“But close enough for you to have a visual. That’s closer than I’d like.”
“Don’t worry about it. Just finish the task. You need to pull down a few degrees. We have to do this by eyeball, so stick to the plan.”
Our plan was relying on my brain’s spatial mapping skills, which didn’t fill me with confidence. But I had no choice. It was either crash this thing and end up stuck here with no food and water while waiting for our friend to destroy us, or I landed the pieces together, and we moved on to work with Slate and get out of here.
I tilted the stick while giving the slightest thrust from my left side. This gave the desired effect, and the prongs rubbed against Mary’s middle station piece just enough to cause her to cry out.
“Are you okay?” I asked her.
“I’m fine. Just about lost my footing. You’re there!” she said, and I could make out her peeking head on the side viewscreen feed.
The large hangar sections merged, magnets taking over when they were feet apart. The force pulled the rope I was attached to taut, and my ship tugged backward with it, sending me and my ship floating into the side of the station.
I didn’t care. I’d done it! I’d connected the top piece of the space station with the middle. Now we needed to focus on Slate’s section.
“I don’t mean to cut your celebration short, but the bogey is heading for Slate,” Mary said, and I found the landing controls, recessing them. The rope fell free from the ship, and I flew toward Mary, making sure to stay well enough away that my ineptitude at controlling it didn’t threaten her safety.
“Get into a ship; we need to get over there.” She was already moving before the suggestion was out of my mouth.
I flew toward the last piece of station that would complete our puzzle, moving slowly so Mary could catch up.
“Slate!” I called into my mic.
“Dean?” His voice carried into my ear as I closed in on his perimeter.
“Slate, are you all right?”
“I’m fine. There’s nothing here to harm me, is there? Other than boredom, maybe.”
“There’s a ship coming toward you – ”
“What kind of ship?” he asked, cutting me off.
I zoomed in with my viewscreen, now able to see a pixelated version of the bogey. It was probably smaller than our Kraski ships, with tendrils extending from the rear and front of it, reminding me of an insect. I’d seen its kind before. “This may sound crazy, but I think it’s one of the insectoid ships from Leslie and Terrance’s planet.” There had been a couple that had landed on their world over the course of our visits, but the race behind them hadn’t reached out to us. They seemed closed off, and unwilling to converse with humans.
After the rumors, and the harsh treatment of the hybrids, I wasn’t sure they ever would. Now, in some remote part of the galaxy, one of their ships was here. My gut wanted to think they were here to help us, but my brain told me otherwise.
“Slate, is your hangar open?” I asked, watching the insectoid ship lower near Slate’s hangar doors.
“Yeah. I was about to bust out of here, to look for you two. I figured it out. We need to…”
“Connect the pieces, we know. The other two are already attached.”
His laughter passed through my earpiece, and I could picture his goofy grin. “Of course they are. Dean and Mary are at it again. Come help me and let’s get out of here.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” I looked at the ship, which was just hovering there quietly. Were they waiting to talk?
“Oh, them? What should we do? I’ve always been a shoot first kind of guy.” Slate’s voice was tense now, unsure.
“Let’s see if there’s a way to communicate with them,” I said, but it was too late. “Slate, close the doors!” Two figures were dropping from the ship, thrust packs aiming them directly for his hangar entrance.
“Boss, I’m on it.”
“No, Slate, leave it open.” I heard Mary’s voice at the same time I saw her race by me in her own ship. She didn't hesitate as she flew the pyramid ship at breakneck speeds toward the containment field the two figures had just dropped into. Her ship arced nose up before diving directly down into the station’s open hangar doors.
“Be careful, Mary,” I called, but she was already gone. I swallowed a dry gulp of air as I chased after her. I slowed the ship, wondering if one of us should stay out and watch their vessel. I also had no idea how to use the weapons on this thing, so I elected to assist on the station. I knew how to fire my pulse rifle.
“They’re here,” Slate said, and I lowered my ship into the hangar bay, the energy field glimmering around my viewscreens as I passed through. I was moving too fast, so instead of slowly landing, I aimed for the corner of the room, hitting the ground hard between two other parked ships. I’d forgotten the landing gear in my haste.
The landing jarred my head, and shouting carried into my earpiece from both Mary and Slate. As I opened the pyramid ship door, the sound of pulse fire erupted around the room.
“Where are they?” I asked, staying low to the ground. I unslung my rifle, ready to take the invaders down.
“We’re by the control panel. Mary split the room when she rushed inside. She nearly clipped one of them with her ship,” Slate said, and I peered over the rows of ships, seeing the pulse-damaged walls above their location.
A beam of orange light passed over my head, causing me to roll behind one of the many pyramid ships lining the hangar floor. “Slate, buddy, this is a good time to shoot first,” I said, and he gave me some cover fire, allowing me time to rush over to their side of the room.
Slate and Mary were there, and my heart melted at the sight of my wife safely in front of me. I wanted nothing more than to get her the hell out of there, but we had to stop the insectoids from killing us first. She gave me a quick smile before firing her bow toward the far side of the hangar. The arrow stuck in the wall with a flash of light.
For a moment, the room went silent. No talking, no pulse fire, just silence. My ragged breath was all I heard.
Slate lifted his rifle and took off along the wall at a crouched run. Mary went the other way, and I followed behind her. Our boots clanged lightly, and I hoped we weren't giving away our positions. Another orange beam passed above us, but we kept going.
More pulse fire, and a grunt from Slate in my ear. “Boss, I got him. The other one turned away. He’s heading for you.”
Mary knelt. Half her body was covered by a crate in the corner of the room. We were near the corridor entrance, and when the insectoid entered our line of sight, it stood straight up as it spotted us. Instead of firing, it moved for the doorway.
“Crap, come on,” Mary said, running after it.
“Wait!” I called to her, worried it was an ambush. Instead, I arrived to see the creature face-down on the metal grate floor. It was only then I realized there was gravity inside the station. I’d been running on adrenaline. A wave of vertigo coursed over me as Mary stood over her fallen advisory, bow with nocked arrow raised and ready to go.
“Hold on,” I said, kicking its fallen gun out of its reach. I knelt beside the alien, noting how it was the same race as the ones we’d briefly met when we’d first followed the hybrids to Kareem’s world.
I pushed it over, revealing a hard-helmeted head, pinchers, and antenna accentuated with painted designs. Through a tinted face mask, a multitude of black eyes looked back at me. It tried to lift an arm but failed. The sound of its hand hitting the floor was jarring in the otherwise quiet corridor.
“What do you want?” I asked, suddenly drained of energy. My voice was a whisper.
“Theos,” a tinny voice said, speaking our language.
I grabbed it by the collar, lifting it off the ground a foot. “What about them?”
“Don’t…” It was dying, and the words were hardly more than a rasp.
I needed to hear what they’d come here for. “How did you find us? Don’t do what?
”
“Don’t wake…” It coughed, an alien sound like the mash-up of a cricket and human. “…them.” For effect, its hand gripped me weakly on the arm.
I set it down carefully. They wanted to warn us? “Don’t wake them?”
It twitched, and I let it be.
“It’s dead, Dean,” Mary said.
Slate walked up behind us, gun tight in his hand. “They might have more coming for us. The ship, remember?”
I hadn’t remembered.
“I found a camera system.” Slate led the way from the hall, and I glanced back at the body as the door to the corridor slid shut. They’d come to warn us about the Theos. Why did they come with guns firing? If they could speak English, why not talk first? Unless the easiest way to make sure we didn’t find the Theos was to kill us and move on. No one would be the wiser as to what happened. They’d just think we were killed during our journey to find the ancient race.
Mary kept an eye on the hangar door as I ran to the controls on the wall. The doors began sliding shut, sealing us off from the insectoid ship.
“Over here.” Slate was by the offices. He was changing cameras and looking for the invaders’ ship. “It’s gone. What in the hell’s going on here?”
“They came to warn us. It was a drop-off,” Mary said, staring at the screens.
“But why leave them?” I asked, confused by the whole thing.
“I wish we could ask them.” Mary was leaving the room, and I followed her to the one Slate had felled. It was clearly dead as well.
“Let’s finish this and get out of here. Any fun we were having on this trek is gone for me,” Mary said.
“Fun? Yeah, this was loads of fun until now.” The sarcasm dripped off my words.
Twenty-Two
It turned out Slate’s section of the station was indeed the rear, or “bottom” as I thought of it, and the gravity drive was intact, as well as small thrusters on the end. This allowed us to fly it to the other two connected parts of the station. In an hour, we were latching on, completing the puzzle.
“Good work, Mary,” Slate said from his seat beside her control desk, where she flew the oversized letter T. The station shook as we attached, and the dim lights brightened as everything became fully operational.
“Now what?” she asked. I think we all expected some big show of success, but we were left sitting in the room in complete silence.
“Land below. That’s what it had said. Then the Final will be upon us.” I reached for the tablet that was now vibrating on the desk in front of me. A planet appeared on the screen: the water planet we were orbiting. The image zoomed toward the water below and kept zooming until I saw a speck of land. Soon the island took most of the screen up, and coordinates scrolled below it.
“I guess that answers our question.” Slate stood up fast, his chair noisily clattering behind him.
“Does it? Are we supposed to take the station down there, or the pyramid ships?” I asked.
Mary tapped a gloved finger on the desk’s surface thoughtfully. “That island doesn’t look large enough for the station to land on.”
She was right. It was deceiving with nothing but water around it, but when you looked closely, it was obvious it wasn’t very large. “Then we take the small ships.”
____________
I lowered my ship toward the rocky mass, at last recognizing it as I got closer. It was the same island I’d seen when the Theos shadow had first touched me back in Sarlun’s room full of artifacts. There was no mistaking it now.
My screens showed Slate and Mary had already landed. They were both better pilots than I was. I bumbled my way down, this time remembering to use the landing gear.
I hit the door release, and it slid open. A breeze blew around me, and I wanted nothing more than to take my mask off and take a deep breath. I couldn’t do that quite yet. I was amazed at how familiar it felt, standing the thousand or so feet above the crashing waves below. It had only been a few days since I’d been there, but that time, it was all in my mind. I expected it to feel more solid, more real now, but it didn’t. It seemed exactly the same.
“Dean, is this…” Mary started to ask.
“It’s the same island.” I cut her off. It was strange to see Mary and Slate in their EVAs in the sunlight like this. The masks glimmered as light and sky reflected off their shiny surfaces. Mary’s eyes were wide, and the three of us walked near the edge, casting our gazes toward the horizon. The sea of blue went on forever in all directions, giving me a sense of loneliness on the waterlogged planet.
This must be it. The Final had arrived, just as the Theos shadow had warned, or urged, depending on how you looked at it. I was ready for it to be over. Slate’s shoulders slumped, and I knew he was on the same page as me. He’d only come along to protect us.
“It’s beautiful,” Mary said, and even though being there shot a series of emotions through my mind, she was right. Even from that distance, I noticed something moving in the water and pointed it out to them. A black form raced along the water’s surface, longer than any sea creature on Earth. The tail end of it emerged and splashed down, sending a burst of water into the air.
“It’s huge,” Slate said, stepping forward to get a better view. I grabbed his arm and he looked down, scrambling back when he noticed he was only inches from the edge of the island. To fall from there meant certain death. If you didn’t die from the fall, the waves crashing onto the cliff walls below would finish the job.
“What now?” I asked. As if answering me, rock crumbled behind us, directly in the center of the island.
“I hope it stops.” Mary’s voice had a panicked edge to it.
Once again, on cue, it ceased the internal cave-in, revealing crudely carved stairs covered by large mossy boulders.
“Ladies first,” Slate said, grinning at Mary.
“You wish. What do you think we brought you for, Zeke? Cannon fodder. What’s the saying, Dean?” Mary jibed back.
“Youth before beauty? That would fit in this case,” I said, getting a light punch on the upper arm from Slate.
“Yeah, yeah. Send the big guy in first. I feel like the canary in the mine shaft.” Slate still grinned but turned from us, taking a step onto the carved-out stairs. “There are lights down here.”
“Mary, whatever happens, let’s stick together and get home.”
She looked me in the eyes as water brimmed along the bottoms of her lids. “Dean, I think I’m ready.”
“Ready for what?” I asked.
“That family we talked about. All of this has opened something inside me. I don’t know why I was so gung-ho to do this adventure. Maybe I just felt like I needed a last hoorah before becoming a mother.”
I grabbed her hand, the glove on glove contact not enough to connect us like I wanted. “I get it. We’ve been through so much. Some painful, and some exciting and rewarding. I’m ready too.” My heart leapt in my chest, and I imagined Mary and I blowing bubbles in our backyard with a little baby girl on a blanket. Maggie would chase the bubbles along with our daughter, and it would end with us all rolling on the grass.
“Then let’s finish this,” she said, taking her first step down into the center of the island.
“You guys really need to remember I can hear everything you say,” Slate said, tapping his helmet where the earpiece sat.
I couldn’t even bring myself to be embarrassed. “You’re family. It comes with the territory.”
With a last glance at the sunny sky, I headed down the steps, ready for the final challenge.
The stairs spiraled downwards, and we kept moving along them. There were glowing crystals merged into the walls every few yards, allowing us ample light to see where we were going. We didn’t speak as we climbed down, just marched at a solid pace. It must have been five minutes before the staircase ended, opening into a room.
“What the hell is this?” Slate asked, crossing the sterile space toward the far side, where three chairs stood. They
reminded me of dentist’s office chairs, the kind that leaned back to a full one hundred and eighty degrees. Otherwise, the room was carved out of the island rock, like the spiral stairs had been.
We each stood at the base of one of the chairs, looking at them. The material was strange, silky but stiff at the same time.
“Who wants to go first?” Mary asked.
“Go where?” I asked, still poking the chair with a finger. I watched as the material sank in, then slowly rose back up to its original form.
Mary didn’t answer. Instead, she hopped on the chair and lay back on it. “Kind of comfy. I could use a nap…” She closed her eyes, smiling. They darted open, wide and afraid. She let out a stifled cry, her whole body rigid and taut for an instant before it fell back on the chair like a marionette without its puppeteer.
“Mary!” I ran to her side, grabbing her hand. Our suits were alien enough, I had no idea if they read vitals or not. I noticed a drop of blood on the gray chair, behind her head, and knelt beside her. “Slate, look at this.”
He knelt on the other side of her and saw the same thing I did: a wire going into the back of her head. “Damned Theos. What do we do?”
Her chest rose and lowered slowly, a weak but constant breath. “I think she’s okay. This must be the last part of our journey. We have to plug in to find out.”
“You sure this is a good idea, boss?”
I shook my head. “I’m not sure of anything, but I can’t leave Mary to do this herself. You stay here and guard our bodies.”
Slate looked frazzled, but he grabbed his pulse rifle, moving to perch himself between the chairs and the stairway. “I don’t like the sounds of that either, but I’ll do it for you guys. Hurry back.”
I gave Mary’s hand a last squeeze and stood by the chair beside her, leaving the end one open. I felt the back of my helmet, noticing a small circle on it. They had planned on connecting us here. The suit was made for it. This was it. The final chapter before we got the location of their homeworld. Love or hate the Theos, we were damned close to finding them.
The Survivors Box Set Page 80