by G J Ogden
Taylor considered trying to kick down the door, as it seemed to be the only way in or out of wherever he was, but as he stepped back, readying himself to launch his boot at the door’s center, he heard a sound. He stopped and listened and heard it again; it was the sound of someone shouting, but from where he could not tell. The cry came again and surrounded him from every direction.
“Who is it?” Taylor shouted into the darkness, but the voice didn’t respond. “Who’s there?” he tried again, but there was no answer and his voice just vanished into oblivion as it had done before.
Suddenly, the pin-pricks of starlight all around him started to diminish, and the swirling galaxies and nebulae faded to nothing. Taylor twirled around, looking up and down, but it was the same in every direction. The brilliant starlight door was all that remained, until that too faded into nothing, and Taylor was once again consumed by a crushing darkness, terrified and alone. He tried calling out again, but although his mouth moved, no sound came out.
This is it… he thought, gravely. This is the end. This is what death is like.
Then the darkness transformed into brilliant light and he was falling again, but this time when he landed he felt the thud of his body striking metal. He felt the coolness of its touch and detected the dimples in the surface of the deck plating. He felt the cool air of the hangar base against his face, though he did not feel cold. He felt all this, yet his body felt no pain from the impact of the fall, despite him hitting the deck like a butchered carcass. But although his body was numb, his head raged as though a volcano had erupted inside his skull, paralyzing him. And then, just as suddenly as the dark gulag had vanished, the pain was gone.
THIRTEEN
The shouting grew louder and more distinct and then Taylor was aware of the sound of weapons firing. But he could only discern the crack of Earth Fleet sidearms; the vibrant pulse of the Hedalt Plasma rifle was strangely absent. The Hedalt soldier! He realized. Casey and Satomi must be fighting it!
The dazzling, white light began to fade and his vision started to clear. He was lying on his back in the hangar bay, buried beneath a pile of containers, but although they pushed heavily against his body, and he could feel the pressure of their touch, he felt no pain. He tried to concentrate his gaze towards the sound of shouting and gunfire, but his eyes still struggled to focus and the blurry images that he could resolve appeared grainy, like an old photograph that was taken when the light level was too low.
He drew breath and felt the air enter his mouth, but there was no sensation of his lungs filling or his chest expanding. Then he realized he couldn’t feel his heart beating and panic gripped him. He lay still again, petrified that his injuries were so severe that shock had already deadened him to the pain that his body must be silently enduring. Yet, as he lay motionless, wracked with a sense of dread that his body was broken and dying, his pulse did not quicken – in the same way that he was unaware of his heartbeat, he also could not feel the thud of blood pulsating in his neck. The terror that Taylor was experiencing should have been accompanied by a nauseating tightening of the gut, but he felt no such reaction from his own body; it was only his mind that had descended into the anarchy of fear. But while his body seemed detached, it was not numb; he could still feel the textured metal of the deck and detect the sharp corners of the containers pressing against him, and he could still feel the cool, still air against his face. Somehow, he could feel the world around him, but only partially. It was like a bizarre kind of anesthetic, which left him conscious of external stimulation, but dead to pain and any primal, physical manifestations of emotion.
The shouting and weapons fire continued to reach his ears, clearer and more distinct with each passing second, but he remained too afraid to move; too afraid to check himself over for fear of what he might discover. But then he heard what sounded like Satomi’s voice, shouting for Casey to take cover, followed by more harrowed cries of, “Move right!”… “There it goes!”… “Watch out!”… and he knew he had to set aside his doubts and help, even if his dying body could do no more than offer the Hedalt soldier an additional target.
He placed his hands against the containers that lay on his chest and pushed; remarkably, they lifted and he was able to throw them to one side with ease and climb up onto his knees without any difficulty or sensation of pain. His vision was getting sharper, but it still looked like he was seeing the world through a malfunctioning viewport. In the days before ocular correction, they would have called it being ‘short sighted’. Despite the fuzziness, he could make out his weapon resting on the deck a few meters ahead; he crawled to it and clutched it in his hand, before looking up and trying to get his bearings. His eyes didn’t need their full resolution to recognize the muzzle flash of a weapon being fired, and he rose up and ran towards it, without any consideration as to the danger it might place him in. He could only think of Satomi and making sure she didn’t end up like Blake; dead on a barren world on the other side of the galaxy.
He could make out the shapes more clearly now and headed towards a maintenance station with what should have been one of the many Hedalt Corvettes, but as he got closer he skidded to a halt and stared up at the ship in astonishment. How can that be? he asked himself, peering up at the ship and squinting, trying to force his eyes to focus, though it made no difference. Even though he could not see it sharply, he could see well enough that the vessel was clearly not a Hedalt Corvette, but a Nimrod-class cruiser. It was an Earth Fleet ship. Taylor remained frozen to the spot, crippled with questions. Is it my ship? Has the Hedalt brought it inside the hangar? But when and why? Or was this always here? No, I would have seen it!
His thoughts were interrupted by the metallic chime of a round ricocheting off the deck plating to his side. Instinctively he ran for cover behind the maintenance consoles as more rounds landed close by. Who the hell is shooting at me? he asked himself, considering that perhaps the Hedalt soldier had damaged its plasma rifle and had somehow managed to take either Casey’s or Satomi’s weapon instead. But if that was true, it meant one of them was injured; maybe already dead. Either way, he was running out of time.
Taylor’s mind was still spinning, but his eyes had recovered enough that he was able to take stock of his environment, and what he saw next did nothing to calm the whirlwind in his head. Peering down along the full length of the hangar he saw, lined up like fossils in a museum, three entire squadrons of Nimrod-class cruisers. The Hedalt Corvettes had all gone. He considered whether he could have somehow stumbled into a different hangar, or perhaps fallen so hard that he’d crashed through the deck and landed on a lower level. But such a fall would have surely killed him. Or perhaps the blow to his head had been so severe that he was suffering from hallucinations. The crack of weapons fire again wrestled him from his contemplations.
“Taylor, is that you!?” he heard Satomi cry, though her voice seemed strange. He tried to see her, but his view was blocked, and he didn’t want to expose his already battered head to a potential bullet from the Hedalt soldier’s stolen weapon. “If you’re there then move!” Satomi continued, “it’s coming for you, Taylor, you have to…” then her words were cut short and the repeated crack, crack, crack of a handgun firing replaced the end of her sentence. Taylor shuffled around the maintenance console and began to work his way to the rear, but then a small, but highly-focused explosion rattled the deck and forced him to backtrack. That was an explosive-tipped round! Satomi, what the hell are you doing?
“Satomi, switch back to armor piercing, before you blow us all to hell!” he called out, but like Satomi’s voice, his own words sounded strange to his ears, and he shook his head to try to clear the fogginess. “Satomi, do you hear me? You’ll blow the fuel containers and this whole place will go up!” His voice still sounded different, wrong somehow, but since this was just another one of a number of baffling incongruities, he set it aside and waited for Satomi’s reply, which did not come. Fearful that she had been hit, he continued to edge his way around
the maintenance console. He glanced over to where Satomi’s explosive-tipped rounds had punched a hole in the hangar deck, making sure that the Hedalt soldier was not using the smoke from the smoldering cavity as cover to flank him. But then through the haze he caught sight of a body on the deck and froze. It was a human woman.
“Satomi!” he cried out and ran towards the prone woman, ignoring the obvious danger of being shot, and slid to his knees beside her. Hastily holstering his weapon, he reached down and nervously turned the woman’s head to face his, apprehensive of confirming his worst fears. But, incredibly, the face he looked down on was not Satomi’s, and nor was it the face of Casey Valera. The feeling of relief was like waking from a horrific nightmare and realizing that it was just a dream. He closed his eyes and breathed a hollow sigh of relief, though as before there was no sensation of his lungs filling or emptying and his body remained disconnected from the tumult of emotions he was enduring. Nevertheless, the action of sighing somehow still soothed his mind.
Able to think more clearly, the next question assaulted him like a club to the head. Wait, if this is not Satomi or Casey, then who the hell is it? He again peered down at the woman and his eyes narrowed and his brow furrowed. The muscles in his face felt stiff, as if his cheeks and eyebrows had been injected with a firming agent of the sort that was popular with those trying to regain the youthful look of their earlier years. But even this sensation was not as strange as the sight of the unknown woman before him. Where did you come from and what the hell are you doing, over twenty thousand light years from Earth?
She was middle-aged, perhaps forty, and tall, with mousy hair that was hanging across a square face, covered in grime and dried blood. She was curled into a fetal position, and her shoulder appeared to be bleeding from a superficial wound, but otherwise she looked fit and strong.
“Who are you?” Taylor asked the woman, who was beginning to stir.
“Captain, what are you doing?!”
Taylor shot around, suddenly remembering about the Hedalt soldier. With the rash of crazy events that had occurred over the past few minutes, he had lost all sense of what was happening around him.
“Captain, move away!”
The source of the voice was Satomi, and though she was standing just far enough away from Taylor’s blurry eyes for her to appear indistinct, it was clear she was pointing her weapon at him. Behind Satomi was another figure, who appeared even blurrier. Is that Casey? Taylor thought, but if it was then she was unarmed and appeared to be hunched over; perhaps injured.
“Has the Hedalt soldier been killed? Did you get it?” Taylor called over to her.
“What are you talking about?” said Satomi, still pointing the weapon at him. She sounded incredulous. “You know it has!”
Her reply made no sense. Why would she assume he already knew? But, it was just another of the many questions that would have to wait, because the mysterious woman on the floor needed medical attention. “Then put down the damn weapon and get over here, she’s hurt.”
Satomi stepped forward, which helped Taylor to resolve her features more clearly, but instead of rushing to the woman’s aid, she looked behind at the second figure.
“Captain, Casey has a broken arm and is pretty cut up, but she’ll be okay...” Satomi answered, but she was speaking the words to him like he was mad. Then her mood darkened, as if Taylor had become the enemy. “Captain, you’re starting to really scare me; what the hell are you doing?”
Taylor’s frown deepened to a scowl. “I don’t mean Casey for pity’s sake, I mean the woman right here on the deck! Can’t you see her?” He again looked down at the woman to check that he wasn’t actually going mad, and he saw that her eyes had now opened and that she was watching him back, rapt with terror. He turned back to Satomi, but now that she was closer he could see that she looked strange, like her face had been smoothed over with a thin layer of clay. Nothing was making sense.
“Captain, I need you to step away from it,” said Satomi, now aiming the weapon at the woman.
“What the hell are you doing? Put that down!” shouted Taylor; anger was overtaking confusion as his driving emotion. “I order you to help her now!”
“Captain, that’s the Hedalt soldier...”
“What?” He swung back to the woman, who was now alert and trying to push away from him. “This is a woman; a human woman. Can’t you see? What the hell is going on?!”
Before Satomi could answer, the woman snatched Taylor’s handgun from its holster and jolted upright, and before Taylor could process what had happened, two shots rang out cleanly in the otherwise icy stillness of the hangar.
FOURTEEN
Satomi collapsed forwards and slammed into the deck like a felled tree. Taylor released a primal, alien-sounding cry and rushed to her side, turning her over onto her back, but her body felt rigid, as if it had been flash-frozen. Bullet holes were clearly visible in her body armor, but there were more than could be explained by just the two shots that Taylor had seen the mysterious woman fire. Stranger still, the burn holes from when she had been hit by the Hedalt soldier’s plasma rifle were no longer visible. He pressed his hands over the holes as best he could, instinctively trying to stem the flow of blood, but there was no blood. Muddled and still in shock, he looked up, but instead of peering into Satomi’s kind, chestnut eyes, he saw something unreal staring back at him. He jolted away from the body, repulsed by it. It was just like in his dream; the mannequin. Except this mannequin had silver eyes and a single bullet hole in its forehead.
“No, please no! She can’t be dead!” The voice was Casey’s, but Taylor didn’t look at her; he was still reeling from what he’d just seen, unsure if it was real or another hallucination. Perhaps he was even in a coma, and this was just a cruel trick that his battered and unconscious mind was playing on him.
“Stay back, Casey,” Taylor ordered, “we don’t know what this woman will do next.”
“Captain, what woman?” cried Casey, on the verge of tears. “What is going on with you?!”
Taylor didn’t answer and climbed to his feet. His eyes, now sharply in focus, were fixed on the woman who had just shot Satomi Rose. She was steady on her feet now, weapon aimed at his chest, but she was also studying him with a mix of fear and fascination, as if Taylor were an alien species that she was laying eyes upon for the first time. He glanced back down at the body again, and saw the mannequin-like facsimile of Satomi staring blankly up through alien silver orbs. Shock was curdling into rage. What had this woman done to her? Fury engulfed his mind, and though his body did not experience a rush of adrenalin, his anger felt as real as anything he’d ever felt before.
“What are you?” the woman shouted.
Taylor gritted his teeth and stormed towards her like a frenzied bull, but the attack was clumsy and easy to avoid. He felt the butt of the handgun whip him across the face and he stumbled and dropped to one knee, but again there was no pain; just a detached sensation of the impact.
“Do that again and I’ll destroy you,” the woman warned, menacingly, watching Taylor like a hawk, while also keeping half an eye on Casey, who was frozen, staring down at the inert mannequin of Satomi. The woman’s next words were strangely softer and more hopeful, “I need you to tell me what you see.”
Taylor remained on one knee and glanced up at the woman, who he now realized was wearing an Earth Fleet uniform, adorned with the rank of Commander. It was one absurdity too many and Taylor could feel his resolve ebbing away. Too many questions. I can’t take this anymore… The anger began to bleed out from his mind, like wine spilling from an uncorked barrel, and was replaced by an overwhelming sadness and a sense of disorientation and disembodiment from the world. He wanted to cry, and tried to, but the tears would not come. Of all the questions crowding his mind, there was only one that seemed to matter now, “What have you done to Satomi?”
“What do you see?” the woman cried out again, ignoring Taylor’s question. “When you look at me, what do you
see?”
Taylor shook his head. “A murderer!”
“Am I a Hedalt?”
Taylor laughed scornfully; the absurdity of what was happening had reached a new level, “What are you talking about? Of course not!”
“Then what – or who – do you see?” Each word was stressed and the sentence took on an intensity and gravity that made Taylor take it more seriously than the first time she had asked. He rose to his feet and the woman threatened him again with the weapon, but Taylor was careful not to provoke her further.
“I see a woman, of course. What sort of stupid question is that?” He pointed to the body on the deck, without taking his eyes off the unnamed Commander. “What did you do to Satomi? If she’s dead, I swear, you’ll be next!”
“Captain, why are you talking to it?” yelled Casey, her voice shaking. Taylor had forgotten she was still there. “Why are you calling it a woman? Kill it!”
“Casey, go check on Satomi, help her if you can!” Taylor called back, but Casey did not move to help Satomi; she was still rooted to the spot, as if she’d seen a ghost. Taylor peered over at her, seeing her clearly for the first time since his fall from the containers, and like Satomi, she appeared strange as if her skin had been painted. The woman’s voice drew his attention back to her, before he could study Casey further.
“Listen very carefully,” said the woman in a diplomatic but serious tone. “What I’m going to say will sound insane, but once I’ve said it, look around you, and look at your crew mates – really look – and you’ll know I’m telling you the truth.”
“I’m not listening to anything until Satomi gets medical help!” Taylor growled.
“You can’t help her!” the woman hit back. “That’s not Satomi Rose, any more than you are the real Captain Taylor Ray, or that other simulant over there is your pilot, Casey Valera.”