fake. You’re just a scared little girl.”
“Screw you…whatever you are,” she growled and fought back, but her arms and chest we already burning from the effort. And he wasn’t even breathing hard.
Lex’s gaze lifted to his face and locked on his eyes just as he ripped his hand free and slapped it around her neck. The strength and ferocity of the movement startled her, his hand clamping down and then wrenching her up. Lex kicked and thrashed, fighting to find the ground.
Erik’s pupils blew wide as strange black veins crept in from the bruise-darkened skin around his eyes. His face, his form, changed as she watched, an unseen presence sliding just beneath the surface. Something forced its way out of his eyelids and started to crawl over his cheeks. Opaque tendrils peeled his nostrils open, and then his mouth.
“It is okay, Lex. You can stop fighting now. Rest easy, I never expected much from you in the first place.”
She struggled to breathe, to break this iron grip on her neck.
“Do you want to know the…best part about…being a woman in a military combat unit?”
Erik smiled but didn’t speak, just blinked those horrible, wrong eyes.
“Everyone underestimates you,” she said, and jammed the utility she had eased out of her pocket into his arm.
-Pull yourself together
Jacoby paced in front of the maintenance airlock, stopped to look in the dark, frost-covered window, and slapped the cold metal. He looked to the dark spot of floor just a few feet away, where his plasma saw waited. Jacoby turned and looked forward, his gaze settling on Titan as it loomed beyond the wind screens.
He saw a green-blue world, covered by what looked like lakes or oceans, partially concealed by a murky, orange atmosphere. It was so close he could almost reach out of the ship and touch it. Well, not really, but it sure looked that close. His stomach pulled forward, the site inducing the rather uncomfortable sensation that he was falling. He tore his eyes away and forced his feet to move.
“It’s been too long. Something happened. I’m going in after her.” Jacoby immediately made for the ladder.
“Coby, wait,” Anna yelled, her small flashlight blossoming in the darkness. She cut him off before he could descend.
“We don’t have time to wait.”
“You have to,” Poole said, appearing over her shoulder, “Red…err, Lex will get us in. She might never forgive me for…well, something I’ve been doing. But that is neither here nor there. She will get us in! Because that is what she does.”
“What if something happened to her? What if she needs help?”
“You won’t fit through that passage. Erik is blocking Poole, somehow. And what am I going to do that she can’t? She’s tough, Coby, resourceful. Give her a chance.”
“Jacky-Boy. Listen to Anna. Lex is too stubborn to fail…”
“Look!” he said, pointing–without looking–towards the bridge and Titan’s growing form. “We are out of time–”
A shriek interrupted Jacoby’s argument–so high-pitched and dreadful that they all covered their ears. Something banged beyond the maintenance pressure door, and a loud, rage-filled scream followed.
Jacoby ran to the door and tried to scrape the frost off the window and gaze through, but it was too dark. He banged a fist against the cold metal and shifted, trying to pull the door open.
“Lex!” he screamed.
“Does that mean she got in?” Soraya asked behind him.
“Why is he trying to pull the door–” Lana started to ask.
A flicker of light caught in Jacoby’s peripheral vision, immediately followed by a single, warbling beep. A piercing whistle filled the space, and then the door was sliding open.
A tremendous vacuum turned him over and pulled him bodily into the darkness. He skidded to his knees. The maintenance passage was impossibly cold against his palms. He tried to push back up to his knees and gasped for breath, but choked. Air rushed in and around him as a solitary sliver of light appeared ahead.
Another breath cleared his head as the atmosphere equalized, and he found his feet. Another shriek echoed from ahead, as something moved beyond the opening door. It thrashed, casting confusing shadows.
Poole, I hope you’re ready. His alien counterpart shifted in his head, the slimy movement his only response.
I’ll take that as a yes.
Jacoby emerged from the dark maintenance passage into a space of grimy machinery, conduit, and confusing masses of cable. His gaze caught on a device on the floor a few feet ahead–Lana’s data point. A small bundle of frayed wires hung from the device’s port and the screen was shattered.