Manifest Destiny

by Allen Ivers

  “That would be ill-advised,” Leo posited, “He’s my bullet-proof shield. As long as I am… piloted… I am immune. Without him, the Beast will take me too.”

  “It can’t overload your system?” Raines asked, but she wasn’t really going to wait for anybody’s answer. She was talking to herself now, “Chemical injections influencing memory, desires, impulses… maybe direct electrical flow? That would mean the source point is the electromagnetism of the nervous system. With something else providing impulses, it can block out external sources, even over great distances.”

  “You’re completely incorrect,” Leo said, a smile cracking across his face, “But that was an entertaining theory.”

  Raines stood as tall as she could on her one good leg, “Theories have to be tested.”

  “You’ll have to hold onto your hopes of a dissection, Doctor Raines.” She bristled at that, and Locklear’s smile faded. “Yes, it was aware of you and your work. The other colonists whispered your name like it might bring the wrath of God down upon them. It seems they were correct, after a fashion.”

  Raines hobbled forward, nearly pressing herself against the glass, “What is It?” She breathed the pronoun like she was afraid to invoke its power, lest she conjure evil.

  Leo cocked his head, twisting it towards her, like he forgot he could pivot. “They chased It here. This long way. Injured It, even. It burrowed into the planet, to hide and to heal. To feed. It took them so long to find It. Years ago, It consumed their world, as It will consume ours, as It has so many others. It will worm Its way into your mind, overwhelm your senses, and you will become Its hands. You will do Its will, to your own demise.”

  Locklear straightened up, his back and pelvis cracking and popping. He would stand up to this thing right now, even if his legs were broken. “You lie. Everything you say is a lie.”

  “You’re wasting time,” Leo said, as matter-of-fact as if he was describing gravity. Shit falls downhill, and you’re wasting time.

  “You expect me -- or any of us -- to trust you after you have murdered three of our colleagues?” His fingers tingled, his hair standing at attention like troops during retreat. He could feel his feet tapping and skin crawling.

  Locklear was going to kill this man. He knew it, right down to his bones. And the details of his death would be sung about as a warning for any who followed.

  “You think violence begins in a flash of light?” Leo challenged, head tilting back as though presenting his chin -- or his throat. “It will not turn you over to bloodshed like the turn of a switch. It boils up inside you, Sergeant. A cresting wave. A rising ocean.”

  “Shut up.” Locklear knew then, for certain, this thing was absolutely lying.

  And a hundred percent correct. It wanted him to release it, sure, but hardly for a noble end.

  But also, he could sense the change already. That power it spoke of. He could picture what Leo would look like with his eyes gouged out, his stomach torn open like thin plastic rending under his fingernails.

  This thing had dastardly plans, but it accurately forecasted that sanguine future.

  “It has fought this Beast for longer than our little civilization has known how to shit. So one last time: shoot me -- or let me the fuck out of this cage.”

  His gun was holstered. He wasn’t even sure when he’d done that.

  But his hands were tight at his sides, all white knuckles and tight muscle fiber. Coiled springs under heavy load. He couldn’t trust this creature.

  Too many risks, too many dead.

  “I want two people posted on this creep at all times,” Locklear hissed.

  Leo lifted one gentle hand, pressing it against the glass, doing nothing for anybody’s nerves. “You’re making a mistake, Lock.”

  “I haven’t blown your head off,” he snapped back at the parasite, “because Gateway is going to want you tip-top. What they decide to do with you is above my pay grade.”

  Raines curled a lip into a wry smile, an uncharacteristic display of happy sadism.

  God, he hoped he was doing the right thing.

  He wasn’t hungry, but that didn’t stop Piotr from pushing a platter of beans, mash, and pressed meats through a slat into his cell.

  Leo eyed it, curious at first. The smell hit his nostrils like sliding on a familiar jacket on a cold day, some distant comfort freshly remembered. These were fond associations to simpler times: the warm pillows of whipped potato flakes and water that seemed injected with flavor, rather than having them naturally; the meat block that was an indistinct blend of animal and fats to maximize nutrition; and the bean slurry that was more paste than food, suitable for binding the body together.

  It was an illusion of a meal made to provide basic staples. But none of it could sate him because he was not hungry.

  He drew his eyes up to Piotr at the edge of the cell. The little man was the only one willing to engage him. The rescue -- Dr. Raines -- sat on her cot nearby, idly tending to her wounds, but it was clear she was more interested in observing him than mending herself.

  Mathers stood with Gamble, trying to occupy himself with anything other than the nearby presence of his... companion. It must have been torturous to even look at the thing. A keen reminder of the abuse he had been spared, but only to pass it on to another.

  Mathers saw great pains, and yet he survived. His frailty was a current state that would wax and wane to reveal greater strength beyond.

  Did he really believe that? Or was that the Rung trying to assuage his concerns?

  “You need to eat,” Piotr urged from beyond the glass.

  Leo sniffed again, enjoying the smell. “The Rung takes care of me just fine.” Mathers twitched, some or all of that sentiment stirring up reminders.

  Piotr blinked a few times, incredulous at Leo’s conviction. “You look like a plague victim, Leo. You have to eat.”

  “I appreciate the concern, Piotr,” Leo whispered, “But it’s customary to let an inmate choose his last meal, isn’t it?”

  “You’re not going to die.” Who was he trying to fool?

  “You miss your sister?” Leo asked, eyes narrowing.

  Piotr folded his arms, tongue digging into his cheek. He was considering how to answer, or even whether to follow this line of logic at all.

  After a long moment: “Course I do.”

  “No one’s waiting for me, Piotr,” Leo chirped at him, “There’s nobody back there with a flag and a sign. It’s why I left in the first place. Every single person on this boat signed up because the roots had been torn up.”

  “And?” Piotr asked, more of a hurry along than a question.

  “You’ve got someone who worries about you. Waiting at home during this crisis, watching the screens, holding their breath like a simple sigh might doom us all. Too far to help. She’s just waiting at home for some kind of word.”

  Piotr’s eyes darted back and forth across Leo’s body. “What would you do? If we let you out?”

  “I’d get out alive,” Leo stated, curt and harsh, “Wouldn’t you?”

  A derisive snort. “See, that’s the thing. Real Leo would help out. He’d grumble, he’d moan, he’d mutter under his breath something about useless people. But he’d help fix it. It was in his blood. There’s so much he couldn’t fix, so he fixed everything he could get under his fingers. Leo didn’t hurt people.”

  “They were going to kill me, Piotr—“

  Piotr slammed his fist against the glass, a deep baritone that commanded the whole room to cease their activity and take stock of the outburst.

  No exclamation followed, no declaration or interrogative; just a drumbeat commanding attentive silence from the assembly.

  Leo leaned back against the wall, twisted his shoulder backward to take the weight off of his passenger. “What would you have me do?”

  “Let my friend go. Please.” Somewhere between agony, demands, grief, and begging. Piotr wasn’t going to let himself cry in front of the Space Monster.

&n
bsp; “Piotr… it’s the only thing keeping me alive right now.”

  He shook at first, a stressful vibration like a string plucked. Then he nodded his head up and down, pushing his tongue into his cheek again. “You need to eat. It’s good for you.”

  Piotr turned his back and walked towards the step ladder up and away.

  Leo could feel the others examining him, his lack of display. He wouldn’t meet his jailers’ eyes.

  He stared at the food platter, the beans and meat and potatoes, and tried to remember being hungry.

  Chapter 21

  Murcielago

  Hollow. The barracks had been emptied of life.

  The hammocks hung tranquil off their ceiling anchors. The table sat empty of song and banquet. This was a stage with no other ballad to play, no more curtains to fall. No more players to take their bows.

  It was going to be a long, lonely flight home. Locklear supposed he could have his pick of the beds, but there would be something wrong with sitting in the cloth that still belonged to someone else.

  One trunk’s lid was left open, a pile of twisted fabric and memories tied up inside. Isen? Maybe Romanov? Garner and Amelia were far too precise with their space, they’d never have left a locker open.

  He could hear the footfalls on the ladder behind him. Lightweight, but urgent, and off-set. Only one other person on this ship that was both injured and still moving.

  “You should let Gamble take a look at you, Reed,” he croaked past his tired lips.

  Jazmin hung against the ladder. She had to collect herself as the gravity set in, but her wounds weren’t making that easy, so she elected to lean against the rungs like it was the cool thing to do. “Eh. She’s just goin’ to tell me I went and broke myself.”

  Locklear chuckled, thinking about that phrase in Gamble’s trademark acidic tone, “Yeah, well, that ain’t the kind of hurt you can walk off. So, consider it an order.”

  “Oh, yeah?” She taunted back, almost playful. Daring him to double-down.

  No energy for that. “Eh. We’re not cops anymore. Do what you want.”

  Jazmin stepped away from her safe harbor, grunting through the discomfort as she hobbled over to the small porthole in the wall. The rusty glow of the planet’s surface painted her tanned skin, scarring her face with a fine luster so as to make her a divine of this new world – a God of War overlooking her fiefdom, won with the blood of others. A title won but not desired.

  “They’re going to be forgotten, aren’t they?”

  Locklear blinked at that prediction. But she continued before he could interrupt her. Her eyes cut narrow, peering down at the Red Planet like it was some thief, a suspect behind tinted glass.

  “Cally, Amelia… the colonists… nobody’s going to remember their names. All people will talk about is what they found. What that means for us. ‘Martian Colonists Find Aliens.’ Won’t be anybody, just that simple little byline. ‘Colonists.’ Fuckin’ hell.”

  It was a tough notion to swallow down. These were not deaths on some glorious battlefield, nor caught up in the defense of a great cause or conquest. There were no stirring speeches for bards to recite.

  Just first contact bloodshed. Only horrors to whisper to misbehaving children in exchange for obedience.

  Horrors that claimed just over a hundred people’s lives, and snuffed them out like the minutiae that they really were. To stand at the feet of gods is to risk their heel.

  “What do you want me to say, Jaz?” Locklear bleated, feeling the push behind his eyes, to finally let out the agony crammed into his skull, letting the dam burst forth in a wave of anguish. “You want me angry? Is that it?”

  She couldn’t look at him. He could feel her eyes bounce off of him, back to that haunted place below them. “I’m just talkin’, Lock. You’re the only conversation left on the whole boat.”

  He felt his shoulders slump forward, as if they might pull him over on to his face. Two weights that hung on his chest and snapped the strings that held him upright. “I’m not a big talker these days.”

  “Well, I am just startin’,” she grunted back at him, “Suppose it’s going to be a one-way conversation then.”

  The first tear he felt only as it dropped off his cheek, falling to the floor at his feet. It was a curious thing to see the droplet hit the metal, and smear just a bit, as it adapted to the circular force of the spinning module.

  Isen would’ve mocked him right now. Rom would have followed suit. Garner would’ve laughed it off. Cally would’ve comforted while Amelia defended him. Would Jericho have even noticed?

  But here, now, there was no one to register its existence, as Jazmin just stared out that goddamn window. The action may very well have never happened, a deniable moment consigned to oblivion by passive observers.

  “We’re going to be forgotten too, y’know,” Locklear quipped, “So that’s something, I guess.”

  No response.

  “Thought you wanted to talk. So let’s talk.”

  “Talk later,” she said, nodding at the glass.

  Maybe it was the change in her tone or the shift to her posture, but he noticed the change in her eyes. The hanging eyelids of heavy sobriety had shaken free, lifted up to let loose the shine of horror long thought dead. That childhood nightmare once assured to be but fleeting shadows had taken form and substance to reach out for her throat.

  He stepped forward to see what had been captivating her attention. He might’ve taken a moment to feel remorse for all of that exasperation he had directed her way, but the shock of the sight robbed him of that.

  The sound would’ve been deafening, a thunderclap that would’ve made Zeus soil himself. But in outer space, all they had to go off of was the visual.

  Mars had cracked.

  A crevasse stretched down from the polar ice cap, zig-zagging along the lines of least resistance. It grew with each second, as canyons cut their way through every barrier. This growing shadow crept across the Red Planet until the inevitable, as if a great hand reached out from some unseen darkness to wrap about it tight.

  And split it in half.

  It was small at first, almost without ceremony, with the two large halves sliding apart separated by mere miles, but in less than a minute, he could see the stars twinkling on the other side, clean through and past the planet’s glowing core. It was like the planet blew a button on its shirt, the product of hundreds of quakes, big and small to finally rend asunder a celestial body.

  The raw energy required to split a planet, to subvert the gravity pulling it together… he kept waiting for the cataclysm to strike the ship, a shockwave that every instinct told him was approaching.

  But it never came, ushering him to watch the overwhelming tableau.

  Chunks of debris, clouds of it, swirled back and forth, as the intense pull of gravity tried to bring the world together again, but the strongest force in the universe could not mend what had been broken.

  Twisting in that nether, the space between, was It. It must’ve been a couple hundred miles across, a mere speck against the broken majesty behind It. But there was no question in Locklear’s mind, that this was what had just killed the Red Planet.

  It stretched Its broad body and unfurled Its limbs as though waking from a deep sleep. The main body -- if it could be called that -- was thick and bulbous, like a fatted calf or a swollen worm. A half dozen tendrils poked off Its body, spiraling around the asteroids the way one might look to silence the morning alarm. A lithe tail split into a grouping -- possibly just more of the same invertebrate arms -- stretching out for something else to rend and slash.

  And the head curled in on itself, hiding Its face from the world. And clear across Its back was that goddamn arch, matched with nearly a dozen of its asymmetric peers.

  They had been studying the ridges of a cobra, never the wiser that they had been standing on top of It all along.

  The little hatchling. And they were nothing in comparison.

  Locklear dashed fo
r the ladder, swinging his way upward. As it turned out, he and Jazmin were the very last people to arrive back at Medical. Piotr and Mathers stood a healthy distance from the quarantine cell, staring at Leo’s turned back – and the pulsing monstrosity that clung to him.

  “Can you fight it?” Locklear demanded, more order than question.

  Leo’s head tilted, the only response before: “I can try.”

  Locklear looked back at the room, scanning his colleagues. Nobody dared move, like the electricity in the air might shock them all if someone breathed too hard. Static building up and ready to snap onto the first person that broke an unknown rule.

  Gamble had scissors in hand, poised over Jericho, halfway through cutting him out of his clothes. Paused over his chest, clammy and bare.

  Inches from his heart.

  “Let him out,” Locklear whispered, heaving the words past his teeth. It would’ve been easier to lift a fucking car, but he somehow slid those three syllables out of his mouth.

  “Say what now?” Gamble blurted. She stepped up to Locklear’s side. Something about it too fluid, too easy. “We’re not letting psycho-killer out!”

  “I gave you an order, Doctor.” Locklear could barely hear himself speak, the ringing his ears battering at his defenses.

  He could feel the temperature rising, the breath quickening. Adrenaline hitting his system without cause. The fuckin’ Starfish was telling the truth – the Beast had awoken. Bloodshed was coming and soon. Whatever diabolical exploits the Rung had in mind, Locklear was now out of options. He would have to improvise.

  He wouldn’t let himself become one of those stony thralls. Not him. Nobody else.

  On the other hand, Gamble’s response was entirely predictable. “Fuck that, and fuck you, leatherneck!”

  “We won’t know what’s going on until we do one of two things,” Raines said, almost eager as she pressed her hands against the glass.

  “What are we waiting for?” Jazmin seemed to plead, but her question seemed wholly disconnected from her intent, as she stared down at the unconscious Jericho. His chest rose and fell, so shallow.