“Everybody, make your way to the edge of the cliff and start climbing down it. Make sure you hold onto the rocks tightly, and after scaling the cliff, try and make your way to safety, hopefully into one of the caves. You need to get out of the blast zone. If we are lucky, the blast radius will bounce off the ground and remain at a consistent level, missing us as we go below ground. It’s our only chance,” Timson said, watching the people of the colony run for their lives. He wasn’t sure if any of them heard what he’d just said, but there was every chance that at least somebody did. Somebody like a leader. They themselves couldn’t lead the pack from behind. By the time they began to move, the beam had turned into a solid red light. By Timson’s own calculations, they didn’t have more than a few minutes before the explosion. So time was of the essence.
And that’s what Timson, his two crew mates and Gustoff and April did. They ran. At first, they were at the back. But as they gained pace, they ran past some of the frailer, less athletic colony members. Gustoff felt an immense feeling of desperation run through him. Desperation and guilt. He wasn’t fond of the colony members. But he didn’t want to see any of them suffer. So as he ran, he pushed and shoved some of the weaker colony members toward him. He grabbed one of the elderman by the arm, clinging onto his flapping cape, and dragging him toward the others. As they all ran, the colony huts started to become smaller. Dirt and dust was being kicked up by their collective running feet. Some of the dust was causing members of the colony to struggle for air. But the stampede of humanity managed to get out of the colony perimeter within thirty seconds. Now they were all running through the forest. Past trees and branches. Leaves and twigs. Bushes and rocks. Clunking under their feet. Rapid movements. Breaking twigs. Snapping heels. Wet feet. Through a stream. Over a hill. Another thirty seconds passed. The beam was still visible from behind. It was casting a dark shadow over the woods. The trees above became as red as the sky. Timson didn’t dare look back. He knew it was close. He’d seen it before. It was protocol. When a ship went missing or was captured by adversaries, then it would be blown up. The tech would have to remain safe. It couldn’t fall into the enemies’ hands.
Second Earth was not a threat. The only threat at that moment in time was Earth. Earth were the ones responsible for the beam. They knew that Timson and his two crew mates were not dead. They would have seen that at the very last moment of contact that they’d been alive. They were supposed to send a team of rescue personnel to their location. But instead, they blow the ship up. Just shows how easy it was for Earth to kill. To kill their own. Just for the sake of saving face. And as the beam grew more intense, and the light became even darker, turning the sky above into a premature night, Gustoff, April, Timson and his two crewmates reached the summit of a medium-sized hill. After an exhausting climb, they reach the others. People were now disappearing off the edge of the ground. It was as if the ground had disappeared. Like it had broken off, an iceberg of some sorts. But this was no iceberg. This was a cliff. A cliff that stretched and reached for the skies. As Gustoff and Timson watched men and women slowly scale the cliff, disappearing from sight, Timson turned around and observed the beam of light. The beam had started to flicker. This was it. It was going to blow. Any second now, and the end would commence. Gustoff was the first of them to start scaling the cliff. Then it was April. And then it was Timson’s two crew mates. But Timson remained standing there, staring at the beam. He didn’t dare take his eyes off the wondrously dangerous light. A flurry of thoughts were rushing through his head. The most prominent one was a question. Why did it take so long for the ship, the pod they were on, to self-destruct? In the time that the beam had come into existence, Timson had managed to get most of the colony members to the edge of the cliff. The majority of them were now scaling the cliff. They’d had plenty of time to get away from the explosion. Usually, remembering the stories that he’d heard from other pod pilots that lost ships in the past, self-destruction switches didn’t usually take longer than half a minute to set off. But for some reason, this self-destruction switch was taking its sweet ass time. Maybe it was the distance between Earth and Second Earth, two-point-five million light years was a lot of distance after all. Plenty of real estate. Plenty of obstacles for the signal to bounce off of. A smile crept across Timson’s face. It was absurd. There he was thinking and analysing like a Captain whilst his life was in immediate danger. I guess my mind really doesn’t ever switch off, he thought to himself.
He was just about to turn back around and make haste for the cliff’s edge when everything went bright. His vision was blurred. The beam had disappeared. The self-destruction switch had gone off. An explosion shortly followed. Timson dived to the floor. He braced himself for the inevitable. He felt something grab him. A hand. It was pulling him. But then everything went dark.
As dark as the night.
Chapter Five
Commander Williams is nervously pacing up and down the width of the atrium. Plastic tubing hangs from the ceiling. He swats a PVC pipe away from his face as he holds his radio in his hands. The Commander is nervously looking from left to right. Williams didn’t like the dark. And this place was really dark. So dark, the shadows seemed to go on forever, blanketing the interior of the medium-sized room. The shadows weren’t covering up much anyway, seeing that all the room consisted of was piping and machinery. From what he’d seen of the Orion Traveller so far, granted he’d only really been in the atrium, the ship wasn’t much of a looker. Most Captains of fleet ships took pride in the way they presented their vessels. But for other captains, a ship was nothing to be proud of. It was just a machine. A machine to get them from point A to point B. And Commander Williams was willing to bet his mortgage that the Captain of this ship, wherever he was, didn’t take much pride in the Orion Traveller.
“Just a piece of junk floating in bloody space,” Williams said, feeling as if the shadows were creeping up on him, as if they were about to pounce, grappling him to the ground. But then he blinked. The shadows retreated. It was all just in his mind.
“A flashlight would come in handy,” Williams said to himself, immediately realising how silly he sounded, him being the only person in the room, talking to himself like an absolute madman.
There would be a radio check soon. And then he’d know his men were safe. For that was all that really mattered. The anticipation was really making him feel uncomfortable. Deep down, the Commander knew that he was afraid of the dark. But what he was more afraid of was losing a man on duty. He’d never done so before, and wasn’t planning on doing so now. So the radio check couldn’t come any quicker. But it wasn’t as if he could just do it willy-nilly. There were protocols to follow. And Williams was all about following the protocols. He needed to give his men enough time, enough time to search the ship. There was no use doing a radio check when there was nothing to check. The priority of the mission was still to get in contact with the crew members of the pod that crash-landed on the planet below. But a new mission directive had been presented to the Commander. An unofficial mission directive. Once their comms had gone out, it had forced Williams to go off the beaten track. He wasn’t much of a risk taker or a rule breaker, but today, right at this moment, Williams was all of those things.
But no matter what, there were some protocols that you just couldn’t break. And not leaving a man behind was one of them. It was a rule that Commander Williams took very seriously. The Commander looked at his watch, three minutes until radio check. Hopefully, by then, one of his men would have found the whereabouts of the Orion Traveller’s crew or its captain …
Somewhere on the third floor, in the east corridor of the Orion Traveller;
Teddy had the barrel of his gun pressed firmly against his right shoulder. As he walked, his back arched up, aiming down the sights, taking in his surroundings with caution. The red dot sight mounted on the top of the barrel was helping Teddy see better in the dark. But the shadows around him were playing tricks on his eyes. He was seeing things. Sudd
en movements. He was hearing things. Creaks and cracks as he walked down the corridor. The walls seemed to be closing in on him. The ground was a little uneven. His heart was thumping in his chest; his hands tightly gripped the smooth body of the firearm. The back end of the gun was weighty. His forearms were tense as he swooped his sights from left to right, left to right. But all was quiet. Bar the creaks and cracks, they continued. The pounding in his chest droned on. Yes, Teddy was frightened. If he’d been able to get the comms to work on the ship, then he wouldn’t be there now, walking down a deserted and darkened hallway, holding a gun, waiting for the worst to happen. But he wasn’t able to get the job done. And because of him and his lack of experience, he and his crew members, plus Commander Williams now found themselves on the Orion Traveller.
Teddy wasn’t stupid; he could tell something was going on. Something bad. Crewmembers didn’t just vanish into thin air. They had to be somewhere. And he knew that they’d find them. But the question remained, were they alive? Or had something gotten to them? Those were the two scenarios running through Teddy’s head. Those were the only fathomable options. The only fathomable scenarios. Teddy had had a few thoughts on the subject of the missing crew members on the Orion Traveller, but walking down the hallway, staying alive, was his only objective at that moment in time. And something was telling him, something deep down within his belly that staying alive would be the only thing that his crew and his Commander would be focusing on from now on. The shadows around him held many secrets. But Teddy was none the wiser to them.
The fourth floor, Research Room Seven, the Orion Traveller.
Sam “Samuels” Sampson was also feeling the pressure as he entered a room marked research room seven. He had his sidearm equipped. The gun was rattling in his grip a little. He was never really a steady shot. Back in training, on Earth, he’d been known as the kid that couldn’t hit a bull’s-eye from a metre away. Sam didn’t think highly of himself. He knew that he wasn’t that great at being a Marine. That’s why he failed the Marine Corps. But he was a great data analyst. And he did data analysing just fine. Better than anybody on the crew. That’s why Earth and The Company hired him. That’s why he got paid seventy-five-thousand credits a year. Fifty-thousand credits more than anybody else. Anybody else in his field that is. So even though Sam didn’t think much of himself, at times he was grateful for the gift he had. The gift of analysing data. The gift of subtracting and multiplying numbers. It was a gift that helped him see and read between the lines. And that’s what was needed on this current mission. The ability to be able to see the bigger picture.
That’s why Sam “Samuels” Sampson found himself in the research room. He’d spotted it on his way down a dingy and dark corridor. A corridor that had been filled with shadows. He’d grown too afraid to stick it out any longer. Too afraid to carry on his search and rescue down the dark corridors. There were far too many of them. He and his team had split up. But in doing so, all the pressure had also been split. Like atoms, splitting into millions and millions of tiny pieces, the pressure had been fragmented around the deserted ship. He was sure that some of his crew members would be dealing with the pressure just fine. Most of them would be excellent at dealing with and working with such pressures. The pressure to find the crew. The pressure to get the comms up and running on their ship again. The pressure to go and rescue the stranded pod crew members on that mysterious planet below them. All those pressures would be helping his team progress. It would be helping them succeed. But not Sam. Sam didn’t work well under pressure.
“Research Room Number Seven,” Sam said, turning on his dictation microphone that he carried around with him. He’d seen it in many Science Fiction films and novels. The member of the team that carried research equipment with them usually carried a personal recording device. Equipment to log every detail of every encounter and situation they partook in. Logging details and dictating what findings Sam and the crew came across wasn’t part of his job description. But it was something that Sam enjoyed doing.
Hopefully Research Room Number Seven would have something interesting in it. Something that he could log into his database. His personal database. The journal to the stars. There were thousands of log entries. Should make good reading when he retires. But retirement was a long way off. And judging by the shadows that seemed to be creeping up on him, he’d need to focus on getting off the Orion Traveller alive. Retirement would have to wait.
The basement level, communal shower rooms, the Orion Traveller.
Lucas enjoyed playing tricks on his crewmates. He was a boisterous type. He had no qualms about displaying his playful side. But as the mission continued, and the hours trudged away, evaporating into time like time so often does, Lucas’s playful and boisterous side evaporated along with it. There was nothing fun, comical or enjoyable about this mission. He was only a recruit. Commander Williams and the members of the crew had yet to call him anything different. A lot of them didn’t even know his surname. And for a second or two, as recruit Lucas walked down the basement level, he’d also forgotten his own surname. But it came back to him. Obviously, no one actually forgets their surname. Unless they’ve had some sort of head trauma. And the more Lucas thought about it, the more he likened his signing up to this outfit akin to suffering massive head trauma and blood loss. He must be stupid. A bump on the head surely explains his willingness to sign up to be a crew member of this rescue mission.
“Yeah, a massive fucking head wound, that’s what this is,” Lucas said as he stopped dead in the middle of the basement and looked at his surroundings.
Since he’d step foot on the Orion Traveller, there’s one thing he’d noticed; the whole ship was a ghost ship. Both in resemblance and metaphor. It looked like ago ship while walking through it. There wasn’t much light. The only source of illumination was coming from the torches on their suits. Head torches. Shoulder torches. The Orion Traveller seemed to have suffered a catastrophic loss of power. The way the ship was just floating above orbit of the mysterious planet below was eerily similar to a horror movie. A planet that they’d been sanctioned to run a rescue mission on. A planet that supposedly had life signs on it. Satellite imagery of heat signatures. Organic life. A cluster of buildings. Buildings that resembled shelter. Intelligent life. That’s what the rumblings on the radio had contained. The radio that they’d listen to on the way to the planet. On the way to the Andromeda Galaxy. Lucas usually didn’t hold much credence to pirate radio, but he enjoyed listening to it as much as any other acting soldier. Commander Williams didn’t have a problem with Lucas listening to the radio on his augmented personal suit system. So that is what Lucas had done on the journey to the planet. He’d listened to wild stories of government conspiracies. How there were rumblings that the so-called habitat had been found. To this day, Lucas didn’t know where these pirate radio presenters got their material from, but nine times out of ten, surprisingly enough, they’d been right. Did that mean that they were right about this? Could it be that there was life on the planet below? And if so, how does that link with the missing crew members of the Orion Traveller? Had they abandoned ship? Would Commander Williams’s men find the crew members of the Orion Traveller on the planet below?
“I suppose that could be a possibility…” Lucas said, catching his breath whilst taking in the derelict and dark surroundings of the basement level of the Orion Traveller. Lucas hadn’t been paying much attention to the shadows on the walls. If he had been - he would have noticed that the shadows were forming a shape. A silhouette. A silhouette that was getting ever so close to Lucas.
And as Lucas stood there, twiddling his thumbs, looking up at the ceiling, admiring how it seemed to stretch and stretch above, the shadowy shape slowly floated toward Lucas. Inches away from Lucas’s back, the shadowy shape took form. And before Lucas could let out a whimper, the shadow had overtaken him. It wrapped its dark tentacles around Lucas’s neck. Before the young recruit could scream, he’d been dragged to the floor and the s
hadow now consumed him.
The atrium, mid-level, the Orion Traveller.
Commander Williams looked at his watch. Eight minutes had passed since his team had all gone in different directions. It was now time. He’d grown antsy in anticipation of commencing a radio check. For some reason, he’d had a bad feeling about all of this. A feeling that was becoming ever more apparent. The shadows around him seemed to be moving. At first, he thought it was just his mind playing tricks on him. But the more he studied the shadows around him, the more he became convinced that something was lurking within them. And Williams didn’t want to hang around to find out what truly fuelled the darkness that engulfed this ship.
He tapped the button on his PDA unit strapped to his arm. He pressed a green square that went red as he put pressure on it. The button he’d pressed was the communications button, a direct radio system that ran from his suit to each of his crew members. A pop-up floated across the screen. On the pop-up, he saw that he’d lost signal with three of his team members. The GPS system on their suits had gone awry. The blips that he was expecting to see vanished into thin air. His crew members were gone. All five of them. He tried to make contact. But all he was getting was static in his ears. Like nails on a chalkboard, reverberating through the middle section of his brain. Outwards, like ripples in the ocean. Waves crashing against him. Getting him wet with perspiration.
“Anybody read me?” The Commander said into his microphone. But nobody replied. The LED screen on his PDA system suddenly cut out. It went dark. The torch on his helmet started to flicker. As it did, the Commander looked up. In front of him was a door that one of his crew mates had walked through earlier. It was opening. Slowly. But nobody was on the other side. Just darkness. A dark hollow shadow staring back at him. At first, the Commander thought he was seeing things. But then he was seeing nothing. His torch went out. The flickering climaxed with a burst bulb. The sound of his torch fizzling out made the Commander jump.
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