Skyquakers

by Conway, A. J.

  He came to the bed and looked down.

  Ned managed to open his eyes. His body was lathered in sweat. His stomach hurt. His head hurt. Every breath was difficult. He could feel the fever destroying him from the inside, and he could tell by the sorrowful looks on the white-scarfed Quakers tending to him that there was not much they could do. There was a tube connecting a machine to his bellybutton, and inside he could feel a long needle, feeding him fluids through his organs. The fluid seeping into his guts was a soft pink in colour, ice-cold to touch, and clearly had an analgesic effect; the white room looked fuzzy and his movements were slow and laboured.

  Ned saw Psycho standing over him, staring down with cold, merciless eyes. He noticed his hand was clenched by his hip, concealing something. Ned couldn’t help but to smile at the bastard. He knew what he was getting away with. He could see Psycho was red with anger, and it was a pleasure to know, despite all the cities he had burned and all the massacres he had orchestrated, that this was his ultimate failure.

  Psycho looked down at him and said, ‘I can’t save you, but you can save her.’ His concealed fist tightened.

  Ned snickered, ‘You’re out of time, aren’t you?’

  ‘I can make it worse. I can make it hurt.’

  ‘It already hurts.’

  He asked very slowly, ‘Tell me where she is.’

  Ned told him to go to hell.

  Psycho snapped. There was no time to be delicate anymore; there was no point in holding back his rage any longer. He lunged at Ned with a small steel scalpel, hidden in his tightened fist. He leapt forward to stab him in the gut, but Ned saw it coming. In a burst of energy, he managed to hold him off. He seized Psycho’s wrist mid-thrust and the two struggled back and forth. The scalpel came within millimetres of slicing through Ned’s bare chest, but before his muscles caved, he sharply twisted his wrist, and Psycho dropped the blade with a cry. He lunged for it again as it clattered to the floor.

  Ned threw himself off his bed, and with all his weight, he took Psycho down. He wrapped the cord extending from his bellybutton around Psycho’s neck and began pulling back – hard. The two wrestled on the floor of the clinic, trying to pull away from each other. Psycho, gasping for air, saw the discarded scalpel, but it was just beyond the reach of his fingertips. He felt Ned on his back, pulling on his own plastic tubes with the true determination to kill him. Psycho felt the pressure in his skull begin to throb. He elbowed Ned in the gut before his vision went too blurry. Ned made a choking noise and lost his grip. The two pulled away from each other. Psycho coughed and wheezed; his face was as red as a tomato.

  Ned knew he had to get out. He looked down at his stomach and saw the cord connecting him to the machines. Biting his lip, he agonisingly tore the tube out, along with a one-inch needle that had been lodged into his guts. It hurt like hell. It bled a lot, but once he was free, he got to his feet and ran.

  By the time Psycho regained his breath, Ned had escaped out the door of the clinic.

  ‘Someone stop him!’ he screamed, and he took chase.

  Captain was almost having too much fun. With a wild, half-tonne mutant running loose in the warehouse, the laboratory quickly turned into a circus of death. With ferocious leaps, the hybrid feline pounced from one victim to another, too quick for them to raise their projectiles and fire. With another pinned, it ripped off its arms and head with crushing jaws. Captain only had to be a little faster than the crewman running behind him to avoid being eaten. Within minutes, the whole warehouse was splattered with blood and visceral pieces of his own kind. Captain avoided a near-miss of the monster’s giant paw by climbing up the walls of the pods, just inches out of its grasp. Others tried to climb as well, but when their feet slipped on a glass shell, there was nothing but a mouth full of teeth waiting to catch them below.

  To make it even more fun, Captain found his way to the sealed warehouse door and forced it open, unleashing the hybrid onto the rest of the ship. On the other side of the barricade, another small army of guards were waiting to arrest him, all dressed in chemical suits. The beast roared and lunged at them, green sparks flying. Running and gunfire carried on. Captain managed to slip out undetected.

  The beast continued destroying everything in its path as it thundered down the corridors ship. It crashed into walls, destroyed things with its claws, and sucked up projectiles into its thick fur like mere stings. It roared, and the electrical current from its fluorescent fur sparked against the ship’s walls with bolts of green lightning.

  Captain climbed the pipes into the ceiling as the carnage carried on beneath him. He found a series of wires inside an electrical panel and began ripping them and reconnecting them. He managed to tear his way into the cloud’s PA system, and, with a handheld transmitter, he found a way to project his voice throughout the entire ship.

  Captain relayed a message entirely in the native language, a message only meant for one.

  Ned was limping through an alien spaceship with one hand over his bleeding stomach, no shoes on his feet, no shirt, and with the blurred vision of a patient who had stumbled out of a dentist’s chair too early. While the enormity and spectacle of the ship left him entranced, it was the blazing sirens and distant sounds of gunfire which kept him in motion as he urgently ran from his captors. He stumbled down long corridors of silver and white, through heavy doors, into sectors that housed foreign and epic technologies far beyond the realm of human understanding. From the inside, the truth about this entity was finally clear: the storm was, and always had been, a machine. The heavenly beams were its weapons. The spiralling shapes it made during its thunderstorms were vapour and exhaust. Gazing upon the innards of this incredible ship made him see how humans never stood a chance. Those days of learning how to shoot in the fields and fend for themselves had been a waste of time. Draining water from a tree, setting fire to a farm, even hiding in a fridge; there was no way he could have ever beat them.

  We were doomed from the beginning.

  Once, during the time he spent imprisoned with the ship’s former captain, Ned asked between beatings how many there were. Captain said there were eight clouds just like this one, scattered across the world. Eight clouds. And this was by no means the biggest.

  He came to a sealed metal door at the end of the corridor. Shit. The door made a ding noise and he realised it was an elevator. Hurriedly, he hid in a shadowy niche as six Quakers emerged from the confines of the cubicle and ran by, armed with guns which looked to be made of glass. They ignored him, as though there was some other more dangerous threat to be worried about. He kept his back pinned to the wall and waited, panting, until it was clear to move on.

  A bullet then pierced the wall just above Ned’s head, making him flinch and curse. He looked up and saw Psycho at the other end of the corridor, armed with a small black-barrelled gun and striding directly towards him. He stretched out his arm to fire again, but suddenly there was a voice, an electronic voice, which blasted from the walls and ceiling and began talking to them in English.

  ‘Get to lowest platform! Get to ze beams! Ze beams!’ It crackled and faded in and out, but the voice was familiar.

  Psycho gazed around him. ‘How the hell did he—?’

  Ned heard the alien talking to him in his thick, Eastern European accent.

  ‘You must follow plan! You must!’ he cried. ‘Zhey are vaiting for you! You must take her! Take her to them! Go! Go now! Go back to Planet and save my Lo!’

  Ned knew what he meant. The plan.

  ‘Lily,’ he panted.

  The other Quakers on the cloud all paused and could not understand the native language as it rang out across the public airwaves. Many of the transitioned humans in silver suits could hear the words, but did not understand their meaning. They simply shrugged to one another.

  ‘Get to lowest platform! Door with circles! Go n—’

  The power went out. The PA system was cut off in order to stop the Captain from relaying his secret message. The voice died, b
ut by the time they located where the Captain had hacked the system, he was gone. He had slipped away through vents and pipes once again. The crewmen stood about, scratching their heads, and pondered what crazy act of madness he was going to commit next.

  Then a new alarm sounded, and an electronic voice began relaying the ominous message: ‘Danger, danger, danger.’

  13

  MELTDOWN

  The lights went out. Darkness settled across the entire cloud. Only the red flashing beams of muted sirens still lingered, briefly washing corridors in red and orange, then leaving them to the shadows again.

  Psycho lost track of his prey. When the red hue of the alarms washed over the dark corner where he had cornered his prisoner a moment before, it revealed he had vanished. All that remained were little droplets of blood on the floor, marking his movements like breadcrumbs. The red stains showed he had disappeared into the elevator.

  ‘Shit.’

  A handheld radio in his suit pocket connected him directly to Engineer.

  ‘They’ve escaped, both of them. Send everyone.’

  Vet arrived at the animal warehouse far too late. It was a graveyard of dismembered bodies and blood, scattered around a sprung cage in the centre of the experimental platforms. There was extensive damage where the giant cat had crashed into walls, pods, computers and support beams. It was a mess, both biologically and structurally.

  In panic, he raced to the human warehouse, but thankfully it remained undisturbed. A hundred million natives still slept soundly in their tiny worlds, stacked high up along the walls in rows of tens of thousands. A supercomputer at the far end hummed in the diminished light, but no analogue programs were running, as per Engineer’s orders. DNA samples from these natives had not been taken and tested for any possible matches with known species from their own planet; these intelligent beings were instead set to be incinerated. The pressure Vet had put on the bossy boy to alert the Captain of this extermination had worked better than he expected: the old coot was running wild, disrupting as many operations as possible in order to keep Engineer preoccupied. From the sight of the bloodshed next door though, Vet could see the captain’s actions were getting out of hand. These specimens were now in danger; should the ship lose any integrity in relation to power, pneumatic pressure, or general structural reliability, he could lose every single one of them. Around him, he could hear the sirens. The danger signal was roaring, and Vet began counting the remaining minutes until the ship succumbed to complete devastation. Every so often there was a clang of metal, a shout, some gunfire, more sirens and alerts.

  Vet came to one of the sleeping pods and brushed away droplets of warm condensation with his hand. He looked down onto a sleeping face, with a tube connecting her to a machine, pumping her full of life. A shame. Biologically and evolutionarily, they were remarkable creatures. Had there been a way to preserve them, to integrate them into the New World as seamlessly as the other analogues, perhaps they would have found a place amongst them in the expanding new ecosystem.

  He found something in the pocket of his robes; a glass vial. He had forgotten about it. The vial contained a small amount of red fluid, the life fluid of the little native dying in his clinic. Curious, he moved towards the supercomputer. He lodged the needle end of the vial into an injection port. He ran the program and he waited.

  Ned ducked into the elevator at the first opportunity; the lights flickered out and in a second he was gone. He sealed himself within the metal cubicle, panting, still bleeding. He collapsed against the wall for a moment, trying to maintain his balance and focus. The elevator was moving, even though he hadn’t pushed any buttons yet. He was going up and he didn’t know how to stop it. There was no way of telling where he would wind up in this spaceship.

  There was a ding and the steel doors slid open. Ned found himself on another floor of the ship, an identical linear corridor, but this one was occupied by six Quakers dressed in chemical suits, armed with black weapons. They turned their heads. They saw him through their glossy gas masks. One pointed and shouted at him, startled by an escaped animal. They raised their guns to fire at the wild contaminant. Ned backed into the corner of the elevator, covered his head with his arms, and shut his eyes.

  Before they sprayed him with bullets, there was a roar. The darkness lit up with a flash of green. A mutant tiger appeared from nowhere, charging around the corner, horns poised and jaws pried open. It rammed into the army of Quakers, piercing two through their guts with its ivory horn, while others were snapped up and crushed between bloodthirsty teeth. Ned watched in horror as the animal tore the Quakers apart. Hurriedly, he launched for a button inside the elevator – any button – and impatiently waited for the doors to seal again.

  Silence. Ned fell back, panting. It was too much stimulation, too much chaos. What the hell was that thing?

  The elevator was going down again. Ned knew he could not keep this up, going up and down, trapping himself in a small cubicle surrounded by gun-wielding aliens and giant, horned tigers as he slowly bled to death. He had to get out. He had to keep his promise to Captain. Stick to the plan.

  In the silence of the descending cube, Ned noticed the long list of buttons on the side wall. They reached higher than his head, although at ideal heights for a two-metre Quaker. Each was labelled with a very simplistic character which he could guess was a number or letter. It was only the last button, at the very base of the list, which drew his attention. Instead of an alien character, the button simply depicted a distinct pinkish-purple glowing ring.

  Door with circles, he recalled Captain saying. Ze beams.

  Ned pushed the button. He stood up and prepared to face whatever stood on the other side of those doors.

  I’m coming home, Lily.

  Engineer was pacing up and down the bridge, too anxious to sit, when the final alarms sounded and the power began to fade. He checked the control bench in front of him. The gauges were in the red. The cloud had lost all control of its pressure, its internal temperature, its atmosphere, and its fail-safe systems had been manually dismantled. Captain, that maniacal parasite, had finally wriggled into the heart of the cloud and initiated a complete and irreparable nuclear meltdown. The radioactive core in the centre of the ship, keeping them elevated, powering their engines, and keeping the air breathable, was minutes away from self-destruction.

  Engineer had to pause for a moment. He briefly wondered if this was a joke, but the alarms relating to the ship’s power plant were stacking up exponentially each second. He was super-charging the generators, draining coolant, and destroying pressure detectors. The reactor was in overdrive, and there was nothing stopping it from snowballing into a catastrophe. The technicians were in full panic mode as they rushed to find every possible fix, but there was not enough time. Already they could feel the walls shaking. Hot steam was gushing out from loose crevasses in the bowels of the cloud. Things were bursting into flames. The reactor had already passed the point of no return; shutting it down at this stage was impossible.

  Engineer had nothing more to say to his crew, so he hung up. He sat in the commander’s chair for a moment and tapped his fingers. He began making external calls to other clouds, to different ships around the Planet, warning them of the impending disaster on board. A rogue captain, escaped specimens, enormous structural damage, and now a meltdown; officers of other clouds were astounded that such a desolate corner of the Planet could spark such unruliness. He asked for their assistance, he pleaded for it, but there was little anyone could do: this damage was internal and Engineer had to deal with it himself. That was the role of the commander, right?

  He hung up and slammed his fists in rage. He called them spineless bastards under his breath. The one downfall of his species was their ruthless adherence to protocols and procedures, and in instances such as this, they knew it was more feasible to simply cut the weakest link. If Engineer should fall, he should fall alone.

  He hung his head. He ignored all calls coming through, calls o
f panic, calls for help. He required peace at this moment. He switched off the radio bands and let the silence sink in. He paced up and down the bridge, meandering from one side to another. He ran his hand along the glistening silver and glass digital control benches. The cloud was a spectacular machine. It had carried them across galaxies, costing them almost every last resource so that their species may have a chance of surviving elsewhere. A floor-to-wall window, spanning the entire length of the bridge, gave him a view of the world beneath him: sand, salt, poisonous things… It was an ugly place, but Engineer had once had great plans for it. Pity he would never see them come to fruition.

  In the dimness of the vacant room, Engineer felt the lingering presence of an intruder. He spun. He found Captain, sitting in his former position in the cosy chair reserved for the ship’s commander. Captain was dressed for a momentous occasion in his thick, navy blue robes, draped over his shoulders and almost touching his feet. He wore boots, black gloves, and had a headscarf neatly wrapped around his high forehead. He was adorned in all of his badges and medals from previous space missions, pinned across his robes. He was dressed as a captain. He sat there with the integrity of a captain. And he grinned.

  There were some final words. There was talk of treachery, of honour, and of supremacy. They spoke of the ‘great vision’ and how it had been besmirched by greed. Engineer’s dream of a new paradise was, in Captain’s eyes, a dark, horrible future of tyranny that he could never allow. Captain despised his colleague for the way he treated his child, whose lust for power was now as disturbing as his own. There was no love. There was no sympathy, no compassion. Engineer argued, in return, that this meltdown would result in the death of every living thing on this cloud, including the animals, his own crew and their families, and the sleeping bodies of millions of native children, just like his precious, little Lo. Captain understood the price, but by shutting down the cloud, he was ridding the world of a sort of ‘plague’ which he believed his own species had become. They had already destroyed one planet; what made them think they were worthy of destroying another?