“Captain, I believe I’ve found a route of escape from here. When we reach the end of this chasm, we can find an entrance to the MagLev network. It still has power, so we should be able to board one of the carriages and catch it directly to the Metropolitan District,” Aloysius said.
“How do we know that the asshole over the loudspeaker will actually let us use them?” Draco asked.
“We don’t. But if he does shut it down, we can still follow it on foot. It may take some time, but I believe it is the most direct approach we can take.”
“Excellent. Let’s move! We’ve got a train to catch!”
Draco, Aloysius and Raze broke into a sprint, dodging pieces of flesh that littered the floor around them. There was no end to the cavernous darkness. New areas emerged from beyond the veil by Draco’s low-light vision as they ran on.
More birthing pods attached to the walls and ceiling. There were thousands of bodies in this dark chasm undergoing a change that turned them into something else. Were there even any people left on the ship to save?
Maybe it would have been a kindness to let the ship burn in the orbit of Krakaterra.
He tried to push those thoughts out of his mind when Aloysius cut in.
“I’m going to feed the location of the closest MagLev station into everyone’s HUDs. Even if we are split up, we will be able to regroup at the station.” Aloysius said.
“Good work, Al. Approximately how far?” Draco asked.
“Five hundred yards give or take. We will have to see what kind of access we can find.”
They continued running through the dark.
Down in the murky water, Jaxon’s hands held Ava’s waist tightly. The thing that grabbed Vynce had taken him through a flooded access tunnel, overgrown with weird skin sacks.
“Are we even going the right way?” Ava asked.
“Yes. We’re following his trail,” Jaxon said.
“What the hell do you mean? What trail? I can’t even see a foot in front of me in this muck.”
“I’m tracking the water displacement pattern. We’re actually flowing in the same current that the thing created when it grabbed Vynce and pulled him away.”
“What was it, anyway? Did you see it?”
“No, I just saw you swimming down into a situation you knew nothing about and knew that if I didn’t come with you that you might end up dead.”
“But you know how all of this turns out. If I die, you already know it.”
“I need to explain something about time travel to you. It’s not what you think. As far as we know, there are no natural fixed points of the space-time continuum, except for the beginning, and of course, the end. Everything in between is up for grabs and can be changed. The agent travelling through the time stream has to make the call about what he or she chooses to intervene against.”
“So even though you’ve lived this once, it might not turn out the same as it did last time?”
“Exactly correct. Or, through my actions, I could cause events to happen in the exact same fashion that they did during the last time I was on this ship, because I already did. That’s the funny thing about time travel. You never know whether you’re the cause or the effect of the circumstances presented to you. All I know is that I don’t want you to die, so I had to help you.”
Ava smiled to herself, for a moment she was unable to think of something to say back. Jaxon saved her the trouble.
“This isn’t the first jam I’ve helped you out of trouble Ava. Or vice versa. This may be the first time in your chronological sequence, but not mine. We’ve been through a lot together, and I couldn’t let you go down into this darkness by yourself.”
“Thank you,” she said.
She wondered just what kind of a history she had with Jaxon.
Or would it be a future?
It could be both. Her future, and his past.
After they got off the Metropolis Seven, rescued a buttload of people and saved the day, she made a mental note that she owed this mysterious traveler a drink or two. Once she got him drunk he might spill the beans.
Draco, Raze and Aloysius reached a wall of debris and could not go any farther. Sharp pieces of steel sheeting jutted out of the collapsed piece of ship, but it looked as though it could be climbed.
“We can go over this,” Draco said.
“I believe we should be able to find an entrance to the MagLev network at the top of this rubble,” Aloysius said.
The house-sized birthing pods slowly crept towards them. There was one to their left that already had one of its tendrils running up the pile of debris beside them. If it decided to make any sudden movements, the whole pile of debris could collapse, and their escape route would be in jeopardy!
Draco climbed. He took care to take care to avoid any sharp pieces of steel. Their smartsuits were strong, but accidents could happen. All it would take is a small puncture to put any of his crew into danger and let an alien pathogen in. Aloysius scouted ahead using his boosters. Draco grinned. His Child of iNet friend would be able to identify the most stable route to the top.
“To your right, Captain. There is a clear, stable path there,” Aloysius said.
Draco followed Al’s suggested route and looked back over his shoulder. The giant pods were inching closer to them. They were all converging on Draco’s location. How could those giant pods detect his presence? They had no eyes or ears!
Then he remembered the smaller fleshlings from in the maintenance tunnels earlier. They had acted as the hunters for that monstrous flesh reaper that had almost caught them. There had to be something in the room feeding information to these pods. Something with eyes or ears.
“Al, scan the room for anomalies. Ignore these giant fucking things and look for something smaller. Something that might be moving around, keeping tabs on us,” Draco said.
“Yes, Captain.”
Aloysius fired up his boosters to maximum thrust and hovered about ten yards above Draco and Raze. He switched his optic sensors from night vision to thermal vision. The whole room looked different instantly. The huge pods were bright red, burning from the inside with organic heat. Changing things at a base genetic level and repurposing them as other organisms required a hell of a lot of energy. There were also smaller warm globs of flesh dotted around the cavernous ruin. They were on the floor, the ceiling and the walls. They were certainly alive, but completely stationary.
“Captain, I may have found something. I will need to investigate further. You will be on your own for a moment while I do so.”
“Go ahead, Al. We can manage.”
Aloysius flew through the dark void on his boosters towards one of the smaller globs of live flesh. He got closer to the red and white-hot blob and switched back to night vision. It took a moment for his mind to process what he saw.
The flesh seemed to grow out of the metal wall, and on the end of the fleshy nub was a human head. Its mouth opened and closed rapidly as though it was engaged in a heated debate. It had no lungs to project air through its vocal chords, but even then, the shapes it made with its mouth were meaningless. Aloysius could lip read almost every language used across the galaxy, but this head was spouting nothing but gibberish. It was the eyes that unnerved him, though. The eyes saw him. They moved quickly back and forth, like a rabies victim Aloysius had seen back on Old Earth before the exodus.
Aloysius fired a blast of superheated energy at the disembodied head, and it exploded in a gout of red muck. Something down below him made a low, bellowing sound of pain.
‘What’s going on up there? I heard gunfire,’ Draco asked through comms.
“I’ll spare you the gruesome details, but I think it is high time that we made a swift escape from this place,” Aloysius answered.
Aloysius flew back down to Draco and Raze as they continued climbing. Aloysius flew ahead and attempted the guide them through it safely once again.
Draco pushed himself hard to reach the top. The end was almost in sight. Just withi
n reach was the bottom of a still-open corridor that might lead them to the MagLev network. As he reached out to grab hold of a sturdy piece of steel, the rubble moved underneath him.
A deep bellow rattled through the ship.
Raze overtook Draco on the right. The big man had gotten luckier as the rubble shifted. Raze grabbed onto the stable bottom of the open space at the top of the pile of rubble. He clambered up into the corridor, turned around, then reached down towards Draco.
“Grab my hand, Captain!” Raze called out, but it was too late.
Draco shot out his hand and tried in vain to grab Raze’s outstretched hand, but the rubble beneath him gave way. Draco was swallowed by it.
Something made a sound so loud that it vibrated the water around Ava. The fleshy polyps danced as the waves of sound rumbled through the water.
“What the hell was that?” she asked.
“That’s the beast below. The thing that’s taken over the ship. Someone, somewhere must have done something it didn’t like,” Jaxon said.
“What is it?”
“Would you believe me if I told you I didn’t actually know?”
“Yeah, I would.”
“Last time I was on the Metropolis Seven, I just remember being scared out of my mind the whole time. To me, that was a long time ago. I was just a scared kid.”
“Are you still scared now?”
“I’ve never really stopped being scared. The nightmares of this ship stayed with me even after I made it back to New Earth. That’s a story for another time though, I think we’re almost there.”
Ava and Jaxon broke the surface and came face to face with one of the former passengers. There were two pink, naked legs and another appendage sprouting from its ass to give balance to the rest of its ungainly body. The arms were mostly intact, but its fingers had split apart. It looked as though it had about ten to fifteen needle-tipped fingers on each hand. The torso had been split in half, and from behind, the thing did not appear to have a head.
Ava and Jaxon pulled themselves onto dry land. That was when it heard them.
It turned towards them. Acrid bile stung the back of Ava’s thought as she choked back the vomit.
The fleshling’s head lulled to one side of its torso, merged with what used to be a ribcage. The head was human, but the eyes bulged and protruded like there was extreme internal pressure pushing them out from the inside. Its mouth opened when it saw Ava and Jaxon. The purple lips pulled back tight across its jaw. The mouth was filled with a lumpy mass of tumorous flesh. A wet raspy gargle escaped it, squeezing out between the cracked lips and the growth.
Ava spotted Vynce’s grey armor just behind the shambling horror.
He wasn’t moving.
The creature moved towards them with a speed that she didn’t expect. It closed the distance between them in seconds. Ava sidestepped the creature, and Jaxon jumped back into the water. Ava engaged her buster pods and punched the creature.
She wanted to break the fucking thing. She wanted to knock some of those jagged teeth out of its mouth. Break those jagged witch fingers. Burst that sack hanging out of its mouth.
Her fist sunk into the doughy flesh of the thing’s chest, then the buster pods amplified the kinetic energy and sent it flying away from her. She knocked the monsters backwards, but it quickly got back to its feet and zeroed in on her. She hadn’t hurt it. She’d just pissed it off.
Ava swore and pulled her assault rifle from its mag-holster on her back. She opened fire.
The first volley of bullets shredded one of the fleshling’s arms. It hung by a couple of sinewy threads, and inside the wound there were things moving. Pieces of muscle writhing about. She opened fired again and the arm fell limply to the ground. The fleshling’s wet gurgles reached a fever pitch. It stumbled towards Ava as its severed arm crawled towards Vynce. If it reached him, he was powerless to defend himself!
The fleshling groaned with effort as the tumorous growth in its mouth came sliding out of it like a snail from its shell. Shiny white points started to emerge from the skin on the thing’s chesthead. Its eyes bulged, and the growth began to pulsate. Then its head started to inflate as the pressure built up inside.
“Ava, run!” Jaxon yelled from the water’s edge.
She ran, but not fast enough. The last thing she saw before she felt a searing pain in her right arm was the thing’s eyeballs exploding outward.
Her HUD flashed a terrifying message.
Suit integrity compromised.
She looked down at her forearm and saw a long, white, bone-like protrusion stuck through it. It looked a little bit like a sting ray’s barb. She pulled it through the other side of the wound and threw it to the ground. Her suit would perform the necessary first aid on the affected area after it sealed itself again. The smartsuit’s self-repair and life-support function had saved her bacon more than once. Ava had been shot before and being shot hurt a lot worse.
Suit integrity 100%. Commencing first-aid.
After the thing’s limp body fell to the ground, Jaxon rushed to her side and asked, “Did it get you?”
Ava waved him away and said, “It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”
Jaxon grabbed her firmly by the shoulder and said, “Answer me with a yes or a no. Did anything from that creature touch you or get inside your suit?”
Ava shrugged him off and said, “No. I’m fine. Really.”
Her arm was still throbbing, and she kept thinking the same word over and over.
Infected.
Jaxon sighed audibly with relief, and Ava rushed over to Vynce’s side. He was unconscious but still breathing. Ava began to take his helmet off, but Jaxon stopped her.
“No. Not here. We need to get somewhere safe before we expose him to this atmosphere. Exposing him here might kill him.”
“Do you know this area of the ship?”
“Not in the slightest, but this area isn’t safe. Look at the infectious growths here on the wall. See those little vents on the outside of them? Look closely.”
There was that word again. Infectious. Ava shuddered at the thought. Her right arm was still throbbing. Even with the painkillers her suit administered, it still hurt like a sonofabitch.
She walked over to the polyp on the wall and inspected it. There were small holes all over its surface, which opened and closed rhythmically. A jet of air filled with tiny black specks shot out of it every time the sphincter opened.
“Thanks for the heads up,” Ava said.
Jaxon walked over to Vynce and picked him up effortlessly. “It’ll be easier for me to carry Vynce. You just keep your rifle pointed at anything that moves, all right?”
“I can do that,” Ava said.
If it hadn’t been for Draco’s smartsuit, the rubble would have crushed him. Instead of snapping his bones and liquifying his internal organs, he was trapped but alive. He struggled to find some leverage to crawl out, but he was stuck fast. A huge metal beam pinned him down by his chest from above, and one of his legs felt like it was stuck in a vice. There was barely any room to breathe.
‘Don’t panic, Captain. Raze and I are digging you out as we speak. Are you hurt?’ Aloysius asked.
“Not hurt. Just feeling a little claustrophobic.”
Draco focused on slowing his breathing down. He couldn’t let panic set in. His head already felt light, which meant that he wasn’t getting enough oxygen.
‘We’ll have you out soon,’ Raze said.
Draco tried to push against the metal beam across his chest, but the weight of the debris was too much. There was no way he was going to be able to move it from underneath.
The only thing he heard was the sound of his own breathing until there came a subtle sound from above. Small pebbles tumbled down in between the empty spaces and plinked off his visor. Raze and Aloysius were working on getting him out from above, but Draco didn’t know whether he would last that long.
Motes of light appeared in front of his eyes as a wave of vertig
o washed over him. He needed air, and he needed it now.
Suddenly the debris started move, but not from above. From below.
The pressure abated, and Draco gasped in as much air as he could. He limited himself after the first couple of breaths, careful not to overwhelm his system. Over-oxygenation would have been just as bad.
‘Captain, the pile is collapsing! Where are you?’ Al’s voice came through his comm channel.
“I’m beneath you. I’ll try and move upwards if I can, but I’m stuck fast.”
A booming roar thundered up from below as the debris pile lifted again. The thing beneath them was so massive that it could manipulate tons of concrete and steel as though they were grains of sand at the beach.
As the pile shifted, a beam of light reached Draco from either Raze of Aloysius’s flashlight.
“I see one of you!” Draco called out.
Frantic hands moved to clear the debris. Aloysius used his immense strength, and suddenly Draco locked eyes with Raze, who was safe, hanging half out of the corridor above.
“I see him!” Raze said. “Follow my flashlight!”
“This beam!” Draco said. He grabbed the beam that lay across his chest.
Aloysius grabbed the beam and tore it free. With the beam gone, Draco climbed back to his feet and stood on shaky legs. Thankfully, his suit integrity was still at 100%.
“Captain, permission to be reckless for a moment?” Aloysius asked.
“Permission granted.”
“Very well,” Aloysius said and put his arms around Draco from behind. “I suggest you hold on.”
Draco held onto Al’s arms a moment before Aloysius engaged his thrusters. He flew up to the corridor – towards Raze’s outstretched hand. Raze grabbed hold of Draco’s hand and hauled him up into the corridor. Aloysius landed next to them.
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