Harbinger

by Stephen Christiansen

  Tracy screamed one more time. The nightmare before her just wouldn’t stop. Although Earth had become a very violent place, she wasn’t accustomed to violence itself. Whenever another riot would happen, or a civil war would break out, her father would shelter her from it by either removing her from the area or simply hiding all of the social media that was pertaining to the conflicts.

  “Stop it! Stop it!”

  Tracy hoped that her near-hysteric pleas would bring some sense to the scene, but nothing was happening. Vincent was going to die and she would be next if she didn’t do something. All she really wanted to do was run and hide.

  Then it happened. Something inside of her snapped. She didn’t know if it was panic or desperation. Somehow she seemed to watch as her body ran toward one of the larger pieces of shrapnel, grabbed it, and then ran toward the alien creature with the piece in hand.

  “Stop it! Stop it!” Tracy continued to scream.

  She didn’t remember doing it and once she had registered what had happened, she backed away with revulsion. There, before her, stood the creature, the horrible alien creature with the large metal shard that she had once held in her hand now sticking out of its body. Greenish-blue goo started to ooze from the beast. The goo’s presence only seemed to add to the already overpowering odor of rotting fish.

  The beast tossed Vincent across the room and didn’t even bother watching him as he struck the floor and slid into the wall. Its attention turned toward the other one, the one that had hurt it. Its limbs flung out wide as its facile tentacles did the same while it let out an unearthly shriek through its horrible beak.

  Somewhere, off in the distance, Tracy thought that she had heard someone talking to her, screaming at her, but she couldn’t make out what he was saying. All she knew was that she was dumbstruck with absolute terror. Her feet wouldn’t budge. Her body wouldn’t move. All she could see was that horrific beak as the beast came closer and closer.

  “Run Tracy! Run!”

  Vincent tried his best to break Tracy out of her shock. It was no use. He had seen this before in men during battle. They had been oh so brave on their way to the frontlines but once they got there and heard the shelling and the bullets and the other men dying, they simply froze on the spot. He didn’t have time for it then and he didn’t have time for it now.

  Tracy could only watch as the creature came upon her. Her heart was racing through her chest. The beast’s arm came up…

  In a blur of a moment Tracy watched as Vincent’s body slammed into the beast. The two of them tangled upon each other’s forms. It was hard to tell where one began and the other ended. That was until Vincent was tossed aside.

  In a flash the beast was upon the fallen security chief. Vincent tried to crawl away, but the alien creature reached out and grabbed him by the ankle. Vincent reached and pulled but was dragged back. He pulled his body forward again in complete desperation. He saw what he had to do. He had to reach...

  The alien pulled hard and brought Vincent’s body around, dangling by his ankle. Its facial tentacles flared again. Its beak widened…

  Vincent pivoted in mid-air and shot off two shots with the plasma rifle that he had recovered. His aim was perfect. The shots struck deep into the beast’s mouth.

  The alien creature’s head exploded as the plasma bullets released their superheated gas pellets that had been under pressure since they had left the barrel of the gun. Blue-green ichor splattered the wall behind the beast and continued to ooze out of the fallen creature.

  As Vincent pulled his aching body from the hard, cold floor that he had been unceremoniously dropped upon, all he could hear was Tracy sobbing.

  “You finish up here,” Vincent groaned. “I’m heading to sick bay. I’ll be right back.”

  “But...but...don’t leave me. What if…”

  “What if there’s another one here? I doubt it. If there was, it would have come out by now. I’ll be back in five.”

  Without looking back, Vincent left the stunned Tracy to fend for herself.

  Chapter: 34

  Tracy stood there, sobbing from the scene that had just played out before her. Here she was, on an alien ship, a long ways away from home with a dead alien bleeding out right beside her. Ooze continued to drip from above and the stench continued to assault her senses.

  She wanted to go home. It wasn’t worth it. Whatever she was running away from wasn’t worth all of this. If only she could just go home and continue to be sheltered by her father then everything would be alright. He had made everything better. He had kept the pain and the monsters at bay. All she wanted to do was go home and...

  No. She couldn’t think that way. She had had enough of his controlling and sheltering personality. She had to grow up. She had to face life and everything that came with it. She had to make a stand. She had to take her life back and it started now.

  Tracy wiped the tears from her eyes and tried to ignore the dead Xenoamorphopseudopod. She turned her attention back to the control panel. If she could just figure out something about these controls, anything really, then she could go back to the group with something to show for all of this. Perhaps she could actually remove this ship from theirs. From there, they might be able to make it to Phoebe after all.

  The promise of a new life on a new planet continued to appeal to her. But this time, it wasn’t because she was running away. This time, she would face its challenges.

  Tracy let her mind wander back through her memories. The answers had to be there. She tried to remember the times she had spent with her father going through the strange and alien symbols that had been recorded and sent back to him for study.

  “Now pay attention. Each symbol is more of a concept and could mean many things. From what we have been able to figure out, only by adding the symbols together do the concepts come together to create a sort of language. Now this symbol is for power. This one means portal. This is to think. This is to move….”

  Tracy looked around and saw the symbols that her father had mentioned. No one symbol would act alone. She had to push the symbols in the right combination to speak the right set of commands. Now, she understood.

  Without hesitation, Tracy pushed the button for power as she pushed the buttons for portal and to think at the same time. If she was right, this would stop the computer from “thinking” at the joined portals. In other words, it should stop the reprogramming of the life support systems where the two ships were joined.

  Suddenly there was a loud “kachunk” as if metal was being pulled back into its casing. A smile came across Tracy’s face. The ship’s entrails had released its hold upon the Harbinger. The Harbinger would now be able to regulate its own life supports.

  Tracy turned her attention back to the control panel. She pressed the power button and the portal button by itself. If she was getting the feel of these controls, this would close the connection between the two ships.

  Tracy wasn’t sure what she was expecting, but the immediate display of more symbols at the top of the consol wasn’t it. The six symbols kept changing and at different speeds. The one farthest to her right was going the fastest while the one on her left was going the slowest. It even seemed to her that each slower one would only change after a faster one completed a cycle. Then the symbol on the far left went blank.

  It then dawned on Tracy what she was looking at. This was a countdown until the portals closed. This would give time for everyone or in this case everything, to get back aboard. At this rate she was running out of time. She needed to hurry.

  Tracy did her best to run back down the hall of the alien ship. The dripping ooze made any quick movement difficult at best. She slipped several times and crashed into the various bulkheads. On top of this, her trip back was made more difficult by the way it had been sectioned off. She had to crawl under a few of the round holes in the projecting walls and had to climb through a few others.

  The portals were up ahead. She was going to make it. All she had to do was…
>
  Something moved on the Harbinger’s side of where the portals met. Tracy stopped. Her heart started to beat rapidly. Perhaps it was another…

  “Oh,” she replied. “It’s only you. I thought that...wait...what are you doing?”

  The figure touched a few buttons on the Harbinger’s side. The Harbinger’s airlock closed shut.

  “NO! NO!...Don’t…”

  The Dagon ship pulled away from the Harbinger without closing its portal. Her assumption had been wrong. She hadn’t asked the ship to close the portal; she only asked the ship to disembark without closing the airlock.

  The vacuum of space hit her like a fist. The entire environment of the Dagon’s ship’s life support was sucked out into the void of nothingness as the frigid aspects of space rushed in. Tracy tried to breathe but the oxygen in her lungs was escaping, being pulled beyond her ability to hold. The water in Tracy’s body started to boil. Since water boiled at a lower temperature at a lower atmospheric pressure, and there was no atmosphere in space, all of her body’s water started to turn to gas. Her body started to swell. All of this was in the blink of an eye.

  The next moment Tracy’s body was flung into space. Her form bounced off of the hull of the Harbinger and was thrown back against the alien ship. Her body only had two convulsions as it fought for air before darkness overcame her and her lifeless body drifted out into space.

  Chapter: 35

  “Vincent!” Cleo exclaimed. “What the hell happened to you?”

  “We had a run in with another version of the Dagons. It was bigger than we thought. It didn’t want to go down.”

  “But you killed it right? So we’re free of the Dagon ship? We can go home?”

  “I have confirmation of our release,” Eric stated as he scanned over the monitors in their makeshift control room. “We’re free of the ship. We can…”

  “Wait…” Cleo interrupted. “Where’s Tracy?”

  There was a moment of silence before Vincent answered. “She’s gone.”

  “What do you mean...gone?”

  “She must have hit the wrong button or something. I...I don’t know. I had gone off to the infirmary to get stitched up and by the time I got back the bug ship had detached and her body was floating in space. There was nothing I could do.”

  “That’s interesting,” Richard stated. “I was in the infirmary stocking up on supplies that we might need. I didn’t see you.”

  “That IS interesting. Because I DID go to the infirmary and I didn’t see YOU.”

  “What are you implying?” Richard had raised his voice at the implication.

  “I’m not implying anything, I’m stating. I’m stating that you seem to have a habit of disappearing at the most inconvenient of times, the same times that people seem to be dying off.”

  “The same could be said about you. Didn’t Denise die while you…?”

  “No one dies under my watch,” Vincent snapped.

  “It seems like everyone is dying under your watch!”

  That last comment from Richard had Vincent reaching for his plasma thrower.

  “Enough!” Eric’s comment cut through the tension like a knife. He had moved between the two of them to help separate the building frustrations. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. We’ll figure everything out after we get out of here.”

  Both Richard and Vincent seemed to settle down.

  “Now,” Eric continued. “I think I was able to fix some of the short circuits and I think I was able to get the navigation system back online. Where do we want to go?”

  There was another pause of silence. It seemed that this was the furthest from everyone’s mind. However, now that they had the ability to actually travel somewhere, it was time to decide where.

  “Earth,” Vincent said breaking the silence. “Set the coordinates to Earth. This mission is FUBAR.”

  There weren’t any objections.

  “Fine,” Eric stated. “But I don’t know how to set…”

  Vincent rolled his eyes and stormed out. He was tired of being around individuals that didn’t know what they were doing. He needed to have a break or he was going to strangle someone.

  “I know a few things about ships,” Richard stated as he moved toward the makeshift control panels. “I can put in the coordinates needed.”

  “I’m heading back to the cryo chambers,” Cleo started “I...I just need a break from all of this.”

  Eric gave a nod and turned his attention back to the coordinates that Richard was punching in.

  Cleo moved toward the door leading out and then stopped to look back over her shoulder. The two men were completely distracted. Good, she didn’t want them to follow her. The last thing she wanted was to be on everyone’s bad list, especially since tensions were so high. On top of this, she had to wonder if someone really did flush Tracy out an airlock. If that was the case then she needed to take care of herself and make sure that both she and her cargo got back to Earth.

  The empty hall echoed with the sound of her footsteps. Cleo kept looking over her shoulder just to be sure that no one was following her or that she might run into Vincent. No, no one was following her, she was alone.

  Then it dawned on her. She really didn’t want to be alone. With the engine going, she could feel the ship vibrating. The conduit tubes moved back and forth and she could swear that the ship was breathing. On top of this, there was still the tension that had been created, a possible murderer on the loose and she was hoping that they had in fact killed all of the Xenoamorphopseudopods aboard the ship. The last thing she wanted to do was meet up with one of those things running loose.

  But what if there were more aliens aboard? What if there was a murderer among them? What if the ship wasn’t stable after all and was on the verge of falling apart? What if the singularity engine containment field was losing its integrity? What if the Dagons had called for more ships to come along?

  Paranoia was starting to build. They had been lying to her all this time. This mission wasn’t about Terraforming a planet. They were on to her and were trying to trap her.

  “Cleooooo…”

  The sound echoed down the hall.

  “Cleoooo…”

  “Who’s there?”

  Cleo’s heart raced. She spun in place looking for who was calling her name. There must have been someone, anyone.

  No one was there. It was just the hiss of the pipes losing their coolant. Or was it?

  Cleo’s pace picked up until she moved at a full sprint. Her body slid as she rounded the first corner and she slammed into the opposite wall. She could hear the footsteps behind her. She could feel his breath upon her back. She picked her body up off the floor and continued to race down the hall at full speed.

  The door to the cryo chamber room wouldn’t open. Cleo tugged and tugged again and again to no avail.

  ‘They’ve locked me out! They know! They’re coming to kill me! Have to…’

  Cleo’s mental conversation with herself was interrupted when the door hissed open. At first she jumped with the sudden and unexpected release of the door. Then, without any more hesitation, she bolted inside and closed the door behind her.

  Her eyes dashed around the room. Bruce’s body, or at least what was left of it, was still where she had found it earlier.

  “What are you looking at?” Cleo asked him.

  “And, no, I couldn’t come any quicker. It was your idea to be heroic. Don’t just lay there and smile at me. I have things to do.”

  She had to find the crate; she just had to make sure that no one had disturbed it. She had to make sure that it was still alright.

  ‘It must be around here…’

  The crate was right where she had left it, under her personal cryo chamber. She didn’t know why she had to worry. No one was going to look for it there. And, besides, it wasn’t as if…

  Cleo’s eyes went wide. It was only now did she see the small hole in the side of the container. It wasn’t very large; it was smaller tha
n the beast she had kept inside. However, she remembered how the aliens could squeeze through small holes. The alien was loose. The container was supposed to be strong enough to withstand the alien’s acid. It seemed that her “benefactor” “Mister Smith” had a bad habit of not coming through with what he promised.

  Or was this his plan after all? Did he deliberately set them all up? Was this less about getting an alien home and more about simply getting one? Was it possible that the Space Marines that were promised were just on the opposite side of the planet waiting to swoop in and steal her specimen and let the Harbinger and its crew simply perish? “Mister Smith” obviously didn’t trust her.

  Right now, it didn’t matter. Right now, she had to find her specimen. Again Cleo’s eyes dashed around the room. She had to find the thing and find it fast. If anyone found out that she had smuggled this thing, then she would not only lose her career, but she was sure that she would be flushed out an airlock. Then they would destroy this alien and no one would benefit from its abilities. The best thing she could do was find it before anyone else did.